The Vicar's Page

Moving to a new site

2011-08-16T09:52:00.001-05:00

So, I won't be posting entries here on this blog for some time now, as I move my work to the blog on the Church's website. My blog can found at http://downtownepiscopal.org/aron/. This is in the context of our existing website, so join me over there.

When you arrive at the website, look for "The Rev. Aron Kramer" on the right side of the page and click on my name and you will be able to find my blog there.

Thanks!
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Pentecost 4, Proper 10 Sermon, July 10, 2011

2011-07-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

Most of us when we hear this Gospel begin to think of the different gradations of soil in a qualified way, in a way that places us in one particular location, while at the same time placing others in a less pleasant location or more pleasant location. We can identify people in our lives who are caught up on the path and do not respond to the Word of God. We can identify people in our lives who fall on the rocky ground and respond to the Word but have no sustainability and fall away fast. We can also identify people in our lives who we think are saintly, phenomenal people who do so much good it is clear to us that they have fallen on fertile soil and are responding in their vocation fully to the Word of God in their midst. It is kind of a natural process, to try to compartmentalize people in certain ways, to look at folks and attempt to determine their worth based on our understandings of the moral implications of the Gospel as told by Jesus, contrasted with their behavior and lifestyle.

If we are lucky, or if we are a little wiser, maybe, we take this Gospel and internalize it. We can see that we have times in our lives when we fall on the path and have little chance to respond to the Word of God because it is taken away before we can take hold of it. More often than not, we can frame our lives in the vision of the third image from this Gospel, seeds that fell among thorns, when the Word of God falls to us but is choked out due to our penchant for things, both valuable and not valuable. When our idols get in the way and keep us from holding the Word of God present in our hearts. And we also can identify times in our lives when the Word of God lands on rich soil in our souls and our response has produced on a great and amazing level.

This Gospel is rich with metaphor for our personal lives, it is also helpful to bring order to our relationships, at least, perceived order on our part. It is a wonderful parable that allows us to engage the Word of God in many different ways. My thoughts have taken me down a new path, a path that I wish I had weeks and weeks to explore, because when I imagined this parable in a way I hadn’t before, I found myself liberated, I found myself excited, I found myself yearning for more. I read a sermon by The Rev. Ramona Soto Rank, an ELCA pastor from Portland Oregon, she wrote one thing that sparked my imagination. She wrote, “Think of the seed as God’s word. The seed will fall where it may, but will never fall in vain.” It will never fall in vain. Which of course is not how we understand this Gospel, right? There were some seeds that fell in vain, there were some seeds that did not take root, and of course those were in vain, they were failures, right?

The parable of the Sower inevitably is interpreted as a picture of this God of ours who is outrageous and wasteful and reckless. It is a parable that helps us to see that God is constantly and abundantly covering the earth with God’s word in every language that has ever been told and in those languages that have no words. There is nothing wasteful about the actions of our God, there is nothing in vain about the actions of our God, there is no failure in the actions of our God. Is this a liberating thought? That nothing God does is in vain? That noting God does is wasteful, it may look wasteful, careless or reckless, but in the end, it is not. In the end, God’s Word, sown as seed in the world and in our lives, always has transformative implications and always turns our own expectations and order and our world’s expectations and order on its head.

Tied together with the Old Testament reading from Genesis we see and understand more clearly God’s saving action in the world, and God’s saving action in the world is not an action that brings comfort and joy to our lives. The story of Jacob and Esau is a puzzling story, God clearly has a plan for these two, and it is a plan that does not sit well with me. God speaks to Rebecca and clearly states to her that Jacob is the favored Son, that the promises God gave to Abraham will be given to Jacob, not to Esau. Then, when the two are born, Esau comes first, and in that society, as well as in our own, the firstborn is privileged, is worthy of special rights simply for being the first born. I should know, I am a first born and, like all the rest of you firstborns, raise your hands please, we know we are particularly special people, right. The law of primogeniture, Walter Brueggemann states, claims two particular things, first, that the oldest is first and favored and second that some have natural rights that cannot be questioned. Jacob comes out of the womb grasping at Esau’s heel, Jacob is born second, the birthright belongs to Esau. Yet later in the story we discover that Esau gives over his birthright for food, Brueggeman again states that this is not a qualified action, this does not make Jacob better than Esau, the contrast that is made in this giving over of the birthright contrasts two particular things, first it is a contrast between deferred and immediate blessing and second the contrast is between material blessings that can be taken managed and controlled and well being that must be received only as gift. Jacob took the birthright for his own, and Esau received something for his well being as a gift from Jacob and God, we come to understand, is tampering with the fundamental convictions of society.

The birthright becomes Jacobs, the second born and the work and goals of this God of ours becomes clearer. God’s purpose in our world is to turn everything on its head. God’s work in this world is to make our human expectations lose their power, their control over our lives and those of others. God’s mission in the world is to take those who are second, those who are last, those who are least and hand over to them the rights and privileges of power, love and joy. As Desmond Tutu says, “God has a bias and that bias is for the poor, the orphan the widow, and the least of these.” While we gather together here on a Sunday morning to worship and be fed by the Body and Blood of Christ, God is out there with the people who have nothing, shivering in the rain. God is out there with the people who are suffering from the heat and who do not have enough water to give them life or food to give them energy. While we are in here, God is out there caring and loving and moving and breathing, giving God’s self completely and wholly to those who are in need. God is out there working to turn the world on its head.

Nothing God does is in vain, and there is nothing wasteful about God’s great abundance. There is a future for us that God has imagined, but it is a future that we cannot comprehend, but also a future that allows us to choose to participate in the mission of God in the world. God has a promised and preferred future for all of us, a future that takes our expectations and removes them from the world, that takes our expectations and replaces them not with ordered reality, but abundant and fanciful and reckless possibility that will become a new reality for us all. The seeds sown in today’s Gospel are not for us, and while we are not called to be the Sower, or the judge of how the seeds fall, Jesus makes this clear when he alone, the Son of God, takes the opportunity to explain the parable, explain its implications for judgment, that its determination is not in the hands of the disciples but only in the heart of God. The disciples are called to recklessly and abundantly sow the seed, likewise, we are called to sow, we are called to share, we are called to take the risk of being abundantly reckless like the Sower of today’s Gospel, we are called to be intentionally careless about how we share God’s word. Some will say we have to share the Gospel with those we don’t know, I would say yes, that is true, but we also have to share the Gospel with those we love. We have to share the Gospel with those we know, we have to share the stories of God in our lives, the stories of the spirit moving and shaping and blowing us to and fro, the stories of how we are trying to follow Jesus and be and do good in the world. If we can claim and see and share those stories from our lives, if we can understand how the Word of God has been planted in us, we can begin to work with God to turn the world on its head.

Risk is never fun or easy, and the risk that God is calling us to today is a risk that takes us beyond anything we have accomplished in our lives to date. We are now called to participate in the turning of the world on its head. We are called to turn our own selves over to God, to open our hearts and let the Word of God break out of the prison we have contained it in all these years. Our hearts and souls are filled with the Word of God, the Word of God as seed that we have been afraid to let go of, because we weren’t sure how it would be received. Now, we have permission to let it all go, to release it all, for the Word of God, the seed of God within us is not for us, it is for everyone else in the world, those we love, those we do not love, those we know those we do not know. Sow your seed, sow the Word of God that sits in your soul, share it with everyone who has ears to hear or eyes to listen. And know, that there is nothing wasteful about spreading God’s word, the Word of God is never sown in vain.

Sunday Sermon, June 26, 2010

2011-06-26T17:12:00.000-05:00

I was looking through Facebook posts the other day when I ran across one that made me stop and do a second look. It said, “We all have at least 60 friends on Facebook; but when it comes to needing someone to talk to, how many would actually be there for you? I can guarantee not even one of your Facebook friends will copy this status. If you would be there for me, set this as your status & see how many of us would be there for you! Let's try it out & see. Prove me wrong.” My first response to it was to think that whoever created it must be angry and bitter, maybe they were left at the altar or betrayed by someone they loved, went to Facebook seeking comfort and when no one responded to their post because most of that persons friends weren’t online at the time and unlike that person don’t spend every waking minute posting new statuses or looking at everyone else’s, that person must have freaked out and put this post together. It is angry, selfish and unrealistic, that guarantee they offer is not one I would put money on.
            What is this world coming to that someone can post such a selfish, unrealistic thought and have it become some kind of popular and dare I say, meaningful thread on Facebook? It wasn’t even National Cheeseburger Day, or Reach out in love instead of hate to the cockroaches in your life day. It was a call for help, I imagine, a call for human touch, human connection, human relationship. It was a call to be welcomed in love into the arms of another, or at the very least to be shown some kind of love by another, love that could go deeper than a simple “I like this” post or pithy comment back suggesting a get together over coffee. As a community of faith, we must hear this not in the way I heard it, but instead as a call from our culture, from our society to experience hospitality. To experience welcome. It is easy to dismiss this technology as irrelevant and a threat to human morality, I disagree, I think it is an opportunity to deeply connect, it is not the end all be all for the human race, but it is another opportunity for us as Christians to embrace the idea of radical hospitality, the virtue of Christian hospitality as a means to transform the world.
            We, as a congregation, have committed ourselves to being a hospitable congregation, a place of hospitality, a place of warmth and welcome. We are seeking to become a place where the words from today's Gospel are reality, not just nice words that warm the heart. Jesus said, "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” There is great weight in these words of Jesus, yet there is also a hollowness, an emptiness, or maybe not that, but a lack of meaning for us, or a loss of meaning. When I was in Duluth, we ran a summer program for at risk youth in the neighborhood, and every summer, twice each summer, a couple from St. Paul’s would open up their home to the children of this program. It always amazed me, they gave money to this program, and they volunteered at it as well, just as many other people did, but they were the only ones to actually step into that risky place and welcome these young children, rambunctious and wild, into their own home. They lived on a lake in Duluth, and the kids every year waited anxiously for the day they got to go to Laura and Frank’s house to go swimming, fishing, water skiing, to play and to run. To this day I remain overwhelmed by the example that Frank and Laura set for all of us. To me, this is what hospitality is about, welcoming people who are strangers or outcasts into our own homes, offering exactly the same thing we would offer our family members and closest friends.
            Hospitality over the past many centuries has lost its meaning. Christine Pohl, in her book “Making Room” writes, “Today when we think of hospitality , we don’t t think first of welcoming strangers. We picture having family and friends over for a pleasant meal. Or we think of the “hospitality industry”, of hotels and restaurants which are open to strangers as long as they have money or credit cards. Those of us with resources can usually avoid depending on the personal hospitality of strangers for food, shelter and safety.” In the early Church, its leaders were adamant about the importance of hospitality. John Chrysostom, insisted that hospitality be face to face, gracious and unassuming, nearly indiscriminate and always he said, always enthusiastic. Martin Luther wrote that when persecuted believers were received hospitably, “God himself is in our home, is being fed at our house, is lying down and resting”. John Calvin wrote that, “No duty can be more pleasing or acceptable to God than hospitality to religious refugees. Calvin viewed Christian hospitality as a “sacred” form of work in the Church.

Hospitality has lost it impact and it has lost potency as a virtue of the Christian Church. Hospitality is often reserved for those we know can pay us back, those we know can reciprocate our hospitality in kind. But for the early church it was a different story. Actually for most of the history of the church, hospitality was understood to encompass physical, social and spiritual dimensions of human existence and relationships. Pohl, in her same book, “Making Room” writes, “It meant response to the physical needs of strangers for food, shelter and protection, but also a recognition of their worth and common humanity.” Without this understanding of hospitality the Gospel would never have been able to spread across the world in the first several centuries of the Christian Church.

The importance of hospitality is never more clear than in our first reading from Genesis today. Without Abraham and Sarah’s expression of hospitality, this story might have turned out a little different. Abraham and Sarah welcomed, at one time late in their lives, three strangers to their home, unaware that these strangers were actually angels. It was in this meeting that Abraham and Sarah were promised that they would have a son, that the generations that would proceed from them would be as many as the grains of sand on a beach. It was in this expression of hospitality that Abraham was given a promise by God, it was in this expression of hospitality that Abraham held his hope, his confidence as he marched toward the place where he would sacrifice his only Son. We cannot say for sure what Abraham was feeling, or Isaac, and we know that God did not know what the outcome would be, reference his statement at the end of the reading, “now I know”. But we do know that Abraham took God’s promise seriously, placed it deep in his heart and knew that God would find a way to fulfill that promise. Otherwise, how could he have done this. He must have, as he walked with Isaac, been replaying that night with the three strangers in his mind over and over, remembering the promise of God to give him a son.

Some of my favorites stories of the early Church’s hospitality and rise to prominence come from the book The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. He writes about how when the plagues and pandemics swept the communities of the early church, many people died, but often not people belonging to Christian communities. In roman society when someone was sick, or ill they were cast aside as no longer useful to society, they could offer nothing more to the community or to the power that the Roman Empire desired for itself in the world. However, when the same pandemics and plagues would sweep through the communities of Rome, the Christians would gather together to care for one another. They would tend one another, and work to heal one another. We have stories of this throughout our histories, stories of disaster and illnesses striking and individuals and groups from Christian communities remaining in the danger zones to minister to those in need. What was different in the early church was that these people used their hands and the presence to heal. People stayed in relationship with one another and did not cast anyone out who was ill or dying. And because of this the mortality rate dropped significantly while the mortality rate among communities around them increased dramatically. Hospitality is about touch, and presence, it is about healing and life. Hospitality is vital to the success and life of another person. We do not seek advantage or wealth in our hospitality, we seek love and we seek life. Hospitality is so much more than simply saying hello.

So what does hospitality look like for us, what will our hospitality, which is very much in its infant form be like as we grow this community forward? We believe that Christ is in all people, not just those we know. What if we took seriously our Baptismal Covenant that states “We will seek and serve Christ in all people.” Through the leadership of Roger Green we developed a ministry that has had a lasting impact on our downtown community. In this ministry we see God’s grace abundantly flowing from this Church into the lives of others and we see God’s grace more than abundantly flowing from the people who are served by the Shelf of Hope into our lives here at Gethsemane. We have been transformed because of the people that come to us each Wednesday for food. Yet, there is a deeper calling being formed, there is a stronger ministry waiting to pop out. And that ministry is centered around our call to be a hospitable people. Our call to create a place of worship that is steeped not just in welcome, but in Christian hospitality.

It would be easy, if anyone wanted, to invite people into your homes, or to welcome people deeper into this community. Come by on a Wednesday for an extended lunch or take the day off and sit with the people who come to our Shelf of Hope. Come and ask them to lunch, or take them to dinner. Welcome them to your own home, and listen to what their needs are. We cringe at the idea, I cringe at the idea, because it would be a risk, wouldn’t it. It would be tremendously hard to open up our homes to such an experience so far outside of our safety zone, but isn’t this the kind of hospitality that God is calling us to? Isn’t this the kind of friendship God is seeking us to offer those who are in need. We have many opportunities now in place that have brought excitement and life to our community and to our ministry. These opportunities now sit before us and call us in a new way, they call us to look closely at our hospitality, to look closely at our own hearts and how we love. Who do we love, and why do we love? How does this idea of hospitality seep into our hearts and broaden our experience and our desire to know more fully God in the world? John O Donohue in his book “Anam Cara writes, “Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awaken what is divine within you. In love, you grow and come home to your self.” This is what all humans want and desire, to come home, and through our love, we can offer that gift.

Next Sunday's First and Most Challenging Reading

2011-06-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

This text from Genesis, the eternally perplexing and difficult text where Abraham takes his son Isaac up to the mountain to be sacrificed is on tap for Sunday. I am struggling with it today, it seems to be calling to me to be preached on, but I have yet to break open the other texts for Sunday. The question I have as I read this text is this:
What promises did God make to Abraham prior to this test?

Seems important to keep the whole picture of the story of Abraham in view when dealing with this one.

Genesis 22:1-14

God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you." So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."

Trinity Sunday 2011 Sermon

2011-06-19T14:21:00.000-05:00

I was pulling out of the driveway here at Church this week when I was approached by a man who has worshiped here a couple of times. He is a client at House of Charity, and has played basketball in our gym and worked on our garden. He is in the process of getting his life back on track, he said, and he was getting really frustrated with the obstacles and the troubles he was facing to get back on track. He had made some poor decisions in the past that were keeping him from moving as fast as he would like. Decisions that forced him to jump through hoops he was not at all pleased to jump through. He said his life was chaotic, in upheaval and just plain crazy and sometimes all he wanted to do was run back into those familiar places which held for him, nothing but darkness and death.

We talked about Jesus, and God and faith. Where do you see God in all this? How could God be in that? How could God be in the midst of this chaos working and striving and thriving where you seem to be flailing and failing with great ease? I talked about how when the chaos is ripping through our bodies and souls, when the world seems to be upside down, that might mean more than ever God is at work not only in our lives, but in our world. The uneasiness, the uncomfortable nature of chaos, means we are struggling with the moral and theological questions that run through our daily lives. The chaos in our midst is much more an indicator of being fully alive than it is an indicator of approaching death. The opposite of faith, you have heard me say, is not doubt, the opposite of faith is fear, because fear immobilizes us and causes us to not act, to stand in silence as injustice glides by eliciting little to no response from us. Doubt is threshold to belief. Without doubt, there would be no belief. Without doubt, there would be no struggle, without doubt there would be no new creation.

After our brief conversation, I pulled out of the driveway and started on my way. I stopped however, in front of the Parish Hall and waited for him to catch up with me and I asked him, “What did God do at the beginning of the Bible?” He answered, “Created the heavens and the earth.” So I asked him, “And after the earth, what did God create?” He answered, “Mankind.” And then I asked him, “And what did God say about the earth and human beings when it was all created?” He shrugged his shoulders, and I pointed at him and said, “God said it was good, it was very good, you my friend are very good, God says so!” And I drove off, and that alone would have made me feel pretty darn good about myself, but when I turned onto tenth to head to my next appointment for the day, I caught him leaping in the air, tapping his heels together with a huge smile on his face. We are good, indeed, God says that we are all very good, and the mess we have made of our lives never defines us.

Many of us were taught that God created the world out of nothing, that in the beginning there was nothing at all, nothing existed, and we think we have to do the same, create something out of nothing. This is not true according to the bible, and oddly enough, should be a comforting thing, that God did not create the world out of nothing. In the beginning was chaos, a formless void, not of nothing, but of chaos. And from this chaos the world was brought into being, from this chaos the world was ordered into life. From this chaos life sprung at the Words of God. God made the world, yes, and it was God’s words, such as breath, light, darkness, water, land, plants, animals and finally, humans that brought everything into being, but these things did not come into being out of nothing. They came into being out of chaos. This should be comforting for us all because out of the chaos of our lives God can create something good and God does create something good. Out of the chaos that our lives offer the world, something good will be created. Is it comforting to know that in our chaos, in the chaotic lives we sometimes live, is it comforting to know God can create something beautiful? The chaos of my life is creating something new, I hope, my life is being honed and built and formed into something I can’t see yet, and may never see, but I can feel it most days, out of the chaos of my life something is being created. I have been told by many of you that the messiness around me will clear up, it will just take time.

Looking out over all of you I know I am not alone in my chaos. But I look out over all of you today and I see a lot of chaos, I see a lot of upheaval, I see a lot of pain. Some of you are going through all sorts of things, individually, or as families. A number of you have loved ones who are sick or in pain. A number of you are anxious about friends and neighbors as they deal with crises of their own. A number of you are dealing with health issues and ticking time bombs that you cannot see or hear or even feel. Some of you are unemployed or underemployed. In all this chaos, where is the good, in all this upheaval, where is the calm, in all this stress where do we find peace?

Walter Brueggeman believes that in creation, God moves over and makes room for others, for us as co creators. I wonder if that is not what happens in our own lives, in our own chaos, that God moves us over to make room for others, so, as many of you might assume I would say, in our chaos God creates community, God creates opportunities for compassionate community. Where we are being made new, or being remade into something similar to what we were, in that making or remaking, in that forming or reforming, we are being put in a place where there is more room for others, more room for our experiences, more room for compassion. When there is room in our hearts and in our souls, then the healing can begin. Then compassion and love can enter in and transform the brokenness that resides deep in our souls. Chaos is the threshold to wholeness, maybe, as doubt is the threshold to belief. But that wholeness is not to be held onto for ourselves, that wholeness is not our own bodily or spiritual wholeness, it is a wholeness for the entire Body of Christ. The messiness we have created in our lives, the chaos that seems to constantly jostle our lives around is about the creation of God’s future, a future that is not our own.

I heard a wonderful story from some classic and great timeless piece of literature which I have forgotten the name of so if you know from which book this comes, let me know. A wealthy woman died and stood before the gates of hell facing something really evil looking that was saying to her, “Account for your deeds, if you do not want to enter the gates of hell.” The woman thought long and hard, she was a very selfish woman who had never given anything to any charity much less to any individuals or homeless people she had passed in her entire lifetime. As she thought she remembered an onion that she had given to a homeless woman on the streets of the community where she had lived. She told the gatekeeper about this and sure enough, the records indicated she had done so. It was not an act you or I would have been proud of, in fact it was quite small and done out of pity more than charity. Just then an onion, the same onion in fact, small, insignificant and unappetizing floated down attached to a thin string. The woman grasped the onion with great fear and doubt, how could this one single onion, attached to such a small string carry her all the way up to heaven. She held on to the little onion and it began to raise, bringing her with it, her hopes began to ascend as well. As she rose up she felt a tug on her legs, and saw that some others who desperately wanted to go with her were clinging to her. She panicked and kicked her legs saying, “No, no, no, don’t hold on to me, let me go!” But the hands were desperate and she could not break free from them, “Please, please, no, let go of me, this onion cannot hold us all, please let me go.”, the hands that clung to her held on even more desperately than before. Then in anger she hugged the onion as strongly as she could and yelled at them, “Let go! This is my onion!” The string holding the onion, in that moment snapped, and she fell back to the pit of fire.

Our acts, our lives, our deeds, almost everything about us is not our own. The woman being carried up to heaven by the onion and string had an opportunity to save a number of others, but could not see past her own chaos, her own danger to witness the possibility that something as small and as ridiculous as an onion on a string could bring countless people into the goodness of God. Is it possible that when we let go of the chaos within ourselves, and let God create in the midst of that chaos, that we then don’t have to define what our lives will look like or what we will be, we can simply be who we are, and let God do the work in us to create something for other people to cling to, experiences that can raise others up from their darkness, peace within ourselves that can calm the troubled waters of people who are being tossed to and fro. You see, we are made to be sent into the world to do and be good, to bring the goodness of creation to the world, we are made to delight in creation with God, to dance at the sight of a rainbow, to sing with the birds, to run with the animals of the earth. We are made to delight in creation, we are made to enjoy the world completely. So as Meister Eckhart has said, “Put on your dancing shoes and leap into the heart of God”.

Sustainable Farming

2011-06-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

Stumbled across this interesting article about sustainable farming. Hope you enjoy it, and let me know your thoughts.

Click here to read the article.

Sermon for Sun Jin 12, 2011 Day of Pentecost "We are all God's glory."

2011-06-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

“The Glory of God is a human being fully alive.” This quote from Irenaeus is one that I have found to be deeply comforting and inspiring in my ministry. Irenaeus also said, “God became human, so humans could become like God. Christ became what we are, so that he might bring us to be what he himself is.” Diana Butler Bass in her new book “A People’s History of Christianity” wrote “Salvation is a kind of dance, a process of growing ever more to be like God.” I love this as well, it speaks to the wonderful nature, the wonderful goodness that we find in all of creation, and in our own selves as well. We are constantly in a process of becoming, a process of imitating Christ.

Sarah Thomsen, a singer in Duluth captured the process of coming fully alive, this dance of salvation, if you will, in her song, Little One, the first verse goes like this:

Hey there little one

You’re life has just begun

You’re learning how to cry

You’re learning how to smile

You are a blessed one

You are a Holy One

Part of the process of salvation is discovering the goodness within our own selves. Discovering our divine spark, the holiness that we already possess. The process of salvation is not simply following the rules and making sure that we don’t cuss and swear too much, it is developing a relationship with God and with our own bodies, understanding that our bodies, created and made by God are a whole and complete picture of the potential of the divine presence, the reality of our own divinity. And of course, part of this process of salvation, this dance of salvation is learning that we do not participate in this process alone.

Oh child may loving arms

Surround and keep you warm

There as you learn to crawl

To catch you when you fall

And may you learn to stand

Held by a loving hand

That when Christ came to earth as a little baby, born in the same way each of us was born, lived his life the same way each of us have lived our lives, died the same way, albeit a little more painful than most of us will die and then was raised, in that process Jesus took on human flesh and carried it back to God so that our flesh would be made holy and divine in the spirit of God.

Stephanie Paulsell, a professor at Harvard University wrote in her book, “Honoring the Body”, “We have a difficult friendship with our bodies. Our friendship with our bodies bears witness to God because the body reflects God’s own goodness.” We are all created in the image of God, and therefore are all endowed with the same spark of divinity. No single person is greater than another and no single person is loved by God more than any other person, this is clear to us, we all carry the spark of the Holy within us and it gives us all access to the holy, to the deep and passionate love of God.

Thinking about the divine spark within us, Louis Pasteur, a theologian, said, “The Greeks have given us one of the most beautiful words of our language, the word “enthusiasm” – a God within. Happy are they who bear a God within.” But it is difficult to bear a God within, it is hard to have a deep and abiding friendship with our bodies. Our bodies betray us, our bodies don’t work like they are supposed to, our bodies breakdown. This very breaking down of our own bodies is probably a piece of what causes us to not see as clearly the goodness of God within our own souls, within our own bodies. This is a piece of what causes us to not believe that we are holy, how can this, yes I gestured to all of me, who we are, be even remotely divine or holy or even good?

This is when Paul’s letter to the Corinthians becomes important and helpful, for our gifts, the gifts given to us by the Spirit are what make us holy and blessed in the eyes of God. Our bodies by themselves cannot make us fully alive, can they? We must engage the gifts of the Spirit in order to accomplish that feeling of being fully alive. Whatever our gifts may be, they have been decided upon already by the Spirit for the benefit of the community. The community as the Body of Christ is a Pauline image that has stuck in a major way for us Christians. It is by no means the only way that Paul used to describe the beloved Community of God, but it is one of the ways that he used to help the Corinthians come to a place of understanding for their own roles in the community that they lived in.

The Corinthians at the time of Paul’s letter were having disputes over who was the greatest and what roles and gifts were best for the community. Paul squashed that as quickly as he could, saying that if you used your gifts to attain status then the spirit was not being honored. If the community delineated who was superior and who was inferior by placing upon the differing gifts each person had a value of some sort, then the holiness of God was being diminished. On one level it is comforting to hear that the early Christians were subject to the same kind of issues we are subject to today, isn’t it? This understanding of the gifts we receive got me to thinking about the people who worship here in this building.

I started thinking about the people who have a gift of creativity. Gloria Hoglund and her writing ability, able to capture pictures of real life in gritty, compassionate ways and describe them with a great fullness.

Sarah Brickson and her dance, graceful and attentive, a gift, not for her, but for all of us.

I thought of Maggie and Cindi, and their gift of music and composition to this community, a gift they have given us with great passion.

John Belk and his cello, his ability and gift for music will take him far and we will be able to watch him grow into that.

I thought of Tien Belk and the Sundays that she bakes delicious homemade goodies for us all.

I thought of Heather Hunt and her voice and leadership, and Walter Cogswell and his vast musical talent and all the musical gifts they bring to our worship here as well.

Sara Logan, who can write thoughtful and solemn prayers that send us deep into that place of holiness as we listen to God in our midst.

I thought of Elaine Madigan and her ability to speak through writing her experience of the Holy Spirit and the spirituality it moves her to feel.

I thought of Mary Martin, Zara Renander, Jane Eschweiler and Dale Dienes, these four people lay hands on those who come to church seeking healing and wholeness and prayers. Their compassion and their presence has brought a depth to our worship that is profound.

I thought of David and Lindsay Becker, without whom we would have no garden to share with the community and to inspire our mission.

I thought of Ricky Nolan, Donald Fox, Douglas Kruger and the work at the Shelf of Hope that they do, their gifts help us to accomplish justice in our neighborhood, by feeding those who are hungry.

I thought of Lou and Linnah Schoen whose work on racial injustice moves us constantly to look at how we are creating an equitable and just community.

I thought of Ed Anderson, George Hoglund and Don Rosenquist who work tirelessly to maintain and care for this beautiful old building, that like our bodies, is slowly falling apart, you three are the equivalent of Medical Doctors of this parish.

I thought of Katie and David Olson, and Chris Bowman, who have immersed themselves in the politics of the Diocese, not because they felt obligated to do so, but because the gifts they have been given can bring transformation to the Episcopal Church in Minnesota in ways that no one else can accomplish.

I thought of Joanne Cogswell, and her gift of humble hospitality, she hates that I am saying this right now, but there is no one in this parish who exhibits the kind of practical hospitality that she does, making sure that people are fed and welcomed each and every Sunday.

I thought of Tom Hara and his dedicated service at the 8AM Eucharist, where almost every Sunday he is serving at the altar, carrying on the traditions that were taught to him by the saints of this parish when he was a child.

I thought of Charlie Hample, who is deeply committed to this place, not just its maintenance, but its thriving, who by his work and passion has carried us into a place where we can confidently move forward as a community of faith positioned to accomplish God’s work in the world.

I thought of Sean Huizinga, who we will baptize today and the loving and caring family he has. Two young people who are so in love with him and proud of him and his accomplishments. Two parents who look caringly and compassionately over his life, catching all the good and forgiving all the challenging parts. I thought of Sean and the love that he will see when he looks at the two of you looking into one another’s eyes and how blessed he will be. And I thought of Sean and how lucky we are that we get to witness first hand the life of a child that will change the world, that will change this community and already has in so many ways. I hope that all of us gathered together today feel the same great joy as we witness a human being coming fully alive through baptism and community. And may Sean’s baptism remind us of the Holy that resides in us, as all of creation knows resides in it.

Hey there little one

The moon the stars the sun

The hills and valleys low

The trees and flowers know

We are all blessed ones

We are all Holy Ones.

We are all blessed ones, we are all Holy ones. We are the Glory of God.

Garden Day at Gethsemane, May 29th, 2011

2011-06-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

The final product after we planted most of the garden.

Len smiling for the... corn.

Karl helping out with the corn

have you ever seen someone plant corn as intensely as Dave? Child of the corn...

Sarah & Joey planting peppers. How many peppers would Sarah and Joey plant?

Lindsay like lettuce, or maybe spinach.

Georgia and Kristine planting seeds in the Garden

Another shot of the final product.

Sermon for Sunday May 29th, 2011

2011-05-31T10:43:00.000-05:00

I have told you before about the visions I had as a young person about seeing how the human race was interconnected. I would often close my eyes, shortly before I fell asleep and witness a sea of white strands of some kind of web, connected in every possible way to one another. It was all of humanity, faces and names I knew and recognized, as well as faces and names I never knew and did not recognize. It was a comforting vision, it was a good vision, and it helped me understand the African concept of Ubuntu, which we in the Episcopal Church have been using lately in our mission and ministry. Ubuntu is the idea that , "I am what I am because of who we all are." Desmond Tutu defines Ubuntu as this, “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

Of course when I was angry, that vision was helpful in exacting revenge. I would close my eyes, imagine that web of connectedness and seek out the name of the person who I had perceived had wronged me. When I found the strand of web with their name on it, I would cut it, I would cut it and watch it flutter helplessly in the wind, disconnected, unsure, useless. It never made me feel any better about myself, it only would fuel the fear and anger that I felt, really. I never remember returning to those strands that I had cut to repair them. And when I would return to the same strand to cut it a second time, my world was a bit small back then, it would be repaired, no signs of scars, no signs of mending, the web was simply put back together, whole again.

In today’s Gospel Jesus paints of vision of connectedness simlar to that when he says, “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you.” He says this as part of his declaration to the disciples to love him. We often read this Gospel as a dichotomy, as if Jesus is a parent demanding us, his children to follow him and love him so that we will then keep Jesus’ commandments. This must be a wrong reading of this Gospel, I find it hard to believe that Jesus salvation or self esteem or anything really depends on our keeping his commandments. I find it hard to believe that Jesus would have such a punitive view of love and what love means. Rather, this is saying, I believe, that in our love for justice and inclusion we are keeping Jesus commandments. That in our love for the world God created, we are accomplishing the work of the Reign of God Jesus was also trying to accomplish. That in our love for one another we are connecting ourselves deeply to one another, in ways that recognize none of us can be a complete person unless everyone else has the opportunity to be a complete person as well. Ubuntu.

What does it mean to love Jesus? Jesus’ commandments were clear, it seems, if not extraordinarily difficult, “Love God with all your being and love one another as I have loved you.” Our work is to recognize this love in all people, our work as baptismally covenanted people is to be sure that every human being on the face of this earth knows they are built, and made in the image of God. No single person is greater than another, no single person has more standing with God than any other. Love, as Paul writes in the letters, as we understand Jesus to say in the Gospels, love encompasses ALL people, not just those we deem worthy. Love and God throughout the Scriptures is not reserved for a certain number of people. Christianity has had a difficult time believing and understanding this. If we believe God had a hand in all of creation, then we must also believe that God had a hand in the creation of every human being, EVERY human being that has ever walked the face of the earth and therefore is also the love of God’s life, is holy and blessed as much as anyone else.

Of course our dialogue about this concept, this idea of love has been akin to the dialogue of the disciples who were challenged by Jesus about their conversation and when confronted by him said, “We were just trying to figure out who among us was the greatest.” Jesus’ response was to say that if you want to be first, if you want to be greatest, you must be last of ALL. All, not some, not a few, but last of all. If we wish to impose our agenda’s, if we wish to impose our biases and our discriminations, well, we will never have the chance, because if we want to be first in the Kingdom of God, we must live in this life as humble and loving human beings.

The dialogue at the state capital, the dialogue nationally about whether or not we should let people enter into same sex marriages is similar to the disciples’ dialogue it is a dialogue that is full of hubris, pride and fear. There is little about this dialogue that is rational or loving. It is simply another opportunity to discriminate against people, to legislate that discrimination and let our fear win. I was drawn to a conversation I heard about the Declaration of Independence the other day, it contained a reminder that struck me like a clarion bell. What are the opening words of our declaration of independence? They are: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It dawned on me, there it is, right in the heart of one of our most important historic documents. All people are created equal. This statement is the secular equivalent to our religious and Christian statement that all people are made in the image of God.

What part of all do we not understand? Everywhere we look, in our political life, in our religious life, it is clear as day that we are called to include all people into the life of Christ, that we are called as people of this country to honor the equality of all people. We cannot escape this inclusive and justice oriented understanding or call, this wide open clear as day thought of our forefathers that all people are created equal and hold the same opportunity at equal rights as anyone else. No man, woman or child is better or greater than another. And as Christians, no man, woman or child is greater than God. Yet we seek to divide, to diminish, to lessen the quality of certain human beings because of who they sleep with, because of the color of their skin, because of how much money they make. Because of our fear of things that are different from us, we desire to oppress others.

When our forefathers founded this country, they were courageous and great agitators, but they did not found a democracy over night. What we have today is not because of what some men accomplished at a certain time long ago. In their minds there were still only a few people who were worthy, only a few people who were considered “All”. Women, African Americans, Native Americans and anyone who did not own land was not allowed to vote in the elections of this country. That resulted in only 4% of the people being able to vote, 4% of the people making the decisions for 96% of the others. Thank God, as Martin Luther King Jr. has said, the arc of the universe bends towards justice and inclusion. These past two hundred plus years have developed a democracy, that, while not perfect, is bending towards justice and inclusion. We have spent the last two hundred years shaping and forming the idea that our forefathers and mothers left us. We have spent the last two hundred years shaping a form of government that will include all people in its work, just as we have spent two thousand years shaping a Christianity that bends towards justice and inclusion. We have not finished this work, we will arrive. But it will take courage and hope in order to arrive there.

I have heard a number of people say that the vote at our capital on that day the constitutional amendment was passed was simply inevitable, they knew it would happen. We are fine with this decision going to the people of Minnesota for a vote, because a majority of people of Minnesota support same sex marriage. I find this appalling, and the main reason for my preaching on this today. For it reflects an apathy and a deep misunderstanding of how we see one another in the light of our understanding of being created by God. The work at the capital, the subsequent religious battles that will occur threaten to diminish and negate our common good. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Forces that threaten life must be challenged by courage, which is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of life’s ambiguities. This requires the exercise of a creative will that enables us to hew out a stone of hope from a mountain of despair.” Despair is at the heart of our apathy towards our politicians and towards one another, and while we despair and lose hope other people seek to actively divide and diminish. As Christians we must be on the side of justice and inclusion, challenging through our hope all that seeks to destroy life. We must, as Dr King states, stand together courageously and creatively speaking out against that which would threaten our lives together.

What good will come out of this debate? After a long, humiliating, protracted and heavily financed battle the only result will be a continued and deeper divide in our state along political lines. Discrimination does nothing but sow hate and violence. Discrimination does nothing but separate and drive a wedge between people who could otherwise work together to accomplish God’s reign of justice and love. This discriminatory act will distract us from the real work we are called to do, it will take away from those who are poor, those who are orphaned those who are in need, and continue to oppress and diminish. No good will come out of this, because it is filled only with fear and money.

When we discriminate against others, we diminish our own self worth and cloud our image of God and our understanding of the love that Jesus calls us to express in today’s Gospel. As the First Letter of Peter commended the early Christians, I commend all of us here today to be eager to do what is good. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.

I'm giving 101% from now on

2011-04-26T11:16:00.002-05:00

Enough with this 110%, that ain't nothing compared to 101%!

Give 101%

Thanks to Don, via Ed, for this one.
God Bless!

Teh Anglican Covenant

2011-04-13T16:42:00.000-05:00

As we begin to form our own opinion and recommendation, here is one, that isn't so surprising, but is, none the less helpful.

Check this Link.

Global Hunger and Some Solutions

2011-04-13T11:37:00.000-05:00

My Colleague, Jim Gertmenian, pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church just emailed this to me. It is quite moving, and inspiring. How can we at Gethsemane move our food ministry to begin to explore our role and efforts in resolving global hunger?

The video is on the The World Bank's website.

Watch it and let me know what you think.

Sermon 5 Lent, Sunday April 10, 2011

2011-04-13T11:34:00.000-05:00

It was a beautiful evening, my friends had all been drinking and partying and having a great time. For whatever reason I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t interested in shots or chasers or alcohol. Which was odd, because this was the last night for a year that I would not be carrying the great responsibility of others on my shoulders. I would return the next afternoon to college students, mostly freshman, wide eyed and completely unsure of themselves or so sure of themselves you wanted to punch them. So it was unusual for me to not want to be part of the party.

I walked down to the dock on the lake, it was dark and the stars were out in full force. You know when you go to the wilderness in Minnesota it usually is on a lake or in the midst of trees. Wilderness in Minnesota is vastly different from the wilderness Jesus experienced. Grouse, deer, poplar trees, walleye, bass, these are the things I think of when I think of wilderness, these are the things that root me to the Creator. So in a way, it was not all that unusual that I would be drawn to the lake, to the dock jutting out into that lake. It was not unusual that the wilderness would draw me out, take me in, be a place of transformation, a place of resurrection for me.

As I lay on that dock, time seemed to slip away, I lay on my back staring at the sky. The stars seemed to start circling around me and as I lay there I began to feel something uncomfortable in my belly. It wasn’t indigestion or anything like that, it was much worse. It was something that tugged not just at my belly, but also at my soul. It was as if God had stuck God’s finger in my stomach, latching on the to material and immaterial stuff of me and began to twist. Like God was making a tie dyed t shirt. As I lay there, and I still, to this day, do not know how long it was, the pain, the knottiness of it increased, but at the same time my body began to fill with warmth, with presence that I had never felt before or since.

As I lay there, feeling the power of God in my body, or the work of the Spirit in my soul, I was compelled to ask God what my purpose in life was. I prayed on that dock, on my back, I prayed to God to give me the answers to the questions I was asking. At that point in my life I was not all that interested in my future, I was not all that interested in vocation. So it was a surprise to me to hear the questions that came to my lips ,as if the work happening in my body at the time was wringing those questions out of me. As I prayed those questions the shooting stars began. As I lifted those questions to God, out of myself, each question came with a magnificent shooting star. These shooting stars streaked across the sky in brilliant oranges, yellows, reds, purples, blues, all sorts of colors that I had never seen from shooting stars before. As each one streaked across the sky it ripped a part of me away, I could feel the twisting in my belly as they went, but at the same time it filled me with that warmth, which was soothing, peaceful.

Finally the twisting, the pain I felt, subsided and only the warmth remained, but that warmth would not stop growing within me, it would not stop building and soon tears were streaking down my face, for no apparent reason it seemed. I had to fling my hands out over my head, and the only thing I could do when I opened my mouth was scream, bellow really, and then sob and then laugh. It was a resurrection moment, an Easter moment if you will, when I was made new, directed towards a new way of life.

Resurrection is not what happened to Lazarus in today’s Gospel. Jesus did not resurrect Lazarus, Jesus resuscitated Lazarus. Jesus brought Lazarus back to life. Likewise, maybe I should call my moment above a resuscitated moment, cause in the same way I was not resurrected, but made new, given new life. John, in the Gospel says very clearly this was not the same thing as would happen to Jesus. Lazarus emerged from his tomb still covered in the bandages of death. Jesus would emerge without them. Lazarus would die again, for real this time, Jesus, after his resurrection would never die. There are distinct differences in the bringing back to life of Lazarus and Jesus’ resurrection, differences that were important to the writers and early readers of John’s Gospel.

Marcus Borg in his book “The Heart of Christianity” speaks of resurrection in a metaphorical way that I found quite compelling. He simply says that resurrection is the dying to the old way in order to live a new way. He is very intentional about calling it a way, and not life. As most of you know the early Christians did not actually call themselves Christians, they believed they were followers in “The Way”. So it was important for them to likewise, maintain that vision for themselves when thinking about what the afterlife held, what would happen to them after they died or were killed. Borg goes into some detail that I would like to share with you about how the Gospels and Paul’s letters see resurrection and their effects on the readers of those scriptures.

In the synoptic Gospels the path of death and resurrection is “the way” Jesus himself taught. Matthew and Mark equate following Jesus with taking up your cross. Borg says that in early Christianity the cross was a stark symbol of death, of execution. It was not a cute little trinket people wore around their necks. The cross meant death. Death was the new way to life. It is a central theme of the Gospel of Mark. Death, following Jesus along the path of death is the way to transformation, to resurrection to life.

Paul’s most famous resurrection reference is from the letter to the Galatians, he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Paul speaks about an internal transformation, a deep change that is not as visible as Jesus’ own death. The old Paul is dead and the result of that death is new life, a new Paul has been born, one in whom Christ lives. The Glory of God is a human being fully alive Tertullian wrote, and this centuries after Paul lived, but it captures this sense of death and dying and resurrection. For Paul what was most important was dying to our old ways, or what he called “life in Adam” and being reborn in Christ, rising with Christ.

Borg says, in his book, the Gospel of John sums up its ideas about resurrection in the pericope, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” For the writer of the Gospel of John the way to God is only through dying and rising, death and resurrection. We can be reborn in God if we accept death, if we accept dying and are raised from our death. Borg writes, “Rather than being the unique revelation of a way known only in Jesus, Jesus’ life and death are the incarnation of a universal way known in all of the enduring religions.” Death and resurrection it seems, is the only path to new life in God.

We are constantly searching for new life, for a new way. How many times have each of us tried to reinvent ourselves, tried to transform our lives? My bet is many of us can count hundreds of times we have had significant life changes, changes that have literally reoriented our faith, our direction, our lives. Yes, I said above that Lazarus was not resurrected as Jesus was, or was he? The Gospel writers were foreshadowing Jesus death and resurrection, they were making a point, but in his own heart, in his own body, Lazarus was resurrected, he was made new, he was given another chance to live a life of hope and love. We are called to enter the tomb, dead, as Lazarus did, and called out of the tomb in order to be made new, in order to follow a new way.

That dock, as I think back on it, that dock represented the tomb for me. As I lay there on my back, I became open to God’s work in me. The stone was rolled shut, and inside that safe and secure tomb I was transformed. I was made new, the old me died and a new me was born. It has happened numerous times since and will happen numerous times to come. It is a matter of seeing, of remaining open to God’s work in us, to God’s work in the world. It is a matter of seeing and trusting that God’s love will win the day. It is God’s love that will make us new, it is in God’s love we will be born to new life.

Sermon by Aron, 1 Epiphany, Jan 9, 2011

2011-01-10T08:15:00.001-06:00

Jonathon Goldstein is a radio personality who is often on the show “This American Life” and has his own podcast called Wiretap. Recently he was talking about his sisters new baby boy and the effect it had on him and his family. Now, he’s Jewish, so there is not all that much to say about Christian Baptism, but he does say some profound things about love. He said on a recent podcast, “How strange to find yourself falling in love with someone you only just met, and how endlessly fascinating it is to watch someone getting used to being alive, though perhaps even more fascinating will be watching someone getting used to becoming a member of our family.”

Those of you who have witnessed children being born, who have raised children yourself, can understand this fascination of watching someone getting used to being alive, and watching someone getting used to becoming a new member of a family. It takes time, as he suggests, it is not something that happens over night. Our beings are catalogs of experiences that have shaped and formed us over the years. A vast library of books filed with stories that make up who we are and how we behave. We are a wealth of information and we are amazing creatures that, in the end, have a unique claim on life.

I have been reflecting deeply on the incarnation, I have been wondering about this concept and what it means. At Christmas I talked about how the incarnation pulls us deeper into the act of embracing the world, not as a place we must fix, or make better, but as God’s good creation. Howard Anderson, my old mentor, used to always talk about how Anglican’s baptize the popular culture, how important it is not to reject and condemn the world around us, the people we walk with, the creatures we are called to steward, but rather how important it is to embrace the world, to embrace the things that have been created by God, and man, so that we can more fully see the holiness of God in everything around us.

There is a Sufi quote I enjoy, it says, “When you place the world between yourself and God it becomes a spiritual obstacle. When you place God between yourself and the world, it becomes your spiritual friend.” Our task as Christians is not to reject the world we live in, our task is rather, to embrace this world as fully as we can, to live as fully as we can into God’s call for us and God’s desire to be with us. In the coming weeks we will have a couple of Baptisms, Baptisms of children recently born to families in this church. It will be a time to remember this day, to remember Jesus’ baptism. It will be a time to remember how it is we are a part of the Body of Christ. It will be a time for us to be filled with fascination and deep love as we fall in love with these children, as we watch them grow and become their own beings, fully incorporated into the Body of Christ.

Jonathon Goldstein, later in the same podcast, is at dinner with his family, and they have a conversation about how much each of them loves the new born baby, Justin. It starts out innocently enough with the family reflecting upon the deep love they have for this child, but then it takes a funny twist. The grandmother says, simply, I love him so much it hurts. Then the Grandfather says, I love his so much it hurts, like a serrated knife, being corkscrewed into my side. The contest is on, at that point, each family member debating how much they love this new child more than the next by creating some form of deep and dark punishment to explain their great and soaring love.

The mother of the child finishes the debate when she says, I am so in love with him it hurts, it is like I am drowning in love. Then she proceeds to make choking noises and scratch the air as if she is actually drowning in love for her child. This debate got me to thinking, what if we were able to express the same kind of love for every child we baptized here in the Church. What if we held, after services each time we baptized a child, a contest, a contest to see who of us could explain and proclaim why we loved that child the most. And what if that love we explained was not simply happy warm feelings, but truly deep and abiding love? What if making a contest out of loving someone made us love something or someone more?

How do we express our love for God, how do we express our deep gratitude for Christ, how do we express our expectation of the Spirit? God tore open the skies and said to everyone who could hear, “This is my beloved, with him I am well pleased.” Tore open the sky! Yes, its’ a metaphor, but is there anyone here who can say they have ever accomplished anything that could even remotely stand up to God’s tearing open of the sky? Peter stood up and said to all that could hear him, “God shows no partiality.” This to a community of people who believed they were set apart, to a community of people who knew who was in and who was out. It radically turned the world he walked in upside down. “This is Christ’s table, open to people of every race, class, gender, faith, belief of today, no belief at all.” I know this turns peoples hearts inside out, I have heard it said to me that those simply words have changed people’s lives.

It is so important to express our love, our gratitude, our hospitality. It is life changing for people, it is important, it is divine, our hospitality. Baptism, the main event for our lives as Christians, should cause us all to go whacky. Baptism should make us crazy. Baptism should make us tremble and shake, maybe even dance with joy, swing our hands a bit. Baptism, the main event of our Christian life, the main event of our Christian faith allows us to witness, with great fascination, the becoming of an individual as part of a larger community. As we grow in Christ, we grow in love, as we grow in love we grow in faith, as we grow in faith, our hope transcends all time.

Jonathon Goldstein ends his podcast with a call to his parents, to ask them how a new baby has changed their lives. It is cute and gentle, to listen to his parents talk about how they have now had reason to reflect more deeply upon their lives. They are changed, they are new forms of their old selves. They have seen love in a new light. But then Jonathon turns on them, and asks, “Which one of you loves him more?” The debate is on, “I do!”, Grandma says. “No, I do!” Grandpa counters. “My love is stronger than yours as a mother.” Says Grandma. “My love is more concrete!” yells Grandpa. The podcast fades off into silence with the two of them battling toe to toe about which one loves their grandson the most.

So I leave you all here today with one important question:

Which one of you loves Jesus the most?

Lost Generation

2010-11-24T08:22:00.001-06:00

An interesting video my uncle sent me.
Quite powerful actually.

Lost Generation

Sermon by AJ Colianni, Sunday, Nov 7th, 2010

2010-11-09T06:50:00.001-06:00

When I was asked to stand up and speak about the Shelf of Hope today, and my students’ involvement in it, I joked to the Shelf team that I didn’t feel that I was qualified, and that public speaking made me feel a bit itchy. In truth, I speak publicly quite often at Breck, and I actually just returned from a conference in which I gave my first presentation to a group of complete strangers.

I guess what caused me anxiety was the feeling that something like “ending hunger” seems like something that I just can’t do. How can I stand up here and make the case that we are making a difference at our little food shelf? It’s too big! There are too many variables, too many problems, too many things outside of our control, and besides, I have a job. You have a job! We have things to do!

Whew!

I settled my mind a bit. I slept on it. I thought about my students, and the people that we serve. I knew what I wanted to say.

But, first, a little background. At Breck, all upper school students participate in weekly service learning. Each advisory group spends about an hour on Wednesday morning volunteering across the city at various institutions: working with young kids, senior citizens, people with mental or physical disabilities to name a few. In the years before the creation of the Shelf of Hope, I worked with people at opportunity partners, an institution that helps people with mental disabilities learn job and life skills, and also at Jones-Harrison, working with seniors who had memory loss.

These were all great experiences for me and my students in those years, but I felt like I wanted to do something a bit different.

It was about this time I was having these thoughts that Roger had spoken with Aron about a food shelf, I had a couple conversations with Aron, and I know that others were thinking about this problem of hunger and what Gethsemane might be able to do about it.

In my recollection, (and Sonja says I don’t always remember the details of these things) just a few weeks after the initial conversations with Aron, I told our service coordinator at Breck that I had a new location.

This idea for a service site was definitely out of the norm for Breck. Let me quote for you, an email I sent to Aron before we came for our first wednesday, back in 2008.

“I think a conversation ... about the work in the neighborhood would be excellent, and will give the kids a better idea of what "downtown" is like... I think a lot of them (and their parents, perhaps) don't have a solid idea.”

I continued on....

“We had the "Back to School" night last Thursday where I meet the parents of my Advisees. They were a little... apprehensive... about the site... I don't think that I did the most eloquent job of explaining it, but no worries. I'm really looking forward to it and feel that we'll get a good sense of where we're going here shortly.”

We really had no idea how this was going to all work, but we had a feeling, and that’s enough to get change started.

At the conference I attended this week in Chicago, I heard a presentation from an author by the name of Dan Heath. He wrote a book called “Switch: How to change things when change is hard.”

He argues that to make change, you have to appeal to both the rational and the emotional, otherwise, change won’t happen. Changing our mission to food is a big change.

Rationally speaking, I know we are making a difference. I see, along with the other volunteers, the clients coming each week. I read the numbers about how many thousands of pounds of food we are distributing. I hear people passing by the garden, literally singing (Zara can attest to this) singing our praises for doing what we are doing in the city.

But we’re also making a difference emotionally. I want to speak a bit about some of my students, since that’s who I know best in this equation.

Early on, in September, a student from my original advisory at Gethsemane two years ago came running up to me. Abby is her name.

“Mr. Colianni! Mr. Colianni I have a great idea about the food shelf! We’re going to collect food for homecoming and donate it to the food shelf! Are you still doing it? I think we can get a lot of food this year!”

She hadn’t been here for 2 years, but apparently it was on her mind.

Awesome! I said.

As it turned out, we collected so much food that we needed to reserve a larger bus for the ride over from school.

I’ve asked the kids to write entries on the shelf of hope website, here’s one of them.

“We start our day walking through the doors of Gethsemane church with a warm welcome from the many people waiting in the lobby. It's always amazing how happy they are, even though it's about 40 degrees and raining out today, and they might not have anywhere to go. After going into the back room, where they keep the food, we get to work. There are always lots of things to do including bagging up the fresh bread that is delivered each week, helping Doug pick out food for each individual person, picking food from the food shelf's garden, or organizing food on the shelves. Overall, we always have a fun time, and knowing that we're a part of feeding the hungry each wednesday, makes us leave feeling good.”

That was by Amanda.

Here’s another, from Luke.

“As I walk into the room, which emits a strong smell of Panera bread, I notice that there were many tasks that need to be completed. There's three full boxes of Panera goodness, a bag of tuna, and of course the garden. I decided to take the job of writing, cause it seemed fun. Maybe the internet will help get the word out about the Shelf of Hope. Well, I guess I'm not going to get anything done typing all day, so... I'm going to go serve now.”

Here’s another one, last year from Malayha:

“Today, our service group went outside with around twenty bagged lunches, it was a little chilly outside and really cloudy so we all had to dress warm. We went around downtown near Super Target and the IDS building. There were a few people around in Target and a few people sitting around in the IDS building. The people i went to really appreciated it and we all put smiles on their faces.”

I’m pretty sure that these experiences have created emotional change in my students.

On the bus home after last Wednesday, I told the students that I would be speaking today at church. I asked if they had any messages for you.

“Give food” one girl yelled out.

We all chuckled, I guess that one is a bit obvious. We do need food to keep this going.

“Talk about God!” Another suggested. Another laugh from my group.

Nobody spoke for a few seconds...

“Do you feel like you made a difference today?” I asked.

“Yes, absolutely”, one of my boys replied.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Well, people needed food and we gave it to them.”

It’s pretty hard to get ninth graders to be quiet, but at that thought we all sat silently for the next few minutes.

And I guess that’s what I’m speaking about today. What really matters to me, my students, the volunteers and most of all to the clients we serve is that we’ve made a difference, however small or big.

I mean we’d all love to solve hunger, and if you did, you’d probably win the Nobel prize!

But the chances of that are rather slim... I think they only give a few out every year, don’t they?

But making a difference with our food shelf is easy. I can guarantee you nearly a 100% success rate in difference-making. And that’s pretty good.

So thanks to everyone here who has made difference-making possible, let’s keep it going!

What is a vision?

2010-11-02T11:42:00.002-05:00

What is a vision? What is the purpose of having a vision? Every time new leadership enters a situation or a context, that new leader offers up a new vision. I did it when I first arrived at Gethsemane and again when we realized things were getting tough. Thought it is not defined perfectly, or finally for that matter, Food is our mission is a big part of the vision for Gethsemane.

Attending the Diocesan Convention this past weekend the idea of vision was bandied about like a birdie on a badminton court. I heard a vision about a school of formation, about connecting congregational resources, about flat screen TV's. I heard a vision about the Diocesan offices getting out of the way and letting congregations connect and something or other.

I left with a cold feeling in my gut, I left with deep worry about what the future holds. I left un-compelled, uninspired. I left spirit less. I had one spirit filled moment during convention, when Stephanie Spellers listed all the things that have happened at the various Triennial General Convention's held in MN. She left out the fact that the first General Convention west of the Mississippi was held in Mn, right here at Gethsemane.

Big things happen when our state hosts General Convention, but we rarely can carry out that spirit of grandeur when we are left to our own. Stephanie asked us to embrace her idea of Radical Welcome in the way we work as hosts of General Convention, but alas, her plea was lost.

Why can't we embrace larger visions, and grander dreams than the ones we have before us now? Why can't we dream of transforming the Church wholly. A transformation that would include a re framing of the Episcopate and its role in our lives. Re imagining the role of priest and deacon and even total ministry. Why can't we dream of a future where it is not just the congregations sharing resources, but each Diocese? Why can't we imagine a vision that tackles Brian McLaren's harsh criticism that we are not spiritually or theologically forming our members? Why can't we engender a vision that is rooted in love.

Mumford and Sons new album, Sigh No More has a song of the same title, and one line sings:
Love it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see
The beauty of love as it was made to be

It seems to me that at the heart of any vision that is compelling and inspiring is an intangible, ungraspable, even unimaginable spirit that makes people do things they would not expect. Where is that spirit in our Church right now? Where is the passion for mission right now? Why are we so tired? Why are we so inflexible? Why are we so slow moving? How can we work together, to see the beauty of love as it was made to be?

Zacheaus and me

2010-10-26T10:28:00.000-05:00

This coming Sunday’s Gospel reading is the story of Zacheaus. I stumbled across a commentary that suggested the “short in stature” bit didn’t so much describe Zacheaus’ height as it did his status among his friends and neighbors in society at the time.

At first glance this doesn’t seem to be a big deal, but when you sit with the reading, you see that it shifts the entire meaning of the story. What I found most compelling about this was that it wasn’t so much Zacheaus’ sinful behavior that becomes the heart of the story, but rather the people who keep him from seeing Jesus.

It is right near the blind man story in Luke, where the crowd tries to keep Bartimaeus from distracting Jesus. It seems the crowd is trying to monopolize to the best of their ability the time and attention of Jesus. Likewise we find that the NRSV’s version of the story, where Zacheaus states he will give half his possessions and he will pay back those he wronged is wrong. Turns out Zacheaus may have been doing this ALREADY!

So this got me to thinking about how we as the church and we as individuals keep people from seeing Jesus, even those people Jesus so desperately seeks out himself. I can’t imagine I would do anything differently if I were part of the crowd and knew of Zacheaus’ sinful nature. Why wouldn’t Jesus invite himself to MY house, after all it is probably a much more humble dwelling and I don’t even have an eight the possessions of Zacheaus, so don’t have hardly as much to give away.

Dogma, doctrine, racism, bias, jealousy, all sorts of things help us get in the way or at least help us try to prevent people from seeing Jesus. Is this because we have a vision of Jesus we don’t want to see changed? Is it because we have enough friends and acquaintances that one more would be the straw that broke the camels back? Is it because we think we are superior to everyone else? Why do we keep people from seeing Jesus? Why do we force people to take extraordinary measure, like climb trees, in order to get a glimpse of Jesus?

So, how am I in the way, how am I keeping people from seeing Jesus? How can I get out of the way and allow grace and love to flow more freely, more fully between Christ and the people who are seeking Christ and the people Christ is seeking?

Sunday Sermon from Oct 10th, 2010

2010-10-11T12:33:00.001-05:00

The beginning of the Gospel today notes that the healing of the ten lepers took place “on the way to Jerusalem.” In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem begins at Chapter 9, verse 51. For those keeping track, about 12 Sundays ago. In Luke’s Gospel Narrative, we have been journeying to Jerusalem with Jesus since mid July. The writer of the Gospel of Luke uses this time to share parables of Jesus, dig up information about Jesus’ journey, and to speak as thoroughly as possible about discipleship.

Aside from being in the “region between Samaria and Galilee”, read the first verse of the Gospel, the village Jesus and the disciples are in is not identified. Its location and the description of the one who returns to thank Jesus as both a Samaritan and a foreigner is enough to set the scene for the writer of the Gospel of Luke.

Some interesting history for you all, Samaria became “foreign” following Israel’s secession from the Davidic monarchy in 1 Kings 12 and the establishment of Samaria as the capital of the northern Kingdom under Omri in 1 Kings 16. The Assyrians destroyed Samaria in 721 BCE, dispersing its citizens and resettling the region with other conquered peoples. Ruling and dominant global powers at that time did that. They took people they had defeated in various wars, uprooted them from their homelands and inserted them into different lands around their particular kingdoms.

In Nehemiah 4, tensions developed between the people of Samaria and the Jews who returned to rebuild Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, which the prophet Jeremiah had some interesting things to say about today in our first reading. During the Hellenistic period, Jews and Samaritans took differing sides in the various conflicts that unsettled the whole region. In Acts, Luke treats Samaria as one of the first fields of Christina mission, a theme which is foreshadowed in Luke, in fact in today’s Gospel, as well as the parable of the Good Samaritan.

By singling out the leper who returns as a Samaritan and a foreigner, Luke shows that Jesus’ message reached well beyond the border of Judea, both literally and metaphorically. The mission to the Gentiles is a prominent feature of the book of Acts, especially evident in various pivotal and tipping point kinds of stories from the book itself.

The other interesting interpretation of this Gospel is about the final phrase, “Your faith has made you well.” This is a vague interpretation of the Greek, it has many different layers to it, one other layer being that it can be interpreted as saying “Your faith has saved you.” This of course, has much more emphatic theological and Christological overtones. Does Luke suggest something other than healing happens to the lepers, or the one leper who returns to Jesus? Has the one leper been saved, in contrast to the other nine who were cleansed as well?

The lepers were cleansed on their way to see the priests. The one who returns does so because he sees that he has been healed. He does not return to be healed by Jesus. He returns rather, to give thanks and praise to God. It seems that Luke is presenting this story in the Gospel not to distinguish one leper from the others, but to emphasize the proper response to any act of grace: thanks and praise.

Any act of grace we receive in our lives should be followed by a response of thanks and praise to God. How many of us would have responded in the same way the Samaritan leper would have responded? How many of us would have had the courage to turn around and give praise? We live in a time of entitlement, when we believe we have worked hard enough to receive or just rewards. A time where we believe we are above and beyond thanks and praise. Past that immature expression of weakness.

To express thanks and praise to God is to humble ourselves in a way that is probably quite unfamiliar to each of us. Every Second Sunday so far we have sung the Gloria that was written by Maggie Brickson, and every Second Sunday so far I get goosebumps all over my body. I get chills when we sing it because I believe the simple act of singing something about giving thanks and praise taps into a deep part of our soul, a part of my soul that does not get fed all that often, a part ofm y soul that does not see the light of day for fear of a show of weakness.

Five years ago when I first started here, I took an online class through some seminary down in Iowa, it was called from maintenance to mission, and one week were talking about transformation and congregations response to transformation. And as we were discussing, I said, we should, in light of various transformation a congregation experiences sing about them, and yell about them and give thanks for them from the rooftops, at the top of our lungs. There was silence for a moment and then someone said, people don’t need to hear about transformation and thankfulness, they need to hear about sin and how to be reconciled.

To express thanks and praise is to humble oneself before God, it can be a humiliating experience and people will not hesitate to humiliate anyone who shows any kind of humility as a part of humbling themselves. After all we are individuals, who arrived in the place we have arrived because of the hard work we have accomplished and we did it all on our own thank you very much. Entitlement is a dangerous. It leads to hubris, which leads to judgment, which leads to separation. The only thing, it seems that can bring entitlement down is a good does of thanks and praise.

The basic Christian response to God is gratitude: gratitude for the gift of life, gratitude for the world, gratitude for the dear people God has given us to enrich and grace our lives. The basic Christian experience is gratitude to God for God’s love in Jesus Christ and the accompanying gift of hopeful confidence and wholeness and wellness that comes with it, regardless of the worldly circumstances in which we find ourselves.

This week I would ask you to consider Anne Lamott’s two favorite prayers: each morning wake up and pray, “Help me. Help me. Help me.” And every night as you go to bed pray, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And as you fall asleep, remember this song.

Sunday Sermon Sep 12 2010

2010-09-13T08:14:00.001-05:00

We are the sheep we are the coin. For some it is the question of what the Bible is about. Is the Bible about our humanity, is it the story of who we are as God’s created people or is the Bible fundamentally about God, and God’s actions in history on behalf of God’s people? Is today’s Gospel about our response, stop running away from God, hiding from God, and open our hearts to God who is searching for us always, who is looking for us all the time and who loves us with reckless abandon? God is the shepherd, God is the woman, searching for us, looking for us while we wait, hidden, and hoping to be found.

My hesitation with this interpretation of the Gospel comes in light of the Gospel we read weeks ago, about Jesus’ commissioning the disciples to go into towns before him, to preach the Kingdom of God and to heal, to me this sounds not unlike what this shepherd was doing, not unlike what this woman did to find her lost coin. We are called to be missionaries; we are called to heal the world, we are called to care for those we meet along our journeys of faith.

We are called by the Spirit to participate in God’s work in the world, work that is already happening. Sheep and coins can not repent, and that is where the rub is for me. Sheep and coins cannot do much at all in these stories when it comes to the repentance we are called to do. So that is why I wonder if we are not being told, in these parables to be the shepherd, to be the woman, to take on the character of Christ and reach out to those who are lost, to turn over every nook and cranny until we find those people who are desperately seeking community, seeking love, seeking to be returned to the heart of God. I am not so sure it is wise to wait for God to come to us.

I do believe, however, that the Bible is a story about God, in fact, I preach all the time, that at the center of who we are, at the core of our being lies God, God is at work in us, the Spirit is flowing and blowing through us and we are responding as Christ did, preaching and healing. Without God, we are nothing. But what I also believe is that we are partners with God, we are partners with God, and God desires our participation in the work God has been about for generations. We must search, we must go out and seek God’s hand, to be led and guided by God’s love for each of us.

Affirming this idea, I stumbled across a wonderful quote: “Neither sheep nor coins can repent, but the parable aims not at calling the “sinner” to repentance but at calling the “righteous” to join the celebration. Whether one will join the celebration is all-important because it reveals whether one’s relationships are based on merit or mercy.” That is what this Gospel is about, are we going to join in the celebration or are we going to sit on sidelines feeling self righteous and as if we didn’t get what we deserved?

Jesus was not asking the Pharisees in this Gospel to be a bit more generous with people, he was not asking them to be more nice, he was saying something along the lines of “There is a party at 2PM today and you’re invited, come join us, celebrate for what was once lost has been found.” Jesus was challenging the Pharisees, the authorities and therefore, all of us, are our relationships with others based on merit or mercy. Of course, if you were wondering, the answer should be: mercy.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote, “In a culture that sanctions every individual's right to seek his or her own path to perfection, self-righteousness can seem only an irritating character flaw. One person decides that steaming vegetables is the responsible way to eat and turns pale when her friends order meat. Someone else discovers the aerobic benefits of running and begins to badger all his sedentary friends. We all do it on some level. We find something that gives us life and we want everyone else to have it too. We want to share the good we have found, whether it is as simple as a new way of losing weight or as profound as a new way of approaching God.” Jesus has a relatively easy time with sinners, as their hearts are already broken; it is the righteous, hearts like bank vaults, which are the trouble.

When I first came to Minneapolis, not knowing much about the city, I was looking up some good places to go for a drink. We play soccer, as many of you know, in the gym, and it is a good thing to go for a beer after three hours of soccer. I stumbled across a wonderful article in the New York Times, that for some reason had highlighted The Local and Brits Pub as part of some kind of nationwide Pub crawl. It said, “A good pub is a ready made party, a home away from home, a club anyone can join.” I believe we should substitute Church for pub.

A good Church is a ready made party, a home away from home, club anyone can join. It works, doesn’t it? Church is a place to celebrate, to experience joy, to experience the wonderful feeling of what it is to be found, to be loved, to be celebrated. If we say, “We don’t party, or we don’t party with a certain kind of people.” Then we have lost our livelihood, and lost our perspective on what it means to be a follower of Christ, a hearer of the Good News, the Gospel. I am not saying that Church should be all fun and happy clappy, on the contrary, as I have said the last few weeks, being a Christian is hard work.

The hard work of being a Christian was never made more clear to me than last night, watching, on the History Channel, raw footage of the World Trade Center attacks of 9 years ago. The first instinct for people with loved ones near the area of ground zero, for people with friends and colleagues in the buildings or near them, the first instinct, every time, was to go search for folks they could not find. To re-enter the danger, that horror, to search for those who were lost. Where barriers were set up preventing people from doing so, you could see hearts ripped out, tears flowing like rivers, mouths open in a constant yell or scream in the hopes for some kind of response.

At the core of our being is God, a God who desires to participate in life with us. Always. Not just when we feel like we want God to join us, but always, in the places where we search dangerously for those who are lost, in the places where we are refused the chance to search. God is constantly on the lookout for those who are lost, and asks us, people who have not yet been fully healed, and maybe not fully found, but found enough, people who can hear God’s saving voice in our souls, God is asking us all, gathered here today to reach out in love to those who are lost. Reach out not on anything based on merit, but rather entirely based on mercy. In mercy we see joy, in merit, we see only darkness and separation.

So what will it be, will it be? A celebration with a great feast, or a sulking, miserable dinner in the corner? Will it be a feast of joy or will it be ash in our mouths from jealousy and pride? Will it be simply good feelings remembering what has happened in the past, and the pride it gives, or will it be the seeking of a guiding hand, one that when found, fills our heart with rejoicing, with singing for what was once lost has been found.

SUNDAY SERMON Sep 5, 2010

2010-09-07T10:49:00.001-05:00

It is said that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. How bound to the earth are we as we try to reason ourselves into the air? One of my favorite songs is sung by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It is called “Why walk when you can fly”, it is a wonderfully light song that recognizes the great pains and troubles in the world yet asks, why walk when we all could fly. Why be burdened and held by the bonds of our fear and anxiety when we could let them all go and fly to soaring heights.

Paul Tillich, a great theologian once wrote, “The burden Jesus wants to take for us is the burden of religion. It is the yoke of law imposed on people of His time by the religious leaders, the wise and understanding. Those who labor and are weary laden are those who are sighing under the yoke of the religious law. And He will give them the power to overcome religion and the law; the law Jesus gives them is a new being above religion. The thing they will learn from him is the victory over the law of the wise and the understanding. Jesus is not the creator of another religion, but the victor over religion. He is not the maker of another law but the conqueror of law.”

The burden of religion is not something we would expect Jesus to take from us. Often the focus of my own sermons as well as other studies and reflections is on the burden of the world. On how our society is beating us down, on the injustices of our political system. We focus much on the oppression our social system levies against the poor. The burden of religion is often far from our minds. Yet it is the burden of religious law that is much greater than the burden of social law. Social law has no ability to liberate us. Our focus, so often, leads us to forget what it was the Church Jesus envisioned embodied.

We know well what the Church Jesus embodied does not entail. Divisiveness is prevalent in our society, unwillingness on all sides to find compromise together is appalling. The hatred and bias that is bringing a literal meaning to Jesus’ words hate father, mother, brother and sister truly is rending our families apart. It is a hatred that is cleaving reason from belief rather than materialism from our faith.

This Gospel recommends being prepared, unfortunately, today, we find ourselves answering the questions of the Gospel in an adamant, unreasonable way. No matter what it takes, I will stand against that army approaching, needless death is much better then surrender or compromise. Or we say, we can do anything we want on our property, it is mine and mine alone, and no one else matters.

No one else matters, this is not the Church Jesus envisioned. This is not the Church we know and love, or is it? We separate religious law from social law and proclaim that religious law is better, even though it seems social law, currently, is much more inclusive and even loving than religious law. We tend to blame society and societies rules and mores instead of the divisiveness of our own religious rules and mores.

What if we, as the Church stopped blaming our politicians and our other elected officials, what if we stopped blaming officers of the state and looked solely at our own rules, both written and unwritten? What if we stopped to look at how well we were living into the rule of Jesus, the law of religion that we abide by, that we were made to overcome, as Paul Tillich suggests. Did not Jesus trump all religious law by saying, “Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself?”

People are disillusioned and discouraged by religion not because the fundamentalists have the most powerful voice in our country today, but because we as moderate Christians have not spoken and shared our story, shared our beliefs with the world and our passion for Christ. Our voices have been silenced not because someone else’s voice is louder than ours, but because we have chosen not to speak of the complexities of our faith, we have been unwilling to speak and share with the world the value of living with and loving each other. We are to blame for the suspicion of religious institutions, we are to blame for declining churches, we are to blame for the overburdening of religious law and misinterpreted meaning given in the Gospels. It is our fault, not theirs.

Rather than allow ourselves to be freed from religious law, rather than overcome religion, we have pulled down the blanket of religious law upon us, seeking its comfort, we have welcomed the solitude of religious institution and its bonds that tie us to the ground, keeping us from flight. What does it mean to overcome religion? What does it mean to be freed from religious law? What does it mean to give up all our possessions? What does it mean to become a disciple?

What if becoming a disciple meant giving up our religious possessions? Releasing ourselves from the yoke of the religious institution and law? What if being a disciple meant liberating ourselves from the heaviness of religious ought’s and should’s? What if, instead of looking at the cars we drive, and the things we have and identifying those as the things that prevent us from being disciples, what if instead we looked at our religious possessions? Our religious possessions, I would argue, are much more attached to us than any of the material possessions we own. We have certain religious beliefs and understandings that are not as tangible, and much harder to identify.

You all probably can identify myriad things that bind us to religion, none of which are material at all. Our beliefs, why do we believe what we believe? What beliefs keep us from the loving inclusivity of Christ? What religious rules do we have that prevent us from following Jesus? Our prayer, can our practice or lack of practice of prayer keep us from being disciples?

I think if I stopped and took a close look at the religious bonds that tied me to the ground I would see unfinished work, towers that were leaning every which way, completely unfinished, I would see myself overrun by armies of the enemy, trampling my spiritual and religious being into the ground, deeper and deeper, preventing me from that lightness of being that allows the angels to fly. I would see that I am truly not ready to be a disciple of Christ.

Jesus said, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Thomas Merton responded, “If we are called by God to holiness of life, and if holiness is beyond our natural power to achieve then it follows that God must give us the light, the strength, and the courage to fulfill the task God requires of us.” I may not be ready to be a disciple, but I know God and Jesus want me to be a disciple. So I will turn my work to a different task, understanding the burden of religion and releasing the religious bonds that keep me from taking on the weight of Glory, the weight of love, the freedom of Christ.

Food is our Mission. Make food your mission

2010-08-31T11:40:00.000-05:00

I was standing in our driveway when I man approached me and asked, “Are you associated with the parish here, and the garden over there?” I responded, yes, and he let out an exasperated sigh, and said, “There were two men who stole a melon from the garden, I thought you should know that.”

That’s what it’s there for, was my brief response. Our Garden is not there for us, it is there for us in that it is an opportunity to participate in God’s call to us for mission in our neighborhood. The fruits of our labors are meant for those who are willing to take the food from our garden. It is not ours.

Food is our mission, and it will remain our mission for at least the next year. I want us to buy into this mission effort we are participating in, because there is nothing we have been called to do more clearly than this mission around food. God is in this work, God is clearly asking us to do this work. On Monday, the Junior class from Breck school walked into our sanctuary with bags of food they had gathered in an hour and a half of work.

What can we do to help you buy into this work that we are doing? Cooking classes? Healthy eating habits? Local restaurant visits? Be Eucharistic people? As we prepare for the fall help us make this mission of food more fully part of our lives together. We have been called, we are being transformed, we are being made new. Let’s eat!

From this weeks email

2010-08-24T13:41:00.000-05:00

I am the sexiest man alive. Seriously, I am. When I was in college, attending my Sociology classes, I learned about this little phenomenon called a self fulfilling prophecy. As a joke, a couple of my friends and I decided to make our own outrageous self fulfilling prophecies. Mine was that I was the sexiest man alive. To this day, I look for opportunities to mention this fact to see what kind of reaction I get. Lately, I get responses that are very serious, usually short like, “No you’re not.”

One of the enduring concepts of the Episcopal Church is the idea, “What we pray, shapes what we believe.” The things we pray week in and week out, day in and day out, shape what we believe. I haven’t done any scientific studies about this, and I have been told by some important people that this idea is a bad idea, but I really like it. The tradition of the Episcopal Church is one of small “c” catholic tradition. A tradition that embraces a great deal of diversity, in fact our diversity in, thought, ethnicity, theology, is considered a strength and not a deficiency.

It is also something that is enduring and true. A self fulfilling prophecy changes a behavior about something that in reality may not be true, but in a persons mind makes something true. Like how I believe I am the sexiest man alive. I am the only person who believes that. What we pray, shapes what we believe is not based on whim or upon one person’s desire to alter reality. Rather it is rooted in a heritage that is ever evolving, prayerful and part of the work of our ancestors as well as those who will eventually live on this earth. That work being a discerning effort to discover constantly anew the glory of God in our lives.

The Continuous Church

2010-08-17T14:00:00.003-05:00

I recently received an email from an organization, or a publisher that stated the following:

"The old church met on Sunday mornings. Today’s church meets all day, every day, everywhere. Today’s most successful churches have a secret – they’re fulfilling their mission in part by enabling and growing an environment where church community and communication happens every day, in groups big and small, throughout the congregation."

We will be working on the latter part of that this coming year. The constant, continuous communication of what it is our mission is about and opportunities to share in that mission.

Food is still our mission, and it will remain our mission as we prepare for our work in stepping out from under the Diocesan Financial assistance we have been receiving the past five years.

How will we live, what will it be like stepping out on our own into familiar, yet unknown territory. We are on our way, and it is exciting to think about what we can do as we continue to grow into God's mission for us.

Be well,
A+

Opening the door to God

2010-07-27T15:26:00.001-05:00

I recently saw the movie “Salt”, starring Angelina Jolie. There is significant portion of the movie that was filmed at St. Bart’s in New York, the Episcopal Church we sent a delegation to for their annual conference a few years ago. It was actually the first time I had been able to see inside that Church, and what a cool looking church it is. I also received an email from Bill Tully, because I am on the mailing list, not because I know him, where he explained how it came to be that Salt was filmed in the Church. He closed his email with a poignant statement, “Opening the door for God is a privilege and a challenge, the very heart of our ministry, every day. That's the way of God's world, filled with vocation, opportunity - - and yes, temptation.”

What does opening that door look like for you and for me? Is it vulnerability? Is it simple openness? Is it centered around justice? What does it look like in order to take the privilege and the challenge to open the door to God and to the Spirit? How often do we succumb to temptation? How often do we see opportunity as temptation? How often do we leap at opportunity? In my time away at CREDO I found myself joyously telling the story of Gethsemane to people who wanted to hear and know more. Our story, the story of this past five years, is a remarkable one. It is a story of opening the door to God and the response we have all had at the privileges, opportunities and temptations presented to us.

Sermon by the Vicar, July 25, 8 & 10am

2010-07-26T14:55:00.000-05:00

It is not often I am compared to, by the God I consider the source of all, the source of my life, it is not often I am, by the God I love, compared to a prostitute. And yet that is exactly what is happening in today’s Hosea reading. It is easy for us to extrapolate this out as a story about a prophet from long ago, a man who was called by God, but whose presence today is insignificant and impotent. But we cannot see the prophet Hosea in such a light, we must see his powerful actions in the light God meant us to see these words. To render these characters simply to the imagination cheapens the Good News of a Gospel that transforms all of human kind centuries later.

The time of Hosea was difficult, God had delivered the Israelites from certain doom, from the slavery of Baal, God had offered up God’s self in service, in love and had done much for God’s chosen people. The people then, repaid God by having, as it says later in the book of Hosea, “No faith in the land”. This lack of faith in the land involves a rupture of faith from the land, a separation from the very soil we walk upon. It is as if we, along with our ancestors have decided that our God is not the God of Creation. That our God could have done no such thing.

Of course, to read this periscope from the Book of Hosea means we also have to consider the patriarchal assumptions of a time we can only barely understand. We have to see Hosea’s gender position, his consideration of his place as a dishonored husband. The position of a dishonored husband in the face of his family and the shame and disgrace infidelity brings upon, not just a person, but an entire family. This sort of infidelity, in an age when marriage is at a 50% success rate, is a concept far from our own minds. I find myself saying, well, geez, Hosea, man up and get out of that relationship. Of course, upon further reflection I find that in the context of this story I am saying that to God, and do I really want God to man up and get out of this relationship?

But back to these assumptions that we must consider in the reading of this prophetic text. It is because of these, because of the hierarchical, ancient assumptions that we can read this scripture in alternate ways. What if Hosea had been a woman, what would the demand from God look like? How would her image of the ruptured covenant with God have been expressed? What shames and violence’s of marriage would she have used to invite the audience, you and me, to identify with God’s experience?

However we remember this, this exercise of reading the word of God is not a way to water down the impact of a story that should shock us into reflection. No matter how we look at it, we occupy the place of Gomer in this relationship with God. Willis Jenkins, a theologian writes, “Consider Gomer’s mute passivity in all this. We know nothing about who she was or how she interpreted this experience. That has in part to do with the patriarchal context, but also offers a clue that human experience is not the emotional center here, God’s experience is.” Once again, we are reminded that we are not the center of the universe, whether it be the galaxies and stars in their places or our own hearts, our own universe, at the center of it all is God’s experience, God’s experience of creation, God’s experience of humanity, God’s experience of relationship with each of us walking this planet.
Mothers and Father of the Church all agreed over the centuries that you are doing what you ought to do, as a human being, only when your whole being is focused solely on God, and this means, to be concrete, when you forget yourself. How do you move from this prophetic reading to the teaching of one of the most beloved prayers in the history of humanity? A brief story for you all, prayer for me is more often than not, an action, it is active, it is fluid, it is moving. And I mean that literally. I learned this the hard way when I was in college. After my discernment process was finished I was inundated with suggestions about how to pray. I tried everything, centering prayer, meditation, you name it I tried it and it all failed me. I would often get this feeling in my stomach, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, a feeling that no matter how hard I tried to fill, it always gave me a sharp pang of hunger for something I lacked. It seemd that prayer was of no use to me.

It was towards the end of college that I realized I had been doing an act of prayer that suited my own needs for finding my center, for forgetting about myself, and focusing solely on God. Whenever those pangs hit my heart, or my stomach, I would put everything down and go for a walk. I would walk amidst my fellow students, looking deeply into their faces for some sign or signal of God, I often discovered it, on those walks I would see the light in the eyes of these people and know, even if they did not, that God was walking among us. So now, today, you will find me walking about downtown Minneapolis, in the midst of prayer, looking and finding a God that is at the center of my universe, a God that is at the center of our universe, a God whose experience of love for all of humanity is at the center of the universe.

We are burdened by centuries of exhortation and technique concerning right prayer. We have to do centering prayer, we have to do taize, this burden of right prayer makes me wonder what percentage of people actually pray, for fear of offending God, for fear of asking for something we shouldn’t. I find the juxtaposition of this story from Jesus, teaching the disciples to pray with the reading from Hosea fascinating. It seems the compilers of these texts were saying to us who would read them, yes, we are flawed, and yes we are broken and no we are not perfect, but in order to glorify this God we love and adore and this God who loves and adores us, the only way to build relationship is through prayer. Prayer that does not lead us away from God, prayer that does not change who we are, prayer that does not separate us from the God of creation, prayer that does not belittle us to insignificant little children whining in the wilderness.

Douglas John Hall, one of my favorite theologians writes, “Prayer is not a meek, contrived and merely “religious” act; it is the act of human beings who know how hard it is to be human.” That is what God desires in the story from Hosea, relationship, and not simply an acknowledged relationship, but rather a relationship that is rooted in prayer, connection and the real sense of who I am as a human being, as a human doing. A relationship that is like a relationship with a beloved friend, lover or family member. Relationship is hard, relationship is never complete, and yet relationship is the most joyous expression of love we have to share with the world and all who reside within it.

What's for Dinner

2010-06-23T08:45:00.001-05:00

The food here is amazing, and wonderful, and spectacular and perfect and yummy. Did I mention the food here is really good?

Some Pictures from Bishop's Ranch in California

2010-06-23T08:42:00.002-05:00

This is the view from the building most of our meetings take place in. It is quite beautiful here in wine country...

An Invitation to those with a willingness to reflect on the future of the Church

2010-06-14T14:59:00.001-05:00

As some of you know, Brian McLaren will be with us in Minnesota for two days in September, the 21st and 22nd, to be exact. In preparation for his visit, and to ensure we get as much contextualized conversation as possible, we are asking Minnesota Episcopalians to blog. The blog is under construction at the moment, but can be found at www.episcopalspirit.com (or www.episcopalspirit.wordpress.com)

Rather than ask a specif question, we are asking that you reflect on the following passage from the book of Wisdom (7:22-23) in context with the message of Brian McLaren's new book, "A New Kind of Christianity", which is essentially a series of essays n the ways Christianity as an institutionalized religion is changing.

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy,
unique, manifold, subtle,
mobile, clear, unpolluted,
distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen,
irresistible, beneficent, humane,
steadfast, sue, free from anxiety,
all powerful, overseeing all,
and penetrating though all spirits
that are intelligent, pure and altogether subtle.

So, how do you see the Spirit moving in the Church? How do you perceive the church is changing, should change? What is most important to you about the new kind of Christianity as you seeing on the horizon?

We are hoping to launch the blog on June 15, but by no means expect blog posts by then. It is our hope that over the summer you will take a bit of time to reflect and put down your thoughts to be posted. Send your posts to: news@episcopalmn.org.

Please note that this is a multi-media project. We do not expect essays from you all unless that is what you would like to do. Art, photos, music, video it is all good an might make this an easier project for you.

Please share this email with people you believe could make a contribution to this project. Also, I welcome your calls or questions if you have any.

Be well,
Aron

Last Sunday's Sermon by Ben Shank

2010-06-09T14:07:00.000-05:00

God...Miracles.
“Fairy tales are more than true,” writes G.K. Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that they can be beaten.” Now a number of the scriptural commentaries I read this week almost made me think there were dragons in these texts. Scholars were uneasy with these miracles happening in any kind of historical way, and they thought you might be, too. And I understand that concern. I do. They are hard to believe.

And we’re supposed to be uneasy, in a way. We don’t live in a miraculous society. We live in a scientific one, a technological community where the events that draw us together are the release of the latest Apple gadget or the finale of a beloved television series. If our lives were fairy tales indeed, our Merlins would be more likely be found in a board room than a woody glen, more likely working in the hospital’s surgery than in the hospital’s chapel. Rational, comprehensible inquiry saturates the very fabric of our lives.

Only, I didn’t get that memo. It’s just never occurred to me, really, to doubt those things that I can’t understand. I use my computer every single day – couldn’t imagine doing good work without it. Yet I don’t have the slightest idea how it actually works. And yet again, that doesn’t stop me from relying on it for a minute. How many things in our lives are like that? How many things do we use every single day, how many things would we miss terribly, but we have almost no idea how they actually work? Can any of you point to the place your power actually comes from? Your water? How many of you could take apart the door of your car and put it back together, no questions asked?

Now I’m not saying that any of those things are miracles. And I’m certainly not equating my ignorance or yours with the work of God. For what it’s worth, I think indoor plumbing is neither more nor less a salvation than binary code. But what I am saying is that I wonder if we might play around with Chesterton’s words a little bit. I’m wondering if we might say that “Miracle stories are more than true, not because they tell us that something happened, but because they tell us that hope comes from God.”

See, it’s not the explanation that matters. It’s the assumption. Miracles stories are the ones that tell us what we actually rely upon – whether we understand it, or not. Miracle stories point out to us what we think is ordinary, and ask if we might be wrong.

When Elijah comes in out of the wilderness, he must truly be a mess. He’s been out in the desert, he’s sandy, he’s been eating with the crows, he’s run out of water, and the same God who brought the famine that caused Elijah to flee into the desert is the God telling him to come out.

Now the point of the story is not Elijah, to be sure. But I’m saying: he was a wild man at this point, just as untamed and unpredictable as the God who had been with him in the desert. It’s not for nothing that John the Baptist gets mistaken for him later. There’s a power here. And that power, present in Elijah, walks into the home of a widow, a widow who’s marginalized and vulnerable and nearly starved herself. And he asks for food and drink, as God told him God would provide.

See the question? What do you rely upon? See who God’s asking it to? Elijah and the woman both. Everyone gets that question. Because everyone relies on something. Elijah’s been asking God for food and God has provided, but now he thinks that provision has run out. So God sends him to see someone who doesn’t have any food at all. That’s an object lesson.

And the woman knows she doesn’t have any food. And she doesn’t have any means of getting any, right? She’s alone in her society, cut off. Her son isn’t grown enough to work, and she knows they’re going to die. This is no exaggeration. This is her last meal in a dried-out, famished land in a place that doesn’t have protection for widows or orphans, because this isn’t Israel. This is Sidon, Phoenicia, northern heathen soil, the kingdom of Queen Jezebel. And the widow invites in a wild man, this illegal immigrant, in out of the desert. And whatever Elijah heard out there, she doesn’t say anything about God commanding her to do anything. Maybe God did, maybe God didn’t. But she’s at the end of her rope. What she relies on is used up, as far as she’s concerned. But she invites the wild man in anyway.

Because you can’t tame God, you can’t predict God, but maybe you can invite the power of God. “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,” says the psalm. What do we rely upon? Miracle stories are more than true, because they tell us that our hope comes from God. And that’s the rest of the story. The oil keeps pouring out forever, this oil just keeps pouring and pouring – and maybe that sounds a bit more dreadful to us, now, but back then, back then it was a good thing, oil pouring out. And the bread isn’t used up and the kid and the widow and Elijah all live.

Except – that’s not the end of the story. The boy does die, of illness. So Elijah and the widow both accuse God of killing him, because hey, the God who gives us bread and oil forever must also be the God who gives out life and death, that’s not a hard thing to think. And God doesn’t deny the charge. But after Elijah lays himself out on the boy, the God who stretches out over the universe brings the boy back to life. Because we’re really supposed to get it: there isn’t one miracle. There aren’t even two miracles in this story. Because the whole thing’s a miracle.

The purpose of the miracle story is to show us what we rely upon, which is God. So for us, it’s miracles all the way down. Miracles aren’t exceptions. The most outlandish thing that can happen to us, someone rising up from the dead, can only build upon the miracle that we are here to experience it at all. Right? Elijah’s there because crows brought him bread in the desert, God’s sustaining miracle. The man already should be dead. And the most ordinary things, the everyday things, the ten cent things, our bread and oil, these also rely on the unfathomable, untamable power of the creator of the universe. Miracle is the water that saturates our lives. And miracle stories are more than true because they show us that our hope comes from God. They show us that on which we can rely.

“Do not put your trust in princes,” says the Psalm. “in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth, on that very day they perish.” But “The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow... The Lord will reign forever.”

So when Jesus tells the widow of Nain not to weep, we should not be surprised. Or maybe we should be surprised that the God who weeps with us would tell someone not to weep, but we should only be surprised a little bit. Because the God who weeps with us is always the God who hopes with us, who brings hope among us, who set the prisoners free and opens the eyes of the blind and lifts up those who are bowed down. You can’t tame the power of God. But you can invite it in. And the hope here is that sometimes hope can come to you whether you ask it in or not. This widow never even speaks to Jesus, and no once accuses God, though the body is already dead, carried out on a funeral bier.

But if the Elijah story is about the untamed power of God, this story is about the compassionate character of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Because Jesus is one who risks becoming impure to revive a dead person, Jesus is the one who restores life, and Jesus is the one who gives the mother back her son. Jesus is the one in whom all things are possible, and Jesus is the one who will do it for the least of these. It’s not that Jesus is Elijah reborn and repeated, it is that Jesus bears the power of Elijah, and then some, without Elijah’s apprehensions and misgivings. Jesus is the anointed one, the one on whom oil has been poured out, as he brings life to the lifeless. So she didn’t have to confront him. Our Lord saw her, and that was it, he came over. That’s the character of God. And that was all it took for a miracle to happen.

Because a miracle isn’t something strange that happens to happen to us. A miracle is the work of God, which we cannot escape. God...miracles. That is what God does, whether we know it or not. And that is on what we can rely. Maybe that doesn’t leave us much to do, I don’t know. But maybe that also leaves us to see everything in a different way. So I leave you with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Perhaps you’ve heard it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings

Our bittersweet nest

2010-05-27T11:17:00.001-05:00

The above video, if it works, is a video of the the nest that was built by a Robin in our front yard. We were all excited to see the development of the little family, but alas, something got into the nest and destroyed all the eggs, well, all but one, but the mother decided not to return and eventually the third egg disappeared as well.

Cool new videos from our new place...

The Garden is Growing

2010-05-25T15:38:00.002-05:00

Literally.

I walked over to look at our Garden the other day and there were green things growing. Very cool, I will get some pictures up here regularly so people can see the progress of our Garden.

Literally, last Sunday morning before services I went and looked at the plants that had come up the day before, and then returned after the 8AM service and all the peas had sprouted!!!

I am so grateful for the work of the people who have put so much energy into this, it is exciting to watch the vision of a couple of people galvanize a congregation and bring us all great joy.

Grow Garden!
A+

Sunday Sermon: Pentecost 2010

2010-05-24T11:53:00.002-05:00

I used the following for my two sources to craft a sermon on Sunday morning.

Anthony De Mello says this about the needs of the Church: “The greatest need of the Church today is not new legislation, new theology, new structures, new liturgies – all these without the Holy Spirit are like a dead body without a soul. We desperately need someone to take away our hearts of stone and give us a heart of flesh; we need an infusion of enthusiasm and inspiration and courage and spiritual strength. We need to persevere in our love without discouragement or cynicism, but with a new faith in the future. In other words, we need the fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit.”

And from a man I knew as a student at St Thomas, The Rev. Stephen Stanley, at the time chaplain at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

If you are confused – Thank God!
If you do not have all the answers – Thank God!
If you do not know exactly what God is up to – Thank God!
If you have to wait up on the Lord – Thank God!

There are no shortcuts to grace.
Our home is NOT the destination, but the journey

St. Anselm said, “I do not understand so that I may believe, I believe so that I may understand.”

Trust precedes understanding.
Grace precedes acceptance.
Faith precedes works.

Pieces from the Past, May 21, 1910

2010-05-19T11:02:00.002-05:00

The following was found int he Parish Visitor from May 21, 1910, and interesting little bit about the rectory that was found and secured for the rector at the time, Irving Peak Johnson.

From the May 21, 1910 Parish Visitor
Gethsemane Parish Visitor
Published every Saturday at Minneapolis, Minn.
By the vestry of the Church of
Gethsemane.

The rector has waited for the actual passing of the deed before formally expressing to the committee in charge of this work, and to the constituency which they represent, the deep appreciation which he feels for their generosity and interest in this matter. The securing of a rectory is a matter so much bound up with the comfort of the rector and his family that which he nevertheless feels is most vital to the interests of the parish.

If it were merely a matter of his own personal comfort, he would say that the rector, as well as others, might run his chances in the securing of a home; but a parish has a social side as well as a religious one, and no parish of the church is complete without a house which is known as the rectory.

To make a flat or rented rooms or even a rented house, take the place of a rectory, seems impracticable. For the efficient prosecution of the work the parish needs a parish home.

Again this seems the opportune time for the purchase of a rectory.

The rectory ought not to be more than five or six blocks from the church.

The number of houses suitable for a rectory are limited and the probability is that in the near future available property will advance in price so that it will be beyond our reach.

The house that has been secured seems the most admirably adapted for this purpose of any house in the community and the price is certainly very reasonable.

Moreover, in the securing of successive rectors, the parish will learn that the house problem will be a large factor in fixing the choice of men with families, and it forever removes the temptation for a rector to attempt to administer the parish, while living several miles away.

Personally, the rector is under the deepest obligation to those who have done this thing, and he desires to express his gratitude at this time, but apart from this he believes officially, that the parish has done a wise thing.

Monday's no sermon to post post

2010-05-17T09:06:00.002-05:00

I did not preach this Sunday, we had the Rev. Dr. Lucy Hogan in for a sermon, and the baptism of her Granddaughter. Very exciting.

I did do a little winging it homily at the 8AM service, we did not do the Ascension readings, using instead the readings for 7 Easter.

Here they are: The Lectionary Page

The Acts reading is one of those wonderful visual readings that the writer of the Gospel of Luke-Acts uses to express the power and possibility of God. Paul and Silas are freed from prison by an earthquake. My brief homily touched on how we can revel in the imagery of this story and how God does the impossible in freeing God's disciples. However, the Gospel, from John, offers us the real impossibility. What does it mean to be one?

What does it mean to be one for the Church. This is the impossible feat that we should all be impressed if it were accomplished by God. Breaking a couple of short tempered disciples from prison is no problem, making the world one, or all Christians one is a whole other story.

So I left the 8AM'ers with the question, what does it mean to be one, for the Church? What does that look like and how do we live into this Gospel story from John about being one?

Be well,
A+

Sunday, May 2nd Sermon, given by Chris Huizinga

2010-05-05T20:51:00.000-05:00

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can say that can’t be sung. Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game. It’s easy. Nothing you can make that can’t be made. No one you can save that can’t be saved. Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time. It’s easy.
All you need is love! Do do do do doooooo…

The Beatles have a sort of soft, prophetic lilt to this song. Tunefully they proclaim the bridging and healing powers of love in the world. You can do anything, go anywhere, save everyone, because all you need is love. However there is one phrase wrapped in the song that I simply cannot, or perhaps do not want to, agree with. It’s small, but don’t over look it. Right there, taunting you before the refrain. Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time – it’s easy.

I subscribe to the idea that there is little about love that is easy. I suppose it really depends what kind of love you happen to be looking at. There is familial love, although I would contend there is twisted love at play when brothers are involved. We could look at comradery/friendship in which I’ve been told many times, “we tease ‘cause we love.” Or take a gander at the angst-filled world of sweaty, hormonal teenage love. Well, then again, maybe we shouldn’t. Spousal, puppy, sexual, platonic, romantic, etal. Love, love, love. There really are various and sundry forms of love.

Every form love takes has a relatively simple recipe with which to follow. First you need to discover your ingredient (i.e.: the person(s) of your desire). Then add a cup of mutual focus. Mix in some emotion, laughter, trust, and comfort. Season to taste with adventure and/or pain. Cooking times may vary based on degree of involvement and depth of desire. Because really, all you need is love. Do do do do doooo…

Man, I should really start my own cooking show! Now I’m certainly no Iron Chef, but perhaps the Beatles were right. My simplistic recipe for love does sound relatively easy. We have our love relationships, we are comfortable, and it can seem to be, well, easy. However this is NOT the kind of love that Christ is talking about in the Gospel.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In all seriousness, doesn’t that make you feel all warm and cozy inside? I have a friend and his name is Jesus. We could chat on the phone, exchange friendly emails every now and again. I love Jesus and Jesus loves me. That sounds like an easy kind of love. But look what Jesus did just there: “Just as I have loved you…”

Hmmmmm, different ball game now. The Gospels are stuffed full of stories all over the place about Jesus making everyone UNeasy in love. Run the gamut from the prodigal son (familial love and social norms turned on their very head), to the calling of the disciples (deep, abiding friendships formed in moments with fishermen), to Jesus sitting down to dinner with just about anyone to ruffle feathers, communing with God amongst the most unsavory of sorts. What better way to show your love than through food, right?!

Jesus uses food as a gathering tool, a call to your senses through your stomach. The way to a man’s heart is, of course, through his stomach. The Gospel today gives a brief contextual phrase, “at the last supper,” that gives reference to what precedes it, but I think more of an explanation may help. John 13 begins with Christ washing the disciples feet, each and every one of the twelve. Then he foretells of his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, who also just received an a-one foot wash from Jesus himself. Background complete, now back to our Gospel. “At the last supper, when Judas had gone out…” Did you catch that? They had eaten, all of them. All of them together, even Judas. Jesus shared his last meal, in fact his last morsel, with the very man who would send him to death.

“Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” Jesus communed with and loved his betrayer even after he was well aware where this course of action would lead. THAT is not easy! All of this got me pondering: what would have happened if Judas had not killed himself after Jesus’ death? Do you think the other disciples would or could have loved him after knowing his actions? Are we even capable of such love and compassion? That is the kind of undeniable, uninterruptible, uneasy kind of love Jesus shows us. Ugh, suddenly I want to be a sweaty, hormonal teenager again.

However our love does unfortunately know bounds. We fall short of the example set for us. It is hard for me sometimes not to feel guilty that I cannot (or at least not yet) achieve such loft sights. That guilt merges into frustration and can make a fleeting stab at anger. “Come on, HOW can you love that much?!?!” But then something will happen around me, simple reminders; my wife making me French toast for breakfast (yes, I’m back to food) just because, watching my co-workers tend to and care for one another through the chaos of the Nickel sale, being greeted back from a long day at work by the loud, squeaky voice of our neighbors daughter saying, “hi cwiss.” Little things that make me realize we are all in this together. None of us can live up to the kind of emptying of oneself demonstrated in that one really, REALLY huge action, but we are commanded to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself. No, love is not easy, but if it were easy everyone would be doing it. All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

Easter Sunday Sermon, 2010

2010-04-06T15:59:00.003-05:00

The four Gospels in the New Testament do not describe the actual event of the resurrection. Jesus dies, is put to rest, and then women go to see the tomb and it is empty. That time in between the death of Jesus and the arrival of the women, it seems, is left to the imagination.

Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit liberation theologian says no, “The Gospel writers did not give free rein to the imagination. To depict Jesus’ resurrection in itself puts faith on a false trail by conceptualizing the resurrection as a return to living under the conditions of our current existence.” To return to our current context, to image a world after the resurrection similar or just a little better than the world we live in today is a horrible lie.

It was a matter of fact that the Gospel writers did not depict the resurrection itself, it is a matter of duty, Sobrino says, that they refer us instead, as in today’s Gospel, to something just as important, Jesus’ appearances to the disciples.

Today’s Gospel picks up with Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women, arriving at Jesus’ tomb with spices, to cover the smell of a decaying body. They left their homes, I imagine in a somber mood, sad from the events of days earlier, taking their time as they travel to a place where they do not want to go. Along their way, I imagine, they break down in tears, and have to stop, consoling each other in this time of grief.

They are a mess, heartbroken and dejected. All that they knew and loved was gone, and when they arrive at Jesus’ tomb they find the stone rolled away, and they are perplexed. Are they dreaming, what is happening, how could this be?

I like to think that despite their perplexity, despite their confusion there was a piece inside of them that was beginning to wake up. A piece inside of them that was quietly saying, “This is supposed to happen”. It is that piece of faith that we often do not know we have, that piece of us that is faithful beyond our own comprehension.

That piece of us that allows ourselves to be rooted in the knowledge and hope of God in the world, despite stark evidence to the contrary, especially in this day and age with death everywhere we look. Where earthquakes rarely precede the arrival of angels. That sliver or knowledge might be our intuition, it might be our subconscious, I don't know, but it is there and most of us have had that experience, knowing we grasped it, or held it only in our 20/20 hindsight vision.

You know what I am talking about, that sixth sense, if you want to call it that, that part of our gut that causes us to stand fast in situations similar to the Gospel story, a piece in our mind that tickles our conscious with some sort of understanding that even though this moment is confusing, it is supposed to be like this.

There is a poem I have that speaks to this, in a silly way, written by Joan Siegel it begins, ”There ought to be a word for the way you know how to get some place but don't remember the names of streets or the number of turns”. There ought to be a word for that sliver of faith we think we have that only shows up in our understanding after the fact.

The women, puzzled by the stone rolled away and an empty tomb knew there was something up, but also knew, somewhere in their bodies, or in their minds or even in their souls that this was something that was supposed to happen. It was a seed of faith planted years earlier by the teachings of Jesus, by the life of Jesus, by his word and flesh and his love.

How else do I explain the fact that they stayed put, puzzling this new occurrence rather than fleeing from it? Then, as they puzzle this new event, they remember, the Gospel says it right there, “Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.” They remembered Jesus’ words. They remembered Jesus’ life. They remembered Jesus’ teaching.

Life, suddenly, is changed. Life, immediately holds new possibilities. Life has shifted and the women see a new future. It is all there and the words and teaching of Jesus’ life now come into view for them, a path is revealed and joy is shared as they skip in the hope of the resurrection.

Remembering is one of the most important acts we do as the Church. Re – Membering, putting together pieces of a story that has been told and interpreted for thousands of years. It is what we do. We remember the story of Jesus, we remember the story of the early Church, we remember the difficult stories of the great Schism, and the Reformation. We remember the history of the Church in America. We remember the story of Gethsemane. We remember the stories of our childhood. We remember the stories of the last year. We remember what happened yesterday. We remember, it is what we do here in the Church.

But our remembering is not simply fond recollection. Our remembering is like the experience of the women in today’s Gospel. We remember the words of the people and the institutions and the communities that have gone before and we are changed, we are reminded of the call at our core and in our baptism that we are called to speak the Good News. To participate with God in the work God is already doing in the world.

Too often we look for the living among the dead, too often we are caught staring into the recesses of our memories, not doing the work of remembering, or breaking open God’s presence in the moments that have changed and transformed us. We try hard to understand the mystery that God wishes not to share with us, to understand the complexities we have no right to comprehend. We try to fit the unimaginable resurrection into an imaginable box that will make us warm and happy, knowing all along that the box never contained this miraculous event, only our own imaginings of what might have happened.

Ours is to respond, to leap for joy on this day of Christ’s resurrection, to fall to our knees in tears, to do something miraculous, or to do something completely crazy and out of character, to do something no one would have ever expected us to do. As Wendell Berry wrote in his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, “Practice Resurrection”. He writes in that poem,

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what humanity
has not encountered humanity has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.

Today we baptize five children, today we mark in the minds, and the hearts of several families, memories that will never be forgotten. Memories that will always be held with joy, with hope and with faith. Jace, Anton, Arvid, Anna, Cian, today you become part of a story that has existed for centuries and generations, we all look forward to seeing how each of you will teach us what it means to practice resurrection. What it means to live resurrection, what it means to embody resurrection. Today, because of you, because of us, we will be changed. We will remember. We will live.

Sermon Notes, Lent 3: Too Big To Fail

2010-03-08T11:44:00.002-06:00

(Vicar's note: I went off the cuff and didn't record my sermon from Sunday, so the below is a brief synopsis.)

I have been reading Sorkin's book, "Too Big To Fail" and learning a little bit about this whole economic melt down and how it got started, and why it happened and how it was encouraged by the actions of a few. Interesting book, I like it and enjoy it. What I find fascinating is the drive to succeed and the complete unwillingness to fail on the part of the main characters of the Wall Street Investment Banks. They were so confident in what they were doing, had been through so much that were driven to believe that they could never fail.

Having just finished the Olympics, I saw the same kind of mentality on the slopes, in the rinks, all over the place, people who were simply unwilling to fail, unwilling to lose, unwilling to finish second. The difference between the Olympics and W@all Street of course, is that someone always finished second and the athletes tended to accept their position while the big bankers refused to accepts finishing second.

I was having a conversation last week with a woman who is pregnant and was telling me about a friend of hers who happens to be a pastor. Her pastor friend seems to find it important to tell her that she is going to hell. Because she doesn't go to church. I looked at her and said, "And why is this woman your friend?"

But all this got me to thinking, is the Church too big to fail? Is the Church too big to fail in the way the banks are too big to fail, in that we are so networked and connected throughout the world that if Christianity failed in some way, the world would come crashing down? Or is the Church too big to fail because our Christian leaders are so stuck in their ways, so oblivious the crises around them that they cannot see past the ends of their own noses.

Is the Church too big to fail, and in what context is it too big to fail? In a good way or a bad way? We, as Christians, often think we are called to be lambs, all the time, taking whatever is doled out to us and simply accepting it. It's the Christian thing to do. I wonder about walking a fine line however, where we embrace our light, our strength and live out of the confidence of our expertise, the strength of our knowledge, the passion of our lives while also holding in our hands the great need for humility and compassion we are called to have.

Is it possible to have both Wall Street Drive, and Mother Theresa Compassion in our lives? Is it possible to hold those two in tension so we can live as full a life as we are able? Confident in the gifts that we have been given by God, all the while changing the world with compassion and humility...

Sunday Sermon: Advent 1: Food and the end of the world

2009-11-29T09:10:00.000-06:00

I went to see the new movie 2012 this week. The movie, about the end of the world as the Mayan calendars predicted, seemed appropriate for our particular world ending scripture readings that we have today. I went to see it so I could have some great tidbit of wisdom for you all about end times. I came away from that movie only wanting to talk about Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Dolls. Seriously, its hardcore. I am turning into a big wimp when it comes to movies these days.

The end of the movie has stuck with me because it expresses a dream I have for our Church. A dream for Gethsemane, for the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, and the United Sates, for the Anglican Communion and for Christendom as a whole. In the movie the world is changed, it took freak alignment of the planets, and extra strong bursts of fire from the sun, but the world was changed. At the end of the movie one of the kids asks if they can go home, which of course they can’t because some place in Wisconsin has become the new South Pole, and South Africa is the only place above water. His question about going home struck me, because where exactly is home, what is familiar and how do we orient ourselves to a new horizon knowing the world is changing all the time?

Christopher Columbus, when he went sailing the ocean blue did not simply leave Spain and waltz over to the Americas. No, he hugged the shore of Europe as long as he could, and then when Europe’s shore came to an end he hugged the African coast as long as he could, when the African Coast finally came to an end he had no choice but to leave the coast behind and head out into the new horizon. By the time he had sailed down the coast of Africa his people were angry, close to mutiny and ready to go home, when he ventured off to the new horizon, their orientation changed, their focus changed because their lives depended on there being a new horizon. Home was no longer the same, and they had to know in their hearts that the world was changing.

It is my belief that Jesus felt and believed down to his bones that he was going to change the world. God told him, yes, probably true, but if he was truly human, he had to have had some doubt, some kind of question as to whether or not this was going to happen. If not doubt then, a lack of clarity about how it all would end or come about. All Jesus had to go on was a promise after all. A promise of a better future, a promise of salvation, a promise of righteousness, a promise of justice. That is all. If we had only a promise to go on, how would we react? We often don’t act on promises unless we are certain that the outcome will benefit us. It is not often we will act on an uncertain promise or on someone’s simple statement of I promise you this.

Yet we hear loud and clear today, from the prophet Jeremiah, that we are called to listen to God’s promise for us and respond with utmost faith. It is God’s promise, Jeremiah tells a people in exile, a people being slaughtered by Babylonians, it is God’s promise to you that I will restore you. Tell that to the woman being raped, tell that to the father being murdered, tell that to the children being cast aside, orphans in a new dangerous world. How in that kind of anxiety did the Israelites hear any kind of promise. How do people hear and know that God has a promised and preferred future for them when it seems there is no hope for their life right now. But Jeremiah knew exactly what to say, he reminded them of God’s promise to the people of Israel. Jeremiah listened to their suffering and said, God is with you in your pain, God is with you in your suffering, God is here and present and promises to raise you up and give you justice in this unjust world. That is what Jeremiah says God promises. When Kings and rulers practice righteousness then the city and the land will be healed and restored.

What do our lives depend on here at Gethsemane. Bonnie Perry, one of the Bishop Candidates said at the walkabout I attended, “When the Bishop came to our parish he said, ‘Some parishes are dead, and that is ok, but the worst kind of dead parish is the dead parish that thinks its still alive, for that parish will never experience the power of resurrection.” It is a sentiment I have wondered about this place for a long time, not if we have died, but rather if we have been resurrected. Have we allowed ourselves to be pulled out from the darkness into the light that is God and Jesus. Have we allowed ourselves, as I said at Patti Cadwell’s funeral, to be turned into God’s own. God turned Patti’s body into God’s own, now what is God doing to our body, this part of the body of Christ? How are we being transformed and changed, how will we sing our praises, what truth will we speak, what justice will we declare?

God has given us a few clues about what our promised and preferred future will be. That future includes food, food shelf, Eucharist, meals, potlucks, hospitality and a few other things you all could probably name as well. We have been given all that we need in order to listen and hear the hope in God’s preferred and promised future for us. We have been given the vision, we have the energy, we are doing the work. But there is something missing, there is something that is not present, and I can’t put my finger on it. It is the Brett Favre shaped missing piece of our Church. One thing that will make us complete and Super Bowl contenders. What is it? I wonder if it is moving from the mindset of we have to grow the Church (Capitalism) to we have to do and be God’s Missional people in the world (Kingdom of God). How are we being transformed by the coming of Jesus, by the power of the resurrected Christ. How are we becoming God’s own in new ways? We are clinging to the coast as Columbus did and it is time now to turn to a new horizon and prepare for what waits beyond our sight, beyond our knowing, beyond our imagination, beyond the horizon we are oriented towards.

We are fed in order to feed. We feed in order to be fed. That is our new mission slogan, our new mission statement. No longer are we about New Life in the Garden, today We are fed, in order to feed, We feed in order to be fed. It is the truth is it not? As Ben said last week, we are activated already, we have been transformed already, we have been changed and we have been fed. Now, because of our new life, because of how God has done to us great things, we will go out into the world and do great things. Because we have been fed in such a way as we have, we will go and feed others as they wish to be fed. Because we have everything we need to live and do God’s mission, we are feeding the people of the world, we are changing the world itself so that we will be fed and transformed ourselves. Our mission is food, our hope is food, our future is food. Sounds like something Cub Foods should trademark, but it is our new trademark. Our lives have changed, I hope, for the better, but more importantly we have chosen that life for ourselves. Our lives have shifted, and we can no longer live the way we wanted to live, we must now seek a new horizon for this place, for this state, for this country, for our world and for ourselves.

Facing the sunset, the characters in 2012 had no choice but to embrace a new horizon. A new horizon that shifted the world, literally shifted the physical structures of the earth. We also face a new horizon on this day, a new year, a new liturgical year, but more than that a day that declares God’s kingdom the alternative kingdom for us as Christians. Macys, Wall Mart, Sears, and yes, even Target do not matter they have no hold on us. All that matters, all that possesses us is God, God’s preferred and promised future for us and that we are oriented towards that new horizon, glittering bright red, orange, green and azure blue, as we prepare for the next phase of our life together. We are fed, in order to feed. We feed in order to be fed.

Remain in the Building Sub Option Vote NOW OPEN!!!

2009-05-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

VOTE HERE

VOTE HERE

VOTE HERE

Place to Go or People to Be

2009-05-10T13:27:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer 5 Easter Sunday May 10, 2009
The Church has become a place to go, not a people to be. This was said by Phyllis Tickle last Wednesday night at Breck school. Many of you heard her say it and I hope it struck home as much with you as it did with me. This is the tension we are being called to live into at this point in our lives together. We have become a place to go, not a people to be. And yet we are making a decision together on how we will be a people called and sent by God, to participate in the work God is already doing in the world.

I would be lying to you if I said that I was overjoyed we voted to remain in the building. What seemed to be the easiest task of the three truly is the hardest. Closing the building was the easiest of all of them, and we resoundingly chose not to take the easy path. Leaving the building would have also been difficult, but oddly enough, not as difficult as staying in this space. The decision we have made together, and over 150 of you voted in total, so it really was together, is a decision that states loud and clear a couple of things, at least I hope it was your intention to state these things.

By choosing the most difficult option, we have made a commitment to never grow complacent, to never be a place to go, but rather, to dedicate our lives to becoming a people to be. The other piece of this decision is that we recognize that if The Garden were to leave this location we would never truly be able to come back to the urban setting we currently hold. The Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota would completely lose its claim to being an urban denomination, a denomination with a strong presence in the heart of the city. So this decision was twofold. To recommit and re-imagine ourselves as a people called and sent by God, and to commit ourselves to being an urban presence for the Episcopal Church in the whole state of Minnesota.

So now we go to work, we go to work making a decision about the direction we want to go, the next vote, we go to work creating new relationships and imagining how we can share in God’s mission for the world. Some of you will breathe a sigh of relief and say to me, “It’s about time we got to work, its about time we became the people God is calling us to be.” Some of you will sigh a heavy sigh and say to me, “I am exasperated, what more can I do, what more is there to do?!” And yet, even some more of you will say, “Whatever.” We all have our way of dealing with these decisions that we have made, we all have our fears and anxieties about whether or not we want to continue on this path for The Garden.

If I were a stupid priest I would stand up here and from this pulpit say that if you don’t do what I want, I will leave. But I am not a stupid priest, at least not that stupid, and so instead I say to you all, I am excited about the possibilities we have in front of us. In fact, I think as we move forward and boldly claim a vision that God has for us, we begin to take a journey back to the beginning of The Garden, back to its roots, back to the heart of the mission that started this amazing community of faith.

Kristine Granias rightly challenged someone the other day, I think at our convocation that suggested Gethsemane started all those churches simply because we outgrew our church. We didn’t have space for people and so started a new church somewhere else. If you read our history, one of the striking things about that history is the deep sadness coupled with the great joy that came with each Church start. Gethsemane did not simply grow big and send a faction of people off to start a church. They saw a need and sent people to fill that need. Most of those people were happy to go, but they were deeply saddened by having to leave the community they had previously called home. This was not an easy thing for those people who started the Churches Gethsemane founded. It took courage, it took faith, it took a great deal of hope, and he were are tapping into that same call, that same experience as we look to our future and ask what it will be.

Jesus talks about being the vine in today’s Gospel, that as the branches of that vine we are rooted in the vine that grows in the world. However, that vine is, once in a while pruned, we are being pruned as we speak, we are being cut back so that we will be more fruitful, so that we can hear God’s dream for us more clearly and be able to respond without the baggage that we normally carry with us. If you listen to the Gospel, and this is one thing I love about the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” John does this throughout the entire Gospel and it is a thought that we should all dwell upon on a regular basis, the idea that we have already been cleansed, that we have already been forgiven, that we have already been transformed by the Gospel, by the word of God. So this Gospel, instead of asking us to seek forgiveness and to seek cleansing and transformation, calls instead for a response to that “already”. We are being asked to grow, we are being asked to move, we are being asked to do, because our hearts have already been knit into the fabric of God’s being and the only thing we can do now is respond.

Our ancestors, the people who went before us, experienced this pruning on a regular basis. In those first 50 years, our forebears were constantly being pruned and being asked to respond to the Gospel as they lived it in this particular context. They saw need and they approached it unafraid of the cost. Today, we begin to reach back to grasp the spirit of our forebears and ask, where is the need, and how will we respond. Where is it that God is calling us to participate in God’s mission for the world? There is a DNA that once you have sat in this space, absorbed the living spirit of the community of the Garden there is a DNA that gets implanted into your own, you become a Sower to seed, you become a seed to be sown. For too long we have been languishing on the vine, and now as we finally allow ourselves to be trimmed back to the beating heart of our being there is pain and remorse, but more hope for our future together. I know making decisions has been tough for some of us, but without these decisions we will continue to languish and the closing of the building will be inevitable.

It is a new day, and together we are being sent by God into the world to accomplish the particular mission of this place, of this community of faith. God is at work, and my hope for us all is that we will see the truth and the value in Phyllis Tickle’s statement, “The Church has become a place to go, not a people to be.” Everything we do is raising up the vision of what it means to be a people, not a building to go to. Placing primacy on the relationships that reside within the community not our relationship to this building. If we can do that, we will become a people to be, and transcend the geographical location that has stranded so many churches in this day and age. We believe that God is here, seriously, we do.

My Thoughts for Saturdays Convocation

2009-04-30T21:34:00.001-05:00

For the past three years The Garden has been one of a handful of parishes who have taken the work of the BCMS and incorporated into the very fabric of our being, into the very culture of who we are as a congregation. We have allowed its wisdom to guide our decision making processes as we journey to a new future together.

Gethsemane was the catalyst for this entire mission discernment process, out of the work around the Gethsemane plan, the BCMS and MSN processes emerged and came into being. For every minute of our renewal experience and around every decision we have made in the Garden (how we affectionately refer to ourselves, no one seems to know how to say Gethsemane) we have held close to our heart and soul the work of the original BCMS plan. It is important work that challenges us at a level that goes beyond the perceived diocesan structural challenges we face.

Three years ago Gethsemane was in an uncertain place, a place not unlike where the Diocese finds itself today. As part of our work to transform the culture, and as part of our ministry and commitment to bring a shift to our thinking about how we do Church, we embraced the work of the BCMS and listened to the Spirit in every letter of the document. We absorbed what it said about vulnerability around the brokenness of relationships to name our current realities. We listened to its wisdom about the need for transformation. We patiently shared our stories of how God was active in our lives and how we saw God active in the world. The BCMS 2007 document approved at Diocesan Convention changed us and it changed us drastically.

We decided not to plan our way out of the mess and simply listen as best as we could for God’s dream for us. As many of us did in the Diocese, we embraced Gospel Based Discipleship and began to try to allow the Gospel to speak to us about how God was active in the world. We held true to the process as laid out in the GBD books and how it was taught to us.

Where the BCMS report encouraged us to use gifts discernment resources, we decided to go a different route. Understanding—from much of our study of the Gospel—that clergy and leadership often get in the way of ministry and mission, as well as understanding that most people who come to church have an idea already of what their gifts are and how God has graced them with the abilities to be accomplished human beings, we decided instead to take on a vision of gifts implementation. Rather than discern what people’s gifts might be, we asked them flat out, what they love to do and how they could envision doing it in the Garden. Clergy and hierarchical leadership stepped out of the way and acted as support resources for people who had a passion to accomplish their unrealized dreams.

To date this model of ministry permeates the entire culture of the Garden, from our Altar Guild to our New Member Ministry, from our Green Group to the UTO collection; people involved in these ministries give from their passions, energy and dreams, not as obligation, have to’s and routine. Too often gifts discernment places too much power in the hands of clergy and other leadership within the church. We have found this leaves a sense that only the clergy have access to spiritual transformation and are the only arbiters of Spiritual Transformation; no one else can have it unless it is given them by the clergy.

Some clergy will think this is too harsh, or may seek to place blame on the lack of initiation of the laity, but it is primarily the unwillingness of clergy and those in established position of power to relinquish the “power over” they have and instead embrace the “power with” we are called by Jesus to have. By stepping out of the way—opening the avenue for all people to have access to spiritual transformation—there is a spirit of collaboration at Gethsemane that is unique.

I wonder if we as a Diocese are not already spiritually transformed. Gethsemane, over the past three years has felt like Thomas from John’s Gospel, Doubting Thomas. Why was Thomas not in the room with the disciples when Jesus first appeared to them? What was he doing, what might he have been doing? I like to think that Thomas was out carrying the mission Jesus asked the disciples to accomplish in the world. I’d love to think that Thomas was out actually engaging the very world that Christ had called all his disciples to transform. The disciples were already transformed, I can’t imagine one walks with Jesus and doesn’t walk away totally affected. Yet even in his ministry, something was missing, in Thomas’ solitary work, it did not feel complete.

The other 10 disciples had locked themselves in a room; scripture says it was out of fear of what might happen to them. This leads me to think that they were strategizing; how could they best carry out the mission they were called to do without being killed or dieing? Thomas would have none of that, therefore decided to go out and do what Jesus had asked, no, commanded them all to do. Thomas was out transforming the world, because he was transformed himself. However, he was one person, and seeing and knowing that he could not do this on his own, he returned to his friends, possibly, to try to convince them to join him. What a surprise he was in for!

Spiritual transformation assumes we have a relationship with God and with Jesus, the living, dying and rising Christ. At its very heart, to me, it is relational, face-to-face, heart-to-heart, touch-to-touch transformation. Spiritual transformation, I wonder, has little to do with the structures and the buildings and the systems that we, as Christians, inhabit.

The MSN report suggests identifying and commissioning our “Spiritual Connectors” and sending them out to connect our congregations. I like this but it is dismissing one thing, the Gospel. The phenomenon we have in Gospel Based Discipleship is a wonderful way to start all our conversations and connections as well as a powerful way to live fully into the idea and reality of being spiritually transformed. But first, we have to believe that we can be transformed.

Where this all must begin is not in our churches, or in our Diocese or in our Diocesan office, but in us, the people that call themselves Episcopalians and live their lives committed to that expression of Christianity. We have to believe that God is here, not far away. We have to believe that God is alive, not distant and disconnected. We have to believe that Christ is seen most clearly in the margins of society. We have to believe that God is at work in the world despite our uneasiness or unwillingness to actually go out and do ministry in the world. We must recognize that God is not done with God’s work, God has only just begun. We may even have to entertain the thought that God has a plan for the transformation of this world and that we are a small part, not THE part of that plan.

What if we said clearly, “We ARE spiritually transformed and we believe that God is here, with us”? What if we said as loud as we could, and with great joy in our hearts that before anything else the Spirit is moving us to those who are in need, and the mission that God is accomplishing already in the world is where we are being called to put our time, energy resources and talents? What if we said, the gifts we have that God has already given us are the gifts we want to offer the Church, not the gifts the Church needs in order to create attractive performances and flawless liturgies, but rather to meet people in the world where they are at?

We are already cultivating communities of love, justice and peace in this Diocese, and that work has deeply transformed us, yet we refuse to speak from that place of transformation and we refuse to allow the new life we see to guide us into deeper relationships with one another. We refuse to allow the vulnerability deeply interwoven in transformation to open our hearts to the possibilities of reconciliation and healing. That is where we NEED spiritual transformation in how we reconcile ourselves to one another as humans and Christians, and Episcopalians in the Diocese of Minnesota.

I imagine that Doubting Thomas’ understanding of his context was vital in how he moved through the city, finding people with whom he could share the story of Jesus. He would have had to have a deep understanding of the city in order to safely maneuver if the authorities and others were as hostile as John tells us they were. Yet, his fear and anxiety did not prevent him from going out, rather his knowledge of the context of his situation, his knowledge of the city, the neighborhoods, where the poor were, who housed the orphans and widows would have been great assurance to him as he carried out his work. Context, and his particular understanding of it, was vital to the ministry he was conducting.

The ministry that really lit the fire under the people in the Garden was one that landed on us like a 10 ton elephant. The housing crisis filled Hennepin County’s temporary shelters, so they began moving families into the Francis Drake hotel next door to Gethsemane. We knew there were families with kids next door in great need, families who would not stay long, but none the less, had need. We knew we had a gym, stage and classrooms that could be used to help those in need, whether it was the families themselves or the county. Our work culminated in a Christmas Party for the families of the Drake none of whom actually attended. What we found was that the people five blocks north of us at People Serving People were much more interested in the work we were doing. So we had several families from PSP attend our party and discovered that sometimes, when looking one way, other opportunities present themselves that you would have never expected.

I once heard someone say that creativity in a relational sense is not making new connections between people and organizations; creativity is discovering unexpected connections that already exist between people and organizations. The Garden has been the most creative place I have ever experienced, from exploring redevelopment opportunities to the Christmas Party, from worship to Episcopal Church partnerships. No other Church I know of has quite the amount of creativity that we have, under the definition named above.

Suffice it to say, the context we live in was never difficult to find, all we had to do was look out our back door. All we had to do is say—with boldness—the people we are here to serve are not the ones sitting in the pews, but rather those who are in the streets, those who are hungry, those who have no shelter, and those whose families are facing difficult times. Then, after saying it, actually do something about it. We, in the Episcopal Church, talk really well, we listen well too, but rarely do we believe that God is actually calling us to do something. It is not rocket science to understand the context one lives in, it is not difficult to see beyond the end of our own nose and experience the lives of those who are in need.

Something I love about the Presiding Bishop, whenever you read about her trips, whenever you hear about her work, one thing you always can bank on is that she is immersing herself in the context of the place she is visiting. She goes to those places where God is most clearly present. She goes to those places where the need for the Church is the greatest, she goes to those places most of us would never go and she gets her hands dirty. She has been an inspiration to me, because she is going about doing the work of Jesus in our world. She is walking in the streets as Thomas might have done and spreading the Good News to all who have ears. Then, I imagine, she comes back to those upper rooms, those big cathedrals and small country parishes and says something like, “What are you doing here? The work is out there, stop talking, and get busy.” But then again, maybe not.

I imagine that is what Thomas came back to say to the disciples. I imagine that is why Thomas went to the upper room, he knew he could not do this work alone, he knew he could not carry out this work without his close friends, but he was miffed, he was upset and he had an agenda that was never able to truly be revealed, he wanted to shake down Peter and his buddies and give them all sorts of trouble. But he never got the chance, because before he knew it, Jesus appeared to him. Jesus interrupted his diatribe, Jesus never allowed him to share his anger and frustration with the Disciples. Thomas, in that moment must have seen the futility in his anger, frustration and instead was reminded of his faith, the faith of those gathered with him, who, notice, did not say, “We told you so!” The transformed were transformed. Again.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus appears and goes directly to Thomas. I wonder if we misplace Jesus’ intention in his approach. I wonder if Jesus wasn’t feeling the same way as Thomas the second time he appeared to the disciples? “I told you to get your butts out last time I appeared; I even gave you the Spirit, now I have to tell you… ah, Thomas is here, the one who has been doing, the one who has been trying, the one who has been despairing most of all, I am glad to be here.” Jesus goes directly to Thomas and fills him with the Spirit, fills him with confidence and in a way says to Thomas, now you can carry on in our work knowing that I am alive, not dead, that I am here, not absent, that I am with you always. I love you Thomas, now go, out into the world filled with passion, love, joy and the spirit to carry on our work. Jesus appeared to Thomas, not the disciples. To Thomas, who had been absent and had possibly been carrying out the Words and teachings of Jesus without passion and joy and love or the Spirit.

Jesus has appeared to us. Jesus continues to appear to us—calling us out of our fear and anxiety, out of the upper room into the world. Some of us are out there already, trying. Some of us are hiding, strategizing. Wherever we are at, we still must be open to Jesus’ appearing and not expecting new connections, rather seeking unexpected existing connections that transform us and point us to the context in which we are called to walk with God.

State Fair Goodness

2008-09-01T15:17:00.001-05:00

naomiandstick781, originally uploaded by origen00.

We went to the state fair on Friday, the last day of vacation, and my excellent picture taker sister in law snapped this great one of Naomi finishing off my deep fried Snickers bar on a stick. It was delicious! I wasn't sure what to expect, but I have to say, I was impressed.

Be Well,
A+

ON THE DRIVE HOME... I got nuffin

2008-05-01T16:21:00.002-05:00

So the drives home lately have been relatively quiet. I imagine that some of what happens in the car and some of what is said is pretty noteworthy, would be entertaining, but most of that has been hashed over so much in the past two years that it is no longer entertaining to me or Sara as it once was. You hear it a couple hundred times and its funny, then it eventually stops being funny.

Anyway, Eliot and Naomi both have taken to answering my once brilliantly disguised question, "So, what happened at school today Eliot/Naomi" with "Nuthin." Seriously, Eliot says "Nuffing" and Naomi just sits quietly, or says, I played with my kids.

That is something that is cute beyond measure, whenever we are talking about school and their classmates, we don't call them friends, we don't call them classmates, or anything like that, the other children at school are identified by E & N as "my kids."

Now I am not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it brings to my memory a time when I walked in on the Naomi's classroom only to find her in the middle of a circle of kids laughing and laughing. They were supposed to lined up ready to go to the Commons, but they had all encircled Naomi and seemed to be watching her every move. It was cute, and I never thought much of it till I connected it with her idea of "my kids." Watch out.

The same goes for Eliot, its not just the kids in his class that want to hang out with him, its the kids in the BIG KIDS class. The BIG KIDS, Eliot is awed by these kids but I think they are just as awed by him for whatever reason.

We are watching the Showtime Special, "The Tudors" about Henry the 8th. Its really cool, Eliot has about 4 or 5 servants that are always hanging around him at school and feeding him information about what is going on and what is happening. The big kids run up to him when I get there, and they say, "Your Dad is here!!!" He kind of looks at them as if he knew that or it wasn't all that important of a piece of information, try better next time, get me information I can USE!!!

Maybe that is what I need to do, try another track, find out what information I can feed into them so that the information they have can be released to the world of the blog, I think they are on to me though. It's going to take some extra work...

Game on Baby!
Be well,
A+

ON THE DRIVE HOME... It has happened

2008-04-19T07:11:00.003-05:00

When we first started taking the kids to daycare, or school as we call it, Eliot and Naomi both had a really tough time. Eliot sat in his corner in the bathroom, crying for, as he put it, 40 minutes.

I understand now about the significance of the number 40 in the bible. 40 days, 40 nights, 40 years in the desert. 40, biblically speaking, means a VERY VERY VERY long time. Not actually 40 days or 40 nights, it just means that the people experiencing the pain and agony of that moment experienced it for a very long time.

Eliot was in great pain and agony for 40 minute everyday, we still haven't quite figured out what happened, or even what motivated him to end his pain, I like to think it was one of the young women he has grown fond of lately.

Naomi, on the other hand, simply didn't talk, she didn't interact with the kids, just sat around sucking her thumb and holding her blanket and sitting, I assume, in the lap of her teacher.

We discovered Naomi's plight one day when the teacher asked me, "Does Naomi have any words?" This shocked and stunned me, since Naomi is nothing but a jumbling, mumbling, stumbling word filled fool when she is with us. Does she have any words??!!

We thought for sure it would be Naomi who would take to daycare long before Eliot would, his leukemia and all, but we were wrong, Naomi is the one who had the most trouble.

Every morning when I arrived Teacher Edith would always say, someday soon they will not want to go home, they will want to stay here and will cry when you pick them up to go home.

Well, it happened, mostly to Eliot. I picked them up on Wednesday of last week and Eliot wouldn't have any of it. He and his new friend Madeline, Maddy I was told is her name, were running around the jungle gym sliding down the slide having a ball. When I told him it was time to go he cornered himself in the crook of the curvy slide, stuck out his lip and started pouting and crying. He didn't want to go, he wanted to stay with his kids.

Naomi, it seems has not had the same reaction, but she did need to get pulled off the slide in order to get to the car.

So, the combination of being outside, and new friends has finally taken hold of the kids and they are excited to go to school on Monday morning and can't stand coming home in the afternoons. It is very cool!

Be well,
A+

Oh, what a day

2008-04-18T16:50:00.002-05:00

I'm reading a book called "blink" which is about the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second decisions our unconscious makes in our lives. It is the millisecond when we know something is right or wrong, real or fake, etc, etc...

For me, I was most in touch with that split second process when I was coaching soccer. I knew exactly when a goal was going to be scored, about 2 seconds or so before it actually happened. I could tell by the curve of the ball, or the location of the forward, or the misstep of a defender. I just knew.

Therefore I was the first to cheer when one of my girls scored, or the first to groan and turn my head when we got scored upon. I just knew. Long after I had stopped coaching that ability remained until one day when I realized I was a bit rusty.

I still remember it well, I hit a shot about as well as I have hit one before, it was about 25 yards out and the thing just knuckled and knuckled, there was no way it was going to miss, heading straight for the upper left corner. The problem was, the goalkeeper for the MN Thunder was the goalkeeper of the other team and he made a spectacular save...

After I had started celebrating, oh the shame.

Today I was not at all operating out of blink mode, it was more like my, deep sleep can't make a decision to save my life...

Or my kids mode.

Sara is out of town, in DC for a wedding, and today we decided to go to the MOA, run around eat crappy food and look for a pair of soccer shoes for Eliot. Everything was going well until we decided it was time for lunch. I decided, instead of walking the 4 miles to the elevator to brave the escalator.

With a stroller.

And two kids.

And an unconscious that was taking the day off.

I saw it all in my head just fine, I would put Naomi in the stroller and Eliot and I would hold hands up the escalator. I saw it all so clearly, it seemed like a sound decision, yes, I have done that before, the problem of course: Sara is usually with me.

It usually is a mutual decision with hands to go around.

Not so much this time.

I should have realized in the moment I went to park the stroller to prepare for loading and Naomi and Eliot raced over to the edge of the escalator and begun calculating the speed, their ability and how much pain they could inflict in one single incident.

Kids do that you know, they calculate all these things to live on the edge, and always add in the piece of what is going to cause the most anxiety, the most craziness, the most awkwardness a person could ever imagine. It's a good thing we lose that ability when we grow old.

Anyway, I am not sure what happened, but as the two of them began to consider the escalator, I charged over, and for some reason only known to my sleeping unconscious, I brought along the stroller, I was able to get Naomi's hand and it looked like, for the briefest of milliseconds that they had decided to wait.

Then Naomi took the step. And when Naomi takes the step, Eliot has to as well, he can not for any reason be seen as lesser than has little sister. And so it happened. Naomi had my hand, she was safely on a step, ascending, when she suddenly decided NOT to let go of my hand so I could be sure Eliot was OK. When I freed my hand, Naomi decided to walk forward, off the step and the slow motion God's went into action.

I looked back and saw Eliot get on his step just fine. Turned to see Naomi fall forward DOWN the escalator, what a sight, legs spread wide and almost straight in the air, arms also wide, heading down the stairs, seemingly on her face, she looked like a seal flailing around in the ocean, it was strangely graceful.

With Naomi secure in my arms, not sure how she got there, Eliot was halfway up the escalator, he was pretty sad, his blanket was about five steps behind him. I turned and it was in that moment that the stroller decided to enter the fray as well, I turned, took a step down and it attacked, seriously it attacked me.

I fell forward onto the stroller, scratching the heck out of my ankle I found out later, but Naomi was secure and just fine, I didn't actually fall, I stumbled over the attacking stroller and at that point was rescued by a few generous and gentle people who helped me up and helped get the stroller up as well. They asked if they could hold Naomi and rock her in the stroller while I went after Eliot.

Thinking that wasn't such a good idea I put Naomi in the stroller, braced it on the escalator and rode up after Eliot who was completely and totally rejecting the strangers who were trying to help him. He actually started walking towards the ascending stairs trying to come get me. I am sure I yelled stop or something, but have by now, effectively shut that part out of my memory.

We got everything settled and the only thing that was ugly was a little cut on Naomi's lip, she'll pry have a fat lip tomorrow, hopefully not, so Sara will never know this all happened.

Oh what a day. Thank God for McDonald's and M&M's, they make the world go round. Although I am sure they won't help me sharpen my unconscious decision making.

On the drive home, Eliot had dropped his toy in the car, and asked if I would pick it up, I said no, I had to concentrate on driving. Eliot asked, "So we don't crash?", I said yes, and Naomi said she wanted to crash. I said, Naomi, if we crashed it would feel a little bit like the fall you took on the escalator today, but it would hurt a lot more. Do you want to feel that again?

As I looked in the rear view mirror, a huge smile came across her face and she said:

"Do it agin!" Oh the shame.

Be well
A+

A heartbreaking story

2008-04-13T17:45:00.002-05:00

We have members in the Garden who have a dear friend who lives in LA. In March, a few weeks ago, the mother gave birth to a beautiful child, named Madeline. Shortly after the birth, Liz, the mother, died unexpectedly. It is a tragic story, and AJ & Sonja, Madeline's Godparents, and members in the Garden, shared with me the story of Matt and Madeline and Liz. Today we raised over $400 to help Matt and Madeline meet at least some of their needs and prepare for a future without Liz.

I just finished reading the blog that Matt is keeping about life with a new child and in the wake of the death of his beloved, and cried, and cried, and cried. I am sure it brings up for me some of the vulnerability that has never and probably will never heal over from the experience of Eliot's leukemia.

Matt is an amazing man, and if you would like to read some of his story, go to: http://www.mattlogelin.com/, but I warn you, have tissues and prepare to weep. There is great hope in the form a little child, but deep sadness that will break your heart. My prayers, my whole being goes out to him in this terrible time of loss and heartbreak, and joy and gladness and hope for what the future will bring.

Be well,
Aron

Sermon for Apr 13, 2008, 4 Easter

2008-04-13T17:44:00.000-05:00

The other night I watched a movie called Heart of the Game. It is a documentary about a young African American women’s experience as a High School Basketball player in Seattle. She decided not to attend the school she lived next door to in favor of a white suburban school across town. It is a compelling story, and quite inspiring, I recommend it. One of the most effective things the coach of her team did was create what he called the inner circle. He believed part of his job was removing parents and other adults from the decision making processes these young women had to go through in order to create a team. He realized after he had implemented this plan that it meant he could not be a part of the inner circle either, being an adult. In the four years of this documentary the young women had to deal with tremendous decisions that would effect their season, chemistry and many other aspects of their game and lives on as well as off the court. Each player, at some point in the movie, spoke to how they felt empowered, lifted up and given the opportunity to make life decisions that truly made a difference. These young women were given the opportunity to be priests to one another using their gifts to create a team that was near unstoppable on the court and a team that overcame great challenge and controversy off the court.

Bill Countryman, my New Testament professor at seminary wrote a book called “Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of all”. He asks, “What then, is priestly ministry?” His response is, “It is the ministry that introduces us to arcana – hidden things, secrets.” I will come back to that in a moment, but I want to speak to this idea of the priesthood of all believers first. In one sense priestly ministry is the most ordinary thing we can imagine, all our lives we are repeatedly in the position of finding, revealing, explaining and teaching. We are all priests of a particular mystery that someone else does not know. Whether that is coaching a sports team, putting together a budget, leading a business team, cooking a turkey, we are constantly serving others as priests of the mysteries known to us and being served by those who know what we do not. As you can see, these secrets, these arcana, as Countryman talks about, are not secrets that we hold to our chests, deliberately keeping from others for the sake of power and privilege. They are the secrets that we know deep in our souls, secrets that are about experience more than they are about knowledge. They are about having life and having life abundantly. We all have a vocation that leads us to a deeper relationship with God and in that vocation we discover out rue humanity, our true priesthood.

All of this is to say that today’s Gospel is one of the most popular images we have in all of scripture, Jesus as Shepherd; God as shepherd. It is, besides God the Father, one of the most impactful images we have for the Church. Lutherans call their spiritual leaders Pastors, another term for shepherd, and Pastors, Priests and Ministers call their congregations flocks. The image of shepherd is a popular one that has created roles and boundaries and lines that are rarely crossed, it is one of those images that has helped perpetuate a hierarchy in the Church that has not been so helpful over the years. While this idea of the shepherd developed out of a time where they knew exactly what herding sheep was about, I would argue its symbolism is lost on a people who have rarely, if ever seen and understand exactly what it means to be a shepherd today. The image in our stained glass over there would suggest that sheep are cute and wonderful and cooperative, and while that is true to some extant, they are also stubborn and loud and dirty. And shepherds were not regal in the way Jesus is regal in that picture. Shepherds were usually hired hands; they were often thieves who were forced to steal and rob to get food to eat and resources to survive day to day.

So who are we? How do we see ourselves as we listen to the Gospel of Christ, the Good News and begin to hear how we are called to be part of the priesthood of all believers? Bill Countryman taught me in his class, “The news God speaks to human beings can only be good news if it address and affirms our humanness, the very humanness with which God first endowed us in creation.” We talk often of the incarnation, God putting on human flesh, in that same sense God’s putting on of human flesh has endowed each of us with a holiness that calls us into deeper relationship and deeper love of God and one another. By serving one another, out of the arcana that we know and even the arcana that we do not know, we are bringing Christ to the world as priests of the Church. Our basic humanity, Countryman is saying, is what makes us all priests. Our basic humanness is what we serve in one another as priests of the Church and priests of creation. Our basic human essence reminds us that priesthood is a fundamental and inescapable part of being human.

So with that in mind, how does the Gospel read now? To me it means to follow. It means to listen to the voice that is calling to me. It means to be open to the humanness that connects me to each and every person on the planet. It means that I am not the shepherd, I am not the one who is calling to other humans to follow me, I am not the one who is the gate, or the gatekeeper. I am sheep, dirty, stubborn, uncooperative, yet responsive to the familiar voice of God. It means that I am called to live into the humanity that is the core of my priesthood. William Stringfellow wrote, “The vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the Resurrection. The only thing that really matters is to live in Christ instead of death.”

Lately I have found myself surprised by my opinions and thoughts, has that ever happened to you? Where you thought you believed one thing, then in a conversation your belief changes and it changes in such a way that it completely surprises you. As you all know we have lived, as the Diocese of Minnesota, for the last two years in the knowledge that we are in precipitous decline. That we are slowly dying, and it will be a long and painful death we have been told. I found myself having a conversation with a colleague the other day, and I found myself saying to this person, I believe that this precipitous decline that we are in as the Diocese of Minnesota will become a precipitous incline. That we will be starting churches, reviving churches, we will see great growth, great depth and spiritual renewal the likes many of us have never experienced. And I will see it in my lifetime. I was quite surprised by my confidence, it felt good, it felt good to shake away that negativity we had had for so long, it felt good to get to the crux of my Anglican/Episcopal Identity and hold that incarnational, relational belief. But the next words that I heard struck me right back down. My colleague asked me, “Where’s your confidence in that?” Where is your confidence in that? My colleague asked me. My response was simply, God is in the resurrection business. God is doing something new, God is active and present and pulling us out of our self interest, out of our selfishness out of the need to think only of myself. God’s voice is coming over the loudspeaker of life and calling to us all, speaking gently and softly to us, saying, follow me. And it is God’s voice we are following; we are no longer following the voices of those who would pretend to lead us. Our clergy who are wise, though also foolish, are no longer the voice that people are listening to; it is the voice of Christ, the voice of Jesus saying to us, you are my priest, my beloved, follow me. That is where my confidence lies, that we are becoming the inner circle, it is not just the clergy who reside in the circle, keeping the secrets of salvation to ourselves, it is the church, the people of God who are slowly infiltrating that circle and bringing to the table a voice and a perspective that is transformative, that is equalitative, that is authentically priestly.

God is in the resurrection business, and we pray everyday to be shaped and formed by the life Christ led, by the Good News we have in the Scriptures, and by the priesthood our humanity bestows upon us. We live in the shadow of death, but we also live in the confident hope, and I mean CONFIDENT in all capital letters, hope of the resurrection. God is our coach, God is our empowerer, we must trust fully that God knows what God is doing and we must trust fully in the humanity we have that bestows upon us the gifts of priesthood and the call to serve one another and be served by those around us. In all things, we are priests. The degree to which faith, hope and love permeate us with integrity determines how effective we are as priests, but to be no priest at all is impossible. In all things we are priests.

ON THE DRIVE HOME... In the Commons, not actually in the car

2008-04-08T20:39:00.002-05:00

I usually pick the kids up in a big room called: "The Commons" at Daycare. It is the place where they throw all the kids together, all ages and let them run rampant after 4PM because of rules and regulations which I won't get into right now. Suffice it to say, its always loud and crazy and wild.

Eliot was standing in there one day, looking just fine, until I arrived when all of the sudden the flood gates opened and the tears poured out. Apparently one of the big kids had scared him pretending to be a fox, the poor kid didn't know how to respond so when I arrived he just cried, ran into my arms and sobbed. I told him next time to pretend he was on a horse with a big rifle hunting foxes for his family to eat.

Just kidding, I would never do such a thing. Or would I... I did tell him to be wolf and howl and bare his claws and teeth. It seemed to calm him down a bit.

Another time in the commons, as I arrived, a big kid came up to him and said, "I like your shirt", the shirt had a big 18 wheeler carrying cars, the little boys head hadn't ever swelled so much, I honestly thought he was going to explode with pride.

So today, I arrive and the kids run up to me, I had to find them as they were not in their usual place on the trampoline in the corner, and all goes as it usual does. But lately what i have been noticing is that Naomi seems to attract a crowd... of little boys... who like to touch... her.

Uh huh. Its happening, crap. Look out below, how do I deal with this???

Teacher Judy solved it for me when she said to the 2 little boys touching and bumping into her, "Don't touch with your bodies!" WHAT, I thought, WHAT do you mean, don't touch with your bodies, is this such a common and regular event that it has gotten to the point that the teachers just nonchalantly say, don't touch with your bodies, and if they already are touching with their bodies what the... do they touch with their hands?! This is my kid we're talking about, what happens next??? I don't want to know, and don't even think of telling me in the comments.

None the less, I put Naomi's jacket on and we got ready to go. Now, I have to say the other thing that is really odd about picking up the kids, is that the same 2 or 3 kids show up each time and look at me as if they are expecting me to put on their jackets and take them home. One kid has even gone so far as to reach out to take my hand. I guess all us dads look just the same or something.

So today, after we were ready to go I heard mumbling from Naomi and witnessed a little swat in the air. Not sure what se was getting at I looked at her with a cocked head, and I heard her say, while looking angrily at the kids surrounding us, "My daddy!" Swat. "MY daddy!!" Swat. "MY DADDEEEE!!!" Swat, swat SWAT!

It was then that I realized that Naomi has been protecting me from the evil little children that want to steal me and take me for their own. What a saintly little girl I have. And what a brave protector she is, standing up to the little boys who would only seek to do me, her, mommy and eliot harm. I love her.

ON THE DRIVE HOME... Yay!!!

2008-04-08T20:20:00.003-05:00

Eliot just finished his last steroid pill this morning. Every month he gets 5 days of steroids, and while he does not turn into the little hole-in-the-stomach-eating-machine-with-a-temper monster anymore, he still is affected. Sara probably will hate me for this, but I am quite fascinated each month by how he changes during the steroid time.

We will often say to people, when he is acting crazy and wierd, its the steroids. Most of the time people laugh and think we are joking, of course, it gets a bit awkward after that sometimes. No, really, he's on steroids.

This month has been different than most in that he has been more clingy and attached to the hip, mostly of momma, not me, for some reason this past week or two, daddy mania has drifted away and I am no longer the exciting one to be with, momma has replaced me.

Anyway, on Monday I dropped the kids off at “School”, that’s what we call daycare, school, they learn things there, like how to punch and kick and beat the crap out of each other. How to make fun of the nerdy kids. How to survive the general nastiness and hostility little boys and girls reap upon each other for no other reason than that they can. They learn a lot at school. It's an important time.

On Monday morning, the old sad Eliot face showed up, the one that appeared every time I left him in his room those first few weeks, the old sad face that sent him to the corner of the only room that would offer him protection from the harsh cruel world of daycare – the bathroom.

I was pretty heartbroken, tears, lip trembling, it looked awful for him. On the drive home, while he was munching down one of the bagels I had brought the kids, he said, “Daddy, I cheered up at school today, I didn’t stay sad.” Thinking I could hear about his activities, and what he actually did in a day, I asked, “What caused you to cheer up bud?”

He put the bagel carefully in his lap, I witnessed this in the rearview mirror, he looked at his hands and threw them up in the air and said, “Yay!” We all laughed and threw our arms up in the air and said “Yay!”

ON THE DRIVE HOME... I want Easter!!!

2008-04-01T15:02:00.002-05:00

I bought two doughnuts for Eliot and Naomi after my meeting at a local coffee shop on Monday and thought it would get me a lot of good points to give them the treats for the ride home. These were not just regular doughnuts, they were chocolate covered, with lots of sprinkles on top.

The woman who served me there asked the question after I told her they were for my kids, not for me, "Why is it that kids absolutely love sprinkles, its not like they taste like anything, they just are colorful." We concluded that scientists everywhere had spent enormous amounts of time studying the pheromone reactions of children to eating sprinkles.

Anyway, I left, excited to be able to give the kids their treats and was jazzed about to hear what they would say.

In the car, I told them I had a present for the two of them, Naomi freaked out laughing and laughing and laughing, and as I reached into the big and pulled out the doughnut, she screamed in great delight. When I handed Eliot the doughnut, there was a little different reaction.

Anger, crying and screaming "No! No! No!!!" I was shocked, seriously, he was saying no, no no! And with enthusisasm. Why would a child not want a chocolate covered sprnikly doughnut, were the scientists wrong, did they study only kids 2 and under and 4 and above?

Then his anger subsided into sobs and what I heard next was the funny part, guess what he wanted, guess what our little boy wanted. EASTER! I want Easter, imagine Easter, as he said it, starting at a regular inside voice level, ending with the "r" at the top of his lungs, it looks something like this: easTERRRRRRR!!!!!

So I asked Eliot if I could eat his doughnut, quietly he said, "no."

ASIDE:
As I pulled up to the stop light at Franklin and River Road, I looked back and saw Naomi's mouth, open as wide as possible, trying to get the sprinkles and chocolate off all at the same time. That's all she ate, I got to eat the slimy, gooey snot covered remains after she gnawed off the chocolate and the sprinkles.

And it was good.

ON THE DRIVE HOME... What the...

2008-03-27T06:35:00.003-05:00

Driving into the Rosedale Mall parking lot I got stuck behind some horrible drivers, seriously, they were swerving in and out of lanes, stopping in poor places to stop, going as slow as they possibly could.

After about 3 blocks of this I said, not too loudly, but loud enough to be heard, "What the..." That's it, just "What the..." Nothing more nothing less.

As soon as I finished saying the..., Eliot screams at the top of his lungs in the back of the car, "HELL!!!" Then he continues screaming, almost singing, "What the Hell! What the Hell!!!"

Not to be outdone, Naomi had to join in the fun as well.

"What the Hell! What the Hell! What the Hell!"

I know this one is my fault, because that is the one little habit I have never been able to give up, along with my use of the word damn. As part of the ground rules I used to make in Youth Group for my Sr High group, I would say, no swearing allowed, except for hell and damn. Hell because we probably will talk about hell and what it means and because kids are always crazy when you use a word that is forbidden and damn because I said it all the time.

Oh well, what the hell.
Be well.
A+

ON THE DRIVE HOME... Waving, waving and more waving

2008-03-27T06:30:00.002-05:00

So Wednesday was a big day.

Naomi at one point, some time after our conversation about weird and strange people, started waving at the people in a truck next to us while we were stopped at a stoplight.

The two men in the big bad truck just stared, men have a way of not seeing that ultimately astounds me. I know, because I fall into that category often.

She was waving and waving and waving, her hand held high, she became quite exasperated and disappointed these guys who were staring right at here weren't waving back.

I asked her if she thought they were weird and strange, her response an emphatic and loud, "YEAH!"

After which she continued to wave at everybody.

ON THE DRIVE HOME... People are wonderful

2008-03-27T06:14:00.002-05:00

Eliot has taken to wearing a pink dress lately, dancing to the soundtrack of Juno, and other music, and just fully enjoying his life at home as a ballerina. It has been a joy to watch and if I can get the videos off my phone card someday I will post them, much, I am sure, to his eventual chagrin.

On the drive home yesterday, Wednesday, I was talking (to myself) about how Church people have to have names, I said out loud, "everyone has to have their own name!"

Eliot responded, "why do people need their own names daddy?"

I said, probably entirely inappropriately, "Because people are weird and strange Eliot."

For the past couple of days I have been working on creating a disk of reflections by Desmond Tutu that I can give as a gift. One of the reflections is titled "People are Wonderful". Bishop Tutu talks about how in all his life the one thing he has learned is that people are wonderful.

Eliot responded to my weird and strange comment not with his usual "Why, daddy, why?" statement but with this one instead: "Not all people are like that daddy."

There was a moment of silence as I marveled at this little boys wisdom. Then I asked, do you mean not all people in the church are like that? To which he said, No daddy, not all people like that!!! Very emphatically. So I said, you mean no one in the world is like that, his response, "yeah, not all people like that, all people are happy."

There was a bit of silence, and I turned onto Snelling from Larpenter, we were actually going out to eat, not home, and Eliot said, "princesses happy, daddy."

I said, oh yeah? Why are princesses happy Eliot? He said, because they wear dresses, and they dance to music, they dance at home, they dance ballerina dance, they like being ballerina's, they like ballerina dance.

Understanding where he was going with this, I asked him, with a huge smile on my face, "And what, exactly, do princesses wear Eliot?"

His response: "Pink dresses."

At which time their began an enormous world shattering row between Naomi and Eliot about who had more pink on, both my princesses, as happy as they could be.

A New Topic

2008-03-27T06:08:00.003-05:00

I realized the other day that I had an opportunity to blog that I had been missing, and might just be the kicker to get me a little more motivated and in practice to get some things written here and what not.

My life has drastically changed recently with Sara taking a new job at Target. I take the kids to Daycare M T & W at 8AM and pick them up at 4PM those days as well. suffice it to say, my usual pattern of getting through the days has changed.

Anyway, the rides to and from Daycare everyday offer up wonderful little bits of joy that I thought I should share with you all. I will call it, ON THE DRIVE HOME...

My first post will follow this one.

Be well,
A+

Easter Sermon 2008

2008-03-25T06:30:00.000-05:00

Reynolds Price is a novelist, he writes from a wheelchair because of a rare spinal cancer that almost killed him 20 years ago. He wrote a book called “A Whole New Life” in which he writes about the healing vision of Jesus that he believes saved his life. In an interview with the Oxford Review he said, “When you undergo huge traumas everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?”

Who are you going to be tomorrow? Most of us will walk into work tomorrow morning after having spent time with family, time that for some of us might be excruciatingly painful, and for others, sweet joy and happiness. But most of us will walk into work on Monday morning and enter into our old lives, follow our old patterns and in the end be unchanged by this earth shattering event that has happened. What if, instead of walking from this place feeling the same, expecting the same from others, we declared to ourselves, I am dead, now, who am I going to be tomorrow?

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, “Leaving Church”, writes of an encounter with a former parishioner who had stopped attending church altogether. She writes, “After a lot of listening, “he said, “I think I finally heard the gospel. The Good new s of God in Christ is ‘You have everything you need to be human.’ There is nothing outside of you that you still need – no approval from the authorities, no attendance at temple, no key truth hidden in the tenth chapter of some sacred book. In your life right now, God has given you everything that you need to be human.” In hearing the words today, tomorrow when I wake up, I am going to look at Sara, and I am going to look at Eliot and Naomi, and recognize fully that God has given us everything we need to be the humans God wants us to be. I am going to look at all of you when I greet you in Church, when I see you on the streets or skyways and know deep in my heart that the light of Christ is in you, not because of something you did, not because of something you want to be, but because you are a beloved child of God, created with great care and intention to walk this earth.

When God has given us all that we need to be human, we understand the great and simple challenge that we have to be human, to be who we are without striving to be someone or something greater and different than what we are. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more, nothing at all. And the kicker of course, is that there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. God has a great and beautiful and powerful love for us and it is a love that is so far beyond what we know and understand. It is not at all like the love we have for our children, yet we can see God’s love in their dancing eyes. It is not at all like the love we have for our spouses and partners, yet we can feel God’s power in their intimate touch. It is not at all like the love we have for one another, yet we can experience God’s beautiful desire for us to belong when we are gathered in community. God’s love is a love that vastly transcends our understanding of emotion, spirituality and life. John O’Donohue has captured the smallest tip of the great iceberg that God’s love truly is in his poem, Beannacht, he writes:

On the day when/the weight deadens/on your shoulders/and you stumble,/may the clay dance/to balance you.

And when your eyes/freeze behind/the grey window/and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,/may a flock of colors,/indigo, red, green, and azure blue/come to awaken in you/a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays/in the currach of thought/and a stain of ocean/blackens beneath you,/may there come across the waters/a path of yellow moonlight/to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,/may the clarity of light be yours,/may the fluency of the ocean be yours,/may the protection of the ancestors be yours./And so may a slow/wind work these words of love around you,/an invisible cloak to mind your life.

Always God’s love emerges from the depths of our hearts and souls, always, God’s love emerges in our lives unexpectedly and sometimes in an earth shattering way. Beneath the darkness, beneath the fog, there is a great light, beneath the hardened shell we have created for our lives as protection from the elements of our world and culture, from the words of our friends and lovers, a deep longing is singing out desiring to be made free, broken from its prison of callousness, hardness and darkness. Our true authentic selves, the eyes of our hearts desire and long to be free from the cross we have hung them on. It is not that we must strive to discover these authentic selves, it is not that we have to find out who we are or start a great search for the human being God wants us to be. No, it is simply allowing God to overtake us, allowing the love, the light, the pain, the agony we have to break through the hardened casing we place around our heart so that we may see with the eyes of our hearts, with eyes of generosity, love and humility. That is what the cross is about, it is about love, it is about seeing with deep generosity, abundant love and great humility how others seek to belong and be loved themselves.

Taylor, in the same book writes, “While there are clearly many different ways to be human, it remains possible to see Jesus not as the founder of a new religion but as the exemplar of a new way of being human – a new Adam, in the language of the apostle Paul – who lived and died with such authentic faith in God that he gave his followers the courage to try to do the same thing.” In our being human, we often can stomach only so much freedom, limitations and boundaries immediately spring up to protect what we know, and what we understand as familiar and like ourselves. Taylor continues, in the same paragraph, writing, “We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful and we are not.”

I have felt this for sometime in my ministry: that God is faithful and we are not. We come to Church every Sunday, we come and listen to the music provided, pray the prayers we have and we know deep in our hearts that this model of Church is broken, that there is a dissonance, something is wrong. We choose not to pay too much attention to it, but we know; we know that something is dead, and rather than proclaim it dead and seek to discover what it could be tomorrow, we proclaim, maintain and hope for the same. It is time for us to let down the Church from the cross, it is time to take the body to the tomb and mourn its passing. We must roll the stone in front of the hewn out grave and kneel, stand and sit in vigil, mourning over our loss, remembering that God is greater than anything we can imagine and that by placing the Church in its final resting place, there is one more act, one more event that will take place. The Church, the Church as the people of God, will be resurrected in some way, I can guarantee it, because that is what God does, but until we can give ourselves fully to God, and allow God to act and work the miracle of the resurrection, we will never discover what we can be as the Church.

As much as it might pain me to say so, you do not need anything from me in order to know how to live fully. The Church cannot offer anything to you that will make you a better person. Our liturgy, while wonderful and beautiful, will not make you a more complete person. Why is that, you might ask, because God has already given you everything you need to be human and as St. Irenaeus, the great second-century theologian, said “the glory of God is a human being fully alive!” God lives in the world, working in the lives of those who do not know God, those who are oppressed and alone, those in prison and those who are broken, dying and sick. Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her hope for the Church, resurrected, “What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at Church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job was to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?” The empty cross and the risen Christ speak volumes in our effort to understand that the Church is the only institution that does not exist primarily for itself, but rather for those who do not belong to it.

“Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?” These are the words I challenge you to hold in your hearts as you leave this place, as you spend time with your family and as, on Monday, you return to work or to school, to the life you once knew. God has ripped to shreds the expectations the world has for all of us. Christ has reached out his hands to us, embracing us erasing our solitude and aloneness. The tomb is empty, something has happened and we can never be the same.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

You are dead! Who are you going to be tomorrow?

Sunday Sermon: 2 Lent

2008-02-17T07:19:00.000-06:00

And Mother’s everywhere are cringing at Nicodemus’ words, imagining their children crawling back into their wombs…

The fact that Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night is significant in the writing of John. It is significant because it symbolizes the theme that runs throughout the Gospel of John, the theme of Light and Darkness. The light is always being challenged by darkness, and of course, the light always wins when it is Jesus, but for those disciples of Jesus and those disciples that follow Jesus long after John has left this world, it is a different story. Disciple’s today struggle as much as anybody has with the challenges and the evil that darkness brings.

Nicodemus’ questioning of Jesus in the dark is significant for another reason. Conversion always preceded Baptism in Jesus’ time, and the early Church. They often did not have infants to baptize as we do today. They often made people go through the intense formation in the weeks leading up to Easter, as we hear on Ash Wednesday, Lent was always a season for those seeking to be baptized and those who were seeking to be restored to the Church. For John the story of Nicodemus is about Baptism, we often hear different stories of Baptism in the different Gospels and Epistles, for Paul it was about death and new life, for Matt, Mark and Luke it was a ritual cleansing, a washing away of our sins. But for John it is about being born again, or, as the phrase can also mean, born from above. Rebirth is the theme of John’s Gospel and we will hear all about it as we journey through this Lent.

I would ask you all to take this Gospel home with you this week, take your bulletins and reflect on the Gospel, read it over and over, because it is a unique Gospel; it is a wonderful tug of war between Jesus, this new upstart, renewal figure and Nicodemus, the old established, traditional teacher. It is a tug of war that we often engage in ourselves, and this dialogue could go a long way in helping us all come to understand how God is calling us.

Nicodemus has no understanding about Jesus’ words, but he remains with Jesus trying hard to work out his meaning. The psalm today sheds some light upon the eternal questions of Nicodemus when it sings, “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?” The questions we ask are often as difficult and challenging as the ones Nicodemus is asking. They are questions that we ask out of our history, out of our past. Questions that are about what we know and less about what we are becoming. Nicodemus knew full well how babies are born, so in hearing the idea of being born again he thinks of only the physical re-birth of a human being and its impossibility. Nicodemus is asking only out of his knowledge and experience when Jesus is asking him to suspend his own experience and listen to the seemingly impossible answers of God and God’s love for all of creation.

We are in the midst of this same struggle, the same struggle with a bit of a cultural twist. For years, centuries even Christianity has been at the center of the public and private life of most humans in the world. Religion always held some sort of state or official role in its life time. For the first time since Constantine declared Christianity the state Religion, we are experiencing the disestablishment of Christianity from the public life. For instance, we here at Gethsemane have been asked to revive a Church, and I have come to understand that the revival of the church in the eyes of those who sought to make this happen had certain expectations that perpetuated this model of Christendom, this model of Christianity that still places the Church and the religious experience at the center of civic and cultural life. I have come to see that the commitment to this kind of established Church, to this idea of Christendom as it has always been present in the public life, is the single most important cause of inertia and inhibition of intentional and creative response to this great transition the Church at large is going through. The more we seek to institutionalize and recreate institutions of old, the less creative we become, and the more the Spirit is boxed up and left behind on a shelf somewhere.

However, I say that and understand that not many of us are equipped for the end of this Era of Christendom, for the end of the Church’s life in the civic center. I find myself often falling back into the habits and models of the expectations of a priest and a priest’s traditional roles, roles that perpetuate a kind of religious experience that is not transformative and is not engaging the culture meaningfully and with intention. For the most part, there are few people, if any that are prepared to move us out of Christendom and into the post-Christendom world we are all experiencing. This experience, I have to say, goes hand in hand with the great shifts in our culture as well. No longer are people willing to accept one or two world views, or a particular institutions worldview as their own. More and more people are seeking out meaning for themselves and meaning for their particular situations. One size fits all no longer applies to our culture and the people in our culture. Pluralism has become the concept of the day, in everything we do we have to be sensitive and aware of how our actions affect those around us, and at the same time understand more clearly our own needs, wants and desires and strive to have them met.

For years all Christians saw their role as bringing unity under Christ to the world, Christianity rolled through the centuries beating down all those who would oppose her, and reducing to fantasy those religions that stood with her in various expressions of God. Christian mission for years did not mean necessarily bringing Christ to the world as much as it meant territorial expansion, it was and has been a tool of empires and often used the language and goals of the empire to further its cause in the world.

Today if I were to tell you all to go out and convert the world, most, if not all of us would shudder at the thought. We would point out that the Muslims and Jews’ expressions of God are just as valid in the world as ours. Or, we might say that evangelism is not our particular gift and we would rather stay home and explore some other interest we have. The tectonic shift of our culture and our religion is upon us, this sift has been happening for many decades, and yet we refuse to see it, we refuse to see this shift, which is less about culture and much more about God’s activity in the world, about how God has been freed from the boxes that our ancestors have tried to reduce God with.

I wish I could end this on a hopeful note for you all, but we are very much in a struggle of questioning God and Jesus as Nicodemus struggled with Jesus. We approach these questions and the challenges of our future from the places we know and the experiences we have had. It is not often that we are able to step out of those experiences and even out of what we know and look at the world, at the Church and our own lives in a different way. Abram is called by God, in our Old Testament reading to leave all that he knows and all that he loves and embark on a journey that is a mystery to him. To go to a land that God will eventually show him. I believe to my core that until we can find a way to leave what we know as historic Christianity, until we can find a way to disestablish ourselves from the traditions that hold us to a model that is quickly dissipating, we will be stuck and we will not succeed in our life together here in the Garden. We must heed the call of God and leave what we know and love and explore this new world, this new place that the Church is being led to.

Last weekend I met with 15 young adults and although I heard the same sentiment of sticking it out with Christendom, in the same words and sentiments I heard a desire for the opportunity to engage God and move into a land of unknown promise. They have the will and the energy to lead us all as Abram led his people into a new land, out of old expectations and traditions into a place that transformed him and his people. The problem is they want to do that work as a community, not as individuals, so until we all can make the journey together, we will be stuck, inert, unmoving.

Nicodemus, in John’s Gospel, is one of the individuals who eventually will bury Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea, we can assume then, that Nicodemus eventually came to understand how to reconcile his knowledge and experience, his authority and teaching with the new call and teaching of Jesus, with the new life and experiences Jesus was asking people to live. That is our hope, that in our struggles, which will be mighty, we will eventually come to see the world in a new way, in a way that is disestablished from Christendom and that is authentic Christianity, Christianity rooted in Christ and God, in love and hope and faith.

Ash Wednesday 2008

2008-02-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

I was selfish yesterday.

Ash Wednesday is the only service that speaks louder than the scriptural texts it has at its core. Looking back at past sermons I have rarely preached on the texts themselves, and mostly on the numerous movies and pop culture references to the beginning of the penitential season. Not so much on the different texts. I realized last night, at our 7PM service, that my sermon touched the Isaiah and 2 Corinthians readings more than it did the Gospel, so the 7AM and 12N people must have been a little baffled about why I was saying what I was saying...

But back to being selfish, I decided to be the one to put the ash sing of the cross on everyones forehead. Sandy did my head, but I did everyone else's. And in my drive up to Grand Marais I really tried hard to figure out why I was so compelled to do that.

I really love Ash Wednesday, there is no other season of the liturgical year that marks itself at the beginning with such a powerful symbol. We usually just flow from one to the next, But Lent begins with Ashes, with dirt placed on our foreheads. As people lined up and came to receive the imposition of ashes I couldn't help but wonder why these people, many of whom I have only shook their hands, would allow me to wipe dirt on their heads. Some with smiles on their faces, others with eyes closed in fervent reflection, and still others not sure what to think about the whole process. It is an intimate experience for me, it brings me close to people, physically, and I suppose emotionally as well. I was overwhelmed with the graciousness people had in allowing me, and through me God, to mark them in an important and vital way.

I guess that might be it, more so than any other day of the year, I feel like a vessel, as Jim Snyder always talks about, I feel more than ever the conduit through which God flows. Maybe it is about power, I hope not. But it is a moment in the year where I feel more than ever that I am priest and my role is to be the person through which God is heard. Vulnerability, intimacy, honesty and openness. So many things, just as this service is full of so much symbolism and mystery we can only seem to engage it in parts.

I learned that Psalm 51 is supposed to be the psalm of David after he committed adultery with Bathsheba. The words in that psalm are odd, when you think about it, Fleming Rutledge in a book she wrote talks about the phrase, "against you God only, have I sinned." What about Bathsheba's husband David had killed? What about Bathsheba herself? What about David's loved ones and family? I guess we are all in God's hands, and in God's hands, that is the relationship that is above all, our relationship with God, and the one relationship that suffers more so than anything else when we realize our jealousy and hatred and vice.

Ash Wednesday is an amazing service, I know there are ways to engage the symbolism more fully than we did last night, and I hope this lent we truly can live into what this Season of Lent says to us. There is so much there, and the best way to experience it is to listen, to others, to God, to the Spirit, to the Word, to isten and to hear rather than desire to be heard. May we all be receptive to what the world is saying to us these 40 days.

Be well,
A+

Sunday Sermon: 2 Epiphany (preached @ St Pauls, Mpls)

2008-01-21T08:00:00.000-06:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer 2 Epiphany January 20, 2008
How many of you here today are Aries, born between March 21 and April 20? The animal symbol of Aries is the Ram, but that, it turns out, is only a recent phenomenon, it was known for many years as “teleh”, which to the Latins, meant “male lamb.” The book of Revelation identifies Aries as the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David. The sign of Aries was always pictured as a male lamb with its head reverted backwards, looking over its shoulder at the emerging Taurus, the next constellation arising out of the cosmos. Only a being with a broken neck could look over its shoulder as the animal sign for Aries does, and yet, the sign shows the lamb still standing, still upright even with its neck broken. It becomes quite clear then that Aries was the perfect choice with which to identify Jesus and his life that would eventually be broken on a cross, only to see him standing upright again as a resurrected being, looking back as we follow and emerge into the holiness God has for us all. The Lamb of God does away with all that preceded it, it is a new beginning, a new life and a new age. John testifies to that for us and we are to believe that God is doing something new among us and for us.

The late Anthony de Mello liked to tell a story of two taxidermists who stopped before a window in which an owl was on display. They immediately began to criticize the way in which it was mounted. Its eyes were not natural, its wings were not in proportion with its head, its feathers were not neatly arranged, and its feet could certainly be improved! When they had finished critiquing the owl, they looked at each other self-satisfied with their evaluations. Then, suddenly, the old bird slowly turned its head, and winked at both of them. The Gospel of John, similarly calls us to look again at our faith, at our dogma and our rules for belonging. Many people have used this Gospel as a tool for deciding who is in and who is out. Many have used this Gospel to produce hatred and fear among people and therefore division. Many have used this Gospel to further the heretical belief that God is not a living, present and active God, but a distant, far away God that cares little for creation and for the most part is finished with Gods work on earth. However, John’s Gospel is one of the most vivid scriptural accounts we have of Gods living legacy in our world and even in our lives today.

I was told recently of an Episcopal parish, somewhere out west that includes among its actively pledging, attending and serving people, a group whose members have one other important thing in common – they do not believe in God. I wondered when I heard of it, if perhaps we have finally and truly become an inclusive church. Then I thought, what better place for atheists to be, both for themselves and for all the rest of us hangers-on, than in a church where they may not only freely challenge the appropriated theology just by their mere presence, but where we might learn that the God of our understanding is altogether more prodigious than our understanding of God. This is the Gospel of John, knowing that the God of our understanding is altogether more amazing and marvelous than our own understanding of God. John spills forth with language that is rich and beautiful, weaving a magnificent narrative tapestry, filled with language that requires silence, silence to let it sit and stir in your soul, silence that allows the hearer to truly inwardly digest and understand how God is alive today and changing and working and transforming ones life. For John’s Gospel is important if we are to believe that we can affect change of any sort in the world and if we believe that God is effecting change in our own lives as well.

Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun wrote in her book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, “The kind of change that shocks us into new beginnings is the kind of change that gives us new life.” What a description of conversion. I remember many years ago, at Holy Apostles Episcopal Church, going through my first Teens Encounter Christ weekend. We had just done the final transforming Eucharist and I was being pulled around by this effervescent young woman jumping from room to room and singing at the top of our lungs the songs we had learned to sing to celebrate our love and praise for Christ in our lives. I describe that moment as the day my life went from Black and White TV to color. It was that shocking new beginning that changed my life and gave me new life and new hope for my future.

Two of John’s disciples follow Jesus after he declares Jesus as the Lamb of God. Andrew is one and the other we do not know. It is this unidentified Disciple of John that I want to speculate for a few moments upon. The text says nothing of what happened to that individual. Some commentators I have read said that this is the beloved disciple of Jesus, the first introduction of that individual. Others say it is the disciple who was close to the chief priests, the disciple who would eventually turn Jesus over to the authorities. Still others say that this disciple after spending the afternoon with Jesus and Andrew just wasn’t impressed and decided not to respond to the word as John had proclaimed him. I like this final interpretation best because it speaks to how we respond to conversion in our lives. Andrew, having heard Jesus’ teaching goes out and retrieves his brother and suddenly Jesus has a couple of disciples, not to mention the rock upon which the Church would eventually be built. Andrew responds to Jesus teaching by asking another, someone extraordinarily close to him we can presume, his brother, to come and hear the words of this rabbi, Jesus. Most of us know the story of what happens from there on out.

But what of this second unidentified disciple? I like to think he or she returned to John, preferring the comfort of his past, the comfort of John’s leadership, a leadership that he or she knew. To follow this Jesus would have been to take a big leap of faith. It would have required new thinking, new paths, and new ideas about what the world was like and how we were to live in it. John had been preaching and teaching for some time before Jesus came into the picture, what was wrong with what John had to say about the world and God in that world? I imagine this unidentified disciple hearing things that were probably similar to John’s teaching, but a little skewed to one direction or another more than they would have liked. I imagine this person saying, well, John said that in one form or another, therefore I do not need to hear this because it is nothing new. The comfort of John’s teaching, of John’s leadership, of John’s institution was enough and change was not needed at this juncture, even at the behest of John himself.

Joan Chittister, in that same book writes, “The first gift of struggle is the call to conversion – the call to think differently about who God is and who I am as an individual. It calls us to think again about what life really means and how I go about being in the world.” John’s call was a call to conversion, a call to think about God differently, a call to imagine a new way of life in a world that was rife with poverty and disease, and in need of great healing. John was calling us to live a life focused on conversion, focused on the changes in our life and how we respond to them. Not by, as Chittister says, “attempting to cement today into eternity, but by embracing the welcome of the tomorrow and opening our heart to the grace of new possibilities.” Change is difficult, but it is inevitable, we grow older, we shift our thinking, we adjust the way we live. Conversion, on the other hand, is near impossible, and far from inevitable, it is easy for us to resist conversion, conversion is more than just change, it is more than making a simple adjustment, conversion is about looking and seeing God in a new way, and then responding to that experience in a way that changes our life or the life of the community that conversion took place in. Conversion calls us to imagination. Imagining a God near us, not far from us. Imagining a God active in the life of this community, not absent from it. Imagining that the God of our understanding is more sublime than our understanding of God.

Neal deGrasse Tyson, an Astrophysicist blew my mind the other day on a radio program when he said, “The cosmos and human life have more in common than we can ever imagine. The number one ingredient in human life is hydrogen, same for the cosmos. The second ingredient in human life is oxygen, same for the cosmos. The third ingredient in human life is carbon, so it is for the cosmos. So it goes as far as we have been able to scientifically determine one for one in human life and the make up of the cosmos. It is not just that we are in the cosmos, but also that the cosmos is in us.” I have a sinking feeling that John knew that. He knew that all of life was linked and created in such a way that it could not be put asunder. The Lamb of God does away with all that preceded and all that followed; it is a new beginning, a new life and a new age. John testifies to that for us and we are to believe that God is doing something new among us and for us.

The City is where we work out our corporate life: The Rob Thomas Edition

2008-01-12T14:51:00.001-06:00

I like this song by Rob Thomas, and it is an interesting addition to the study. Are their songs or poems that you know of that speak about the city? Send them to me and I will post them! The city is where we work out our corporate life, becasue the city is where we gather, where we come together, all walks of like, all people, all of us.

It's morning
I wake up
The taste of summer sweetness on my mind
It's a clear day
In this city
Let's go dance under the street lights
All the people in this world
Let's come together
More than ever
I can feel it
Can you feel it

Come on over
Down to the corner
My sisters and my brothers of every different color
Can't you feel that sunshine telling you to hold tight
Things will be alright
Try to find a better life
Come on over
Down to the corner
My sisters and my brothers there for one another
Come on over
Man I know you wanna let yourself go

Some people
It's a pity
They go all their lives and never know
How to love or to let love go
But it's alright now
We'll make it through this somehow
And we'll paint the perfect picture
All the colors of this world will run together more than ever
I can feel it
Can you feel it

We may never find our reason to shine
But here and now this is our time
And I may never find the meaning of life
But for this moment I am fine
So

The City is where we work out our corporate life: Cain & Abel

2008-01-12T13:26:00.001-06:00

Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. Genesis 4.

With the story of Cain and Abel, everything about cities seems to get off to a very negative start. It seems that they are founded out of restlessness, out of wandering. It seems that they are rooted in being cut off from the land, and murder and violence and blood. It seems, at first glance, that the opportunities for cities are nothing but dread and death. At first glance they seem to come out of everything that is antithesis to God and community.

But when we stop and look at the story closer, many more questions arise. Why did God mark Cain in such a way that no one on earth would be allowed to kill him? Why did God allow Cain to go off, seemingly of his own volition, to start a new life, away from his family? Finally, the biggest question of the whole text, why did God reject Cain’s offering and sacrifices? Is the death of Abel God’s fault? Is this some sick and demented plan God has in place to start something new? Why did these things happen in this way?

Terence Fretheim in his commentary on Genesis suggests the following: “The seven generations of Cain may mirror the seven days of creation, thus placing human creativity parallel to the divine. Just as one may marvel at the great diversity of God’s creation, so also human creativity mirrors God’s in producing numerous gifts and interests.” He goes on to say that the names of the three sons of Lamech, one of the offspring of Cain, in Genesis 4:19-22 are similar in that they mean capability and productivity, all that goes on in the city.

I find this fascinating, that Cain, desiring to reconnect with God, started a city, named it Enoch and adjusted, or shifted his life style so that he could continue to make offerings and sacrifices that would please Yahweh, my own interpretation there, but his remorse in the story says to me he would forever try to reconnect, root himself again in God.

We are extraordinarily adaptable people, we shift and move and adjust in ways that can leave the mind completely aghast. The city is not unlike that, the city is constantly changing and adapting, welcoming new neighborhoods and new people, creating space for businesses and opportunities for growth and transformation. The city is a diverse place that lives its life mirroring the diversity of God’s creation. I am reminded of how much influence and power we as human beings have, and that God has granted us an opportunity to participate in the creativity and great work of the imagination that God started so long ago in creation.

It is in the city that we must work out our corporate life. It is in the city where this wandering is rooted again in our home. It is in the city where diversity, ripped apart by hatred, as Cain seemed to hate Abel for having a better offering, is knit back together, repaired and made new so that the city may again mirror God’s diversity. It is in the city that the church emerges, made new and created into an organism functioning as a place of rest and peace, as a place of hope and renewal, as a place of joy and creativity.

It seemed, at our beginning, that everything about cities was going to be negative, but even in the midst of murder God marks Cain in such a way that keeps him alive. Cain chooses to leave God’s presence, but God chooses to remain. The city is often considered a place of evil, a place far away from God, but that is most likely because we are more afraid of the other represented by the city, we are afraid, even, of God’s working and moving, challenging us to change and confront those things we fear.

The city is the place where we work out our corporate life, the city is the place where God, seemingly absent, still lives and works besides us, marked both protectively as Cain was marked, but also marked in Baptism and as part of the body of Christ, participating with God in the joy of the Kingdom here on earth.

Please comment away, this is just a beginning!
Be well,
A+

The City is where we work out our corporate life.

2008-01-08T12:07:00.000-06:00

So, I have been wanting for some time to have regular posts and what not, but have never really been able to get motivated about it in one way or another. So one of my work new year resolution is to take 2 hours or so a week and blog two different things.

First, the title of this post has been a phrase that has been clinging to me for some time, so I am going to do some Bible Study on the word and concept of "the City" in Scripture. I want to see how cities functioned in the OT and the NT. I want to listen to the Word of God and hear how this line, "The City is where we work out our corporate life" can change or transform or affirm our minstry here in the Garden in Downtown Minneapolis. I imagine it will be both fun and wonderful, and challenging and difficult to hear, but I want to try it.

Second, the BCMS stuff is still out there, and after spending all of Advent studying it with members of the congregation there are many things to say and to think about. So I will blog a little about that for a while. It was a good experience, with many different insights into what that text said and means for us as a congregation and as a Diocese.

So, hopefully I will be able to do this, before you think 2 hours is a lot, I am going to spend those two hours in study and writing, so it should be good. But not extensive. I hope you, my faithlful 2 readers will participate in a conversation about all this with me.

Thanks, and be well,
A+

Christmas Eve Sermon

2007-12-25T00:42:00.000-06:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer Christmas Eve Sunday December 24, 2007
Well baby I've been here before
I know this room and I've walked this floor,
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Now maybe there is a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot someone who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen caught something in the imagery of a broken Hallelujah. There is something on this night when we sing hallelujah, when hallelujah is on all our altar hangings, on this night when we give praise for the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, on this night when God puts on human flesh and walks among us, as us, with us, that rings true about a broken hallelujah.

In the Gospel, the people of God are ordered to be counted, something that claims them as the Empires’ people and not God’s people that is a broken hallelujah. Jesus is born in a feeding trough in a stable or maybe a cave behind a place where others sit warm and comfortable that is a broken hallelujah. Mary, Joseph and Jesus’ life together begins in poverty; it begins as homeless people, with no comfortable place to lay their heads that is a broken hallelujah. It begins not as a glorious story of joy, but an odd story of broken hallelujahs. Luke keeps this story of Jesus’ birth with the lowly, the poor and the marginal of the earth. It is a dirty story for Luke, unlike other Gospel accounts that dress up the story to make it seem a little more miraculous. The angles do not come to Mary and Joseph; they stay far away from them, in the fields with the shepherds. Luke tells a story that is starkly contrasted with even Matthews’ royal visitors and John’s miracle of Zechariah regaining his speech at the birth of Jesus. Luke keeps it simple, lifting up the symbolism of God’s faithfulness to all of us, to God’s people for whom Jesus has come.

We know all this; we understand this idea of God with us being born in stark contrast to our expectations for the savior of the world, or the King we would desire to have. We understand in our heads why this story is told in this way, but what do we understand in our hearts? It is in our hearts that we allow the spirit to come alive, that we allow God to walk among us, now today, not just as a sanitized safe God, but as a crazy, dangerous and powerfully present God. It is in our hearts that we come to understand that this birth story is more than just a story, and more than just a cute historical reckoning of something that happened 2,000 years ago. In our hearts, we come to understand the power of God’s transforming love for us and we begin to see how we are transfigured by God’s power and love through this simple story of a child’s birth.

Desmond Tutu writes, “Dear child of God, I write because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in our world will never end. There is a no such thing as a hopeless case. The most unlikely person, the most improbable situation these are transfigurable and can be turned into their glorious opposites. Indeed God is transforming the world now through us, because God loves us.” Indeed, God is transforming the world now, I love that, God is not done with us, God is not far away from us, God is transforming the world right now as we sit here and listen to God’s words and praise God’s holy name. God is at work among us, God is doing amazing and wonderful things all around us and this birth story as un-miraculous as Luke makes it out to be, is the piece that we hear this silent night. Tutu goes on to write, “God is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in the still small voice. In the hum drum, ordinary, unexpected and unlikely places and people. In a baby in a manger, on a cross, if we just have eyes to see. We see transfiguration at work in the lives of the people all around us. Perhaps even in our own lives.”

Those broken hallelujahs that pull at our hearts to overcome our logical and reasoned minds, those broken hallelujahs that call at us to listen to the poor, the marginal, the people on the fringes of society. Those broken hallelujahs are more than just simple songs with broken tunes; they are God’s hand at work in the world about us. It is in those broken Hallelujahs that we see and experience God alive and present with us, those are the thin places where God is felt more strongly than anywhere else. A year ago, Sara and I were singing a broken hallelujah as our little boy sat tied to tubes and machines waiting to be touched by God. Just under a year ago, we found out Jeff Smith would be singing a broken Hallelujah as he battled with a brain tumor that would eventually take his life. Jane still sings that broken Hallelujah. Kimi Hara and Dorothy Rajacich died this past year, and though they lived full and powerful and amazing ives, it was still a broken hallelujah that we sung in celebrating their lives with us. The broken Hallelujahs have come to us, mostly unexpectedly these past several months, but they have come, and with them Emmanuel, the child born this night, has come also. God wades into our despair, our hopelessness, our sadness and lifts us up, carries us if God must but God remains with us to sustain and nourish our souls and bodies.

This Gospel, this Good News is about the expectations we carry. It is about the fear that we hold on to in order to gain comfort and strength not from God, but from our own actions and being. We place expectations in our lives and in our world so we can control what goes on around us. We have expectations so we can at least have an idea, as small as it really, might be, about what next might come. But this Gospel blows our expectations out of the sky; it dissolves them completely not with violence or force, but with love. The opposite of fear, is not doubt, you have heard me say, the opposite of fear, is faith and maybe tonight, it is love. Maybe tonight love is something that transfigures us in unexpected ways. Maybe tonight love dispels the fears that we have about how we will get to the next moment in our lives, about whether or not we will have enough food to eat, or whether or not we will be able to buy those things that bring us comfort.

Broken hallelujahs abound in our lives, and it is in those broken hallelujahs that we see God’s love for us, that we see God with us, that we see how we are transfigured and made new. We see that even the bad, difficult and secret parts of our beings can be made into their glorious opposites. God is at work in us, and around us and about us. God is always at work and we can choose to see God at work, or we can choose to ignore, through our fear, God at work in us. Through us, this night, as we go out into the silent cold of our little corner of the world, I hope a spark ignites a flame, a flame that warms those cold broken parts of us, a flame that heals and renews those cold and broken hallelujahs we have.

Mary treasured all the words she heard the night Jesus was born. But tonight, we are not Mary, tonight we are not about pondering and treasuring, tonight we are the shepherds, broken and poor, thieves and malcontents, tonight we are the shepherds going from the stable, from the feeding trough where Jesus sleeps, glorifying and praising God for all that we have hears and seen. Tonight, our fears are dispelled by love, tonight our broken hallelujahs are torn apart by God’s emergence into our lives as a living and holy God. Tonight, even we, gathered together as an imperfect people, are transfigured and told the Good News so that we may be made holy and glorify God singing Hallelujah….

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

An unusual anniversary

2007-12-18T09:42:00.000-06:00

One year ago today, about this time of the day, 9:30, I received a call from Sara telling me Eliot was being admitted to Fairview University for something serious. It would not be until later that evening we would find out it was Leukemia.

Sara and I are reflecting on that day today, trying to remember its details, the love and support that out poured from Gethsemane, from the Diocese, from our families. It was a crazy time, and because of the generosity of so many people we were truly able to be a family during that crisis.

Eliot is doing so well today, he is happy and learning to be a little kid all over again. We face a challenging remaining two and a half years, and let me tell you that last day of maintenance will be one heck of a party.

Thank you to all who walked that scary time with us and supported us as we faced this scary thing.

Be well
Aron

Advent 2 Sermon Series 2

2007-12-09T06:57:00.000-06:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer Advent Sermon Series II Sunday, December 9, 2007
In the absence of Christ, what emerges?

The city is where we work out our corporate life. The city is the place where we witness the emergence of Christ in ways we could only scarcely imagine. The city is the place where the poor and wealthy walk the same streets. The city is where the oppressed and the oppressors live. The city is where darkness and light wage an eternal battle. Christ set himself towards Jerusalem, towards the city so long ago, to go there and to be killed, but he was not just killed in the city. In the city, Christ was resurrected, in the city Christ ripped the curtain of the temple, blowing the box of the limitations that religion and authority had set upon God. It was in the city that Christ’ resurrection happened; it was in the city that the apostles began their work. It was in the city that Christ began to emerge.

Fred Burnham, an Episcopalian I have had the pleasure to meet on a couple of occasions wrote a paper about Network Theory and Church Leadership, it is a phenomenal piece of writing and I wanted to share part of it with you:

“The attack on September 11, 2001 left a gaping relational vacuum in lower Manhattan. But that relational vacuum did not last long. Thousands of souls rushed in to fill it. The first and most startling feature of life at Ground zero in the early days was the absence of any centralized authority or control. Droves of highly skilled people from every walk of life showed up at ground zero. Joe Bradley, the first crane operator on the site, describes his exhilarating experience: ‘I walked up West Street and saw a crane. There was a guy who gave me the keys and dispatched me out. No orders! No money! No services! Nothing! Just volunteers trying to help. I ran into a fire chief who said he’d like to clear a debris field three feet deep with heavy iron on top. I turned around. There were four or five ironworkers there. They asked if I had a crane, and I said yes. So they said they’d like to work with me. So I had a machine and a crew. Like a miracle, 25 firefighters showed up right then with tanks and torches. Then we had a mission. So we went to work. No supervision, no foreman, we worked as smooth as you can imagine right through the night. I have never seen so many people pull together. One unit, one thought. We were going to rescue a survivor.’”

I find this story inspirational. Sure it was a crisis of epic proportions, it was something that people responded to admirably and heroically, but they responded in a way that revealed what the true nature of humanity is. We are a relational people, we seek to live together, we seek to know one another and live in community. We are a relational people who desire more than anything else to be in relationship with one another. We have the ability to organize in ways that do not require one person telling us what to do. We have gifts and abilities that are unique and similar all at the same time. God has given us these gifts, and in the same way Joe Bradley got the keys to the crane he operated, we have been given the keys to unlock the potential of this place, of the Garden. We have been drawn here not just because it is a nice building, not just because of its worship, not just because of its location; we are been drawn here because of God’s call to engage our gifts and skills in the community that lives in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. We are here not because this is wealthy parish; we are here not because we are so perfectly living into what it means to be an institutional be everything to everyone kind of Church. We are here because this unique and growing community has been called to participate with God and we all, I hope, are willing and seeking to find out how we can put our own gifts to work in this place.

We are not unlike ants in that sense.

OK, before I go any further, let me say there is a caveat here, we’re smart, ants are stupid. We have an intelligence that ants can’t even dream about. We are complex and intricate beings that create complex and intricate patterns in our lives. But, that does not mean we cannot learn anything from ants. One of the most amazing mysteries about ant colonies is the question of how they form an ant colony. How do worker ants know to go get food? How do worker ants know to fix and clean up the nest? How do worker ants know to clear out the dead bodies of their colleagues? It comes down to two simple things: neighbors and neighborhood. Ants are able to determine the amount of pheromone trails left by other ants and can determine by those trails if they need to help with the nest, help with food or help with bringing out their dead. That is being a neighbor the ants learn from the other ants in their colony what aspect of work they are most needed for. Ants also run into other ants from different colonies, and it is these interactions that define and form the colony itself. It is these interactions that allow the ants to solve problems and regulate itself effectively. In a sense the neighborhood the ants live in is the most important factor that determines the shape and form of the ant colony. The local interactions and their actions locally create a global effect that is greater than even the ant colony itself.

So what, you might be asking, so what about ants and so what about 9/11. Read again the Isaiah reading. Read again the vision of the holy community, the wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. It goes on and on, and it, to me, tells a story of the emerging community God is calling us to live into. We are a relational people, we want to be in relationship with one another, contrary to what our world, and our media, our politicians want us to hear. We want to be together, we want to eat together, we want to solve problems and address the issues of the day together. In one sense we could re-write this image of the holy emerging community from Isaiah like this: The Taliban will live with American politicians, al Qaeda will be close to the conservative Christian right. Muslims and Christians and Jews shall eat together, Iraqi’s, Israelis, Americans shall celebrate, living joyfully in the knowledge of God. You get the picture.

The creation of this vision from Isaiah requires humility, an emptying; the vision also requires a place be worked out. The city is that place, and we are those people. The healing, the participating in the creation of a new world and a new heaven can continue in this place with us. We can drop the pretenses that divide us and seek to live into justice and peace described in our Isaiah reading. We can seek to come to know our neighbors and our neighborhood and work to create a community in which people feel safe, feel joy and know that God is at work in the world. We are a relational people and the city is where we must work out our corporate life. The city is where we can see God’s body ripped apart and broken, where we can see the healing effect of God’s body being knitted back together, created into something new. Christ on the Cross is the ultimate vision of God’s decentralization, God’s unwillingness to remain in the Temple. God has torn the curtain of the Temple in two, released Christ from the confines of truth and certainty and has sent Christ free to roam the world, to meet people where they are at and live in them as they live together. There is no clearer image of God’s vastness than in our Eucharistic Feast. Wine and Bread become body and blood. Body and blood are broken up and distributed to each of us and no longer is Christ in one place, but Christ is now in you, and no longer are we together at the end of the worship service, together we go forth into the world, celebrating the new thing God is at work creating.

It is the Communion feast that we live out this sense of emergence I have been addressing these last two Sundays. God has given us all that we need to organize ourselves into the Body of Christ. God is not acting as a mayor or an appointed individual telling us what to do. We are being called to the sidewalks, called to walk the conduits of the city seeking Christ in everyone we meet, seeking to heal, to preach to share the narrative of the Kingdom of God.

In the absence of Christ, what emerges? We emerge, in the absence of Christ this Advent season we emerge to create opportunities for the Kingdom of God to be revealed. In the absence of Christ, we emerge to grow the Body of Christ, to spread the God of hope to all people, to shape and form a community of faith that is not tied to the bounds of Christian institution and Christian regulation. We are here to say that God has exploded; God is no longer confined to one place anymore. Advent is a time when we come to understand that God is not in this place alone, but that God is out there, with those in need, with those who are hurting. God is with the dying, with the suffering, God is a God of the living, not a sanitary God that we must work to keep clean and free from any dirt. In this age of information, in this age of technology that allows so much information to flow so freely, let us begin to share in the knowledge of God, let us begin to pass on that information through the conduits we experience in our daily life. Christ is absent during this time of Advent, God is about to explode, and out of the wreckage, we emerge, proclaiming the Good News and participating with God fully in the revelation of the Kingdom that has come among us, today.

ADVENT SERMON SERIES PART 1

2007-12-03T12:41:00.000-06:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer Advent Sermon Series I Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007
In the absence of Christ, what emerges?

If you read my email this week, you saw that I asked the provocative question, what do Jesus and slime mold have in common? Before I answer that, let me tell you a little bit about slime mold, my new favorite slimy organism. Scientists have been studying for years different kinds of systems that use simple and small components to build higher level intelligence. Essentially, organisms that have no brain or organization at all and how they come together to create a more intelligent organism that can actually get things done.

So back to slime mold, say you are walking in a forest and you come across this red, orange-ish slimy goo lying on a log, or in the midst of some leaves, seemingly sitting still in a mass on the forest floor. If you were to come back later, it might be gone, or it might be in a different place, if the weather were to cool down and get rainy, it might actually disappear completely. We might think it has been eaten by an animal, or maybe moved to a different place, but actually it has done something no one figured out until the late sixties. Slime mold has perplexed biologists for decades, and it took a physicist and a mathematician, not a biologist, to figure out what it was doing. Steven Johnson, in his book Emergence writes, “The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which begins its crawl across the garden floor… When the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, “it” becomes a “they”.”

Now, bear with me, I will, hopefully, take this to a place you all can resonate with. The problem for biologists for years was wondering what caused the slime mold cells to come together, they believed there was a mother cell, a cell that set the pace for the others, a pacemaker cell that was responsible for all the others to come together, the problem was, biologists everywhere, could not find a pacemaker cell anywhere. A physicist and a mathematician combined efforts to study this phenomenon and simply asked the question, what if there was no pacemaker cell? What if these single celled organisms came together of their own accord? Suffice it to say, this turned the world of biology on its head, and there has been a tremendous amount of progression in a field called the Science of Emergence, or simply, the study of how simple, single organisms come together to form a higher, more complex, intelligent organism. This work has transformed a whole lot by studying things like slime mold, ants, termites, our brains and cities and the development of neighborhoods in our various cities.

Let me take one step back for a minute and tell you why I am thinking about slime mold and preaching about it from this pulpit. A while back I heard a story about the science of emergence in the context of many small pieces, seemingly organizing out of nothing and coming together to create a more dynamic, adaptive organism; it was a study of ant colonies. As Advent was fast approaching, and as we live in a liminal time here at Gethsemane, trying to create something from the ground up, I began to wonder how this concept, which gripped my soul, could apply to our lives together and to how God is at work here in the Garden. Advent is the time in the liturgical year when we wait, we wait for Christ to be born, we wait for the savior to come. During Advent, Christ is absent from the world, there is only God in these few weeks leading up to Christmas. Christ is not present, I began to think of Advent in a new way, what if Advent could be that time where we discover our own ability to self organize, where we discover that the gifts, skills and talents that God has given us are adequate enough to build a community that is transformative and passionate and world changing? Seriously, I thought all that. What sealed the deal for me was when I was in Baltimore for Alison and Will’s wedding I ran across a book called Signs of Emergence that asked exactly that same question. How can we create a community that does not necessarily wait for the pacemaker cell or the mother cell to send out a signal to us, but rather a community that is able to determine the resources we have now, the needs that are all around us and how to best address and effectively meet the needs as they exist in our world?

The challenge of this sermon series, is a simple one, but one that is more than difficult to overcome. The challenge is to recognize that Christ is not the single pacemaker cell sending out the signal to tell us what to do, but rather Christ is the trail we leave in our wake, the trail that tells others to follow, that tells others: this way to joy, justice and peace. It is the same with God, God is not just a personal God that we can all define in whatever way we choose, God is not far away from us striking stray cells with bolts of lightening to get them back on track, God is a living God who is out in the world teaching, preaching and healing, whether we are with God or not. The challenge is to stop, and recognize that God has given us gifts and passions and skills that are immensely transformative and effective in healing the world and bringing righteousness to places of injustice. God has given us all we need to participate with God in this new creation that is being built. God has given us the gifts we need to help bring about a new world and a new heaven.

Jesus, then is the result, in some way, of the mission and the ministry we accomplish. As we, as Paul says, put on Jesus, not follow Jesus, not wait for Jesus, but put on Jesus, we join ourselves to a growing body that brings light to the darkness, that wakes us from sleep, that brings justice and righteousness to the poor, and the oppressed. Jesus is the trail left behind that tells people, there is joy here, there is justice here, and there is peace here. Jesus is the trail that people are able to follow because we have done the work to make straight the paths of the Lord, because we have accomplished the mission to make holy the way of God. We do not follow, we do not even lead, rather we simply walk together and live because we have put on our Lord Jesus Christ and because the light shining forth let’s us “live honorably as in the day”.

What I love about all these readings from Paul, and Isaiah and Matthew is that they require from us great humility. In Isaiah the nation’s stream to the house of the Lord, the house of God, they stream to it because of the trails left by our forebears, because it is a place of great nourishment and holiness. But they also stream to it because the people have left behind their weapons of hate, their weapons of destruction their weapons of war. They stream to the house of the Lord because they have seen that hubris and haughtiness do no good while living with Christ put on, living with Christ trailing behind, giving people an opportunity to experience the righteousness, the right relationship, the holy meaning and deep understanding God has for all of us. When I think of the waiting of Advent I imagine heads turned to the sky in anticipation of a star, a sign of some sort that will call to us that will pull at us and transform us. All the while, at our feet, while we are looking to the sky, people are crawling on the ground below us, bleeding, starving, thirsting for the simple ability to experience the new earth and the new heaven God is at work creating, without the help of those who are looking away.

We do not know when or even if Jesus will return, but we do know that God has given us talents beyond measure, gifts above average and passions that will change the world. We do know that God has given each of us and this community that is part of a larger global community, all the tools we need to do God’s work. There is nothing more we need, there is nothing more we can desire, we have it all. How do we communicate then, with those around us, the passions and the skills we have. How do we even come to understand what skills and talents we already have? How can we organize and come together and, in the same way God is creating a new heaven and earth, create a new Church, and not just a new building, but a new community, a community that has confidence in its ability to participate with God, a community that has put on Christ and lives fully into the justice and righteousness that God is calling us to live into.

I have a confession to make, when I arrived here at the Garden, one of the first things I read was the 125 year history of the Church. I was succumbed by the temptation to be the one who does it all, I wanted a page in the book of this history that rivaled our founder, David Buel Knickerbocker. I wanted to follow the pattern he set for us, the idea of mission that he placed at the center of our DNA. I wanted to be immortal in that same way. It was exciting and it was intoxicating to think about what I could do. Today, I do not want that, today I am more passionate about re-writing that history, I want to re-write that history to tell the stories of you, to tell the stories of how you all gathered together, a group of people who have put on Christ, a group of people who desire to participate with God in creating something new. This is about all of us together; it is about the coming together, out of seemingly nothing, of a rag tag, gentle and beautiful group of people who responded to the trail left by someone who came before us. Let us re-write the history of the future of this place and create, together, stories that will be inspirational, stories that will be transformative, stories that will be holy and faithful, stories that will give people hope for the future, not fear of it.

Our minds may be wired to look for the mother cell, our minds may be wired to look for that pacemaker cell, but let us together turn the world on its head and be with the bloody, the hungry, the thirsty the prisoners, the marginalized, let us be with them, fully present to their needs, to their stories, sharing with them in the power of God and discovering the gifts and talents they have to offer us. Let us empty ourselves fully of all expectations this Advent, let us just live, let us just live meeting one another where we are and let us see what emerges out of our passion.

Today we will be with Jesus in Paradise

2007-11-25T17:16:00.000-06:00

The Rev. Aron Kramer Last Pentecost Sunday, November 25, 2007
Our journey always begins with our trip to the Inn. After days of waiting and hearing rumors of a miracle in Bethlehem, we go to the Inn, but God is not there, they say God is in the stable out back.

We leave the Inn and go to the stable; there the shepherds say God is not here, God has left with his family to go to Egypt.

We leave the stable and go to Egypt, but the people there do not know God and we return to God’s birth place where God’s family says God is in the Temple.

We go to the Temple, but God, the people say, is out in the country and by the seaside, making apostles out of some.

We go to the Apostles to find God, but God, the Apostles say, is not with them, God is at the outskirts of town, with the poor, the lame, the widowed, the orphaned and the oppressed.

We go to the outskirts of town, to find the poor, the lame, the widowed, the orphaned and the oppressed, some say they have been healed, others ask us, since we know God, to heal them, but they all say God is no longer with them, God has been taken by Roman soldiers to the Roman Courts.

We leave the outskirts of town and go to Jerusalem, to find the Roman Courts. In Jerusalem, the Roman authorities sneer at us and say, God is not here in the courts, God has been condemned to death upon a cross.

We follow the noise of the crowd and the trail of blood and bone all the way to the cross, but God is not on the cross, God has been taken down from the cross, Joseph of Arimathea says, and taken to a tomb.

Still in search of God, we go to the tomb, only to discover the stone barricading the tomb and sealing God within it has been rolled away and tomb is empty. Some women running from the tomb tell us God is not there.

So we go back to the Inn, back to the Inn to wait for God to return there, not realizing, that by staying at the Inn we leave no room for God’s family to rest their heads.

Jesus, remember me, when you come into to your Kingdom. Simple words, words that I would have been hard pressed to come up with hanging on a cross, about to die. Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Jesus’ response is one I think we gloss over, one we do not truly hear. Jesus says to the thief hanging on the cross next to him, “TODAY you will be with me in Paradise”.

At our core we are seekers, we are constantly seeking. Not many of us can claim that we have discovered the truth of God or of Jesus or of the Holy Spirit and are so confident in our faith that we cannot be shaken, nothing in the world could cause us to doubt our faith in God. This need for seeking, for discovering is important, as the two men crucified with Jesus shows us, we always want to have a choice, we want to be able to choose to accept or to deny. One of the men next to Jesus derided him, asked Jesus to save him, the other, repented, out of fear, out of desperation, out of sheer faith, we do not know, but he repented, he turned to Jesus and did not say, Save me, he simply said remember me.

Memory is something very important, not just to remember how things have been done over the years, not just to pass on institutional knowledge to maintain the traditions of old. Memory is important because it brings meaning, it brings deep understanding of how our ancestors lived, of how our ancestors made mistakes and recovered from those mistakes. This weekend, for Thanksgiving, my brother and his new wife returned from Vermont to celebrate their wedding with the Minnesotans who were not able to make it to Vermont for the wedding. One particularly important thing happened over the course of this holiday, that was the gathering of the siblings and their wives as well as some of the cousins to talk about our family, we talked about growing up, we talked about the crazy uncles and aunts, we talked about our life together as young children, it was amazing, it was fun, and it helped bring new meaning to old relationships. Remembering is salvific, it is saving, it is meaningful and it is important. Memory strengthens our faith.

I was listening to a new radio program called Radio Lab the other day about the subject of memory and forgetting and they were talking about how uncertain our memories truly are. They even went so far as to say, if you were to sit three or four people down in a room who experienced a particular event and asked them to retell their stories, none of them would be the same. They would all be different depending on who had spoken to them, how well they are able to actually put together memories, all sorts of factors play into the development of memories. There is little more clear evidence of this phenomenon than the Gospels. We have four distinct stories, four particular memories about Jesus, four different narratives that incorporate various similar themes and ideas, but tell the same story of Jesus very differently.

At first glance this might seem heretical; it might seem as if we have no direction, as if we, as the people of God are wayfarers lost in a land of doubt with no idea of the way home. It may seem that at our core, we are simply seeking, never faithfully grounded in God. However, we must remember always, that faith without doubt is not faith at all. The televangelists we see all over the place would have us believe otherwise, that doubt is the seed of the devil, that doubt is so insidious it will destroy us completely. This is far from the truth, doubt is the threshold to belief, without passing through our doubts, our beliefs would never be strengthened, would never be founded in any kind of truth. And if our beliefs were not strong or founded in truth, our faith would be nothing, it would not be able to move mountains; it would not be able to plant trees in the middle of oceans. Without doubt, we cannot grow more deeply into our relationship with God.

Our relationship with God is the most important relationship we have, it is more important than the ones we have now, it is more important than the ones we have had and the ones we will have as we grow older. Our relationship with God is the one thing that can never be shaken, can never be destroyed, and can never be taken away. Our relationship with God is at the center of our heart, the heart itself is the seat of God in our very own bodies, the place where God goes to work calling us, shaping us and forming us. Why is it then, if God is at our center, why is it that we look for meaning outside of ourselves, outside of our communities? Is it because we know God has moved on from this place, that God does not reside in this building? Is it because we do not believe that God is alive and active in our lives right now as I am speaking these words?

We go from place to place, from Inn to stable, from cross to tomb, always returning to the Inn, always seeking God, always seeking that sign from Jesus that will bring us calm, that will bring us peace. We go from place to place seeking and looking and trying to discover, maybe it is time to realize that as we go from place to place, there is no longer any need to seek; there is no longer any need to find. For God is not hiding from us, God is not running from us, God is walking with us, God is here, God is now, calling us to live a life that is transformative, that is filled with joy and hope, that is faithful, but that understands that God is present now, and instead of following hot on the trail of God, all we must do is look to our left and our right, look into the faces and eyes of those we love, those we worship with and discover that we are already walking with God that God is with us wherever we go that we are co-creators, partners with God in the world. Today, we will be with God in paradise, today the Kingdom of God is here.

READ THIS ARTICLE

2007-11-19T17:23:00.001-06:00

Just got the newest Trinity News magazine and read an amazing interview.
Read it here, it is very cool.
The article is called: The Objective of Islam is Peace

Be well,
A+

Inadequacies of the Gospel

2007-11-19T11:53:00.000-06:00

I am studying for my sermon next Sunday and reading a little piece about the Colossians reading and discovered this little gem about the community in colossa, or whatever their name was, and the news they were receiving about the Gospel not being adequate for their faith.

It reads: "There is a host of different ways in which contemporary believers can be tempted to feel that the basic gospel message is inadequate and that it needs to be supplemented by additional religious rites or disciplines, more sophisticated knowledge, or some compelling experience, if they are to be accepted by God or to reach their full potential as human beings. They need to hear... that there is no inadequacy about its basic message."

Now, I don't know about you, but that was kind of wonderful to hear. It gave my heart a boost, to think that the Gospel message as we have it is all that we need to understand the basic message of faith, the basic message of Christ.

We are in the midst of studying what it means to be missional, or rather, how we can come to understand what God is up to here in the Garden and in Elliot Park and the Downtown community and what our response to God's mission will be. What we are slowly discovering is that everything we need, we have.

We do not need more book studies, we do not need more programs to minister to people who don't need to experience the kind of ministry that program offers. We must instead listen to how God is speaking to us and respond in great love. We must dwell in the scripture, particularly the Gospel, so we can authentically do a ministry that is truly transformational.

Justice, that is what we are called to do, the Jeremiah reading for Sunday speaks to that, to the need to understand that our worship must be about justice, it must prepare us to stand for the poor, the needy, the oppressed, the widowed, the orphaned, all those who live on the margins. When our worship becomes something that is solely for my own meditative benefit, all bets are off and God leaves the building.

To do justice is to be missional, to be missional is to do justice. That is where at the Diocesan level of things we are missing the point. We are so worried about the money we have or do not have, we are so worried about the rules we have or do not yet have, that we can not DO mission, that cannot DO ministry. If our parishes, Diocesan wide are prepared to step into that black hole and through our own ministry, network and build the Diocese through the ministries we have, then so be it, let's go.

Bishop Jelinek said in our clergy meeting a while back, something like, "Let's get on with doing mission." I agree, let's, all together, get on with doing and being mission in the world, participating in the work that God has already begun.

Be well,
A+

Signs of Emergence

2007-11-11T15:12:00.000-06:00

I am reading a new book called "Signs of Emergence" by Kester Brewin. I stumbled upon it by chance, I am doing and Advent Sermon Series on Emergence, called "In the Absence of Christ, what emerges?" Of course in my perfect world I would have blended the thought and science behind the Science of Emergence with different Anglican Theology and doctrines to make this brilliant statement of how science and theology are coming together and how are response is to be amazingly brilliant children of God. Then the boiler died, our chimney still hasn't been fixed and many other sordid things that are not making me happy.

Anyway, in reading this book, I stumbled across a little quote that got me really excited: "The only way to consider whether our structures are serving us is to stop and reflect on them. To dismantle them; take them apart piece by piece. Expose them to the air. Lay them on the ground and let everyone walk around them and get a good look at them without the pressures of meetings and deadlines and agendas. This is the beginning of empowerment: we must allow people space and time to return to the deep simplicity of things, and spend time mulling over the fundamentals, the nuts and bolts that interlock to make our complex lives."

Interesting, huh.

My first response is that we are still in the midst of doing this, the BCMS felt they did not have the authority to dismantle or take apart anything, and therefore did not take the time to actually take apart the structures that exist, that is the role of this next committee, I hope. But what it got me to thinking was how ready we are to take apart the Diocesan structure and rebuild it in our own image before we are ready to do the work that must happen in our own congregations in order for people to respond to the great and mighty change the BCMS report is calling us to.

It is clear that most people only care about their church, and the mission their church does. Many people, I have heard over and over again, don't really care about the diocese as a whole, so it is a whole lot easier for us, by us, I mean clergy, to focus our energy on something external to the life of the parish in which we live and work.

That, I think, is why I have such a visceral response to this idea of networking the diocese, it is a great idea, but what have we done in our parishes for members and seekers and others to prepare the great responsibility and effort that will be needed on their part to participate in the networking project.

When I first came to the Garden, everyone had many positive things to say and well wishes for my ministry here. I made a suggestion early on that parishes in the Region see if any of their members would be willing to come to the Garden for one year, one year with their pledge to help the Garden get off the ground. I suggested it thinking it was something that could bring us together, something that could create relationships across the parishes and something that would begin to overcome the competitiveness that exists between places. I suggested it because I thought it would be a great idea for us to begin creating relationships not just among clergy but also among laity. I suggested it because the sooner Gethsemane could get off the Diocesan Grant and move into a place of being able to sustain ourselves, the more money from that grant might be available for other places in need.

To say the least it fell flat, clergy said there was no way people in their parish would do it, clergy said that church members were not ready to do such bold mission. Clergy said it was a dumb idea. Now we want to do just that, connect our parishes and network the diocese so we can move forward.

I wonder though if we shouldn't have a year of implementing the BCMS report in our own parishes before we move into the bigger picture of the Diocese. Yes, we are doing that work here and let me tell you, in the short 7 years of ministry I have not experienced anything as amazing as the transformation I am seeing here in the Garden because of the honest and open conversations that are having about mission and how we do mission in the world.

Are we ready to implement the BCMS report in our Diocese, I suppose, are we willing to implement it in our parishes, I am not so sure. I wish we could have regular reports about how people have taken recommendations from the BCMS and begun to discuss and form ideas about how they demand local changes in mission and ministry. I wish we could have some sort of regular report from the Total Ministry parishes that tells us of the struggles and joys they have in learning how to be a networked ministry team. I wish we could hear from the Native Parishes about their work in the communities that are dealing with such great challenges, and where mission is simply assumed in their work and so much more than the building where it resides.

I like the idea of taking the time to really look at the structure we live in and I would suggest an Advent exercise with leaders and any other interested parishes in all of our parishes. There are 4 weeks in Advent, there are four goals. Talk about them and talk about how they are relevant or not to the work we each do as parishes in the Diocese of MN. Find ways to internalize and actualize the recommendations so in early 2008 we could make some reports about what is working and what is not. That would be soo cool to hear and see.

Talk about getting ready to transform the Diocese, if we, as parishes were in places of preparedness where we could see the BCMS goals and recommendations coming alive in our parishes, nothing could stop us from being sure that the next Bishop would have as the core of his or her work the vision of the BCMS. That toothless, empty vision with so much potential for vigor and new life.

Just some crazy thoughts from reading a fun book. I recommend it, if only for the chance to get some fun ideas about what we can do together.

Be well,
A+

Recreating the Diocese as a Network

2007-10-31T09:18:00.000-05:00

You can read about this here on the Diocesan website.

I wanted to post this so people could read a little bit about the goal as this network idea seems to have a lot of energy right now. So read through and make comments, I will comment early next week or later today depending on how much time I have to write.

This is just the first operational strategies, #6 not the entire Goal, so the rest will come soon.

Thanks!
A+

Goal 3: Recreate the Diocese as a Network
To redevelop the entire diocese by the end of 2009 to function primarily as a network of congregations and ministries. These networks will exercise local initiative and responsibility for shared ministry in their contexts.

Recommended Mission & Ministry Initiatives

Initiative 6: Develop Network Infrastructure:
We need to re-conceive and redevelop the diocese as a network of congregations and ministries where organization, communication and the use of resources flow along the lines of meaningful relationships and shared ministry commitments. We anticipate that much of this network will be experimental in character, especially initially, but that patterns once established will become more formally operational over time. In the short term, we may decide to maintain existing structures, such as regions, where they are helpful as an overlay on this emerging and evolving network. We need to devote attention, time and resources to cultivate the informal connections between congregations and ministries that are already coming into existence in numerous places.

Theological Foundations – Because our life as Christians resides in the living Christ, is continually informed by the biblical narrative and is forever open to the action of the Holy Spirit, we expect new expressions of the churches’ life to appear. We recall St. Paul’s proclamation that in Christ we are “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The church must always be incarnate within particular cultures, and culture is always changing. Today, our culture is shifting from bureaucratic and hierarchical forms of organization to decentralized networks, the primary example being the Internet. People seek connection through relationships more than institutional allegiances. In redeveloping the diocese as a network, we hope to follow the emerging work of the Holy Spirit and allow congregations to experience being “a new creation” as we engage others in fresh and culturally-relevant ways.

Operational Strategies 2007-09
6.1 Map existing and emerging networks and identify actual and potential hubs.
6.2 Invite and convene conversations among existing and emerging networks.
6.2.1 Recruit, orient, and resource a group of facilitators to convene and lead
Conversations among networks of congregations and ministries.
6.2.2 Invite existing and emerging networks of congregations to explore how
Their ministries can be strengthened and enhanced.
6.3 Identify hub congregations and their roles.
6.3.1 Determine criteria for hub congregations.
6.3.2 Identify potential congregations which can serve as hub congregations
within a network of congregations and ministries.
6.4 Reconfigure the structure and organization of the diocese.
6.4.1 Based on the patterns experienced in working with the emerging networks
Of congregations, finalize recommendation to the Diocesan Council
Regarding organizational structure to replace the regional structure.

2007-10-30T19:34:00.000-05:00

I snapped this picture of Naomi yesterday, not so flattering of Eliot, but what a shot of Naomi. She was having a great time.

What I actually said

2007-10-29T20:48:00.000-05:00

So I ended up speaking on the floor convention and looking back at that previous initial post, I realized I changed a lot of that. So here is the text of the statmenet I read at convention, what I actually said:

It is vital to the future of the Diocese and the integrity of the BCMS work that we call a Bishop Coadjutor. To do anything else would limit the effectiveness of how we continue to discover how we will be the Church together. God is working among us, and I believe that this process is an opportunity to deepen our commitment and participation with God in the mission God is calling us all to.

With the work of the BCMS at the center of all we do in the search for a new visionary leader we can be confident that we elect someone who can work collaboratively and in full partnership with all of us to continue to create a pioneering vision for the future of the Church.

I imagine the demands upon the time of a bishop are great, only Bishop Jelinek can tell us what that demand is like. In the case of direct succession there would be administrative, liturgical, national and global issues to bear moving into this position of leadership. To add to that list the work of the BCMS, which it must be, would limit our ability to fully implement the goals of the BCMS without the undivided support of the new bishop.

What a gift we can offer the ninth bishop of Minnesota, time to fully dwell in the work of the BCMS, opportunities to meet with congregations, laity, clergy and the new BCMS team, time to dream and imagine, collaboratively and in full participation with the people and the institutions of the Diocese so the Coadjutor can have a comprehensive experience of how we as a Diocese have been working on the question of how we are the Church together.

The BCMS has spoken about the culture of mistrust that exists in the Diocese. The best piece of unsolicited advice I have received is this: If you want to change the way someone behaves, you must change your own behavior first. May we remove the cynicism that hardens our hearts replacing it with a spirit of hope for our next 150 years. We must look past our personal feelings towards the Bishop and his perceived mistakes and instead dwell in the vision that has begun to be revealed by God through the work of the BCMS and the hope that it gives for the future of the Church.

Be well,
A+

OH YEAH! That's right...

2007-10-29T14:20:00.000-05:00

Had a Baptism on Sunday and was reminded of how core that action is to my life of faith. I love how the Baptismal Covenant, though uniquely Episcopalian, says nothing about being an Episcopalian or even for that matter, says nothing about institutional Church. It was so refreshing.

It was similar to past experiences where I re-discovered those things I loved as a child or a young adult, things that gave me energy, passion and nourishment, not just nostalgia and useless memories. For instance, and laugh at your own risk, Dragonlance Fantasy novels, I love those things and read them regularly still today. They were enduring objects, hobbies or activities that I have, for a long time, enjoyed immensly.

Saying the Baptismal Covenant with the members of my parish, claiming those questions as a core piece of who I am as Christian, really was like breathing fresh and new air. I heard little about our Baptismal covenant at Convention, or of what we as a Episcopalians claim as pieces of how we express ourselves and our faith. Scripture, Reason and Tradition, the three legged stool, our baptismal covenant, and a few other things. It was wonderful to experience and definitely a holy spirit moment.

I think the other thing that rings true for me is that I am Christian before I am Episcopalian, and as a Christian am sent to participate in God's mission in the world before I am called to defend or even finance my own church. That was a bit odd to think about, and I may change my mind in the future, but that is how I feel right now. I am happy to be back immersed in the words of the Covenant and reminded of the stool (the three legged one that is) and the radical inclusiveness that was so central to Richard Hooker's work as the Church of England began to come to life in the mid 1500's.

I feel grounded again, and prepared to move forward in some way equipped with the root pieces of who I am and of course, who we are as we discern our future together.
My darned optimistic self has re-emerged. More to come...
Be well,
A+

A Deeper Crisis for the Episcopal Church in Minnesota???

2007-10-27T19:22:00.000-05:00

I am ever the optimist, I always assume that people are operating out of the general good of their hearts, for the betterment of whatever it is they might be working or advocating for. I am also not one to hold a grudge, and will jump on board with the decisions made by a body that they believe are what that particular body needs.

So, of course, when I was on the losing end of just about every resolution presented at convention I was able to look forward to what would come next and prepare myself to support the decisions I need to support as we move forward.

Tonight I put all my eggs into the basket to try to get a coadjutor process passed as the way we would proceed in calling a new bishop. We missed that by three votes, granted, a majority of the Diocese wanted to have a coadjutor, but because of a motion to have the vote by orders it lost, clergy passed it 86-59 and the laity narrowly missed it by a vote of 114 to 117. Makes for some nail biting prime time entertainment, let me tell you.

I am fine with the decision, and will wait to hear from the bishop on what our next course of action will be. But I have really gotten to wonder if we are facing a deeper crisis than we ever could have imagined as we move forward together, or maybe not so much together. I have been warned that the BCMS process is possibly pushing us towards a stronger congregationalist way of life as the Church. A way that would strip the Episcopate of much of its power and grant more and more authority to the individual churches as we live into what this process is about for us.

I have been warned, and can see how easy it would be to move down that path, a path that is much easier to traverse, I believe, than the path to truly reform and re-imagine and reclaim what it means to be an Episcopalian in this state. Tonight I fear I have witnessed a further push to isolate and congregationalize ourselves so as to pretend that the more money and the more authority we keep in our parishes, the better off we will be as a Diocese.

I realize now, a little too late, why I was so compelled to put my energy into the process of a coadjutor. We are the Episcopal Church, Episcopal, according to Wiki means "in principal 'Of Bishops'" My hope was to try to tie the BCMS work in with the future election of a new Bishop. Now I sit and wonder, as I watched people put most of their efforts into fighting a budget, and fighting a resolution about accountability, if people are going to be able to grasp fully what the BCMS report is calling us to do and be as I understand it to relate to us as the Episcopal Church.

Anyway, it has become more clear to me that the silos that separate us and the barrier's that have blocked our way forward are deeper and stronger than we could have imagined because they are not where we suspected them to be. Our identity and purpose according to the BCMS work is good, but I wonder if it was formed too much in the fear of what was going to happen globally with the Anglican Communion, and not enough in the truly local judicatory we most fully exist.

What does it mean to be EPISCOPALIAN, what does it mean to be "of Bishop's"? The BCMS work and mission and ministry and results must be tied intricately to how we live out our life with a Bishop. Not to say that we need to have a bishop as we have had bishops since 1857, but rather, we are being called to enter into a deep transforming conversation about what BEING an Episcopalian means and looks like, how authority of the Episcopate is disbursed and what a Bishop does as the leader of an institution.

This is where I am going to try and focus the conversation going forward, we must remember that we are a whole, not several parts, and I fear we have forgotten or at least willingly put aside a piece of our identity that is vital to our future as the Episcopal Church in this state of Minnesota.

More to come, this is going to be a good and productive conversation.
Be well,
A+

My two cents about the process to elect a new bishop

2007-10-25T06:21:00.000-05:00

I believe it is in the best interest of the Diocese of Minnesota to proceed with a modified version of Bishop Jelinek’s coadjutor plan. I believe we have already completed a two year interim process through the powerful work of the BCMS and that this work needs to be the core of the Bishop Coadjutor search process.

The Bishop’s Commission for Mission Strategy has looked closely at and been honest about our diocesan wide bad habits and helped us acknowledge, honor and move forward to create collaborative relationships and collegiality among laity and clergy.

We have begun to overcome our bad habits and new partnerships and opportunities have emerged. We have begun to discover our gifts, talents and skills as we have heard the Good News in the ministries and missions of congregations around the Diocese.

The past two years have been extraordinarily challenging and anxiety provoking. We have asked HOW we will be the Church together as we move forward. Two years of maintenance and deep spiritual discovery have helped us truly imagine what our future as the Diocese of Minnesota could be, our imaginations have been ignited by this work and we are prepared to move into portions of the action phase of the BCMS process.

This has been powerful interim work that has a well thought-out and expansive plan for continued work.

Why stop this powerful work now by creating a parallel and disconnected interim period?

Instead I propose that we fully embrace the work of the BCMS by using their report as the core of our Bishop search process and diocesan profile, making it clear to all who are nominated what our plan is for our future.

I propose that we continue with a plan for a Coadjutor so that the work of the BCMS and the report as it exists has an opportunity to shape how we participate with God to shape and form how we will be the Church together.

Let’s call for a coadjutor at our diocesan convention with this time-line:

•following convention proceed with the plan to form the next BCMS as well as a search team.

•Reduce the time the search committee needs to create our diocesan profile due to the excellent two years of work that has been done in coming to understand what sort of promised and preferred future God is calling us as a Diocese to.

•In the late fall or winter of 08 elect a coadjutor.

•Then sometime in the summer or fall of 2009 Bishop Jelinek retires and the coadjutor is consecrated as the ninth Bishop of Minnesota.

I believe it is vitally important that the coadjutor has time to spend with the new BCMS team and the regions and parishes of the diocese to explore, imagine and dream about how the BCMS report can be shaped into action steps.

The coadjutor, upon request from the Diocese, diocese being all of us gathered together, spends six to eight months steeping him or herself in the report, in the mission and ministry of the Diocese and how we can begin to dedicate our work to accomplishing the goals and dreams of the BCMS report that has been so comprehensive and empowering. Following that time of discernment the Coadjutor would have time set aside to go on retreat to help imagine a future and a vision for the Diocese to be presented for all of us.

I propose this because it is imperative that we place the work of the BCMS at the core of how we see ourselves living out God’s call to participate in God’s mission in our particular context here in the Diocese of Minnesota. We must place mission and ministry at the core of who we are and what we do in EVERYTHING we do. My fear is that we are instead placing our own expectations and anxiety about limited resources at the core of the process before we think about how the Spirit is moving among us. We must trust implicitly the work we have done as an entire Diocese and believe in the call it gives to work and walk alongside God as we are being deeply transformed by the Spirit.

Be well,
A+

New Inspiration

2007-10-17T12:06:00.000-05:00

I am listening, right now, to a podcast from Speaking of Faith in which Krista Tippett interviews a young Rabbi fro LA named Sharon Brous. She is crazy inspirational.

One thing she said that has kept hitting me is this: "What do we want the world to look like and what are we doing about it."

Powerful stuff, wow, what if we as a community gathered together and had a real conversation about just this topic. What do we want, what do we desire, what is it we see when we look at the world, and how then, do we see GOd in it.

She is quite cutting edge, even going so far as to say about worship if you are not inspired each time you come to celebrate go see a movie instead, I should say that.

More to come when I finish this podcast, it is amazing!

Be well,
A+

Good Intentions

2007-10-15T12:18:00.001-05:00

Well, sometimes the best of intentions just don't cut it, do they.

Today I am sitting in my office getting caught up on email, and mail and phone messages and all that wonderful stuff. I have been in Baltimore since Friday and just returned to my office. My office, today, is freezing cold, I mean freezing, even I couldn't handle it anymore. So I walked downstairs flipped on the boiler, thinking I would like to have it run for a while and warm the place up.

So I did. And it got warm, I was comfortable, and was planning on turning the boiler off at about 12:30 before I left for my 1PM appt.

It was not long after I turned the boiler on, 25 minutes MAYBE, the sirens started screaming, the fire trucks, and I mean a lot of them, more than I have ever heard, starting coming towards the church, so I got up to see where they were going, and what they were doing.

When I stood up, and looked out my office window, lo and behold they were sitting right there looking at our roof. I went out and talked them down, told them the boiler had just been turned on and the "smoke" coming out of the chimney was actually normal and just fine.

Our chimney has been at the center of craziness for a while, we have been trying to get it fixed as it was hit by lightening sometime this summer, and the insurance company is dragging their feet on it. Of course we have been on top of the game from day one...

Anyway, I am sitting right now in my office, with my car behind a fire line that says do not cross, an appointment I have to get to in a half hour, and a big question as to who the H-E-double hockey sticks called the fire department before they bothered to call us here at the Church.

Sometimes, people's good intentions are a heck of a lot more difficult than they are helpful. If it had been a fire, wouldn't there have been BLACK smoke???!!!

Ugh, to the people in American Express, thank you for your concern, now come and join us and see that this place is not dead, it is fully alive!

Be well,
A+

Certain Company

2007-10-09T16:46:00.000-05:00

I was sitting in an office today and looked at the front page of the Star Tribune. On said front page was an article about how my alma mater is rejecting a request to have Bishop Desmond Tutu come and speak. For the record, I think it is ridiculous, of course that a man such as Tutu, with the tremendous accomplishments he has achieved, is going to be sent away from even a Roman Catholic institution. Sara and I are both appalled and have more reasons to not give any of our hard earned dough to the University.

Anyway, as I looked at the front page, I was struck to see what they were actually writing. The paper, and this is my first reaction, had the GALL to place Archbishop Tutu in the same company as the president of Iran, can't spell his name right now, Ann Coulter and Michael Moore. WHAT??? Ann Coulter? What has she done that could even shine a candle to the ministry Bishop Tutu has accomplished? What has Michael Moore done? And the president of Iran? Yikes, the point, I feel, was poorly made.

Just wanted to vent, Tutu will be presenting at Metropolitan State University I hear, and if he can't do that, Bishop Tutu, we would be happy to have you here at The Garden, I hope I left a good enough impression when I was your chaplain in Berkeley at the CDSP graduation.

Be well,
A+

Sermon Preached at the Blessing of the Animals

2007-10-06T11:15:00.000-05:00

This is what i put together for the blessing of the animals service I was at this weekend, the 6th of October.

Our pets, as many of you already know, help us remember significant moments in our lives. My wife and I had a chocolate lab named Fran; Fran was the first pet we had as new family living in the world. She was beautiful and gentle and cuddly and so much fun to play with. On September 10th, 2001, the day before the Twin Towers fell, Fran was jumping up and down at our back door, she really wanted to go outside, it was morning, so I assumed she had a full bladder and needed to be let out. When I opened the door, I realized she was not so much interested in finding a fire hydrant as she wanted the rabbit that was hiding somewhere in our backyard. She took off after the rabbit and during the chase leaped over the flower bed in our back yard, in that moment her life changed, our lives changed. She landed on her neck, had somehow paralyzed herself in the jump, and couldn’t move. We brought her down here on the 10th of September and began a long process of rehabilitation that resulted in a very healthy and happy dog. For us, the terrorist attacks on 9/11 will always be remembered along with the day before, when our Fran ended up in a half body cast, leaving us to wonder and fear for her future.

Often I will hear at blessing ceremonies such as this one, that people bring their loved ones because Fido really needs it, he is a little rascal, or last years blessing wore off, and its time for a new one. While I wish I had the kind of power suggested to change the behavior of these animals, in that simple act of blessing, as maybe my colleagues here also wish, I wonder if receiving and gathering these animals together has more to do with discovering the holy, uncovering for ourselves once again, how each animal on this earth, made lovingly and with great care by God, is a divine and beautiful creature. Our pets, our loved ones, those we have today, and those who have journeyed with us along the way and are no longer here, these creatures that love us unconditionally, no matter what, remind us that we also, then, are holy, and divine and full of God. These blessings upon our beloved pets, both present and living, and past and died, help us to see that we do not need to do anything to achieve greater holiness, rather, all we have to do is see that we are holy in order to achieve all that God dreams for us to accomplish.

There is a wonderful children’s book I read to my kids all the time, it is called “How the animals helped God”. It talks about how the animals helped God create humans, and the many ideas they brought to help shape God’s imagination about what humans would be like. Make them loud, make them silent, make them fast, make them slow, the animals say. God takes all the ideas and suggestions from each animal and creates humans. Days like these, are the days that help me realize, we need the help of our beloved animal friends, more than they need ours.

I want to close with a Poem adapted by a friend of mine for the Indigenous Theological Training Institute here in Minneapolis,
Inside an arch, like that of the sky
Inside the shell of old turtle
Inside the body of our mother
Inside our memories waiting to be born again
We hear the sound of flock after flock
Their ancient call of welcome and question.
Seeking relatives before a winter exile
Hiss of water on stone
And the cries of the geese bark an answer
Their touch is deep as bone
Speaking words never written
That always mean home.

Blessing of the Animals

2007-10-03T13:40:00.000-05:00

For 2 years I have wanted to do a blessing of the animals service at the Garden, and for 2 years I have failed to make it work. I do have a blessing of the animals service to preside at however, this year, at the Veterinary Medical Center at the University of Minnesota on Saturday, October 6th at 4:30PM. All are welcome to bring their pets, pictures of pets that have died or even, and this is my addition, stuffed animals that are meaningful.

Should be fun, be sure to join us!
Be well,
A+