Bare feet on holy ground

A sermon preached at Faith on March 7, 2010.

This morning’s reading from Exodus is one of the most thematically rich passages in the Bible. I could probably preach a different sermon from it every Sunday for about three months. When I first read it this week, the thing that jumped out at me was “take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground.” In an instant a whole tapestry images and song lyrics swirled around me. Two of my favorite women singer-song writers, Carrie Newcomer and Mary Black have songs called Holy Ground. So I hummed for a while and enjoyed their take on holy ground. But in the middle of my musical reverie I realized that the soles of my feet were tingling and I knew why the voice from the burning bush said, “remove the sandals from your feet.” When we find holy ground, we need to get everything else out of the way – anything that comes between that thin place and our skin. We are invited to step onto those places in which the divine shines through with nothing to interrupt or muffle the experience. Moses did it and his life was changed. Once his feet came into contact with that holiness he communed with God. He learned what God wanted of him, how he was to do it and apprehended, in a somewhat cryptic way, what God is. Holy ground is the place of heightened awareness and knowing.

The problem for us is that this is Moses, star of Cecil B DeMille and Disney blockbusters and his encounter with God was way beyond the normal so how can we relate to it. Well, I want to share my holy ground/burning bush experience. It’s much more mundane. Some of you have probably heard this before, but it’s a good story. It begins in November 1992. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a tornado ripped through northeastern Indianapolis and the neighborhood of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church where my family and I had been active members for about fifteen years. I had just rotated off of the Vestry on which I had served as the first woman Junior Warden, which meant that I had been responsible for the building and knew how it responded to storms. I had also just completed the installation of new stained glass windows. The next morning, when I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, I decided to go and see what was going on for myself. What I saw as I drove down Emerson Avenue was shocking; it looked like the disaster it was, although mercifully contained. I would learn later that 200 homes had been damaged, 50 completely destroyed and those were mostly within a three block radius of the church. I was worried until I saw the familiar A frame structure of the church I loved so well. When I went into the church I saw that St. Alban’s had indeed escaped wrath of the tornado; the power was even back on. Fr. David Musgrave was there but was heading out to drive to Illinois to bring his daughter home for Thanksgiving. He had told the church secretary not to come in so after he left, I was there by myself checking the windows and the usual places that the roof leaked. Everything was ok, although the phone was ringing off the hook. I answered a few calls and was ready to continue on with my plans for the day. I was just about to lock the door when Dave Carlson, a volunteer fireman and member of the congregation walked up and said “Sharon, if you lock this church, there are no working bathrooms in the neighborhood.” Believe it or not, that was my “take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground” moment. And that’s not something that I know in hindsight – I knew it in that instant because I felt it. I literally felt a shimmer of energy run through my body, my arms were tingling, all the way down to my hand that held the key. All I could do was say, “OK, I’ll stay and keep the church open.” Soon, there was a steady stream of workmen in muddy boots tracking across the carpeting of the narthex on the way to bathroom. The phone continued to ring off the hook. By the end of the day, the Mayor was involved and with the help of his Assistant for Public Safety, the neighborhood was invited to the church for dinner. I had mentioned in a conversational kind of way as Mayor Goldsmith and I were standing across the street in the mud looking at the mess created by Mother Nature that the neighborhood was going to need a good clean up. When he showed up at the church for dinner that night, the first thing he said to me was, “so, how are plans going for the clean up?” I looked at him and said “Great!”
The Holy Spirit is often depicted as strong wind. First we had the real tornado and then I was caught up in a spirit whirlwind. By the end of week, a massive clean up took place, and one of the people who showed up to help was Bishop Ted Jones and as he signed in to work, I realized, “Ooo, he’s knows who I am now, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” Sure enough, soon I had been appointed to chair the diocesan Social Concerns Commission and one thing led to another and here I am, Lord! Holy Ground is not just on a mountaintop with a burning bush; it is wherever and whenever the divine shines through the haze of daily living. It does require something of us – it requires that we stop what we are doing and pay attention. We must allow it to touch us by taking off our shoes or our blinders or how we’ve always thought of something and be ready for something different. Now what’s different doesn’t necessarily mean that you head off to Egypt to free the slaves or end up going to seminary. Once touch by holiness you might simply find yourselves less anxious, more loving, more able to forgive, more interested in what you can do for others and if you say yes to that and give it your attention holy ground will be wherever you step.

I’ve been reading one of Peter’s books – this one is about what makes our genes work and as I’m reading this book, I frequently let out an “Oh wow!” Here’s a simple yet profound finding that is such a holy ground moment; AIDS patients that believe in a loving God as opposed to an angry punishing God, have lower levels of the virus in their blood and higher T-cell counts. Apparently, encountering a loving holy ground brings you health. The electro-magnetic field of love grows healthy things in you and can even undo chronic, incurable disease.

The implications for this and what we think and do are like standing in the presence of that burning bush. In an instant we know how important teaching God’s true nature of love is, not just for us but for those in need of the good news. There is such meanness done in the name of God and some supposed morality that many people are permanently damaged by it. There are those connected to this congregation yet not fully engaged in it because of the echoes of what was drummed into them as children – you are a sinner and God will judge you harshly for any number of things and where is the good news in that.

We are the stewards of holy ground. That means first, that there is something for us to learn and to integrate as a part of us. Then, as faithful, creative stewards, we live it and teach it with our lives and set others free.

So, I guess we’re all Moses after all. So take your shoes off and let the warmth of God’s love touch you and begin works of wonder.

The wine of love

A sermon preached at Faith on January 17th, 2010.

The history of Haiti is not a happy one. Western understanding of the island begins in 1492 when Columbus stumbled upon the island that he named La Isla Espanola or Hispanola. Bartolomeo Columbus, brother of Chris, was left to found a colony for Spain which led to the near extinction of the native people, through diseases for which they had no immunity and an incomplete recognition of their humanity.
Spain’s interest in the island waned as gold and other riches were discovered elsewhere in the Americas. To protect the remaining inhabitants from pirates, everyone moved close to the city of Santo Domingo on the eastern end of the island which is now the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, that left the western side, that part which is now Haiti, available to be taken over by pirates. Not an auspicious development.

In 1664 the French West India Company took over the settlement, named it St. Dominique and began the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao which was accomplished by slaves shipped in from Africa. Nearly a third of all slaves brought to the Americas were put to work in the fields of St. Dominique, eventually totaling somewhere around 780,000. The conditions were so bad that the plantations needed a constant supply of replacements, sometimes 40,000 a year.

Slave revolts were frequent. After the French Revolution, the slaves were freed, sort of. The next hundred years were filled with even more treachery and suffering for the native and black residents. An army of former slaves eventually defeated Napoleon’s forces and in 1804 independence was declared and promptly celebrated with the slaughter of the remaining 2000 French residents. There followed decades of revolts and coups but finally in 1874 a workable constitution was ratified and a period of peace and prosperity arrived. Haitian culture blossomed and thrived. But during the 20th century, coups and dictators were the norm culminating in Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc. It seems that every time hope dares to raise its head in Haiti, it’s like a game of Whack-a-mole. Hope is beat down, if not by greedy politicians then by hurricanes and now earthquake. Recently the drug trade has taken up residence in Haiti, agriculture is no more, the people survive on foreign remittances and aid. What little progress had been made since the last coup in 2004, thanks to the focused efforts of the UN and the world’s NGOs, is now buried in the rubble.

If Haiti seems to be that place where Pandora’s box was opened and spilled all of the ills of human sin, it is also right now the place where, once again, hope is arriving on a variety of wings. The list of nations sending help is heartening, heartening in that we can put down our dukes for long enough to give a hand to a neighbor. This morning we heard the litany of the gifts of the spirit in the letter to the Corinthians. Well in Port au Prince in the last three days, we have had a different list being read. To some are given the gift of strength to lift fallen slabs of concrete, to others the keen nose of a rescue dog. To others the gift of ingenuity to overcome the obstacles of ruined roads and collapsed bridges. To others an engineer’s eye to dig in and shore up and rescue. Still to others is the skill of mending broken limbs and torn flesh. To many is given the gift of patience to sit and sing until help arrives. To many others is given the spirit of generosity by text and twitter and collection plate. And to many more is given the spirit of compassion and tears and prayer. We are all part of the body that is reaching out to help and to heal. Every American is contributing and represented by the planes and ships full of soldiers and marines and aid workers. In this moment, the world is saying to Haiti, “we are here with you and your suffering matters to us.

Port au Prince is as far from a wedding celebration as we could possibly imagine so it was hard to even contemplate today’s Gospel reading. But there are some things about this first miracle of Jesus that can help us in times like these. The wedding at Cana is a most curious story that offers as many questions as it does answers. Right before this story Jesus promises to his disciples that they are going to see great things that speak of God’s glory which is to be revealed by and in Jesus. Interestingly, this story has an undercurrent of tension. It starts with Jesus’ mother apparently expecting him to do something about the problem of no wine half way through the wedding festivities. Of course, this is not to be taken as a supply problem. It is her invitation to Jesus to do what only he can do. He’s not particularly acquiescent, in fact he somewhat rebukes her, saying that it’s not for her to determine the timing of his work. And yet he goes and does it anyway but in a very subtle way. There is nothing flashy about this miracle. He takes the water in large stone jars, the means of ritual cleanliness and purification, and turns it into the wine of celebration. Also of interest, he does not do it so that anyone except his disciples notice it. The wine is turned over to the wine steward and he is amazed at the quality and does not know from whence it came. The party goes on and the miraculous wine flows freely. We are left to wonder about the people who drank that wine. Were they changed by it? In his commentary on the Gospel of John, catholic theologian Gerard Sloyan wrote about what the author of the fourth gospel was doing as he wrote this long after Easter and the birth of the church. He says, “John knows from the experience of years now that to believe in Jesus as the Christ is to live a life within a life. Nothing is changed but everything is changed. What had been water is wine. Word has become flesh. An hour that has not yet come is here…What will be is. What seemed to be is no more.”

What Jesus brings us changes every part of human life. In the course of his public preaching, Jesus redefined every relationship. He redefined marriage from a relationship of power to one of equality; he redefined neighbor – no longer just those we know and like but now even those we despise. He redefined family, no longer just his mother and brothers and sisters but now the whole Body of Christ. He redefined the outcast as those redeemed and reborn in their communities. He redefined peace from the product of imperial might to the product of justice. He redefined the relationship between humanity and divinity. But just as no one noticed the miracle in Cana, we have been slow to live the changes he brought.

While Mother Nature is not, God is frustratingly subtle in our lives. I enjoyed greatly a conversation with some of the inquiring minds of our newest youth group. Mateo wondered why God doesn’t just spit it out for us, just talk to us and tell us what is what and what to do. Wouldn’t that be nice? I told him that I believe that the divine wisdom is just that, wise. We must come to God on our own not because we are forced or scared into it. Real faith, real spiritual growth comes from responding to the invitation so gently and persistently offered.

And then sometimes it is offered in painful, dramatic fashion. We are presented with the suffering of others and everything we have tried to learn about love suddenly becomes real. We realize in a moment that they are not strange or strangers. They are our family. They are us and we reach out because we cannot stop ourselves. Without realizing it, we have been changed from the water of duty into the wine of love.

Christmas - it's a mystery!

A sermon preached at Faith on Christmas Eve, 2009.

It wasn’t a Christmas movie, but the Best Picture from 1999, Shakespeare in Love, got me through last week. In it, Geoffrey Rush played the theater owner who was attempting to put on a new play from Will Shakespeare, which turned out to be a little known piece called Romeo and Juliet. In the story, Rush’s character seemed to always be just one step away from disaster and when anyone asked him how something in the theater was going to possibly work out – he would always reply, “I don’t know – it’s a mystery!” And what made Rush’s character so compelling was that he seemed to revel in the unknown, the possibility of being surprised by the end result that he could not possibly have foreseen.

I found myself embracing this statement of faith as the planning of our Christmas week loomed. So many of our families had taken advantage of the full week off of school and gone away that we knew we were going to be a little thin casting the Christmas pageant; our annual women’s brunch had only half of the number of women signed up to come and those who had were dropping like flies due to flu, unexpected travel and assorted circumstances. Our flower guild was stressed by the loss of some ready hands at this busy time of year, the choir was struggling with the syncopated rhythms of one of the pieces for tonight and then last Friday night at the pageant rehearsal, our director called in sick. Disaster was gaining on me. Then the full impact hit when we realized that the oldest girl available for the pageant was 3 years old. She would be our Mary but every time I referred to her as Mary, she emphatically told me that her name was Raine, not Mary. The oldest cast member was six. When I finally got home, exhausted and wondering how we were going to pull this off, Geoffrey Rush popped into my head – “it’s a mystery!” In that moment, I decided that I was going to completely trust in the mysterious ways of Christmas and I’ve not been disappointed.

The Women’s Brunch was delightful – great food, the cut-throat gift exchange was its most riotous and fun. The choir is in fine form, the flowers are beautiful and the pageant was one for the ages. We began with the revolt of the angels – the boys who thought that “angel” sounded cool changed their minds when they discovered that the costumes were decidedly girly. So a quick change into shepherd garb. In the spirit of the mystery one of our girls showed up and was slapped into Angel of the Lord costume. Her sidekick angel was only two and pretty much frozen in place because she was stepping on the front hem of her dress and unable to move. Max the Churchdog made his triumphant reprise as the flock of sheep and every other bit of livestock. Mr. Vicar had to stand as Goliath to be slain by David. The shepherds were right to be afraid as the stand-in Angel of the Lord was clearly not happy; she stood there with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face refusing to share good news. And then Joseph showed up in Bethlehem alone. When I said, “Hey Cooper, you forgot Mary.” We heard from the back of the church, “She doesn’t want to come!” Our Mary finally arrived, not on a donkey, but in her mother’s arms. At any rate, it all worked out, mysteriously but it has let us all proclaim with assurance that here at Faith, Christ was born to Raine!

2009 has been a really tough year by anyone’s standards. People have been unemployed for way too long, too many have lost their homes and some have lost hope. If there were ever a time for glad tidings and great joy, it would be now. However, we look around and see that it is still a mean world but Christmas says that meanness does not triumph. In Los Angeles Mirna Gonzalez had saved her change all year to be able to have some money for Christmas for her sons. She took the jar and went to the change machine – it totaled $620. But before she could even put the money in her purse – she was robbed. She turned to an organization called MEND – Meeting Every Need with Dignity. She saw just that. People who were worse off than she was, all struggling with needing to ask for help. The staff was so kind to everyone that Mirna was determined to help them. So she made lunch; enchiladas, taquitos, beans, and a flan enough for 25 people and took it by. The staff was moved to tears. An LA Times reporter heard about the story and wrote it on her blog. The community’s response became the page two column on Tuesday. Her generosity triggered the generosity of others and we all had our hearts lifted a bit. How did it all come together? It’s a mystery.

But there is more mystery in this night than people moved to generosity. It is the mystery of the incarnation – that intersection of the human and the divine in the infant we celebrate tonight, that living idea of God. We don’t need to know exactly how those two different things fit into one, all we need to know is that love now has a face. And in the way of good mysteries, that face is revealed in each and every face. I don’t understand the incarnation to mean that God was not in the world before Jesus. But this little light of the world has helped us to see it. Because of Christmas, the divine in the world, in you and in me has been drawn out of the shadows cast by meanness and indifference. It is no wonder that so many of Jesus’ healing miracles involved restoring sight to the blind. Through him we can all see the each other clearly and recognize ourselves as family.

We have been invited into this Christ way of living for 2000 years. I don’t know if God thought we were going to catch on quickly or not. The meanness of the world has not yet been overcome and it is here that I need the voice of Geoffery Rush the most because quite honestly, I don’t see how it’s going to work out. I don’t know that is going to stop us from hurting each other. I don’t know what is going to make the suffering of others unacceptable to us. I have no idea how we are ever going to learn self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t matter if I don’t know because God does.
Christmas tells me that God is not content to let us stumble around in the dark, snarling when we bump into each other. I don’t have to know how we are all going to figure it out one day. It’s a mystery and I’m fine with that.