Prayer and Action



Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, by Jan Vermeer
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
1654-1655



Prayer and Action

Last Sunday I preached on the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). Martha has strenuously worked to fix dinner and gets worked up, watching Mary just sit and talk to Jesus, and she's angry at them both. I’ve been there. From the response Sunday morning, others have been, as well. Several parishioners formed a Mary society during coffee hour, challenging one another to “be” Mary five times during the week. I'm very pleased, because several minutes of “being Mary” counts—just listening to, thinking about, being with, Jesus. Stopping doing just to be. I"m trying it myself.

I’ve been Martha, often, and spoke her feelings last Sunday: “I was awake during the night, worried about the dinner I said I’d serve; and here is Jesus, talking about the lilies of the field, and how God loves all creatures, and all…Does God love me? Does anyone (especially Mary and Jesus) actually care about me? Worker as I am…without me, there would be no dinner… Does anybody care?”

I’m pondering this today because several stories in the recent The Lutheran speak about evangelism; what is the best way to “talk about Christ, ” to express our faith? Answer: to be a model of Christ-like love. And how can we be a model of Christ-like love without action?

 Dr. Lisa Dahill writes in “Conversations with Atheists” in that issue of The Lutheran that many atheists reject “...the ways popular culture speaks of God: as, say, a watchful judge, a supernatural being, an old man in the sky or even a projection of our nation pride.”

But I don’t believe in that God, either! I believe in--relish in--the God of love incarnate in all that is.

Seemingly, so does Dahill (and actually many parishioners at Ascension).

Dahill invites us to follow Jesus into the world, rather than call athetists into the church, because Jesus is the DNA “...of all that is (John 1:1-5), the very abundance of life (John 10:10) for us and all creation. And thus what speaks this living Word perhaps most evangelically of all is lives opened up for the life of the world: Christians living this love in prison gardens and at deathbeds, in wetland restoration and after-school arts programs and (with [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer) organized difficult political resistance to evil.” (The Lutheran, August 2013, p. 19)

Wonderful stuff to think about and live. Like the strands of the DNA double helix, which encodes genetic instructions in all known living organisms, wholeness/wellness/salvation depends on weaving together times of reflection and action, prayer and work, returning home to rest, and going out to bring our unique selves and gifts to a beautiful, complex, suffering, glorious world.

Prayer and action: in discovering how they work together, we discover and become ourselves  as followers of the Way of Jesus.

How Clan the Church Better Express Jesus' Radical, Wide Love?

Robin Meyers, author of The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus and United Church of Christ minister at Mayflower United Church of Christ, Oklahoma City for 27 years, spoke at the UCC annual conference meeting this last Saturday in Randolph, VT.

He said:  Contrary to the risk that early Christians took, no one expects  dangerous things to happen at church; Christians are not on anyone’s no fly llist. The church needs to “Go where love calls, serve where love needs” –which is the synod’s motto.  And be leaven in the loaf of society, as was the early church. Here are some of his suggestions based on levels of risk to the church’s status quo. What do you think?

Low risk

Form a committee to find out what other churches are doing and join them in mission; adopt a local public school and learn what it needs, and how you can make it better; actively participate in interfaith services and move the host site around to different houses of worship; join other faith communities in responding to hate crimes with public declarations; become a “green” church and an active recycling center

Middle Risk

Form a Sunday School class that is dedicated to reading and discussion the latest in biblical scholarship; form a committee whose responsibility is to bring biblical scholars to the community; add worship services to attract people who don’t like traditional worship; bring local political candidates to church for Town Hall event; give laypeople power to create mission ideas and pursue them without undue interference from the staff.

High Risk

Make changes to the way communion is served and invite poor people; change the use of words: “trust” not “faith”; “these are our sacred stories” to replace “this is the word of God.”; Incorporate more silence, more poetry, less insider language. Establish the church as center for nonviolent change;  practice radical hospitality by welcoming people who test the church’s comfort level  (e.g., ex-convicts and sex-offenders); give money away in the church to those in need; and consider returning to the ancient practice of loaning money at no interest.

As Ascension continues to responsive to the Spirit, which of these are doable at Ascension? Other ideas you may have? Let me know!

    Blessings, Pr. Nancy

Idle Tales that are the Truth!




Three Women, Romare Bearden, 1979.



Happy Easter! What is coming into your imagination that may seem like an idle tale (Luke 24:11), but that if you live it out will bring joy and healing to people or to animals and plants on God's green Earth? Live it! Live your precious life! Below is my Easter sermon. The heart of the universe, love, is abundant, for the taking!

Blessings, Pr. Nancy

Easter

Luke 24:1-12

“But these words seemed like an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

All the gospels tell of the women coming to the tomb; they find it empty; they return to tell the disciples, who do not believe them.

Women through the ages have not been believed. An old wives’ tale… Have you had the experience of saying what you know is hard-earned truth, urgently important, you feel, but you are not taken seriously?

Often it seems that God, or goodness, or truth needs to come in slantwise, through people who are not to be believed at first; as Emily Dickson wrote:

Tell All The Truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.

Emily Dickinson

The truth must dazzle gradually or every person be blind.

The Bible is a collection of stories (told by human beings and written down in human words) of people who were far from perfect who kept meeting God in unlikely places and people, who kept adjusting their lives, and stumbling over old patterns and breaking through to new life: followers became leaders, women make public dramatic statements of love, people heartbroken by sorrow and the absurdity of death are met with experiences of new life—of Jesus not bound by death but always calling forward to new life. And, they tell their friends of this strange, slant-wise truth. Idle tales…

Therefore, Jesus told parables, and gave us strange sayings.

Are these idle tales?

Reading a contemporary, The Message Bible translation:

Matthew 6:27-33: “Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving.

Or these idle tales?

“The first shall be last, and the last first….”

“Become like a child so that you can enter into the kingdom of heaven.

“In as much as you give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, you give it to me…”

“Turn the other cheek, when someone strikes you…”

“If you have two coats, give 1 away…”

“Ask me for living water…”

A cluster of idle tales…

Tell it slant, because otherwise, truth has a hard time coming up against the status quo, the half-lies that we tell ourselves: that to get ahead, we must push other people aside; that our economy must grow at all costs, even at the cost of the earth and its living creatures and other people left behind; that more stuff equals more happiness; that we don’t need to care about the past or the future; that violence brings peace..

These half-lies, which pass for truth because we don’t hear much to counterbalance them; these half-lies pull us toward being less than we can be. God can’t get a word in edgewise, hardly; and God doesn’t compel; God invites us.

What are seemingly idle tales can come to us when we listen to marginal voices: the poor, women, children, and people from other parts of the world, or the other side of town? What idle tales come to your imagination, stories that counterbalance the half-truths…and the status quo? Ways that you can see solutions to the problems you see and feel in the world?

For the women didn’t let the disciples persuade them to stop talking….their news spread throughout the world and is the reason you are here today. They had courage to continue talking.

Through the women’s story, the idle tale, even after Jesus’ horrible death, leading his disciples and friends to despair, God changed the stakes, rebooted, cleaned the disk; created a mysterious new birth, turned death into life; Jesus’ power of love and truth burst through the world, forever; through all barriers, prejudices, political power, cruelty, greed, our own failures to love and to forgive others, and even, perhaps especially ourselves. God always continues to create a world of love and peace for humans and Earth’s creatures. And, the loving power in the universe, needs the story to continue, through you, and me.

When people tell  idle tales about God’s love and justice, you can feel it.

Our Confirmation class—three young people—prayed together last week; one in 6^th grade is studying sustainability and writing on nuclear power; she prayed for North Korea; another student prayed for the Syrian rebels; another prayed that we might continue as a group to study the Bible together…

Idle tales are also actions that seem small: Ripple: “We never know how one small action inspired by love to bring about peace might ripple out and change the world.”

Clean up of Bartlett Brook, behind our church; with UVM students; over four years, we took out a washing machine, a truck, and countless bags of sand, and won an award from Burlington for the most trash collected on Clean-Up Day

His name was Nathan Johnson.

He was a canner - he collected cans in Burlington.  He would collect, and talk to people all over the town and college.  He lived alone and very simply.  After he died he left money to his church, 1st Methodist of Burlington, to help homeless and needy men.  I think it was $25,000..

Five ministers in Burlington got together and wanted to help, in an organized way, the people who came to their churches asking for help.  So, they decided to collect money from those five churches, added Nathan's money, and started JUMP. (Joint Urban Ministry Project)   It was in 1st Methodist for a year or two and then went to 1st Congregational for the next 24 years. And the rest is history.

The great, most important idle tale is that God raises Jesus from the dead each day,  in you, strengthening you to be a Protest-ant, against all that creates disharmony and demeans people or that degrades them and Earth’s creatures. Strengthening you to embrace life, here on earth, and eternally.

God seeks to restore harmony and wholeness (the meaning of “salvation”) through you and me, and Ascension, and the world-wide church, and all people. Because “God is the unconditional lover of all creation,” (­The Underground Church, p. 99)

For the earliest representations of Jesus in the first 1,000 years (on walls and tombs and in churches) were not of Jesus suffering on the cross, but rather of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the new ruler on the throne instead of Caesar, and of Paradise Restored.

You and I are alive to celebrate and enjoy God’s love and life given in so many ways.

Do you think you can take the idle tale of the women, that Jesus’ love is alive, now and always, and try it out, trust in your ability to love, and courageously give your imagination, your faith (trust), your love to it?  If you answer yes, your answer will bring you sorrow and joy, freedom and risk, adventure and meaning; and your answer will continue to tell the greatest story ever told, through your very own, precious, life.

Amen

Thoughts on Good Friday and Violence

Georges Rouault, Head of Christ, c. 1937

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 Why have Christians through the ages used the word Good for the terrible events of Good Friday? Perhaps because the meaning of the day is revelatory because it shatters all old conceptions of God, of God as angry or vengeful, by showing a vulnerable, and therefore compassionate God.

This day is Good, and here I would argue with some Christians in love in order to say that Jesus did not come into the world only to die. If we believe as some Christians, including the great theologian Anselm and many other have believed and still do believe, that God demanded blood sacrifice through Christ in order to come again into a right relationship with humans (because God enforces strict justice, and humans have sinned, and God demands a retributive payment) we then believe in a wrathful, angry God. That is not the God revealed by Jesus on the cross; if we worship that God, this Friday would not be good. That God would be made in our image, because in the world we know, we are asked to acquiesce to the lie that violence is necessary to conquer violence, where supposedly good violence is used to try to redeem from bad violence; but that is the world of calculation and suffering, repeated time and again, an endless cycle of destruction.

This Friday is good not because of violence but despite violence. Jesus was betrayed into a terrible violent death by a system of domination that feared the attractive goodness of his preaching and teaching of peace and goodness and healing, his passionate preaching and living from a foundation of love and justice. He succumbed to the violence of domination and control; Jesus only responded with suffering love. Which makes that possible for all of us. That makes this Friday Good, even though still it would seem that all was lost, that God’s self was defeated by human evil.

This Friday is Good finally because of the Resurrection. In resurrecting Jesus, God’s self, we know that God’s power of love and justice, seemingly vulnerable, is stronger than any power on earth.

(I've benefitted from reading Rene Gerard's The Scapegoat and, building on Gerard, Mark S. Heim's Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross.

Preparation for Holy Week and Healing the World



Add Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, Albrecht Dürer, 1511. Web Gallery of Artcaption



As we prepare for Palm Sunday and Holy Week, it’s an auspicious time to ask, “What is really important?” What makes life full and meaningful? What was so central for Jesus that he was willing to offer up his life?

Two answers have filled my heart and mind lately: First, the love (grace) of God, showered in life, the universe, and the Way of loving discipleship. Second, the God-given responsibility given to each disciple to repair the human and nonhuman (earthly) community.

Pope Francis has stirred people throughout the world with his call for addressing the needs of the poor and the needs of creation. (The two are always closely related, as the poor suffer most immediately from environmental degradation.)

Jesus’ called for simplicity (“if you have two coats, give one away”), care for the poor (“if you give to the least of these, you give to me”), and love of creation (“look at the lilies”).

Let us hope that the church heeds this call; I’m very moved that Ascension has discerned (through Task Team 2) the same areas in which God calls us to continue and grow: poverty (both physical and spiritual), care for the Earth, and fellowship with the most vulnerable (children, youth, the elderly).

I will look for you this Saturday (3/23), Mud Morning (9:30 am to 11 am), when we will envision more specifically God’s future for Ascension. This is an important part of our long-range planning! Bring potluck pastries, and wear your books, because we will go for a meditative walk in the woods afterward. Childcare provided by Rachel Valliere.

Blessings to each of you as we enter into Holy Week together.
Pr. Nancy



A detail of Rembrandt's monumental painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son 

 Last Sunday we read the beautiful story of the Prodigal Son/Forgiving Father (Luke 11-32). A great contemporary description of the love of God and the joy of God's welcome for everyone (imperfect yet wonderful as each human being is) is last week's segment of Krista Tippett's "On Being" podcast.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/father-greg-boyle-on-the-calling-of-delight/5053
Fr. Boyle's joy in welcoming Los Angeles teens whose lives have been broken (in society's terms) is stronger because he believes that they help him more than he helps them. Very inspiring.

Lent is a time to look at ourselves clear-eyed, to slow down (difficult) and rest in the daily awareness of the presence of love in our lives. To look at the sun rise, to hear a bird, to count how many people welcomed us in the past days. To take note of those parts of suffering humanity and creation that we may be called to help heal.

On March 23 from 9:30 am to 11:00 am, we will host

MUD SEASON MORNING Sunday, March 23^rd at 9:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., with childcare

The purpose of the gathering is to create an opportunity for the congregation to discuss and affirm the results of the Task Teams, which addressed the questions, “Whom do we serve in our community?” and “How do we at ALC bond and communicate as a community?” We desire that the outcome of our time together will be a shared commitment as we move forward in “Claiming Our Ministry.” Refreshments: coffee and potluck pastries

How wide is our embrace of one another and of people in our community?
Come, and participate in this exciting conversation at this point of oppenness to God in our life at Ascension.

Lent 4 How is Love (aka God) calling us to be ministers to the community, to hurting people?

Hello! Come to Ascension this Sunday t(March 10) to find out (talk about) how God is calling us to minister to people in the community. Love promotes action!

Also, at the same time, Lent is a time to slow down and reflect and just discover God in nature, friendships, and whatever feeds our souls. Here is my sermon of last week to help us "feed our roots" (souls).

Lent 3 2013

Luke 13:1-9

God’s Grace in Suffering: The Parable of the Fig Tree



A beautiful fig tree leaf with fruit



For four days this week I thought that the hero/heroine of this story is the fig tree.

How many of you have seen fig trees? Leaf is from Mousa and Kris’s sun room in Essex.

Googled, fossils founds 12, 00 years ago, close to Jericho, the oldest continually inhabited city in the world. Even before wheat was cultivated, people in drier climates Middle East, Mediterranean cultivated figs; the fruit is delicious and nutritious, and the trees provide shade in dry desert climates and habitat for birds. In Genesis, Adam and Eve had fig trees!~

I’ve seen and loved large, towering fig trees in Italy; so large they don’t I’m sure need much manure; the figs droop and drop down, walking under then the delicious fruit smell wafts through the air.

I’ve also seen and stopped by fig trees, in Brooklyn, planted by people yearning for their homeland (Palestine, Italy), scrawny in about this much dirt and apartment building on one side and sidewalk on the other. Barely making leaves, rarely fruit.

A fig tree needs care, burlap over them in winter (for those I’ve seen in New Jersey) and fertilizer, from animals or maybe Jake’s liquid fertilizer from his worm bin, poured on the soil to nourish the roots, which, by the way, are extensive and deep to keep the tree alive in droughts and difficult environments.

This fig tree that the owner sees is barren, little seems to be happening, the juice of life has gone out.

A person living in Dismas of Vermont, which has residential programs to help ex-prisoners make the transition from prison to the community and a life of harmony and fruitfulness, wrote:

“Have you ever had a period in your life when indecision, confusion, dissatisfaction with your current position in life, and an overall feeling of helplessness had consumed you? Thrown up your hands and proclaimed “no mas”? It’s a veritable cornucopia of negative feelings and emotions that can be defeated only with help, and lots of it. A great support system, where people understand situations of this nature and will help someone start anew without judgment, a nurturing environment [that is Dismas House]”.

Or is the main character the owner, who says the truth, doesn’t mince words, and strips away denial: “You have no fruit.” Or, you are a goat, when I was hungry you did not feed me, thirsty, you did not give me drink, naked and you did not clothe me.”

And continues, unless you change and grow into who I meant you to be, into your full potential, you will feel that you have missed out, and it will gnaw at you, and you will become cynical, envious of others who seem to have it  better or have more; you will be biter and sad and judgmental.

And if the owner really gets going, he or she may say “you will never bear fruit again, your life is over; you are not of use to anyone; you are lost. You may as well curse life and die.”

Or is the main character the Gardener? “Come unto me all you who are weary and I will give you rest…for your souls.” It’s OK to be barren now, for a time; yes to have lost your creativity and not know what to do. It may seem like death…but..wait.

The Lenten study book’s [Falling Upwards: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life] author Fr. Richard Rohr may speak the words of the Gardener: There are two halve of life, roughly divided by middle age. The first is outer focused, a career, a family, a worldly identity, building a container.

The second is an inner journey, an inner task to find the essence of the container, which is the soul.

And, speaking like a caring Gardener, there is no avoiding, in the change from the first to the second half, experiences that feel like death, failure suffering, loss, breakdown, powerlessness, barrenness.

Why? Because life itself knows cycles; winter and sinner; death that nourishes life. The Gardener says sometimes this is called the Dark Night of the Soul (which is a territory entered by people and perhaps even now the church); where the outer fruits (success in life; hundreds of people filling church pews) is no more; but there is deeper growth, and that takes time and nourishment; time to take in manure; to see that waiting yields insight like shoots that rise from ashes; that God is not a venture capitalist, focused on growth and profit and appealing new products for spiritual consumption but is rather a Gardener, attuned to the natural cycles of life and to what is underground and to the vulnerable, and who knows how to nourish roots.

The Gardener says “You don’t have to white knuckle solutions to the feeling experience of barrenness, of grief, aloneness, smallness, and  fear of (evidence of) the real problems that rightly scare you: church decline, violence, greed, hunger, diminishment of my beautiful forests and rivers and streams…

Behold, I make all things new, even you;

In order to bear fruit, you need friends, people who say they love you, and time, and not panic; God’s time is different, and isn’t about to cut you off at the knees.

Can you  accept the idea that you are not doing fabulous things. Bearenness is needed in order to usher in a deeper reality; it happens again and again throughout Lent and life.

We are like the ex-prisoner, needing a nurturing environment and people who love and are not judgmental; we are the hero and heroine who need to go through suffering to deepen spiritually, as in the 12-steps we are powerless.

What do you need that nourishes you? It’s not us ourselves that makes this happen; barennness helps us realize we need to wait…and rely on God in our need.

One parishioner spoke about her year of grief; going down deeply spiritually, trusting God and friends; and seeing nature as giving her insight…

To stand like that fig tree and be cared for isn’t so bad; is it possible that the owner is the super-ego,, demanding that we bear external fruit that is different from the purpose God wants to give us?

“Dark Night of the Church”—essay in the Christian Century, Rev. Tony Robinson, applied St. John of the Cross’ famous dark night imagery to the church: “ God at work wrenching our alluring memories of social prominence and significance from our minds, ripping dreams of fame and fortune from our imaginations?” Moving beyond the container to the essence.

God creates the Dark Night to strengthen faith in God, to realize our fundamental union with God in love. Sociological studies reveal a church in decline: conflict, aging, lack of young adults; church history rooms filled with trophies from the church’s softball team are rarely visited; the church in Europe and America has lost its social prominence.

Theological reality is different: Strength and life come from trust in God, not ourselves. What does God have to say about this, about us, we are asking in this time of envisioning, of long range planning? Could it be that the most important thing to do is wait and trust and be fed by God? That, contrary to the panicked need for answers or even an out, there is time enough to grow in depth of faith in God? Truly liberated from union with God in love will we be delighted in God’s good time by the fruits we will bear?  

Blessings, Pr. Nancy