Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter
April 4, 2021
 
Bill was a beloved priest in one of my former congregations died in his sleep at a ripe old age.  Being a priest of the Church who had officiated at who knows how many funerals, he left very strict instructions for his own service of Resurrection.  He said that his life is to be celebrated “at whatever church I am a member of at the time of my death… and while such an occasion warrants the attendance of any number of bishops and priestly colleagues, the local priest is fine, wherever. A five-minute homily is enough at any funeral – especially mine.”  We were to sing Easter hymns only, we were to read the particularly uplifting lessons he chose, and the officiant, me, was to read a letter he wrote to his family and friends.  Thus, that guy got to preach at his own funeral.  Take that death.
 
The letter was typed on an old-school type writer with r’s that were a half a line too high.  He addressed his wife of sixty plus years with loving praise for enduring life with him and life with him in the Church.  He addressed his sons, enumerating the unique things he loved about them.  And he addressed the congregation of friends and extended family with gratitude for their companionship.  Essentially, he said, that we were to rejoice as he now knew all about the depths of the great mysteries of God which he had spent his life trying to articulate, embrace, and comprehend.  The letter was a testament of humor and humility and life.
 
As I read it for the first time, weeping, I wondered how he could ever end with a proper salutation.  He had already told of his love.  He had already encouraged all of us in the faith.  And there at the top of the second page, that is right, he gave thanks for his life and more than 50 years as a priest, author, educator, theologian, and seminary dean, in one page.  Even at the end, he knew that a long sermon was never a good one.  So how did he sign off?  Simply this: “See ya later, Bill”
 
The Easter Word we hear from Mark’s gospel this morning is the earliest of the written texts.  It is the simplest and the most to the point.  It is early morning, the first day of the week, the men disciples are hiding out, but three loving women who come to anoint Jesus body with scented balm, caring for their friend even in death.  The stone, as heavy as their grief, is rolled back.  An angelic messenger greets them Jesus is not there, rather he is alive and gone on to Galilee, back where the journey began.  He tells them: “Go home, and you will see Jesus.”
 
It is important to note that the men folk are nowhere to be found.  At that moment, they are more concerned with hiding out than burying their dead.  The women are the feelers here.  When they show up for a goodbye ritual, the whole thing is turned upside down.  It may take a while for them to process, but this is not a ‘goodbye moment,’ this is a ‘we will always be together moment.’ 
 
Unlike many accounts, this earliest telling ends right there.  No explanation.  No rationalization.  Drop the mic.  This leaves us knowing is that there has to be a sequel.  And we will the ones to write that one in our lives.  Mark’s last word tells us to change the scene.  No longer will God’s love story told from the capitals of corruption, from the places of death dealing, and hope squashing subjugation.  The rest of the story happens where we really live, and move and have our being.  The rest of the story happens where we love on each other, where we gather for encouragement, and where work thorough our struggles together.  God lives and moves and has being in the circles of love, no more in the circular firing squad hate, blame, or despairing apathy.
 
Easter is not the end of a long slog through sin and pain and death.  It is our beginning as full and eternal partners with God.
 
The poet T.S. Eliot puts this Eternal Easter message this way:
 
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
 
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
 
(The Four Quartets, Little Gidding)
 
One of my favorite theologians put the Eternal Easter message, more succinctly, in this way:
 
“See ya later.”  Amen

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Palm Sunday
March 28, 2021
 
Follow your passion.   That bit of self-help advice is a consistent theme as we seek our way in this world.  Graduates in this spring season will hear variations on this theme in commencement addresses as someone of note attempts to help them launch to whatever is next for them.  Passion is what drives us.  Passion is what moves us.  But do we ever stop and think about what passion really means?
 
The word entered our language from the Latin word meaning to suffer.  As language tends to do, especially when the root is unpleasant, the word passion has been whitewashed to indicate a strong emotional feeling or commitment.  Given the original meaning, telling people to follow their passion is better advice than the cliché it has become.
 
There is a great line in the movie, The Princess Bride where Wesley, a main character, tells Princess Buttercup: “Life is suffering, highness, any who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.”  And yet, for the rest of the story, the two characters continue to suffer and struggle out of a deepening love for one another.  The story is a comedy, which Carol Burnette one quipped is tragedy plus time.
 
We do not need to be reminded about suffering.  Suffering has been front and center with a global pandemic, children separated from families at our borders, two mass shootings in the past week, and the now standard and predictable divide of partisans pointing fingers and gridlocking thoughtful and compassionate solutions.  There is that root word again.  Compassion means, literally, to suffer with.
 
In stark contrast were are bathed in beauty too.  Spring is happening in this particularly verdant part of creation.  Healing and help is happening as folks are being vaccinated through the collaborative efforts of science, industry, and health care providers.  Folks are cautious, but gathering again as they feel more safe in doing so. Houston, Texas is reports that traffic is really bad again, touting that as a blessing to go with a curse.
 
Today is Passion Sunday.  It all starts out wonderful.  Jesus comes to Jerusalem and is welcomed as a hero.  He has embodied compassion for them.  The crowds turn out because they want to believe Jesus will overturn an oppressive regime and set the world right.  But he shows up on a donkey, not in a horse drawn chariot like all the good conquerors do.  And very soon, all turns dark as the powers that be act out of fear, blaming Jesus for stirring up the people, and seeking to silence his threat to their tightly held control.  His own people deny Jesus, run off, or join the crowd in screaming “Crucify him,” all because things do not go as they expected, they  wanted and they needed.  We are not as removed from the story as we might like to think.
 
As we know, this is only part of the story.  It is more appealing to skip ahead to Easter, but all that goodness does not come without passion, without suffering.  We have to go there on the way to glory. 
 
Is there anything worth anything in life that is not experienced without some measure of suffering?  Loving another person enough to put their needs ahead of our own?  Birthing a child?  Raising a child?  Finding our own path through failure at following the wrong ones?  Passion is not a feel-good emotion.  It is a hard scrabble commitment to knowing what is worth suffering for.  In the end, love is not a feeling, it is an action and a decision.
 
Jesus suffers on the cross to show us that even in the face of the worst fate imaginable, even in the face of hate, shame, and blame, Love does not back down or leave us hanging.  God’s action, God’s decision is to love us, anyway.
 
The whole journey of this Holy Week walks us through the unvarnished Truth.  Life can be terrible and filled with pain, loss, and suffering.  Life can be amazing, glorious, and beautiful.  Both of these things are true.  To deny one negates the other.  The secret of life not to follow our passion, it is to live in the light of God’s Passion for us.  At the cross, Jesus shows is that nothing else in this world holds power over Passion, Compassion, and Love.  Amen.

Lent IV
March 14, 2021
​
“Your wife called.  She needs you to come home now.” 
​
Sue, the parish secretary, said this in the hallway outside my office because she did not want to yell that down the hall.    My phone was not hooked up yet because I had not been in my first parish job for much more than a week.  The cigarette bounced on her lips as she said it while smoking hands free.  She smirked a little, so I knew it was not a tragic “come home now.”  We were working on our new house, and I assumed that she needed me to pick out a paint color or something.  We were newly married, and still collaborated on such matters.  Fortunately, we lived two miles from our new parish.
 
When I arrived, Janice was visibly upset, flustered, and, clearly, anxious.  Now this is a woman who, at the time, took care of premature babies in the intensive care.  She could intubate, insert a chest tube, and start a pic line in any sized patient.  This was a woman who climbed into helicopters and flew to outlying medical centers to retrieve sick newborns and keep them stable long enough to get to the neonatal unit.  What in the world?
 
Fighting back tears, she said, “I saw a snake on our front porch.”  Though I wanted to laugh, I did not.  We were newly married after all.  She had told me that she was terrified of snakes.  This was not the time to tell her that is called Ophidiophobia.  Like many phobias it is irrational. As I have acrophobia, a fear of heights, in the same irrational way, I got it.  She wanted me to find the snake and kill it or call the realtor and list the house for sale.  It turned out that it was a baby rat snake, but no amount of telling her that those are the “good” kind of snakes would help.  While calm returned with the passage of time, that visceral fear remains to this day.
 
The wandering Israelites had snake troubles too.  Their fears were real because most of the snakes they met in the desert were not the “good” kind.  People were dying from poisonous snake bites and they begged Moses to get God to intervene.  We cannot help but think that Moses was tiring of them using him like God’s bellhop.  They had already complained that there was no food, only to complete the sentence with the fact that they detested “this miserable food.”  While they had been freed from slavery in Egypt, delivered from the wrath of Pharoah’s army, escaped through the parted Red Sea, been given water to drink, and manna from heaven to eat, their response seems to be yeah, Moses, but what have you done for us lately.  Get God on this right away.
 
The story has a mythic quality that we often find in the most ancient stories.  These stories were told over and over around campfires, even with wide-eyed children listening, long before they were written down.  Moses fashions a bronze image of two staring serpents intertwined around a long staff.  And, as the story goes, anyone who got snakebit was to look into the eyes of the bronze serpent and they would recover.  From there, the story moves on, and we never hear if it worked, but this early form of aversion therapy brought calm to the hysteria, and more than likely, it reminded folks to be careful in the desert.  As I learned when I visited there, most things that crawl and slither in the desert are deadly.
 
Some stories are true as told.  Good stories, even if embellished or exaggerated, are just as true, because they tell us something about ourselves.  Going back to the beginning story in Eden, the snake represents the insipient craftiness of human sin.  In that story, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve to believe that they can eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and become all knowing and all seeing, just like God.  When they give it a go, they become aware that they are naked (or nekkid as we say in the South), and they left to wander outside of paradise.
 
When Moses sets up the bronze serpent, God’s people are put in mind of that beginning story as well as their current plight.  They cannot help but be reminded of their sin, their self-will run rampant, and maybe, just maybe, they might substitute gratitude for grumbling.  They have a long way to go, yet, but whining is lousy fuel for a journey with God.
 
It is an ancient story, but it is true to our own journey with God.  The first step is to remember that we are not all knowing and all seeing.  It is important to look our fears and sins in the face of them to be more honest, more real, and humbled before our powerlessness.  This is not a one-and-done thing.  It is an everyday thing.  It is a lifetime journey of becoming.
 
That bad news is that we will never get it right.  We will swing and miss more times than we get a hit.  When John’s gospel has Jesus giving a summation of the journey, Jesus goes right back to staring the slithery and sliminess of our nature in the face, referring back to Moses and his whiners in the desert. But then Jesus delivers a walk off home run shot we know well as John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  We know that one from the rainbow haired guy who used to hold up the placards in sports stadiums.  Remember him?  Unfortunately, that passage is often leveraged against anyone who does not believe, anyone who doubts, or dares ask questions.  Can we really say that we believe 100% all of the time?
 
While John 3:16 is good news, it is conditional and it not the whole thought Jesus delivers the completion of that statement comes in 3:17. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved” that is, put right again.  The world will not get more right because we work harder, pray more earnestly, or let that person cut in line at the grocery store.  The world gets more right because Jesus does not point fingers and tell us we are bad.  We do that to ourselves and others.  The world gets right as Jesus is lifted up on a cross, staring us all in the face, and showing us the lengths to which God will go to love us.  Rainbow hair man should have pointed to 3:16 and 3:17. Think of all the seekers and searchers that might have been welcomed with the full text.  Alas, Rainbow man is now in jail for kidnapping and assault.  Apparently, his now ex-wife, stood in the wrong place with the sign and he lost his temper.  Things went downhill from there.  A little John 3:17 might have helped him too.
 
In the Book of Kings, we read that in a fit of graven image reform, King Hezekiah had Moses’ bronze snake pole destroyed.  It seems folks were taking the symbol too literally and worshipping before it a bit too enthusiastically.  Nevertheless, that symbol remains in what we know as the medical symbol.  The snakes represent the judicious use of potent medicine and their shedding of skin represents the body’s ability to grow anew and heal.  The COVID vaccine many have had, and we all need to get, helps teach our body’s immune system to recognize and stop the beast before it can take hold.  Recognizing the form of the very thing that can make us ill, or kill us, is then, leveraged for good.  The pain of a needle prick is a saving grace.
 
Even though we are God’s body, we are not immune from fear, pain, anxiety, and all the rest.  Sometimes, we are so human, it hurts.  There is joy in there too.  Lots of it.  And joy is just as potent as pain.  In the end, our physical life is a temporary condition, just as was God’s earthly life in Jesus.  When our time comes, we will get the call.  Come home now… where perfect Love casts out all fear -- for good.  Amen.

​Lent III
March 7, 2021
 
For some of you, who have encouraged, aided and abetted my latest obsession, the starting place of this sermon will come as no surprise.  I am speaking of my newly acquired devotion for the television series, Ted Lasso.  You can, and should, watch it for yourself.  It can be streamed on Apple TV.  The first week’s subscription to that streaming service is free and you can watch all ten half-hour episodes in a week, or even a few days.  I am not being compensated for this endorsement, but we might consider that as an alternate source of revenue for the parish someday.
 
Ted Lasso is about a successful American Football coach from nowhere in Kansas who wins a national title and, is then recruited to coach an English Premiere League Soccer Team in London.  To say that the Brits are maniacal fans for soccer is an understatement.  They make any American football fandom seem timid at best.  The fans are bewildered by management’s choice and they are none too kind to Coach Lasso, hurtling constant insults as only the British do so well.  At his first press conference, Lasso proclaims that he is excited to be there, but says they could fill two whole internets with what he does not know about soccer.  All through the whole first season, he is learning the rules.
 
But Lasso is indefatigable.  He is generous and loving and forgiving.  He makes friends with many who have no interest in liking him.  He may not know soccer, but he knows people.  Though everyone underestimates Coach Lasso, together with the unwitting participation of so many great characters, he leads the team to deep growth and some athletic success.  To the aging and injured former star, he is loyal and understanding.  To the upstart truly gifted but hot-headed star, he gives gentle lessons in humility.  When he consults the lowly and picked on equipment manager for strategy, he shares and gives power to one who is neglected and overlooked.  While I could fill this sermon with Ted Lasso-isms, and analyze each episode as a master stroke of writing and truly soothing balm for our contentious times, I will save that for a forum series in the future.  Whereas in 2020, I was consumed with the character and generosity of Dolly Parton (and I still am), in 2021 I am digging into Ted Lasso and its lead actor and writer, Jason Sudekis.
 
So, is Coach Lasso sounding familiar?  He comes from nowhere, meets people where they are, responds to anger and threats with gentleness and self-control.  He surprises everyone with his wisdom and ability to bring people along with him.  He tells the truth even when it hurts, and sacrifices fame and glory to make life better for all he encounters.  He puts up one sign in the locker room and invites others to live into its simple encouragement: “Believe.”  He is a Christ-like figure, for sure.
 
Of course, Lasso is not Jesus.  He is going through a divorce and trying hard to be a good father to a kid who is half way across the world.  But the Lasso character creates an archetype that is largely missing our self-obsessed culture, and all that goes with the worship of fame, fortune, and winning at all costs.  He is a reluctant, self-deprecating, self-sacrificing hero, but he is no pushover.
 
This is much like the Jesus we come to know in the gospels.  What stands out about Jesus against our vast human history of power, vainglory, and achievement, is that God’s way is not always our way.  Jesus is like none other.  He is human and divine.  He upends all preconceived notions, and calls everyone, everyone, to God’s almighty love.
 
Of all of the passages in the gospels, the story of Jesus turning over the tables and driving the people out of the Temple courtyard, we hear of an atypical raging Jesus.  Like nowhere else, he is visibly angry.  This is not Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild hymn, or the old Sunday School poem kids used to memorize.  This is a picture of Jesus we do not find in stained glass.  This is a story we only tell well into Lent because, in this time, we are challenged to contemplate the hard truths as well as the softer ones.  
 
As we look into the Temple incident, beyond what it looks like on the surface, we discover that Jesus has good reason for some righteous anger.  The courtyard of the Temple was a place where folks could buy and sell animals for ritual sacrifice.  A big Temple event looked more like a slaughter house than a worship service.  Rich folks sought to be more holy in offering lambs or fat cattle.  In return for their largesse, they got to go inside and get close.  The poor were relegated to the outside where the best they could offer were doves or pigeons.  Of course, all of the sacrificed critters had to be “without blemish,” meeting certain standards of, you guessed it, the sellers of critters in cahoots with the priests.  Thus, the people get fleeced. They had to pay a Temple Tax too, but they could not do it with regular currency, so they had to exchange it for Temple approved currency, thus, the money changers made a market with large margins of markup, again, in cahoots with the priests
 
While the Temple was built to the glory of God, it had long strayed from its mission, becoming an idol to be worshipped, threatening folks with an angry God who demands sacrifice.  This is why Jesus let them have it.  This tirade gets him into trouble because, well, follow the money. 
 
What Jesus insists that God is not the resident of a building.  God is not most accessible to the well-heeled.  That old model was steeped in pagan sacrifice.  What Jesus comes to do is offer himself for the world with the central sacrifice: unconditional love.  Jesus shows God is not to be used for a scheme, or coopted to make some better than others. As God, Jesus is everywhere and for everyone.  He becomes the Temple through which we come closer to God.
 
We see all kinds of anger these days.  I do not need to enumerate the power of rage to divide and destroy our bonds of affection.  Self-serving anger is a major stumbling block insofar was it consumes us in judging others.  Jesus will show us and tell us, that judgement is for God, not us.  But there are times when God’s cause of love need our anger energy to hold fast to what is good and of God.
 
Returning to Ted Lasso for a moment, at one point in the show, Ted reflects on people who have under estimated him for his entire life.  And it used to bother him, he says, until one day he saw a quotation from Walt Whitman on the walls of his kid’s school.  “Be curious not judgmental.”  Then he realized that all those folks putting him down were not curious.  They thought they knew everything and had everything figured out, “so they judged everything and judged everyone.”  Then he says that “if they were curious, they would have asked questions.”
 
In our gospel today, we might like to look past the unpleasantness, and figure that Jesus was having a bad day, or throw judgement on the priests and on all religion as corrupt.  But if we are curious, we might ask questions like “What is our role in going along to please others?”  “What does God desire for God’s people?”  “How can I help?”  Getting riled up is not a bad thing, it is just a tricky thing.  When we get there – and we should - it is good to ask questions and consider how can we be curious and not judgmental.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Lent II
February 28, 2021
 
Names are important things.  Think about how you got yours.  Likely, your name has meaning and connection to family, close friends, or some other major significance.  The people who named you thought long and hard for sure.  Nowadays, there are books and websites and all kinds of surveys about what names are most popular and, even, which names for people make them more likely to get noticed or become successful.
 
There is a story in my wife’s family that she, being the youngest of six kids, got named by her oldest brother.  No kidding.  Apparently, he had the chicken pox and the deal was that if he stayed away from her, he could choose her name.  As the story goes, he chose Janice, but being a good Catholic family, she had to have some form of Mary in there, thus, she is Janice Marie. 
 
That is such a great story, and far more interesting than my super protestant one as I was named for John Marshall, a notable relative who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  But he had ten children so there are lots and lots of Johns out there.  My mother liked Feilding and Garland, but I can thank my father for nixing those choices.
 
When we have a baptism, we are deliberate in naming the candidate being brought into the faith.  We say their name, and not their surname as that indicates their earthly family.  Their first or given name is what matters in that ritual, because the family the person is joining is the family of God, so we call that their Christian name. 
 
As we look over our biblical passages for the day, there are lots of names in there.  Bible names almost always have deep meaning.  Adam, for instance, means, literally, first man.  Eve comes from the Hebrew word for breath and is indicates that she is one who gives life. 
 
When we meet Abram and Sirai in Genesis, God gives them new names indicating their role and function in initiating a forever covenant of love between God and all humanity.  Abram becomes Abraham which means father of many nations.  Sirai becomes Sarah, which means princess.  And given that she will birth a son at 99 years old, that is an apt title.  Not only does this give a clue as to their role in the story, it helps all those generations of storytellers keep it straight.
 
Much later, as he is reviewing God’s great love for all, St. Paul harkens back to that ancient naming story to talk about faith.  As he encourages the Romans to hold fast to their belief, he points to their common ancestor, father of many nations, to connect them to something really large and important for their identity.  Not only is Abraham a great patriarch, he is one who listened to God, and believed in God, sending him on a journey to a new land and a new way of being.  It all started with a promise and a new name.
 
When left his fishing boat to follow Jesus, he was called Simon.  Later in the story, Jesus quizzes his followers about who people say that he is.  Some say he is a giant like the fathers and mothers of old, like an Abraham or a Moses.  Others say he is like one of the marquee prophets like Elijah or Isaiah.  That is some pretty holy company.  But Simon says no, Jesus is the Messiah, the promised savior and deliverer that God’s people have longed for.  Seeing as they had been occupied, oppressed, and put down over and over, the Messiah was an almost unimaginable hope and grace bringer.  To call Jesus Messiah was to hope against hope that he, right there with them, is God in human form.
 
That rung the bell.  Immediately, Jesus gives Simon a new name, a great name, Petrus, the rock, Peter.  He will be the cornerstone of building a new thing we know as the church.  But good old Peter, who is so painfully human, misses the point so often that we could think of him as rock headed, dense, and hard to move too.
 
With that affirmation behind them, all they seek now is the plan.  What will it be Jesus?  Will we ride into Jerusalem, take out the Romans and set the chief priests straight?  What kind of army will we need?  Are you going to bring down all of the God powers of thunder, fire, and show them once and for all what real power is?  They are kind of giddy with anticipation.
 
But then we get to today’s announcement.  Jesus tells them that the way he will go is the way of suffering and death.  He points them to the cross, which is far from the brassy and adorned icon we hold up as a sign of our faith.  For them, the cross is an instrument of torture, shame, and defeat.  When Peter hears that, it makes no sense.  That is not victory.  That is not a plan.  That is suicidal.  Peter takes him aside and lets him know that this is no way to gain followers.  But Jesus calls him another name, a searing and harsh name: Satan, telling him that his mind is way to set on earthly things, and not heavenly ones.  Then, in terms they cannot understand on their side of the cross, he explains that they (we) all have to take up the cross and suffer too.
 
That is the hard news.  And it is not something that even centuries of theology can unravel sensibly.  It is the great paradox of following Jesus.  All the world shows and tells us is that success is all about winning, about coming out on top, about making ourselves happy and fulfilled on our terms.
 
But, then, there is good news here, if we stick with it.  Like Adam, Abraham, Moses and all those prophets, we are just human.  We flop and fail and flounder even when we try as we might to look like we are winners.  We miss the point again and again.  God knows that.  He does not ask us to be perfect, he shows us that we are being perfected in a life much larger than the one we know.  In his harsh and perplexing way, Jesus tells us that he, that God, has this.  God knows what God is doing.
 
We do church to remember that what we see is not all there is.  We tell the stories to remember that even when life is hard and does not make sense, God is still God.  What the cross shows us is that there is nothing so horrible, so difficult, so shameful, that God cannot redeem even that.   And in case we forget, God has a name for all God is, and all God does: the only thing that matters.  Love.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Lent I
February 21, 2021
 
Some close family friends recently birthed a beautiful baby boy.  Being thoroughly hip parents, their nursery is lovely, painted in neutral hues of blue and gray.  It is a far cry from the days of loud, primary colors when we figured that because children saw primary colors best, we used them everywhere, only to need a paint job when the child was old enough not to want to be a baby any more.  There is, however, one ubiquitous feature that seems to have spanned all of decorative evolution.  Right there in the hip nursery is a happy painting of the ark, complete with a rainbow, the animals, and a tiny self-satisfied looking Noah.
 
The story does make for some great children’s art, and provides an object lesson for thinking of animals, naming animals, and making their animal sounds.  Googling Noah’s ark books yields 18 million results, though I am sure there repeats in there.  Nevertheless, we have a curious relationship with this story.  If we dig even a little, telling that story is problematic.  As it goes, the people God created back in chapter 1 grew wicked, and now in chapter 9, God finds one righteous guy, Noah, and tells him to gather his family and two of each animal, build an immense ark our of gopher wood, and get ready for the rain.  Even the young children know this one.  They ark floats them to safety, and after forty days (which is Bible speak for a long time), they come to rest on dry land.  And now, cue the primary colors.  God sets a rainbow in the sky to serve as sign that God will never again send a flood.  The promise extends to all living creatures.  It is a reboot for creation.
 
What gets glossed over in the story is bound to raise questions as children age.  What about the people who perished?  Why would God send destructive weather to destroy God’s good creation?  This is an apt question for Texans this week, for sure.  And that rainbow, that bright sign that is set up as a sign of love and promise, well, is that not a warning too?
 
Here, we have to pull back a bit and see what the authors of this tale are telling us.  The original hearers were more than aware that in many cultures and religions that they encountered, there were epic tales of floods and other natural disasters.  These tales personified angry gods, fighting with each other, and exacting punishment to demand greater obedience and sacrifice.  It is all pretty grim stuff.
 
The authors of the Noah story were not literalists or fundamentalists.  They were story tellers.  They spin their narratives in concert with other stories in their library, connecting symbols of creation and redemption in loaded language.  Back in the beginning, God creates all that is out of the watery void of chaos.  Of course, anyone familiar with birthing babies knows that all of us emerge from the watery womb to breathe new life.   Look ahead, and we see the Israelites are delivered into freedom through the waters of the Red Sea.  They will be in the wilderness for 40 (there’s that number again) 40 years, and will be given a Promised Land.  Thus, the flood story takes a horror tale and turns it up on end.  It is not about fear.  It is about love and redemption, about one God, not many, a God who is creative, not destructive.  And that bow, the word is the one also used for an archer’s bow.  And as it appears, it is pointed away from the earth, thus the symbol of a weapon is transformed into a sign of peace.
 
As any student of children’s literature will tell you, stories work on many levels.  Their appeal is their universality.  They tell deep truth with creative artistry.  Not everything has to be literal to be true.  This is what all good artists know and practice. 
 
Consider Van Gough’s Starry Night painting.  It captures movement, feeling, and color in a way that a flat photograph or simple drawing never could.  Recently, I was forwarded a video of a number van Gough’s paintings set to music.  It is sublime and reminded me of the power that art has to capture thought, feeling, emotion, and deep truth.  That is one of the reasons to love poetry as it uses and economy of words to paint connective images in the mind.
 
With the rainbow story as a backdrop canvas, we move to another beginning story with Jesus in today’s Gospel.  Mark does not tell the Christmas story, rather, he begins with Jesus being baptized.  And as he comes out of the water -- you see where this is going – he hears God saying: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  It is said for Jesus to hear and Mark helps us eavesdrop.  With the strength of that affirmation, Jesus goes to the wilderness for, you guessed it, forty days.  Ding, ding, ding, the stories are connected.  God is about delivering Jesus through danger, discomfort, and potential tragedy, to be new life.  In the very next sentence, Jesus shows up in Galilee to begin his saving work, announcing: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
 
Jesus is off and running, and Mark will tell his story at a breakneck pace, using evocative language and familiar phrases, drawing on every connection he can make to the bigger story of God with God’s people.  Jesus’ story, while connected, is not just another story.  Jesus speaks in the present tense, rather than the past tense of fable.  The plan of new creation and redemption already embedded, but the truth to which all of the biblical stories point, becomes human, God among us.  We will follow this one, carefully.
 
It must be noted that Noah was a great guy, but he turned out to be a drunkard and wildly imperfect.  The Israelites, while lively and committed, can be weak kneed and downright self-absorbed, falling down and getting up before God over and over.  If God were to be destructive and vengeful, the story would tell of thousands of floods and arks.  Jesus knows this.  Jesus confronts this.  And still, he invites us, all of us, to turn around, see that God is not distant and removed, but very near, so we can believe the good news.
 
We are off and running in the season of Lent.  As I have said and written before, we do this season to make space for God to grow us in love.  For forty days, (forty, again!) we take on some discomfort, some deprivation, or some new discipline, not to become better or get more holy, but to live into the story, to be brought through whatever watery chaos may be drowning us, and plant our feet on solid ground. 
 
In beautiful summary, the Psalmist says:
 

I waited patiently upon the LORD; *
he stooped to me and heard my cry.
​
He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; *
he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.

He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God; *
many shall see, and stand in awe,
and put their trust in the LORD.
 
And you guessed it, that is Psalm… 40.  Go figure.  Amen.

​I come from a divided household.  When I was growing up, both of my Episcopalian parents took us to Ash Wednesday services.  We went to the early service with the bribe of a big greasy breakfast to follow at the Chase Café near our church.  So much for fasting, I guess, but after all, we were growing boys.
 
The divide was not in attending the service, but the tension arose right in the middle of the service.  When it was time to come forward for ashes to be imposed on our foreheads, my dad went up, and my mom did not.  Inevitably, we would ask why the divide?  My mom said that it was not her tradition.  My dad responded that we needed all the signs of humility we could get.  Growing up Presbyterian, he subscribed to the theory that people were, by nature, a damned mess.
 
If we pressed it further, mom would refer to the gospel lesson where it talks about not practicing our piety before others, not looking dismal, and washing your face.  It was a fair point and that has always been an ironic twist in the day’s lessons.  My dad came back with the belief that the ashes were not to show off to others, but for us to remember that we aren’t the center of the universe.  Neither could convince the other.  For familial compromise, I got the ashes, and then washed them off before I went to school.  In the end, that made it easier not to have to explain the whole thing to my mostly Baptist friends.
 
This year, we are not imposing ashes on foreheads.  These times call for creativity, but I am sure God understands.  Churches all over are being changing their practices like we are.  Some places are going back to an old tradition of sprinkling ashes on people’s heads to avoid direct contact.  That could get messy, but it is not a bad idea as that was done at one point in the Church’s history.  Our compromise is this: as you depart today, you will receive a bag in which we have imposed ashes on a card for you to take home and keep throughout Lent.  The bag has other resources as well. 
 
The ashes we use are made from burning the palms from the last Palm Sunday.  In doing a little research, I wondered about this practice.  As it happens, this is practical as well as symbolic.  Palm ashes are fine, very black, and free of much of the acid found in wood ash.  Thus, to get the best ashes, you can make your own, or buy them on the internet, which has made a market for just about everything.
 
As it has been really cold, and we heat with a wood stove as much as possible, we have plenty of ashes around our house, but apparently, those ashes with their high acid content, if mixed with water, form lye, and that is a powerful cleaning agent.  If we used wood ashes, we could, literally burn people’s foreheads.  While that is not a bad image, it might not be the best practice.
 
What we do know about ashes is that they are what is left over when all of the energy in matter has been converted to heat and light.  That science is also good theology.  When it comes down to it, we are at our best when we radiate the warmth of God’s love and show the light of Christ in our lives.  That is the critical energy of holiness.  That is what we are created to be for the world.  Thus, when time takes, all that is left of us will be ashen dust.  That is a sign.  What matters most is what we radiate in the fleeting life we given.
 
For a time, we put away the Alleluias, and we make our worship simple and unadorned.  We do this to make space, because sometimes, in our rush to be on our way somewhere, we forget to be still, and give some space to God growing us in love.  We may be a mess, but we are God’s mess, and if Easter will show us anything, it will be that there is nothing so dark, so rotten, so not right about us, that God cannot redeem it.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Last Epiphany
February 14, 2021
 
 
"We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground, so we can get there. We can make it to the mountaintop through the desert, and we will cross this divide. Our light has always found its way through the darkness. And there's hope on the road up ahead.”
 
Those are powerful and poetic words.  They call us to common humanity.  They echo the words of Martin Luther King Junior’s “I have a dream” speech, which draws heavily on Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery and toward the Promised Land.  They echo John’s Gospel prologue as he draws on the Creation story, where it says: “the light shines in darkness and the did not overcome it.” (John 1:5).  Then the words look to a future in hope: a strong evocation of love and life overcoming death and despair.  Those are powerful and poetic words and as we know, words have power.
 
These powerful and poetic words are not those of a prayer, though they could be.  These powerful and poetic words are not those of a preacher, though they could be.  If you were among the 96.4 million viewers of the Super Bowl last Sunday, you may recognize them from an advertisement featuring Bruce Springsteen, the iconic singer, songwriter, and musician.  Jeep paid 5.5 million dollars for the two-minute ad, entitled “Meet in the Middle.  It did not seem to be about convincing us to purchase a particular automobile, beyond linking the brand to a warm and conciliatory cool factor. 
 
As the game was not close and the half-time show was particularly odd, this ad has been among the most talked about and criticized, non-football aspects of this yearly spectacle.  It was big news because the 71-year-old Springsteen never, ever, not even in his starving artist Jersey Shore bar band days, has endorsed anything.  This prompted cries of Bruce being a sell-out.  It is not clear how much, or even if Springsteen got paid.  With a net worth of half a billion dollars, he has no need for money, no need advance his career, and no need to make some sort of comeback.  His energy is legendary and he has never gone away.  The impetus to do this ad comes from something else.
 
The visual images for “Meet in the Middle” are set in the geographical dead center of the lower 48 states, somewhere in Kansa.  On that site, there is a small, clearly Christian chapel with a cross hanging on the backdrop of the stars and stripes.  Without enumerating all of the arguments, the ad inflamed folks who have now lit up the internet with critical dismissal of the message, the medium, and the man.  Extreme opinionates do not cotton to calls for middle ground, as they water down their particular point of view, cultural agenda, and their intense moral and political fervor.  Critics have run the whole thing down crying “follow the money,” insinuating that the message is all about sales.   Of course, those self-styled purists will not own the fact that their one-sided fervor, with its visceral outrage and mistrust of all others, is great for their own causal attention and fundraising.  “Follow the money,” indeed.
 
As a person of faith, one who has grown up with the Boss’s music in the background, and even, seen the Springsteen live, I choose not to share in the cynicism.  Sure, I get it, the advertising space can be manipulative in attempted culture shaping, but not all messages are bad simply because of the form in which they are delivered.  Advertisements can be effective mirrors, messengers, and thought provokers.  The Jeep ad with Bruce Springsteen has a brilliant text.  True enough, the images may not speak to everyone, but they speak to some.  And in these times, any message of unity, light, and hope is a step in the right direction.  There is gospel in those good words, and we lose out if we throw away the message because the envelope is not to our liking.
 
Today’s gospel is an old chestnut of the Church’s proclamation. If you come to church any kind of often, you have heard this story of the Transfiguration.  It is fantastical as Jesus goes up the mountain with three of the disciples and suddenly, turns brighter than Clorox white, then he is joined by Moses and Elijah, and Peter.  It turns comical as good old lunkhead, Peter, asks if he should build them some little huts so they can all hang out.  As is often the case, he gets it all wrong.  This is not a stopping place; this is a furthering place.  The transfiguration is not just for them, it is for Jesus too.  The thundering voice of God says: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  It is an echo from Jesus’ baptism.  It is a sign pointing forward, and lighting the way.
 
Instead of hanging out in all of the glory, Jesus lights out, heading back into a contentious world that does not understand his Way.  From this point on, Jesus is going to Jerusalem.  This is the journey we make with him in the Lenten season that begins on Wednesday.  We will see that Jesus is not hailed, he is reviled and suspected.  His Way is that of subversive love, superseding petty religious regulations, putting people before power, and forgiveness instead of fighting.  The mission is not perfected in a mountain top moment.  The mission is perfected in one encounter after another, leading to the cross where an instrument of torture that transfigures into a sign of resurrection life.  But that is jumping way ahead.  To get there requires a journey.  And it will not be easily experienced or understood as it unfolds.
 
This takes us back to Springsteen, and his encouragement for folks in this time and place to do the hard work of seeking hope on the road ahead.  Does he speak everyone’s language?  Hardly.  Does the post production work of focus group minded marketers say it all, and do it all, for every person, or even, every American?  Obviously, not.  There is no one shot deal in the work of transformation.  Martin Luther King, Jr. did not eradicate racism.  Mother Theresa did not bring about world peac.  But they set us on a path and gave us language and examples to follow.  Neither of those giants were perfect.  And while he is hardly in their league, Springsteen is not going to be perfect either. 
 
And yet, as a performer, he knows the of substantial stage that two minutes provides.  From his long and successful songwriting career, he also knows that well-crafted words stick to human consciousness, shape human thought and action, and help being about positive change.  We can throw away the letter because of the envelope, or we can accept it as a passionate offering, continuing in the ongoing struggle to move us beyond petty and cynical bickering.
 
If we are to come together as God intends, it will require a journey like that of Jesus going to the cross.  The work will be contentious at times, and sublime at others.  It will ask us to mine our souls for generosity and sacrifice.  It will push us to cast off the old ways in which we have missed the mark, and urge us to see, be, and believe differently. 
 
"We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground, so we can get there. We can make it to the mountaintop through the desert, and we will cross this divide. Our light has always found its way through the darkness. And there's hope on the road up ahead.”
 
Those are some gospel words.  Let’s take them where we can get them, and leave the rest behind.  Amen.