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Sermon Blog
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Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter IV April 25, 2021 Today is known, affectionately, as Good Shepherd Sunday. It is a good day to engage in a deep dive into the living metaphor of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and all of us as sheep. Here, I quote myself from a year ago: “(Sheep) are not naturally smart. Apart from being particularly smelly and overwhelmed with matted fur, sheep do not have much in the way of defensive capability. They have no claws, no fangs, or particularly frightening roar. Their panicked and cacophonous bleating only serves to tell a predator exactly where they are. About the best they can do for defense is to run away and clump up together so the predator can pick out the slowest or fattest one and leave the rest alone. In extreme danger, sheep tend to scatter, and that leads to no good. Sheep have been known to run off cliffs or fall into deep ravines. I will let you do you own interpretation of sheep and the parallels to human nature. It is not such a flattering exercise.” Here in Easter season, with all of the grace of Jesus suffering to death and coming back to live and forgive, I have seen Good Shepherd Sunday an occasion humble ourselves with an exposition of low anthropology. It is a good time to throw in one of my favorite observations that many want to serve God, but mostly as advisors. I have not been alone in my estimation of sheep. Here in the time of COVID, we hear cries from folks who are suspicious or anxious or feel done wrong. Here, I quote news story from a large newspaper reporting on a rally against a state mask mandate: "’Don't be a sheep,’ a local sheriff said, to loud applause from a mostly mask-less crowd, gathered in a church parking lot.” How ironic is that? A quick internet search shows memes and t-shirts and bumper stickers carrying the slogan: “Don’t be a sheep. Think for yourself.” While I am all for critical thinking, and for sure, our systems are imperfect and fail miserably at times, this is not because we need no systems, rather, we need to remember that most things human are imperfect, and respond rationally. As a result of further study, I have discovered that my estimation of sheep and my yearly harangue about human nature has been unnecessarily harsh. I confess to God and you all that I have been wrong about sheep. An in-depth BBC article, reporting on a longitudinal, scientific study of sheep says this: “Sheep are actually surprisingly intelligent, with impressive memory and recognition skills. They build friendships, stick up for one another in fights, and feel sad when their friends are sent to slaughter… [many] were found to form long term relationships… [they] intervened on behalf of weaker colleagues and supported each other in fights”[i] It turns out that sheep are capable of all kinds of admirable traits, and it is not so bad to be called a sheep. The reason the shepherd is so valued is that the shepherd leads sheep to sustenance and safety. Sheep imprint the shepherd’s voice in their brains, knowing from experience that following that voice is a good thing for their survival. Rather than lamenting our sheepness as a liability, today, we might reconsider the cultural baggage that being sheep implies. Sheep are not blind followers. Sheep are discerning followers. Thus, we can be sheep and think for ourselves all at once. This opens up a whole new way of thinking, believing, and following. The wolf, a natural sheep predator looks for the lone sheep, the weakened sheep, and the lost sheep as easy prey. Thus, those who are crying for us not to be sheep might be described more accurately as wolves in sheep’s clothing. I include a humorous cartoon from the Far Side series of comics in your service bulletin for today. This is oddly prescient, as so much of what we hear from the shrill extremes comes from self-styled would-be shepherds, whipping up fear, and excluding so-called undesirables from the herd, mostly to feed their own ego or pocketbook. Radical or rugged individualism finds no purchase in the Gospel. Jesus never asks us to go it alone, quite the opposite, his resurrection life and example invites to go it together with God and one another. The term “herd immunity” has found great attention these days. It is seen as critical, desirable, and necessary. If we cannot or do not accept that we are, in fact, members of the herd, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the wolves of disease, despair, division, and death. So much of what is afoot in skepticism, whataboutism, all the other isms, and all manners of divisiveness is the work of wolves, not the Good Shepherd. The whole being sheep and having a Good Shepherd is wonderfully empowering. The image gives us guidance as to where to look for health, safety, leadership, and abundant life. We are capable of so much beauty, creativity, and love. While keeping a healthy view of our weaknesses and foibles is needed and necessary, the Jesus story shows us again and again that we are worthy. We are worthy of Jesus presence among us. We are worthy of God’s infinite love. We are worthy and powerful in our love for others. Resurrection happens because God chooses it for us, and with us. As it turns out, the revelatory nature of our sheepness is deeply and accurately descriptive. But the fact that we belong to the Good Shepherd is what matters most. While ego and ambition can draw us into more wolfness than sheepness, it is the Shepherd who helps us sort that out. We do not have a crisis of leadership as many decry, we have a crisis of followship that dogs us most. There are so many voices talking out there, taking up valuable space ion our consciousness. In the wake of the Minnesota verdict this week, we have been bombarded by statements, postures, and positioning from just about anyone who could grab a microphone. Justice does not come from a verdict. Justice does not come from talking. Justice comes from listening to the pain of another and working together to help. The voice of the Good Shepherd calls the herd together. The voice of the Good shepherd proclaims love for every single one of us. The voice of the Good Shepherd calls us to follow. That is the only voice that matters. Amen. [i] Earth - Sheep are not stupid, and they are not helpless ... - BBC Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter III April 18, 2021 “Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold Jesus in all his redeeming work.” Or, to quote the British rocker Rod Stewart: “Every picture tells a story. Don’t it?” I addition to poetry, one of my favorite expressive art forms is photography. I took a few photo classes in college and back then, it was all old school. We used black and white film and manually adjusted cameras. In the field, we learned to capture shapes and patterns, use depth of field, shutter speed, and f stop aperture settings. As we gained competence, we moved on to images of people beyond snapshots, and there was a day we even had a nude model to see the human body as a creative palate. That was exciting and difficult at once. In the darkroom, we learned the art of framing an image, zooming in and out for composition, and timing for developer, stop bath, and fixer. Dust specks were the enemy of a good grade, and we were maniacally precise as light sensitive photo paper was really expensive. Remember that back then, photographs were precious. We saw them in print newspapers and magazines, but if you wanted your own to be developed, you had to drop off your film, wait a few days, and come back to pay for every single print, even if the subject’s eyes were closed. These days, we just hit delete and print few if any through online services. There was a woman on my college campus who made a whole job out of taking pictures of students. She was odd for sure, a true artist who never allowed pictures to be posed. She would say “life does not look like that, so I won’t shoot it.” Between classes, in the theater, at sporting events, and outdoor gatherings, she looked for moments, scenes, and interactions that she could capture and sell for two bucks a print. Her name was Lynn, and we all called her Katie Kodak, but not to her face. Twenty years after I graduated, I became the Head of School at the local prep school where I went to college. The day of my installation ceremony, Katie Kodak came to take pictures, and on the sly, handed me a few particularly embarrassing negatives dating back to my senior year. That day, she won my undying affection. These days, we are all photographers. We all have the capacity to make art. Most of you have a camera on or near you right now. I do not wax nostalgic for the old days as much as I appreciate the democratization of art. I still love to see a well composed reflection of a moment, a mood, or emotion. I remain suspicious of filters, photo shop, and anything posed. We see lots of pictures now, but the realm of photographic art is still powerful. An artist with a perceptive eye, a seeing heart, and honed technical skill can create such beautiful art. Erin Edgerton from the Daily Progress gave us the amazing gift of shooting images our Easter experience for the newspaper. I have looked at those photos online just about every day since. In our Emmanuel Bible study this week, we studied the lessons but came back around to the collect, inviting us to “open the eyes of our faith to behold Jesus in all his redeeming work”. Stories are crucial, but stories that come with, or create, images are even more moving. The lessons for the week are like artfully composed pictures of resurrection seen, appreciated, and experienced from different angles and perspectives. There is no one way to capture Jesus resurrection. If there were, we would not need to strive daily to remind ourselves of its immensity. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter paints a large canvas, placing Jesus in the larger scene of God’s expansive landscape. In First John, we are invited to see ourselves as children of God with some dark spots of sin getting in the way of light and life. And finally, we see Luke’s picture of the resurrected Jesus coming into focus while fear, doubt, joy, and wonder shape the disciples’ expressions. A picture is not worth a thousand words. A picture takes us beyond words, which is where we ask God to help our faith take us. What does resurrection look like? What does peace look like? What does forgiveness look like? Those are just big words without a fleshy, world worn images to bring them to real life. I remember two moving images from this week. The first was of a masked little girl wiping the tears of her masked mother at the ceremony honoring of the Capital Police officer, William Evans, killed in the line of duty. The President was there, but he is not even in the picture. That picture says so much about what is important, and about the agony of human grief, and honor, and, yes, a child’s love and resilience. The other picture is of a baseball team mid-jumping celebration after the pitcher has struck out the last batter on the opposing team. In the foreground, however, at home plate, the pitcher is hugging the disconsolate batter. We come to find out that he had just struck out his best friend to win the game. Character, love, sportsmanship, friendship, victory, and defeat are all there. The story is good. The picture is better. Circling back to Katy Kodak, I am reminded that there is no such thing as still life. Still life is an oxymoron, like a small crowd, acting naturally, or social distancing. Good images show us how we look and how the world looks when frozen in one fleeting frame of a moment. Great images tell a story, evoking memory, making connections, and unmasking a panoply of feelings. When we gather for church, we read from Holy Scripture, we give words to praise and prayer, and we break bread to image God’s love broken open in Jesus. If we get caught in mundane explanations of pure theology, we are apt to get up in our heads, to remain at a distance, or just get bored. But when we tell stories, we start the process of developing an image, an image that we can relate to real life. As disciples too, we wonder, we doubt, we fear, and we find joy. But what does that look like? What does that feel like? Where are we in the picture? Admit it, we have to find where we are in a picture when we see it. Are we in it, near it, or just looking at it? “Open the eyes of our faith,” we pray. What an invitation to get off the pages and seek God in our never still life. And in that, we might behold Jesus in all his redeeming work, as a child showing immense compassion, or friends hugging at the intersection of agony and ecstasy. The image of God shines throughout life. Faith is the lens that helps us see God more clearly. Faith begs us look for ourselves in frozen moments of experience and memory. And most importantly, faith helps us find the living and resurrected Christ right there in the picture with us. Amen. Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter II April 11, 2021 Good morning and welcome to what is known in the church world as “Low Sunday.” Church statistics keepers look at this Sunday and the Sunday after Christmas as outliers and throw out the numbers when assessing average attendance. As you are here today you are here today, you are the hard core. Good on you. Really, there is some good stuff to be considered on the Sunday after Easter. All of the resurrection stories are as bit shadowy and mysterious. They kind of leave us hanging with some followers heading home to Galilee and some hiding out in a locked room in Jerusalem. We have to wonder what they all were thinking. Like, so what now? It is one thing for we who have the benefit of a few thousand years of resurrection talk, but it is quite another for those who were getting their hearts and minds around it for the first time. So, what now? Given this fact, I am proposing a name change for this Sunday. Rather than Low Sunday, I believe we should call this “So What Sunday.” Last week we had more than 200 folks here to shout “Alleluia” and the “Christ is Risen,” but today we get to the more meaty and earthy reality of how this whole story continues. John’s gospel gives us more of the resurrection story. As he tells it, later on Easter Day, the disciples are in their locked room, the same room where they had the Passover meal with Jesus. Jesus appears and rather than explaining the whole resurrection thing, he shows them his wounds, bids them peace, breathes the Holy Spirit on them and tells them that they are to practice forgiveness and let go of blame and shame. Thomas was not there. Who knows where he was? Maybe he was checking to see if the coast was clear or maybe he was getting some food. But when the others tell him about what they saw, he says he needs to see this for himself in order to believe, thus he is forever known as Doubting Thomas. If we are honest, most of us are doubters some of the time, and some of us are doubters most of the time. Frederic Buechner puts it this way: “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” Thomas’s questioning does not mean he is faithless, it means he is practical. He gives us permission keep our own seeking lively and be on the lookout for life busting through death. Then natural world gives us quite a show of this. Albert Einstein once said: “that it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!” This is a good message for Easter because resurrection is not a one-time event, it is a process with a very long time-line. When Jesus meets his disciples in the locked room, he might have had some choice words for them. He might have pointed our Peter’s denials or the way that all of them ran off to save their own skins as love suffered on the cross. When he appeared, his words were not an indictment, they were words of encouragement. He bids them peace and tells them to be forgiving. The resurrection shows that God is not interested in eye for an eye justice, God is all about setting us free from the messes we create and helping us love our way into new and full life. The “so what” of this message is crucial and important. The folks who turn up to see the baby in the manger and then to hear of the empty tomb miss out on the whole forgiveness part. We might want to get out there with some of the Holy Spirit in our step, and show folks the rest of the story. I do not mean this as some sort of holier than thou sour grapes. It is good to have people here to celebrate whenever they come, and however they get here. But Easter is not over when the lilies turn brown and the jelly beans are all consumed. It is just beginning. As the poet Wendell Barry says: “practice resurrection.” What does that mean? It means looking at all of the brokenness in this world and jumping into it with love. It means letting go of shame and blame. Contrary to popular culture, it does not mean canceling others worth or dignity. It means admitting when we are judgmental or out of line. It means saying we are sorry, and meaning it rather than, ‘I am sorry you feel that way.’ I had the unfortunate occasion of spending time at my local auto repair store this week. Contrary to how some folks feel about such places, I found them to be honest, helpful, and generous. The place is not much to look at. There are decades old stacks of Popular Mechanics magazines. There are a few muscle car calendars. And there are always two to three guys, who do not work there, available for advice and consolation. They also have free coffee. On the wall there is a great sign that reads: “Your beliefs don’t make you a better person. You behavior does.” If that is their business motto, I am all in. That is a practical statement that tells us what to do about resurrection. We are to live it. Nobody ever come to believe anything through being shamed or having things explained as we believe they ought to believe. The old adage is that faith is caught, not taught. That is what Jesus embodies in this mystical encounter with Thomas and the rest of them. Legend has it that Thomas took off and went to India to tell the story, and when the first missionaries got there, lo and behold, there was already Christ following community. Happy “So what Sunday.” Today we remember Thomas, not in spite of his doubt, but because of it. He accepted Jesus’ forgiveness, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and set out to show it to others. There is so much more to learn in our faith and through our doubts. Meanwhile, practice resurrection. And if in doubt as to what that means, love somebody else, and meet God there. 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 |
AuthorThe Rev. John Thomas is Rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood Archives
October 2024
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