From our Micah Fellow: A Poem for the Week

This week our Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis, invites you to reflect on a poem she was recently reminded of; she found it especially relevant as she reflected on our responses to violence in the Easter season, and as she looks forward to Climate Revival in Copley Square this coming Saturday.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head. 
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer. 

When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you 
to die for profit they will let you know. 
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 man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed. 

Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. 
Say that your main crop is the forest 
that you did not plant, 
that you will not live to harvest. 

Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. 
Put your faith in the two inches of humus 
that will build under the trees 
every thousand years. 

Listen to carrion -- put your ear 
close, and hear the faint chattering 
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful 
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men. 

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child? 
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth? 

Go with your love to the fields. 
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts. 

As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn't go. 

Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction. 
Practice resurrection.

Et homo factus est: A sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday

This sermon was given by Student President Graham Simpson '13 on Good Shepherd Sunday, 21 April 2013. The readings for the week can be found here. See also this article on Episcopal Cafe written by our Chaplain, which uses Graham's sermon to reflect on the events of the past week.

In 1749, Johann Sebastian Bach was 64 years old and had written over 1000 pieces of music through his lifetime, pieces for organs, orchestras, and choruses.  By modern accounts, he was nearly blind and suffering from illness that would bring him to his passing within the next year.  Over the last decades of his life, Bach composed the various sections of his Mass in B minor, setting the complete Latin Mass to music.  His different personal compositional styles and different historical musical styles are seen within the hour-and-a-half musical masterpiece that today is considered one of the very greatest choral works of all time.

As he lay dying in 1749, Bach decided to rewrite one final section of the B minor Mass, the “Et incarnates est” section of the Creed.  Bach had already written music for this portion of the text as part of the preceding Soprano-Alto duet.  That duet sets this portion the text that we will recite shortly in the Nicene Creed:

“We believe in on Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.  Through him all things were made.  For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”

In 1749, this sick, blind 64-year-old decided to throw out the last page or so of the duet and write a new chorus for the text that follows.  Unlike the duet which is in a major key, G major, “Et incarnatus est” is in the tragic, lamenting key of B minor, one of only five movements in the B minor Mass that is actually in B minor.  The entire chorus sings the words:

“By the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man”

“Et homo factus est”

“And was made man”

In Bach’s massive catalogue of compositions, this is generally thought to be the last piece of music that the composer ever wrote for choral voices.  “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto, ex Maria virgine; et homo factus est.” “And was made man.”

I am not really an expert on Bach’s life or composition and so I apologize if any of my music history is off.  But I am a singer and was fortunate enough to have rehearsal on this Tuesday afternoon when I rehearsed the B minor Mass with the Harvard University Choir.  It had been a long day since returning back from the Marathon on Monday.  I hadn’t any time to put my thoughts in order and was feeling anxious and tense.  In that moment, in our first rehearsal with strings, Bach’s music calmed me.  And moved me.  “Et homo factus est.”  “And was made man.”  The Creed continues, “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”  I imagined this aging, blind composer at death’s door, coming to grips with the suffering of this Earth and connecting to God through the shared suffering of Christ on the cross.  Christ was made man to share with us in our suffering on Earth, to experience the pains and trials that we face as humans.

In today’s familiar Psalm, the Psalmist tells us that the Lord is with us at all times, even when “we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”  For Christ suffers with us, in pain, in death, in sorrow.

I must say, when I agreed to preach on a Sunday evening, as has become the custom of graduating Presidents of the Chaplaincy, I did not expect to speak after a week like this one.  When Luther gave me an out to give up this pulpit on this challenging Sunday, I was tempted to take him up on it.  How could I speak on Good Shepherd Sunday following a week like this one where we, the sheep, had felt so abandoned by the shepherd?  How could I talk about the experiences, shared, but also unique, of such intense fear, sadness, and anger?  How could I come to grips with the fact that my city had been the focus of such an act of terror?

And obviously, I don’t have answers.  But I do know that Christ is with us in our losses.  In the words of Henry Baker’s paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm that we sang,

“In death’s dark vale I fear no ill

With thee, dear Lord, beside me;

Thy rod and staff my comfort still,

Thy cross before to guide me”

And we remember that though Christ suffered and died on the cross for our sake, but that is not where the Easter story ends.  After all what would Bach’s “Crucifixus” be if it were not followed by an “Et resurrexit”, that is “And he rose.”  The Good News of Easter is that Christ’s story and our story is more than pain and suffering.  We remember that we are promised eternal life with Christ in the Resurrection.

But how do we reconcile this faith in eternal life with the intense darkness of a week like this past one.  The Good News of the Easter Season is not just about the future.  There was indeed Good News in this terrible week.  We find examples of God’s presence over and over again in terrible situations like Boston experienced this week.  We have by  now all heard stories of heroic actions taken by people in the immediate aftermath of the bombing on Monday.  In the videos of the explosion, we saw people running towards the explosion to help others who had been hurt.  I learned about another hero yesterday while watching the First Pitch during the Red Sox pregame ceremonies.  Matt Peterson was an off-duty firefighter who ran towards the blast site to rescue a little boy who had lost his leg.  He was one of many who carried people to safety, gave blood, or helped however they could.  In such acts of love and compassion, we see the Good News of the Easter season.  But even though I know this, I struggle to sort through the conflicting emotions and feelings.  How can we see any glimmer of hope when we are surrounded by suffering and confusion.

On Monday, I skipped my classes to watch the race and was hanging out near the 25th mile, near Fenway Park, when the two bombs exploded.  I had no idea what had happened until I started receiving texts from people asking me if I was okay and what was going on.  It seemed impossible to believe at first, but we started walking back towards campus, deciding right away not to take public transportation.  I was overwhelmed as I tried to sort out what was going on and what my friends and I should be doing.  I first tried to contact my brother James since I knew he was hanging out near the finish line.  Fortunately, he was back at Northeastern by this point and was able to contact me and my parents to let us know.  I got in touch with my parents relatively quickly as well.  In the confusion of busy signals and failed texts, my roommate Michael managed to get a text to my father before I did and I sent one to his mother as his cell phone battery died.

Even once I crossed the river, the situation continued to overwhelm me.  I was safe and so was everybody that I knew.  But it was immediately clear that dozens, if not hundreds, were hurt and that at least two people were dead including an eight-year-old boy.  My phone continued to buzz with texts asking me if I was alright and if I knew what was going on.  I received just as many texts that read “Love you” that had never felt more heart-felt and sincere.  Sadness, relief, anger, sympathy, fear, and love all swept over me, in a cloud of contradictory emotions.

This whole week has continued to be a confused jumble of these feelings.  I continued to feel uneasy and afraid.  I mourned for those who had died, lost limbs, or suffered other injuries.  But I also spent more time talking about love, feelings, and life with friends and my girlfriend than I normally do.  I got lunch with my brother James on Tuesday and stayed in touch with him throughout the week.  Amidst the craziness, I managed to find moments of peace and happiness.

When I awoke Friday morning, the news brought out conflicting feelings and emotions in fuller force.  Violence had exploded in our city again, a police officer was slain, and the situation was only more confusing, if anything.  Reliable information was a challenge to come by for hours.  Harvard was shut down in lockdown.  The streets were eerily empty and anxieties ran even higher than they had on Monday.  As we learned about the two brothers, we felt upset, mad, confused, and disturbed.  Sirens and bomb threats terrified us.

But again, at least for me, the day was more than one of darkness and despair.  There were moments where it felt more like a snow day than anything else.  No one tried to read or work.  Tutors cooked food in their suites for students.  I watched two movies.  I spent the entire day with those closest to me at Harvard and stayed in touch with those beyond our campus.  Students genuinely appreciated the dining hall staff, the police force, and each other far more than on a normal day.  It was a bizarre day, but not a day without joy or love, or even without fun or laughter.

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured at night, I felt relief.  I hoped for some sort of justice.  I was satisfied that our law enforcement had successfully pulled off their manhunt.  But I felt very uneasy.  Confused and perhaps further saddened.  How could a 19-year-old that lived within two blocks of one friend, had worked at a Harvard pool with another friend, and had played one-on-one basketball with a third committed such hateful acts?  He seemed like such a normal American citizen.  He had wrestled at his high school, won a scholarship, and liked to play FIFA.  It doesn’t fit for me.  I could feel no joy at Facebook statuses of “Got him” or consider going out to the parties that had been rescheduled in celebration of his capture.  I did not – and still do not know – how to react.  An unclear muddle of thoughts fills my head.

But I am trying to accept that it is okay to feel conflicted and confused at times like this.  That is part of what makes us human.  And it is in these moments that we can reach out to God and feel the Holy Spirit.  The Lord is with us in green pastures and he leads us beside still waters. The Lord also walks us through the valley of the shadow of death with his rod and his staff.  And sometimes we are not sure whether we are in the green pastures or the valley of shadow.  Maybe we can be in both places at the same time.  We can experience the suffering of the cross and the hope of the resurrection.

The Lord is my shepherd.  Christ is also the Lamb of God.  Christ gives us eternal life.  Christ also suffers with us.  The shepherd protects and guides us, but the shepherd also feels our pain and fear.  And as Christ is in all of us, we must all feel each other’s pain and also protect one another.  We look to the hope of a new day, but that does not mean that we cannot mourn and lament.  We can live with both contradictions.  We pray today for the families and friends of Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzhi, and Sean Collier and remember their lives which were cut too short.  We pray for all those injured in the events this week, especially those that are still in the hospital.  And we pray that we can continue to find hope and peace in God.  We pray the prayer from the end of Bach’s B minor Mass, “Dona nobis pacem.” “Grant us peace.”

Catastrophe, Chorus, and Comedy : How does God open our eyes?

This sermon was given by Kellogg Fellow Emily Garcia on the Third Sunday in Easter, 14 April 2013, at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. The readings for the day can be found here.

Dearest Lord, we ask that you would open us to you, so that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts might be pleasing to you. Amen.

Friends, before I share some thoughts on the Scriptures, I hope you’ll allow me a short church-nerd lesson. You all probably know most of this already, but we have this opening prayer at the beginning of our service, and it changes every week. It’s called the “Cóllect of the Day”. (Just a tangent: when I first became Episcopalian I outed myself as a newbie by continually calling it the colléct.)

The name cóllect comes from the Latin collecta, whose foggy origins seem to mean “the gathering of the people”, the collecting up of many prayers into one. What’s reeeally interesting to me is that these Collects are paired with particular readings throughout our yearly lectionary.

So! The lectionary, at its best, places some of the myriad Biblical voices in conversation and counterpoint to each other. And the Collect acts as a kind of moderator, offering an opening remark to focus our attention. I’ve often found that the Collect raises questions in me, which find their answers or echoes in the readings.

I explain all this because tonight’s a good example, and I want to share some thoughts on the question the Collect raises. Here it is: O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work. Open the eyes of our faith that we may behold him. Open the eyes of our faith.

What are we asking for, when we ask to have the eyes of our faith opened? What are we asking for, or waiting for? And how does God respond—how does He open our eyes    to see Christ?

The authors of Acts, Revelation, and the Gospel of John all have very different answers to that question.

Caravaggio's Conversione

This scene in Acts says that God opens our eyes in startling, strange unexpected signs. Saul is approaching Damascus when, “suddenly, a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, ‘Saul Saul why do you persecute me?’”. This light blinds him for three days, and he’s “led by the hand” to Damascus, where he prays until God sends the disciple Ananias to heal him and fill him with the Spirit.

I love all the paintings and drawings that have been made of this bizarre moment on the road. Sometimes Saul is shown flying off his horse, knocked by a blaze. Or Christ is leaning in from a cloud, and Saul has his ear turned toward him. Or Saul is falling forward before Christ in humility— or, like in the Caravaggio painting in your bulletin, Saul just lies there, stunned. Stunned silent, even, maybe still stunned long after the voice of Christ has left his ear.

Saul continues on where he’d been headed, but now he goes “led by the hand.” Later, he receives the power of the Spirit from Ananias, but only after he has been made powerless. God opens Saul’s eyes, but only only after they have been stunned shut.

When God opens our eyes in this way, it may not knock us off our path, but it’ll change the REASON we’re on that path. When we see Christ in this way, we might not turn around, but we walk on in a very different way than how we started. And, we might need a word and a prayer from someone who God sends to us, to explain what has happened.

This is one way God opens our eyes. How else does God open our eyes, to see Christ? In the Revelation to John, the narrator’s eyes are already privileged in one way,  because he has been taken into heaven, he’s seen the one seated on the throne who looks like carnelian, and the sea of glass, like crystal. But a crisis comes, and John weeps because no one can be found to open a scroll. An elder says, “Don’t weep, see, the Lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered,” and he is worthy to open the scroll.

John looks up, and instead of a lion, and sees a lamb, literally, “a little lamb,” “standing as if it had been slaughtered.” I imagine John is confused for a moment—can this be Christ? But then the voices of the creatures and the elders sing that this Lamb has “ransomed for God saints from EVERY tribe AND language AND people AND nation.” Then, comes our reading—a moment when ALL THESE who have been ransomed and redeemed begin to sing—and there are myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands. And then, as if they could not help but join, “EVERY creature in heaven AND on earth AND under the earth AND in the sea, AND all that is in them,” sing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever.”

John had already seen God, had seen heaven, but couldn’t understand what Christ was, until it had been explained to him in the voices of myriads of myriads of saints. John’s eyes were opened by the voices of every people and nation proclaiming the truth of God, and by the whole chorus of creation singing the truth of Christ’s reign and redemption.

For many of us, God opens our eyes to Christ in the singing voices of others—in the saintly lives led by others, in the glory of the created order. We may think we have seen God on his throne, we may think we know the Lion who has conquered, only to have our eyes opened by another’s song, our ideas upended by the Lamb.

But how ELSE does God open our eyes to behold Christ? Our Gospel reading, interestingly, has a couple different ways God opens our eyes. In this story, the camaraderie of the disciples and their friendship with Christ is still evident. Peter decides to go out for a round of nighttime fishing, and his friends join him. At daybreak, after a fruitless—or fishless—night, a distant figure on the beach shouts, “Boys!” (The Oxford Annotated says this is a better translation than “children”.) As a master of understatement, this figure suggests they’ll find “SOME fish” if they throw their net on the other side.

The sudden absurd weight of fish in their net seems to be what opens John’s eyes to see that it is Jesus. He turns to his friend Peter and says, “It is the Lord!” And THAT seems to be what opens Peter’s eyes to Christ’s presence. The Gospel says, “When he had heard that it was the Lord,” he put on his clothes and impulsively dove in.

So God opens John’s eyes in this almost comical experience of abundance, and he opens Peter’s eyes through the words of a friend. And these aren’t judgmental or explanatory words—simply, “Look! It is the Lord!”

By the time the rest of the disciples get to the beach, and Jesus invites them to eat, their eyes have all been opened, and no one needs to ask, “Who are you?” God opened their eyes, they are beholding Christ, and they sit down to have breakfast on the beach at sunrise with the Lord.

So Acts, Revelation, and John tell us what it means to have God open our eyes to behold Christ. I wonder, then, how God has opened your eyes, our eyes? Perhaps he did this gently, in the breaking of bread or the voice of a friend? Perhaps he opened your eyes with a great light or a great catastrophe? Or with the holy lives of people you’ve read about, or with the singing beauty of nature? Perhaps he opened your eyes with a sign of abundance and plenty in your life, a loving family, a good friend? When has God opened our eyes? When have we seen Christ, and heard him say, “Tend my sheep. Follow me.”

O God, we praise and bless you for your mysterious ways. We look for you in the world, we try to understand you and how we should live, but we can’t do it alone. Open the eyes of our faith, so that we may behold your son, the risen Christ, in all his redeeming work, and know you.

No More of This! : A Morning Prayers Homily

This homily was given by our Chaplain, Luther Zeigler, at Morning prayers in Appleton Chapel on the morning of Maundy Thursday.

A reading from the 22^nd chapter of the gospel of Luke:  “While Jesus was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. Judas approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, ‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, ‘Lord, should we strike with the sword?’ Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him.”  (Luke 22:47-51)  Here ends the reading.

On Monday of this week, I traveled to our Nation’s Capital along with twenty Episcopal bishops and hundreds of fellow Episcopal clergy and laypeople from around the country to participate in a “Stations of the Cross” pilgrimage that started in Lafayette Square across from the White House, winded its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, and ended on the steps of the Capitol.  Organized by the Bishop of Connecticut in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings, this Holy Week pilgrimage was intended to be a public witness against an American culture of gun violence that claims too many lives each day across this country, including not only the children and adults who were massacred last December in Newtown, Connecticut, but also the 2,244 Americans killed by guns in the three months since. 

Through this pilgrimage we hoped, among other things, to persuade Congress to inject some sanity into federal gun control law so that weapons of death are not so readily accessible to those prone to misuse them.  Our public witness was designed, in the words of National Cathedral Dean Gary Hall, to demonstrate to our nation’s leaders that “the gun lobby is no match for the cross lobby.” 

We are not naïve.  We know what we are up against, and we are mindful that the sources of violence in American society are myriad and run deep.  We understand that limiting access to guns is not, by itself, enough.  Any comprehensive response to this epidemic requires, among other things, improved mental health care for our most vulnerable citizens, an assessment of the economic and social conditions that often spawn the resort to weapons, and a critical look at all aspects of our culture’s glorification of violence.  With our presence in Washington we hoped to shine some of God’s light on these issues as well.

At bottom, though, what distinguished our pilgrimage from other demonstrations in Washington was that our primary motivation was not political but religious.  Our witness against violence was embedded not in the rhetoric of public policy but in the narrative of the Passion.  For those of you unfamiliar with the “Stations of the Cross,” it is a dramatic liturgy commonly practiced by Christians during Holy Week in which participants prayerfully re-enact the biblical events that comprise the final moments of Jesus’ journey to the Cross.  Stations of the Cross are usually observed within a church or in some other sacred setting.  Our pilgrimage, by contrast, was quite intentionally a public one, with stations set along the iconic landmarks of our national corridors of power.  

In this setting, we sought to juxtapose Jesus’ life and death at the hands of a ruthlessly coercive Roman empire against the lives and deaths of all the innocent ones we Americans each day allow to be victimized by our own obsession with guns.  We came not sanctimoniously to condemn our legislators, but to confess our own sin of complacence in not doing more to stop the violence in our own neighborhoods, and to invite our representatives to search their own hearts in a similarly penitential spirit.   

The Christian faith is unique among world religions in that we worship the victim of a murder.  Jesus of Nazareth was viciously put to death by a society deeply threatened by his willingness to speak out against injustice, by his unrelenting commitment to the vulnerable, and by his unconditional love for all those persons unloved by the world.  The evangelists make clear, however, that in facing his accusers, Jesus never himself responds with violence of any sort.  Although his cause was pure and his arrest and conviction unjust, he refuses to retaliate.  Jesus knows only acceptance; he does not condemn, resist or exclude.

As we see in our text from Luke today, when Jesus’ followers understandably react to his betrayal and arrest by brandishing the sword against those who would harm him, Jesus rebukes them, reaches out to heal the wounded ear of his oppressor, and responds unequivocally to all who would hear:  “No more of this!”  No matter how just the cause, no matter how pure the victim, Jesus’ response to the violence of the world is never counter-violence, but always loving protest:  No more of this.

The Christian faith rests on this seeming paradox:  God’s chosen one is the crucified one, the purest and most innocent of victims.  And yet, Jesus is no mere martyr.  By the resurrection that is to come three days hence, we are assured of the Father’s refusal to permit the hatred of the oppressor to extinguish the life of love embodied by the Son.  Rather, God stands with and vindicates the Son, just as He stands with all victims.  As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once put it, what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ teaches us is that “it is with the victim, the condemned, that God identifies, and it is in the company of the victim . . . that God is to be found, and nowhere else.”*

This is why during Holy Week we turn toward the Cross.  In a relentlessly violent world, our only hope lies in facing the victim.  It is there that we confront not only the consequences of our own complicity in the harm that has been done, but also the possibility of forgiveness by a God whose mercy will not permit our brutality to have the last word.  But our redemption can begin only by first facing the victim who bears the marks of the hurt we caused, or at least allowed to happen. 

Ultimately, then, this is why we went to Washington this past Monday:  to stand with all the victims, and to do so in the name of the One whose love overcomes all the hate the world can muster, and whose healing presence never abandons those crucified by its violent ways.  With Jesus, let us say:  No more of this.

         

         

*Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1982), p. 5.

The Wedding at Cana : A Morning Prayers Homily by Graham Simpson

Graham is a graduating senior and the student President of ECH. He gave this Homily on Wednesday in Holy Week at the Morning Prayers service in Appleton Chapel (Memorial Church) on Harvard Yard.


This morning’s reading comes from the Thirteenth Chapter of the Gospel of John, verses 34 and 35: “Jesus said, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.   Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’”

I spent part of Spring Break this past week with a handful of close friends away in rural Vermont, relaxing with food, games, and jigsaw puzzles.  One of these puzzles was that of a 16th century painting by Paolo Veronese, depicting The Wedding Feast at Cana.  None of my friends were familiar with the Biblical story that this painting illustrates so I felt obliged to share the tale with them.  In his Gospel, John writes about a wedding banquet where the guests finish all the wine as the party is nearing an end.  Jesus is a guest at this wedding and he takes matters into his own hands.  He takes some hundred gallons of water and miraculously transforms the water into wine.  And not just any wine, but exceptionally good wine.  According to John, this was the first miracle Jesus performed.

My friends enjoyed the story and deemed it fitting for a Spring Break where we never did run out of wine.  And I enjoyed sharing the tale, but it is not a Biblical passage I had ever really reflected upon.  Though I remember it from my childhood book of illustrated Bible stories and had brought it up in at least one friendly argument about Christianity and alcohol consumption, it is not a story I had thought twice about before and couldn’t recall a sermon preached on the miracle.  When I did think about it, I realized that an important element of the story and what really makes it fitting for a Renaissance painting or a child’s illustrated Bible is that the miracle takes place in an atmosphere of celebration, full of many people, reveling in each other’s company. 

For this first miracle, Jesus chooses a setting of community and friendship.  This detail reminds me of the holiness of such social gatherings of friends and families.  Today’s reading came from another congregation of friends, John’s telling of “The Last Supper” which we will remember tomorrow on Maundy Thursday.  When Jesus brings together his friends for this last Passover meal, he has a simple commandment for his disciples: to “love one another” as he has loved them.

As people of faith, we cannot survive without gathering in groups.  We need communities in which we love one another.  This is why – though our religious journeys are unique and personal – we come together in congregations like this one to pray, reflect, and listen.  We need friends and communities with whom we can share our joys and sorrows.

My last year here at Harvard has been full of many joys: memorable formals, exciting classes, parties in Eliot House.  But it has also been full of a great deal of stress and anxiety as Commencement looms closer and closer and a new, unknown stage of life awaits me.  Fortunately, in all these days of joy and anxiety, I have never felt alone.   I have shared these days with my loved ones and my communities at Harvard: These include my religious communities, here at Memorial Church and Morning Prayers as a member of the Choral Fellows, and the Episcopal Chaplaincy, where I worship on Sunday evenings; and also the other wonderful people that I have in my life, friends from extracurricular clubs, those I work with at the radio station, the roommates that I live with.

With these friends, I have shared many laughs and many tears over the last four years.  Now, I’m guessing the guests at the wedding in Cana also shared laughs and tears with one another when they gathered.  Such is the case at any wedding.  And I’m guessing the disciples partaking in Passover dinner with Jesus thousands of years ago also laughed and cried at that table.  For these wedding guests and these disciples loved each other and were in community with one another.  Only with such relationships can we hope to make it through the highs and lows of life.

As my post-graduation plans currently stand, I intend on leaving the United States this summer to live abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer, where I will remain for over two years’ time.  The scariest part about this plan is leaving my loved ones here in the States and dealing with the inevitable changes in how I relate to the important communities in my life.  How will I handle days of happiness and sorrow without these friends in my life?

I find peace in knowing that I will not lose these relationships or these communities.  I will think of them and know that they will consider me.  With the marvels of modern technology, I will be able to stay in very close touch with these friends and groups.  But also, I find peace in knowing that I will make new friends and find new communities abroad.  For wherever God’s children live, God’s presence will bring them together in love and compassion.

Let us pray:
Almighty God, we thank you for the blessing of family, friends, and significant others, and for the care which surrounds us on every side.  We thank you for the communities to which we belong, our churches, our towns, our universities, and the increasingly connected global community to which we all belong.  Help us to love one another as you love us, so that we may grow closer to one another and closer to you.  Amen.