Christ our Mother: A Sermon for the Last Sunday in Easter

This sermon was given by our Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis, on May 12th: the Last Sunday in Easter, Mother's Day, and our last evening service together as a Chaplaincy. The readings for the day can be found here.

Today is a bit of a challenge for me in terms of preaching, because even more than usual, I am tempted to try to cover everything! I am intrigued by the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven, which the church calendar celebrated on Thursday. I am a huge fan of the English mystic Julian of Norwich, whose feast day was Wednesday. As you know, today is Mother’s Day and Bishop Tom and many people from the Diocese of Massachusetts are walked to stand publicly against gun violence in the annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace in Dorchester this morning. And then there is that peculiar, circular, beautiful gospel reading for today--I in you & you in me & they in me... It’s a lot to cover in one sermon! And probably not wise to try, but I can’t resist. Forgive me, it's my last sermon of the year!

I don’t know if the Ascension means much to you or how you interpret it...I confess that I actually hadn't thought about it at much length before this sermon. It wasn't a theological point that really grabbed my attention, but this week it really struck me.

It says in the Acts reading from Thursday that the disciples asked Christ if it was time for the restoration of God’s Kingdom. And Jesus responds by saying that the timing of God is not for them to know, but “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Then Christ is lifted up out of their sight by a cloud, and two wise figures in white say to the crowd of disciples gathered there, “why do you keep gazing up into heaven?”

By leaving the disciples alone on earth while Christ ascends to heaven, we, as contemporary disciples, receive a charge from Christ. To be witnesses on this earth. Not to pine after heaven or ask when all things will be made right by God. But to practice the power of the Holy Spirit right here in our charge as witnesses, from our own city to the ends of the earth.

But what does a witness do? What is a witness? A witness doesn't just act mindlessly. Nor does a witness just see. Witnesses are neither passive observers nor thoughtless actors. A witness is aware. A witness sees the reality of the world, and with  thoughtfulness and compassion acts and testifies in accordance with her values. It is a sacred call that Christ gives us in the Ascension account in Acts--to be witnesses in the world--to choose awareness of reality & not to stay silent, but to speak and to act.

The truth that we know all too well is that we live in a world of brokenness and suffering, and so our sacred call to bear witness to that reality is a powerful and challenging one. It’s not easy to witness suffering, to witness violence. As witnesses, however, we are also called to witness the beauty of this world, the small flashes of compassion and peace that sometimes go unnoticed. We are called to testify to love. In this way, being a witness is a  rather maternal call, for all of us...as we are invited into the possibility of observing and acting with a tenderness, justice, and love that is grounded in reality and oneness.

Julian of Norwich, the English mystic who was commemorated this week, lived in a time of disease, violence, and societal upheaval. Millions and millions of people in Europe died during the mid to late 14th century while the plagues raged. Julian witnessed this reality, and undoubtedly suffered because of it, and yet her legacy is one of hope and love and oneness with God. She is famous for the vivid vision she received where Christ came to her and told her, “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things, will be well.” Julian also received visions that Christ was our Mother--a somewhat unusual theology at the time and even now. She saw the relationship between Christians and Christ as one of nurture, love, and sacrifice, and Christ literally as our mother, taking on our human nature in what Julian called “the motherhood of grace.” Julian was a witness to the oneness of humanity in Christ's motherly love, in Christ's motherhood of grace.

Taking a cue  from Julian of Norwich, let’s look at the readings for this week again: Christ, our Mother, ascends into heaven, and asks us to be her witnesses to the ends of the earth. She asks us to wait, not idly, but actively. While she is in heaven, and we are here on this imperfect earth. The disciples want to know when all will be made right, when Christ will return, and they keep gazing up at the heavens expectantly, probably impatiently, with frustration, sadness, maybe even despair. Their best friend, their brother, teacher, mother, has died unjustly, been mysteriously and miraculously raised from the dead, walked alongside them once more, and now finally leaves again as suddenly as she arose from the grave.  

But if Christ is our Mother, and leaves us as her witnesses on this earth, we know that even in our separation from Christ, there is tenderness, nurture and love--there is oneness. It can be discouraging, tragic even, to be a human being. We often long for something better than the realities of this world. We yearn for union with God. There is a temptation to believe that all things will be made right sooner rather than later, or at least to hope. We hear this desire in the reaction of the disciples to the Ascension, and it is also reflected in the reading from Revelation today:

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come."

And let everyone who hears say, "Come."

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Come! Come! There is an impatience! Come, let us drink that water of life! Let us be nurtured by the maternal milk that Christ offers us from her breast--the water of abundant life! How can we make that feeling of safety, of love, of comfort & closeness--like a child at her mother’s breast-- a reality in this world of violence and disappointments and broken hearts and empty bellies?

Today’s Mother's Day Walk for Peace in Dorchester is one beautiful example. Not because the walk itself is going to end gun violence in our city. Not because any public protests or actions can make decisive, instant change in our society. But our gospel reading for today reveals to us what is powerful about this kind of action:  it creates oneness, in the way that the gospel of John describes. Coming together in common cause for good with people with whom we wouldn’t necessarily come together otherwise is undeniably powerful. Jesus says in this passage, “God, I am in you, and you are in me,  and as such, the people are in me so that they can know you.” It is through our oneness in Christ's spirit that we have connection to God, that we have union with love, and that we have the possibility of changing the world through our powerful role as witnesses. An action like the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace is a beautiful example of what witness and oneness look like, calling mothers and others into unity in a message of peace: We see our children shot down on our own streets, we witness that truth, and we speak to it--we bear witness & testify together.

As human beings who have had the experience of holding another human being within their bodies, mothers seem particularly aware of the need to care for others, of the lack of separation between individual people--the fundamental unity of humanity. Mothers can relate to what Christ says in the gospel today: “I am in you and you are in me.” Mothers have literally held their children within them. But even for those of us who have never been mothers, or perhaps never will be--by choice, circumstance, biology--we can learn from the power of a mother's witness. The capacity for humans to hold other humans within us is not limited to the physicality of motherhood. By holding one another in love, we become part of a web of connection that binds us to the Holy, and that expands our sense of compassion and justice out beyond our own self-interest. By holding one another in love, we live into our maternal capacity for witness and oneness.

Julian tells us “all will be well, all will be well,” and perhaps her vision could become a reality in this world. Maybe not as quickly as we'd like, but if we all held the people of our communities and families and world a little closer to us, and if we all understood this oneness as a clarion call to courageous compassion--to witness to peace, maybe then all would be well. 

This call to witness to peace is not a passive call, but a call to activity. Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. Peace is not gazing up at the sky, focused on heaven. As witnesses and peacemakers we are called to active awareness of the world around us and courage to face it with that fierce maternal love within us all--that love that our Mother Christ gives to us. The power of the Holy Spirit has come upon us and does come upon and will come upon us so that we can be courageous in our witness and our love, from those most intimate to us, to the ends of the Earth! As Christ says today, “so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." So that the young people who are shot on our streets each and every day may be in us, so that the civilians who are wounded and killed by bombs every day in Afghanistan may be in us, so that the mothers whose milk--whose water of life--is dried within their breasts by hunger every day may be in us--so that Love may call us into witness and oneness. Amen.

The Easter Vigil Sermon: The women at the tomb

This sermon was given by The Revd. Luther Zeigler at the Easter Vigil on March 30th, at Christ Church Cambridge. The Gospel reading for the day on which he preaches can be found here.

In the name of the risen Christ, through whom we are given new life, fresh hope, and everlasting joy.  Amen.

In churches around the world this evening, preachers are climbing into the pulpit, like I am tonight, in fear and trembling, not sure if we can muster words that do justice to the good news of Easter.  Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the greatest theologians this country ever produced, once quipped that even as a diehard Protestant who loved a good sermon, his preference on Easter Sunday was to sneak off to a “high church” service where all the emphasis was on the liturgy, music and sacrament because, he insisted, the Easter message is best absorbed just by listening to the gospel story itself, singing the great Easter hymns, and sharing the bread and wine together as a renewed community.  

It is hard to quarrel with Niebuhr.  Words from the pulpit do not seem adequate to describe God’s mysterious and mighty act of raising his Son from the dead so that we might live, this event we call ‘the Resurrection.’  It is tempting just to leave it at “Christ is risen!  Alleluia!” and get on with the Eucharist.  And yet, with all deference to Niebuhr, I honestly don’t think we as preachers, or indeed any of us as Christians, can get away with sidestepping the question of what the Resurrection means.  

Yes, it is true that our words will never be up to capturing the mystery of the Resurrection, but nevertheless the challenge for each of us each day is to ask:  how do I live more fully into resurrected life?  For there is a grave danger in thinking that the Resurrection is merely some over and done with historical event – something that happened in an empty tomb a few thousand years ago – that is either to be believed or not.  In fact, the Resurrected Christ is a living and ever-present Christ, who is continually calling us into new and healthier ways of being human. And to discern how to respond to that call, we have to ask ourselves, what does resurrection mean for us here, right now?

A clue to how to approach this question, I might suggest, lies in our gospel reading from Luke and his account of the women at the empty tomb:  

The first thing to note is that these women – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and certain other unnamed women – are present.  Despite their grief and the obvious risk of being caught by the authorities as one of Jesus’ followers, the women are all there, seeking their Lord.  Unlike the male disciples, all of whom have fled the scene in fear, in some cases having repeatedly denied even knowing Jesus, the women persevere in being present.  What their example teaches is that the living Christ appears to those who seek him and remain present to his reality in the world.  And for this reason, in baptism, we promise, as May just did, to seek and serve Christ in all persons.

What a great joy it is, I might add, for our Chaplaincy community to be here today with our mother parish to welcome into God’s family one of our own young women, May Chow, a Harvard Law School student and a product of the Episcopal campus ministry at the University of Michigan.  I am so grateful to May for her faithful presence this year in the Chaplaincy, as I am grateful to this parish for its continuing support in helping our Chaplaincy be a welcoming presence to students like May.

The second thing to note about the women in Luke’s story is that their presence at the tomb is not animated by some idle curiosity or self-interested motive, but rather they come out of an overwhelming sense of compassion.  They bring spices as an expression of their care for their Lord, so as to honor in tenderness and love the dead body they are expecting to find.  Indeed, it was this same sense of compassion that brought many of these same women, according to John’s gospel, to sit at the foot of the Cross as Jesus died on Friday.  They seek to be a balm to the wounded, a comfort to the dying.  Thus, the second lesson we can take away from the example of these women is that the risen Christ appears to those who open themselves to the hurts of the world, who tend to the sick and the dying, and whose hearts are filled with Christ’s own spirit of compassion and care.

Finally, upon discovering that the tomb is empty, and being reminded by the angelic visitors that Jesus had promised he would rise to new life, note that the women immediately trust in the risen Christ’s presence and run to tell their story to others.  Again, unlike the male disciples, represented in Luke’s story by Peter, who seem to require some tangible evidence of resurrection in the form of the discarded linen cloth, the women come to faith by trusting in the memory of Jesus’ ministry and the promises he had made to them.  They are willing to believe in the enduring goodness of what they had experienced in him, while others seem first to want proof.

This is no mere gullibility on their part.  Remember that these women, whom we first encountered in the eighth chapter of Luke, had been followers of Jesus throughout his Galilean ministry.  Indeed, Luke tells us that they were women of means who had given up their resources to support Jesus and the disciples.  Selfless servants, more often than not a silent presence in the background, they nevertheless had been devoted followers from the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and were present for his teaching, for his healing of the sick, and for his prophetic challenges to the powers and principalities of this world.  

The women, in short, had come to trust in his divine authority and the Kingdom he had begun to inaugurate.  These truths were not things they could prove with tangible evidence or data, but they were truths they had come to live by and were willing to stake their lives on.  They had met a man who was a true God-bearer and they believed in his risen life.  And they were eager to proclaim his message of love, peace, and reconciliation, even as the men initially dismiss their belief as “idle tales.”

In sum, one of the most striking truths about the gospels is that Christ’s story begins and ends with women.  God chose to enter our world through the faithful willingness of a young woman, Mary, to bear him as an infant child, and God also chose to entrust the astonishing news of his Son’s resurrected life first to the care of women.  It is the women, not the men, to whom God seems to turn first.  Moreover, while the women (like the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene) are always faithful and trusting in their response to Jesus, the men more often than not are off pursuing their own glory (like James and John vying to be the greatest of the disciples), or denying their friend in a crisis (like Peter), or even worse, betraying their friend into the hands of death (like Judas).

Perhaps God’s decision to entrust the women first with his message of love and hope tells us something important about faithful discipleship.  In answering the question of how we can best live into the resurrected life of Christ, maybe, just maybe, it is to the lives of the women of the New Testament that we should primarily turn – to their abiding and faithful presence; to their compassionate care for the suffering and abandoned; to their openness to God’s goodness; to their willingness to trust in God’s promises; and to their courage in fearlessly proclaiming his message both in word and deed.  It is to, and through, such people as these that the risen Christ appears most manifest.

Let us give glory to God for raising his Son from the dead for our sake, and let’s give thanks to the women for believing and sharing the good news of God in Christ.  Happy Easter.  Alleluia.

ECH Senior Sermon: "If you loved me . . ."

This sermon was given by Harvard senior Greg Johnston on the sixth Sunday of Easter at the Episcopal Chaplaincy's service. The readings for the day can be found here.

When Luther asked if I wanted to preach, a few weeks ago, I said... “Yeah, absolutely! I would love to!” When I looked at the lectionary readings for today a few days later, my first thoughts were, “Oh...”
    These readings are not easy to draw meaning out of. We start with what's basically a travelogue for Paul and Luke, listing some cities in Macedonia that we've never heard of. Then there's the beginnings of a story about a woman named Lydia, but it ends without much detail. Next we have a passage from the Book of Revelation, which is never exactly easy to follow. What is this city, the new Jerusalem? Is it heaven? Is it the church? I'll be honest with you: I've read through two commentaries on Revelation this week while doing research for a paper, and I still couldn't tell you. The Gospel for today comes from Jesus' farewell message to his disciples, about two-thirds of the way through the Gospel of John. This, too, seems scattered: an injunction to keep Jesus' word, a heads-up to watch for the Holy Spirit, and a premature goodbye.
    So. Where can we start?
    St. Augustine, in his book De Doctrina Christiana, writes this: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them.” In other words: if your interpretation doesn't lead you to love, it's probably wrong. We're lucky, because this works both ways. If you're looking for an interpretation and ask how a text teaches us to love God and our neighbors, you'll probably be on the right track.
    And we finally get lucky in the next lines of the Gospel, in the second-to-last verse of this passage. “If you loved me,” Jesus says, “you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Now in a way, this verse seems strange. When we love people, the very last thing that we want to do is give them up. Imagine your boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, mother, father, sister, brother, best friend, or mentor saying to you, “I'm going away.” Then, “Why are you sad? If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going.” What does this mean? In most of our relationships, the very last thing we want is to lose the one we love.
    I think what's going on here is that there are two kinds of love in question.
    We can call the first “possessive love.” In this sense, when we love someone, we want them for ourselves. I love you, and therefore I want to spend time with you. Now, don't get me wrong; this is a wonderful thing. It's a healthy thing. It's an important thing. It wouldn't be right if we didn't respond with sadness when we heard that the one we loved was going away. And here we have the disciples, who have spent the last years with Jesus walking around Judea and the Galilee, healing the sick, feeding the poor, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, and—we have to remember, because this is the Gospel of John—going to weddings where Jesus turns water into really good wine. They're having a great time! And so when Jesus says, “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father,” I suspect the disciples are just as perplexed as we are.
      And I think that maybe, it's because Jesus is talking about a second kind of love, which we could call “self-sacrificing love.” When we love someone in this way, we want the best for them, even if we have to give something up. Because I love you, I want the best for you, even if it means I won't spend time with you. This is the love that I would guess many of our parents feel when we go off to college, and that many of our friends will feel when we graduate and go our separate ways. This is the kind of love that St. Paul says (in 1 Cor. 13) is patient and kind, that is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, that bears all things, hopes all things, and endures all things—even the departure of our loved ones. This is the love of which St. John says in his First Letter, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). This is love: that God loved us, that God wanted the best for us, so much that he gave himself up to suffer and die for us.
    And so Jesus says to the disciples: you've seen me performing signs and miracles, healing the sick, feeding the poor, proclaiming the good news, and drinking really good wine, but the Father is greater than I, and I get to go home to him. If you loved me, you would rejoice, because you would want what was best for me.
    And this is the same love that we see, though it's sometimes hidden, throughout the readings for today.
    It's the love that drives Paul to Macedonia, when in a dream he sees “a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, 'Come over to Macedonia and help us'” (Acts 16:9). It's the same love that drives Paul across the Mediterranean and ultimately to his death, in the hope of spreading the good news he has received.
    It's the love that leads God to create for us a heavenly city, a new heaven and a new earth to replace those that we have broken, a city with water “bright as crystal” (Rev. 22:1), with gates that will “never be shut by day,” and in which “there will be no night” (Rev. 21:22), a city that is always open to us. And all this when it would have been so much easy to destroy it all and go back to the drawing board.
    And it's the love that God promises to show us when we love God, when Jesus says that “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home in them” (John 14:23).
    The collect for today begins, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding.” This sounds great. So what do we do? How do we love God? How do we reflect God's love in our own lives, fulfilling the Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27)? How do we love God?
    Perhaps the better question is this: How have we been loving God?
    We have been loving God when we have visited Ronald and Duncan and Daniel at MCI Norfolk with the rest of our teams from the Harvard Interfaith Prison Education program, helping the three of them work toward their degrees through BU while incarcerated. We've given up a Saturday or Sunday every month, putting off a little leisure time to support new friends.
    We have been loving God by walking seven miles this morning to raise money for Project Bread, to help feed thousands of people across Massachusetts who are in need. Now, waking up at eight in the morning isn't much of a sacrifice unless you're a college student, but sometimes that's all it takes.
And we have been loving God by giving up a few hours on this beautiful afternoon to gather together and share in God's word, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and—well, this isn't much of a sacrifice—to share a free dinner in excellent company.
    Next year, as many of you know, I'll be working as a Micah Fellow, filling the same role Tiffany has with our chaplaincy here with another group to-be-determined. This work, wherever it ends up taking place and whatever form it ends up taking, will be work for social justice. Micah Fellows like Tiffany organize prison-mentoring programs, help run food pantries, advocate for a response to climate change, and work on so many more projects with real impact. But as Christians, I think, we work for something more than social justice alone: we work for social love. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, suggests that love should be the soul of justice. Love animates and fills justice in the same way that the soul animates and fills the body. Without love and care for the other, justice is empty. It's not just about changing laws. Building community, in other words, can't be detached from effecting social change.
    And yet unfortunately, I'll be parting from that community after a year, just as I'm parting from this community now. In a month, I'll be leaving Harvard, leaving this chaplaincy community and the Morning Prayers community at Memorial Church, leaving my house and many of my friends, my familiar routines and locations and coffee-shops and libraries. As we part, I hope that God gives me the grace to want what is best for these places and people, rather than wanting to keep them for myself. And I hope that God gives them the grace to do the same.
    But the beauty of the season of Easter, the beauty of the resurrection story, the good news of Christian belief, the message written in every spring flower we can see out these windows, is that this parting is not final.
    The bare trees of winter are not bare forever.
    The stone will not cover the tomb forever.
    I will see all of you again.
    I will see all of my favorite places again.
    I will read those books and drink those cups of coffee and, God willing, see those friends again.
    And when I do, we all will have grown and changed; not in spite of but because of our separation. We will have been transformed, as St. Paul puts it, “from glory into glory” (2 Cor. 3:18 KJV). We will continue to increase in our love for God and for our neighbor, growing into a life that, to paraphrase the collect, “exceeds all that we could have desired.”
“If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to
the Father, because the Father is greater than I.” Amen.

From our Micah Fellow: Compassion

I was honored to be invited to speak at a conference on compassion at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The organizers read about HIPE in the Crimson, and contacted Hilly Haber and me to ask if one of us might be willing to speak about our experience of practicing compassion in a prison context. I said yes, and got to present on the opening night along with some diverse and dynamic speakers. There will be a video forthcoming, I am told. In the meantime, I wanted to share the text that I wrote up to prepare for my comments at the conference.

Be well,
Tiffany

--------

There are two basic emotions: love and fear. Every feeling in between is a variation on one of those fundamental impulses. When we talk about compassion we are talking about love. We are talking about a particular kind of love that is grounded, open, & present. Cornell West is famous for saying that “Justice is what Love looks like in public,” and I think compassion is what love looks like without fear.

We live in a society based on fear. And particularly when it comes to our system of crime and punishment the model is fear & control.

The first time I visited a prison, I was afraid. I was afraid because I thought there were people there who could hurt me. People who had committed crimes, and people who guarded them, who had guns and watched my every move. I was afraid when they asked me to go through security checkpoints where they looked inside my mouth, under my hair, at the bottoms of my feet...my body was controlled, watched. And I walked into a visiting room to visit someone I didn’t know, a man who had been in prison for over 20 years.

But even while I was afraid, I felt a sense of love in my heart, a sense of compassion. I knew that I was reaching out to someone who felt isolated, and who had applied to participate in this mentoring program as part of his efforts to secure his college degree while incarcerated. I knew this was someone who wanted connection and transformation.

What is powerful about the work I have been able to participate in as a volunteer visiting prisons is that unlikely sense of connection: a connection that provides an alternative to the fear-based system. By visiting imprisoned men and women and developing relationships with them we volunteers are embracing a compassion model. A love model, rather than a fear model.

Showing compassion is one way to help another person to flourish by creating the conditions that evoke the best in us as humans. Love and fear are both natural. But fear is closed, it is clenched, protective. Compassion is open & bold, and leaves space for creativity, growth, and change.

Along with the rest of my team, I currently visit a man named Ron who is in prison in Norfolk, Mass. He is an amazingly compassionate and articulate man, and I wish he were presenting here on this panel. Since he can’t be here, I want to share directly from him. He and I had a conversation that really moved me, and that I have been thinking about ever since. He told me about a program that he had seen on television about doctors and nurses who were treating people with benign facial tumors who had been abandoned by social stigma for their condition, kicked out of their homes and forced to forage for food in the trash at night. A nurse who they interviewed for the program described the feeling of reaching out to these individuals and simply expressing “I see you”--she wept and said that this moment of human connection was the beginning of the healing, before any actual treatment. Ron wept, too, when he saw this, and felt how much he related to a sense of being an outsider, of being marginalized by social stigma. He felt such compassion for the suffering he saw on the television, and it brought home for him how much he wants to work to touch those who are the margins: to be able to “see them” and embrace them in their humanity. As he wrote in one of his letters: “My entire desire is to be able to touch those society turns its back on, such as the homeless, ex-prisoners, the elderly shut away in awful nursing homes with no family, kids in foster care... I know what it is to lose everything and have no one...However, now I see my reason for living is to impact people’s lives.”

As a nation, we imprison over 6 million people, more people than any other country in the world. Our incarceration system is based on fear and isolation, and does not lead to change. 63% of those who are released from prison eventually commit another crime and return to the prison system. Partakers, the organization that I work with as a prison volunteer, has been working with Massachusetts prisons for 15 years, and in that time, only 2 individuals in the program have returned to prison. The power of compassion is at the heart of that striking difference.

When I entered the prison for the first time, I was afraid. In many ways, I still am. And yet it is compassion which draws me back time after time. Compassion is bold and courageous. It pushes us out of our protective fear, and into an openness to the world. I show up time after time to do the unglamorous work of sitting and talking with an incarcerated stranger in hard plastic chairs in a prison visiting room. And yet the results are powerful. Ronald recently wrote to me: “I am beyond grateful for your sacrifice and empathy and it is of more value to me than 5 million dollars. After having my life twice ripped apart...and over decades losing everything and everyone I ever cared about, your act of kindness restores and creates anew a belief that the imprint of God’s goodness and love resides in us all. So, thank you.”

Although Ron is thanking me in this letter, this is not because of me, or anything special that I do. It’s also not only about the specificity of prison. Ron’s statement is about the power of human connection, a power that we all have for one another, and which is alive in the act of loving. Compassion is practicing love without fear, reaching across that which divides us in society. There are so many ways in which we separate ourselves from others, choosing fear over love, but we are all innately capable of fearlessness, of courage. How do you show compassion in your lives? How do you show up with courage? Where is love calling you?

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.