St. Elisabeth's Episcopal Church – Sermons

April 8, 2012   Easter Day

Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; John 20:1-18

Easter is like…walking down the sidewalk and happening upon a man leaning against the trunk of a tall oak tree.  Then you see he’s really pouring himself into it, sweat on his brow, jaw tight.  You notice that the palms of his hands are torn up from pushing on the rough bark.  He’s trying to put his shoulder into it now.  You hear the strain of his effort in his groaning.  The man sees you staring at him and says to you wearily, “I’m holding up this tree.”

What would you like to say to the man?

Easter is a liberation holiday.  It’s the Christian Passover.  We go from whatever bondage we’re in (slavery, sin, death, despair) and we pass over into freedom and release and life and hope.  I would want to say to the man holding up the tree, Let go!  You don’t have to hold up the tree.  It’s not up to you.  Go do something!  You’re free!

My yoga teacher had us in some postures this past week (Holy Week) to invite us to un-grip, relax, un-clench.  It was so hard!  I was supposed to release my shoulders, unclench my jaw, and to stop gripping in the feet, the groins, the eyebrows, and the tongue.  All the places I hold the tension in my body, especially in cold weather, especially in stressful times.  Alison said to us, “Stop gripping.  Stop gripping.  If you stop gripping…you’ll still exist.  You’ll still be okay.”

Then she said the most shocking thing of all to our yoga class.  “If you stop gripping, the world will not fall apart.”  I hadn’t thought of that before.  I’m more like the guy holding up the oak tree than I care to admit.

On that first Easter Day long ago, the way John tells the story, at first Mary Magdalene confused Jesus with the gardener.  For Mary it had been a startling and confusing morning, after a difficult and grievous few days.  You can’t blame her for not recognizing him.  But when he said her name, she knew.  John doesn’t say that at the moment Mary knew, she ran straight to Jesus and wrapped her arms around him.  But maybe she did.  I know I would have.

Running straight to him and throwing a hug would have been my reflex.  The same reflex I have when my children come home from camp.  The same reflex I have whenever I see someone I love after a difficult absence.  Whenever someone is a sight for my sore eyes.  I don’t think, I hug!

I assume that comes from our human grasping instinct, the one that infants display when you brush an object across their palm.  Grasp!  Grab!  Hold on!   Evolutionary biologists surmise that baby humans have the grasping instinct like other primates do, and it comes from a time when our mommies were hairier than they are now.  It was our way to hold on like other primate babies hold on to their mommies.

But Jesus tells Mary, “Don’t hold on to me.”  Another translation reads, “Don’t cling to me.”

After the resurrection, Jesus also did a lot of breathing on the disciples too.  Easter is releasing, letting go of what was.  Mary quite naturally would want to hold on tight to the manifestation of God she had come to know and deeply love.  But Jesus knew better.  Don’t hold on to this, Mary.  God is everywhere, under your feet, in the air you breathe.  I am behind and around you.  I am in the stranger.  I am at the table with your friends; I am in the bread.

Jesus himself had done his own letting go.  Oh, he had done everything in his power in his human lifetime to teach, to heal, to proclaim the good news.  He had done everything he could to show people how to cross boundaries to help one another.  He had done everything he could to prepare his disciples for what was to come after.  But in the end, he’d let all of that go.  He, just like all of us will one day, let go of life itself.  He stopped clinging and grasping and gripping, and he gave up his spirit to the greater flow of all things that be.  And he died on a cross in a posture that is burned into our Christian sensibilities forever: arms outstretched in surrender, open and unclenched.

The resurrection from the dead is just one more unclenching.  Even the Death Grip is released in the Easter mystery.  The cold tight grave of hell is opened forever to light and life and glory.  Neither might the gates of death, nor the tomb’s dark portal, nor the watchers, nor the seal, hold you as a mortal.

I’ve been glad this week that some of the blooms, buds, and flowers stayed closed in the cold, closed and protected from the threat of frost.  We, like they, stay tight and gripping to protect ourselves.  It’s natural.  But just like a bloom or bud or flower, you can’t see our whole beauty until we open up, until we unclench ourselves.  There’s nothing to fear or protect anymore.  There’s no use in holding up something that’s already been upheld.

What are you holding onto?  Clinging to?  You might be holding on to a manifestation of God that you have grown to love, but isn’t there anymore.  You might be grasping onto control of something that’s impossible to control – especially if it involves another person or if it involves the future.

You might be clutching something you can’t even name, but you feel it in your shoulders, your brow, the bottoms of your feet, your chest, or your stomach.  Jesus said, Don’t cling.  Let go as I have let go.

Stop gripping this Easter.  The oak tree can stand by itself.  Or, the oak tree might not stand, but that’s its problem.  The universe is unfolding as it should.  God inside you is ready to be released and shown to the world.  Go do something with that.  Feel free.

April 1, 2012

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself mulling the senseless deaths of two seventeen-year-old boys.  One of them died just last Sunday.  The body of Edward Schutt, the son of the President of Lake Forest College, was found in Lake Forest, having been struck and killed by a train.  It’s the third such death of teen boys in Lake Forest since January.  Of course Jason works closely with President Schutt.  We knew Edward when he was a little boy of eight and nine; he lived a block away from us, through the fence, in the President’s Residence.  The coroner has still not finished analyzing what happened to Edward, but by all accounts it seems impossible that it was an accident.

Before that, I was already upset, as many are, about the death in Florida of Trayvon Martin.  He was unarmed, save a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles, walking at night in a gated community near a friend’s house.  Another young man, George Zimmerman, shot Trayvon.  George was part of a volunteer neighborhood watch group, and he suspected Trayvon of being there to cause trouble.  George claims he killed Trayvon in self-defense.  There are all kinds of layers to this tragedy, obviously.  The incident is under investigation that’s bound to take a while to unpack.  Trayvon’s death has people talking once again about guns, racism, double standards, gated communities, vigilantism, and youth violence.

No one disputes that Trayvon shouldn’t have died; that Edward shouldn’t have died.  These deaths are unspeakable tragedies of nearly unbearable shame and grief.

I think we call them “senseless” while at the same time we mine all the evidence we can to try to make sense of them.  Why?  Why?  Why? We all want to know.  They’re senseless to us because we know they were lives cut short that could have been prevented.

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday is a day in our church year on which we commemorate another senseless death of a young man.  People have been trying to make sense of Jesus’ untimely death for two thousand years now.  Theologians have spun out intricate theories of atonement in thick books trying to reason out why Jesus died the way he did.  Groups of people have been blamed unfairly and then understood to have been punished for it by God.  Even the earliest Christians tried to piece together how and why this happened.  New explanations as to the “purpose” of Jesus being killed on the cross arise to this day.

But no one can argue the sad truth that Jesus died too young also, just like Edward and Trayvon died too young.  Each of them could have done so much more good in the world had they been around longer to bring their lights and gifts and maturing selves to bear on their neighborhoods, families, and society.

Jesus’s is another death that we don’t simply shake our heads and say, ah well, Inevitable.  Instead we are outraged, and angry and say, God!  Why!  Stupid!  A Waste!

And even better we say, “How can we make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

A common thread in all these senseless deaths is that they involved some kind of fear or dread.  They each involve someone afraid of something new or different or vaguely threatening.  And so decisions are made, sometimes split decisions, with eternal consequences: fatal decisions borne out of fearful misjudgment of the facts.  Death taunts the people in these fearful situations as the quickest, best answer.  And maybe it is the quickest, but it’s very rarely, if ever, the best.

We know that fear or threat causes people to lose their heads.  Adrenaline and norepinephrine are there to save our lives, but mixed up with guns and isolation,  Metra trains and mobs, ignorance and Roman crosses, it can also be deadly.  And losing our heads when we’re afraid is something we can at least try to prevent, knowing what we know now, having seen what we’ve seen.

We’re afraid in tornadoes and fires and airplane crashes and choking situations, too, so we have safety drills for those.  We do everything we can to prepare for those scary situations so that we don’t lose our heads and kill people.  We practice exit routes and rolling techniques, what to do with the windows, and how to help the people around us.

How do we practice preventing senseless death due to fear of someone different or threat by something that represents change to us?  How do we practice refraining from lashing out when we’re afraid of what we can’t handle?

Only love casts out fear – Jesus showed us that on the cross.  He prepared his whole life, in prayer and in action, for the day when his life would be threatened.  He practiced loving in the place of fearing.

Love and trust God.  Love and trust your neighbor.  Love and trust yourself.  Remember, as our bishop preached in a sermon earlier this year, if you die in the process of loving, well, dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.

For us: we practice loving people who are different: we practice loving people from different neighborhoods wearing different clothes.  We practice waiting for the evidence of their humanity to emerge.  We practice in small increments loving new ideas.  We practice in small increments new ways and new things, so that, in the process, our fear gets smaller and smaller to the point, where, in the end, the fear is so small, love wins.

January 15, 2012 (ML King Jr weekend)

1 Samuel 3:1-10; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

I have news for you all this morning about your job.  You’re all getting a promotion!  For years now, you have been faithful baptized people ministering in the world.  You have, with God’s help, sought and served Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor.  You have, with God’s help, continued in the apostles’ fellowship and in the prayers.  You have with God’s help, striven for the dignity of every human being, and been Good News people to a grumbly world.  You have persevered in resisting evil.  In your new job, you need to keep doing all these things.

But now you get a job promotion.  Well known Christian author and speaker Brian McLaren believes this job promotion is not only well-deserved, but also imperative for the church and for the world.  You are needed in your new position, now more than ever.  You will need the church to equip you with the skills for your new role in the Christian enterprise, and it will also be up to you to dive in and be prepared for the new realities of working in God’s kingdom.

We are living right now in a Religious Recession, in case you haven’t noticed.  Religion was sort of out of fashion even in the year 2000, but that first decade of the 21^st century plunged America into more than just an economic recession.  We’re in a religious one too.  Diana Butler Bass, one of our best Episcopal thinkers, points out the first blow was Sept 11, 2001 which ended up getting blamed on religion, somewhat unfairly.

Then in 2002 the Boston Catholic archdiocese’s deep, prolonged fiasco with clergy sex abuse of children soiled religion’s reputation possibly irrevocably.  Then in 2003, all the mainline churches started fighting in public in ugly ways about openly gay clergy.  Young people especially were turned off by the fighting: most wondered why the churches would treat gay people so poorly and then wondered why nice people would fight so meanly.

And then quite subtly, all of religion in America shifted once more in 2004 when 85% of evangelical Christians voted for George W. Bush.  Young evangelicals grew so disillusioned with their churches being so completely “in bed” with politics that they started leaving their evangelical churches too.

The United States is one of the most religious developed nation in the world, but it’s evident everywhere in the country that religion at least for now is in a recession.  And given religion’s track record of late, it’s no wonder.  97% of Americans in 2010 said they believe in God.  It just seems like many are shy about associating with religious people.

For those of us here, we can’t imagine living life without our Christian community here at St. Elisabeth’s.  We come here because we’re known and accepted (like Nathanael with Jesus).  We come here to hear stories and catch glimpses of timeless truths of love and the universe and God.  We come here because Jesus heals us and gives us something to hold onto.  We come here to sing the songs of the longings of our hearts, and to keep us honest in our prayers.  We come here to find a port in a storm.

So you are being promoted today.

Lay people are promoted in the new era to the role of priests to their neighbors.  In the new era, there will be fewer of your neighbors who have ever heard the stories.  There will be more people who have never said a prayer.  There will be more people who don’t know what to do to mark the wonders of their lives and have nowhere to go with their children’s questions.  Lay people will be priests to them.  Many of you already are and already know exactly what I’m talking about.

A friend of mine (a lay person) was telling me that recently she was at a big retirement party for a coworker of hers, and there were over a hundred people gathered for a big dinner.  Toasts were planned, and gifts were to be given.

At the beginning of the festivities, one of the planners looked around to the other planners and said, “Someone ought to say something right now…like a prayer or something…grace?…does anyone know how to give a prayer?”  My friend was the only one who knew how.

Similarly, one of my daughter’s friend’s moms was saying the neighborhood kids found a dead bird this past fall, and they all wanted to bury it with a simple funeral.  So they all looked to this mom to be able to conduct the funeral.

Another example is one that one of you told me: that a business colleague was going through a difficult time with his spouse’s serious illness and turned to this St. Elisabeth’s person for comfort and counsel, especially asking about God’s role in this situation.

When the St. Elisabeth’s person said, “You know, I don’t come out of your tradition…” this man responded, “I don’t care which tradition it is, I’ll take any tradition right now.”

You are priests among your neighbors.  Don’t be afraid.  I’m promoted too.  Brian McLaren says that priests are now bishops, equipping, teaching, and supporting all you priests to do the work among your neighbors.

Jesus found Philip and called him to follow him, and Philip did.  We don’t know much about Philip except that the first thing he did was find Nathanael, who seems to have been a fellow seeker with Philip.  That Nathanael was under a fig tree implies that Nathanael was a student of scripture.

One under a fig tree would be a person, usually a man, who reads texts and discusses them with others in the shade.  I have been hearing and trying to make sense of the Nathanael and Jesus story for years, and I have to admit I still don’t know whether it’s straightforward or not.  Either Nathanael is truly amazed by Jesus and vice versa and they become fellow travelers that day (which it doesn’t say outright)…or maybe not.

It’s possible that there’s antagonism throughout this story, driven by sarcasm.  Can anything good come from Nazareth?  Oh, here’s a true man of Israel!  Oh, wow then, you truly are the Son of God.  Wink wink.

I can’t tell if this dialogue is for real, or not.  Can you tell?

Here’s the thing though.  We have our eye on Philip.  It doesn’t matter what ultimately happens between Nathanael and Jesus.  That’s up to them.  God will handle Nathanael.  Philip’s job was to find Nathanael where he is and invite him to come to another place.  Philip says, Come and see.  It’s just like us saying nowadays, “There’s someone you should meet.”  There’s someone I think you should meet, and I’m going to take you both to lunch.

Of course Philip had Jesus there in the flesh in real time.  When we say to someone, “There’s someone you should meet” or “Come and see” we mean the Body of Christ.  This.  It’s this port in the storm we need so much, it’s our worship stories and songs, it’s the Christmas Pageant on Christmas Eve.

The Body of Christ is the group gathered in the dark church later on Christmas Eve with the harpist playing ancient songs and the nave bathed in only the light from candles, with incense going up around the altar.  The Body of Christ is in Evanston when we serve the Soup Kitchen.  It’s the language of our prayer book at the funeral of a friend (or a bird).  It’s the grace we say at our tables when we have people over for dinner.  Whenever you think of your neighbors, colleagues, friends of your kids, your own kids even, the people in the bleachers, or on the train, or wherever you are, you are their priests.

There’s no anxiety to convert anybody to anything.  We don’t do this to get more money for our congregation, or to beat the Catholics or evangelicals.  We don’t need to force anyone to anything.  We are to gently touch other lives, as Jesus has gently touched ours.

What’s happening in the Body of Christ around here these days?  And who do you know in your sphere that you might say to them, Come and see.  There’s someone I think you should meet.

December 24, 2011: Christmas

A couple of Christmas pop songs have me laughing this year. “All I Want for Christmas is You” is a really sweet song, made sweeter by the fact that the latest version is a duet with Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber. “All I want for Christmas is You” falls in a long line of Christmas songs through the decades that are about Christmas romance. You and I both know mistletoe has been around for a long, long time.

Another pop song has caught my ear this year: the 1953 Eartha Kitt song “Santa Baby” which seems to have caught a lot of momentum in these last couple of years. I think the one that plays on the radio most is Madonna’s rendition of it. Videos of Madonna and Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby” are similarly themed: snowy white fur-trimmed strapless dresses adorning Madonna and Eartha, both getting ready to seduce Santa.

You know, ladies of the congregation, here’s what I have to say. I don’t know about you, but amid all the pressures of the season – cooking, shopping, decorating – the last pressure I want to add on is having to figure out how to be sexy for Santa! Ugh!

But we all want to be a better lover, don’t we? Men and women, we all yearn to be better love-ers. I assume that we come to church on Christmas for many different reasons on the surface,
but underneath, the main reason we come here is because we want to know how to love better: To know how to share ourselves while still keeping ourselves, to gain ourselves by giving ourselves away.

So you can tell your friends that on Christmas Eve you went to church to hear tips from your priest on how to be a better love-er…How can you and I be covered with love, surrounded by it, and how do we radiate love? That embracing love we always talk about, the love this holiday calls forth.

I’m reading a book these days called Half the Sky about women’s issues around the world. The topics in Half the Sky are vast and thorny, from the sex trafficking of women and girls — to maternal death during childbirth, from girls education — to dowries and honor killings.

For some reason I thought back in November that Half the Sky would be good reading for me to do during Advent. I thought it would be a good way for me to remember and honor Mary, a poor, probably uneducated mother who gave birth in an animal stall after an oppressive government made her march to another town while nine months pregnant. The book is not peppy or Christmas-y, but it does offer hope that in many places change is on the way, that the world may be about to turn. This book describes how people in wealthy countries want to help, they do help, and no one helps more than religious groups. Religious people of all stripes are overrepresented by far in the support and operation of hospitals, schools, clinics, and other programs that reach out to poor women.

One of the biggest learnings for me in this book, however, is this: people are moved to helping, giving, and sharing, not by staggering problems, but by actual connection to a person or to a person’s story. Multiple experiments have been done to understand how humans are moved to act or moved to help other humans. Aside from dramatic catastrophes like tsanamis or hurricanes, humans are almost always more moved to act or to help when they know the story of one person. In one experiment, research subjects were divided into several groups, and each person was asked to donate $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. One group was told the money would go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Another group was told the money would go to address hunger and malnutrition among 21 millions Africans. A third group was told that the donations would to Rokia, as in the first group, but this time her own hunger was presented as part of a background tapestry of global hunger, with some statistics thrown in.

People were much more willing to donate to Rokia than to 21 million hungry people, and even a mention of the larger problem made people less inclined to help her.

We seem to be wired in such a way that our hearts are moved to love and compassion by connecting with one person, or with one person’s story. One social psychologist has found experimentally that when presented with numbers, statistics, and the bigger picture, a different part of our brain is activated, and has a numbing effect on our ability to feel compassion. In other words, we are better love-ers when we hear the story of one man, one woman, one child, or when we actually know them.

So. There’s religious wisdom in the Nativity Story. God came as one baby in all his particularity: a boy (not a girl), from Galilee (not Judea), poor (not rich), right-handed or left-handed (and not the other way around). It’s bothersome this particularity of Jesus. It’s annoying to feminists that he was a boy, and annoying to rich people that he was born poor. We paint black Jesuses and we paint blond Jesuses and we wish we could make him into what we want him to be. But God came as one particular baby with one particular story. And perhaps therein lies its power. It might be easier if Christmas were about broad generalities like “peace on earth” or “the warm glow of family.” Those broad Christmas concepts are nice, and they were probably written into many of our Christmas cards: “blessings” and “joy of the season” etc. Those are all wonderful things.

But if you want to be a better love-er, if you expect your heart to be stirred by something. If you’re wondering why you’re not really feeling anything, of if you feel like nothing here in compassion department is growing at all, then it might just be

That you are still in the realm of Christmas platitudes and concepts, and you haven’t really connected to one particular person or one particular person’s story.

For some of you maybe this very moment someone or someone’s story is leaping to mind. Maybe you’re not even listening to me anymore, as you think about this person this Christmas Eve: someone in need that could use your help or compassion.

For those of you still listening to me, I invite you to look this Christmas for a particular person or a particular story. It could be someone in your family, or Rokia in Mali, or whomever it is. Don’t worry, there are plenty around and God will send you one. We love in particularity, not in statistics. We love in connection to someone, not in broad Christmas concepts. If you want to be a better love-er, with your heart moved to compassion, then come down from the ether and get particular.

That God came down in one person with his one story, this Jesus, will always remind us of that.

September 11, 2011:  Tenth anniversary of 9/11/2001

Exodus 14:19-31; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

[People turned to the person next to them and shared how 9/11/01 affected them.  The listener afterwards, said, “Peace be with you.”]

I thought a lot about whether to take some time this morning to do what we just did.  I know for some people the 9/11/2001 stuff comes right back up with raw grief and anger.  Other people are sick of hearing about it again and just want to move on.  Some are afraid that dwelling on the tragedy with memorials and tributes will stoke up anger and violence once again.

So I made a decision to offer the opportunity here, within the walls of the church, to gather up our memories.  Some of us may want to leave them there, some might want to sift through the rubble of them.  It’s possible that some brave soul might try to make sense of them, though I’m fairly sure they make no sense.

And then we’re given this gospel this morning.  Remember: in the Episcopal Church, we use the common lectionary.  I don’t pick this stuff.  This gospel passage was given to me – it’s “up” for this week.  And what do you know, but it’s about all this business of forgiving our fellow human beings.  Not just seven times, as Peter anticipated Jesus might dare to say, but seventy-seven times.  Left to my own devices, I might have picked something about God being there for us in times of trouble.  But instead we get a parable about forgiving someone an unforgivable debt.

It’s not easy being a follower of Jesus.

The way I understand it is that the men who flew the planes that day ten years ago went terribly wrong in their thinking.  They became convinced that God was on their side.  They became convinced that some people are good and some are evil: that they were the good people and that America was evil.   They became convinced that it was noble, glorious, and God’s divine will that they attack the bad people of America.

Mohammed Atta and his fellows made a huge mistake in this thinking.  Their theology was bad.  And they did something overwhelmingly wrong.  However, they were not the first to go wrong in this way, and they probably won’t be the last.  We know weren’t the first because of what we read from our own bible stories this morning.

Our first lesson today was the celebratory, liberating, and awesome story of God parting the Red Sea so that Moses could lead the people out of slavery in Egypt to freedom.  After the Israelites made it safely to the other side, the Egyptians, in hot pursuit, were trapped when the walls of the sea rushed back in.  Now in those days, the Israelites believed they had their one God and that the Egyptians had their own gods, and that each nation had its own gods.  The Israelites just had to believe that their God could hold his own against the other ones.  It was a sort of “My god is bigger than your god” thinking.  It was a “my daddy can beat up your daddy” kind of theology.

As Hebrew theology developed, however, and monotheism emerged as the dominant concept, this story of the parting of the Red Sea took on a different tone.  We monotheists read this story through a different lens.

This story sounds to us as though the one God (because we know there’s only one Supreme Being above the universe) was on the Israelites’ side.  It looks to us like God smote the bad Egyptians when the waters rushed over them while saving the good and chosen Israelites.  We read this story with a mixture of dismay and relief: relief to think that God saves the good people, and more than a little dismay that God would destroy the bad people.

You see, it’s right there under the surface for all of us, this idea that there are good people and bad people and that we are the good people and that “they out there” are the bad people.  It’s right there on our hearts ready to spring up at any moment.  The men that flew the planes into buildings were guilty of this thinking.  They used a religious term “jihad’ to express their deep conviction that God is on their side.

We all have a tendency to put people in boxes of “good” or “bad.”  It is a useful tool for making good judgments about how to stay safe.  In high school I tried to stay away from the kids who I feared would get me in trouble.  I would never have articulated it this way, but my subconscious sorted out who were the “good” kids and who were the “bad” kids.

But this kind of thinking goes dangerously wrong when we begin to see ourselves as wholly good with God on our side and see some others as bad, and when we believe that God would just as leave have us eliminate these bad ones in our rage and fight against evil.  It’s just not like that.  It’s not what God intends.

There’s a beautiful old Jewish commentary (called a “midrash”) on Israelites’ crossing the Red Sea story that helps shed light on Exodus.  It goes like this:

The angels were rejoicing over the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea, playing their harps, singing, and dancing.  “Wait,” said one of them.  “Look, the Creator of the Universe is sitting there weeping!”  They approached God and asked, “Why are you weeping when Israel has been delivered by your power?”   And the Maker of the Universe said, “I am weeping for the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore – somebody’s sons, somebody’s husbands, somebody’s fathers.”

For me as a Christian, Jesus helps me to see that every human being is a mixed bag.  And each mixed bag walking around out there has incredible power to do good or to do bad in the world.  Especially when we organize with other human beings who are likewise mixed bags like we are.  We have to work very hard to remember this.  It might help us with the task of forgiveness in every day life with all the people around us.  We have to work very hard to remember that each person has within them the power for good or for bad.  If we don’t we too can fall pretty quickly into wrong thinking too.  We can be susceptible to assuming that that other one is the bad person or the bad people, and that we are most obviously the good people with God on our side.

Look!  God made and loves all of us – that’s what monotheism (believing in one God) requires.

June 12, 2011

Feast of Pentecost A: Whitsunday: Acts 2:1-23; John 7:37-39

Luke told a story long ago, and we read it every year on this day, 50 days after Easter.  If you can’t remember when Pentecost is, here’s a little mnemonic device: just like a pentagon has five sides, Pentecost is fifty days after Easter.  During the last fifty days we’ve eaten the rest of our Easter candy, we’ve left the Confession of Sin out of the liturgy, we’ve lit the Paschal (Easter) candle at the back of the church.  Fifty days is up.  Today after church we wrap the Paschal candle up and put it in its box.  We go into summer mode in our lives.

Pentecost is like the last hurrah.  It’s like Commencement.  And it always falls around graduation time.  This time of year we graduate from high school.  We graduate from college.  We graduate from Easter.  And the disciples of Jesus back in the old story seem to be graduating from Disciples School.  They’re now no longer just disciples, but apostles.  Apostles are official messengers of the good news.  In those days they didn’t have caps and gowns for graduation, but in the place of mortarboards, God gave these guys tongues of fire for their heads.

But of course the irony of the word “commencement” is that even though we associate it with the ending of school, it means the beginning.  And the Christian Pentecost is definitely a beginning of something new.

It’s a great day to baptize a new person with a new beginning in life (in our case today, a little boy named Brody Mygatt), because Pentecost is the commencement of something big: the power of the Holy Spirit coming among the people.  A Lutheran minister I know calls Pentecost a game-changer.  Without it, the Jesus movement might have ascended right up into heaven with Jesus, never to amount to much.  What game did it change exactly?  What is Pentecost about?

Let’s go back in our bulletins to page 3 and I’ll ask you to look at the story again.  You can re-read it.  My question is, “Is the Pentecost story a miracle of the tongue, or a miracle of the ear?”  How many people say it’s a miracle of the tongue?  How many people say it’s a miracle of the ear?

There’s no right answer.  But when you look closely at this story you see that the true miracle is that the lowly guys from the backwards regions were given the power to speak.  The powerful men of Judea were made to listen.  And that’s the miracle above all.  This weekend in Normal, Illinois, our parishioner David Graver is competing in the Special Olympics at the state level as he does most years.  Now the Special Olympics is an organization that I believe has changed the world.  The Paralympics similarly holds my highest admiration.  When I was a child, the Special Oympics were just getting started.  I heard about them from one of the families at my church.  One daughter in that family had Down Syndrome and competed in swimming.  That was wonderful, and the church people I knew were respectful of Carol and her family and her swimming.  But I can’t say life was generally great for most people with disabilities I knew .  I knew Carol from church, but in school we had no special education.

Kids with disabilities went to a special school, period.  They were unknown to us, and a little scary.  We called them words you don’t even say anymore.  We told jokes about people in ways we would never think were funny today.  Parents were told by well-meaning doctors that institutionalizing delayed children was the only option.  Truly we’ve come a long way as a society in celebrating people for who they are and what they bring.  We’ve come a long way in understanding people with disabilities, and we’re still striving to make programs, buildings, and activities accessible to people of differing abilities.

Part of this is because somewhere along the way, there was a group of people in power who had the wisdom, the spirit, to listen.  And there were a group of people with disabilities (and less power) who had the courage, the spirit, to speak up.  That we ended up with powerful legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act is a miracle.  Pentecost moments are when both the miracle of the ear of the powerful and the miracle of the tongue of the powerless are both operating.

Look at Brody, our baptismal candidate this morning.  Many research studies have shown and would predict that the more Brody’s parents speak to him, the more words they use, and if they speak clearly and directly to him with lots of repetition, the more likely it is that Brody will succeed in school.  Forget Mozart.  Conversation is key.  It’s hard for parents these days to put down their electronic device and talk to their babies and toddlers.  But it pays off.

Brody has an even better chance if he gets to “overhear” conversations between his parents and to watch them making eye contact with each other.

At this point in his life, Brody is a living example of the miracle of the ear.  When was the last time many of us spent most of our time with others completely and fully listening and watching like Brody does in his waking moments?  When was the last time we were open to learning that much?

Many of us humans with our big brains have learned to use words to dominate and control others.  We’ve learned to use our ears selectively, listening for ideas we already like and tuning out the rest.  The miracle for us smart, successful Americans would be for us to switch things around: using our tongues more selectively and our ears more liberally.

Of course here I am up in the pulpit talking from a place of power.  I remember a wise preaching teacher once telling me that preaching is only 5% speaking and 95% listening.  He told me that he can tell right away when a preacher is preaching whether the preacher has been talking all week or listening all week.  I’ve never forgotten that.

What does God do?  The all-powerful God whose Holy Spirit came in the rush of a violent wind, what does God do?  We pray so often, Lord hear our prayer.  What we want most is for God to listen to our prayers, to hear us from our smallness, to absorb our pains and our thanksgivings.  We don’t need God talking at us with a commanding voice.  God has spoken to the people, through stories, through prophets, through the wisdom of Jesus.  But the best stories in the Bible are the ones where God stoops to listen to people.  Those ones take our breath away.

Some of you in this room might be in a situation where you need to find your tongue and speak up.  Please do so: the miracle of the tongue at Pentecost awaits you.

For most of us, especially those of us in positions of power, or in the dominant social rung in our society, it’s time to ask: to whom should I be doing more listening?  Where is needed the miracle of the ear?

May 15, 2011

Easter 4A: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

Rodgers and Hammerstein were on to something when they were working on their classic musical Oklahoma!   The iconic song from that musical “The Farmer and the Cowman” describes a rivalry which goes back millennia.  The farmers build fences, put down roots, and attempt to live a settled life.  The herdsmen range over the land with their animals, moving from place to place as the herds eat down the plants, a little less settled, and a little rougher in manners and style (at least according to the farmers).  The farmer and the cowman have feuded from time immemorial, one thinking the other pampered, and the other thinking the one uncultured.

This is the last week of our church’s major project of reading a book together this year called The Story, a narrative version of the Bible from the accounts of Creation to today’s assigned chapter which covers the book of Revelation.  You may have noticed that the Bible is mostly about the cowman, not the farmer, or…well…not cowmen so much but sheep-men.

Our Bible, the story of our ancestors in the faith, favors herdsmen.  From the very first, Adam and Eve’s two sons were Cain and Abel.  Cain was a farmer and Abel was a herdsman, and which one did God favor?  Abel, the herdsman.   But Cain killed Abel, which some scholars say reflects the typical pattern in human history – that agriculture always wins out over nomadic herding.

The Bible bias toward the herdsman goes way beyond Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.  Our great ancestor of all three “religions of the book” Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, was Abraham who was a herdsman.  Abraham’s grandson Jacob had twelve sons that were all shepherds – the best-known one was Joseph who went out to his brothers among the sheep and told them about his dreams.  Moses fled Egypt to become a herdsman in Midian until God called him out of a burning bush to go back to Egypt to free the slaves.

The greatest king Israel ever had was David, who started out as the shepherd boy who wielded in battle the shepherd’s weapon, a slingshot.  David’s greatest poem, the one everyone still loves after all these thousands of years is Psalm 23, the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

Centuries later, when Luke was writing down the birth story of Jesus, he included herdsmen as the ones to whom the angels first brought the good tidings.   I suppose the farmers were not out in the fields watching their crops grow by night.

Jesus himself was a little more even-handed in the great farmer/cowman rivalry.  Among his disciples were neither farmers nor herdsmen; in fact they were mostly fishermen, an entirely different breed of people altogether.  Jesus told stories about farmers all the time – planting, reaping, vinedressers, landowners.  He equally used herding imagery: parables with shepherds, sheep and goats.  Jesus was an equal-opportunity preacher who used all sorts of images from all sorts of professions to get out his message.

Yet somehow Christians we ended up with a one Sunday a year we call Good Shepherd Sunday.  We ended up with our church having a huge beautiful window in the back there of Jesus in the role of the herdsman.  We call our clergy pastors, and we call their congregations flocks, and we give our bishops shepherd’s crooks, and we catechize our children with John’s gospel, where Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd.  We couldn’t help ourselves.  We always did prefer Abel to Cain.  We can’t forget Abraham or Moses or David.  We can’t get Psalm 23 out of our heads.

There’s an old, old story from the Desert Fathers that goes like this:

A soldier asked Abba Mius if God accepted repentance.  After the old man had taught him many things, he said to the soldier, “Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn do you throw it away?”

The soldier replied, “No.  I mend it and use it again.”

The old man said to him, “If you are so careful about your cloak, will not God be equally careful about you?”

It’s a good story because it implies that sin is not an evil failing but just a hole due to weakness and overuse.  It describes repentance as a desire to mend a tear in the fabric, and God as one who is more interested in mending the tear and putting the creature back to use again, out of care and keeping.  Abba Mius comforted the soldier who sought forgiveness and care from God.

I wonder though if this story makes people of my generation nervous instead of comforted.  We live in a disposable generation.  Some of us still darn socks and mend coats, but very, very few of us.

When we get holes in our clothes, we buy new ones, more or less.  We pitch cell phones that still work to get better ones, and we throw into the recycling bin magazines only one person has read.  If Abba Mius asked one of us, “Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?” we would most likely say yes.

And so what does that say about repentance and God.  If we’re broken in some way, are we finished?  If we screw up in our weakness, does anyone have patience to mend us, including us?  Does God write us off as damaged, like we do with our torn cloaks and just move on to something new?

The shepherd and the sheep are an enduring image in the church because they hold out an image of relentless care and protection of something valued for its own sake.  Some of us laugh a little nervously on Good Shepherd Sunday because we don’t like to be compared to dumb sheep, but that window back there in the church reminds us of just how dependent on the Good Shepherd we are when the thieves come to steal us, or the predators come to kills and eat us.  I’m not sure sheep are really that dumb anyway: they know what to be afraid of and they know whom to trust.

I had kind of an interesting adventure online this week as I was researching sheep and shepherds.  I ended up on a blog that was all Q’s and A’s for shepherds.  What a world.

I was privy to an online conversation among Kels in Australia and Swinger in Ireland and Josie in Wyoming and they were all talking about their pregnant sheep.  And I learned that sheep that are cast down are in trouble.  I’d never heard the term cast down before, except in church.  We pray in the Collect for the church, “Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up…” which is one of my favorite Collect phrases; I just never knew that “cast down” was a sheep term.  A “cast down” sheep according to the Kels and Swinger and Josie is one who has gotten onto its back and can’t right itself.  Its legs flail uselessly in the air.

Often cast down sheep are pregnant, but not always.  Sometimes they just get themselves in a pickle, and because of the way their anatomy is structured, they can’t get back over.  A cast down sheep can die within an hour because gas builds up in its digestive tract.  And it appears the shepherd has to do very little to help the cast down sheep: just raise it up again and set it on its feet.

One of the shepherds on the blog said the righted sheep can be a little teetery for ten or so minutes, and so she suggests leaning the newly-righted sheep against a wall or a fence until he gets back his equilibrium.  Who knew?

The Good Shepherd persists as a chief metaphor for God because in our heart of hearts we know that sheep need their shepherd not only to keep us safe, and to pick us up when we are cast down, but also to show us the way and to lead us to new pastures so that our flock can thrive and grow.  The Christian movement, as much as we wish it were sometimes, is not settled and pampered, with fences and barns.  The cowman, as Aunt Eller sings, treds a road that’s difficult and stony.  The Christian movement is more of a sheep and shepherd sort of operation like that: on the move, looking for pastures, trying to keep together.  It’s not called the Christian movement for nothing.

We as a church need to always be listening for the shepherd’s voice and following where he leads…which might just be somewhere…entirely…new.

Daphne C. Cody

St. Elisabeth’s Church, Glencoe

February 20, 2011

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

Draw the circle a little bigger

Is a Christian supposed to be a doormat?

We’ve just heard a list of “you’ve heard it said, but I say to you’s” that might seem at first to be an exhortation to be a human punching bag.  It might seem like Jesus in these words is holding up idealized perfection as submitting to bullies and accepting oppression.   He seems to say that glory comes from being a beaten dog who lets others walk all over you.  It’s really confusing because we know what happened to Jesus at Golgotha, where having been flogged and mocked, he died in shame, defenseless.  And we wonder, is Jesus recommending this to us?

Many have thought so, especially when it applied to other people.  This passage about turning the other cheek and loving our enemies has been misused for generations by clergy who have counseled battered women to just take it and to forgive their tyrant husbands.  This passage has been similarly misunderstood by well-meaning parents of adult children who for decades have scammed their elders out of their retirement savings and mortgage equity.  A friend of mine was just telling me how her forty-year-old brother has worked over their mother for years and years, taking all her money to support his gambling and profligate lifestyle.  Tragically, their mother has cited this Bible passage and says that Jesus asks that we not turn away someone asking for a loan.

Perfectionists read this part “Be ye perfect” and become even more neurotic, and ruin lives in unhealthy compulsions.  My point is: read this passage with care.  It’s dangerous.  Don’t try any of its recommendations unless you’re using the buddy system and that you’re sure you understand the instructions.

Let’s start with “perfect,” since we know nobody’s perfect and we can’t imagine why Jesus would expect us to be.  Perfect in this case, the Greek telios, means “complete” or “whole.”  Jesus gives us the key to completion or wholeness by his teaching, healing, feeding, his death and resurrection.

Dying and rising is one of our most prominent Christian themes.  You can’t have rising without dying, and in Christianity you know you can’t have dying without rising either.  If you were to do a power analysis we’d put resurrection on the top of the cycle.  Resurrection is the place of victory, of power.  And on the bottom of the cycle we’d put death, the place of powerlessness, the cross.

Powerful people enter this cycle here, at the place of power, and when we enter there, we must choose the cross.  This part of the circle requires that those of us in high positions choose the cross over and over until we know some sense of our need for God.  Lent is about that part of the circle, which is why powerful people give up things for Lent.  Lent is a symbol of choosing powerlessness, following the cross.  The wisdom of our Christian faith is beautiful in that way.  And Jesus preached it again and again.  People in power decide as Christians to give up their power, to take up the cross, to listen and listen and strain to hear while refraining from speaking.  The old theological word for that is kenosis: the emptying.  God did that in Jesus on the cross: the Almighty One emptied himself even to death.

On the other hand, powerless people enter the circle, by contrast, here, in the section of the circle that seeks resurrection.  The goal here is to endure, to hope.  In the cycle of gospel living, when we’re on this side of the circle, we need to stand up for ourselves, find our voice, speak the truth, and be filled with grace and power.  While the folks on the other side of the circle need to be listening hard, the folks on this side need to be speaking out.

We’ve each, I assume, been in different parts of the gospel cycle at different times of our lives.  Each of us has had times of power where our spiritual task is to choose the cross.  And each of us has experienced times of powerlessness, where our spiritual task is to find our voice.

The problem with the gospel lesson today, these sayings of Jesus, is not really a problem with the gospel.  The problem is that often we emphasize the wrong parts for people when they are at different places in the cycle of gospel living.  This is the mistake the ministers make when counseling a battered woman, for example.  While the battered woman is down here, needing empowerment, resurrection, and to find her tongue, the minister gravely instructs her to take up her cross, counseling from this side of the circle.  I’m sure you can think of other examples.

During the twentieth century, Latin American preachers preached liberation to the impoverished masses that made up their congregations.  Kenosis, emptying, and sacrifice were not the right message.  The gospel they needed to hear was hope! Speak! Empowerment!  Telling them to lie back and take it was the sin that European missionary preachers had committed for generations.

How do we read Jesus’ preaching this morning?  Love your enemies, go the second mile, give to everyone who begs from you, give them your cloak too.  Is this preaching aimed toward people in power who are in need of choosing the cross?  Or is this message aimed toward people at the bottom?  The genius of Jesus’ preaching is that it can work both ways: kenosis or empowerment.  You can decide.

For example, a rich man with multiple coats and cloaks reading the part about giving him your cloak as well can read the gospel as choosing the cross.  Giving up your stuff, emptying.  Or, a poor man giving up his only cloak, will embarrass the oppressor who takes his coat by becoming naked in court in the giving up of his cloak.  That’s a protest – it’s using the same gospel to expose the truth of injustice.

The genius of Jesus’ preaching is that you can read any of these things the same way…or rather, the same two ways.  The gospel is life-giving to all.  And makes us all whole…telios…rounded out in what we need wherever we are in the gospel cycle.

The good news of God in Christ is that God can be found anywhere on the gospel cycle, on the cross or in the resurrection.  God is the one always beckoning us forward to the next place we need to be for our own wholeness.

January 9, 2011: Baptism of our Lord

Isaiah 42:1-9, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17

I could not figure out for the life of me what the message was.  The same message was everywhere, expressed by most of the commentators on New Year’s, but I couldn’t tell what they were trying to say.  I couldn’t decide whether they were trying to be optimistic, or whether they were truly fallen into the abyss of deep cynicism.   Over and over I’ve heard, “Good riddance 2010!”   Those nice-looking TV people keep smiling while they say it, but they keep on saying it:  2010 was a terrible year and we should all be glad it’s over.  Maybe they’re trying to be clever.  It might be their funny way of being hopeful for 2011.  I didn’t get it.

I keep wondering what would have to happen in 2011 for them not to do the same thing to 2011 next January.  How can an entire year be so roundly and soundly decided to be bad?

I guess the malaise that has been with us since 2007 in many pockets has now thoroughly permeated everywhere.  Most everyone knows someone who is still without work.  Most everyone knows someone who has some kind of debt problem.  Everyone is still edgy about economics, grumpy about government, and tired of drawn-out wars, shabby educational standings, and aware of a general unfocused sense of decline.  I guess it’s the Malaise that still is lurking under the surface, under the skin.  A “terrible year” is still the narrative that sells TV ads, or something.  I don’t know.  If you get it, please explain it to me at coffee hour.

This is one more way being a follower of Jesus leaves a person out of step with the rest of society.  We Christians have just celebrated Christmas, the light coming into the world.  We are about hope and joy and have sung hymns about scattering the darkness and putting the doom and gloom to flight.  Which I assume is why I feel like the smiling commentators must be speaking some other language, one that I can’t quite track.

I come to church, and maybe you do too, for clues.  The Sunday after the Epiphany, which is today, the Church annually celebrates the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord.   And every year, I have to clear up once again in my mind before I get into the pulpit why it was Jesus was baptized at all.  Why was it Jesus had to be baptized?  It’s a good question, and it makes me feel better that John the Baptizer himself asked the same question.

John thought baptism was about repentance and then cleansing from sins.  John liked to drown sins in the river.  But since Jesus didn’t need to be cleansed from sin, it was kind of weird.  John thought it would be more apt for Jesus to baptize him.  But Jesus was adamant: his baptism was to fulfill all righteousness, whatever that means.

Jesus didn’t need baptism to be adopted into the Christian community either (since that didn’t exist yet).  Being brought into the Christian community is why most of us get baptized these days, and especially why we have our kids baptized.  Since Christianity didn’t exist yet, there was no Christian community for Jesus to be brought into.

So, what was it?

Well…Jesus used his baptism, just like his birth, to become fully one of us and to begin his ministry.  He went down into the water with all those people.  He went down into the water with all of us.  I’ve been down there with you, Jesus says.  I’ve gone down into the water, come out again to live another day.  And so he did.  And more:  Today I’m thinking about how the baptism of Jesus also got him out to the Jordan where the people are.  Out there at the Jordan, on the edges, where the people are: that’s where the hope and the light are to be found.

The reason I’m stumped by the TV people claiming 2010 as a lost, crappy year, is that I myself saw great things happen in 2010:

a beautiful graduation, an awesome triple baptism on Pentecost,

a happy boy who learned how to read,

a friend of mine who got a hold of her depression,

a whole congregation that got behind a bishop’s challenge.

Out where the people are is where the good news is always to be found.

Sad things and losses came around in 2010 just like any other year and some people in my circle were hit harder than others, but nothing outweighs the joy of watching Isabelle or Nate or Rocky take their first steps, of praying for Bridget, Claire and Alana at their confirmation service.   If we start to base the goodness or badness of an entire year on what the market is doing, then we really have lost track of who our God is.

Jesus went right out there to the Jordan where the people get water, wash their pots and clothes, share news of their neighbors, and mingle with all sorts and conditions, and there he met up with the place of his baptism.  That’s where he began his ministry to regular people.  It’s no accident that Matthew describes the voice coming down and the heavens opening as thought they were quiet, small, almost private things.

The heavens open and the voice of God is heard — we know this – in the small stories of regular people.  The hope is to be found on the margins, in the flesh and blood of real lives lived.  Do we sit grumpily in Jerusalem and wait for things to get better?  No, we go out to the edges where people actually are.

The mistake so easily made is to look for the great white hope of the macro, some big thing that’s going to fix everything, but Jesus always dealt with the micro: this woman, or that man, this group of people gathered, that little girl.

Americans are supposed to be cockeyed optimists, so it’s a bit unnerving to be part of a collective malaise, but many are making this same mistake in looking for hope.  We’re frustrated that a Great Peace has yet to settle on Sudan or Israel.  We’re impatient for the jobs report to get better, or terrorist groups to lay down their violent plots.  We might be hoping for a global plan to slow climage change or for a miraculous cure for autism.  It’s right to hope for these things.  Christ came to redeem Creation, to bring it into the fullness of being.

We are living in the time between the beginning and end, and it’s fun and sometimes painful to watch the unfolding of things.  But if you are to follow Christ to do God’s work, go out to the margins where the people are, and that’s where you will see the evidence of things hoped for.  One of our baptismal vows is to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God.  How we can be a good-news person during a national malaise is to follow Jesus out to the Jordan and dive in.

Mary had to give birth in a stable and lay her baby in a feeding trough because there was no room in the inn.  There was just no room.  The hotel was full.  No space, no place, no vacancy.  A pregnant woman was turned away, and ever after that inn has gone down in history as being too full to receive God’s gift.

We hear the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World” so many times in the mall and on our playlists in December that we might not notice its imperative: Let earth receive her king, let every heart prepare him room.

If you are the inn, if your heart is the hotel, is there room?  Is there a vacancy…in you?  Is there any space in your life whatsoever, for the coming of Jesus?

In our awesome North Shore culture of abundance, we have such wonderful offerings – jobs and volunteer opportunities, theatre and athletic events, parks and the Lake, airports to take us places far away.  Our kids have camps and activities, cool electronic entertainment, and tons of homework for academic enrichment.  We all have birthday parties and pets and email and workouts.  Many of us have serious and demanding responsibilities.

Is there any room?

A few centuries before Jesus was born, far far to the East in China, legend has it that a very regular man Lao Tzu was inspired one day to set aside his regular work, and to write down a whole book of his insights.  When he was done writing his book of insights, he returned to his regular work as a regular man and went on.  But his book became the basis for Taoism.  In Chapter 11 of that book called the Dao Te Ching, we hear this wisdom about vacancy, about there being space, or room:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wheel move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

In other words, the spaces are just as important as the structures.  What there isn’t leaves room for what is meant to be.  I’ll never forget my church choir director from my youth who pointed out to us that the rests between the notes were just as important as the notes.

The emptying and filling of the heart and of the life is dynamic, and that dynamic is godly.  God, like the heart of the circulatory system, is forever contracting and expanding, emptying and filling.  Our hearts pumping within us this very moment, contract to push the blood out and then relax so the blood flows back into them, over and over again.  Same with our diaphragm and lungs.  The goal of our lungs is not to constantly fill and fill and keep filling and getting more and more and more, or they would just stop, and nothing would flow anymore and we’d pass out, and if they still couldn’t empty themselves for another breath, we’d die.

The same is true with our selves, our souls.  Every one of us has a space inside us.  Each one of us has a vacancy, put there on purpose.  Just like the wheel, the clay pot, the room, most of our usefulness comes from that space within us to receive.  Wheels with space between the spokes are lighter, more functional, more flexible.  Rooms with more space are more inviting, more accommodating.  Hearts and lives with more space are also more adaptable, more open, and ultimately more helpful to others too.  Some of you may know someone who’s completely filled up, and there’s no space at all, no room for anything else.  What’s that person like to be around?  Well, there’s certainly no room for you.

Let every heart prepare him room.  How in God’s name could a heart with no room receive another person, notice another person, be ready for a new person, or a new idea, or a new movement of the Spirit?

I know someone dear to me who has a gaping painful space inside, and because it’s painful, she’s closed it off entirely.  A person who has closed off their empty place is just as tough to be around as someone who compulsively tries to fill their emptiness.

Listen!  Every one of us has an empty place in there somewhere.  If you’re aware of it, embrace it  — it’s natural.  If you’ve never noticed that you have a vacancy in you, pay attention to it.  It is the room that’s built within you so that you can receive God, receive others, receive the new.  When the newness comes knocking, you want to have room for it.  It means you have capacity.

Christmas and New Year’s give us a chance to measure our capacity, our room in the inn.  One measurement tool is an inventory of our stuff.  If we have so much stuff that we’re not even grateful or appreciative of our new Christmas gifts, then we might examine that a bit.  A woman recently wrote a piece about a little girl she tutors in the city.  She brought her tutee a doll for Christmas back in the last week of tutoring two weeks ago, and she encouraged the second-grader to go ahead so she could see her open it.  The little girl opened the present and saw the doll and gaped with wide eyes.  When her mom came to pick her up, the girl was still hugging the doll tightly to her as if she would never let it go.  The mom told the tutor, “She’s never had a doll before.”   How you can make it to age 8 in America and never have your own doll is beyond me.  But it was clear to the tutor the capacity this little girl had to receive it.

Do you have room?

As we approach New Year’s and we think about schedules and activities, camps and vacations, responsibilities at work and home, our time is another measurement of capacity.  Are we in the mode of Fill, fill, fill, or can we leave space to be available, to be open?  One way many Christians leave room for God is to set aside most Sunday mornings for God alone, saying no to Saturday night sleepovers, Sunday morning sports, the Xbox.

Some of us this Christmas Eve are aware of our naturally diminishing capacity in our lives.  Physical limitations might be pressing upon the energy we used to have.  We might not be able to do everything we used to be able to do.  And so, the question in this case becomes, because I can’t do this one thing anymore, what might that leave room for new in my life?

Let every heart prepare him room. God is coming to you.  God is always coming to you in many forms.  Christmas reminds us of that simple idea.  God comes to dwell among us and within us, in our homes and in our hearts and in our lives.  Is there room?