A Two Goal Lead is the Most Dangerous Lead...

I came across this while reading my old blog posts, it is from Henry Nouwen's book, "The Wounded Healer". “Every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbors fear by entering into it with him and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.” Freedom comes from suffering, but only if we walk together. When we enter our neighbors fear, when we embrace the whole humanity and divinity of our neighbor in love, we discover freedom. This of course reminded me of the Star Wars quote from Yoda, "Fear is the path of the dark side.  Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." This is when we choose to not help our neighbors, or when we choose not to accept another hand offered in help to ourselves.  This kind of suffering, bound up in hate and fear is when we choose to see our suffering as the most important suffering we know, as the worse suffering that is out there. Isolationism is what causes this kind of suffer...

With the approach of All Saints, which we will celebrate this coming Sunday, the 4th of November, (is it really November already), I have been thinking about suffering. Suffering in the sense of loss, as these times come near, this thin time when our ancestors begin to dance on our hearts and in our homes, we often are reminded of the pain of losing the ones we love. I was caught by surprise on Saturday as I said the hymn during Roger's memorial service and tears began to flow from my eyes, and I choked up. I was surprised because I thought I had dealt with the death of our brother in the weeks leading up to his service. But suffering isn't something you deal with, it isn't something that has a time line. No, suffering is something that evolves over time. Suffering evolves over time because our particular contexts shift and change. Broken hearts heal because we begin to believe we can love again and our experience of love is changed so that we...

What does it mean to see again? What does it even mean to call upon the Lord? “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me!” Let’s face it, most of us in this room would put ourselves in the same shoes as the crowd that hushed this man up and told him to be quiet. Most of us, with our good Minnesotan and Scandinavian influences wouldn’t like this man disrupting everything so loudly and inappropriately. Have you ever put yourself in the shoes of this man though? Have you ever been in such a place of desperation that all you could do is cry out? All you could do is blindly hope that someone could hear you, and that even more risky, someone would hear you and have compassion? Bartimaeus’ persistence pays off, he doesn't listen to the people telling him to be quiet, he continues to cry out, “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me.” Which one, which statement hits you hardest, resonates strongest? Is it Jesus’ words, “What do you want me to do for you?” Or is it Bartimaeus’ words, “Let me see ...

The preface for the burial of an adult says, “To your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.” Never before has life been more changed for me than the day that Roger Greene died. Someone asked me the other day, of all the people who have sat on that bench, a bench which, ironically, is also gone, of all the people who have sat on that bench, what was unique about Roger? What made Roger fall into our hearts the moment we met him? What was it about Roger that made us want to see him day in and day out? When I saw Roger a couple of weeks ago for the last time I was struck by how strong he still looked. By how confident and filled with the spirit he was. I had been told that he was not up for much talking, but as soon as I walked in he started giving me instructions, talk to this person, don’t forget to ask this person. When I asked him what he might want me or someone else to say at his funeral all he said was remember the Shelf, and remember the people in the neighborhood. R...

A couple of years ago I was standing in our driveway, conversing with someone, I can’t remember who, when a man in a suit ran up, he was out of breath and red in the face. He looked at me, I had my collar on, and he said, a little exasperated, “Are you the priest here?!” I said I was, he took a deep breath and said with some urgency, “Someone is in your garden taking your vegetables, I think he’s a homeless person, and he’s taking a whole bunch of tomatoes and other veggies.” I smiled at the man, and said, that’s ok, that’s what the garden is there for, it serves our food shelf and anyone who is hungry. He looked even more exasperated and sighed, “OK, if that’s ok, I guess, that’s ok.” And he walked away. I know I have told you this story before, but what I haven’t told you, is that the man who was in the garden was one of our own members. A pledging, active member of Gethsemane Church. We make great assumptions about people based on what they look like and e...

Who do people say that I am? Have you ever wondered what your own response might be to this question? What if Jesus walked in, and for whatever reason, we thought this was normal, and as Jesus stood among us, he asked us, “Who do people say that I am?” What would we say? Would we follow Peter’s path and say that Jesus is the Messiah? Or would we say something else, something more appropriate to our own context? Who do you say that I am? It seems that Jesus is working on his own self-awareness, his own understanding of who he is in a context that is constantly evolving and coming to fruition. The write of the Gospel of Mark seems also to not want his Jesus to be seen as a, or as the Messiah, so he has Jesus say to his disciples, do not say a word of this to anyone. The Messianic secret of Mark, Mark doesn’t want anyone to know about this Jesus and who exactly Jesus might be. This story of Mark has always resonated for me, it always seems like the most accessible story of Jesus’ Messia...

“Good luck storming the castle!” Miracle Max yells out. “Do you think it’ll work?” his wife asks. “It’ll take a miracle.” Miracle Max says in return. I introduced the kids to “The Princess Bride” this weekend, and for whatever reason they both laughed out loud at this exchange, after Inigo Montoya, Fezzick and the Man in Black leave Miracle Max’s house with a miracle pill, covered in CHclate, and with a hope to save PRicness Buttercup from the evil Prince Humperdinck. One of the greatest movies ever made. There is another wonderful movie called Amelie, many of you may have seen it, it is about a young woman who finds some old nostalgic treasures in the wall of her flat in France and returns them to their owner inspiring her to do good deeds to all the people she is able to help in a day. Little miracles, we may call them, deeds that bring love and light to the people they effect. The first person Amelie sees in her effort to be a Good Samaritan is a blind man, she grabs the blind man...

It feels like this Gospel, at first glance should comfort us. It should be a Gospel that tells us clearly, human tradition, while good in many ways, is not often the way of God. It could be seen as a Gospel that could lead us down a path of justice, of righteousness. Indeed, as I began studying this scripture, that is where I went, how can I fight the Religious Right and their rules and regulations, their dogma and doctrine that is so oppressive. I even was able to ask the hard questions about Christianity and religion on a large scale, the Church is such a challenging presence in the world in many ways, trying to limit the rights and freedoms of so many. Deceiving people in all corners of the earth. Stories abound about the harm Religion has caused over the past millennia. And here we have in front of us, a scripture that moves us to that place where Jesus himself is saying that human tradition is not the end all be all for how we are to live our lives. How we follow God, how we speak...

Russell Rathburn, a local pastor here in Minneapolis, asked an interesting question in his weekly column called “The Hardest Question”. Rathburn asks, “Is John’s Jesus telling us that we should become God? In the Eucharist do we rehearse the consuming of Jesus’ life, binding his soul to ours making us like God? Which begs an even harder question: what is God like?” We don’t really know what God is like, and we don’t even really know if God wants us to be more like God. But these are important questions for us to consider as we walk along the path we are on. These are important questions that can help us understand more fully what it is God is calling us to do and to be. There are indeed clues that help us understand the questions, never the answers unfortunately, but always the questions more clearly, and one clue that I love to the think about is the idea of the incarnation. The incarnation has been on my mind a lot as I have read these scriptures, the idea ...

L et your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. ___________________________________________________________ The above was the collect that was read this past Sunday, August 5th, 2012 at our 8 and 10AM services. At first it was a tough collect to read, a tough collect to comprehend and swallow. A collect is a prayer that the clergy person at an Episcopal Church reads to "collect" the people, gather us together as we begin our corporate worship. It is a little late in the service to really function that way as we have already said a different collect, something called the Collect for purity, and sung a hymn to gather us all together and mark the beginning of our corporate worship, but none the less, that is its function. I had an old...

I came across these two quotes in a magazine from my Alma Mater on Service Learning. I found them interestingly and potentially in conflict with one another. First: "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of it innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of activists neutralizes their work for peace. It destroys their own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fullness of their own work, because...

What is it that we know, and what is it that we don’t know? These readings make me wonder deeply about the things I claim to know and the things I claim not to know. We think we know what it would take to feed five thousand people then, six months wages. What would it take to feed five thousand people today? When we think of feeding five thousand people, do we look at it as if it is the state fair, do we consider feeding people in that way? Or do we look at our weddings, our blessing ceremonies, or other celebratory moments in our lives where we fed, 10, 50, 100 or 250 people? So what is it that we know, and what is it that we do not know? I think it is an interesting question to ask ourselves, what is it we do not know? What are the moments where we have been surprised by our lack of knowledge, or where our knowledge was expanded by something new we had learned? What sorts of moments make us think to ourselves, or exclaim out loud, “I didn’t know that!” I love it when Eliot ...