Lean In And Listen*

I saw them out of the corner of my eye on my desk—some flowers in a small ceramic vase. I thought: “How nice. Sukie must have made a bouquet for my birthday.”

And then I went on in my head with whatever pressing issues preoccupied me at the time, passing i

nto forgetfulness.

I didn’t notice them again until three days later. They were still there. They hadn’t moved. I just happened to see them—different kinds of flowers.

One I recognized as a nasturtium--deep, rich yellow petals with orange and blood red accents radiating outward from the stamen.

And then others alongside— more yellow flowers, flowers with shades of purple and blue and tiny pointed buds. Getting closer, I noticed one of them smelled minty. And there was another, with a delicate soft white flower...

I finally thanked Sukie and asked what they were. Nasturtiums, she said, and lemon gem marigolds. And some lavender. And catmint. And white flox. All from our garden.

I almost missed them. Another day or two, and they would have been wilted beyond recognition.

And truly seeing them, my life was, in that moment, touched, even changed. My awareness heightened, sharpened; my spoken gratitude consummating that kind gift.

That experience of truly seeing the flowers reminded me of a favorite scene from a movie.

The film stars Robin Williams as John Keating, an English teacher at an exclusive boys boarding school. Dead Poets Society was filmed at an Episcopal prep school—St. Andrew’s in Middletown, Delaware, established in 1929 by a member of the DuPont family.

The scene I recall takes place in the foyer of one of the buildings, with school banners adorning the walls. There are glass trophy cases containing memorabilia and old photographs of athletic teams. The room has the feel of a chapel, the sacred precincts of sports and boys long since gone.

Keating instructs one of the students gathered round to read from the school hymnal. It’s a poem entitled To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by the 17^th century Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick.

The student reads aloud: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying, And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

Keating says to the students: ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’ The Latin word for that sentiment is Carpe Diem. Now who knows what that means? A boy answers: Carpe Diem. Seize the day.

Keating responds: Why does the writer use these words?

Because we are food for worms, lads. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.

Now I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. Keating moves them over to the trophy case and huddles them close, turning their gaze upon the uniformed schoolboys in the old photographs.

You've walked past them many times, he says. I don't think you've really looked at them.

They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you.

Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils.

But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. Do you hear it? And behind them, Keating whispers in a gruff voice: Carpe. Hear it? Carpe. Carpe Diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

How fitting these lines, as we grieve the loss of this genius, this  gifted comedic and improvisational genius so tragically imprisoned within by dark forces from which he  felt himself unable to escape, except by taking his own life.

And yet his Keating teaches us even now:

Carpe Diem. Seize the day.

Wake up. Pay attention. Of the schoolboys in those old photographs, long since deceased, he remarks: You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve really looked at them.

So we might ask ourselves: what or whom do we walk past everyday without looking, without really noticing or truly seeing?

The disciples can’t imagine that a Canaanite woman could be real, says Sara Miles, a priest on the staff of St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco, as she comments on this morning’s gospel reading.

Jewish scripture was full of these horror stories about the Canaanites who occupied the promised land and who had disgusting religious practices like worshipping idols and cross breeding with people of different faiths, among other abominations.[i]

The Canaanite woman is a heathen. So when she accosts Jesus pleading, ‘Lord, have mercy,’ she has no standing to do it and moreover she’s acting completely shamelessly, just waving her hand around in the air begging for recognition and insisting that Jesus should heal her daughter, something that she’s unqualified to even ask for.

And the disciples believe that they should keep non-persons like the Canaanite from raising their hands and demanding God’s attention.

They see themselves as keepers of the holy traditions. They’re protectors of the true people of God.

And they’re supposed to stay on guard, so that God won’t waste any precious mercy on the unpedigreed, on some stray mutt yelping around the flock.

And it seems that, at least according to Matthew’s gospel, even Jesus sees it this way. He tells the Canaanite woman to shut up and go away. I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he says.

Not truly seeing her, he dismisses her.

And then, as Miles asserts, this becomes a healing story, a story first and foremost about the healing of Jesus.

Something happened.

Jesus is challenged by this woman’s back talk, by her pushy insistence that she needs and wants him. This [woman] breaks Jesus open with her faith that God recognizes her too, that God calls her by name and that salvation is for everyone without exception.

And then Jesus knows— [he sees] suddenly—that he’s not just here for the chosen people...he’s here for us all, that salvation is for everyone without exception.

It’s a rough moment and it teaches us, the way that everything Jesus does in his human life teaches us how to be human...Jesus has to undergo the fully human pain of conversion.

He has to be broken and humbled and changed by the realization that someone who he has written off and insulted has consciousness—[is real]—and it hurts.

But it’s healing and like so many of God’s healing acts, the good news is that it happens in unexpected ways...

In my work as a hospice chaplain, I expect everyday to be broken open and humbled and changed. Because to really pay attention, to really see the person sitting in front of us as real—which is to say, to listen attentively and with care—will transform us.

Everyday, I walk away a new person, my universe expanded by listening carefully to the words of  another or at last seeing the flowers on my desk for what they truly are.

That conversion—that change of heart—is the challenge and the gift of being human, something we all share, whoever we are, whatever our work.

So lean in and listen. Do you hear it? It’s uttered every moment if you have the ears to hear and the hearts to respond.

Carpe. Carpe diem.

This is the only day. This is the only moment. Take hold of it gently. And let it change your life. AMEN

*A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME ; August 17, 2014;

Proper 16, Year A; Revised Common Lectionary

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[i] Miles, The Rev. Sara Food for Dogs August 14, 2011 St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco, CA.

Come and See*

The Rev. John Buehrens, a former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, married to an Episcopal priest, tells the story of his daughters, Erica and Mary, being exposed to both traditions.

At a certain point he writes they were told, “This year you can go to either Sunday school. You choose, but you can’t stay home.” ...When Erica was two and a half, we found her one day with a towel draped down her back like a vestment, holding a hymnal (upside down), and marching around the couch singing “The Hokie Pokie.” Obviously, an Episcopalian!

...Mary, on the other hand, goes to All Soul’s, [UU]. She loved her Sunday school class this year, which studied stories from Genesis and Exodus—putting Jacob and Rachel on trial in the matter of Esua’s birthright, and conducting a protest march against Moses and Aaron, with signs reading “Meat, not Manna!” “Impeach Moses!” and “back to Egypt.” When she grows up, Mary says, she might like to be Jewish. [Clearly, the Unitarian!][i]

My dear friend, James Ford, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, Rhode Island, when I told him of the UU Folk Ensemble visiting with us this morning, quipped in a Facebook message that Episcopalians are just Unitarians with a sense of style.

Though it may be dangerous to say so—thankfully, the Bishop is on sabbatical in the Midwest somewhere—I largely agree. I have great sympathy with Unitarian Universalists, having attended the Allen Avenue UU Church (the other UU church in Portland, affectionately know as A2U2) briefly after taking leave of parish ministry in 2006. My wife, Sukie, comes from a long line of venerable Boston Unitarians dating back to the Nineteenth century.

It goes without saying that Unitarian Universalism represents liberal religion in its broadest, most comprehensive and all-embracing sense. But I would also argue that the Episcopal Church (and by extension, Anglicanism)—within the larger rubric of the Christian Church—is, at its heart, a liberal tradition.

I was raised in the Congregational Church and became an Episcopalian in college. While I valued my religious upbringing, the Episcopal Church attracted me by its liturgy and rootedness in an age-old tradition rich in history and with a global reach. I understood that the Anglican Communion’s common prayer was its guide to theology and practice and that tests of orthodoxy, and censorship of thought, were anathema to its essentially liberal spirit.

Most importantly, I was advised early on not to leave my intellect and my reason at the door when I entered the church, but to bring it—along with my heart—and honor it as an important means of seeking the truth.

I share this with you this morning as we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. There are some today, particularly among my daughter’s generation, who are unaware that King was a Christian minister. King came from a long line of orthodox Baptist ministers—his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather, only brother, and uncle were all clergy. “I didn’t have much choice, I guess” he said as an aside in his great sermon “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool.” Throughout his life as a great civil rights activist, King served as pastor of Baptist congregations.

But his faith was essentially liberal and it was that liberal faith that inspired his prophetic witness, including his civil rights leadership, his commitment to non-violence and pacifism, and his advocacy for the poor of all ethnic and racial backgrounds across America and indeed around the world. Some have even argued that King’s was a Unitarian Christianity.

Be that as it may, Robert Scofield, in his essay entitled King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Martin Luther King, Jr.. says that despite being raised in a lineage of orthodox Baptist ministers, King at a young age demonstrated skepticism of the irrational claims of religion, and embarrassment at the emotionalism of his father's preaching.

 King carried these suspicions with him when he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of fifteen. He had originally planned on being a doctor or lawyer. At Morehouse, under the guidance of  [the President of the college] and [a] professor [of religion and philosophy], he began to believe that religion could be both "intellectually respectful and emotionally satisfying."

 Scofield writes that the purpose of the church for King is not to create dogma, theology, or creeds but rather "to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience," and to commit to action. From a young age, King understood the importance of combining his religion with social justice.

From this perspective King viewed the church's role as promoting a way of life rather than a belief system, saying, "Jesus always recognized that there is a danger of having a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.” He stated that Christ is more concerned with how we treat our neighbors, our attitudes toward racial justice, and living a high ethical life than he is with long processionals, knowledge of creeds, or the beautiful architecture of a church.[ii]

So much for the Anglican Church!

But at the very heart of King’s faith was his experience of God, a God whom he knew as a personal presence, transcendent yet immanent; that is, a God of love and whose Spirit is synonymous with seeking justice. King tells us in his own words that, God is not a process projected somewhere in the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave. …God is forever present with us.

In 1955, as a young pastor, King’s life was transformed, his vision of the religious life unalterably deepened and clarified, by a profound encounter with God at his kitchen table in Montgomery, Alabama. Albert Raboteau, a professor of religion at Princeton University writes: That encounter was precipitated by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott which King had neither started nor suggested, but which irrevocably changed him from the successful pastor of a moderately comfortable church to the leader of a national movement for racial justice...[iii]

As spokesman for the boycott, King was overwhelmed with a load of back-breaking responsibilities and frightened by serious threats against his life and his family's safety. Reaching the end of his endurance, King sat at his kitchen table one night over a cup of coffee, trying to figure out how to get out of the movement without appearing a coward.

Of that experience, King later preached:

But I never will forget one night very late. It was around midnight. And you can have strange experiences at midnight. I had been out with the steering committee all that night. And I came home, and my wife was in bed and I immediately crawled into bed to get some rest...

And immediately the telephone started ringing and I picked it uup. On the other end was an ugly voice. That voice said to me, in substance, “[N-word], we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow your house up your house.”

I’d heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me. I turned over and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I was frustrated, bewildered. And then I got up and went back to the kitchen and I started warming some coffee, thinking that coffee would give me a little relief...

Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something...that your Daddy used to tell you about. That power than can make a way out of no way.

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it.... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak.”

And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world." ...I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.[iv]

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me.

In the reading from John’s gospel, two disciples were standing with John the Baptist. And turning, Jesus addresses them, saying: What are you looking for? One of them responds: Rabbi, where are you staying? Jesus replies: Come and see. Just that. Come and see.

As if to say, see for yourself. Experience God for yourself, here and now. Experience first hand that inmost connection with the divine, that inmost connection with all people everywhere and all creation; that larger life that embraces you and sustains you and calls you to works of justice and compassion. Come and see.

My friend the UU minister, James Ford, in a sermon preached three years ago on the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and reflective of King’s own experience that night in 1955 at his kitchen table, states that his own understanding of God is our direct knowing that we are not alone. What UUs call that interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.

God, he says, is that knowing of our connections down to our bones and marrow. Not just a head knowing, but a body knowing, a heart knowing, a knowing that permeates the very fiber of our being.

It is the sustaining experience that allows us to continue the endless work of feeding the hungry, of seeking compassion and justice for all, [of] trying to help transform our own lives and the life of this country in an ever more generous, open hearted direction.[v]

We are not alone. No never alone.

Come and see. AMEN

*A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough

January 19, 2014

Second Sunday after the Epiphany: Year A

Isaiah 49:1-7; Ps. 40:1-12; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

   

  

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[i] Buehrens, John A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism Beacon Press, 1998

[ii] Scofield, Robert James “Be” King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Martin Luther King, Jr. Tikkun Magazine http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/nov_dec_09_scofield

[iii] Raboteau, Robert J. A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/884057raboteau.html

[iv] King, Jr., Martin Luther Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/why_jesus_called_a_man_a_fool/

[v] Ford, The Rev. James Martin Luther King’s Liberal God: A Meditation on the Soul’s Longing http://www.firstunitarianprov.org/sermons/110116.shtml

Wading in the Waters*

In the measure of one short week, from the Second Sunday after Christmas Day to the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have been catapulted from the birthplace of Jesus to the banks of the Jordan River; from the wise men bearing gifts to the sweltering throng wading into the muddy waters; from a new-born babe to the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John.

It all leaves me feeling breathless and not altogether prepared. Perhaps it’s because I was abroad in England for Christmas. It seems as if the tree was just put up, the lights strung, the decorations unveiled from their year-long captivity in the battered cardboard box where they had been stored away.

Perhaps I am reluctant to let go of Christmas because it is for me the most beloved liturgical season of the Church year. All the seasonal uproar that surrounds it aside, it is simple and direct. It is a season of contemplation and adoration. It speaks to the heart.

It reawakens in me that longing and desire—as I quoted the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams last week—for the sheer presence and accessibility of God, that bare fact of the child in the manger, the life in Galilee, the mystery laid open.

Perhaps because in a fifteenth century chapel in Cambridge, England—with my family by my side—I experienced that sheer presence anew and my heart is still laid open to the mystery. And being laid open, it is tender and vulnerable.

Yes, I am reluctant to let go of Christmas.

Yet, here we all are, at the muddy banks of the River Jordan, propelled over the thirty years or so that it took for Jesus to meet his destiny—and ours.

I said last week that it is my conviction that our most powerful moments are profoundly simple even prosaic, like that of the barefoot shepherds in the carol: our day’s work done, sharing our love, our hopes, ourselves, giving all to the child.

And this precisely because our lives are so complicated, we live so much in our heads and not in our hearts, trying to figure our lives out, get it right; in short, striving to be good, competent, fulfilled people.

It then it happens.

We lay that heavy burden down and we find ourselves welcomed and loved and embraced, wholly and completely, through no merit of our own, but by sheer gift.

Just that.

And when I’ve had that experience, it’s enough, and I’ve felt that if it were my time to depart this earth, so be it. I would go in peace.

I wonder if, in a sense, that was Jesus’ experience in the muddy waters, with that swarming mass of ordinary, struggling men and women swirling around him: the descent of the Spirit like a dove, the voice from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

But here’s the thing: Jesus was not at the end of his ministry but at its beginning. He was not at the conclusion of his life but at its commencement; and the life he would live would be for the life of the world, for all those women and men with whom he waded into the waters. 

Through the power of the Spirit, this Son of God was embraced by God’s unconditional love for the sake of all people everywhere. The same may be said of us as well: we are the sons and daughters of God, we are loved by God, and through the Spirit bestowed in baptism, the life we have been given is for the life of the world.

William Sloane Coffin, for many years chaplain of Yale University then senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, once observed that Yale students were much taken by the Descartian assertion cogito, ergo sum—I think therefore I am—whereas, Coffin felt, it should be amo, ergo sum—I love therefore I am.

I love therefore I am, which is to say: the life we live is for the healing of the world. As with Jesus, baptism sets us on our journey. We have a calling to be heeded, a purpose to be realized, a destiny to be upheld.

At Christmas, the mystery was laid open. It is now ours to show forth for all to see. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; First Sunday after the Epiphany; January 12, 2014 

Late Arrivals and Cold Comings*

What can we say about the wise men? Well, they were not kings and there were not three of them, at least, that is, according to Matthew. We may presume that they were not historical figures but characters in a parable. Matthew imagined them to be magi, a word from which we get magician.

But they were not magicians in any sense in which we understand that term. Rather, according to the New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, they were quasi-religious figures. Some have suggested that they were astrologers, although to think of them primarily as such is misleading.[i]

They came from the East, presumably Mesopotamia, but more from a mythical geography, following the star. They were Gentiles and not Jews, drawn to Jesus as one who was the “light of the nations.” I imagine that these wise men were clever, complicated, with mixed motives, and even, as we are fond of saying these days, more spiritual than religious. 

And they were late arrivals. The simple barefoot shepherds were at the manger long before, even the cattle.

They may even remind us of ourselves.

I trust that you all had a delightful Christmas Eve, as I have been assured you did. London was crazy. Half the globe, it seemed, was on Christmas vacation in London. One of you said to me recently, having been on a trip spanning the continents, that traveling is for young people not for us oldsters. I tend to agree.

However, amidst the crowds and chaos, we had a great time; except, that is, when I got trapped beside a desiccated mummy at the British Museum. Unable to move due to the press of hundreds of people, I was barely able to breath... 

If you ask me what the “high” point of my trip was, I can tell you precisely. Not surprisingly, it was not in London but in Cambridge on Christmas Eve, at a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel.

Standing in queue with six hundred for six hours from before dawn with a brisk wind blowing out of the west, though not the high point, was delightful. All were in good Christmas cheer and we met friends with whom we hope to stay in touch with for years to come.

But the service itself, in that glorious space of soaring fan vault and stained glass as the sun slowly set in the western sky, was sublime. Because the acoustics are so fine, there is no need of sound amplification in a sanctuary vastly more spacious than this, just the sweet voices of the choristers accompanied at times by the organ.

We heard for the first time a piece for unaccompanied choir by Bob Chilcott, a modern British composer who, in earlier years, was a chorister at King’s. It’s titled Shepherd’s Carol, a tune set to words by an anonymous author.

In it the shepherd’s address Mary at the manger, reflecting on their epiphany in the hills on a calm winter’s evening, watching the frosted meadows that winter had won, and a star shone in the night, the silence more lovely than music.

They heard a voice from the sky...telling of God being born in the world of men. And so we have come, they say, our day’s work done, Our love, our hopes, ourselves, We give to your son. It’s a lovely, meditative piece that exudes calm and transcendent peace.

Of course, there is now no way to recreate the sound or the mood, the melody repeating and enhancing, weaving a beautiful web of music in that candlelit space. Nor is there any way to convey my experience in that moment though, I found later, Sukie was equally touched. That it brought tears to our eyes hints at its gracious power to move us.

But I’ll try, in the hopes that you too have had a similar experience, though perhaps in a different setting.

It is my conviction that our most powerful moments are profoundly simple even prosaic, like some barefoot shepherds, our day’s work done, sharing our love, our hopes, ourselves, giving all to the child.

And this precisely because our lives are so complicated, we live so much in our heads and not in our hearts, trying to figure our lives out, get it right; in short, striving to be good, competent, fulfilled people.

It then it happens.

We lay that heavy burden down and find ourselves welcomed and loved and embraced, wholly and completely, through no merit of our own, but by sheer gift.

Just that.

On the plane back home, while being entertained by 40 teenage Irish school boys on their way to a skiing holiday in New Hampshire, I happened to be reading Choose Life, a collection of Christmas and Easter sermons by the now former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It seemed to me that he captured something of my experience at King’s. In his Christmas sermon The Kingdom of the Simple, he talks about the wise men coming to the manger.[ii]

He reflects on the wise men, like us clever, resourceful, complicated people, who manage to screw things up more often than not, late-comers to the manger. And so I close by sharing a few excerpts from that sermon.

He says: Yet—here is the miracle—the three wise men are welcome. You might expect that a faith which begins in such blinding simplicities, the child, the cattle, the barefoot shepherds, would have no place for the wise men...

Coming to the Christ child isn’t always simple. It just is the case that people come by roundabout routes, with complex histories, sin and muddle and false perceptions and false starts. It’s no good saying to them,’You must become simple and wholehearted’, as if this could be done just by wishing it.

The real question is, ‘Can you take all your complicated history with you on a journey towards the manger? Can you at least refuse to settle down in a hall of mirrors, and go on asking where the truth really lies? Can you stop hanging on to the complex and...recognize where the map of the heavens points?’

So: don’t deny the tangle and the talents, the varied web of what has made you who you are. Every step is part of the journey; on this journey, even the false starts are part of the journey, experience that moves you toward the truth.

We know how much we long for that sheer presence and accessibility of God, that bare fact of the child in the manger, the life in Galilee, the mystery laid open. But we come as we are; room is made for us, healing is promised for us, even usefulness given to us if we are ready to make an offering of what W.H Auden called our crooked heart.

In the straw of the stable, the humble and complicated are able to kneel together. If God is there in the simplicity of the baby in the straw...that means he is there in the naked simplicity for the sophisticated and troubled as well, those who have had long and tortuous journeys, cold comings, to the stable.

The childlike response of longing and delight can come even from a heart that has grown old and tired...let no-one think they are too compromised, to entangled to be welcome.

AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME; The Second Sunday after Christmas Day;

January 5, 2014

 

   

 

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[i] Borg, Marcus; Crossan, John Dominic The First Christmas Harper Collins, 2007

[ii] Williams, Rowan Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral eBook

Staying Awake*

I didn’t expect to be ordained. Formal religion made me feel claustrophobic, like I couldn’t get enough air. Institutional maintenance was not work that I felt called to or competent to perform, yet I knew that it was a big part of any priest’s job.Yet my spiritual director at that time—now the Bishop of Massachusetts—said that I had a vocation to the priesthood. Who was I to protest?

The framed certificate in my study says that I was consecrated to the Sacred Order of Priests in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church on the third of December, 1983—thirty years ago this Tuesday. It was signed by Frederick Barton Wolf, the Bishop of Maine. So it must be true.

Shortly after my ordination, I attended the annual clergy conference in Massachusetts, where I was serving as associate Rector of the church in Wellesley at that time. The retreat facilitator was from the Alban Institute in Washington, D.C, a kind of congregational think tank. He had all the clergy—and there were well over a hundred of us—break up into small groups by years of ordination.

I was in the 1-5 year group. Then there was the 5-10, 10-15, and so on up to the thirty and over group, which was the end of the line. The facilitator had us look around the room. The thirty and overs were venerable to be sure—many were Rectors of the large cardinal parishes in the diocese, one or two went on to become Bishops—but they looked a little rumpled and out of shape. Bunch of old farts, I thought.

Well, here I am—thirty years and counting. Mind you, I didn’t expect to be ordained.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says: Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. Who was this Son of Man of whom Jesus speaks?

The phrase has several meanings. In the Hebrew scriptures—the Old Testament—it means simply, son of a human being, which is to say, the fully human one. It also signifies the one who will appear in history to usher in God’s judgment, not unlike its context in today’s reading from Matthew. Finally, in Matthew’s gospel and elsewhere, it refers to the centerpiece of the whole narrative—that is, the one who will suffer, die, and be raised again by God in glory.

Furthermore, the Son of Man, as God’s judge, is an agent of the apocalypse—the end times—when, minding our own business as in the days of Noah, we will all be swept away, or one taken and the other left, at an unexpected hour. So we need to stay awake and be vigilant. These are hard sayings and the preacher could spend entire sermons explaining them. I’ve done so exhaustively over my thirty years as a priest. And, frankly, I’m not sure that it helps much.

Let’s just say that apocalyptic literature was woven into the fabric of ancient times. Whether the historical Jesus himself actually adopted the apocalyptic worldview is a matter of debate even among scholars today. But the dominant dynamic of the reading is relevant never the less—that is, the unexpectedness of the events of which Jesus speaks.

No one knows, Jesus says in today’s passage – neither angels nor even himself – no one knows when this will take place except the Father. And it’s this element of the uncertainty, even unpredictable-ness of life, which offers a point of entry into this otherwise bizarre passage.

I didn’t expect to be ordained but once I was, I found that my priesthood was all about learning to live with the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the uncertain. Priests are specialists in being present to the unpredictable, which is to say, to the impermanent, precarious nature of our lives, of showing up at emergency departments and deathbeds and heaven knows where. 

Or we aren’t, and become specialists instead in avoiding or denying the unpredictable and painfully precarious, numbing ourselves with all manner of substance abuse or sexual misconduct. In that sense, we are not alone, but quite at home with the rest of humanity, even leading the way.

But there’s another side to the story as well and that’s about staying awake. You know what time it is, Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

Staying awake to the unpredictable and precarious brings the promise of life’s preciousness, of indescribable moments of grace and heartbreaking beauty that bring tears to our eyes. We won’t catch those moments if we’re numbed out and asleep. Such moments are all about salvation, about becoming whole and fully human, sons and daughters of God.

As a life-long student of world religions, it has always struck me as fortuitous—which is to say, very cool—that the beginning of Advent coincides with the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment. In Zen, the Buddhist tradition with which I am most familiar, it is called in Japanese rohatsu, meaning simply the eighth day of the twelfth month. In most Zen communities, there is a rohatsu sesshin—an intensive retreat leading up to the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment or awakening on December 8^th.

There’s a story that when the Buddha started to wander around northern India shortly after his enlightenment, he encountered several people who recognized him to be an extraordinary being. They asked him: Are you a god? No, he replied. Are you a wizard then? No, he replied. Well, are you a man? No, he replied again. Becoming very perplexed, they asked: So what are you? Buddha replied simply: I am awake.

Awake to what, you might ask? Awake to the reality that everything is impermanent, everything changes. Awake, too, to the reality that everything is interrelated, what the celebrated Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls InterBeing. Interbeing describes that luminous web of life where all is intimately connected and reflects everything else, where all is precious and irreplaceable.

No one can know for sure when the Son of Man will come, Jesus says, but in the meantime we can stay awake. Even in the midst of the precarious, unpredictable nature of life, we can welcome God’s advent: surprising moments of grace and beauty, of healing and wholeness, of light in the dark, all manifest in every precious human life.

And lest I be accused of clerical despotism, staying awake is rightfully the work of every Christian, not merely the ordained, even an unexpected old hand like me. AMEN

A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough

December 1, 2013

First Sunday of Advent: Year A

Isaiah 2:1-5; Ps. 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24: 36-44

Unfinished Work*

I’ve been told that one of my clergy predecessors here at St. Nick’s, the inimitable Gil Birney, was often given to beginning his sermons with a film review. I have no idea whether he morphed his review into the overall sermon topic or whether it was meant simply to warm folks up, but apparently it was his common practice.

So following Gil’s lead, I begin this morning with a film review, except it’s a movie that you probably don’t want to see. You see,  it’s a painful movie to watch. It’s not fun. It’s not even especially entertaining, in the sense that it provides neither pleasure nor amusement. But it is a masterpiece. And, I’m willing to wager, if you can stomach it, it will be among the most important movies you’ll ever see. In fact, I would go so far as to make the very un-American assertion that every American should see it.

12 Years a Slave is adapted from the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup, who had been a free black man in Saratoga, New York. A husband and father, he was a literate, working man, who also made money as a fiddler. In 1841, after being lured to Washington, D.C. with the promise of several days' lucrative work fiddling with the circus, he was kidnapped into slavery. Over the next 12 years before finally winning his freedom, he became the property of a series of plantation owners, one of whom was a drunken, randomly violent, Bible-based fanatic.

In a film with many striking images, one stands out above the rest: Northup, manacled and in chains, stands up and stumbles to the barred window in his cellar cell in a slave pen in Washington, DC.  From a close up of his face in the window as he shouts for help, the camera zooms out and follows the red brick wall up and over the rooftop, where the city skyline is revealed before our eyes with the unfinished dome of the Capitol building in the distance. And therein is revealed in miniature the whole story of racism in this country.

In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, the British director Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the now deceased American actor), speaks of his films as being about various “elephants in the room,” not least of all slavery. He speaks about the lingering effects of slavery as being all around us:

All you've got to do is walk down the street [in any city], he says, and you see the evidence of slavery in everyday life. But there's a huge silence about it. It's a deafening silence... You know, why [is] the prison population of black males so huge? Why is poverty in that community so huge? Why is mental health, why is education so poor, why? When you ask yourself that question, it all leads down to what happened in slavery...

In the end, says McQueen, 12 Years a Slave is about love. It’s about the depth of a man’s spirit, a spirit that is somehow—gently—unbreakable. It’s a film about human dignity, a dignity that endures and survives the most unspeakable horrors. In that sense, it is a profoundly redemptive work.

And for all of us the work is ongoing: Brothers and sisters, says Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians, never tire in doing right or, in another translation, do not grow weary of doing good. The work of doing right—the work of compassion and justice--is as yet unfinished and incomplete and it is ours, and future generations, to accomplish.

This Tuesday, November 19^th, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, delivered just ten years after Solomon Northup wrote his memoir 12 Years a Slave. In his new documentary film The Address, set to be premiered in the spring, Ken Burns tells the story of a tiny school in Putney, Vermont, the Greenwood School, where every November the students are asked to memorize, then publicly recite around the time of Lincoln’s birthday, the Gettysburg Address.

A task requiring significant effort for us, such memorization and public recital is even more challenging for the fifty boys with learning disabilities who make up the school’s student body. Burns says that the heroic challenge to recite these most stirring words ever spoken enable the boys to find the inner strength and courage to push through and achieve their goal. The results, he says, are inspiring and deeply moving. 

Burns has extended the challenge to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address to all Americans—from paupers to Presidents—by making a video and uploading it to his website. He says that the words of the Gettysburg Address, as they were medicine for the souls of so many at the time of the Civil War, may be medicine for us today.

The world will little note, said Lincoln, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. That unfinished work was for Lincoln the work of justice, as a war for Union alone became as well a war of emancipation for an oppressed people.

That memorable image of the unfinished dome of the Capitol building has become for me a metaphor of our own as yet unfinished soul work, as a people and as a nation; the unfinished work of healing our hearts and the heart of this world. For we need only look deep within ourselves to find the roots of what ails us, and then beyond, to a divine wellspring of healing and hope.

The prophet Isaiah holds out a vision of the end of such work. Call it the dream of God. Call it our help in ages past and our hope for years to come. Call it, with Martin Luther King, Jr., the long moral arc of the universe that bends toward justice. Call it God’s kingdom, that kingdom that Jesus initiates and inaugurates, unfolding in our midst even now.

I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.

May it be so, now and forever. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Year C; November 17, 2013

 

  

Unafraid of Grace and Beauty*

On a bright autumn day, I stood with my father at the college war memorial—an open space at the crest of the hill overlooking the athletic fields below and the Mount Holyoke Range beyond. Three Marine helicopters circled the campus and landed on the fields. On the roof of the nearby gym building stood a man wearing a dark suit and holding a rifle with a telescopic sight.

It was October 26, 1963. President Kennedy had come to Amherst College, my father’s alma mater and much later mine, to attend the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library and to receive an honorary degree. I was eight years old.

Later on, among an outdoor crowd of 10,000, I struggled to see the President speak on the wooden platform erected for the occasion. My father hoisted me up onto his shoulders, so that I’d have a better view.

Less than a month later, I was standing in the hall of my grade school when it was announced that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. A teacher was crying. We all went home early that day.

But the memory that has remained with me over the years—much sharper in relief—was of those helicopters and of that dark-suited secret service man with the rifle and of sitting up high on my father’s shoulders straining to see the President of the United States speak.

Many years later, in her application to Amherst, my daughter Anna was asked to write a brief essay on a theme from Kennedy’s address that day in 1963. He said: What good is a private college or university unless it is serving a great national purpose? It seems to me incumbent upon this and other school’s graduates to recognize their responsibility to the public interest...unless the graduates of this college...are willing to put back into our society those talents, the broad sympathy, the understanding, the compassion...then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy are based are bound to be fallible.

Anna wrote about that day I sat atop my father’s shoulders, about her grandfather’s service to his country as a Naval officer in World War 2, about my work as a hospice chaplain and as a minister, and about her desire to serve her country—to put her gifts back into society--fiercely and bravely, as she wrote—and with broad sympathy, with understanding, and with compassion.

Kennedy spoke that day about the responsibility of college graduates to serve the greater good of the society. And he spoke, reflecting a theme from Robert Frost’s inaugural poem, about the right uses of power, this just one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the midst of an ever expanding nuclear arms race.

At bottom, Kennedy said, [Frost] held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that [he]coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Then he said, in a quote now carved on the wall of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington: I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

In the calendar of the church year, this is the Last Sunday after Pentecost, sometimes referred to as Christ the King. Odd name, you might say, for one who was a Palestinian peasant Jew crucified by the Roman authorities. Odd, indeed.

Today the language of kingship is largely outmoded. We no longer live under kings, so the meaning of the term is largely lost on us. The reign of kings was anything but benign, their massive power and wealth often amassed by means of exploitation and violence.

The inscription over the crucified Jesus read: This is the King of the Jews. With this mockery of Jesus and the Jews, Pilate wrote much more than he could have ever known or imagined.[1]

What is this power of Christ the crucified King?

It’s the power of the wisdom from before time and forever. It’s the power of self-giving love, whose purpose is for healing old wounds.  It’s a power unafraid of grace and beauty, revealed even at the darkest of times.

Today we support the life of St. Nick’s not only with our financial pledges, but with the power and purpose of our love. We pledge to use our gifts, fiercely and bravely, for the sake, not only of this place, but of the wider world; forever offering our broad sympathy, our understanding, and our compassion.

AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King; November 24, 2013   

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[1] See Clendenin, Daniel B. Journey with Jesus 18 November, 2013 http://www.journeywithjesus.net/