Love mercy: A sermon preached at St. Paul's, Minneapolis on March 3, 2013

Watching the 10 o’clock news this past week, WCCO had a special about the four things as a parent of tweens you should try not to do. Tweens are those kids who are at that age before they are teenagers and after they are completely dependent upon their parents for everything. Wait, does that ever change? Aren’t we all tweens does anyone ever become a teenager?

The four don’ts were the following, 1. Support, but don’t rescue. 2. Give kids what they need, but don’t give them everything they want. 3. Don’t do things for your kids they should do for themselves. 4. Don’t develop an allergy to your children’s unhappiness.

If you are anything like me, you might be thinking, “Duh, of course! Those are basic parenting 101 classes, kids these days; they don’t know how to do anything. Back in my day I walked to school, up hill, both ways.” It is interesting to see what TV news shows think is important and helpful. I did find the piece enlightening, but I was more intrigued about the people who have created industries telling us how to raise our toddlers, how to raise our tweens, how to deal with our rebellious teenagers and so on and so forth.

I am close to becoming a parent of tweens, so I did find the story interesting, if not a little simple. The urge to step in and rescue, or to help my kids in different situations is often overwhelming. I want nothing more than to be sure that my children are healthy and happy. I want nothing more than to show off my own abilities to protect and care for my children. Sometimes, the helping, the rescuing is not at all about the children, so much as it is about our own abilities to parent.

We often become overly connected to people we love, particularly those people we love that are in downward spirals, people that refuse our help. The toughest cases, I have found in 12 years of ministry, are those where we have invested our own time, talent and treasure into relationships that have never returned anything remotely to the level we have put in. And though we might think we do it out of the goodness of our hearts, we often desire to see some results from our efforts.

It makes me wonder about the motives of the gardener from todays Gospel reading, it even makes me wonder about the motives of our own God, meeting Moses face to burning bush. Don’t you think readings like this, particularly the parable, are not at all helpful in understanding how to help? Is this Gospel parable even a story about how to help, or how to care? After all, how much power do we really have to help ourselves not to mention anyone else we need to care for?

The collect for today has something to say about that, “we have no power in ourselves, to help ourselves” Thomas Cranmer wrote. No power to help ourselves? No power to fend off the adversities of the day, no power to protect ourselves from evil thoughts that assault the soul? If this is the case, and I think it is helpful for us to imagine once in a while that this truly is the case, how on earth do we think we can ever help anyone else?

Of course, that is the rub, if we can imagine ourselves as powerless, as humble beings who cannot help ourselves, much less the people around us, then we come to understand what mercy is all about. God’s mercy is more important than God’s judgment. God’s mercy is more important than the judgment of others. God’s mercy is more important than the judgment we place upon our own lives.

So, what is mercy? Is having mercy on someone the same as offering help? To me, mercy is the picture of this gardener at the base of the tree, spreading manure around to help it grow, mercy, it seems to me, is providing the resources, the humanity, the love that we have that is in excess of what we need to bring transformation, or even simply to bring a breath of new and fresh air into the life of another being.

In the Missional Church conversation happening throughout the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, mercy is working with people, and helping tends to be working for others. At least this is my interpretation. Having mercy isn’t about having pity on someone, having mercy is walking with someone in their pain. Walking with someone in his or her suffering. Having mercy is recognizing the dire situation someone or some community may be in and exploring how it is God is at work in their midst.

I have a friend who often asks the question, what kind of help is help? It’s a really good question to ask, what kind of help is help? I have a horrible picture on my iPhone of a little cartoon person deep in prayer, and the headline on it says: “Prayer, how to do nothing and still think you’re helping.” See, I told you it was horrible. But I think the question and this cynical perspective on prayer go together.

We pray for, we try to help, often accomplishing very little in our efforts, to change others. Showing mercy is much different, much deeper, it is about being vulnerable, open and willing to match up our own pain and suffering with someone else’s, to walk through the dark valleys of our lives, again and again if necessary, in order to find that we are not alone, and that God is at work in our midst.

As we walk with one another through the valleys and over the mountaintops, we come to understand what Meister Eckhart means when he says that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. A spiritual journey implies a linear progression, a trip of sorts with a beginning and with an end. Meister Eckhart says if there were a spiritual journey it would be an inch long and miles deep. Being on a spiritual journey means we are walking with people, with others. And when we walk with others, we are required to journey back into places where we have already been, and already experienced, whether they are the dark valleys or the sunlit mountaintops.

I am reminded of one of my favorite stories from West Wing, when Leo, President Bartlett’s Chief of Staff tells Josh the following story. "This guy is walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, 'Hey you. Can you help me out?' The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, 'Father, I'm down in this hole can you help me out?' The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, 'Hey, Joe, it's me can you help me out?' And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, 'Are you stupid? Now we're both down here.' The friend says, 'Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out.'" What kind of help, is help?

Our lives are deeply interconnected, our lives do not progress to one single goal, they weave themselves throughout the countryside of our experiences, through one another’s tumultuous lives. Our interconnectedness requires patience and above all, mercy.

The relationships we have with one another and with God require us to get our hands dirty, not just in the clean dirt, but also in the disgusting manure. The interconnectedness we share with one another is about the discovery of the Holy, the divine, as the prophet Micah put so well, our interconnectedness requires only that we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

The space we inhabit.

I am sitting in a Lunds, minding my own business, sipping on a delicious hot chocolate. The place is empty. There is a line of tables to my left, I am sitting against the wall, trying to get some tax work done, some money work done and all of those things I have to do, "have to" being the operative words there.

I am sitting here just getting settled when this guy walks up to the table next to me, which doesn't have a chair at it, and unloads all his stuff. He proceeds to adjust the table for some reason, moving it within a foot of me and then walks down the line of four tables, picks up a chair and drags it to the table.

I guess I am exerting a safe presence at the moment... Or maybe he has something planned for us.

Anyway, he breaks open his brown bag pulls out a banana, a fresh one, so it smells pretty good and a red devil cake doughnut. After this he pulls out a plastic knife and combines his fingers and knife to cut up the doughnut and chow down.

He takes the doughnut piece, stabs it with his knife and eats it from the end of his knife. Then he pulls out a normal cake doughnut and does the same. I didn't see how he ate the banana. It wasn't as disconcerting as the eating of the doughnut.

I kind of feel like he and I are sitting on the same side of a booth at a restaurant, how cheesy couples do when they are in love. I've never done such a thing.

This scenario gets me to thinking, why am I so uncomfortable that this guy decided to sit right next to me, and I mean right next to me. If I am not careful I will hit him with my elbow if I am typing. So my left arm is being held tight to my side.

What is it? Am I such a big guy that I need space? Is it that I don't want to seem like I am too close to this guy? What prevents me from saying "Hello" to him, to asking him about how his day was? What is it that keeps me from possibly creating a new acquaintance.

Space. The space that surrounds us is somehow an extension of us, an extension of our comfort and when people so brashly move into that space, just the fringes of it, mind you, we get set on edge, I do anyway. Would it have been any different if he was a she? Would it have been any different if I knew him, even if it was only as an acquaintance.

Boom, he stood up to throw away his knife and bag, pushed the table and it swung over and hit mine. I told you he was close. I am not sure why I am so uncomfortable, he is minding his own business, I am watching him more than he is watching me. I don't know what it is about the space we inhabit being our space. I don't know why this guy makes me uncomfortable. Maybe its the knife...

Last Sermon preached at Gethsemane. Jan 13, 2013

The Rev. Aron Kramer

First Sunday After the Epiphany

January 13^th, 2013

I feel like John, John the Baptist that is. I feel like John might have felt at the transitioning of his ministry into Jesus’ own. Surrounded by expectation surrounded by people who thought he was it, he was the guy. John was baptizing and healing, preaching and teaching, and had a reputation to go with it all. Then Jesus comes and you hear from John this shift, something about being unworthy, and unquenchable fire. There’s a little bitterness in there. You have to imagine, that as the heavens were torn open, and that amazing sound, or voice comes from heaven, you have to think that John was hiding in the corner thinking to himself, “Why didn’t I think of that!”

Of course I am a little off, John was probably much more gracious and generous than I can imagine, after all, he is John the Baptist. So maybe it’s not so much John that I feel like, maybe I feel more like one of John’s disciples. There was great expectation around John, people wanted him to be the Messiah, wanted him to give them all they needed for their lives. People clung to the idea of John, and the words that he spoke. They made him their savior; their chosen one, only to see it all come crashing down at his premature death.

We find out later in the Pauline letters that there is often a disconnect between Paul and his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah and the people he runs into who were disciples of John the Baptist. John’s disciples, those who never decided to follow Jesus despite John’s urgings, put up a significant fight when it came to giving up their belief, their discipleship to John and shifting it towards Jesus.

But, as I think about this Gospel, as I think of the human emotions that John must have felt at the river where he was baptizing all those people, I remember a sermon preached here on one of the first Sundays I attended Gethsemane. It seems that as I wrote this last sermon, as I thought about endings, all I could bring to mind were beginnings. The sermon preached, the one I remember, was a sermon preached by the Rev. James Snyder, your interim priest of sorts, who walked with you after Sandye Wilson left and before I arrived.

Jim stood here at his own transition, knowing he would not be back all that much and preached a wonderful sermon, a letter to the Vicar, so to speak, where he asked me to remember that we are all vessels, vessels for the Holy Spirit. He looked at me, he looked at all of you and he said, “Aron is not your messiah, Aron is not your savior.” Then he looked at me and said, “Aron, you are not their messiah, you are not Gethsemane’s savior.”

Looking back on those words, I am sure I lost track of that very important fact, as perhaps some of you may have lost track of that message as well. I sure wished I could be the savior of Gethsemane, wished I could move us into sustainability and greatness. When Bishop Jelinek asked me to come here, he said to me, “Aron, if you succeed at Gethsemane you will be able to go anywhere you want.” I didn’t quite understand what he meant at that moment, I think I know now what he meant, but his words sure didn’t help keep that messiah complex at bay.

It’s possible I feel like John because I know deep in my soul that I am not the Messiah, that I am not the savior. I also know that I wanted to be that, I wanted to save this place. I, at many points lost the idea that I was simply preparing the way, always speaking, baptizing, loving, but not saving. I am not the savior of this place, not of anyone here, not of the world.

I am simply a human being, a child of God, made to glorify God in the world to the best of my ability. Made by God to be fully alive, filled with the Spirit and overcome with the abundant love God has for me, and for the entire world. And when I forgot those things, it wasn’t long before the brokenness of my life, brought me back on track. It was through life events such as Eliot’s near death and his fight with Leukemia that reminded me of who I was. It was the struggle of a broken marriage resulting in a divorce and my own challenges that were never fully understood, shame that went deeper than I thought and effected more of you than I could imagine. These are the things that knocked me off my pedestal, knocked us down from our high places.

We are all human, I am human, and I am grateful for that. I look around this sanctuary, indeed, as I wrote much of this sermon I sat in those wonderful orange chairs over there absorbing as many memories as I could this past week, thinking about all the stuff I didn’t accomplish. All the things I wanted to do, but now, will not get the chance. But as I began to be filled with a little despair, despair about work not completed, about work not fulfilled, about relationships ending, I was drawn to this table, this altar. This one here where so many sacraments have been shared, so many words have been spoken, so much love has been felt and shared.

I was reminded of one thing that we did do really well together. We, together, tore open the exclusive barriers, the walls, and the limitations that the Church and the world has placed on this table and we together created a hospitable environment and a welcoming community that has changed the face of this Church.

When I was ordained, The Rev LeeAnne Watkins preached at my ordination. Her sermon I have mostly forgotten unfortunately, but what I do remember has had a lasting impact on my ministry, on the very vocation I have lived, and on the core of my own humanity. LeeAnne preached about the importance of guarding the Eucharistic table. She said it was of the utmost importance that I, as a priest of this Church guard this table with my very life.

Now, many of you may find that a bit odd, some of you come from traditions where that is exactly what was happening, the table was protected from those deemed unworthy to participate in the life of the Church. Some of you come from places where the table was only open to those who would believe exactly as the rest of the community believed.

But LeeAnne wasn’t speaking of the exclusion that has been created around our Eucharistic feast; no , she was speaking of something much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more uncomfortable. She was asking me to guard the table from those who would prevent anyone from coming to it. She was preparing me to guard with my life this table against all those who believed you had to be perfectly worthy, or a dutiful follower of Christ in some certain and narrow understanding of the word follower, in order to be welcomed at it.

Little did LeeAnne know, and little did I know, that I would come to understand the meal we share together at this table as the most important and most vital part of our humanity and core to my understanding of the abundant love that God has for all of us. 

Together we have done this work, of this I am certain, we have held open the iron curtains that are placed in front of this table to prevent people who are deemed unworthy from participating in the life of this community. We have torn open the limitations set upon Christian membership, upon belonging by being sure that this table, this altar is a place of respite, a place of love for anyone who seeks to eat with us.

It is this task that I entrust to you as I leave this community of faith. For it is, I believe, the only way the Church today will find its way towards wholeness. We must guard this table against all those who would claim it to be an exclusive club. We must guard this table from those who wish to place regulations, and expectations upon it. We must guard this table from being limited in any way to those who are in the world.

And how do we guard it? How do we protect it? Not in the way you might be thinking. We guard it by welcoming everyone to it. We guard it by taking it to the streets, letting it get dirty, letting it get beat up. Not worrying about who places their grubby hands on it. Not fretting about who might do what with it. We guard it by welcoming everyone, every single person that ever walks through these doors. We guard it in the same way that God has foolishly and crazily and ridiculously blessed each of us. By offering it to anyone and everyone who wishes to eat with us.

How we guard this table is how we also guard our own hearts, which is the rub. That is why it is so vital to understand our worship in such a poignant way. If we put limitations on who can come here, than we put limitations on who we allow to love us and who we allow ourselves to love. It is so easy to think that Sunday morning is the only place where hospitality is vitally important. Placing expectations on who is a good member, who I like and who I don’t like only leads to exclusion and a cold heart. When our hearts are open to everyone, so is our table, and we are fully alive.

After John baptized all the people, Jesus came to the river and there Jesus was baptized. And as Jesus was baptized, the heavens were torn open. And the Spirit descended upon Jesus and a voice was heard to say, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” Dear ones, this is what we are called to do, we have been baptized by the Spirit, we have been welcomed into the Body of Christ, our work is to tear open the iron curtains of exclusion that surround this table and surround our own hearts and lavishly, and foolishly share with everyone that same blessing. It is vital that each of us, and everyone in the world for that matter, hear it.

You are my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.

You are my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.

You are my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.

Thank you all for the ability and the opportunity to minister with you. You are my beloved, and with you I am well pleased, I pray that you will be pleased with me.

Amen.

Epiphany Sermon for Jan 6, 2013

The Rev. Aron Kramer

Epiphany

January 6, 2013

The word 'epiphany' means 'showing' or 'shining forth.' It has to do of course, with the manifestation of God in human flesh, the revelation to the world of God’s love for all of us. It is, to put it simply, a tectonic worldview shift in our perspective of how God is at work in the world.

Think about it, this God of ours has acted out of the ordinary since the very beginning. For most cultures the deity that is at the center of their religious landscape tends to burst onto the scene, kind of like Thor and Loki from the movie Avengers, and Thor. This idea of our Gods, our deities exploding into our lives is one that we embrace quite fully to this day, yet is contrary to our own biblical understanding of how God is at work in our lives and in our world.

Even in our Hebrew Scriptures God never explodes on to the scene, God is always functioning behind the scenes. Ours is a God who chooses not to make God’s self fully visible to the very people chosen to be God’s children. Think about Moses and his vision of seeing only God’s backside, that is the closest humanity has ever come to actually and really seeing God.

God is always functioning in the lives of human beings, Abraham, Moses, David, the list is long, and of course includes the prophets as well. But at no point does God burst onto the scene, change the course of history and then leave. No, God subtly and gently works with the human race God has created to make changes and bring about justice in the world. As Martin Luther King Jr said, the Arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice.

Of course, the day we celebrate today, the arrival the Magi, the wise men, the kings, their arrival to the stable, this story is at the center of who we are and shows us once again that our God chooses not to work in the world in an ostentatious and explosive way. Our God chooses to work in the world through a little baby, a human, weak and mortal, just like all of us. This model, this way of being is different from all other understandings of theophany, and is probably the reason that so many people through the past two thousand years have called Christianity their home.

This has got me to thinking a lot about how we use Scripture, how we understand the Bible to be at the center of who we are as Christians, and so in my reading I looked for what theologians were thinking about revelation, epiphany, and scripture. And then I stumbled across this little nugget, “It is not possible to build the Church on the Bible, but rather it is necessary to place the Bible in the Church, in fact to place it on the altar.” Mind blown. The author of that quote is N.F.S. Grundtvig, a Danish Theological Educator. No one here knows who this is, but in his work to redefine Adult Education, he looked closely at the primacy of Scripture and particularly our sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist.

To put the Bible into the Church, rather than build the Church on the Bible is probably nothing too revolutionary, until you begin to think about our understanding of Sola Scriptura, Scripture Alone. Phyllis Tickle has said over and again that the final rung on the reform of our own current Church is the understanding of the authority of Scripture.

We often place the Bible in a context where even those of us claiming to be liberals try to establish it as some sort of unchanging, absolute and definitive understanding of a way to live. When in fact, this book, this library actually, has been given to us more as a tool, as a map, as a way to understanding our context, understanding who we are and how we are loved.

Douglas John Hall, one of my favorite theologians wrote, “There are very good reasons for the reformation’s sola Scriptura principle. But it is one thing to make the testimony of the original disciple communities of Israel and the church normative and something else to regard them as being absolute.” He goes on to talk about how our work of understanding God, the work of theology is not to imitate word for word or act for act the ministry and mission of the disciples, our work as Children of God is to explore the manner in which the disciples of Jesus and the great leaders of our Old Testament went about their own quest for meaning, their own struggle to understand the world they lived in and what they were called to accomplish by the Spirit.

In short, to make the journeys and words and acts of the Disciples absolutes that must be spoon fed into our theological gullets makes a mockery of our understanding of authority and who we are as Disciples of Christ. This story, the story of Epiphany is first and foremost a story about following stars and paying attention to dreams. When did following stars willy nilly and paying attention to our dreams ever land us in any kind of certainty about our futures and our own moral framework?

Our dreams, our journeys are vitally important to building the Church, and when we place the Bible in our Church, upon our altar, we see its ability, its desire to shine forth in our lives, to shine forth as our own Epiphany star, leading us deeper into the dreams we have, giving us the courage to share our hopes for the future.

Our everyday actions, our everyday humdrum, mundane life is vitally important to the God we know and love. Our lives, each minute detail is vitally important to the creation of our communal theology and way of life in God. There is a poem by Louis MacNiece, called “Fanfare for the Makers”, a portion of which goes:

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not notice when we die,

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

Today we will baptize Eden Jean Vinton, for her we are the cloud of witnesses, we are the stars to help shine upon her life and her journey in Christ. We are the ones who will bless her life and all that she does. We will notice for her the things that lend each moment words and wings.

We are stars, we are the stars meant to shine forth in the world, we are the baby born in a manger. We are the wise men, the kings, the magi bearing gifts. How, you may ask, it is in the blessing of our lives and the blessing of the lives of others that we become the Epiphany star, the Epiphany revelation, what we do matters, because what we do, no matter how small, changes the world.

Sermon from Sunday, Dec 23, 2012

The Rev. Aron Kramer

Advent 4

December 23^rd, 2012

I began working at St. Paul’s in Duluth in July of 2000. I had been three years in Berkeley California at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, working on my Masters of Divinity. Seasons are different in California than they are here in Minnesota, and 2001 was the first Spring I had experienced since leaving for seminary in 1997.

That first Spring was amazing, I realize that spring in Minnesota tends to be muddy and, for the most part, absent these days, but in 2001, I watched each bud on all the trees in town grow with possibility and purpose. I watched as the grass went from dead brown to glorious green. The earth seemed to be birthing something new in a way I had not seen before.

So, one Sunday, when I was preaching, I preached about the earth seeming to be pregnant with possibility. That this spring was filled with newness, I reflected back on this text, the approach of Mary and how in Elizabeth, John, the little baby, leapt with joy, as she was filled with the Spirit. I said in my sermon that I felt the same way, that I was privileged to experience the approach of spring and that my heart leapt for joy, and I was filled with the Holy Spirit.

After the service that day, I was approached by no less than twenty people who asked: “So, you are going to have a baby soon?” and “Is Sara pregnant?” Since that day I rarely preach about pregnancy, for fear of being accused of having another baby!

But as I approach this text, and as I look at the future, I can’t help but think about the idea of being pregnant with possibility. Being filled with something that will transform lives. I look at this moment and I see the innocence and the excitement these women must have had for their future together. They were so filled with the idea of possibility; they were filled with hope for the children they bore.

Of course, we know how it all ends for these children. John loses his head at the whim of a woman loved by a ruler, and Jesus’ life is cut short when he is determined to be a rebel revolutionary and a threat to the empire. But, I am getting ahead of myself; we are a long way from those sad moments of ending.

Yes, for now, we are faced with a future, with a spark, with a small light that is leading us towards hope. We don’t know, at this moment, this Advent moment, we don’t know what will happen, and instead of being filled with the sadness of death, we are filled with the expectation of possibility. Anything can happen, anything will happen, and these women know only the joy of carrying a life inside of them that will change the world, their own as well as the world around them.

There is so much to consider in these texts, as we close out the Advent season today, as we bring to an end this time that has been filled with possibility, with the hope for a future that will be better.  Our lives have been rocked by a tragedy that has taken the lives of many young children, and sitting here, thinking about a little baby to be born must make us wonder about God and God’s presence in the world.

As I sang last week, Mary takes that role for us today. Not only is Elizabeth proclaiming the joy she has in her God, but Mary too is filled with the Spirit. There is something about singing; there is something about being filled with the Spirit.

Too often we are afraid to speak when we are filled with the Spirit, too often we are hesitant and worried about what people will think if we speak from the passion, from the joy that has filled us when the Spirit has approached us. Those moments when we are filled with the Spirit, those are the moments when we are made to be pregnant with possibility. Those are the moments when we are creating something new. And those moments happen for all of us.

They are not miracle moments, they are not mystical moments necessarily, they are Spirit moments, moments when, as Mary approached Elizabeth, the Spirit approaches us. One of the commentators I read said that Elizabeth proclaiming the joy of the Lord is literally saying that she is using her outside voice to share with the world the love and the joy she feels about God. For Mary it was the same, both use their outside voices to make known their great pleasure and joy.

Our outside voices are too often told to be quiet, we come to Church and we are told to sit quietly, not usually with words, more often with glances. We don’t want to be like those Pentecostals you know, shouting and fainting in Church. No, we have to be reserved, we have to hold it together, we must not sing with too much gusto, we must not speak with too much volume. Yet, here we have two women, seemingly over flowing with joy and possibility and purpose and the Spirit. And because of that they can only sing at the top of their lungs about how much they love their God.

I think about the first days we had together, those early days here in the Garden when we were filled with a hope for the future. Looking back, we had no idea that we were going to experience the hardest economic times since the Great Depression. Looking back, we had no idea the Church was facing some of its own hard questions about its relevance. We had no idea that the boiler was cracked; we had no idea about what the outcome of that moment would be.

Looking back, I had no idea my son was going to be sick, I had no idea my marriage was crumbling. Looking back I had no idea I would lose the love of my life. Looking back, I had no idea about the hostility, and outright belligerence I would experience from my colleagues about the work being done in this place.

I think about those first days and I think also of all the things that were birthed. Looking back, we had no idea Roger Green would come and change our lives. Looking back, we had no idea that the Shelf of Hope would emerge in the way that it has. Looking back, we had no idea the garden would grow into the magnificence that it has become. Looking back, we had no idea the people who call this community home would take into themselves the motto of this Church, The people had a mind to work and then literally change the world.

Those first days together were filled with possibility, filled with hope for a future that would be exciting, Spirit filled and revealed to us the glory of God. All we could do was sing, and our song was heard, and this place was filled, transformed and made new.

We had no idea what would come, how the Spirit would approach us. In the approach of the Holy Spirit into our lives, we let ourselves be open to the possibility of a future, but in that moment, in that approach, before anything else, we sang. So today, as Mary approaches us, as the Spirit approaches us, let us not worry about our future, but instead, let us sing with joy about the love and joy we hold in our hearts, our bodies and our minds for our God.