Listen to it here.

•

A few years ago, I worked at a church in San Francisco that opens its doors every friday of the year to the whole city to come buy their food without money: The Food Pantry at Saint Gregory’s distributes thousands and thousands of pounds of food every year, and they set it out all around the altar, which stands in the middle of the sanctuary.

The people line up outside: Chinese grandmas, homeless parents, hungry college students, curious onlookers, strung out meth-addicts.  They all bunch up outside and then come in through the church’s front doors, making their way around the stacked piles of oranges and cabbages and bread and frozen chicken breasts and fill their various bags and suitcases.

There are no requirements for getting food other than showing up. You don’t have to live in a certain place or have an income below a certain line.  All you have to do is show up.  And, what was even more surprising to me, even shocking to that part of my self that wants the “right” people in charge: the people who run the Pantry, a giant enterprise, are all people who originally came for food.

Almost all of them have been on and off the street since their first visit, and more than one of them has more than a passing acquaintance with methamphetamine or heroin.  Surely, I caught myself thinking, the Food Pantry is being run by the wrong people.

•

All through the history of Israel, God always does this: God is *always* choosing the wrong people.

God chose to protect Cain, who murdered his brother, rather than condemn him to death.

God took a shepherd boy, the youngest son, and made him king of Israel.  David, that king, then went on to arrange murders and commit adultery, and yet somehow, God managed to make good out of this very imperfect man.

Paul, the man who some Biblical scholars call the “Second founder of Christianity” started his career by having Christians stoned to death, and Peter seemed to spend most of his time confused and contradicting his teacher.

These are the people that God seems to like choosing, and we see it again today, here at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel.

When we meet the disciples, they have been hiding out in Jerusalem, doing their best not to meet the same end as their friend Jesus, maybe mulling over just exactly what they might have done to prevent the grisly execution that most of them were too afraid even to come witness.

Or thinking about how futile it had all been.  How powerful the forces were that had been arrayed against them, how foolish Jesus had been to have even tried.

And then, their friends Mary come breaking into their rooms, telling them that Jesus isn’t dead after all, jabbering on about earthquakes and visions and how they have to go back to Galilee and that Jesus will meet them there.

•

How hard do you think it must have been to get up and leave that room.  To get up and travel the hundred or so miles north to Galilee, back to where it had all started, to meet the friend that you had betrayed and that you had *seen* dead.

If it had been me, and I had heard that Jesus was back, I think the first thing that would have entered my mind would have been, “Oh, no… he’s going to be *so* mad at me…”

One way or another, though, they did head north, back home.  I imagine a kind of desperate expectation both to meet Jesus there, and maybe hoping, after all, that he wouldn’t show up.

But he did.  Jesus came to them.

He meets them, and even in the face of this appearance, though they worship, some are still doubting.  There he is in front of their faces, and yet they are still confused, still wondering what can possibly be going on.

•

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t have much to say to the disciples when he meets them after the Resurrection.  But what he does have to say is perhaps the most shocking, absurd thing he has said yet.

•

Jesus spent his life making the authorities angry and inviting the wrong people into fullness of life.  He touched unclean people and told them they were clean.  He ate dinner with sinners and made them his friends.  He did these things and got killed for it.

It wasn’t that he was doing miracles or attending feasts.  It was that he was touching unclean bodies and revealing their wholeness at the times the authorities had told him he was not supposed to do so.  It was because he was inviting the wrong sorts of people to his table and treating them as though they were beloved by God.

In the specialized lingo of seminaries and church work, this is what we call having “bad boundaries.”  Rather than keeping a decorous distance from the people he is serving, scheduling office hours and only becoming just as involved as he needs to in order to send the person on their way, Jesus breaks the rules that have been set for him.  He knocks down the boundaries that have been set up by people of good faith to keep society running as it’s supposed to.

Over and over again, Jesus goes to the people that he shouldn’t and gives them the love and power that they cannot possibly deserve.

And all along, people would ask him, “By what authority do you do this?”

•

And so here, on the mountaintop, after days of desperation, fear, and confusion, the disciples come to Jesus in doubt and in faith, and to all of them, he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus is claiming authority that no human being is supposed to have.  He’s taking authority from all the rulers, all the parents, all the husbands, all the soldiers, all the guards, all the governors.  He is even claiming as his the authority of God herself.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says.

As any of you who have done much study of Old Testament will know, name have power.  Names are more than just labels for people in Hebrew thought: they are the essence of the person themselves.  And so for Jesus to put himself on par with the name of the Father and the Holy Spirit, is a boundary-crossing of the most provocative sort.

•

A fully-articulated theology of the Trinity would only emerge after centuries of struggle and conflict and even treachery and backstabbing (again, we see the kinds of people that God likes to choose), but even from the earliest days of the Church, the disciples knew that in this man from Galilee, they had met God in a new and unique way.

And what the Church would come to understand is that in characteristic fashion, God herself had shown just how bad her boundaries really are: God went so far as to enter creation itself and live a human life, with all of its messes, embarrassments, joys, and confusions.

Jesus is able to claim God’s authority because, in a way that the disciples could only begin to imagine, Jesus is himself an encounter with God’s own self.  Meeting him, they meet God.

Only God is not how they expected: Not in great power and majesty, but in a convicted and executed criminal.  The God they met joins them in their humanity, rather than demanding that they ascend to him in perfection.

God did what God always does: showing up in unexpected places, offering food to the hungry, making servants out of those enslaved to the worst that the world has to offer.

•

And so, perhaps with many of the same doubts that the disciples had as they met Jesus there on the mountaintop in Galilee, we are allowed to overhear his instructions to them.  Jesus is not content merely to appear to his friends: he comes to them, and then puts them to work. “Go, make disciples of all nations,” he says.

I do not care if you don’t think you believe enough or don’t think that you are the right kind of person, he says.  Go, you doubtful and questionable people: I love you, and am inviting you into the work of breaking open the heart of the world, so that there might never be a “wrong” sort of person again.

Isaiah 11:1-10 | Romans 15:4-13 | Matthew 3:1-12 | Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

•

When I was twelve, growing up in rural San Diego County, I remember standing out on our deck, leaning out as far as I could to see the tongues of flame lapping up from behind the hillside in the wide expanse of brush between between our house and town.  Tall, red flames, twenty or thirty feet high I could see, and because it was evening, only faint black smudges of smoke that rose up, lit from below.  On and on the fires burned, but away from us, so there was no need to worry.

Later on, when I was in high school, I remember coming back from a backpacking trip in Yosemite, driving down the Five, through the path of a wildfire, still burning off to the west.  Again, I could see the tall, red and orange flames eating up the hillside, consuming the dry brush and leaving a charred wasteland behind.  Scorched, ashy, shades of dark gray and black.  I remember thinking about the contrast between this utter devastation and the beautiful alpine lakes and seemingly untouched wilderness I had just left.

And then just a few years ago, I walked around Camp Stevens, the Episcopal camp in San Diego, walking amidst the wreckage of the fire that had all but destroyed the place.  Hillsides of matchsticks that had once been trees, and a pile of rubble that had once been the camp’s chapel.  Fire ran through the camp, eating up everything it could touch, taking, consuming, destroying.

And it is with these memories in mind that I hear the words of John the Baptist: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  Unquenchable fire.  These are not the words of a Christmas carol or an Advent hymn.  For most of us, these words do not come as tidings of comfort and joy.  We are waiting for the birth of our savior.  We wanted a King who would bring justice, and instead, he is coming to take what we have and burn it all away.

•

In the earliest days of the church, those first Christians did something naughty.  Something illegal, really.  They took titles that justly belonged to the Emperor and stuck them on somebody else.  Somebody dead.

Look around you as you go out into the mess of holiday shopping that the world has suddenly become, and listen to the music, look for the signs.  They’re getting fewer and farther between as Christmas becomes more and more thoroughly secularized, sanitized and sterilized, but here and there you will still see and hear the old titles, “Prince of Peace,” “Son of God,” “King of Kings.” It’s no secret anymore that these are names that were more properly attributed to Caesar, to the Emperor.  And in putting this titles on the name of a dead, crucified criminal, the early Christians were daring the authority of the Empire to come crashing down on them like a tidal wave, to wash them away as though they had never existed.

In the Roman Empire, as in all empires in human history, the titles of Prince, Lord, and King have always meant power.  They have meant power of the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, men over women, the deserving over the undeserving.  Rome had claimed these titles on account of their Roman Peace.  “The sheep are safe,” they said, “because we have killed the wolf.  The Lambs and cows and children are safe, for we have killed the lion and the bear and exterminated the asp and the adder.  Your are safe because we are strong.  We are the king who makes you safe, the Lord who gives you security.  Truly the Emperor is the Prince of Peace.”

But the early church took the old titles and did something else with them.

Two weeks ago, we heard Luke’s account of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion.  The disciples and all of Jesus’ followers had built up their hopes for the liberation of Judea.  They were sure that this man was their promised king, the one who would save them from the oppression of Rome.  This is the man that will punish the wicked and reward the righteous.  This is the king, the True King.

Only, he wasn’t.

Jesus was executed.

The Romans did put a sign over his head that read “The King of the Judeans.”

“There is one emperor, one Caesar,” the Romans said, “and this, is what we think of your ‘king’.”

The disciples panicked. They had run and fled into the fire Jesus had lit on the cross, and through it, met Jesus resurrected.  He met them in their fear and took it away, like the fire consumes a hillside.  Their dreams of power and delusions of fear were eaten up by the pain of the cross.

And only then did see, and they looked up to the cross and said, “Yes.  This is our king.  This is what we mean by kingship.  This man, hanging on a cross.  Tortured to death and shamed.  This is our king.  The Prince of Peace and Lord of Lords.  This man is the Son of God.

When we say King, we do not mean you.  We do not mean your power.  We mean this.  A helpless victim.  His innocence burns away the lies of your power, your promises of peace that come at the expense of our bodies.  You have not killed the wolf, the lion, the bear: you are the wolf who eats the sheep the lion who eats the lamb.  And in his innocence, this man exposes your fears.  Your fears that if you do not eat us you will go hungry.  That if you do not poison us, there will not be enough for you to eat.  But this man you have crucified offers you more than that.  ‘Come, dine with us‘ is his invitation, for there is more than enough and no need to fear.  Here is our King,” they said.  “Here is his mighty judgement.”

•

And it is into this path that we are invited in this season of preparation.  We are invited by God as we prepare to celebrate the Incarnation of God in human history by walking into the unquenchable fire and having our fears burned away.

What are you afraid of this Advent?  What is looking you in the face and claiming its power over you?    What in you needs to be burned away, left by the roadside as you walk along the way that we are called to follow.  Because the fire is not optional.  We have that clearly from John the Baptist’s mouth.  And we know.  We know what it’s like to have your illusions burned away.  The lies unmasked, the truth laid bare.  And the truth hurts sometimes, right?

•

The first Christians paid for their crime.  They were hunted and persecuted, betrayed and put to death.  Failing to give the right offerings to prove their loyalty to the empire, they were executed just as their king was.

And in the days and years that followed, their fear was burned away, leaving faith and hope.  Looking forward to the future without knowing what it held, only trusting that Christ was going ahead of them.

•

There is nothing that I can say that will make the next few weeks, the next few years of any of our lives be more simple.  Easier.  Less painful.

The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas have become almost proverbially chaotic.  Nothing I can say will make them less so.  But we are invited in the gospel into a different vision of the chaos of our lives.  Cleansed in the fires of baptism from the power of our fears, our histories, our broken relationships to determine our lives, our desires, our ability to see one another,  we are freed to begin again the work of reconciliation.

We come to this table each week, together in our disagreements and differences, to join now the feast at which wolf dines with sheep and lion with lamb.  To fear neither that we will be eaten or will go hungry, but rather to feast together.

We no longer need to fear that our relationships need always be broken or our hopes always dashed.  We are invited to die to those fears and live again in hope, looking for foundations of the kingdom ruled not in power, but in the spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

•

A few years after I visited the camp that had burned, I returned to work as a chaplain.  I remember walking up and down the hillsides, still marveling at the skeletal black tree trunks that lettered the landscape.

The camp had almost finished rebuilding, and green shoots were growing from the stumps of the old.  The fire had burned and left rich, rich soil.  New life had begun.

What gives is this:

1. I love backpacking
2. I hate backpacking alone

While I was preparing for the trip, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would need and how I would manage to make my way from Williamstown, Massachusetts to the Canadian border.  I thought some about the amount of effort involved and how I would be burning an ungodly number of Calories a day (and probably lose some weight in the process!).  I wasn’t particularly afraid of not being able to handle the physical exertion, and knew that in time I would get stronger and by the end of the trail would have all of the muscular fortitude necessary to make it all 273+ miles.

What I did not anticipate was the intense loneliness of long-distance solo backpacking.  It is not uncommon not to see another soul for hours on end, and even then, only to see them for a brief moment of greeting along the lines of, “Good morning!” met with “Good morning! Headed south?” and a “Yep!  Have a good hike!” followed by “You, too!” and passing one another return to solitude.  Evenings at the shelters would entail more human contact, but even then, the exhaustion of the day and the varied pace of hikers meant that one would rarely see the same people two days in a row and even then would be more interested in going to sleep than having stimulating conversation.

And that gets at the key factor missing for me in the Long-Trail-by-myself hiking experience: Everything I saw and all the experiences I had seemed only half-real with no one to share them with.  Every day I would see something and want to turn to my friend and show them, only to find no friend there to share it with.  And so I realized that the thing I love most about backpacking is not the physical exertion (which, I can tell you, is mighty, and delightful in its way) or even the beauty of nature itself, but rather the sharing of that beauty with people I love.

In a parallel situation, I enjoy going to museums by myself. I used to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art all the time while I was doing CPE there two summers ago.  But even better than going to museums by myself is going with a friend who can share the art with me, or with whom I can argue when the piece is strange or when our tastes don’t match. So it is with the wilderness, which, of course, is one of God’s great masterpieces of installation art.  I was having a great time on the trail, but it all seemed a bit half-hollow.  I was there, but I was hardly experiencing what I was doing.  There were moments of profound thought, and moments of genuine beauty, but it all seemed somehow wasted on a single person.

And so, I decided to step off the trail.  Not because I was unsure I could make it all the way to the Canadian border (because of that I had no doubt.  Some fear of the steep mountains, perhaps, but no doubt), nor was it just because I was lonely.  But rather, it was because I want to hike the Long trail someday with my friends, and I want to be able to share it with them as I go.  The thought of walking all of the way to Canada, especially after the Appalachian Trail (whose hikers made up the majority of the people I met) parts ways with the Long Trail some 100 miles up the state, feeling lonely and craving the conversation and relationships of my loved-ones was not my idea of how to spend the remainder of my summer.  The option instead to spend it with my friends in Vermont and in Washington, DC is infinitely more appealing and a much better way to cultivate the thing that I love even more than the outdoors, which is the loving relationships I have with people I care about.

And so, here I am.  Washed (more or less), and sleeping again in a bed.  I do have some regrets about leaving off the goal I had set for myself, but there is really no point in regret.  I sometimes find myself feeling sad that I will now no longer be able to impress people with this astounding feat of pedestrian effort.  But, seriously, is impressing people really any kind of reason to do anything?

I count it as one point against that troubling voice of the ego, which is so often calling us away from what is good and towards what we “ought” to like.  Or, put more simply, is a little death of that part of me that wanted to be admired for doing something other people hadn’t and a little bit of resurrection in the form of relationships new and old to which I can now devote some much needed attention, relationships which are in themselves little signs of life and which make more of us who share them.

Here are my estimated resupply dates for the Long Trail hike.

If you’d like to send me mail, these are the dates that I think I’ll be there.  If you are worried I’ll miss it, send it on to the next post office.  All letters should be addressed to Andrew Shamel, c/o General Delivery.

Updates may follow from the trail, they may not! But either way, off I go!

As many of you may have heard by now, I’m getting ready to go for a long walk in the woods.  Like, for almost a month.  I’m going to be walking the Long Trail, which extends from the Vermont-Massachusetts border to the Canadian border, following the Green Mountains.  You can get a rough picture of it here:
View Larger Map

Why would anyone do such a thing?  Because I’m crazy!! Or, because it will actually be an amazingly good time (I hope).  There will be many pictures taken, and hopefully some posted along the way.

I head out for the trail on monday, and will hopefully reach Canada by the 1st or 2nd of September.

More to come, on where I’ll be when and other such fun.

For the Listening Type

Last week, before I made the long drive south to be with you all today, I was on a kind of retreat up at St Dorothy’s Rest in the redwoods up north.  As many of you may know, I was ordained a deacon yesterday.  Ordination is a rather momentous event, and I thought that that being the case, I would do well to take some time to step back, and to think about what I was getting myself into.

And so: the retreat.  I was lucky enough to have a whole cabin to myself, and so I spent most of my time putzing around the cabin, reading, cooking my meals, and going for walks in the woods that surround the camp.  The idea for the retreat was that I should spend most of my time thinking and praying, considering the impending ordination, and being generally very pious.

Well, I don’t know about you, but whenever I set about trying to be very pious, usually the first thing that happens is that I immediately feel the need to go do something else.  In this case, that something else presented itself right on schedule: I decided I needed to go for a walk.  And so, knowing myself at least that well, I realized that there was really no use in resisting, so I packed up my satchel with my sermons notebook, a Bible, and a pencil or two in case I had some ideas on my walk.

As some of you know, I’m was a Boy Scout way back when, and so I have some pride about things outdoorsy.  After I’d been walking by myself for an hour and a half or so, going from trail to trail between gigantic redwood trees, it came upon me that I was not actually sure where I was.  I had kept trying to get back home, but never seemed to be able quite to get there.  And so, there I was, by myself, in the middle of nowhere, wondering when I would trip and sprain my ankle or get bitten by one of the snakes I had heard slithering about in the dry leaves on the forest floor just off the trail.

Which brings us to the Gospel reading for today.  I wonder how it must have been for the man who was possessed by a legion of demons to live all by himself, off on the outskirts of town.  Tombs in ancient Palestine were really more like small caves or holes in the hillside that could be covered with a rock.  And so I can see the poor man running from tomb to tomb, sometimes tripping, tumbling down the hillside in the hot sun with nobody to help him up again but the thousands of voices in his head.

As you may or may not know, people like this man were not terribly uncommon in Jesus’ day.  I would imagine that most people knew someone (or knew someone who knew someone) who they understood to have been possessed by demons.  Who had been overtaken by some force he could not control.  And so had been shoved out of the community, into the wild where he could do no harm.

•

Ancient Israelite culture is famous for its concern with laws and with its demand that people living in it observe certain rules, and stay clean in the right ways.  And, like people of every time and of every place, most people in Jesus’ day did their best, feeling comforted by the social rules that give their lives structure and meaning, and rubbing up against the rules when they seem to hard, too painful, or too unreasonable.  But overall the system worked.

And one of the things that made the system work was knowing, based on the rules, who is in and who is out.  Even if you’re out, according to the rules and laws, there is almost always a way back in.  But while you’re out, you’re out.  For instance, if you touched a dead body, you would be unclean and out until you had done the proper washing rituals.  Or if you ate with the wrong people, you would be on the outs until you had made it up with the right observance.

But there were always going to be some people who were just out.  They were out, and there was no way they were coming back in again.  Getting possessed by demons was a good way for this to happen.  Like the cast out and demon possessed who live downtown and in Balboa Park, who I met yesterday after the ordination, there are always people who cannot find a place in the clean, organized, proper community.

And so we have this homeless man, demon-possessed and living on the outskirts of society.  It’s worth pointing out that the people of the city did not kill the man.  They couldn’t kill him. He was too strong.  So they drove him out.  And they drove him out, but not too far.  They drove him out far enough that they didn’t have to live with him, but they kept him close enough that they could remember that he was there.  They could remember that he is the Bad One, the Unwelcome One, the One who Deserves It.

•

All those noisy, obvious demons that the man carried looked a lot like the quiet, boring demons that we each carry with us everywhere we go.  Like the demon named I’m Too Busy for That, or the one called I’d Rather Not Look at Him, or my own personal favorite, the demon named But What Would the Others Think if I Did That?

As long as there is a man to live out in the wilderness by himself, with only the two thousand noisy demons to keep him company, we who live in the city don’t have to look at our own demons: his are so much more exciting than ours.  And so, we heap our demons on him.  And as long as there is somebody that we can look to and say, “He must be the really bad one, he’s the really wicked one,” we can offload our demons onto him — he takes the responsibility so that we don’t have to.

We find some person or people or tribe or class to call wicked, to be the man in the tombs for us.   It could be the neighbors, or the wrong political party, or the wrong nationality.  It could be the uncle we never talk to or the immigrants we avoid even though they live down the street.

Whoever that person is stops being a person and just becomes the one who we can look to and say, “At least I’m not him.”

And whoever he is is the one that Jesus goes to first when he comes to this troubled place.

•

The first person Jesus comes to is the one who isn’t supposed to be a person at all.  He comes to the one who has been thrown away by the community so that it doesn’t have to look squarely at itself.  He walks right up to that person and reminds him that he is actually a person.

He is not the voices that fill his mind.

He is not the demons that his people have heaped on him.  He is not the combined sins of his community.

He is a person in his own right, full of life and desiring more life.  And as soon as Jesus does this, it confuses and outrages everyone else.

You would think that people would be happy to have a broken, homeless man living on the outskirts of their town healed and brought back into the fold of society.  But of course we know why they’re not.  Their whole identity had been built around knowing themselves as “the ones who aren’t HIM.”  They were the good ones, the clean ones, the sane ones.  As long as they knew he was out there alone, they could all be together in happiness.

But as we learn from Jesus’ teaching and life over and over again, this is not how the Kingdom of God works in human lives.  Jesus is calling us into a way of life that really has no interest in the way things are now because the way things are now are still on their way to being the whole desire of God for our lives.

The way things are now, there are oil spills, and the first thing we want to do is to find out whose fault it is so we can punish them.

The way things are now, there are political decisions that have good and bad consequences.  When they’re bad, we want to set up an investigation and decide who to blame.

The way things are now, we hurt each other.  We lie when we ought to tell the truth, we fail to keep the promises we made with all the best intentions, and we gang up on the weaker ones, the foreign ones, the ones who have broken the rules and we tell them that they aren’t actually right in the world.  That they aren’t one of us, that they are alone.

But over and over again, God invites us back into community with all of the people we thought we ought not associate with.  God invites us to follow the crucified one and to die so that we might join him in the Resurrection.  To die to ourselves, to die to our preconceptions.  To die to the conviction that we don’t have to see our brothers and sisters as the people they are, and to offer ourselves to them and risk being changed.  We risk being caught up in the stampede of swine as the demons come out, but are promised the joy of the man who returned from Jesus to the city singing and dancing.

•

Later in the afternoon, after my beautiful, though momentarily tense, walk in the woods, I was sitting in my cabin listening to the returning camp counsellors at St Dorothy’s Rest singing just outside.  They had lit a campfire and were singing all the camp songs they would sing with the campers this summer.  They sang, “Give yourself to love, if love is what you’re after.  Open up your heart to the tears and laughter. And give yourself to love, give yourself to love.”

I don’t know how many of you listen to the NPR show This American Life, but a couple of years ago, there was an episode that was all about numbers.  All of the stories had something to do with numbers or counting or representing things in numbers that perhaps shouldn’t be represented in numbers.  Like, there was one story about a couple that spent a month giving each other daily performance ratings, on a scale of one to ten.  You can imagine how well that went over…

Well, one of the stories was about a woman who was getting into her mid thirties and was single and was a bit worried that she hadn’t been dating enough, that she wasn’t trying hard enough, and that maybe that’s why she hadn’t found a husband.

As I recall, she was an engineering graduate student, and so, true to her nature, she ran some numbers.  She actually made a chart of all the people she had ever dated.  It told all of their names, when they had started dating and when they broke up, over the course of all the years she had been dating.  I think she even made a graph.  Upon reflection, seeing them all laid out neatly and in rows, she begin to feel less bad.  Hey, she thought as she saw a small cluster of bars, 2005 was a good year!

Though I am about as far from an engineer as anyone could hope to find (my friends who have seen the organizational state of my room or my desperate attempts to figure out how much I owe at dinner when the check comes will attest to this), after I heard that story, I thought that it might be a fun thing to do: to see the names of everybody I had ever even been on even one date with, all laid out neatly in rows.  And as I looked down the rows, all kinds of memories started coming back to me.  People I had dated in middle school and practically forgotten about came floating up out of history, and it was almost like I could say Hi to them again.

•

Because however hard we try, certain relationships never really go away from our lives.  Those times that we fall in love or become infatuated with someone, or have a fast friendship that dissolves slowly over time, these relationships stay with us, become part of us, keep reminding us of who we were and who we are now.

Because falling in love is a dangerous thing.  It’s a dangerous thing because in the end, you never really know what’s going to happen.  You never really know what your beloved is going to do with that heart you’ve given them, or even what you’re going to do with theirs.  There’s a kind of trust that happens, and a vulnerability, a risk that we take when, when we let ourselves trust someone else and we let ourselves be trusted.

When we do this, we are inviting that person into our lives perhaps for longer even than the time that we will know them.

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In the reading from John’s Gospel that we just heard, the disciples are finally coming to grips with the news that Jesus is not going to be around for much longer.  And, they are responding to him with a collective look of confusion, and if they were able to whip out their cell phones, they would probably be sending him a a text message that says, in capital letters, WTF, man!?!?

They’re hurt and confused.  Things are changing.  They thought they had a grip on things.  They have risked everything to follow this man, and now, just when they were starting to get it, the rules of the game are changing.  Throughout John’s Gospel, the disciples are trying to understand the lessons of this man they have been called to follow.  And now, on the night that they are just starting to understand who he is and think that they have a good grip on what he’s meant all this time, he tells them that he’s leaving.  He’s done.

And, they start asking him questions, they’re trying to pin him down, saying, “seriously?  you can’t really be serious, can you?”

And I think you can understand their confusion.  They thought they had found “the one.”  On the dating chart of messiahs, they thought they had gotten to the last column and could throw the whole business away.

So, some of the disciples get desperate: they start trying to make the relationship work out: “Where are you going?” they ask, “we can go with you!”

Other disciples just throw up their hands and try to take control of the situation: “Ok, teacher, give us the final secret message,” they beg, “if you’re going to go, let us get on with our lives without you.”

But in typical Jesus fashion, he doesn’t answer either of their requests.  He offers another option, and it’s something they didn’t even know they were asking for.  “You’re not wrong,” he says. “You weren’t wrong to trust me: I am going away, he says, but I’m not abandoning you.  Instead, I will give you a gift.  A gift that will see you through the time when I am gone.”

“My own peace I give to you,” he says, “a peace which the world cannot give.”

The world is changing, always changing, he says, and I will give you a gift of peace that will see you through the chaos ahead.  Peace that will change the way you are in the world.

You can almost hear the disciples ask one more question: “Peace? Yes!  Tell us about this peace!  How do we do it?”

And this is the final joke, the beginning of the last lesson: Instead of imparting a secret saying or giving detailed directions to the kingdom of heaven, the secret that the disciples wanted, the place that they want to get to can only be shown to them, not told.

The peace that he offers is something he can only demonstrate, more teaching won’t help.

And so he runs off and shows them what the peace of God looks like: He is arrested, and crucified, and dies, where he was supposed to have been a conquering hero or teacher of the hidden knowledge.

Ta daa…

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And so, of course, this is the same offer that is extended to us.  Out lives are changing, everything, it seems, is sometimes in flux.

Some of us are graduating from high school, or college or seminary.

Others are changing jobs or leaving them for something new.

Some of us are closing old relationships and starting new ones.

Others of us are just now finding ourselves alone and ourselves.

And in all of this, there is change.  There is a loss and a gain, freedom at the expense of what once was.  Because every change entails a little bit of death, and every change has the promise of mew life.  Every time our lives change, we are offered the opportunity to let something of ourselves pass away, to die because it is no longer needed, it is no longer who we are.

Some of the relationships that we carry with us still speak too loudly, even though the person has been gone for years and years.  Those voices can be hung on the cross, the peace that Jesus promised.

For some of us, we are starting a whole new way of life.  What needs to die so that that new life can begin?  What do we have to leave behind when we leave so that we have open hands to accept the new gifts that are coming to us?

For others, we look back to good old times that are comfortable and full of joy, but we hold onto them so tightly that we cannot be present to the new blessings and new life that is rising in us even now.

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The disciples learned, as we remind ourselves every year, through Holy Week and Easter, that things can never stay the same.  Things can never remain the way they are because like all of the great relationships we have had in our lives, Jesus who was dead and is risen is still with us.

We remember him in his words, and we become him at the table.  The traces of his love for his disciples, those men and women that he loved in the world, the peace that he promised them continues in us: our lives are the memory of the one who died, and our lives are called to be the resurrection which he promised.

As some of you know, I’ve been hammering away in my spare time at a piece of Mac software called Bibliography.  It’s a citation-generation and -management application, kind of like a really streamlined version of Endnote.  I’ve finally gotten the beast into something like a workable beta version, and would be interested if any of y’all would like to do me the huge favor of testing it out for me.

Alas, it only works on OS X Snow Leopard (v.10.6), the latest version of the operating system, so if you’re interested, but aren’t running Snow Leopard, perhaps this is some good incentive to upgrade! (haha…).  Here are some features of the app:

• Looks and works basically like Apple’s Mail application, or iTunes.
• Creates citations out of thin air via drag-and-drop.  Just drag a book’s title from the library to your word processor and poof! your footnote appears.
• Drag a whole folder to drop out a whole paper’s worth of endnotes.
• Smart folders that let you gather together books based on a number of criteria like title, author, notes, or tags.
• Speaking of tags, Tags! You can label a work with any number of descriptive tags to create as complex a system of organization as you like.
• Add citations to a work.  Like notecards, you can take notes on a specific work, adding searchable tags to keep all of your brilliant observations in order
• Create templates to make the creation of new documents easy.
• And maybe even others that I don’t even know are features.

Of course bearing in mind that it’s in a rough draft phase, I absolutely welcome critique, bug reports, suggestions for features, and gushing praise.  If any of these things sound like fun (I  mean, who doesn’t love giving criticism?), let me know and I’ll send a beta copy your way. That said, there are a couple of caveats:

• Right now it only produces citations in Chicago/Turabian style.  This is what I use at the GTU, but I’m planning on adding other formats in the fullness of time.  Let me know what you’d like to see!
• Author names have to be entered in this format: Last, First.  If you don’t do this, the citations won’t form properly, and children weep.

I’m hoping at some point to make this into a salable piece of software, so when the time comes, and I’m funding my church off of Microsoft-like profit streams, you can look on and say, “I helped make that happen!”

I would love your help, and with luck you’ll get a handy piece of software out of it, too!

We take them over four days, with two questions per day, and three and a half hours per question.  They cover the seven areas in which the Church’s canons require us to be proficient: Holy Scripture, Contemporary Society, Christian Theology & Missiology, Liturgy & Church Music, Christian Ethics & Moral Theology, the Theory & Practice of Ministry, and Church History, Including the Ecumenical Movement.

I have just finished these tests.  Below, I’ve posted the questions, and once my head has stopped spinning, I’ll post my responses to them, if people would like to read them.  All-in-all, it was kind of fun.  It was a great chance to bring together all the stuff I’ve learned in seminary and try to make some kind of coherent statement about the faith.  And so, without further ado: the questions:

Set 1: Holy Scripture

In the face of the tragedy and seeming randomness found in disease, people have often turned to the Bible to find a reason for their misfortune. In a three-page essay, explain your own exegetically informed understanding of the interrelationship of sin, disease, and healing in at least the following biblical passages:

You may use passages in addition to the two above if you wish to do so.

Set 2: Contemporary Society

One of the most daunting issues in contemporary society is the unprecedented complexity of global economic forces, with the potential for crisis in an interdependent world. The Episcopal Church should be able to speak credibly about the systemic and societal dimensions of such a crisis, in addition to addressing the pastoral concerns it might raise for individuals.

Understanding that there are no simple solutions to the problems that such complexity raises, respond in a three-page essay to the following question:

What can the Christian tradition usefully bring to the public discussion of an economic crisis that economists, politicians and business leaders, as such, might not bring in dealing with the underlying economic issues facing contemporary society?

Set 3: Christian Theology and Missiology

In the Book of Common Prayer the Exsultet states that “earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God” (287). Atonement accomplishes this reconciliation. There are different theologies of atonement. For example, in the BCP:

In an essay of three pages:

Set 4: Liturgy and Church Music

You are vicar of a small congregation. On one of the designated baptismal Sundays your parish will celebrate Holy Baptism. The church building includes a stationary altar at the front and a stationary font on the central axis inside the main door at the opposite end of the space. The seating consists of movable chairs.

In a three-page essay:

Set 5: Christian Ethics and Moral Theology

The education committee of the parish where you are rector has asked you to give an adult forum presentation on the ethical practice of medicine in the context of Christian moral theology.

Taking as a given the presumption that moral principles derived from scripture and theology should inform all areas of human activity, in a three-page essay:

Set 6: Theory and Practice of Ministry

You are rector of a parish that houses on site a popular, low-cost, non-profit, accredited preschool each day of the week. You serve on the board of this affiliated program. It is, in effect, subsidized by the parish, through its daily use of parish facilities (heat, space, etc.), without charge and with no acknowledgment in the parish budget. As the school has grown in success and popularity, its free use of church facilities has become a contentious issue between the leadership of the school and some members of the congregation.

Sunday School teachers increasingly complain about the preschool equipment and materials that are not stowed away, leaving a chaotic environment on Sundays. Moreover, parents; and teachers’ cars fill the church parking area during the week, leaving no room for the needs of those attending church meetings or programs held on weekdays. You also hear claims that although many new families are moving into the area and signing their children up for the preschool, they are not interested in joining the congregation. The vestry’s hope in originally supporting the school was that it would help spur growth in the parish; that has not occurred.

Some members of the vestry now want to charge fair market rent to the preschool or even to eliminate the program. Other vestry members want to continue to support the preschool as the parish’s ministry to families who pay the below-cost rate for the program, citing the importance of preschool programs for all children.

In a three-page essay, describe your leadership in this difficult though not uncommon parish situation, identifying at least three challenges for ministry, and explaining how you would respond to each of them.

Set 7: Church History

The following hymns appear in the The Hymnal 1982:

In an integrated three-page essay, relate each of these hymns to the development of Protestant Christianity by:

In our Good Friday service here at St Gregory’s, we read a section from TS Eliot’s poem “East Coker” that says, “Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith — But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

This is our season of waiting.  The coming Jesus is so close.  He is so close that he is, as the Apostle Paul says, in our hearts and on our lips.

God is just dying to be born, ready, full of promise.

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We are now at the end of Advent.  We have been waiting, and we have been hearing about God’s promises, and we have been hoping that What Mary said is true: that God is faithful and mindful of her love.

Mary’s song that we just heard is a lot to hear.  It’s a lot to believe.  God has promised to fill up the hungry, but people still need to be fed.  God has promised to bring the princes down, but they are still sitting.

And yet we hope.  We hope because hope is like love: You can’t prove it, there’s no way of controlling it.  We just have to trust that it’s true.

Advent is the time of year that we remember what it looks like when God says “I have a desire for you, a love, a dream.

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Some have said that the whole of Jesus life, death, and resurrection is what it looks like for God to love the world.  If that is so, then what we heard today is the beginning of the love story.

Mary had just gotten the news that she has been asked to be the mother of the messiah, the great savior that she and her people had been waiting for, through occupation and exile, all these many generations.  The Angel Gabriel who came to her told her everything she might be expected to hear about the savior: he will take up the throne of the great King David.  He will reign forever and never be overthrown.  This is what messiahs are for.

Mary agrees, and when she does, it is as if at the moment she does so, everything changes.  Suddenly what she has signed up for is something completely different than she had expected.

Suddenly, this fourteen-year old peasant girl, who, it should be mentioned, lives in the middle of nowhere, in a town nobody has heard of, has fallen in love with God.

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Sometimes we like to talk about the books that Mary would have known as the Bible as though they’re full of nothing but doom and gloom, punishment, judgement, and fire.  But if you had asked Mary, she would have told you one thing about what the Scriptures contained: God’s loving-kindness for God’s people.

And now, suddenly, to begin the God’s work in the world, Mary is given a glimpse of what that loving-kindness looks like, and she just has to tell somebody.  She’s filled up with it, and it comes spilling out: a picture of what it looks like for God to be out of her mind in love with the Creation.

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I can’t help but think that there must have been times for Mary and her people to believe in that love.  When the Roman soldiers were setting up camp in their towns.  When the tax collectors were taking so much that there wasn’t enough to buy food to eat.  When teenage girls without husbands got pregnant, and then had to hide out for fear of getting stoned to death by the authorities.  It would be hard to see just exactly how it is that God’s love is working here.

What the Magnificat, Mary’s Song of the Love of God tells us is exactly what God always does and we always forget: God is always doing things that we couldn’t expect.  God’s love is always pointing further than we can see.

I have a feeling that when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her all about the savior to come, she was expecting the dashing military type who would clean out the Romans and set things right, like they used to be.  That’s certainly the picture that Gabriel paints for her.  But as soon as she’s agreed, she knows better than what she’s just heard: Mary’s Song is about God doing everything backwards, everything upside-down, all of our millions of ways of making each other less human thrown out, nailed up, and let go.  There will be no military conquest, there will be no throne of David.  There will only be mercy.  Mary’s song is about what all love is about: Mary’s song is about dying and being given life, and about being truly human.

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The scandalous thing about the Christian message is that we claim to have experienced God as having become a human being.  Not a superman, or an angel, but a real man born from a real woman, with blood and tears and laughter.  A real human being, standing on the ground.

As Paul said a couple of weeks ago, if there’s one thing we know from the Bible about who God is beside the fact that God’s all crazy in love with us, it’s that God’s desire shapes our reality.  The things that God wants for the world are being worked out right now.  And more than anything else, what God wants for people is that they should be people.  Not pretend-people, or empowered-people, or humble-people, but people: real, true, fleshly human beings.

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And so, Mary’s Song is about God’s love; it’s about God working in history to love people to life, to make them back into people.  We go to great lengths to turn each other and ourselves into something other than human.  But the whole point of Mary’s Song is that these things really, really don’t matter to God.

You are not the pile of money that you’ve stacked up around yourself, it says.  You’re a person.

You’re not the pit that you’ve been thrown in by a system that has forgotten you.  You’re actually a real human being.

You are not the student loan debt that you’re afraid you’ll never repay, and you’re not the house that you just had to sell.  You’re not the ex-boyfriend that you’re still missing, and you’re not the college that you didn’t get into.

You are not problem to be solved, you’re a person.  You are not illegal, you’re beloved.  You are not a failure, you’re about to be resurrected.

God’s love is the kind of love that changes everything.  It even changes death into life.

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There is an old medieval folktale that tells that, when Gabriel came to visit Mary to invite her to join in God’s story of the Incarnation and the saving of the world, she was there weaving weaving Jesus’ burial shroud.  She already knew what was to come, and she was getting ready.

This is not the image that we ordinarily have of Mary at Christmastime.  This is not the Mary sitting peacefully by the manger, or looking pretty for the painter when hearing the news that soon she’s going to be in a family way.

This is not the way that we ordinarily think about Christmas, about the Incarnation, about the love of God.  God does not will death, and yet the medievals were not just morbidly fascinated by death.  They were surrounded by it.  I would imagine that death was much less interesting to your average Christian in the middle ages than it is for us, still sad, still tragic, but not at all unfamiliar.

And so, it’s just a folktale, but it points to something very important that is easy to miss at this time of year, when we think the focus is supposed to be on joy: that Christmas points to Good Friday.  Sometimes people here at St Gregory’s say that there are only two season in the liturgy: East and Easter is coming.  What we forget when we say that, though, is that Easter never comes before Good Friday: the resurrection never comes before the crucifixion.  You have to die before you can be resurrected.  Like all love, the Love of God that we celebrate at Christmastime, goes through suffering into life.  And, Christmas is about the beginnings of love.

You are suffering now, says God, and I am with you.  You are dying now, and I am waiting to breathe you back to life.  You have died, and now you are alive.