​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.