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astridstorm · 1 year

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On The Road to Galilee: A Reflection on a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Good morning and it’s good to be back! I just returned from 10 days in the Holy Land with 22 pilgrims from St. James--this is the third pilgrimage our parish has taken, with different groups, over the past 10 years. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.

You would THINK that the first sermon preached on returning from the Holy Land would be really great, full of wisdom and insight. You would think that. :)

The Holy Land is the kind of place you return from more confused than when you left, and even though I’ve made that journey now five times, I always feel this way when I get back. The Holy Land of our Sunday school lessons and even Sunday sermons is far less complicated than the real place--both today, and back in Jesus’ time.

Our guide doesn’t try to avoid all this. Quite the contrary. He’s an Arab Palestinian Christian, and so from the moment you meet him, you get right into it: conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, all the Christian conflicts (with Christians there the fighting tends to be internal, Christians fighting among themselves for dominance and propriety over holy sites).

Now that I’ve co-led two of these pilgrimages I’m noticing some patterns. One is that Peak Confusion and weariness among the pilgrims sets in on Day 3. At that point, you’re dealing with some pretty bedraggled, disillusioned people. On the 4th day, however, all this begins to change. That’s the day we get in our bus, wind our way east out of Jerusalem and into the Jordan River Valley where, just like Jesus would have done, we turn and head north. A hot barren landscape slowly turns green. First you see huge fields of palm trees. Then banana trees. Then lower plants: mango, orange and lime trees, finally, cotton, which grows only in the richest soils.

The closer to Galilee you get, the greener the valleys become. Until you reach the Sea of Galilee, and the shores, so verdant and lovely, that Jesus once walked.

You can feel the tension lift with every passing mile. Even today, the relations between groups up in those parts are easier. There’s more mingling, more tolerance. As if the reassurance of rainfall and good soil in itself shapes a people, and human history. It does.

By the time we reached the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth, where we stayed for three nights, we were finally relaxed.

If you follow the chronology of Mark and Matthew’s Gospels, Jesus only goes to Jerusalem once. His entire life is shaped up north. Luke’s Gospel puts him there several times, but only once as an adult. John has Jesus shuttling back and forth in his adult ministry many times, Jerusalem to Galilee and back again. But all the Gospels agree It’s the North that inspired the stories and parables of our Lord.

The kingdom of heaven is as if a sower went out and sowed seed, some on rocky ground, some on shallow soil, some on rich, deep soil. Last week’s reading.

Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For my yoke is easy and my burden light. Our reading from two weeks ago, a reference to the yoke of field animals, like oxen and donkeys.

Then today: the kingdom of heaven is as if a farmer went out and planted seed. In the night, the devil came out and sowed weeds among the good seed. The hired hands asked the farmer whether they should pluck up the weeds, but he said Leave them. Let them grow up alongside the wheat and we’ll sort it all out at the harvest.

Scholars will tell you there’s a certain kind of grain grown in Jesus’ time that looked like a common weed. There was no way of telling the good grain from the weeds until the very end of its growth cycle when the shoot sprouted. Only then could you distinguish the good from the bad and safely sort them.

I don’t know if that’s the grain Jesus was talking about or it just helps those of us who preach make some sense of it. But I do like where that message leads. A human life is a field, filled with all sorts of things that grow up we never intended to get in there. We learn soon enough that the pristine life without weeds—bad events, bad people, bad thoughts within—isn’t possible. That’s a hard lesson. The myth of the perfect field or garden runs deep in the human psyche. Eden is the name we give that in our tradition.

Yet this parable reminds us that we’re actually not always so good at singling out the weeds from the wheat, the bad stuff from the good. Things that we think are messing up our field, our life may, when it’s all said and done and we have the wisdom of hindsight, turn out to be just the things that saved us. We should be careful before we just pull up the stuff we don’t like. Those might actually be the best stalks of grain in the field.

I think we usually interpret this story in terms of people. The stalks of wheat are good people, the weeds are the bad. That's not a bad lesson either; don’t stand in judgment of others because most of the time we just don’t know or see the whole of a person and their life. That’s why we leave the judging to God.

But as a metaphor contained within one person, it works well, too. Let those weeds be and don’t assume that’s what they in fact are until you’re really sure. Often, that takes a whole lifetime to sort out--and, for each of us, a lot of patience, humility, a readiness to be surprised, and above all, Faith.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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The Binding of Isaac: Three Traditions, with Surprising Agreement (and: On Preparing for a Trip to the Holy Land)

For an audio version of this sermon, click here. (At ten minutes, it’s a tad longer than my usual, but bear with me!)

(Our pilgrims on the Temple Mount in front of the Dome of the Rock)

Good morning on this lengthy (and a bit rainy) Fourth of July Weekend. I’ll say a prayer for our national life shortly, at the prayers of the people.

This coming week our Holy Land Pilgrims will set out on our twelve-day journey to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, Jericho, the Dead Sea and Judean desert. So Mo. Eliza and I will be away for the next two Sundays with that group; Father Dan Heischman has kindly agreed to cover, and I know he’s looking forward to seeing you again.

Our schedule of Sunday readings has this funny way of giving us this story from Genesis, of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac, right here at the beginning of the summer. Our Jewish friends read this in the fall during their high holy days. In Islam, it’s the focus of their second holiest day of the year, which (in fact) they celebrated last week.

Perhaps it says something about us Christians that we slip this story in when attendance begins to drop, and even then there’s an alternative reading that we can choose if we want.

I. Didn’t. Want.

I love this story. In fact, the pilgrims next Saturday will visit the site where it happened. This rock, on Mt. Moriah, where Abraham bound his son Isaac, is now housed within the Dome of “the Rock,” a Muslim shrine built over it in the 7th century. Before that shrine existed, it was the site of the Jewish Temple, the holiest site in ancient Judaism. Going all the way back to the beginning, to Genesis chapter 1, legend says this is where God gathered up a handful of dust, and created the first human being, Adam, from the word “Adamah” meaning dirt, or earth.

I wonder if there’s any place in this world quite as complicated and storied as this place.

Or any story quite as complicated as this.

[It’s said to be some of the best writing in the ancient world. Its genius is in how spare it is, as if to say, Just try to interpret me. The author’s withholding of pretty much every detail you want as a reader (some word from Isaac, some inner thought of Abraham’s, some motive on God’s part -- anything) has led to much wonderful speculation and filling in the gaps.

Let me give you one example, from the famous medieval Jewish scholar, Rashi. He puts words in the mouth of silent Abraham, because Abraham’s silence at God’s command has always been one of the most upsetting parts of this story. But Rashi takes that and even seems to have a little fun giving Abraham a voice.

Here’s what he wrote. God’s words are what’s exactly in the Bible. Abraham’s, Rashi added. (And remember Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, from two different mothers.)

God said [to Abraham], Your son.

Abraham said to Him, “I have two sons.”

God said to him, “Your only one.”

Abraham said, “This one is an only one to his mother and this one is an only one to his mother.”

God said to him, “Whom you love.”

Abraham said to him, “I love both of them.”

God said to him, “Isaac.”

Isn’t that amazing? He must have been having some fun with this. My husband yesterday reminded me that Bob Dylan also did a “midrash” (that is, creative interpretation) of this story--it starts off his song Hwy 61. But I’ll save that for the next time I preach this.

The story in the Bible is brief, spare. One day God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham, without a word, gathers up two of his servants, some wood, and his son, Isaac, and they begin their journey to Mt. Moriah. As they draw close to the place of sacrifice, he leaves the two servants behind and continues with only his son.

If you follow the Bible story literally, that Sarah was 90 years old when she gave birth to Isaac (and notice I said IF you follow it literally!), then Isaac in this story would have been 37 years old. Most of us picture a much younger man, a boy even. His few words make him seem too young to understand, and it takes him well into the journey to start to wonder What’s going on, to ask Where the lamb for the burnt offering is.

Finally Abraham, when they reach their destination, wordlessly binds his son and places him on the makeshift altar, the rock. Then, just as he lifts his knife in the air, an angel calls out to him to stop, a ram appears in a nearby thicket, a substitute sacrifice, and Isaac is spared.

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Three faiths share this story. There are so many views within each faith on what it means that if you lay them all out you can actually find points of agreement all over the place, one faith with the next: Muslim with Christian; Christian with Jew; Muslim with Jew; Muslim Christian and Jew. It’s not as easy as saying every faith has a different interpretation. I used to think that, but over the years in digging more deeply into this story I’ve come to see it’s not that simple.

There’s the version, maybe best known to us Christians and shared with Muslims, that Abraham was a man of faith for being willing to follow a command as difficult (seeming impossible) as this. And yet he stood prepared to do it, if and when called upon.

There’s the version, shared by Jews and some Christians, that God’s test to Abraham wasn’t to see if he *would* agree to this command, but to see if he would reject it. God wanted Abraham to refuse, to push back. Abraham failed the test. In the Bible story, the two (Abraham and God) never speak again. Neither do Abraham and Isaac. Let that be a lesson to you fathers :)

There’s the version, shared by Jews, Christians, and some Muslims as well, that what this story is really about is an advancement towards a more ethical way of life, God ruling out once for all an ancient practice of child sacrifice.

Jews and Muslims, with different motives and conclusions, have suggested that the son in the story wasn’t Isaac at all, but actually Abraham’s other son, Ishmael.

I think back to the site on which this rock stands, which some of us will see in just a few days. Picture it: gold dome of Islam, which stands atop the holiest site of ancient Judaism, the Temple, and was also once a site of a Byzantine Church--I left that one out earlier--and these all built up over (as legend says) the singular patch of dirt that God used to make us all.

If it’s not exactly an ecumenical story, promoting unity and fellow feeling among our three faiths, it should be. This is one of the best-written stories in the Bible and all the world, and what makes it so is that it (like the parables of Jesus) refuses to be confined to one reading, to one group of people, one faith even. It can be debated endlessly and one will always find something to disagree about, but also plenty of common ground. We need both of those, agreement and disagreement, to be in healthy relationships with one another. And whoever first set down this story, got that.

So - if you’re not going on this trip to the Holy Land, please let me put you on the list for the next. I wish everyone in this parish could, at some point, stand there on that Temple Mount near this very spot, and reflect not on the bizarre divisions that most see when there, but on what we all share, in common.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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A Season to Grow Wise In

For an audio version of this sermon, read by Mo. Storm, click here.

Good morning on this seventh (and last) Sunday of Easter. Next Sunday is the day of Pentecost, which begins a new liturgical season.

Yesterday, of course, was the consecration of our new bishop Matt Heyd at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the city. Torrential rain notwithstanding, it was a wonderful event. Douglass Hatcher our former warden was there serving as an usher. I’m guessing others of you might have been in the crowd--it was packed

The service had all the pomp and history you’d expect: the pounding on and then opening up of the huge bronze doors in the back of the church as trumpets played Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. I think that was for the entrance of the Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, but I wasn’t sure because you can barely see down the length of the cathedral. It claims to be the largest cathedral in the world, and however they measure these things it’s at very least among the largest.

Then, as Matt the bishop elect, dressed in his plain white robe (which is what priests and bishops wear before they’re vested with their ordination regalia), as Matt walked up that long aisle of the nave, you could hear a slow-moving muffled wave of applause greeting him. It took about 10 minutes for him and the applause to make its way from the back to the front, where we clergy were sitting. That’s how long the cathedral nave is.

It was incredible, in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Bishop Heyd doesn’t start his work in full until this time next year. It’s the custom in our diocese to have the new bishop serve alongside the old bishop for a year before taking over. Which we’ve all known, but this time there’s a sense of impatience among the clergy, the feeling that Matt is more than ready and capable and it’s time for change. But we have to wait. You can’t serve in the church and not know that things move a little slower than in other institutions.

As I sat in that service (all 2 ½ hours of it!) I thought about the liturgical season we’re in, Ascensiontide, which began last Thursday with Jesus’ ascent into heaven, and ends next Sunday with the Holy Spirit’s descent on the apostles and thus the start of the church, at Pentecost. We get this framework from the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the book of Acts, in our Bible. Forty days after Easter, Jesus, standing before the disciples, rose up and left them for good, but not before promising that the presence and comfort, support, and inspiration of the Holy Spirit would take his place. They just had to wait. But it would come.

Ascension is like the church’s nod to seasons of liminality in our lives. Liminal comes from the Latin word, threshold, or door. It’s when we’ve left the old behind, but aren’t yet sure what takes its place; we’re between, too late to turn back, but not yet sure of (or confident in) what comes next. I guess we might say we’ve reached the limit, obviously a related word, but not quite capturing that sense of being neither here nor there, liminal, at the threshold.

The older we get, the longer the list of these liminal moments in our lives. We’ve been between jobs, between relationships. One of the greatest stresses in life (as many here have experienced) is moving, being between communities, missing the old, not yet situated in the new. Some know the terrible liminal moment between a medical scan and knowing the results.

We can also have liminal seasons in our faith life; I’ve walked through these with a number of you. What you used to believe seems inadequate, rings hollow. Maybe you left another tradition and wandered about confused before finding St. James. I love being the church on the other side of that liminal phase, welcoming people in a safe embrace. But I know that can go the other way, too, where I’ve had to watch people go, and enter a period of confusion and loss before hopefully making their way back here, but not always.

Liminal seasons in one’s faith are hard. You may feel abandoned by God. Even priests go through these phases, very much so. It’s just that we’re forced to figure them out because our livelihood depends on it. And that’s kind of a blessing, I’ve found. Not having the option of giving up.

Communities go through liminal periods, as individuals do. As I mentioned, our diocese is in one, waiting for Matt to step into his role as head bishop and quite a bit anxious and impatient that that isn’t happening sooner. In a year’s time we’ll be, as a country, back in that dreaded liminal, transitional state where a presidential term is coming to an end and no one knows what’s next. I’m not looking forward to going through that again.

Parishes go through liminal seasons all the time--in leadership, identity, mission, motivation.

We priests are advised in such times to be calm, steady, non-anxious, not to try to jump ahead too soon, because, like them or not, there’s value to these times when we’re between things. It’s where our hearts are softened, our egos knocked down a bit, and our hardened certainties fall away, opening us up in ways we hadn’t been before. It’s where we’re kind of ideal Christians, really. Which is probably why God seems to bring about such moments time and again in our lives.

Live through enough of them, and you will grow wise.

So, whether you find yourself settled, in transition, or you’re not sure--or maybe it’s a little of both… wherever you are, I wish you a blessed and meaningful Ascensiontide.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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Funeral Homily for Peter Windley Herman

Good morning and welcome to St. James. A special welcome to Alice, Peter’s wife; to Caroline, his daughter and her fiance, Bruce, here with us from Florida; to Peter Jr and his girlfriend Megan, here from Chicago; to Alice’s siblings here today: Margo, Marion, Rob and Tom; nieces and nephew: Alison, Meaghan and Patrick.

There are friends of Peter’s here from Millbank, welcome to all of you. Also from George Washington High School, even grade school (PS 187).

The Rev. Tom Newcomb, the former rector of St. James is presiding with me today, welcome to him. Until recently Peter continued to have regular lunches with Father Newcomb and their men’s group--some of them are here with us today, as well.

And of course a very warm welcome to the many parishioners who came out to remember the life of this man who was well loved and respected here, and will be--IS--very missed.

Peter and Alice have been at St. James for over 30 years. They became Episcopalians as a compromise between their two traditions, Roman Catholic and Methodist. This is not uncommon. I’ll never forget, though, Peter’s reason for staying in the Episcopal Church, not exactly a ringing endorsement. These are his words exactly: “you can get used to anything.” :)

But I think he did love it here, and that’s as much for the tradition as for the people--really, more for the people. He gave a lot to this community, serving as treasurer and member of the vestry, consulting frequently on our by-laws, looking at contracts. He was a loyal member of the (old) men’s group (as he called it), a regular at coffee hours. He always saw to it that we sang the Navy Hymn on the Anniversary of Pearl Harbor. He was of course a recipient of the Wally Owen Award for outstanding service to St. James.

What I think he’d be most proud of, though, was his generosity to the children of our parish. On the back of the bulletin is a picture from about four years ago of Peter and some kids sitting near the ice cream truck he would commission each spring. It usually came on Pentecost, one of the principal (and most important) feast days in the Episcopal Church -- but never mind that, because everyone really knew this day as Ice Cream Truck Sunday.

Peter also generously had ponies brought in each year for Palm Sunday for the children to ride--this because of an old, as in centuries-old, church custom of having ponies lead the procession into the church, taken from the Gospel story of Jesus’ entry on a colt into Jerusalem. The Greater Church may call it Palm Sunday, but here at St. James it’s probably better known as Pony-ride Sunday. At least to our younger members.

We have others speaking today after me, but before I invite them up I’d like to point out that every bit of this service was chosen by Peter--every bit. Since I’ve known him, he’s talked about what was going to be in his funeral service. “Media vita in morte sumus”: In life we are in the midst of death. Peter embodied an old-fashioned appreciation for mortality. The more keenly we’re attuned to it This side of the grave, the more fully we can embrace our lives. And he did.

He reminded me just days before he died--and I quote--“I want it to be known that everything in this service reflects my values.” (end quote) From the prophet Micah’s vision of a day when war shall cease so that every man can sit under his vine and under his fig tree, safe and free from harm. To the Psalmist’s joyful noise in thanksgiving for God’s mercy. To the apostle Paul’s celebration of the variety of gifts given God’s people, all of which “worketh under that one and selfsame Spirit.”

Need I mention that all these readings can only (and ever) rightly be conveyed by the Authorized King James Bible itself, the only Bible Peter took seriously?

The hymns in this service all have meaning, too--In the Garden tells the story of Mary Magdalene’s heart-rending discovery of Jesus that first Easter morning. How Great Thou Art is an homage to creation and the humility it inspires -- these come from Peter’s Methodist upbringing. Others I scarcely need to explain: classic hymns and above all the Navy Hymn with which we’ll conclude this service.

But I think the pinnacle of this service and of the Scriptures for Peter was found in the story of the Good Samaritan, our Gospel reading. A man is beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. Two men--religious leaders of this man’s own people, no less--pass by, hardly giving him a second glance. But a third man, of a different and disreputable tribe, stops to help. Not only that, but takes the wounded man on his own horse, to an inn, where he pays for him to be cared for, and brought back to health.

It contains everything Peter valued going all the way back to his student days at Columbia and the religious classes he took at nearby Union Seminary, and his days in the Navy--values he formed then and never gave up: mercy, engagement, caring for the stranger, recognizing our shared humanity, and never failing to help someone in need.

The passage ends with what Peter wanted us to hear today, above everything else--his four favorite words in the Scriptures. And for that last line I’m going to have to take some liberties with the King James version because Peter always said they were the FOUR best words in the Bible, and I just noticed in the King James it’s five. I’ll just edit slightly.

“Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” Jesus asked.

“And [the lawyer] said, He that shewed mercy on him.

Then said Jesus unto him, Go, [and] do thou likewise.”

Today we give thanks for a great man. Whose legacy we will carry on--and carry further, just as he would have wished us to. Go, and do thou likewise. Amen.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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Add in a little Gratitude: a Sermon for Rogationtide

Well … if you’re here after yesterday, then you definitely get extra credit! We had a (not surprisingly) huge funeral for a much loved and long standing member of our parish, Peter Herman. And I’m glad to see so many of you also here today because we’ll be celebrating, mostly after this service, the recipient of this year’s Audrey Davies Award for outstanding service to our parish, Jen Young. I can think of few so deserving as Jen, and was thrilled to hear she was selected to be this year’s recipient. But more on that at the coffee hour shortly. (Congratulations, Jen!)

And of course - Happy Mother’s Day. I’ll say a prayer for our mothers present and absent at the end of the Prayers of the People.

I thought I’d keep today light, and the church makes that a bit easier because in our liturgical calendar today is one of my favorites, actually: Rogation Sunday. This is an English thing, and remember we are descended from the Church of England. The name “Episcopal Church” was our attempt to rebrand ourselves after the Revolutionary War when to be called the “Church of England” was probably not going to win many converts.

“Episcopal” just comes from the Greek word meaning “bishops,” and so we basically called ourselves “that church with bishops,” removing the English connection from the title altogether -- but not from our identity in a deeper way. As Episcopalians we’ve had the advantage of being able to pick and choose the things we like about that English (or Anglican) identity: no king, but pomp, yes, and all this wonderful architecture. And such charming occasions as Rogation Days. Rogare is the Latin word for “ask” and the church for centuries has set aside these latter days of Easter to “ask” God’s blessing on our fields and the crop about to be planted. Practicality trumps liturgy, and theology, at a certain point; we need food to eat. That’s where our thoughts turn (or used to) in late spring.

Where I served before coming to St. James, about sixty miles north of here, we actually ended church on Rogation Sunday and then walked about ten minutes up the hill from the river to the farm of one of our parishioners to bless his fields. His family was descended from the English Livingstons who were granted large tracts of property along the Hudson River by Queen Anne in 1704, who at the same time also granted 200 acres of farmland in lower Manhattan to Trinity Church Wall Street. Just 214 acres. (Today they own just 14.)

What remained of that farm of my former parishioner, (like with Trinity Wall St) just a small tract by now, was a working farm and we as a parish would all march up there after church and trudge through his fields blessing them. It was a lot of fun.

The English custom (on which this was based) was just that: the clergy and a procession of people would spend Rogation days--they go from today until next Thursday, which is the feast of the Ascension--they’d spend those days “beating the bounds” of the parish. That is, marking the perimeter of land that the church belonged to (think “parish” not like a single church but a whole area, like they still use that word in Louisiana, parishes for neighborhoods), marking that perimeter and then blessing the fields within it.

We don’t really have rituals for this in our time, but if we did, I like to think we’d be more grateful for the food we eat, and the labor that goes into it.

Church customs like this can seem antiquated in a world where food just appears, is genetically modified so it can be shipped from far away any time of the year and so give us the illusion that we can have whatever we want whenever we want it. Even if that’s true, food is always work, for someone, somewhere. Ancient customs once born of necessity can at least still remind us today not to take for granted the fact that food (and everything that sustains us) is a gift of God, of the earth, and of the work of others’ toil on our behalf. It is, and was ever thus.

I know you had no idea when you walked in here that it was Rogation Sunday (or even what that was). But I hope today we can leave here more thankful for what we have than we were when we walked in. If coming to church does no more than just that for us, increasing our gratitude, it will have been more than enough.

Happy Rogation Sunday.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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Metaphors that Age with Us: A Sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday

I love an ambiguous metaphor. And we have not one, but two of them in today’s readings.

But before I get to that, I’d like to mention just briefly that we’ll be recognizing today at the announcements those parishioners who recently completed reading the entire Bible. We started during Covid, when it seemed like a good idea and somehow they stuck with it.

They got through the battles and family feuds of Genesis. Reams of law in Leviticus. More battles in the books of 1 & 2 Samuel and Kings. All 150 Psalms -- the Psalms, to our surprise, sort of dragged. Much as we love them in small doses. The prophets. All four Gospels. The epistles, and all the way to Revelation.

One of the questions I frequently asked the group at our weekly gatherings was, How’s your faith holding up? Because contrary to popular belief, reading the Bible can really do a number on your cherished beliefs and assumptions.

And I have to say, no one, to my knowledge, lost their faith, or left the Church over this. Episcopalians do a good job (I think) of appreciating new and challenging ideas. And I like to think it’s hard to “lose your faith” because we teach that it grows and evolves with us through our lives; it’s never a static thing we grow out of.

The last thing I’ll say about this Is that the group is working now on a video compilation of their experience, which I hope we can have done and share with all of you before summer. In the meantime, again, we’ll celebrate them shortly and also at a “Bible-themed” coffee hour following this service.

To which my husband queried, Manna? Loaves and fishes? What’s a Bible-themed coffee hour? You’ll have to come and find out!

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Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We are sheep.

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, another fixed day in our Church year that comes up every fourth Sunday of Easter. It has, in the past here, overlapped with Holy Communion Sunday, the recognition of our first and second graders. A couple of times since I’ve been here we’ve had baptisms on this day, as well. This year, today is (for us at St. James) a relatively quiet day. But I like when it ties into events with children because it’s such a favorite early metaphor.

I’ve mentioned this I believe in years past. I had a poster as a child of Jesus holding a sheep over his shoulder on my wall. I found out later that it was one of the most mass-produced images of Jesus in the 70s so probably thousands of other kids also had that in their rooms, but I thought it was something special and unique, just for me. Don’t ask me how, but I thought I was that sheep, nuzzled in the crook of Jesus’ neck. I’m grateful that was one of my earliest impressions of God.

The first Christians, too, found solace in this image. They used it to decorate the walls of their catacombs. Jesus the Good Shepherd was often beardless, a young handsome man with a sheep slung over his shoulders. He was painted there to guard and protect them as they suffered persecution after persecution in those early and difficult days of our faith.

Before any of this, the Old Testament writers presented King David, regarded by us Christians as Jesus’ ancestor, as a young ruddy shepherd. David protected not only his flocks but his people, first appearing on the scene to knock out the enemy Goliath as he charged about murdering the sons of Israel. There’s something about young David unarmored, with just a few river rocks and a simple handmade weapon that makes that story still an innocent seeming one.

On the other side, the people of Israel were the sheep, before the metaphor was passed on to the early Christians and to all Christians including little girls and boys in their Sunday school classes.

Jesus is the Shepherd. We are the sheep.

Of course there’s always more to a Biblical metaphor than first meets the eye; our Bible readers can certainly tell you that.

Having a shepherd for a God is comforting. But outside of childhood we find ourselves (if we’re honest) wanting someone a bit higher up the ranks to show as our deity. You could say that the same discomfort at having a God who hangs on a cross and is persecuted at (human hands), that same discomfort is there when we really think about having a shepherd God. Many Israelites didn’t like it either. Plenty of Jews and Christians were happy to move on to more conquering-hero images of the Divine and put their pastoral days behind them.

To be part of a humble faith that doesn’t wield power and claim to have answers, that admits a weak and low-ranking God who masquerades as a shepherd, or victim on a cross: That is a challenge. It asks of us to see real strength in weakness and vulnerability, going against every instinct we have especially as we age into the prime of our lives when we also don’t like to acknowledge those traits--weakness and vulnerability--in ourselves.

And then we, sheep. The environmentalist Robert Muir (whose feast day in our calendar of saints was last week) called them “hooved locusts.” They destroy everything in sight and are not exactly known for their brilliance, either. Once again we’re challenged to accept a less triumphant view of ourselves in the world, as creatures needing to be guided, not as individual and brilliant and self-determining as we fancy ourselves to be. We’re just part of a herd, one of millions--billions.

So this metaphor becomes more complicated as we age. But it’s no less comforting. In youth it makes us feel unique and special, and we are that; as we age it helps us understand our place and limitations, a comfort of a different sort.

The Lord is my shepherd. We are sheep. Nothing more, because that, is everything.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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A Comfort of a Different Sort: A Sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday

I love an ambiguous metaphor.

And we have not one, but two of them in today’s readings.

To which my husband queried, Manna? Loaves and fishes? What’s a Bible-themed coffee hour? You’ll have to come and find out!

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Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We are sheep.

On the other side, the people of Israel were the sheep, before the metaphor was passed on to the early Christians and to all Christians including little girls and boys in their Sunday school classes.

Jesus is the Shepherd. We are the sheep.

Of course there’s always more to a Biblical metaphor than first meets the eye; our Bible readers can certainly tell you that.

The Lord is my shepherd. We are sheep. Nothing more, because that, is everything.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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We Are the Scars We Bear: A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

For an audio version of this story, click here.

Good morning on this second Sunday of Easter, the season (not just day, but season) that lasts fifty days.

In every church I’ve served except this one, not much is happening on the Sunday after Easter Day. It’s even called “Low Sunday” for the poor participation we typically expect. But not at St. James! We have people right now on a Breakfast Run taking food to the homeless in New York City. We have people making and delivering food for the St. Bart’s White Plains Food Bank. We have a forum scheduled after the 10:30 service. Our Bible Marathon group meets between services. Children’s Music and Arts after Church, Confirmation classes -- I can’t make you people stop!

I spent the better part of this past week at Sloan Kettering with my daughter Naomi, so I didn’t have a lot of time to put together a sermon; I trust you’ll pardon me. But I do love this reading, which we devote time to every year on this Sunday. That’s rare. Most Scripture stories only appear every three years in our liturgical cycle; this one comes up every year.

It’s the story of the disciple we call “Doubting Thomas” for this scene, in which he isn’t present when the resurrected Lord appears to the other disciples, and so (not having seen for himself) he refuses to believe their story that Christ is risen.

Some days later, Jesus appears again, this time with Thomas present. Jesus meets Thomas’ demands, showing him the marks of the nails in his hands and the wound in his side, and by this, Thomas’ doubt is assuaged. He believes.

Doubt is a wonderful topic, especially for the Sunday after Easter Day. It’s the church’s way of acknowledging that even our most closely held beliefs, such as Easter for Christians, are complicated, for most of us. I like what the playwright John Patrick Shanley calls the practice of doubt: a “passionate exercise.” It’s simply what we do with our most cherished beliefs. They deserve not to be taken at face value, but wrestled with.

Usually when I preach on this, I talk about doubt, and faith; the necessity of both in a religious life. This year I’m not going to do that, even though you would think a priest with a sick child would have a lot to say about religious doubt.

I’m drawn instead to a subtler theme in this reading, one that appears in other of the post-resurrection stories of Jesus, as well, but especially here in this reading from John’s Gospel: Jesus’ wounds. The display of them, and the very fact of them in these Easter stories.

In this story we heard today, Thomas goes out of his way to demand to see not just Jesus, whom you’d think he’d recognize with little trouble if he appeared, but to see his wounds. He has to recognize him by his wounds. And then Jesus, when he does finally appear to Thomas, makes a display of showing them. This scene always makes me think of the Baroque artist Caravaggio’s depiction of Thomas, almost photo-realistically, grotesquely, probing his finger into the wound in Jesus’ side. That gash almost seems to be the subject of the painting more than anything or anyone else.

But have you ever stopped to wonder, why do the Gospel stories even mention Jesus’ scarred body after he’s risen from the dead? Wouldn’t you think presenting a perfect body would be more compelling? Christ could have looked a lot more like the Victor if he returned without reminding everyone he’d just been persecuted and killed.

But no. Jesus wears these scars and wanted his disciples, and us, to see them. In Thomas’ case, even touch them.

This isn’t a simple, happy ending; it’s a complicated ending, and that’s one of the things that makes this central event in our faith so profound. Jesus doesn’t come back unblemished, perfect, bathed in a sea of forgetfulness about the pain he suffered in those last days of his life; he comes back now that much more compelling for those wounds he still carries.

We can all think of so many scars from our past that we’d just as soon erase if we could. But then think of all we’d be giving up. Each of those wounds drew you in some way deeper into somebody’s life; introduced you to some new thought or idea; maybe led you to a new place, a new relationship. We ARE the scars we bear, so much so that if we somehow could erase any of them, we’d be difficult to recognize--to others, to ourselves.

One of the most confounding and yet memorable things someone said to me after my daughter’s diagnosis came from a fellow priest and friend of many years whose daughter also had cancer, a similar type. He had read where people with or close to cancer, when asked much later to write things in their lives they’re grateful for and things they’re not grateful for--the grateful things were to be written above a line, the other things, below--the cancer was almost always put above the line.

Now, I don’t know what I think about that and I’m pretty sure at this point (or ever) I won’t be able to put this above a line. But I think often about what he said. Because the fact is, in our faith our wounds are more than endured; they’re paraded. They’re what draw us closer to God and each other. That’s the central story of the cross. There is no resurrection without the cross. There is no Christian story, without it. It is, the cross, definitely, above the line. Improbably so.

The Paschal candle here, which we lit for the first time at the Easter Vigil one week ago yesterday, has (as I explained then) five pins in it representing the five wounds of Christ. This will remain here throughout the fifty days of Easter, and it will remind us to honor the scars we bear. These Easter stories of Jesus’ resurrection cannot be told without them, and neither can the story of our lives. Amen.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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Easter Sunday 2023

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed, alleluia.

Good morning on this glorious spring Easter Day. It's always so nice to see your faces, parishioners, friends, and family, people from afar. If you’re visiting for the first time, a special welcome to you. After the service we have a coffee hour and I hope you'll join us for that, and also come back. This is a great parish, and a great time to be part of it.

Today, we celebrate our happiest day, the very reason we exist, as a church, and as Christians, Easter Day. It happens to fall, this year, on the same day as the feast of someone in our calendar of saints that you may or may not have heard of. His name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Now, technically all Sundays and especially Easter Sunday override lesser commemorations like saints’ days. But I always check the calendar for interesting convergences like this, to see what they might teach us.

Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who was part of the resistance to the Nazis. He began speaking out in the early 1930s, and soon became part of an organized resistance movement. Many of its members were arrested and put into prison camps. Some survived; some did not. Bonhoeffer was executed just months before the war ended in 1945. Today his feast is honored each year on April 9 by churches all over the world.

He also made a visit right here to Scarsdale, in 1941, and spoke at the Greenville Community church just over the hill, on Ardsley Rd. A week from now they’ll be hosting a symposium on the 75th anniversary of that visit (delayed because of Covid).

Many here also know that the local Baptist Church, Scarsdale Baptist (just down Popham Rd towards the village), once hosted Dr. Martin Luther King. We, many of us, including St. James, have incredible stories to tell of times when our churches have stood on the right side of history.

The coincidence of Bonhoeffer’s feast with Easter Day is meaningful. Because his life modeled the central truth of Easter: that to get to today, with its trumpets and flowers and joy; to reach the fullness of what we’re called to be by God, we have to first pass through Good Friday, and the cross. There is no other way. Struggle and freedom, death and resurrection--are inextricably bound together.

Some of you were able this past week to spend time here walking through the last days of Jesus’ life, which we act out liturgically--and have done for almost 2000 years. On Thursday we gathered to remember the night Jesus was betrayed by one of his disciples, then taken away by the Roman guards. That service ended with one of the most striking moments in the church year, the stripping of the altar where we removed everything--every candle, cross, even the linens and kneelers from the high altar and chancel around it. The cold marble altar and its bleak surroundings recall a tomb.

On Friday, many came back to hear St. John’s Passion sung, in which was told the final hours of Jesus at his trial, and his death on the cross. We consumed the remaining sacrament, and extinguished the candle signifying Christ’s presence.

Easter doesn’t come out of the blue. It follows a process of pain and death. It’s hard won. And I wonder, looking each of us at our lives, and the lives of our loved ones, and of the institutions and societies we belong to: If we’re not engaged in some struggle, are we claiming the fullness of life that was promised us that first Easter morning?

Struggle, even death--Big D, but also small “d” death as in the the things that have to die to free us up for new ways, new friendships, new patterns of thinking and living, new life--struggle and death, far from being signs something is heading in the wrong direction, may well be signs they’re going in the right direction. That a fuller life lies ahead, if we can just pass through and get to the other side.

We English speakers are among the few who call this day “Easter,” which actually (I didn’t know this until this year) derives from the name of an old pre-Christian pagan goddess Aestre. The majority of the Christian world uses a word for today that comes from the Hebrew festival underlying our celebration: Pesach, Passover. So Greek Christians call today Pascha, the French Paques, Spanish Pascua, in Dutch Pasen, in Swedish Pask. And so on. We’re the odd ones out. And so we miss the sense of it being a passing through trial to get to freedom. Passing through death, to get to life.

So What does an Easter life look like for you, a life “fully alive”? What must you overcome, pass through, to get there? Christ, and so many of the saints (like Bonhoeffer) made better lives and worlds by taking this Easter journey. The journey to which God calls us every year, all over again, so that one of these times, or once again, we’ll stand up and claim our life in Christ, the life (to quote St. Paul) that really is life.

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astridstorm · 1 year

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A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Good evening on this Maundy Thursday, the first evening of the Easter Triduum, the three holiest days of the year and (tonight) the beginning of the Passion and Resurrection story. Maundy means “command” in Latin (as in our word “mandate”) and refers to Jesus’ command in our reading that we love one another.

Tonight, just after this homily, we’ll celebrate the Institution of the First Eucharist at the Passover Supper of Jesus and the disciples on the night before he died. Then we’ll take the remaining consecrated wafers, symbolizing Christ’s presence, and we’ll place them in the chapel for those who’d like to “keep watch” through the night--as Jesus asked the disciples to do in the Garden of Gethsemane after their meal.

One of the most extraordinary things we do here at St. James is decorate the chapel like a garden. I’ve never seen anything in any church I’ve been in as beautiful as this, and I want to mention briefly that, all these years--I think almost 50 years--our Louise Clark donated and helped arrange the flowers for the altar. This year her children gave them in her memory since she’s no longer with us. She’s definitely here in spirit, though, and always will be. (If you watched the video tribute I uploaded earlier today, Louise may now be more famous for her lamb cakes than this altar. But this is but one more extraordinary thing she left us.)

We don’t know how the earliest Christians carried on the Last Supper in the years immediately following this first night. From our New Testament and other early writings, it seems that for them it was more like a meal--an actual meal, perhaps with a ritual moment of breaking bread and drinking wine in Jesus’ memory. Church communities being what we are, always striving but far from perfect, we have records of them arguing quite a bit over these meals: who brought what, who consumed a lot but didn’t contribute. Some were failing to take others’ dietary needs into account. Others came but refused to eat. Or came and ate only what they brought, not sharing it with the group.

I have to think that coffee hour (the “8th sacrament”) developed as a place where all those issues could be worked out, separate from the Eucharist. We can have debates over food and hospitality at the latter; but there needs to be a coming together in Jesus’ memory and in reenactment of that night that is as free as possible from all the things that can get in the way of our seeing each other equally as children of God, valued and loved every one the same as the next, no more, and no less.

We come up here, and we all kneel. We all take from the same cup. We’re given the same wafer. Stricter priests than I am make everyone kneel down and get up together across the altar rail. This isn’t about grabbing your host and getting on with it; it’s a communal act. We wait for each other.

It’s an enactment that is (I believe) a real taking in, with this wafer, of God’s grace. Episcopalians believe in the Real Presence. Something mystical is happening here, something that transforms us inside; I truly believe that.

But it’s also an act that, in just doing over and over, has the power to shape who we are and how we act towards others outside of this space.

Waiting. Kneeling. Shoulder to shoulder. Sharing. No one consuming more or less than the next person. Eating with strangers. Receiving grace (so we can turn around and give grace). Learning simply to receive. To be. And the best part: anyone can come up here--anyone. And you will kneel next to them, and you will be no better or worse in that moment (or ever in God’s eyes).

The Presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church Michael Curry, whose family was part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the southern states to the north--in their case, Rochester NY--tells a story in his memoir “Love is the Way” about how his father came to be an Episcopalian. It was before he was born, before his parents were even married, and they went to his mother’s Episcopal church in Chicago. He writes: “They were among the few Black parishioners in the pews that day. My father was amazed, but dubious, when it came time for Communion. The priest welcomed everyone to receive the body and blood of Christ--and from a single communal chalice! This was the 1940s. Jim Crow was alive and well. It was the North, but segregation and separation of the races was still the law of the land … My father hung back as my mother went forward. He wondered if the priest would really offer her the common cup. And if he did, would others continue to drink from the same cup? He held his breath. And as the cup was passed, the next person did drink. And the next. And the next. When he told that story, he would always say, ‘Any church in which Blacks and Whites drink out of the same cup knows something about the Gospel that I want to be part of.”

What we do here is extraordinary in ways we seldom really appreciate, and it has implications far beyond this rail. Who you are here [pointing to the altar rail], you’re meant to be out there [pointing outside]. The church has thought about all this. Jesus thought about all this. And that’s why we’re here this night, celebrating still this life-changing, world-changing, ritual. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Make Room for Chaos: A Lesson for Nicodemus and for Us

For an audio version of this sermon click here.

Good morning on this second Sunday in Lent, and notice (as I've pointed out before) that the preposition there is key. Sundays in Lent don't count among the "forty days" of Lent because Sundays, whatever the time of year, are always feast days in the church. So these five Sundays leading up to Easter fall in the season of Lent, but they're not of the season.

And to the point: yes, technically that means you can relax the rules today, and every Sunday. Which I almost hesitate to tell you!

Religion (and this isn't just Christianity) presents this push and pull of [rules and expectations], and freedom from those rules. The Scriptural language for this is "law" and "grace." And it's this tension that lies beneath the complex encounter that Jesus has with Nicodemus in today's Gospel reading.

Nicodemus is an observant Jew, a stand-in (as I think of him) for any observant religious person who values rituals, ceremony, laws, rules of order, all these proscribed in his case by the Torah.

For Roman Catholics these things are spelled out in their canons and doctrines. We Anglicans (and Episcopalians) also have canons, quite a lot of them, and some doctrines, but our fussiness is mostly manifest in our worship: our care of our space, the way we design it, our observance of the church year, our strict adherence to the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer. Those who've traveled and stopped into an Episcopal church in another state or even another country know that what you get there is going to be a lot like what we have here. That's because … we're sticklers. You don't maybe see it, but we priests are held by our bishops to almost every single word in the liturgy exactly as it's been printed and approved of.

Also behind the scenes are myriad written rules. We love our rules of order. People on the altar have to meet certain qualifications and then be licensed by the bishop. Deacons all go through the same steps, the same training, the same ordination. If you're going to be a priest, you have to study this, this and this, and only in a certain few places. You have to prove you're proficient in the same things. That's why Episcopal sermons and priests even tend to be similar wherever you go, just like our services.

And I say all this because Nicodemus, as well as so many other Jewish figures in the Gospels, is often presented as if he has hang-ups peculiar to his religion alone. The human impulse for uniformity and order, and also to upset order sometimes, is manifest in every religion because these impulses are in every society, and every person.

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And so Nicodemus approaches Jesus. At night. Night, because maybe he didn't want to be seen talking to someone the religious leadership was increasingly regarding as a nuisance. But metaphorically, day represents order and rationality, on the one hand, and night the forces opposite those things. It sets us up for the encounter these two men are about to have.

Jesus sees in Nicodemus what he saw in so many religious leaders we meet in the Gospels: people who struggle more than most to let go, and let the Spirit lead. Jesus takes control of the conversation pretty quickly: No one can see the kingdom of God without being “born from above.” (Implied: there’s more than what we can see, and control.) No one can see the kingdom of God without being born of water, and of the Spirit. If there are any two elements hard to control or contain, it’s these. The spirit, which blows where it chooses, no one knowing where it comes from or where it goes.

To my mind, this passage is Jesus’ fullest development of the significance of the irrational, the unpredictable, in life and especially the life of faith. And of the room we need to make for disorder and chaos in order to grow spiritually.

Why Jesus thinks Nicodemus needs to hear this at this time isn’t clear in the reading. Nicodemus shows up from time to time in John’s Gospel; the two men seemed to have known each other. We’re not given much context. But we can infer that anyone who puts too much store in following the rules, a liability of religious leaders, but of all of us (we all know these people and oftentimes are these people), need to be told to let go of control. To appreciate the rules of the night, where things don’t always make sense. Where some questions just don’t have answers. Where, with our defenses down, we have no choice but to be open about our weaknesses and flaws.

I have a feeling when we all look back on our lives and ask, When was God most at work, it won’t be in those times we were standing at our pew faithfully reciting the words of the Nicene Creed, or that time we nailed our Lenten disciples for forty straight days without a single mistake. It’ll be those times when the Spirit blew through our lives in an unexpected, troubling way, taking with it all our certainties, comforts, and showing us just how weak, and vulnerable we really are.

The last time we meet Nicodemus in this Gospel is when Jesus is being taken down from the cross. He provides an extravagant amount of balm, ointment, for the burial. It’s almost as if he thinks ritual can make sense of even this. But here’s what’s admirable about him: he shows up. At night. At the cross. He’s there in the dark places of life and maybe, just maybe, learned from Jesus an important lesson for all of us, in Lent: That it’s in those places that we encounter God, as much and more than in any place else. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Handing it All to God: A Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Happy Feast of the Presentation, also known as Candlemas. I believe this is meant to be held on its fixed date of February 2 (which would have been last Thursday) rather than the Sunday following. But I don’t see any other clergy (or God forbid, bishops) out there who’d notice.

I break the rules on most years just on this one occasion--not because it’s such an important event in the church calendar (it isn’t), but because it’s such a lovely one. And this year, for me, it’s also profound in a way I hadn’t considered before. But I’ll come to that shortly.

The Presentation comes from Luke’s Gospel, the source of so many special events in our church year that it’s hard to imagine Christianity looking anything like it does without this Gospel. That’s not an exaggeration. And it’s particularly noticeable this time of the year. Luke is the sole source of many of our Christmas stories, like the census at Bethlehem, and the angels’ appearance to the shepherds, and the inn, and the stable, and the manger. In a couple months on March 25 we’ll observe the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary, also only told in Luke’s account of Jesus’ life. Luke lifts our spirits in the deep of winter, and then sets us gladly on the doorstep of spring.

Between these two, Christmas and the Annunciation, in early February, is Jesus’ Presentation at the Temple. (The name Candlemas is from the tradition of having a midwinter candlelit procession at the beginning of the service.) The story is in today’s Gospel reading, from Luke.

Joseph and Mary take their forty day-old baby to the temple in Jerusalem to be presented to the priest. Really, it was a handing over. You would give your child to the priest, and the priest would give your child back for a ransom. Because they were poor, the ransom for Joseph and Mary was two pigeons. Families who could afford it might offer a lamb. But it was, a ritual, the meaning of which was partially, but probably not fully grasped, and that’s a good thing. Rituals provide a safe way of engaging with scary and all too real possibilities: loss, death, transformation, the surrendering of the self. With rituals we can acknowledge but then keep those things at a slight remove, maybe pretend we have some control over them.

Just look at our baptism service; we had a big baptism last Sunday. How many times does it refer to death, the grave, dying with Christ, surrendering the self? And yet even as we hear all that, we smile, and coo and clap.

It was probably like that for Mary and Joseph at the Presentation, showing up for their obligatory and even fun ritual redemption (or ransoming) of their infant. Maybe they dressed up for it, had lunch afterward. I wonder if Jesus cried, or laughed or did something cute. Again, I think of last Sunday and those three four month-old babies, all rosy cheeks and wide curious eyes. The silver baptism shell that I scoop the water out with is my trick, by the way. They see that shining and get distracted and all their trepidation vanishes--until that first splash of water hits their heads. Then I move fast!

Of course these are different rituals, Christian baptism and the Presentation in the Temple. But they’re connected as rites of passage for our children, and by their acknowledgement of things deeper and more serious than many of us bother or desire to consider in the moment.

Because within this lovely ritual at the Temple is a fact of life that most of us can’t begin to face head on: that God can ask for everything back at any time. Because it all belongs to God in the first place. Even our children.

I don’t suppose it's a mystery what drew me to this story this year. Thankfully our daughter’s prognosis is good, though the path getting there will be a hard one. But those early days when we had no idea, for weeks, whether she’d live or die, it felt (I don’t know how else to put this) Biblical.

And I remember thinking, Oh my god, this is what we say behind our neatly constructed rituals--she’s yours, he’s yours. I’m yours. Everything and everyone we hold dear, is not ours at all; it’s God’s.

Our life is a continuous handing over to God--or I should say, God handing over to us; the church helps us practice that. It’s a wonder we don’t give constant thanks for all the years when we can indulge the illusion that things are in our grasp, that the people in our lives are ours.

Everything we have is God’s. What’s amazing is that God gives so much to us to hold as if our own. At least for this day, may we look at the people and things in our lives with wonder. May we be truly grateful. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Be Calm, You are Baptized. A Sermon for The Baptism of Our Lord

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Happy season of Epiphany! Epiphany started on Friday, and will take us all the way to Lent, on February 22nd. I asked the Altar Guild to keep our wreaths up because I’m never quite ready to say goodbye to Christmas. It’s also true that much of the Christian world is only now starting their Christmas celebrations. Churches whose roots trace to the ancient Byzantine Church or before--that’s much of the Middle East, parts of Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and Russia--have a different calendar from ours in the West, and you really notice that this time of year when their Christmas begins just as ours ends. So we’re keeping our wreaths up--in solidarity with them and because it’s just nice to prolong the season a bit.

For those of us in the Western Church, it’s the first Sunday after the Epiphany, on which we always remember Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan by John. This is one of several principal days for baptisms; we don’t have one this year at St. James, but today we still renew the vows we said (or that were said for us) at our baptism. Because not only is this a day to remember Jesus’ baptism, it's also a day we reflect on our own.

The Baptism of Jesus is one of very few stories narrated in all four of the Gospels. It’s surprising to many that a lot of the events we consider of utter importance in Jesus’ life are not recounted in all four of the Gospels, not even the birth and resurrection--just the baptism and crucifixion. And some variations aside, there’s surprising agreement on the event. Jesus, as an adult, comes to the river Jordan where people are flocking to John for a baptism of repentance. He approaches John, is himself baptized, and then (in two of the four accounts) the heavens open, a dove descends and a voice says “This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” In Mark’s version, the earliest, the voice speaks directly to Jesus: “You are my beloved, in you I am well pleased.” I like how a very recent translation puts it: "You are my son, chosen and marked by my love. You are the pride of my life."

God said something very like this one other recorded time in Jesus’ life: at the Transfiguration. It’s captured right here on our transfiguration window in the north transept: "This is my son, the beloved. Hear him.” Twice recorded in our Scriptures, but who knows how many more times Jesus heard this from God. I imagine many--countless times, not ever recorded, perhaps not spoken of aloud, but acted out, in his love and generosity towards others. You don’t do the things Jesus did, or love others the way he could, if you don’t first feel loved; if you don’t first have a deep and abiding sense of God’s love for you.

The words we heard in the Gospel were for Jesus, when he emerged from the Jordan, but they’re also words that are meant for us.

Several years ago I baptized a thirteen year-old girl; this was in my former church. In my time as a priest I’ve baptized probably about a dozen kids around this age, and I always look forward to sitting down with them to talk about these vows that they’re very conscious of making. We went through the service and some of the big concepts like “renouncing Satan,” and “persevering against evil.” Then I asked if she had any questions for me, and she paused and said, Will I feel different after I’m baptized? I asked how she wanted to feel. She wanted to feel more loved and at peace, she said.

I still think about this encounter. When I do, I always say a prayer for her. I know her family and that she’s doing well. They’re solid, though they’ve been through hard times like many. But thanks to her, every year when this day comes around, and I read those words of God to Jesus “You’re my beloved, with whom I’m well pleased,” I pray that she, too, feels that same love. I pray that everyone I’ve ever baptized hears this voice from heaven, and often. I pray that I might hear it more, too.

In her book Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans writes (this was from a chapter about her own baptism): “It is said that when [the church Reformer] Martin Luther would slip into one of his darker places, he would comfort himself by saying, ‘Martin, be calm, you are baptized.’ I suspect his comfort came not from recalling the moment of baptism itself, or in relying on baptism as a sort of magic charm, but in remembering what his baptism signified: his identity as a beloved child of God. [She goes on] When Jesus emerged from the waters of the Jordan a voice from heaven declared, ‘This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’ Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness.”

Martin, be calm, you are baptized. Astrid, be calm, you are baptized. Mother Eliza be calm, you are baptized. Baptism helps assure us of God’s love, and that things will be OK. Baptism gives us the strength to love others, in turn. That’s what our baptismal vows are all about. And so on this Sunday of the Baptism of Our Lord, we say those vows, again, and we commit to living them out, another year. Because we are--all of us--God’s beloved children.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Feast of the Holy Name

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Good morning on this quiet, New Year’s morning. This is definitely one of those extra-credit days in the church! We had a great time here last night -- you can see the remnants of that. Once again, Dr. Lewis and the other musicians were fantastic. We are lucky to have you, Matt.

Today is a little-known feast day that, most years, goes entirely unremarked upon, but this year happens to fall on a Sunday: The Feast of the Holy Name. It’s been around since the late 16th century, starting with the Franciscan order. There’s little agreement among Christians about the date for this day. Roman Catholics observe it in mid-January, old Anglicans in August, and a scattered bunch of us today on January 1, since that was the day that Jesus was circumcised and formally given his name, Jesus, according to today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke.

But this feast was really a local event across Christendom, celebrated for centuries at different times and in different ways, not ever rising to the level of importance where we needed to agree on it.

The name, Jesus, was a common name in the first century. It means “he who saves” or “God saves,” and is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua. Other versions of it in the Bible are Isaiah, and also Hosea, two of the Old Testament prophets. The Gospel of Luke tells us that this name was given to Mary by the Angel Gabriel even before Jesus was conceived. Then at his circumcision, it was formally imparted to him by his parents.

The naming of our children is such an exciting event. And all of us with kids have different stories. My son, Inigo, was a jumpy, fiery kid inside my womb, and one day it just seemed right to me and Andrew to give him a name we’d always liked: Inigo, from the root “fire” and also, “knowledge.” Ignatius is the Latinized version of it.

By contrast, our daughter was a contented little baby in utero, and so we gave her a family name that means a lot to us and that suited her, too--still does: Naomi, which means pleasant.

We name our children in that moment of anticipation, when they’re all potential and our hopes for them high and untroubled. I like that Holy Name falls on the first of the year in our church calendar, with all that lies ahead still a blank slate and a touch of hope and optimism in the air. It seems fitting.

Mary and Joseph didn’t give Jesus his name; the angel did. But it’s a generous name, given to many sons in that day for multiple reasons. He who saves. Often it was a family name. It also expresses something about what our children are to us, a kind of salvation, giving us renewed purpose, expanding our worlds, enlarging our hearts to an almost unbearable degree, hopefully also enlarging our hearts for the wider world. Those who in that day gave their sons this name, Jesus, may also have hoped that their child would deliver his people, the Jewish people, from the oppression of the Roman regime. There were, in fact, other men in the first century with the name Jesus who also preached about the downfall of the Temple and the Roman powers that be.

It’s a hopeful name, and an ambitious one. And true to the Angel’s words, this Jesus would live up to it, surely beyond anything his parents could have imagined or expected.

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In the background of this feast day, Holy Name, lies the prohibition from the Bible on uttering the name of God. Our confirmation kids just learned this story, from Exodus: Moses encountered God in the form of a burning bush, but having never known this deity, Moses asked him his name, and God replied, basically, I am he who cannot be named: I am what I am. Or, I will be what I will be. To this day, no one knows how to interpret it. It’s essentially God saying, You cannot know my essence and you cannot pin me down with a name. The word that appears in the written form of that story is never uttered. Substitutes are given for it, most commonly in our Bible, in English, the word LORD.

But think of how, by contrast, the name Jesus has been invoked endlessly, an infinity of times in history. Already in the early church it had become an incantation, uttered in times of trouble or when seeking healing for oneself or another. Entire devotional prayers and traditions have been built up around simply saying, over and over and over again, day and night, the name Jesus. There was also a custom of printing the first three letters of Jesus’ name, IHS, and carrying it around with you as a sort of talisman. You still see these letters carved onto altars, pulpits, clergy vestments. It was once believed that you should utter the name right before your death to ensure salvation.

We use it, we print it, we say and pray his name indiscriminately, and for all sorts of purposes: healing. Comfort. Worship. In grief and in joy. (Sometimes in anger!) In the larger history of our faith, the intimacy of this is unthinkable. And that’s another reason I like this feast just where it is, here on January 1: not just because it’s the New Year and naming signifies new beginnings and potential; but also because it’s here within the twelve days of Christmas, days we’re reminded that God chose to live among us, to be named and known, on our lips and in our hearts.

So a happy New Year, Merry Christmas, and happy Feast of the Holy Name. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Christmas Eve

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Good evening, Merry Christmas, and … You Made It.

Every year, every Christmas Eve when I stand here and look out on all your faces, I always want to congratulate you for making it here tonight. Whether your December was harried and overbooked and you had way too much to do so that you’re resolving next year to do less and not be so exhausted--you made it.

Or maybe you had a lonely month, a first (or second or third) Christmas without a friend or family member you sorely miss. Or you don’t have all those December distractions you once had and thought you’d never miss but kind of do and you’ve struggled with this quieter life you now lead--whichever of these scenarios most describes you, you made it. You’re here.

I’m going to extend that grace and gratitude to myself, and my family, this year. We made it. Those familiar with our lives know we’ve had a year that proves the existence--here on earth--of hell. There were times this fall I never thought I’d be able to stand in a pulpit again, definitely not Christmas Eve 2022. But we made it.

This space holds all that we bring in the way only (and I mean this) only church was built to do. And it’s the most beautiful thing on earth.

Our church here--I’ve pointed this out years past--looks like a barn. It’s gorgeous at Easter, but it was built for Christmas. I wish I could find out which of those two holidays was first held here back when it was half the size and space it now is. Maybe it’s the wood rafters--I think that’s a lot of it. They make this place look like a barn, a stable. Phillip Larkin, English poet of irreverence whom probably no priest should quote from the pulpit, but I do love his poem Churchgoing, described an old English church in which he sat as an “accoutred frowsty barn.” Accoutred frowsty barn. I think of it often when I sit in this space.

So the wood rafters certainly make this a Christmas church. So does the fact that no matter how hard we try to clean this place up after our Children’s Christmas Pageant (last Sunday), you still always find bits of hay and pageant props lying about--the wooden manger, angels’ haloes, loads of glitter!

Or maybe what makes me think this church was built for Christmas is the intimacy of the space, how it somehow manages to be majestic and cozy at the same time--I credit the architects who worked on it over the years for making this so. The effect tonight is of that first night, crowded under timber post and beam. It never fails to remind me of paintings you see of the creche, my favorite being those where an impossible number and variety of people--men, boys, shepherds, magi, old women, midwives, gawkers and villagers, shepherds’ friends--all crowd around the manger. As if the differences of their lives--and there are many, for them, and for us--make zero difference under that roof, with God.

The Easter story, our other great feast, doesn’t have the equivalent of this. It’s of course our primary story, without which we wouldn’t be here at all. And it has chaos and crowds, but more ominous, as crowds can be. People acting in mobs can be more dangerous than those acting as individuals, and so think of Jesus’ trial, and crucifixion, the crowd crying “Crucify, crucify him.” Easter also gives us fallen, complex characters, like Peter, who betrays Christ. Pilate, who washes his hands of complicity. The disciples, who doubt the women’s story after the resurrection. And it goes on.

Christmas, however, is first and foremost a celebration of being human. The Incarnation, God taking on flesh, becoming us, is how in our faith we proclaim the deep down goodness of who and what we are. There are bad actors in the story, to be sure. Herod the Great, evil king. Or the inhospitable innkeeper--actually he’s not in the Biblical story, we added him later and is, to us now, essential to the telling of it. But these do little to dent the feeling of unalloyed goodness of this story, and of the people in it. It’s a story about God’s love for the world and for us, plain and simple. So much so, that God chose to dwell in and among us.

Christmas is of second most importance to Easter, but it comes first. And it begins our story. The first message we hear about ourselves as an old year draws to a close and a new year begins, and as we are all gathered together under these rafters like those so long ago, is that we are good. We contain, and are a part of, God. So let’s take that with us tonight and into this new year. Live your life--and treat others--like you know these things are true.

Merry Christmas. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Parting with John, His Vision, and Sometimes Maybe Ours, Too: A Sermon for Advent 3

For an audio version of this sermon, read by Mo. Storm, click here.

Good morning and happy third Sunday of Advent, which comes really early this year. Since Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, the 25th, this is the longest Advent can possibly be. Which is how we find ourselves already on the third Sunday of Advent on December 11. (Just a bit of church trivia for you!)

Today is also called “Rose” Sunday--rose for the color of vestments the clergy wear. It signals a lightening up of Advent, which begins as a more somber season but turns gradually more joyous as we approach Christmas.

There’s still another name this day goes by. Some of our older or perhaps English members will know this one: “Stir-up Sunday” after the opening Collect (or prayer): stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. This prayer was a reminder to begin stirring, on this day, the Christmas pudding--and if you’ve ever made a proper English Christmas pudding (I know I haven’t, probably neither have you, but if you have), then you know the third Sunday of Advent is actually way too late for starting it. For centuries this Collect was placed not here but on the Sunday before Advent even began. Apparently that’s how long it takes to prepare a pudding. And to be honest I’m not even sure I know what a “Christmas pudding” is. I just like that it takes us back to a time when food, the preparation of it, the preserving of it, was a marker of time. We might otherwise forget that were it not for the church, which ties us to our ancestors and to ancient rhythms unlike our own.

One more occasion that makes today festive here at St. James is that we have a baptism! In just a moment we’ll be baptizing little Lachlan Harbut, son of Mike and Alison, new to the area and to our parish. I’ve gotten to know them and am very excited to have them here at St. James. A warm welcome to all of you, and friends and family with you. It’s a lovely day to be baptized into the church.

Seeming to resist, still, all this festivity is the persistent presence in Advent of John the Baptist, the dour, no-frills prophet and forerunner of our Lord. John this week, moreover, is in prison when we meet him in Matthew’s Gospel. He got carried away with preaching against King Herod and Herod’s (in the view of some at that time) illicit marriage. John was a well known and very vocal figure in Judea already by that point, and so Herod, finding John to be a headache and not worth the trouble, threw him into prison.

In the church we know well that John preached both baptism and repentance, and the coming of a Messiah. Only his vision of that messiah was of someone fierce, winnowing fork in hand and ready to separate the wheat from the chaff, good from evil. From last week’s Gospel reading, John’s words: “One who is more powerful than I is coming after me … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit *and fire.* His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

This week we find John disappointed that the man he thought was the Messiah wasn’t anything like what he had expected. He sends out his messengers from prison to observe Jesus, and to ask him this question: “Are you the one to come or are we to wait for another?”

Jesus knows John won’t like the answer. To me, this is one of the most heartbreaking and psychologically rich passages in the Gospels, this exchange between two people so close and yet so far from understanding each other. Jesus tells the messengers: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” And then, as if anticipating John’s disappointment to this reply, Jesus adds, for his benefit: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Who of us would want Jesus to be anything other than the peacemaker and healer that he was? And yet, I sometimes find myself in the position of John, thinking, It can’t be that this is it. God’s central manifestation and revelation in my Christian faith is … a man who patiently, quietly urged us to love, to cease with our worry, to turn the other cheek. Who, one person at a time, sought to make the world better.

As if that’s going to change the world.

Look at Christian history, and you find many who felt the way John did, wanting to make Christ more imposing, more powerful than he wanted to be. Our churches have dressed him in kingly robes he never wore or saw the likes of. We put him with a fierce mien in a seat of judgment that he never seemed eager to occupy. And then we created positions of worldly authority in his name. Whole armies have marched and slaughtered under the banner of the cross. Many of us, we follow John: we want power, and effect.

But all that does is set us further back from Christ’s vision of a world changed not by power, but by patience, love, gentleness, building and healing.

Advent returns us to this message each year. Today we leave behind John the Baptist. We’re grateful for him, but it’s Christ’s mission and vision, not John’s, that we follow. It guides us, as it will (we pray) guide now a new Christian, whom we baptize into this faith we share. Amen.

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astridstorm · 2 years

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Aligning Our Lives with God: Annual Appeal 2023

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

Good morning! Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year, and the Sunday before Thanksgiving--hence our beautiful harvest altar.

It’s also about the halfway point in our Annual Appeal when I speak a little bit about it from the pulpit. I’m going to do something I’ve never done before and talk straightforwardly about the budget to begin. I’m very proud of this budget and want to be sure we all understand it. Then I’ll talk about giving, and what it means, practically, spiritually, and personally, for me. [If you’d like to skip ahead to the “sermon” portion, scroll down to the ***]

Our 2023 budget you should have received in the mail. It looks like this. I’m happy to say it’s not very complicated. Everything you would expect for a church like ours to function is there. On the expense side, there’s the church staff consisting of a Rector, Associate Priest, Music Director, and Director of Finance and Operations. All adding up to a total (for next year) of $400,000.

Together this staff runs children’s programs, music programs, adult education, youth groups, pilgrimages, our pastoral programs, and of course worship services with sermons, anthems, Communion, all that you see here week in and week out. It’s hard to simply say, we budget this much for Christian education, or this much for worship, because so much of that is built into the staffing piece of the pie. So for example, Christian ed. I do a lot of Christian ed, Matthew does too, as does Mo. Eliza. Worship is the time we spend on sermons, preparing liturgies, making and printing bulletins, rehearsing music, working with altar guild; the entire staff is engaged in the worship every week.

We get a lot for $400,000. We have an efficient and hard working staff, reduced in recent years. They’ve taken on the responsibilities, administrative and more, of previous positions that no longer exist. Which makes their work all the more impressive. We should be grateful for every one of them.

Also on the expense side is worship and education. This includes things that don’t fall under staff salaries, like expenses related to classes taught, confirmation, Red Door Explorers, the adult Bible classes, hospitality expenses we include in here, and costs associated with our choir and instrument maintenance--things that help us worship. All this comes to $68,000.

Our property is a big piece of the pie here at St James. We have to heat and power our buildings, which includes this church, the parish hall, the offices and nursery school, and three houses. We have to keep our properties clean, mow and maintain our grounds, and pay insurance on everything here. All of that totals $260,000 a year.

And last, there’s outreach. We pay an assessment each year to the Diocese of New York, calculated by our expenses. It’s the biggest part of that outreach piece of the expense pie, and we’ve put it here because so much of the diocesan assessment that we pay goes to outreach programs on the diocesan level. We often forget that being part of a larger organization allows us to do good on a far greater scale than what we see and do here in our local parishes. And some of that assessment goes just to the operations of the diocese (without which we couldn’t exist). That piece of the pie comes to $144,000. I should add that next year we will be applying for relief of that figure, so you may very well see this go down a bit in the final budget.

Our total expenses come to $873,000.

To pay for all this, moving to the income side, again it’s fairly basic. We have some rental income from outside groups, from our two rental homes, and also the nursery school; this is a category that’s rife with potential, and we’re working on that.

Next in income, we do draw from our endowment to cover annual operating expenses. I’m happy to report that we’ve brought that draw down, making it at or very close to 6%, and that’s using a conservative calculation on the draw that the vestry put in place 2 years ago. It’s left us scrambling to cut and adjust, but it’s important to have a consistent and prudent way of calculating the draw. And now we do. My goal is to bring that solidly to 5% within the next 3-4 years, and hopefully down as low as 4% in time. 6% is still too high but we have to work our way to this so as not to totally disrupt our life together.

And finally in income: pledges. Over half our income comes from pledging. Someday we need to get that number up to ¾ of our total income. If we keep drawing new families--right now we’re at 135 families, if we can add ten or more per year as we’ve been doing--we probably will get to that figure. For now, we’re aiming for 55% in pledge income in 2023. That’s $475,000, with a hoped for 145 families.

So that’s the proposed budget, total income same as total expenses: $873,000.

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Now let me talk about giving. I think a lot of us (I count myself here too) approach giving to our church in a transactional way. Consultants tell us this is more and more how people think about giving to their churches, and I’m not at all opposed to that, namely because I think many people far undervalue their church in their giving. Over all my years as a rector, I’ve never had someone suddenly wake up and realize they were giving too much to their church for what they get. People sometimes have to reduce their pledges out of financial hardship, but never has someone once said to me, “You know, I way overpay for what I get out of this place” and then reduced.

What I have heard people say, time and again, is: yes, it’s true. When I add up all that I receive, and my children--in programs, worship, perspective on life, a place to do outreach, a place of solace in hard times, community, the care of a priest whenever I need, the connection to history and something larger--when I add all that up, I’ve been way under giving to my church.

So do think transactionally about your pledge. Undervaluing church is one of the most common things I see at Annual Appeal time. And it’s always a joy--and a relief for them--to see someone discover this and start giving more.

But there’s also a spiritual side to giving money.

Jesus talked about money more than anything else, and this, even though he was never trying to raise money for anything. Think about it: he wasn’t pitching for his church (there were no churches), his synagogue, or a charitable organization. So why did he talk so much about money? Because he cared about people. Because he knew that how we use our money can be a path--judging from his preaching, the most important path, because a tangible one--to a richer, deeper spiritual life with God.

We’ve baptized 12 kids this fall--that’s remarkable. When we baptize here at St. James, we pour water out of a shell three times over the child’s head, for the Trinity. That’s been a practice since the early middle ages. But baptism originally, and in many churches (even Episcopal) still today, is a much more immersive experience. Your whole body goes in, every bit of it. There is not one part of ourselves that’s exempted from the vows we make at our baptism to turn our lives entirely over to God. Including the hand that holds our wallet. It’s baptized too. If we don’t have God in mind with the financial decisions we make, not only are we not fully living into our baptismal vows, but we’re missing a huge opportunity to put our faith into action. And that’s what our life as Christians is all about.

One of Jesus’ most famous sayings about money is, Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. I don’t read this as a judgment, as in: let’s see where you spend your money and evaluate the state of your soul. I see it as an invitation. Our money can be actively used, moved to the place where we want our hearts to be, even if our heart isn’t there yet. It’s a tool for spiritual improvement. And if we start using our money like the kind of person we want to be would use it, then lo and behold, we’ve become that person.

It’s kind of amazing.

Jesus talked a lot about money because he cared about people. What we do with our money is in our control, and it can change us, for the better. Giving to support church is part of that total alignment of our lives with God.

To end on a personal note, I give to St. James. I grew up watching my parents give. They give 10%, the Biblical “tithe.” To this day if they decide to give their monthly church check to St. James, as they sometimes do, I can always calculate their current income from it. They’ve had some hard years, some better. I’ve never once thought Maybe they’re not tithing; rather, oh, their income must be down. I’m grateful that they did that and that they talked to us about it when we were kids.

For years, I’ve worked my way closer to that standard, which is the Biblical standard. But because of my circumstances this year, I realized, if I don’t just do this, I may miss my chance. So finally--and let me tell you it’s a relief--I’ll be tithing my salary this year. My husband gives a percentage too, and it’s not the tithe, so, full disclosure. But this is very important to me because it was modeled. Everyone is different, and I get that; my husband and I are different.

But I say this to our parents here: Be open with your kids about the value you put on this place as expressed through your giving. It’s one more way, along with just coming to church week in week out, that they’ll know it’s important. And maybe something will stick.

If you’ve already pledged, thank you so much. I’m asking all of you to give what you can, and try to make it generous. Few things are more deserving than this, here, all of it. And look at it this way: the faster we get through this appeal, the shorter the sermons will get! Thank you for your generosity in listening, too.

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