Reflections on Repentance

This sermon was given on Saturday, December 7 by our friend Greg Johnston at All Saint's Parish in Brookline. Greg is one of the Life Together fellows All Saint's has graciously housed in the church rectory this year.

I want to thank you all for welcoming me here today. And even more importantly, I want to thank you for the welcome you’ve given me in the last three months. Most of you probably don’t recognize me, although some might. Maybe you’ve seen me carrying bags of groceries through the front door of the rectory as you come here on Saturday evening, or maybe you’ve seen me sitting on the bench in the yard.

I’ve been living next door since August as a part of the Life Together Community. A group of us live in the rectory in intentional community, working at congregations and nonprofits across Greater Boston, doing service and community organizing, working for justice. Those of us staying at ASP have come from Texas, North Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin—and even Massachusetts! It’s been incredible for us to have access to a big house in a great neighborhood like this—it’s allowed us to build a strong community that can help support us in our work outside it.

Well, I’m one of the few from Massachusetts. I grew up in Winchester, which is a lot like Brookline in some ways: it’s white, upper-middle class, great schools, progressive. I grew up in a congregation that was very focused on service: I always volunteered moving furniture at the Mission of Deeds, or working at the Woburn Council of Social Concern soup kitchen, and went further afield on youth mission trips to work in homeless shelters in DC and New York, on a farm in Georgia, and at a youth camp in Puerto Rico. But we’d never really been activists: we spent our time working to ease the symptoms of injustice rather than addressing the causes.

I went to college and, like many young adults, drifted away from the church. Outside the community I was used to, I didn’t have my own spiritual life. With papers and exams and reading, service wasn’t a priority. And I got so caught up in the culture of achievement, of success, that it seemed for a while like the best way to change things would be to go to law school, work in government, eventually maybe run for political office. And if, along the way, I ended up in corporate 

But instead here I am, making $450 a month, living a life of intentional simplicity with six other people, spending my time in prayer and working at a community organization in Dorchester called the Massachusetts Communities Action Network. Why?

One of the first weekends I was working there, a coworker and I were driving to a meeting at a church in Fall River. Now, Tomas is 42 years old. He grew up in South Boston and Dorchester. His family, who were some of the only Latino business owners in Southie during the busing riots, left after their bodega and their home were burned down. He had worked in politics and for the labor movement his whole life. We were going to a meeting with a bunch of working-class congregations in Fall River and New Bedford about the minimum wage. He turned to me and said: “You know, when I looked at your resume, I had no idea why you were taking this job.”

And so I told him. I told him about the lack of real connections between people I’d seen in college, about people so obsessed with getting the best internship that they didn’t have time to really get to know each other. I told him about my family: that the same economic system that forced people working minimum-wage jobs to work sixty hours a week forced my venture-capitalist dad to do the same, that the culture of possessions, power, and prestige that led Walmart to fire employees for organizing had led to my parents’ divorce.

And I told him about the moment, when I was sitting in my college dining hall with a friend, one of the most genuine people I knew, talking about our real selves, our values, our families, who we thought we were, what we really cared about—the moment when I first experienced genuine, holy listening, and the first moment in a long time when I experienced the presence of God.

It was a moment that led me to repent.

Repentance is one of the central themes of Advent, what we call—in a truly-Episcopalian turn of phrase—a “mildly penitential” season. Now, you know I’m a New Englander. And you know I’m a mainline Protestant. I don’t know about you, but growing up we didn’t talk much about repentance. Repentance meant sin. It meant Puritanical ideas about sex. But the contrast we see in the readings today is different. It’s a contrast between “righteousness” and “repentance.”

“Repent!” John the Baptist says. “μετανοεῖτε,” in in Matthew’s Greek. He sounds like one of those guys you encounter on the T—they’re generally guys—who works himself up into a furor over fornication or contraception or Obamacare while everyone politely looks away.

That’s not what John is going for. “μετανοεῖτε” means something different. It comes from two Greek words: “μετα,” which often means “across”—a metaphor is something that carries its meaning across expressions; and “νους,” which is understanding or intellect. “μετανοεῖτε” means “Change your mind!” but even more than that... “Change your understanding!”

Benedictine monks and nuns have a principle of “conversion of life.” This really goes beyond Benedictines though, to all Christians. In our baptismal covenant we renounce Satan, evil, and sin—and we turn toward Jesus. We repent. We re-orient ourselves away from the path of evil toward the path of righteousness, of justice. “Repent!” John the Baptist tells us. But what—in a concrete sense—are we supposed to turn away from? What are we supposed to turn towards?

Isaiah gives us one answer: righteousness. In Advent, we read Isaiah as a prediction of the two comings of the Messiah, the Christ: a shoot from the stump of Jesse, who “shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor” (Isaiah 11:3–4). Righteousness, Isaiah tells us, “shall be the belt around his waist” (Isaiah 11:5).

But what’s righteousness? Is it just about wolves and lambs lying together, about unimaginable pie-in-the-sky dreams? Is it just what will happen after the Second Coming, something we don’t have to worry about until then? Is this topsy-turvy world, the world turned upside down, the world that the Gospel proclaims—is this something we can work for on earth?

The psalmist puts it a little more straightforwardly. A righteous person is an ally to the poor, an enemy to the oppressor. The New Revised Standard Version translation maintains the parallelism in the second and fourth verses:

May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice. (Psalm 72:2)

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, 
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor. (Psalms 72:4)

To judge with righteousness simply means to defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. Sure, there’s some community service here, in delivering the needy. But the overwhelming force of the point is that the righteous king, when judging between the causes of the rich and the poor, chooses the cause of the poor. Community organizing, the way we do it, is all about building an alliance between the cause of the poor and the values of the faithful. As the BCP psalter puts it, and as we’ve all just said, we have a commitment to “defend the needy among the people,” “rescue the poor,” and “crush the oppressor.”

At my site placement I’ve been working on a ballot-initiative campaign to raise the minimum wage and to allow all workers to earn sick time at work. Passing these questions would benefit one million of the poorest workers in the state. We needed 200,000 signatures to put them on the 2014 ballot. We gathered 285,000. People of faith working with MCAN collected 69,000, two or three times the number of the strongest labor unions or progressive political groups. This, today, is “the cause of the poor of the people.” And this is how we, as people of faith, have responded.

This is the conversion of life, the repentance, that I’ve experienced in these last three months. Tomas, you see, was right. When I graduated from college, I could have been making six or seven times what I’m making, working in a job with ten or twenty times the prestige. Working alongside poor and working-class people on poor and working-class issues, living simply in an intentional Christian community founded on faith, prayer, and real relationships—these are choices that come directly out of the calling I experienced from God to repent. Not to feel guilty; not to say “I’m sorry”; but to turn away from a life that wasn’t sustaining me, a life that wasn’t really living at all, and to turn toward the kingdom of God. “Repent,” says John the Baptist, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Repentance has never been easy. Conversion of life has never been easy. It’s never even been comprehensible. St. Cyprian, a third-century African bishop—a man who gave away his entire estate and inheritance over the course of his life to support the poor in his diocese—wrote this to a friend:

“How,” said I, “is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has become inveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and radically engrained within us. When does he learn thrift who has been used to liberal banquets and sumptuous feasts? And he who has been glittering in gold and purple, and has been celebrated for his costly attire, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple clothing? One who has felt the charm of the fasces and of civic honours shrinks from becoming a mere private and inglorious citizen.”1

Possession, power, prestige—these are things that have become “deeply and radically engrained” within us. We can’t simply decide to root them out and have them gone the next day. There’s no magical switch we can flip. Intentional community, more than anything, is a structure that supports each of us in our practice of eradicating our deeply and radically engrained dependence on privilege and wealth. Having a house, a place for that community to live together in this daily practice, has been so important, and such a blessing—and for that we thank you, again and again.

I’m certainly not perfect. I know for a fact that I never will be, this side of that second Advent, the Second Coming in Glory. It’s a good thing, really, that Advent comes every year—that every year we hear the call to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

And so I ask you, on this Second Sunday of Advent 2013, as we’re surrounded by advertisements for gifts, by news stories of people being beaten at Walmart over a good deal on a new Xbox, as we hear about strikes for fair wages at Walmart and McDonald’s, as we hear about activists turning in a stack of petition sheets for workers’ ballot issues a foot-and-a-half taller than a T-re—I ask you, what are you doing, individually, congregationally, and as a whole church, to repent? What are you doing to defend the cause of the poor? To deliver the needy? To crush the oppressor?

“μετανοειτε!” John the Baptist cries out. “Repent!” “Change your understanding!” “Change your life!”

Amen.

1 Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian, Appendix. vol. V of The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.

How to Stay Awake? A sermon for the first Sunday in Advent.

This sermon was given on the First Sunday in Advent (Year A) at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard by Emily Garcia, the Kellogg Fellow. The readings for the day are available here.

Good evening and Happy New Year! It’s the first day of our church year, and tonight begins a full year of the Gospel According to Matthew, a full year of stories we’ve heard before but we’ll hear again with different ears and different lives.

In Sunday school this morning we turned the arrow on our circular church calendar to the first purple square, the first day in Advent. During the lesson I told my littlest students that Advent is a time of waiting, when we get ready to enter the Mystery of Christmas. I said to them, “Let’s go with the Holy Family, the Shepherds, and the Magi, to make the journey that was not just back then. It’s happening now, too.”

This overlap or concurrence of time—past, present, and perpetuity—is central to the season of Advent. What happened then is still happening now is happening always, and we’re present to all of it. Advent has three main stories in the Bible that overlap, and the people or each story are waiting for Christ, the Messiah, in slightly different ways.

We hear the prophets, as they await the Messiah. (Tonight we heard Isaiah.) We hear John the Baptist and the Holy Family as they await the birth of Christ. (That’ll start next week.) And we hear Christ himself, and Paul, and John the Revelator as they predict and await the return of Christ in glory and majesty in the Second Coming, the end and new beginning of all creation.

In our readings, our prayers, our liturgy, we wait with all these voices for all these different things. In the drama of each true story we live and re-live that particular desire for God.  We wait, attentive, urgent, for when God will come—a powerful Messiah to save a people, a small child with a star overhead, the Son of Man crowned in glory.

When will God come? We’re waiting!

But in church, you know, we’re waiting for just less than a month. It’s a manageable little season, scented and festooned, a lyrical rush to and through celebrations of warmth and togetherness. In church, the dramatic waiting ends.

What might it mean to wait like this in the rest of our lives? or FOR the rest of our lives?

As you might know, many of the earliest Christians did in fact live their whole lives waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. This included the Apostle Paul himself, who wrote this letter to the Romans. Their expectations are dramatically staged in the words of Christ we heard: normal everyday life will continue as it always has, until suddenly, it won’t anymore. An act of God will surprise everyone, even the disciples and the angels in heaven. And so we should stay awake, attentive, even if it’s impossible for us to know what’s coming at the unexpected hour.

This piece of Paul’s letter though takes up this need for wakefulness and attention and shows us what it might look like. The first two sentences are thrilling: “And besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

What does it mean to wake from sleep? “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

My very first reaction to this was to write in the margin, “St. Paul doesn’t want me to kiss my boyfriend.” It’s easy to read it that way; I could also say, Paul doesn’t want me to throw that party for my friends, or have that pastry for breakfast, or try on some fancy clothes, or learn more French swear words, or zone out in an adventure novel, or, yes, enjoy more than just the intellectual presence of the person I’m dating. I could say—and in fact, I have often said—Just another case of Paul being too far gone in intensity and extremity, Paul wanting us to stay as straight-laced as possible.

But of course it’s more complicated than that! Consider what Paul was asking and expecting of these earliest Christians—that they would be a persecuted minority, that they would live   waiting for something they didn’t understand, that they would completely change how they lived and thought and died in a time when that simply did not happen. That they would believe and act in a completely new, unwritten way. That they would live this new way discovering how it worked as they lived it, discovering each day how to be a Christian.

           

Of course drunkenness—and hangovers, for that matter—would make it hard to think clearly, to pay attention. Fighting amongst themselves wouldn’t help at all—that would be a big distraction. Soaking up the excessive and hard-heartedly sensual Roman culture wouldn’t reveal new aspects of God. And “desires” here is better translated “covetousness”—a serious need for anything that didn’t have to do with God : there simply wasn’t room for this in this final race to the Return of Christ amidst a cruel and confused culture.

Most of us might not find the imminent coming of Christ—which still might happen any day now—to be what makes life urgent. And most of us, people of privilege, don’t find our culture to be as aggressive towards Christianity as pagan Rome was. So what are we waiting for? What reason do we have, today, to be attentive, and urgent?

Well, there is still so much that only God can give us! And we still want and wait for what he gives. Only God gives us perfect love that drives out fear, rescue from all that seems to have power over us, and the grace to love others in the same way.

And so, we’re still waiting for something! We’re waiting what St. Bonaventure, founder of the Trappist order, called the middle advent. This part of the story is the coming of Christ “in spirit and power” into our own hearts. An invisible and hidden advent in our inner selves that has already happened to us and will continue happening. We never know when it will come, and we often miss it when it does, but it still happens—God continues to come into us and say true things, do true things to us, with us, in us.

And like the earliest Christians, there are things that distract us from this quiet middle advent of Christ.  Some, in fact, might be some of those things I mentioned somewhat sarcastically before: things like novels, pastries, kissing, clothes, et cetera. Am I reading so many novels in order to ignore what’s happening in me, in my life? Do I eat only in order to distract or comfort myself, when I might instead look for a real source of strength or comfort? Am I using physical intimacy or using another person, instead of enjoying it in the context of love and affection? Am I trying on fancy clothes as a way of winning the social game, being better than others? If I am enjoying these things in that way, then yes, actually, they might very well distract me from God’s voice in my life.

These are maybe small or silly examples. There are many things that can distract us from the attention and urgency of waiting for Christ. Is there something in our lives that takes up perhaps more attention than it should? Or that takes up attention without giving anything good or beautiful in return? What loud thing is getting in the way of God’s quiet voice? Right now, this week, what’s distracting us from hearing God?

Advent tells us to wake up from these things. The night is far gone and the day is near! Be ready! Be waiting! Pay attention!

You know, the downside of living this way is that we’re always waiting to be caught unaware. The upside is that we’re always waiting to be caught unaware! We’re always the prophets looking forward, always the shepherds about to be accosted by an angel, always Mary right before the Annunciation, always the disciple waiting to see God’s power and glory in the heavens. This middle advent is never over, and every day we get to wake up waiting for something to happen. Who will need our help today? What chances might we have to say a kind word that is dearly needed? What will God say to us?

Let us pray.

Almighty and eternal God, we’re waiting for you. We ask that you would so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated unto you, and then use us, we pray, as you would, always to your glory and the welfare of your people. Amen.

A Poem on Thanksgiving

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

This week I want to share a short poem about gratitude attributed to the mystic Rumi. May it help you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, wherever you are!

Thanksgiving is sweeter than bounty itself.
One who cherishes gratitude does not cling to the gift!
Thanksgiving is the true meat of God’s bounty;
the bounty is its shell,
For thanksgiving carries you to the hearth of the Beloved.
Abundance alone brings heedlessness,
thanksgiving gives birth to alertness…
The bounty of thanksgiving will satisfy and elevate you,
and you will bestow a hundred bounties in return.
Eat your fill of God’s delicacies,
and you will be freed from hunger and begging.

- Rumi

Discerning What to Discern

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

My blog post today will be full of half-thoughts, I can already tell. So please bear with me.

My community members and I were talking last night about discernment - about finding a balance between things one likes/is good at and the opportunities one has to actively seek help and create justice in the world.

This is something I've struggled with a lot; and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I've frequently heard advice from people I trust and admire about making your vocation the intersection of what you enjoy doing and where your skills are. And I do think there is a lot of truth in that. But my fear is: will this intersection for me be "enough"? Will it lead me to a career that serves and is fulfilling to anyone but myself? So I hesitate.

I don't want to go too far towards the other end either; to focus too hard on jobs with "maximum impact" and end up unhappy and bitter because it isn't something I have the skills or the passion for. And how could that type of person be the best one for the job at that point - wouldn't I end up doing a disservice to whatever cause or injustice I'm trying to serve by placing myself in that position? Again, I hesitate. 

So here I sit with a half-finished post, ending, once again, without a solid answer or solution. I don't know the secret to finding this balance between doing something one is good at and something that accomplishes more than making one's self content. I haven't even figured out what that will mean for myself yet. But I most certainly will write on this again, especially when I approach the end of my service year here and these questions become more pressing. And I welcome thoughts (fully formed or otherwise) from you all on this too.

A Morning Prayers Reflection: A Fuller, Unbidden Reality

The following is a reflection given by the Chaplain, the Rev. Luther Zeigler, at Morning Prayers on November 6, 2013, in Appleton Chapel in Memorial Church on Harvard Yard.

“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.  And Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white. . . .  Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the beloved; listen to him!’”
Mark 9:2-4, 7-8.

In our Episcopal chaplaincy, our students have embarked upon a bold experiment this semester.  We’ve been inviting Episcopal faculty from across the University to join us every other week to study the Bible together.

Naturally, we meet secretly in the basement of our Chaplaincy offices, under the cloak of the evening, lest anyone in the broadly secular culture of Harvard discover this quaint little community of folk who still read the Bible with the hope of hearing God’s voice in it. 

It is rather thrilling, to be honest. We feel a little bit like the early Church before Constantine, seeking out a safe and inconspicuous place to practice our faith, not quite fearful of martyrdom, but nevertheless slightly anxious about how our more ‘enlightened’ friends on campus might perceive us. 

I say this half-jokingly, of course; but only half-jokingly.  It can be challenging to be a religious person at Harvard because the prevailing intellectual culture is so skeptical of what the German scholar, Rudolf Otto, called the numinous – the non-material, extraordinary, dimensions of reality that some of us cherish and regard as mysteriously sacred, but that others have a hard time seeing, much less believing in.  Never mind that no less legendary and hardheaded a Harvard philosopher as William James spent much of his scholarly life assessing the bona fides of what he famously called the “varieties of religious experience.”

As it happens, our Bible group’s text for our meeting tonight is the reading I offered at the outset of my talk – the Transfiguration story – which seems serendipitously apt to this discussion of faith in a skeptical world.  

According to Mark, Jesus takes his inner group of disciples up to the mountaintop, where they experience a strange and wondrous transfiguration of his person, a divine explosion of radiance.  Then, a voice from the heavens announces that this young rabbi, Jesus, is himself the beloved Son of God.

The skeptical, of course, dismiss the story a priori on the grounds that the regularities of the natural world do not allow for such miraculous appearances and voices, so contrary are they to our ordinary experience of the world.  Myself, I’m not so cynical as to foreclose the possibility that the “something more” that lurks at the heart of the universe might, from time to time, burst forth in surprising and compelling ways.  Indeed, I think something quite remarkable happened on that mountaintop that day to Jesus and his friends, although we’ll never know exactly what.

But the power of the Transfiguration story lies less in the accuracy of its historical detail than it does in its theological insistence that the world we live in has many layers, many dimensions, and that sometimes these dimensions, normally hidden, suddenly explode out of nowhere, challenging our conventional perception of the order of things.  In such moments, the veil of ordinariness that usually prevents us from seeing the inside of a situation is drawn back, and a fuller, unbidden reality is disclosed.  

Two quick stories to illuminate my point: The first is from my seminary days when we had the privilege of hosting Desmond Tutu for a day. Tutu told us about one of the darker moments during South Africa’s struggles against apartheid in the 1970s.  Mandela was in jail, the resistance movement was losing steam, and the white South African government was firmly in power.

In that moment, Tutu said, he felt hopeless.  Seeking relief from the despair, he wandered into the garden of a nearby theological college.  The date was August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, and in that garden where Tutu sat down to pray he came upon a simple wooden cross.  And as he gazed at the Cross, Tutu said it suddenly dawned on him how this wooden cross, once a ghastly instrument of death used by the most powerful empire on earth to crucify those who opposed its power, had been transfigured by Christ’s resurrection into its polar opposite, a symbol of enduring life and hope for billions of people around the globe.

That moment in the garden, Tutu told us, renewed his faith in what he calls the principle of transfiguration:  that nothing, no one, and no situation, is ‘untransfigurable,’ and that the whole of creation eagerly awaits its transfiguration, when it will be released from its bondage and share in the glorious liberty that God intends for all persons and all things.  And, of course, South Africa’s subsequent history testifies to this faith.

My second transfiguration story is rather different.  The first time in human history that a nuclear weapon was used by one nation against another also occurred on the sixth of August, the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima and decimated its people.  At the first testing of the bomb, J.  Robert Oppenheimer, one of its inventors, upon seeing the explosion, quoted the moment in the Bhagavad Gita, when the god Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in his full, terrible glory:  “I have become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer saw in that atomic explosion a transfiguration of scientific achievement into horror and death, just as Tutu saw in the cross a transfiguration of horror and death into a new hope for humanity.

These two transfiguration stories bracket for us a very real and urgent decision – a decision of faith. We can, on the one hand, open our eyes to the glory of God’s radiant self-giving nature, and allow ourselves to be transfigured by the purity of that love into agents for the renewal of this broken world.  Or, on the other, we can remain captive to the gods of this world and allow ourselves to be disfigured by a vain preoccupation with our own power, one that too often has been used to destroy.

This little story from the gospels presents us, then, not with some idle miracle tale; but rather with a moment of existential choice about who we are and what we want our world to become.  And, I dare say, it also may be why at least some Harvard students and faculty take a moment out of their week to listen for God’s voice in these sacred stories.

Let us pray:  “O God of light and life, lead us all up to the mountaintop, pull back the veil of pride that blinds us to your glory, transfigure us with the power of your radiant presence, and then send us back out into the world to be your agents of transfiguring love so that, through us, you might heal all who are hurting, make whole all that is broken, restore all that is lost, and renew the spirits of all who despair.  We pray these things in your holy name.  Amen.”

Together, let us pray with the words Jesus gave his disciples:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.”

A Norfolk Birthday

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

I’m going to visit Ron, the incarcerated individual I write to and visit with as part of my work with HIPE (Harvard Interfaith Prison Education), tomorrow. As is our custom, I wrote to him early last week asking if the 31st would work for him and heard back a few days ago that, not only would it work, it would be his birthday and so he would especially love a visit. I hadn’t known his birthday when I worked to schedule the visit but was surprised and thrilled to learn of that happy ‘coincidence.’

Surprised and thrilled at first, at least.

My mind immediately started running around all the possibilities of gifts or tokens we could bring to mark that occasion. I could make cookies! Get balloons! Or a book relating to things we’ve talked about! But then, of course, reality had to set in and I realized that I couldn’t do any of that. When going in to see a prisoner, visitors can’t bring anything with them (except little gift cards for the vending machines allowing you to share a snack during your visit) so I couldn’t bring a gift for him with me. And there are strict regulations around what can be mailed to folks inside the prison - clearly sending him birthday cookies would be out of the question.

I felt the inequality of our situations very keenly then. Like Ron is Harry Potter - getting his uncle’s old socks for his birthday - and I am Dudley - flush with expensive things, surrounded by loved ones and taking all of it completely for granted. Realizing that I can’t help give Ron a good birthday, can’t at least making sure he gets more than Uncle Vernon’s discarded socks, was a bleak reminder of the contrast between our two lives. It made (and still makes) me feel helpless.

Not to say I’m not still so glad we’ll be able to give him a little company on his birthday. That, I think, while it may feel small compared to all the things I can’t do, will be a gift.

Why are we in church?

This sermon was given on Sunday, 20 October 2013, at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard, by Emily Garcia, the Kellogg Fellow. The readings for the day on which the sermon is based can be found here.

As many of you already know, I teach Sunday school at an Episcopal church in Charlestown. My little kids always ask a lot of good questions. A few weeks ago I was fielding questions on the story of Creation. We had just dealt with the problem of frogs, who are both swimming and walking creatures and were therefore possibly created over the course of two days—when a spunky three-year-old raised her hand. “Miss Emily, I have a question toooo!” Fidgeting in her seat she said, “Well—why—why are we here?” Fearing I might have a big existential question on my hands, I clarified: “. . . In church?”  “Yes!” she said. “Why do we do this?”

That’s a good question! Why are we in church? Why do we come to church?

Why do YOU come to church? I come to church because I work here, but I’m sure there are other reasons too.

Sitting there on my kindergarten carpet square, I fumbled through my options, calculating how long it would take to explain the word “sanctification” to a three-year-old. In the end, as usual, I returned to my Evangelical childhood for the best answer. I told my student: “I think we come to church because we need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say about it.”

We need to know who God is. And we need to know what to say.

There are many good reasons why we come to church; they change week to week or season to season in our lives. But I do think these are two of the simplest and most constant reasons, repeated in the Scriptures and in almost every liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. We need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say.

Maybe I shouldn’t say “knowing God”—that makes it seem like a discrete piece of information. Better to say, “coming to know God,” or “seeing what God reveals of God’s self to us,” or “re-learning and re-learning and re-learning who God is.” In the same way that we grow out of our five-year-old understanding of the world into a more complex twenty-year-old and sixty-year-old understanding of the world, so our understanding of God changes as we grow.

And maybe I shouldn’t say that WE have to learn who God is, as if God were simply an object of our attention, like the meter in a sonnet or a type of amoeba. We know who God is not by studying him, but by wrestling with him—and God wrestles back. God is constantly at work in us, providing us with many, often difficult—often awkward, often uncomfortable—opportunities to know him. Some of these leave us wounded. But these are places where we can learn who God is.

Scholar and commentator Gerhard von Rad [in his Biblical Interpretation in Preaching] says that although this story of Jacob has “narrative elements of great antiquity,” probably part of a local cultic tradition, in its place in the book of Genesis and the story of Jacob, it is actually a story about Israel’s and our relationship to God. He says, “She [Israel] has set forth her relationship to God in the picture of that nocturnal struggle with the God who feigns a frightful mien yet promises an ultimate bestowal of blessing. In the vessel of that [more ancient] story, Israel is letting us see something of her experience with God, an actual experience of her being guided by him.” Genesis explains the name “Israel” as a name for a person who has striven with God and prevailed, but actually the etymology of “Israel” breaks into the phrase “GOD strives.” We strive, God strive with us. This is how we know him.

We wrestle with God in prayer, too, like the widow in Luke’s parable. The unjust judge couldn’t stand being bothered by this persistent widow, full of moxie, but I think God rejoices in persistence. Luke says the parable is about praying always, and not losing heart. Surely this is another way that we come to know God, from constant conversation with him.

We need to know who God is, and we learn from wrestling, we learn from prayer, and we learn from the holy mystery of Communion at the altar, and from the mystery of communion with each other, God revealing himself in our discussions, disagreements, differing experiences. Being a Christian alone isn’t FULLY being a Christian, as we need to whole body of Christ to help us learn who God is.

So we come to Church because we need to know who God is.

And we need to know what to say. Knowing God and being silent is not an option, as we hear in this letter to Timothy, as well as throughout our own Book of Common Prayer.

In today’s Collect, we prayed, “God, please preserve the works of your mercy, SO THAT we can persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name.” The letter to Timothy says that all Scripture is inspired and is therefore useful—for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” In case Timothy didn’t get it, Paul made it simple: Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.” In our confession of sin we ask God to forgive us “so that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways—to the glory of your name.” In the collect for Purity, which we hear every Sunday, we ask God to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, so that we “may worthily magnify your holy Name.” The older definition of “magnify” means to extol, to lift up, to bring respect or esteem to something. But I also like the more modern literal meaning—“magnify” like a magnifying glass. To magnify God’s holy Name makes me think that I should look at it very closely, that I should make it so big as to be comprehensible to me and others.

So: Confession of God’s name, training in righteousness, proclaim the message in favorable and unfavorable times, be patient in teaching, glorify God’s name, magnify God’s holy name. It sounds like we’re supposed to DO something with this knowledge of God that we’ve got! We need to know who God is, and then, we need to know what to say.

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna preach about converting all the heathen, or starting our own angry talk show about what God wants for America. I don’t find either of those options to be at all necessary or at all compelling.

But I do think we are supposed to magnify God’s holy name. I do believe that through Scripture and the community of the church, “every person who belongs to God can be proficient, and equipped for every good work.” 

This is necessary for the world because there are people who are in despair and need to know that there can be hope and meaning in life; there are people who are hurt and need to know that God loves them, that we love them; there are people who are vulnerable and need to be taken care of; there are people who need to be rebuked, for their cruel or harmful behavior; there are those who simply need to be encouraged in the hard work they do in the world. People need to know God’s Holy Name, because God’s Holy Name is Love.

And praise God, there are many ways to show the world who God is. I happen to be one of those people who likes to talk about God all the time, but this is just one way. We can speak God’s name over and over again throughout the day without ever saying it aloud. 

When we gently, tactfully defend someone who’s being gossiped about.

When we play devil’s advocate to a potentially harmful philosophy or viewpoint.

When we give to the homeless, the hungry, or to anyone in need.

When we mention that we go to Church—and that we like it.

When we bow in our heads in a short silent prayer before we eat in a public place.

When we show ourselves to be competent intelligent academics and then casually mention that we’re also Christians.

When we tell a friend that we’ll be praying for them.

When we have a respectful, curious, attentive conversation about religion with anyone, regardless of what they do or do not believe.

When we are loving, joyful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, or self-controlled—when we show these fruits of the Spirit, we are magnifying God’s Holy Name.

Because the “glory of God’s name” is not the institution of the church (although that’s pretty cool)—the glory of God’s name is love. All kinds of love and compassion manifested in all different kinds of ways, inside and outside the Church.

This is why we come to Church. We need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say.