Third Sunday after Pentecost - June 18, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

June 18, 2023

Proper 6, Year A

Holy and righteous God, you created us in your image. Grant us grace to contend fearlessly against evil and to make no peace with oppression. Help us to use our freedoms to bring justice among people and nations everywhere, to the glory of your Holy name through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. 

Amen

This is a prayer provided by the Diocese in observance of Juneteenth.  

On Thursday afternoon I was having a beer with Spencer Pugh down at Long Way and he recounted to me something he had recently heard on a podcast, I believe.  He said, “God is timeless right?  So, the prayers that were offered over you when you were a child still exist for God, they are still there.”  You see we believe that God exists beyond time, that maybe our linear relationship with time is not at all how God experiences or interacts with time.  

As the first lines of Scripture say “In the beginning God created”.  Before the beginning God was.  God, to be more specific, all the persons of God, didn’t begin to exist at creation.  Because of that, we can say that God exists outside of time, outside of creation.  God Exists, always.  God exists in all time.  This is part of what it means to be the Creator of all things!  So, nothing that has happened before is lost to God.  Relative to God those prayers still are.  That thought almost brought me to tears.  How beautiful is that.  

This made me think of Einstein’s Special Theory of relativity as just a little bit of a way to think about this.  Not to explain God, but maybe to illustrate in human terms just a fraction of it.  You see, the faster something goes, the slower time is for that thing, relative to the observer.  So, when we look up into the sky and look at a star the photons of light emitted by that star are landing on us.  The light is moving at, well, the speed of light.  Well, that light has not experienced the light years that it took to get here.  Inside that light it is always new.   Light years for us, no time for it.  When it falls on us, that is it’s birth.  It is both ancient and new at once.  Relative to us-old.  Relative to it-new.  Pretty cool stuff.  Not that this explains God, but it helps me to think differently about how God interacts.  Helps me remember that God’s time is not our own.  God created our time, so surely God understands, but God transcends time.  

Then, on Friday night Eve and Rhea and I were eating dinner and began talking about my father.  Jerry Yagel is unknown to both of them as he died in 1993, 30 years ago this coming October 9.  I think I probably haven’t done a great job of representing to either of them exactly who my dad was, because, well, its complicated.  The moments of my relationship with my Dad that I think about are the challenging moments, so they can offer a slanted view of him.  Anyway, we were talking about Jerry, and I remembered some letters that I picked up when we were cleaning my mom’s house a couple of months back.  

Jerry penned them when was 16 or 17 and was in Los Angeles, probably on some kind of a mission trip with their Church.  My Dad grew up in a fairly evangelical Presbyterian family, and I am guessing there was some kind of relationship with a church out there, but I can’t be sure.  The letters were to his family back here in Virginia and contained much of the mundane that you would expect.  They also contained some bits about what he was up to that revealed his work as a missionary.  Some of that was, well, let’s just say, not the standard for mission work today.  We grinned a bit and remembered that he was writing in 1949, and, anyway, it cast some light on who he was.  Maybe no less complicated, but it provided some details for Rhea and Eve that I am sure I haven’t offered very well before.

Now all of that was interesting for me, but that isn’t what really caught my attention.  I was instead drawn to a message that Jerry offered to my Grandfather about changing his outlook on life, and taking better care of himself.  It was the sweetest message of concern and love from my father, to his.  What really hit me is that they were words painfully similar to ones I would offer him at the same age, almost forty years later.  

And I smiled.  I smiled because I saw the love, the sweetness in his words.  It was a statement far more complex than a throw away line.  I heard the conversations that were behind that statement.  The complexity of my dad’s relationship to his dad.  My relationship with my dad still remains complex 30 years after his death, but this note cast a new light on it, turned it just a bit.  I loved seeing that warmth and being reminded of his kindness, his Joy in life, and his love for his family.  A real Father’s Day gift for me.  

Then, I thought, maybe that is God’s way.  Maybe God dwells in those places of Love and leaves some of the complexity aside.  Maybe God chooses to see only the goodness.   Maybe God can freely offer Grace because God can always see us at our best.  Because moments like that are where God intersects with lives.  Maybe God doesn’t even look at us as we fall short of the mark.  

In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul says that we have “peace we have with God.”  This is no throw away line.  We have Peace with God because God desires to have peace with us.  God loves us and seeks our love in return. This peace exists outside of our understanding of time.  It exists despite our sin; despite our faults; despite our deeds, despite ourselves.  God exists in an eternal goodness that sometimes only appears for us in a moment.  

This is Hope.

This is Grace.  

And it is this forever nature that I think of for Katie, Jacob, and Emma as they are about to be baptized and be born into Christ.  This is one moment for all of us, and this is an always moment to God.  

It is that moment when they will now and always renounce evil.  

It is that moment when they will now and always renounce sin.

It is that moment when they will now and always turn to Christ.

It is that moment when they will now and always put their whole trust in Christ’s grace and love.

So, my friends even on your worst days.  Even in all of the complexity of the relationships that you will have.  Even in your moments of despair, and loss, and pain, and sorrow, and sin, and wickedness.  This moment is there too.  This moment when we stand with you and join in covenant to strive to be the humans God called us to be will forever in God’s view.  

This moment of baptism is eternal.  It is insoluble by anything you do or anywhere you go, and God always exists in this moment.  God always exists in this place of Joy, Love, Peace, and Hope, and I pray you may be able to keep it with you forever as well, relatively speaking, of course.

Amen

Second Sunday after Pentecost - June 11, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

June 11, 2023

Proper 5, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight O Lord you are our strength and our redeemer.

Amen

“Mercy, not sacrifice.”

These were the words that stopped me in my tracks when I read them early in the week.  If you have ever participated in a Lectio Divina, or a divine reading of scripture, you may remember that often the first instruction upon hearing a passage is to listen for a simple word or phrase that resonates with you.  No explanation or grand theological treatise, simply the word or phrase that jumps off the page and speaks directly to you.  Well, this was my phrase this week.  

I took to heart, without actually realizing it, the command from Christ:  “Go and learn what this means ‘I desire Mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but the sinners”.  I have not been able to shake them, every time I would read the passage again, these words came back and most of the rest seemed to fall away.  The phrase is beautiful and comforting.  It puts me at ease and wraps me in love.  These words have been in the ether around me all week, showing up again and again.

The phrase itself was clipped from the words of the prophet Hosea who was speaking just prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the 8th Century BC.  The term mercy, or Hesed, in the Hebrew of Hosea can be understood as a beautiful expression of the fullness of love.  It translates as mercy, but also as steadfast love, kindness, goodness, faithful love, or covenant love.  This word speaks to the boundless Love that we receive from God.  That love that was promised and offered by God is what God seeks for us to share with him and with one another. 

But the word sacrifice is maybe not what you would expect.  Hosea is speaking specifically to the temple sacrifices, he is not telling them that God doesn’t want them to “give something up”.  The translation of the root word Olah which is taken from Hosea 6:6 is literally “that which goes up” or “whole burnt offerings”.  Sacrifices- in the Temple.  Animals that were killed and whose lives were ceremonially sacrificed to God.  This was their ancient understanding of how the people should worship God.  But by the time of Hosea, the people had distorted the meaning of these sacrifices.  The sacrifices had taken the place of steadfast love and became a way to purchase piety.  The wealthy could afford the best, the unblemished lambs, while the poor could not participate or were taken advantage of.  

The prophetic voice of Hosea is saying God seeks your love not your false piety.  The ritual sacrifices had become hollow, the meaning and power was to be bound up in a love for God but that had been lost, and only the religious act remained.  Religion and Church are not nor have they ever been the goal, rather, they are the means.  These are ways to seek and to be sought by God as a people.  The church is, as I mentioned on Pentecost, God’s mission to us in the world, a gift of the outpouring of God’s love, not our means to self importance.  Mercy, steadfast love, Relationship with God.  This is the goal.

And this is exactly what Paul has in mind as he writes to the church in Rome this morning.  What he does in these few verses is a powerful explanation of the Mercy that Matthew and Hosea speak about.  Much of Paul’s work centered around who could belong to the Church.  Was the budding Christian church meant only for Jews or could Gentiles also join the ranks?  Who did God want in God’s Church. Who has access to the salvation of Christ and who is getting pushed away from the table?  

On this Paul is clear.

He goes back to the beginning of the people of Israel, back to the call of Abram and Sarai out of the country of their birth and into the promised land.  Ok, I just have one more translation for you.  Torah.  The Torah is just the first five books of the bible-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  The Jewish people have had the other OT scriptures as well, but the Torah is the foundation of their faith.  And the word Torah means Law.  Those five books are traditionally believed to have been give by Moses to the people.  Moses Gave the people the Law.  

When Paul is talking about Abram he is remembering that it is faith, not law that was at the beginning.  The gift given by God to Abram and Sarai was not offered because Abram followed the law-the law did not yet exist.  This blessing given to Abram and Sarai and their descendants was never earned.   It was given freely out of and abundance of Love. And we know that his descendants shall be “as numerous as the stars in the sky, and through your offspring all the nations on the earth shall be blessed.”  

Paul is telling the people that God’s, God’s grace, God’s mercy is not reserved for a particular group and certainly not for those who suppose to adhere to the Law, or those who suppose that they are superior.  Paul is reminding the people of the Church in Rome and the Church in Radford that none of us can ever hope to get it “right”.  We constantly fall short and so then we must rely on Grace.  

This is why we make a confession together every Sunday.  We as individuals and as a people confess that we have sinned against God in Thought and word and deed.  In what we have done and what we have left undone we have not loved you with our whole hearts.  We have failed to be your mission in the world and we need your help to do what you ask.  We need Gods help to offer steadfast love, to offer mercy.  

But the really good news from Paul is that Christ made good on the Blessing promised knowing how far short we fall.  The expansive love of God welcomes all of the descendants of Abraham, as we heard in the first reading, it is through Abraham that all the families of the earth shall be blessed.  Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free are inheritors of God’s blessing.  God is welcoming us all knowing that we fall short of any law.  As with Abram, it is not our merits that afford us welcome, but the generative love found in God’s Grace and Mercy seen in the life of Christ that calls us ever deeper into the heart of God. 

So, this morning as Jesus dines with tax collectors and sinners, as he touches the woman and dead girl who are unclean according to Jewish law, he illustrates for us who God called us to be through Hosea and all the prophets.  He continues to call us to be a people of steadfast love who are striving to see our own tendency to going through the motions of faith without seeking the fullness of God.  He charges us to see the fullness of the human family as beloved and deserving of mercy, not because of any merits, but because of God’s unbounded mercy for us.

Amen

Trinity Sunday - June 4, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

June 4, 2023

Trinity Sunday, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight O Lord you are our strength and our redeemer.

Amen

I really missed my chance today when I showed up today despite planning to have the day off.  There is a running joke among priests that the new priest always has to preach on Trinity Sunday.  There is an aversion to preaching on the Trinity, and here I show up for it.  Glutton for punishment, I suppose.  I believe there are two reasons, though, that priests like to avoid the pulpit today.

I think the first reason is because any conversation about the Trinity is necessarily complicated, complex, and nuanced while still being a holy mystery.  That means it is hard to talk about and not wind-up sounding like Boomhauer from King of the Hill, which is completely unintelligible.  Talking about this mystery of God is not easy because the creator of all things simply can’t be summed up in a couple of easy metaphors before skipping of to lunch.  Each question raised illuminates more mystery.  It is exciting, but it is daunting.  In short, it is easier left alone.  

The second reason, I believe, is because an understanding of the Trinity is so challenging that we priests are almost guaranteed to utter some type of heresy from the pulpit in trying to approach it.  Good fun for you, but nerve-wracking for me!  And yes, maybe I should say, that this is MY big fear.  You see, every word matters, language here can be limiting, or it can imply something contrary to what is being offered.  The limitless can’t be contained, especially on the page, but still we seek.

A conversation about the Trinity is necessarily a conversation about the nature of God.  It is the biggest possible topic to approach and one that I will get wrong.  BUT, we as adults so often forget that sitting with a big unknowable question and reflecting on it is important.  Children very often ask those things which adults who focus so often on the practical, somehow forget to ask:  why is the sky blue, are we alone in the universe, what is God like?  So, I ask your patience and understanding as we think for a few minutes this morning about God, in 3 distinct persons, the Holy and undivided Trinity, 

I need, here, to credit my Professor of Theology from VTS, Dr. Kate Sonderegger.  Her voice will ring through what I am able to offer to you here today.  It is no exaggeration to say that I know what I know because of her.  What is right is her, what is wrong is all mine…  And in her spirit of kindness and love I will say that nothing I offer here today is intended to make your faith feel “wrong”.  If you leave this morning thinking how silly this all is, know that you are in good company.  A robust life of faith in the Trinity is the goal, and I celebrate each of your faiths wherever they are.

We explain our ancient understanding of the Trinity every Sunday in the words of the Nicene Creed.  Our Creed has remained largely unchanged since its writing in 325 AD, three centuries after the death and resurrection of Christ.  I like to joke that it was the last time the Church agreed about anything.  Our Creed is fundamentally a statement about the Trinity and was the result of a couple hundred years of fighting about the nature of God.  It speaks to this holy mystery of God as three persons and also it says:

We believe in one God,

This is the foundational truth of our faith.  It is the first commandment given to Israel.  It has been stated by and to Judeo Christians as clearly and often as anything, ever.  There is no pantheon of Gods, there are no lesser Gods, there is one God.  It seems simple, right?  But have you ever heard anyone say things like “I believe in the God of the New Testament?”  Maybe you have said it yourself.  I know I have.  Well, that is in keeping with 2nd century conversations by a Theologian and Presbyter named Marcion.  

Marcion thought that the OT image of God was too pedestrian, or maybe, too human.  God walking in the evening in the Garden of Eden, God and Noah speaking about the Ark, God arguing with Moses about sparing lives.  These concerns were all below the creator of all things, Marcion figured.  He reasoned that this Old Testament God must have been another God, a lesser God, in some way.  Different from the God revealed in Christ.  This resonated with lots of folks, because something seemed to have shifted, but Christ’s life speaks so clearly to the Jewish Scriptures.  He fulfilled the Law, worshipped in temple, and recognized this God of Abraham so to see him and the God he professes as something separate and apart doesn’t work.  The Creed goes a bit farther about God,

the Father, the Almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth,
    of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,

The one and only second person of the Trinity.  If the conversation about the Trinity stopped right there it would be easier.  God the Father, God the Son.  Distinct persons.  This highlights the enduring challenge of the Trinity.  The more you think of the Godhead as unified the farther you get from holding distinction between the three persons.  And the more we can understand these distincions, the harder it is to hold them together.  Sabellius was the third century heretic who ultimately helped us clarify this mystery, who forced the choice to a decision. 

He is credited with the theory of Modalism.  He offered that God exists in different states.  Sometimes God the Father, sometimes God the incarnate Son, sometimes God the Holy Spirit.   The Lee Slusher understanding of God.  That is, this is not unlike saying that sometimes Lee is a mother, sometimes she is a wife, and sometimes she is a School board representative.  Always the same person, but in different modes of her life she is different people in relationship to others.  

It sounds good at first, but here is the thing.  All of those perspectives relating to God are ours, not God’s.  It views God as changing because our relationship to God changes, it assumes that God changes from one to the next based on how we perceive God.  But how does God see God is the question? So, the Creed went on to clarify that the Son was:

    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one Being with the Father.
    Through him all things were made.

Fear not, this is the last little bit I will mention.  This section of the Creed provides some the greatest clarity and explanation of how we understand Christ, and therefore, God.   Jesus of Nazareth was indeed born into the world, but the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity is eternally begotten, not made.  Forever and ever of one being with the first person of the Trinity. God spoke existence into being.  As John says, In the beginning was the word.  Always, eternal, and begotten, that is, of the same type.  The second person is the same as the first and is distinct from the first.  We say True God from True God.  

You see if we can have only one God then we imagine that there can’t be precedence.  Begotten, from the beginning of time.  Always begotten.  The first person of the Trinity could not create the others and be equal?   The father is not the father in our gendered sense.  The Son is not the product of the Father.  The Son always was. 

This phrase light from light, imagine a candle.  When illuminated by another candle.  The second light is not made from the first.  The first gave nothing to the second.  And neither is greater.  Neither diminished.  Both full and complete.  Begotten.  This is the nature of this procession.  One and the other, but not in sequence.  Both.  Coeternal.  This is the mystery of the Trinity that is beyond us-undivided and distinct, both.

And then through him all things were made.  The Word was always there.  Made by the Son, just as we hear in the first lines.  God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth and God the son through whom all things were made, were spoken into existence.  OK, enough for now.

The Trinity is an eternal relationship founded in Love which is beyond our knowing.  To wonder at the mystery of God is folly, and yet we are compelled by reason, one of those unknown things created for us, look ever deeper for the heart of our Triune God.  To wonder without expectation of arriving at the right answer, but, in prayer, we hope to find Truth. 

Amen

Day of Pentecost - May 28, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

May 28, 2023

Pentecost, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight O Lord you are our strength and our redeemer.

Amen

Mission is a term that gets thrown around a lot in church.  Those of you who have been on vestries in years past, or maybe at other churches, may recognize mission, or maybe outreach, as an often under-funded line item on a parish budget.  It usually shows up somewhere after building maintenance, salaries, and Christian Education.  After the essentials are covered, in other words, the excess money is earmarked for “mission”.  Often, I think vestries are so battered after the rest of the budget process that they can’t even think about what those missions are.  Just a generic “missions” or “outreach” line item often appears and monies are allocated as needed throughout the year.

We are called repeatedly through the scripture to give of our first fruits.  Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Amos, Corinthians, and Romans all call us to give first to God.  We celebrate today the first fruit of the Spirit that was given to us, and we are called to do the same.  

Our model of outreach here at Grace allows us to designate a dozen recipients through the year and each of us are invited to make a gift to those deserving groups from our own personal first fruits.  It is a good model, but that is a little different from the body of the church observing their mission in the world.  I mean, we will decide on our list of monthly missions at the June vestry meeting.  We will decide who we will offer a financial gift to in the next year, but that isn’t our mission.  It allows the gift to be offered, which is good, but that is not grappling with our mission.  Just the same, it can be challenging because no matter length of the list and the necessity of those on the list, there are always more groups in need of support.  I would guess, or maybe I should say I hope that every church in this Diocese, in this denomination, and in this country has grappled with these questions of budget.

These questions, however, really speak to the larger question that is lurking behind the finances.  At least, the question I am pointing at this morning.  Did the Spirit join us so that our budget would be perfect?  Does God tally the monthly missions to award salvation?  Not that it isn’t important, but we can all give money away without coming here.  The bigger question that emerges for is:  How are we called to be the church?  What actually is THE Church’s mission, what is OUR Church’s mission?  You know, we have a great mission statement in this congregation, it hides in plain sight every week.  It is in small print just above the picture on the front of the bulletin.  It says:

“The Mission of Grace Episcopal Church is to promote an atmosphere for the expression of God’s love through Jesus Christ, which calls each of us to know God by reaching out to others and inwardly to ourselves.”.

I love that statement.  I hear it speak to our need for growth in ourselves, which allows us to be servants to those in our midst.  Nothing in the world is wrong with it.  I think our work of living into that statement it is a lifetime of work.  Hear me say how important it is, hear me say that this is good and holy work and hear me say,

It answers the wrong question.  Or maybe, it is coming from the wrong “person”.

Just like a budget trying to capture the mission in a single line.  Trying to capture who and how we reach out to the world misses entirely the message of Pentecost.

Today is Pentecost, the Birthday of the church, the day when we mark the gift of the Holy Spirit in our midst.  Today the Spirit sets fire to our hearts and calls us into the world.  Today, on the fiftieth day, Pente-Cost, day fifty the Church Catholic was borne into the world.  The Spirit came in a violent wind, disrupting all with an undeniable intensity.  The Spirit emerged full of power and overflowed into all who were present.  Always, the Sprit has been somewhat wild and unpredictable.  From the beginning she acted in her own way, the maker of holy mischief, as many say.  

This morning in Numbers as the Spirit was shared around the Tent of Meeting in the Wilderness with the seventy elders of Israel it could not be contained.  Eldad and Medad also received a portion the Spirit.  They were not of the 70, at least not in this reading, but the Spirit still found them, touched them, and gave them a prophetic voice. The Spirit moved as it moved, without permission or expectation.  

But in the narrative from Numbers the Sprit appears at any rate, to have been limited to 73 (Moses, the 70, Eldad, Medad) folks.  The select few were vested with authority.  A model the church has really gravitated to.  But, true to his prophetic voice, Moses embraces the work of God, the work of the Spirit in their midst when he offers: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and the Lord would put his Spirit on all of them!”  Yes, all of them would be just enough.

Joel, our bonus reading this morning that was embedded in Peter’s words this morning in Acts, speaks to this expansive prophetic vision of the Spirit moving unrestrained in the world.  The Spirit would land on everyone, no matter their gender or their age.  The enslaved and the free would receive that gift of the Spirit in those days.  

And of course, Peter is talking of Joel because Peter is in those days.  Indeed, on Pentecost the overflowing and wild nature of the Spirit fell on everyone, from all corners of the Earth.  The notion of the privileged few was eradicated, and all were welcomed in.  All who were present understood that God was in their midst.  They were convicted by the work of the Spirit, the work of God in them, they became the vision of Moses and Joel, of the prophets from ages past.  They were infused with the Spirit and were the fulfillment of God’s prophetic word to the people of Israel.  

This is the understanding of church mission that Presbyterian Pastor Darrell Guder and his ecumenical colleagues spoke about in the early 1990s.  Missio Dei, the Mission of God, calls the church, the entire body of Christianity, to be God’s mission in the world.  

Guder was not simply speaking about changing the allocation of resources on a budget, but changing the way we understand the church in our world.  This notion of being God’s mission in the world pulls us away from a paternalistic or colonial model of Church where the church is the authority who pushes herself onto others.  

Instead, the church is given the revolutionary charge of being God’s sent people in the world who are called in everything we do to be God’s Mission.  The entire budget becomes one line: 

Mission.

The church was established on this day AS God’s work in the world, not to DO God’s work in the world.  This revolutionary charge should convict us every week to hear the words of the Gospel anew and to ask ourselves how God is calling us to be God’s church.  The Spirit, the maker of Great and Holy mischief is here to sustain us, but also to challenge us, to disturb us, to force us to hear those questions that are easier not to grapple with.  We are to hear the revolution to be the revolution.  We are invited to see the entirety of our lives as a people sent into the world to be God’s vision of radical Love. 

Any Mission statement necessarily falls short of the dynamic message of Pentecost.  The revolutionary gift that the Spirit infused in our church at its birth is to be God’s love in this place with every piece of who we are.  To know that Spirit has fallen on each of us, that the spirit infuses God’s Church to go forth into the world, rejoincing in the power of the Spirit, alleluia, Alleluia.  

Thanks be to God.  Alleluia, Alleluia.

Amen

Fourth Sunday in Easter - Sunday, April 30, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

April 30, 2023

4th Easter, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen

Those of you who were at Spero Moche’s funeral yesterday heard me speak about the Explicit, Null, and Implicit curricula in educational theory.  I won’t wade into the definition of all of them again, but I will tell that the null curriculum is that information which a system does not teach.  That which would be unavailable to a student in a system.  And today our lectionary has a really left something out.  The null curriculum today is the verse just before the reading from First Peter today, chapter 2, verse 18.. 

Our reading speaks to the endurance in the face of unjust suffering.  Being beaten when we do something wrong?  Well, that is reasonable, Peter says, but to endure that same beating when have not earned it, then you have God’s approval. That notion is hard enough on its own, but it seems to get worse with the verse prior.  That missing verse along with the first couple from our reading says:

“Slaves, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only those who are good and gentle but also those who are dishonest.  For it is a commendable thing if, being aware of God, a person endures pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do good and suffer for it, this is a commendable thing before God.”  

Makes me want to hold my nose when I read it.  This addition of the behavior of slaves adds a whole new layer of challenge for me. It can be applied to nearly any abusive relationship.  It serves as a confounding and chilling piece of scripture that has been and can continue to be so easily used by those on the top side of power to subjugate, oppress, and manipulate those who lack the ability or power to resist.  This recognition, at the very least, of practice that we all find evil is counterintuitive to my understanding of God, to God’s word, and yet, here it is.

Seems to be the right week for it because at our Noonday prayer service on Wednesday, we heard about Zita of Tuscany.  She was recognized for her dedication to her role as a servant and the ferocity with which she sought to do her work.  Because of this we heard Colossians 3:23, “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters.”  Again, not easy for us to hear.  I mentioned on Wednesday that the Colossians passage, and now, our Epistle reading this morning from Frist Peter were used not so long ago, in this country, to justify our institution of chattel slavery.  They were prooftexts or biblical texts that were isolated and emphasized to support the institution of slavery. 

Worse, our text today was used to coerce the enslaved into believing not just that the institution was acceptable, but that enduring the wicked behavior of cruel men  within that institution was exactly what God wanted.  That words of our holy scriptures have been twisted in this way is some of the vilest misappropriation I can imagine.  I wish it to be far from me.  I wish that work to have been done by others, but I know it is closer to me than I want.  Because recognizing that this church, which I love, joined in that dehumanization is something I must grapple with. 

In 1834, William Meade, who was an Episcopal priest, a founder of my Seminary in Alexandria, a Bishop of Virginia, and a respected theologian in his day penned a letter to the clergy of the Virginia Diocese telling the priests that they needed to teach Christianity to the enslaved in their parishes.  He argued that their souls needed to be saved, that they needed to be cared for by the church, but supported their ownership and subjugation. He could validate their intellect and their souls but was not able to justify their personhood.  I read the letter a few years ago, required reading for all the VTS students.  It is a grim reminder that our holy scriptures deserve our attention especially and particularly when they are challenging.   

There is an important defense of Peter that is rooted in context, or in a historical critique right?  I imagine we have all heard some version.  Most often I hear something like, slavery was different back then.  It was not the vile institution that we saw in the Antebellum South.  Because it was different folks from our context really can’t understand it.  I believe that is right and that it is a reasonable and accurate position.  It is true on a number of levels.  It speaks to the challenges of viewing history exclusively through our modern lens.  It is really important to remember as we look at any historical writing.  But if I am honest, I need a little more.  I get stuck when I hear Peter say “when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval.”  

Peter knew it was wrong, that’s why he used it as his metaphor.

I think there are a couple ways to think about it.

One way is to dive deeper into this passage.  To reflect more fully on the message, on what Peter is trying to say.  Where verse 18 sounds like and endorsement for slavey on its own, the rest of the passage is really about the gift of Christ.  It is about recognizing the suffering that Christ endured for our salvation, and what our reaction to that can mean.  Yes, maybe his example is challenging, but so is the notion of Christ’s sacrifice. 

Peter in this reflection is doing some important theological work.  He is insisting that our lives here on earth are not insignificant.  That the way we lead our lives matters to God.  

Theologian NT Wright offers that “the sufferings of Christ are not the only means by which we are rescued from our own sin.  His sufferings are the means, when extended through the life his people, by which the world itself may be brought to a new place.”  It is Peter’s belief that what we do in this world, with our mortal lives is part of the sacred.  Even in the mundane, the endurance of our faith is of vital importance.  The work of our lives is significant not because of what it is, but because of the way we do it.  Your motivation matters in every piece of your life.    Yes, the suffering is bad, that is clear and Peter isn’t arguing against it but we are still called to a live a life centered on Christ.

Now, the second way to consider this passage is at a greater distance.  Focusing not merely on the words of verse 18, or the book of Peter, but upon the biblical canon as a whole.  The entirety of scripture, the revelation of God to humanity over millennia reveals how God feels about this subject.  From the beginning at the explosion of God’s love in creation we see it is for good, for love, for freedom.  The salvific work of Christ captured in all the Gospels is not overturned by a line in first century letter!  

I mean, Exodus exists.  It is the second book of the bible and it seems to provide some insight into the importance and value God places on freedom.  The second book, you don’t have to read too long to see God’s position on slavery, but historically we as a church and as a people lost track of that.

Our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, would summarize by saying.  “If it is not about Love, it is not about God.”  Or as John said this morning: “ I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” This is the great proof text that we should hold up against anything else.  We are given abundant life, and justifying efforts to limit that in creation certainly have an uphill battle.  

God is not in the business of pain and suffering.  But God IS in the business of being with us through our pain and our suffering.  God is in the business of Loving Creation, of loving us.  And passages like this viewed through that lens change from an endorsement of evil to a recognition of all the suffering in the world.  And in light of all that suffering we were given a companion to join us on the way, and an advocate to remain with us.  We find faith in a God who says, yes, I know how very badly that hurts, and I am here to love you through it.  

Amen

Easter Sunday - Sunday, April 9, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

April 9, 2023

Easter Day, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen

Whom are you looking for?

This question, or one very similar to it in this stark form shows up 3 times on Jesus’ lips in John’s Gospel.  Each time it is a profound question that startles the person who is asked.  Jesus seems each time to know what they are doing to know what or who they audience is looking for, but he is putting the question to them directly, forcing them to answer for themselves.  Each time the hearers are affected and compelled to do something beyond themselves.  The simple utterance of these words is enough to stop the audience in their track.  It forces them to go deeper than expected, into the power of Christ.

The model of question serves as bookends for the entire Gospel account in John.  The very first word that Jesus utters in the book of John is to a pair of men who are standing with John the Baptist.  John points to Jesus calling him the “lamb of God” as he walks by.  The men follow immediately, and when Jesus sees them following him, he turns and says “What are you looking for?”  

Rabbi, or teacher is their reply.  Teacher.  

He said “come and see.”

Andrew came and saw and brough his brother Simon.  Simon who would become Peter.  The rock on whom the Church was built.  The two disciples were surely convinced a bit by John’s testimony, but to immediately drop everything and go is an amazing response by any measure.  At the utterance of the question they were conviceted.  At that moment of interrogation they were committed and they went forward into the world proclaiming truth, all from that one question.

The second utterance of this phrase we heard three days ago, on Good Friday after Judas entered the garden.  In John’s account, Judas leads the soldiers directly to Jesus.  The kiss is omitted because Jesus steps forward, full of calm and asks that same convicting question.  “Whom are you looking for?” 

When they hear him say “I am he” they step back and kneel.  It is the only response they can muster.  You can hear in the exchange that they have no choice, their body speaks when they cannot.  Their bodies hear what is behind the name and they can’t do their work in the face of that question, all they can do is kneel.  But Jesus asks again “Whom are you looking for?”, and ultimately, he leads them to their role on that day.  He gives himself over to them to be crucified, knowing what was to come.

In beautiful foreshadowing, the question elicits the same response this morning at the tomb as it did when Jesus first spoke it in the beginning of John.  The Evangelist tells us that the first spoken word of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and the first spoken words of the risen Christ are the same.  This morning, at the beginning of Christ’s risen life, near the end of the Gospel account, Mary Magdalene offers the same reply.  When Jesus says “Whom are you looking for?” 

Mary also replies, “teacher.”  

She says “Rabbouni”, the “carative” form of the word, maybe kind of a term of endearment.  We think she is saying something like “my dear teacher”.  

At first it seems she is unclear.  Maybe she doesn’t know what is going on, in the shock of seeing him she imagines that he is back.  Maybe she imagines him back like Lazarus.  Resuscitated.  Going on with his old life.  And well, he is back, but not as he was before.  It  a new creation, a resurrected creation and .  Theologians think Jesus tells her not to cling to him because they are called into a new relationship.  

It is as though he is saying don’t cling the human me that you knew.  Don’t try to make me who I was because that me is gone.  The way is forward, not behind.  Cling to this new me, the risen me, who is marching on.

It is as this moment that Jesus starts his church.  In a garden next to a tomb where Jesus transcended death he plants the seed that would become the church.  

And Mary is the first Apostle.  In her heart she bears, for a short walk, the entirety of Christendom.  It is her work to tell the people, to share the Good News of the risen Christ.  Mirroring the annunciation to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, this one woman carries the seed, carries the hope, carries the salvation.  She sows without fear or deceit. On her lips would be the greatest piece of Evangelism the world would ever know.  

Jesus told Mary to go and to tell them “I am ascending” to the Father.  

My anticipation about our language tells us that Jesus is about to ascend, that this is effectively past tense, but that is not what it says.  Rather the work was incomplete, it was ongoing, it was continuing.  

There is something beautiful hidden in this utterance.  Something that connects this phrase to the great prologue of John.  This phase from Jesus to tell the disciples that “I am ascending” mirrors in form what John said in part in the prologue of his Gospel account:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

The light was coming into the world, the work emerging into the world was ongoing.  The grammar enthusiasts hiding out there will know that this is called the Imperfect Tense in Latin or French and I am sure in others.  We call it the past progressive or past continuous tense.  I prefer imperfect, but I’m a priest and a nerd, what do you expect.  

Anyway, the imperfect tense is so named because the action wasn’t perfected, it wasn’t completed.  If it was completed it would be perfect because it would be contained, qualified, resolved, but instead this tense indicates that it is incomplete action or action that is ongoing.  And we know this is really important to Jewish people in first century Palestine because of their language.  

Biblical Hebrew, you see, lacks past, present, and future tense.  Not kidding.  Didn’t exist.  They primarily sort verbs by state of completion, not by time.  Not kidding.  This means our translations are always kind of pulling against the essence of what they are saying.  I mean its there, but it is like we are looking straight ahead and without moving our eyes we are looking over there…

The point is, they cared a lot about whether action was perfected, meaning completed, or ongoing and imperfect.  The prologue to John is imperfect when it tells us that the light is coming into the world. It is work that is ongoing.  So on Easter morning when Mary goes to the tomb John is sure to tell us that it was dark when she went because the light was coming into the world.  

We get a nod to that when Jesus tells Mary he is ascending.  That too was imperfect because that work of ascension was incomplete as least at that moment.  It conveyed the urgency to act, to come, to see the way was being made.  

So, on Easter morning Jesus is founding his church in the heart of his friend and is giving her the Good News to share his ongoing work.  And that redemptive and salvific work of Christ has always been ongoing and will always remain a work in progress as Christ continues to emerge in is.  Indeed, the work of the church is imperfect in more ways than one.  But this morning the light is pouring into the world and we stand it the beams of perfected light.  Today we join the great chorus of saints from ancient Palestine to Radford VA who are still singing the chorus of Alleluias into and in spite of an uncertain world.  We join with those who have heard the call of their teacher and turned to answer.     

Whom are you looking for?

Alleluia, the Lord is Risen.

Amen

Palm Sunday - April 2, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

April 2, 2023

Palm Sunday, Year A

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen

All glory Laud and Honor to thee Redeemer King.  To whom the lips of children made sweet Hosannas ring!

Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Hosanna is our cry this Palm Sunday morning.  We enter the chorus from ages past singing this beautiful hymn.  Celebrating and commemorating the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem. 

We shout joyful Hosannas.  Hosanna is a Greek word that scholars believe was transliterated translated from two Hebrew words.  The first is “Yasha” meaning save.  The second is “Anna” meaning please.  Hosanna literally means “Please save us”.  This morning churches across the globe cry in unison “Please save us.”

This word only appears six times in the New Testament.  Always related to  Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  Jesus walked into Jerusalem to save us.  Jesus still comes to save us.  

Then in stark contrast to our cries of Hosanna we just heard the passion narrative and we all called together for Christ to be crucified.  To be honest, I prefer the version of Luke where we all simply cry:

“Crucify! Crucify Him!”

The starkness seems to speak better to our condition, to the starkness of the contrasts in our lives where we want love and salvation and peace, and yet we seem determined to work against those desires.  

This is indeed a day of stark contrast, in a week of stark contrast, in a life of stark contrast.  

I am not sure if any of you pay much attention to our Psalms.  Because of the way they are written and the way we recited them, I can usually sense the lyricism in them.  I do love the poetic cadence of their lines, but I can get lost in the movement and it is often hard for me to process the meaning of the words directly, so it can take longer for truth to emerge. 

But not this morning.  Our Psalm this morning has always jumped out at me.  This psalmist understands and reflects beautifully the challenges and tensions of a life of faith.  Her suffering is real and personal.  It is intimate and fully hers, not an intellectual reflection on pain, but the real impact of pain in her world.  Psalm 31, and this section in particular is one of the most arresting lament psalms we have.  

She sings lament.  She sings of the sorrow that surrounds her and affects her so deeply that she is physically affected in her eyes, her throat, her belly.  She sings that her strength fails her and that her bones are consumed.  Her grief washes over her wrecking her emotions.  She speaks of feeling out of her mind, like a broken pot, unable to go on, wasted with grief and sighing.  Yes, I know how that feels, when the suffering of life is so profound that we are consumed by it, we can think of nothing else.  She hears them whispering, she senses fear all around.  The psalmists pain is so real, so approachable and understandable.  Who hasn’t felt that sinking in their bellies or felt out of their mind with grief and sorrow.

This Sunday of the passion is a fractured one, it is intentionally difficult to process all that is happening.  We enter in Joy but we leave the uncertainty of a closed tomb.  Yes, we know what happens next week, but today we hear about the loss.  That is where we live this week.  First the Lament, the uncertainty, the loss. But even in our lament there are hints of what is beyond.

It is between verses 13 and 14 that our Psalmist quiets us.  There is no pause indicated.  There is no break in the meter.  There is not and added verse of reflection and explanation so we know what she is thinking.  There is a silence that screams from the white space between these verses.  And the silence between these verses lasts an eternity.  The silence between lament and confidence.  This is where she makes her turn. 

In the unspoken place of fracture where we are called to healing.

In that invisible liminal space where we float in suffering. 

Waiting. (wait)

This is where we find ourselves this week.  In the impossible space between, where we cry for salvation.  

Save Me.  Hosanna, please save me.  The cry of Hosanna changes from one of joy to one of necessity, to one of longing.  Our psalmist sings to us today and brings us into Jerusalem broken and crying for salvation.  She takes us to Golgotha where our salvation hangs, where the cross seems to crush all hope.  This is the work of Good Friday, when hope leaves us.  The psalmist expresses suffering in a such a profound and personal way, helping us to channel our lament this week.  

Our lament that is made even more painful by our cry to Crucify Him!  Our betrayal is complete and yet.  Hosanna is our cry.  

But still, our psalmist stays the course.  Verse 14 does come and breaks through the silence.  Breaks through that liminal space and catches us.  The psalmist’s confession restores her, and us. Brining us back from the brink.  Back from the suffering, pointing toward healing.

This is a week of mystery where we enter into suffering and uncertainty.  We are called this week to lose ourselves in the space of waiting and longing.  To hear of the loss we know all too well.  And yet without expecting it, without deserving it, without knowing why,       salvation comes.  

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, March 19, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

March 19, 2023

Lent 4, Year A

Holy and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight O Lord.  For you are our strength and our redeemer.

Amen

Almost 2 years ago now, in the Summer of 2021, our country was unsure of what was coming next.  We seemed to be emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.  There were vaccines available to everyone and folks were experiencing some sort of normalcy, albeit in masks and at a distance.  Hopes were up and people were cautiously optimistic about the future.  But that was also the summer of the Delta variant, if you remember.  So there was no way to say we were out of the woods.  If another, more dangerous variant appeared, we might need to go back into a full lockdown, as some other countries were doing at the time.  I remember clearly because a dear friend of mine was fighting for his life against the Delta variant.  I was completing the intense requirements for my chaplaincy residency that summer while he was so sick that he was even struggling to lift his head off his pillow.

My relationship with Mike matched the public debate at the time.  I was convinced that everyone should be wearing masks, distancing all the time, and getting vaccinations early and often.  Mike, my friend, was opposed the vaccine.  Neither he nor anyone in his family had received the vaccines.  They all wore masks, but that had not been enough and the whole family had gotten sick.  I’m sure we all remember what that time looked like.  And whether one engaged in the debate or not, we all knew that it had become too polarized to touch.  Everyone was sure that they could see what was right. Folks were even happy to talk about religion if only they didn’t have to talk about vaccines.

As I mentioned, this polarized landscape was the backdrop during the summer while I was fulfilling my intensive chaplaincy requirements for ordination at a retirement facility called Goodwin House in Alexandria.  Marcella was a staff member there who distributed food, cleaned up, or generally helped the residents as needed.  Not a nurse, therapist, or a caregiver, but she was just one of the many people who kept the facility going every day.  Her accent and behavior revealed the preference of many first-generation Latina immigrants not to be the focus of attention.  Goodwin House was big enough that it was easy to fade into the background. 

Marcella, then, was largely invisible, like a blind man on the side of the road.  And like the interaction in our Gospel today it was a little miraculous that we even bumped into each other by chance and started a conversation.  Our instructors always told us that we should be available to everyone in the facility and should be open to speaking with the staff, even though the staff rarely had time for (or maybe interest in) a conversation.  It is probably fair to note that I was running on a bit of Sophomoric confidence at this time in my residency, as often happens when we become and little to comfortable in our role.  Maybe I was a little presumptuous in thinking I had something to offer rather than something to learn.  Thankfully, the Spirit interceded and we started talking. 

          As I recall I just asked her how it had been there during the pandemic.  She told me how very hard it had been to see all these residents forced to stay in their rooms.  All of them isolated for everything.  Meals and medicines were left at their doors.  Maybe a quick wave through gowns, masks, and shields for the first year, but little else.  They were in extreme isolation.  Thousands of individuals with no community.  Then I asked how her family was through the pandemic?  Did she have kids at home from school all day?  Yes, she said, it had been hard but she, her husband, and both kids were OK and she told how lucky she felt that they were all healthy.  The apartment was small, but they had managed.

          It seems her husband was also a healthcare worker, but at another facility.  He had worked second shift the whole time while she worked first shift to mimic the school day.  She would make meals and spend the evenings with the kids and he would help them during school to keep them on track.  That meant there was someone with their children almost all the time, but very little time together. 

“And of course, the masks”, she said. 

(huh) Yeah, I was getting used to them by that time.  Thinking maybe she was opposed to them, I struck first.  They were inconvenient, but I told her that I was sure they were really important.  I thought masks and vaccines were essential. 

She read my response perfectly, she knew where I was headed when Marcella said, “yes, and we wore them at home too.” 

In their apartment, masked, all the time. 

Well, they took them off when they slept.

I assumed their concern for their children led to this.  That they were really motivated by self preservation.  But no, not so much, not that she wanted them to be sick, but the kids were young and healthy.  What they couldn’t stand was the thought that they would get the residents of either of their facilities sick.

Marcella went on to say that she and her husband were so concerned with the populations they were caring for that they didn’t even sleep in the same bed. 

It seems every night before she would go to sleep Marcella would make an air mattress in the closet with sheets for her husband when he got home.  And he would pack it up first thing every day when he got up.  They packed it up because they didn’t want their kids to think that there was a problem between them.  They spent the year apart, together, caring for those who never even saw them, who likely didn’t even know they existed.  They provided safety and comfort and love to all of those residents who never knew what she was doing for them.

          John also taps into a polarizing debate in our Gospel this morning.  He begins and ends this entirety of chapter 9 with a question about suffering.  Particularly, he raises the question of suffering as a punishment for sin.  Why is this man blind?  Could it be his fault that he was born blind?  Was it a way to punish his parents?  Whose fault is it that this man is suffering.  Let us know so we can fix it, so we can avoid God’s wrath! 

          These questions of God persist today.  What did I do to deserve this?  Why are bad things happening to good people?  How could a loving God let this happen? In parallel to that is the notion of God rewarding the good.  This is at the foundation of what is called the prosperity gospel today.  Popularized by Oral Roberts and his peers, this is a reading of the Gospel where the more faithful you are, the more God will give you what you ask for.  The more money you give to the church the more God loves you and rewards you.  Supporting the church in itself becomes the way to reach salvation.  Is life a giant karma vending machine?  Do we get out what we put in? 

In short, No.

You can probably tell I struggle with that concept.  Not the notion that we should lead a faithful and compassionate life, not that we should support what is important to us.  I believe, obviously, that the church is an important way for us to draw closer to God, to seek justice and Love in the world, but let me be clear, I don’t have a line upstairs and neither do they.  I beleive that God is not looking to hand out rewards or punishment for our behavior.  That can lead down a slippery slope that can lead people to believe that those who are less fortunate are “getting what they deserve”. 

          The entire narrative of Christ’s life in all the gospel accounts denies a vision of God who is looking for transactions.  As Paul says today, we are to live as children of the Light, and the fruit of that is “all that is good and right and true”.  We are promised a companion through our suffering, not a way to avoid it.  When we are in pain, depressed, anxious, mourning, and lost we are told that God came to experience that with us and that God remains with us through all of it. We are children of the light because Christ came into the world.  Christ does not come to us because of our particular illumination.  As we heard a couple of weeks back from one of the most famous verses in John: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” 

          This is what the Pharisees, the holy men, missed.  And what every priest would do well to hear in this passage each time they hear it.  When our vision matches the Pharisees vision of the kingdom which was blocked by their insistence that they knew what the kingdom looked like we become blind.  They were certain they knew the terms of God’s love, but Jesus broke through all of that.  Their blindness was in believing that they had the answers, that they set the terms. 

Jesus heals that one blind man so that all of us can see God’s glory revealed in that loving act.  Just as God was revealed to me in Marcella and her husband’s willingness to truly care for and love those in their lives.  She became a vision of Christ to me in a bleak and anxious and frightening moment.  She allowed me to see how God was calling us to love, not to be right.  It is always about being a child of light, and reflecting that light to all. Amen

Second Sunday after the Epiphany - January 15, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

January 15, 2022

2 Epiphany, Year A

God, give us strength of body to keep walking for freedom. God, give us strength to remain nonviolent, even though we may face death. -The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Amen.

For years when I was building apartments I was the on-site Project Manager.  When I was doing that work my wife would always groan when I told her that the framers were coming on site.  Inevitably this would mark the end of my casual relationship with a project.  When the framers arrived all the problems hidden in the plans would expose themselves in three dimensions and those problems could not be ignored.  The framers brought with them the plumbers, electricians, sprinklers, and HVAC subs all of who brought their own issues and questions.  The pace of my work would compound seemingly exponentially.  You see, I was the guy who had to triage the questions and ultimately provide answers if the design missed something.     

Apartments were also a funny animal because unlike an office or a home, they are, by their nature repetitive.  That is great if you are trying to make time, because you can make a system to repeat the same work over and over again.  But if there is a design problem it gets repeated over and over and over and over again!  The smallest and least significant of problems can manifest at the final inspection and ruin a project.  So, I became adept at that triage work by necessity.  I spent more time than I ever care to admit learning building codes because I had to know how any piece of minutia fit into the whole.  Trying to head off disaster with each question that came up.

While doing this work I picked up a phrase from an architect named Dan that we worked with from time to time.  He used to speak to this reality by noting that there is a hazard in this business because once you have learned something, you really can’t unknow it.  You may wish you didn’t know it, you may want to forget it, but the truth is right there.  You couldn’t turn a blind eye to almost anything because the impact when multiplied over and over and over was terrible.  

Once you know a thing you can’t unknow it, you can no longer be ignorant.  Once you know it you must choose you course of action.  You must choose; right or wrong.  No longer can the winds of chance push you around.  Knowing means you have to speak up.

I think about this simple reality on the construction site often when I think about The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. whose birthday is today.  I wonder if he would have preferred not to know what he knew.  Seeing the world as it is and as it should be is a heavy burden.  Raising a prophetic voice and calling for justice is dangerous work at any time.  But King had to speak his truth.  It was on April 4 in 1967, one year to the day before he was killed in the Lorraine Hotel that King delivered his speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam”.  He was speaking at Riverside Baptist Church in New York City when he said:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

It was statements like this from this speech that historians say truly made King a target.  King made a turn in this speech from speaking in broad terms about equity and justice to speaking directly to the problem at hand.  He refused to let America off the hook.  He effectively said “You can wage this war if you want, but I am not going to let you be ignorant.  You will have to choose.”  I love that he wasn’t speaking out against the soldiers who were headed in Vietnam.  This reality was bigger than any of them.  In fact, he was defending those men whose lives were being used to prop up a system that was contrary to those values that so many of them were trying to live into.  

King was taking on Empire.  It is especially painful because he was taking on our empire.  He was reminding us of who we aspire to be and he refused to let us unknow it.  His words still ring with a truth that will convict us today.  The relatively small voice of a Black man from Atlanta in the 1960’s had found the truth that he couldn’t unknow.  And from the moment he knew it, King would point all of us to it.  

He was pointing to the truth.  

He was pointing to hope.  

He was pointing to Love.  

He was pointing to Christ.  

This work of pointing to Christ has always been dangerous work.  We see evidence of if from the beginning.  From the first person to point to Christ, John the Baptist, who we heard about this morning.  John is literally pointing at Jesus each time he walks by.  Twice John says there he is, there is the Lamb of God.  Simon, who was a disciple of John, saw what John was pointing to and followed Christ, literally.  Simon who is called Peter would ultimately become the rock on which our church was founded.  Such is the impact of that pointing that John did.  

I love the reflection of Theologian Roger Nishioka about those bracelets from about fifteen years ago that said WWJD.  He offers that this is too high and unreasonable a goal.  Rather we should have had bracelets that said WWJBD, because that is a model that we can hope to live into.  A life of pointing to Christ.  A life not where we expect ourselves to be perfect and make the same choices that the incarnate God would make, but rather, to look at the life of this mortal, John the Baptist, and wonder how we can more faithfully point to Christ.  

Those in our Advent Book study will remember that Rowan Williams, Retired Archbishop of Canterbury, challenges readers of scripture to always ask “where are you in this?”  When I ask this of myself I must admit that I am convicted by both John’s and King’s witnesses. I want to point to Christ, but it is uncomfortable and frightening.  It is easier to allow myself to be ignorant of my neighbor’s plight.  It is easier to be ignorant of those things done on my behalf that I am not proud of.  It is easier to point at myself.  I invite you to join me and to ask yourselves these questions as well.  I will warn you, however, that this is the great hazard of being Christian.  The profound Love that is shown to us in Christ is infectious, but the love of the Gospel compels us to action.  We know who we are called to point to and this morning we are reminded that we can’t unknow it. 

Amen

Baptism of Our Lord - Sunday, January 8, 2023

William Yagel

Grace Radford

January 8, 2022

1 Epiphany, Year A

Even before we call on Your name to ask You, O God, when we seek for the words to glorify You, You hear our prayer; Unceasing love, O
unceasing love, surpassing all we know. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Even with the darkness sealing us in, we breathe Your name, and through all the days that follow so fast, we trust in You; endless your grace, O endless your grace, beyond all mortal dream. Both now and for ever, and unto ages and ages,

Amen.

One of the great realities of our church, and our faith, is the depth of complexity bound into one volume in our scriptures, our traditions, and our liturgies.  If you joined us for the book study this Advent you may well have heard me say that nothing is accidental, everything, it seems, speaks to deeper meanings and deeper truths.  We have multi-valent layers of love and faith that can go unnoticed for a lifetime and then that one time a professor reflects on the Nicene Creed, for example.  She points out that Light from Light is symbolic of a candle.  When the light passes from one to the next, as we did a couple weeks ago at our Christmas Eve service, neither light is diminished by the other.  They are the same light, neither is inferior, neither is derivative, they are both fully light.  This is the nature of Christ the Creed says.  In my, then 46, years, I never even thought about it.  Now the imagery is embedded in every candle I light.  I can’t shake it.  

This is a tiny example of the fullness of our tradition, which stretches back to the year 325 at the council of Nicaea which I think may have been one of the last times that the Christian faith reached consensus on much of anything.  The absence of this depth of meaning and spirituality from a person’s life is one of the great losses of the decline of our churches in America and Europe.  It is a rare pair indeed who can approach the depth of reflection and meaning embedded in the smallest of our rituals at a Sunday morning coffee at Starbucks or standing on the sidelines at a club baseball game in another town.  Not that these things are bad in themselves, in fact I love them, but seem to me a poor substitute for the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reality of immersing oneself in a life of faith.   

And this doesn’t mean the journey is linear for any of us.  Many a faithful Christian has greater fulfillment in our faith by embarking on an individual journey.  Maybe it leads them to Zen Buddhism whose practices of mediation and mindfulness allow a new expression of our faith.  But always we have that depth or that scaffolding, as many of Seminary my professors liked to call it, that allows us to return to our Christian pilgrimage.  Just yesterday I went to the Ordination of my classmates from Seminary Cara Modisett and Samson Mamour, now both priests in our church and I hear the words of Pilgrims’ Hymn by Stephen Paulus.  These were the words I opened with this morning, and again:  

“Even with the darkness sealing us in, we breathe Your name, and through all the days that follow so fast, we trust in You; endless your grace, O endless your grace, beyond all mortal dream. Both now and for ever, and unto ages and ages,”

These are impossible words outside of a Spiritually active and faithful life.  These words like so many that we hear in our liturgies draw us out beyond ourselves, into the fullness of faith.  

The cycles of our church year are no different.  We have come through a 

time of waiting and watching in Advent.  And we have celebrated the incarnation, the coming of God into the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  And this week, we passed the twelfth day of Christmas, marking Epiphany, and today we find ourselves celebrating the Baptism of our Lord.  This week we mark the manifestation of our Lord.  We mark moments in our scripture when the fullness of Christ became clear and apparent, publicly, to the world.  These two readings are interesting in how they are used, the telling of the 3 Magi and the telling of the Baptism of our Lord.  

You see in our branch of faith, from the 11th century officially, but arguably from the sixth century, our church split into the Eastern Orthodox Christian Faiths and the Western faiths of the Roman Catholic churches.  We, being western, mark Epiphany with the story of the 3 Magi, or Wise Men.  Eastern Churches mark the day with the story of the Baptism of our Lord.  So, you can see we hold onto that shared history in our readings for this Sunday.  Always with more depth of connection, of meaning.

So we mark this week three incredibly curious men who were Zoroastri-anists.  Part of an ancient faith group who read the stars, literally, but they were not Jewish.  They were an ancient sect from the East, mysterious and curious traveling to find the truth.  And they followed that celestial map to at stable in Bethlehem.  Creation literally putting up a billboard and saying here it is.  Here is the One you are seeking, the key to the fullness of life is right here. 

So a quick review-First Mary, the teenage mother our of wedlock.  Then her betrothed, Joseph.  Next Elizabeth and Zechariah who doubted their God’s.  And then a group of unclean men called from their sheep in the fields.  And note here, not unclean like they hadn’t had a bath.  These men were fundamentally unclean as they were too close to the blood and waste of these sheep.  Rabbis would stand on tables to keep themselves clean in dealing with shepherds, not wanting to step on the same ground as them.  And then these 3 Magi.  And depending on the Gospel account, leading to a man dressed in Camel skins, eating honey and locusts and offering baptisms.  

This is how the saviour comes into the world.  Not raised up for all the world to adore, but in humility, in the presence of the unclean and the unworthy.  Christ is then found by these seekers who travelled God knows how far just to get a glimpse.  They affirmed their faith and ours by their own pilgrimage of faith.

This faith of ours is not simplistic, it is not linear.  It is complex and challenging.  It calls to our very souls and gives a lifetime of wonder. So go deeper into the mysteries of our God, through our calendar, our scriptures, our sacraments, and liturgies, all of it.  Seek, and find, and wonder in it all.

Amen

Third Sunday of Advent - Sunday, December 11, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

December 11, 2022

Advent 3, Year A

Christ of the cosmos, living Word,
come to heal and save
Incognito, in our streets,
beneath the concrete,
between the cracks,
behind the curtains, within the dreams,
in ageing memories, in childhood wonder,
in secret ponds, in broken hearts,
in Bethlehem stable, still small voice,
Word of God, amongst us.

Amen.

-Iona Advent prayer

This is not the way it was supposed to go.

That is what Casper would likely tell us, if he could speak.  Casper, being a dog, can’t offer that reflection, but I do wish he could.  The community of farmers and dog lovers around the country who have seen Casper’s exploits could use a reminder from the mouth of the warrior himself.  

This is NOT the way it was supposed to go.

Some of you might remember that I said a couple of words about our maremmas a few months back.  They are the livestock guardian dogs that Eve, the kids, and I had on our farm in Nelson County.  Well, Casper is a Great Pyrenees, which is the French version of the Italian maremma, from down in Decatur Georgia.  He has been made famous lately from his brawl with a large number of coyotes that he encountered in early November.  

It seems that a pack of about a dozen coyotes were slinking around Casper’s fence and it came to blows, well, bites.  Casper was badly injured but not before killing 8 of the coyotes.  An astonishing number for a single dog.  As you may imagine, donations have been pouring in for Casper’s medical bills and I think he is back home now.  Obviously, Casper has made the rounds in the news and every article I have read loves to portray him as a brave warrior, leading with the body count and the long odds that he faced.  I am reminded of how much we celebrate battle in our culture.  How much we love the underdog, literally, fighting his way through, overcoming the odds and returning the hero.  But here is the thing about livestock guardian dogs, that fight represents, on some level, a failure of their system.  

You see, those breeds, Great Pyrenees and Maremmas, are obviously able to fight, but only when everything else has failed.  They are not really fighters by their breeding, rather they are protectors.  Maybe it is a subtle difference, but once it has reached the point of violence, the dog must risk sacrificing themselves, and thus leaving the flock exposed forever.  If the dog can no longer defend, they have not done their job. So, counter to what we might expect based on the sensationalized story about Casper, they are not looking for a fight.  

These dogs spend their time patrolling the perimeter of their fences, marking the boundary along the way.  They bark.  All.  The.  Time.  They set themselves apart from the flock and are large, imposing dogs, with thick and fluffy coats. Thus making them appear even larger to be seen as a menacing guardian by any that would try them.  The implication of force is their tool.  They operate with the complete trust of the herd, so when a predator does appear, they are able to hide themselves in the herd shooting through to disorient and confuse predators.  The predators often can’t even tell how many dogs they are dealing with because the disorient them.  In short, their instinct is to do everything they can to avoid a fight!  For them success is the absence of predators, not a battle royale.  Casper’s story is amazing with long odds and a gallant warrior, but: 

That is not how it is supposed to go.

And when John the Baptist sends word to Jesus in our Gospel this morning asking if he is the one we can hear this same refrain:

This is not how it is supposed to go.  

John’s best guess of the coming Lord does not seem to align exactly with the this man who has come.  Last week, early in the book of Matthew, we heard John telling the Pharisees and the Sadducees that they were a brood of vipers!  He asked them who warned them to flee from the wrath to come.   Remember he told them that their ancestry from Abraham would not save them from what was to come!  Clearly, John has some opinions about who is worthy and who is not!  It sounds like John might even like to act as an adviser when the time for selection comes.   John is ready for judgement to come to those who are wicked!  In the moment of oppression by the Roman Empire John was no doubt looking for a little more energy at the very least.  Likely a first century Captain Israel would have suited him fine.  A hero able to put Rome in her place and burst forth issuing judgement and avenging centuries of mistreatment.  

When he asks if Jesus is the one I can hear the exasperation in his voice!  C’mon, man get to it!  And I can imagine him being more than a little annoyed with the response that Jesus gives!  “Tell him what you see.”  In his response Jesus leans again on the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah.  Hear the parallel images from our reading from Isaiah this morning.  Isaiah says:

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

When Jesus responds he seems to speak directly to this passage of Isaiah when he says:

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. 

He reminds the people of the promises he is fulfilling that was made by Isaiah.  But unlike Isaiah’s prophecy, it seems that the Lord is not returning with “vengeance and terrible recompense.”  Instead, Jesus is cavorting with tax collectors and sinners!  He is offering grace and mercy to everyone with an open invitation to the banquet!  How can this be?  We can all hear John saying:

This is not how it is supposed to go.  

I expect all of us can, but I surely know that I can relate to John’s response.  I know exactly how he feels, wanting someone to get what is really coming to them.  Punishment for their mistreatment of me or those I love.  Justice for the way people have taken advantage of the system?  I know how John feels, but friends, the good news?

This is not how it is was going to go.  

Our version of justice is, thankfully, not what we would come to find in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.  And that is not what we are waiting for today.  This season of Advent we wait not for the conquering Warrior King, but the humble child to be born to a teenage mother.  He is born on the bottom side of every imaginable worldly power and would offer a humble life punctuated by suffering as the way to our salvation.  His work in the small acts of intimacy and grace would echo in the halls of power forever.  His power was in his weakness, joining those on the margins giving them hope and mercy.    

John speaks to us this advent season from a cell, where, he sits imprisoned by empire.  We join John this morning in waiting for the Messiah to come, to be God with us.  To remember again how we are freed from that which binds us.  To celebrate the ongoing mystery of Grace, the gift of the incarnate God to us.  Let us wait with joy for this coming, and celebrate how it was meant to be.  

Amen

Second Sunday of Advent - Sunday, December 4, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

December 04, 2022

Advent 2, Year A

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;

before you kings will shut their mouths,

to you the nations will make their prayer:

Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

Amen.

Lamentations 1:1-4.  That is where we begin our ride today.  And it is a ride, and I am going to ask that you hold on, because it may get a little bumpy.  I suppose it is obvious since I am beginning with a selection of scripture, even more, a book of the bible, that we didn’t touch today, but my ramblings may seem a little off course.  Please just stick with me. 

I want to begin with Lamentations because that is one beginning of our Gospel today.  It is at least part of the origin story for John the Baptist’s words this morning.  As always, the ancient story of the Israelites is interwoven with our story today.  Our Christian bible calls the name of this book Lamentations.  But in the Hebrew Bible the name is translated simply as “How” and this is short for “How lonely sits the city.”  

Chapter  1, verses 1-4:

How lonely sits the city
    that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
    she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
    has become subject to forced labor.

She weeps bitterly in the night,
    with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers,
    she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;
    they have become her enemies.

Judah has gone into exile with suffering
    and hard servitude;
she lives now among the nations;
    she finds no resting place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
    in the midst of her distress.

The roads to Zion mourn,
    for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate;
    her priests groan;
her young girls grieve,[a]
    and her lot is bitter.

Clearly, it sounds like a profound and desolate cry, little wonder why we chose the title of the book.  It is one of the great gifts we receive from our ancient, shared story with the Jewish people; we are reminded again and again that we can cry out in desperation and loss.  We can cry out in our own anguish and know that God hears us and cares for us.  We are invited to say, “this stinks and I don’t like it.  I feel abandoned and lost and lonely and I don’t understand WHY.”  Our Jewish brothers and sisters provide an honesty of relationship with God that reminds us that God can handle our anger, sadness, and bitterness.

This is not, however, a random cry of lament. Theologians and tradition tell us that this book is lamenting the loss of the first temple in Jerusalem, the center of the faith of the people of Israel.  The temple, which was their identity, their seat for God, the center of their spiritual lives in many ways, was built by Solomon, son of their first king, David, and grandson of Jesse, centuries before.  In 586 BC their temple was destroyed by the Babylonians after they defeated the Southern Kingdom of Israel called Judah.  The people were in despair and historians place the writing of Lamentations, as would make sense, right in the midst of that despair.  They fine themselves under the burden of a cruel empire.   We know this not just because of the subject, which might be proof enough, but because of what Isaiah says in response to the book!

So, Isaiah, which we did read this morning, but a different section, is a little confusing.  I am not going to explain it all right now, but the readers digest is that many theologians attribute the whole of the book of Isaiah to 3 authors or 2 authors and a redactor (kind of like an editor).  There is little consensus on details, but lots of agreement on the divisions.  So, we find 3 distinct voices in the book of Isaiah and often consider chapters 1-39 as Isaiah 1, chapters 40-55 as Isaiah 2, and chapters 56-66 as Isaiah 3.  These the books of Isaiah were written over the course of 225 or so years beginning around 742 BC, with the last one completed before 515 BC .  Tradition and our biblical canon has them contained in 1 book, but the evidence points to 3 writers.  

So, Chapter 40 of Isaiah as we have it in our bible is what we now consider the first chapter of the second author or Isaiah 2.  

I promise we are getting somewhere.

Isaiah 2 was written just before the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians.  Why do we care?  Because the Persians allowed the Jewish people to return from almost 50 years of exile to their ancestral homes.  Hope returns to the people.  Lamentations was written just after 586 and Isaiah 2 was prior to 539.  Both are written within that 45 year window.  I know the history lesson is a lot, but now you have a little bit of the back story of the time between the Babylonian Exile and destruction of the temple in 586 BC and the beginning of the Assyrian rule, which ended the Exile in 539 BC.  

Now the connection between these two authors, with the help of biblical scholar Ellen Davis, Lamentations 1:1-4 and Isaiah 40 in response:

Isaiah 40, verse 1 Reads:

“Comfort O comfort my people, says your God.”

Remember that in Lamentations that she had no one to comfort her.  Here, God is comforting God’s people.

Isaiah 40, verse 2

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term,
    that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
    double for all her sins.

In lamentations Judah went into exile with suffering and hard servitude.  She had no resting place.  The people are lost and broken under the weight of an empire that abuses them, abandoned by God.  But now, Israel has served her term, the end of this exile is approaching, joy is on the horizon!  She will receive double the good things for her term in exile.  

Now these verses are still central to Jewish life still today.  They mark the fall of the first temple in the Summer at the observance of Tisha b’Av by reading Lamentations during that first week, then they read from the Isaiah 40 the next week.  This is a deep cycle of remembrance for people of the Jewish faith.  These selections and their connections would have been well known to first century Palestinian Jews as well.  They know well this sweeping story of loss and reconciliation with God.  That is important and vital to honor as an element of the faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters.  

BUT I am only telling you this part of the story so I can tell you something else!

And the key is what Isaiah offers in the next verse!  Where Lamentations offers that the roads to Zion mourn because there is no Zion, there is no temple, there is no house for God?   

Isaiah 40:3-5 says

A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
    make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up,
    and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
    and the rough places a plain.

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

Here is the Good News!  As I read this to you, I ask you to remember the words from the Gospel of Matthew from this morning!  When John the Baptist uses these exact words and credits them to Isaiah now we can hear a little more context.  A voice cries out, prepare the way of the Lord.  The reconciliation that the Jewish people know from Isaiah is coming to you, be ready!  Isaiah spoke of a return to the Holy City and right relationship.  

But John the Baptist is re-imagining the covenantal relationship between God and all of humanity.  His prophetic voice from the very edge of civilization, from the margins of society is offering an alternative to this vision of a holy city.  John leans on what the people understand from their history.  They find themselves under the oppression of Empire again, this time the Roman Empire, and they are trying to understand how God will be with them. 
This time, though, the promise changes.  No longer promising Jerusalem, John, whether he knows it or not, is prophesying the coming of the incarnate God.  He is speaking of changing the narrative forever, but he is translating through the scriptures that his audience knows in their very bones from stories that are nearly 600 years old.  

So as John the Baptist changed the narrative we still live in that new reality of the incarnate God.  Whose revolutionary arrival forever changed salvation.  Forever provides Grace.  Forever provides Hope.  Forever grants peace.  

This is why we are making the way straight.  Lament this empire no longer, for the King is coming.   

Come O come Emmanuel, God with us.  

Amen

First Sunday of Advent - Sunday, November 27, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

November 20, 2022

Advent 1, Year A

Please join me in the collect of the Day from your bulletin insert:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of 

darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of 

this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit 

us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come 

again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the 

dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives 

and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and 

for ever.

Amen.

Our collect of the day you will hear again later, because we are celebrating Morning Prayer instead of Eucharist it comes later in the service, just after the suffrages.  It may be my favorite collect in our book, I love the language, cast away the works of darkness, and put on your armor of light!  Good stuff!!!  Anyway, as you likely gleaned, some of the words of  that collect come right from our Epistle reading from Romans today as Paul writes:

“For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.  Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  

The Day is near.

Put on the armor of light.  

My friends this is our good news today as we enter a new year in our church.  We return today to the beginning.  In our liturgical cycle we return to the purple hangings and vestments of our season of contemplation and reflection.  We return to a season of joyfully awaiting the light that came into the world, that is coming into the world, and that light will come again.  I want you to notice that this is a season of Joy, but a different type of Joy than we hope to experience in a month or so at Christmas.  That is the celebratory culmination with all the bells and whistles.  And unlike Lent, the other purple season, where we remove all trace of the Alleluia from our liturgical celebrations, and enter into a time of self-denial, Advent is asking us to do something else entirely.  It is a time of reflection, but it holds none of that somber nature.  It is a time of quiet, yes.  But it is primarily a time of making space for our coming savior.  A time of considering the implication of God who would join us in our earthly pilgrimage.   

I want to remind you that we are not entering today into simply a historic and static reenactment of the time just before God became incarnate as human.  We are not engaging this season so we can act surprised on Christmas Eve and pretend we didn’t know what was coming.  We know that Christ came into the world 2000 years ago, lets not act as though we don’t.  Recognizing the historical birth of Jesus is an important part of our work, but if that is all we accomplish in this season we are missing the boat!  We are also, and in my opinion more importantly, welcoming the coming Christ into our lives here and now.  

This is the time when we as a church community and as individuals prepare ourselves by making ourselves hungry for the light of Christ in our lives here, and now. In her Magnificat, Mary captures exactly what we need to remember in this season.  Her poetry, fittingly, comes after the annunciation when an angel of the Lord told that she would bear the Son of God.  She is visiting Elizabeth and in one of the verses of her hymn she says that God has “filled the hungry with Good things, but the rich he has sent away empty.”  I hadn’t considered this verse until I was recently reading the work of the Czech Theologian Pius Parsch, who offered that Mary reminds us that “in order for bodily food to nourish us, we must feel hunger.”  Food without hunger is unrewarding, and those without hunger are without need, and are sent away with nothing.  Hunger then, is central to our relationship with God.  

Now, we are always in need, all of us, so please don’t hear me offering that God’s grace is conditional.  Rather, I am saying that in our faith we recognize a need to acknowledge that hunger.  We recognize that it is our condition to move away from God, to imagine self-reliance and independence.  That is why we are called to joyfully participate in this season.  We are invited into a season of reflection and penance so that we might create that hunger for relationship with God.  

A hunger for the light.  

I love that the light of the season will follow us in this hunger.  We are living in the shortest days of the year for the coming weeks.  Where the darkness leaves later and later in the morning and that comes to us earlier and earlier in the evening.  We are moving through darkness until the 21st of December and as we make our pivot on the earth’s axis and roll back toward the sun, our days will begin to expand.  The light comes into the world both spiritually and physically.  

Our season of preparing for the light of Christ to come into the world is paralleled by the season of God’s creation also creating a need for the Sun to return.  Bending back from the long cycle of the solstice, leaning toward the light.  We find companions then in our natural world who also long for that warmth, that light.

In the Advent gifts you will find on your way out you are invited to embrace this solar reality.  The darkness of the season is a companion to the light.  One must have the other.  We are invited to create a need for the light.  We recognize the darkness to let the light shine all the more brilliantly.  

So, we start slowly, one candle at a time.  Gradually bringing more and more light into this space.  This wreath and the candles which we light are tools for our contemplation and reflection here as a community.  Maybe you have your own advent wreath at home, or maybe the table tents will afford you the same.  

Know that our work in the next month is therefore extremely counter-cultural.  Everyone knows the challenges of scheduling in this season, and if we are not careful by the time December 25th rolls around we are done with it.  The stress that our consumer culture places on us can be stifling and maddening so we can easily arrive at our moment of celebration exhausted by the preparation.  Instead, we are trying to slow our pace and to recognize the darkness and to yearn for the light that has come, that is emerging, and which will come again.   

  Paul, then, when he is inviting us to put on our armor of light and to live honorably as during the day is inviting us back into a holy life with Christ.  So put on your armor of light and join me to Joyfully create space for the Christ who is coming into the world.  

Amen

Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, November 13, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

November 13, 2022

Proper 28, Year C

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Oh Lord, for you are our strength and our salvation.

Amen.

When I was working in construction one of my employers used to remark about the challenges of focus in our line of work. The company built large apartment complexes, mostly in central Virginia, and would retain ownership or those complexes for years to come. This meant that any problem of faulty construction would become a problem of maintenance in the years ahead. So, focusing on minute details like the type of screws used to attach masonry anchors to the wall, the way a piece of flashing was bent, or the particular manufacturing of of metal clips to eliminate rust in exterior concrete stairs were essential details that called for critical focus. But also, being able to draw back enough to see that the elevation of an entire building could be changed by a couple of inches to improve drainage across the entire property was necessary. We would talk about this as an adjustable zoom lens, drawing back from a project far enough to see the whole thing in on view before zooming in closely to study details, then backing out agian.

It was Veteran’s day this week, along with another notable day that I will get to in a minute, that had me thinking about this tension of seeing the general and the specific simultaneously in our passages today. In thinking about Veteran’s Day, I was remembering a documentary I watched years ago about our Congressional Medal of Honor. That award is often considered the most distinguished award any soldier can ever be granted in our military. The program kind of went through the entire history of the award and highlighted several recipients. Those persons who showed gallantry in action, who went above and beyond the call of duty, who risked their lives, who showed unwavering devotion, conspicuous gallantry, or extraordinary heroism.

I must admit that I don’t really remember many of the specific stories that were highlighted, but I do remember the narrator talking through the challenges of knowing the details of a particular act of gallantry needed to be awarded that medal AFTER that specific act was committed. You see, the first thing that needs to happen is heroic act, but that is only the beginning.

Someone must see that soldier do it.

That witness must survive.

That person then must tell the story that may be impossibly difficult to share.

And when they decide to tell that story it must be told well enough that it compels a response. After that point, the story begins its journey through whatever bureaucracy is set up to vet and consider those narratives.

All of that is before the official selection process of the powers that be who will read the narrative and decide yes or no.

Certainly, there are multitudes of soldiers deserving the Medal of Honor that will never be known because any one of those pieces won’t come together. These details of how a soldier’s story is revealed is therefore essential for our knowing it and honoring it.

Our scriptural record has much the same reality. We don’t have a single original, or Autograph, version of any book in the bible. Every book of either the Old or New Testament has been copied more than we can know. For example, our oldest copy of any gospel dates to about 200AD. And that is a fairly sparse bit of the Gospel of John. Surely Paul, or the Apostles, wrote more letters, which are now lost to history. We are compelled, then, to study the details of what we do have. Theologians pour over word choices, historical references, nuance, political climate, and tone to glean every scrap of meaning we can find. The good news is that over the arc of our history as a Judeo-Christian people we have collected enough of God’s revelation to make an image from the aggregate pieces.

The work of interpreting ancient texts in a modern world takes real work from an academic standpoint alone. Unlike the Medal of Honro, it is even more challenging when as this work of scriptural interpretation is no less than essential and life giving to the world. Small wonder it is the cause of such conflict, despite the ethos of its message!

While considering the dramatic shifts of happenstance that brought us the biblical canon as we know it today—and yes, I do believe that God has a particular interest in sharing God’s word with us, so I believe it is more than simple luck. But in considering that, I was struck by the other, less significant day of the week, Nov. 9. Also known as the birthday of the great astrophysicist, astrologist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and author-Carl Sagan. This is the man who reminded the world that we are all star dust. That the elements in our bodies were formed from the heavy elements found in the crucibles of exploding stars. The Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen dust which form our bodies are the most prevalent elements found in the entire solar system. The majority of what is out there is what is in here! We are all made of the same star stuff.

Sagan forces us to take a step back and to look at the whole picture, to see the grand work of God in the Cosmos. He forces our zoom lens to retract and our view to get ever larger. One of may favorite Sagan quotes comes to us from Valentine’s day in 1990. Sagan had the Voyager Space Probe look back to earth after traveling away from us for 12 -1/2 years, from a distance of 3.6 Billion miles away and take one last photo of us, lost in a sea of stars. He offered:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Indeed, he had the largest human view ever on our planet.

It leaves me wishing that God had told us a little bit about the galaxies, solar systems, black holes, supernovas, or any hint of what we would be in for. But that seems never to be God’s way. We are blessed mostly with stories of the intimate which we must interpret to our broader world view. So, when we hear of signs like Luke speaks of in our Gospel today we in the 21st century have a profoundly different view than those in the 1st century. This is easily evidenced by the blood red moon that showed herself on Tuesday morning this week during the lunar eclipse.

There were no calls that I heard for us to prepare to the coming day of the Lord, maybe because we have the benefit of men and women like Carl Sagan who have helped us understand the order of things. But this can have the effect of distancing us from wondering at the largeness of God’s works, have us looking too closely at details all the time. Certainly, in this season of stewardship my thoughts were often in the particular, looking at details of time and talent, thinking what I have to offer, but still there is that necessity to draw our view back and simply wonder at a God who set all things in motion, who created all things. God who continues to create anew. Who redeems us. Who sustains us.

As I have reflected on this jumble of thoughts in a jumble of a week, I have continued to return to the profound gift that comes to us as good news from early in the sixth century BC. There is much debate on the particular of who wrote Isaiah, the reading this morning is largely thought of as the Third book of Isaiah, being written about 200 years after the first 39 chapters of the work. Much has been read into the details of the book, trying to understand the writers of the work, the time of the writing, the meaning of each reference. We offer historical criticism, form criticism, canonical criticism dissecting the work into details for consideration. Now, all of that is vitally important and fascinating, but that is not what I want to leave you with this morning.

I want to leave by reminding us of the largeness particularly of the second sentence of our passage today. God’s immense joy and delight in God’s creation. What we can piece together from all of the details that we can find is that if there is one identity of God.

God is Love.

It is our common refrain, but it can never be said enough. That God creates us in Joy and delight, and that God will continue to create, redeem, and sustain us compelled by God’s love for us. God who has always loved in a measure so vast that it can’t be known, to be found in details we can often miss.

Amen

Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, October 30, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

October 30, 2022

Proper 26, Year C

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Empire.

Our biblical canon takes a particular stance when it comes to empire.  The utterance of the word is almost always synonymous with evil, corruption, and injustice.  Whether it is the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, or the Romans we hear the prophets and disciples rail against empire.  The forces of empire always seem to bring corruption and oppression to God’s beloved.  Greed and idolatry are often working in the narratives as well, pulling the people out of relationship with God and pushing them farther into the clutches of a system of power and domination.  

In the Old Testament we can see God using Empire to punish the people.  Or, at least, that is how it is portrayed.  Israel from her beginning as a people lived in a cycle of oppression.  They would begin with stability, then they would fall out of relationship and commit acts of injustice and evil, then God would cause or allow oppression of the people before they would repent and return to relationship. This cycle repeats throughout the books of the Old Testament.  It was during those times of oppression that God seemed to use empires and cruel leaders as a punishment.  Amos, for example, famously speaks of Gods Justice rolling “down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24).”  The empire of Assyria seems to be the agent of God who conquers the Northern Kingdom just a few years after Amos’ prophetic warnings.  In the passage from Habakkuk today we hear his lament of the same coming to Judah.

Like Amos, Habakkuk is one of the books of The Twelve Prophets.  

At least that is what the Rabbinic leaders in the early centuries of the first millennia CE, who debated the Jewish scriptures in the Talmud, said.  They combined the twelve books of the Bible that we call the Minor or Lesser Prophets.  We have 12 books, they thought 1 book with 12 chapters.  Most of these books are very short, and Habakkuk is a prime example with only 3 chapters and just over 1000 words.  

An interesting piece of modern archeology, Habakkuk’s length is still being debated as there is a scroll form the Qumran community, one of the dead sea scrolls discovered in the 1940s, that omits the third chapter all together.  This raises a question of the original authorship and content of the book, as that chapter might not be “original”.  The time of writing is also unclear, but tradition places the setting of this work in the Southern kingdom in the 7th century BC.  All of this means that the work it is set after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Samaria to the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and a couple of decades before the Southern kingdom would also fall to the Babylonian Empire.  

Habakkuk is watching the corruption and see the impact of Empire on his people.  The first verses we hear today are his lament of the destruction and violence that are before him.  And in a line that immediately captures my attention  we hear in his lament the complaint of “the law becoming slack and the wicked surrounding the righteous.  Where justice is thwarted and judgement is perverted.”  I have to say, that one hit a little close for me.  

Justice and judgement are central to the law for the people of Judah.  These are not merely governmental goals for a fair society.  These are not secular values, rather, they are central to their faith as people of God.  They are bound by the laws given as part of their covenant with God to seek justice, and in this they are failing.  Habakkuk can be heard as lamenting the fractured nature of their relationship with the Creator of all things.  Empire is coming in the form of the Babylonians.  And God seems to be willing to allow the evils of empire devour that which God has loved.  

But Habakkuk is given a glimmer of hope in the tablets he will create.  There is a vision coming.  It may seem to take a long time, but God has promised the righteous life.  God is saying that God will not forsake them, and that the faithful are to wait for God.  

Now, we Christians have a hard time not reading a certain character right into this page.  I must admit that a savior from the line of David sounds like a pretty good answer from God.  This a challenge for Christians as we read the Old Testament.  It is not simply a proof text for the life of Jesus.  We should always bear the coming Christ in mind, surely, but this is a sacred text not just of our faith, but also a text that has unique meaning to our Jewish brothers and sisters.  And I think that this is vital to remember and to hold in tension.  We are not the only group of people in dialogue with this text.  So where we may hear Jesus fulfilling these words, it is unreasonable, I think, to assert that this prophet was speaking strictly of Jesus in a direct linear arrangement.  Millennia of Rabbinic Scholars would disagree, but I do think we are called to bring this writing into dialogue with the life of Jesus.

So, when we put the words surrounding justice and empire in dialogue with our passage from Luke we do see some similar themes with starkly different understandings.  We see the influence of empire again in the person of Zacchaeus.  You see, he wasn’t simply a tax collector, and it isn’t even that he is a chief tax collector.  I mean, that is accurate, but the part I am asking you to consider is that he is a tax collector for the Roman Empire.  He is collecting for Ceasar.  The collectors that work for him are skimming money off of the Jews and Zacchaeus is skimming off of them!  The corrupt and unjust forces of Empire are here in Luke as well.

Zacchaeus has led a life of success by stealing from the poor to reinforce the empire that oppresses the Jewish people of first century Palestine.  Little wonder he is hated by the people.  And it is this agent of empire that Jesus welcomes.  It is this man, whose life stands in opposition to the Jewish faith, that Jesus seeks out.  This is why the people grumbled.

I encourage you to hear in the dialogue between these passages a shift.  It is just this shift of an understanding of justice that remains transformative for us today.  It is not that Zacchaeus invited Jesus to be with him, rather it was Jesus who saw Zacchaeus and loved him immediately.  Jesus invited himself into Zacchaeus’s house like an old friend.  And there was no lecture on Zacchaeus’s bad behavior or corrupt practices.  There was not admonishment for his complicity with empire.  Instead, there is a full and complete welcoming of Zacchaeus as beloved.  Jesus knew the fullness of Zacchaeus and still, he welcomed him in.  

Jesus presents a new understanding of God.  Hear in the words of Luke this morning how radical the work of the Gospel is and should be.  The Gospel is about change.  Jesus is redefining judgement in this action with Zacchaeus.  Judgement and grace seem to move closer together in this one story.  In Jesus we see more clearly God’s love for each of us as being well beyond our ability to deserve it.  

But we don’t see Jesus give up on Justice.  It is after Jesus’ radical welcome of Zacchaeus that we see the most profound transition.  In the actions of Zacchaeus we see the work of reconciliation.   Zacchaeus is compelled to seek justice for those he has injured, and to push back against the power of empire that would seek to oppress.  Zacchaeus is overcome with gratitude and compelled to be an agent of change in his world.  May it be so with us as well. 

Amen

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost - October 23, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

October 23, 2022

Proper 25, Year C

Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

All we ever talk of is light—

let there be light, there was light then,

good light—but what I consider

dawn is darker than all that.

So many hours between the day

receding and what we recognize

as morning, the sun cresting

like a wave that won’t break

over us—as if  light were protective,

as if  no hearts were flayed,

no bodies broken on a day

like today. In any film,

the sunrise tells us everything

will be all right. Danger wouldn’t

dare show up now, dragging

its shadow across the screen.

We talk so much of  light, please

let me speak on behalf

of  the good dark. Let us

talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

Maggie Smith opens my imagination about these images of light and dark that we toss around so casually.  Generally, I am all about the light.  I mean, John the Evangelist really nails it in his Prologue, or the first chapter of his Gospel.  

“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. (John 1:3b-5)  

I mean that’s the stuff, really good stuff.  Now, I will concede that the whole of the can get me a little wrapped around the axle, just a bit confusing if I read it straight through, but it certainly is beautiful.   But even with that bit of confusion it is plain to see that the light is good and the darkness is bad.  He goes on to tell of “the true light, which enlightens everyone, coming into the world.”  The coming Christ whose love conquers darkness.  I truth, this is the metaphor I operate in nearly all of the time.  And generally speaking, I actually think that is really good. 

But this morning I want to put that down, or maybe, expand a bit, because in her prose I hear Maggie Smith offering another view.  I ask you to consider how we understand darkness afresh and to allow another view in.  A view that confirms that there is good in the darkness of dawn.  There is good in the coming of the light, for that too is a holy time.  If I can just shift my perspective ever so slightly, maybe just hold these notions loosely.

I think the author of Joel might offer me the same perspective.  His visions are alarming, and I think they are clearly supposed to be.  His visions call the people back to God, but maybe it isn’t as simple as a fear tactic.

You might recognize the passage from Joel this morning.  The full passage as we have heard it today only comes up once every three years in our lectionary.  Yep, it’s a year C reading -Proper 25 for those counting.  From this spot in the rotation of our reading cycle it can easily be lost to obscurity, but this passage has a lot more notoriety.  We read some of these same words every year on one of our top 3 feast days???  You may not notice it as readily because when we read the second half of this passage on the Day of Pentecost it is contained within the second chapter of Acts.  

When the Holy Spirit descends on the Day of Pentecost Peter looks back to this passage in Joel and calls on those assembled to see the prophetic vision of Joel’s words.  With the spirit comes visions and dreams; blood, fire, and columns of smoke; the sun darkens, and the moon turns to blood.  A whole array of powerful signs that sound ominous and frightening, at least to me.  All of this on the day that the Lord comes.  A truly apocalyptic vision.

But I invite you to hear more than a show of power.  

Joel was written roughly in the first half of the 4th century BCE, circa 435.  It was written at a time when the Jewish people had been allowed to return from their exile under Babylonian rule about 100 years before.  The diaspora had been allowed to move as they were then under Persian rule.  They had some autonomy, but very little authority.  And this is really important as we consider what is happening in the passage from Joel.  Not that this snippet of history tells us the entirety of the thoughts of the Jewish people at the time.  And certainly, I am not saying that the book was written as a political tool to affect nationalism, unity, or anything of the sort.  Rather, I am hearing how the word of God intersected with a moment in history.    

So, knowing that, I want to point out 2 historic connections that we can see from the author of Joel for you.  First, theologian John Strazicich points out the connection in parts of this passage, particularly those “portents on heaven and earth”, with the book of Exodus.  We don’t hear it readily, but historians note this language in Joel is particularly tied to the wonders that God performed when the people of Israel, the ancient ancestors of the Jews of Joel’s time, were delivered from the bonds of the Pharaoh.  A positive message of deliverance can be heard embedded in the ominous.

Second, hear in the words of the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood the possibility of salvation.  Think of day four.  In the creation account in Genesis, it was day four that God placed the greater light in the sky for day and the lesser at night.  The darkened sun harkens to the creation narrative.  When the sun was darkened, God’s hand was on the earth calling all things into being.  Joel can be heard speaking to a new creation.

In both the connection to deliverance in Exodus and the connection to creation in Genesis, Joel’s apocalyptic vision places God as an active agent in the world.  These visions that seem to be bleak and destructive can be seen another way.  They can be seen as generative and beautiful where God emerges and provides for God’s people.  And this prophetic vision from Joel comes at a time when the Jewish people are seeking connection and relationship with God.  And the connection to the first two books of the Torah can be heard as a sign of hope.

But, our passage takes on ever greater significance when we remember its connection to Pentecost.  Suddenly the Spirit being poured out onto all flesh is no longer a small group of faithful Jewish survivors, but literally all flesh.  Man and woman, slave and free, young and old are all included.  The profound and expansive love of God is seen bursting forth, as it was in creation.  Hearing the words of Joel afresh reminds us today of that generative love that burst forth in the Trinitarian God of Christianity!

It is a powerful theological message that is also a powerful personal message.  As Joel, and subsequently Peter, remind us, God is always at work in the world an in us.  That love that burst forth in creation and in deliverance of the Old Testament narratives was captured in the redeeming life of Christ.  We are invited, as Maggie Smith points out, to hear the possibility of the dawn.  We are invited to hear and see the new creation that is emerging in God and in us.  Let us bravely hear that call, and let us Wonder in All of God’s works.  

Amen

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost - October 9, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

October 9, 2022

Proper 23, Year C

Communion Table, St. Edward’s, Cambridge

The Centuries have settled on this table,

Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth

Which bears afresh our changing elements. 

Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble,

Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both 

In aching absence and in absent presence.

This table too the earth herself has given

And human hands have made.  Where candle-flame

At corners burns and turns the air to light

The oak once held its branches up to heaven,

Blessing the elements which it became,

Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.

Because another tree can bear, unbearable

For us, the weight of Love, so can this table.

Amen

Malcolm Guite from The Singing Bowl

For some of you the recent use of Morning Prayer over the past few years has been quite easy.  It was returning to a way of worship that you grew up with.  Morning Prayer was the typical service in most Virginia churches from the colonial period into the 1980’s.  In my early childhood we only had Eucharist one Sunday per month, just like we have been doing here for the past few months.  It was the proponents of the Liturgical Movement who, much to the dismay of the snake-belly-low Virginia Churches, shifted away from Morning Prayer in the creation of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, or BCP, which is the version resting in the rack in front of you now.  

I say snake-belly-low not to indicate informality.  God knows we are not now, nor has Virginia ever been, casual when it comes to worship.  The term “low church” seems to have come from England as far back as the 1700s.  Low churches were those that emphasized robust scriptural readings.  They would also emphasize sermons and reflections on the readings while putting less emphasis on sacramental theology, or Communion.  

Protestants wanted to distance themselves from our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters whose devotion to the Pope was suspect at best.  The Catholic Church has always focused on the Mass, so from the time of Martin Luther in the 16th century, our Church moved away from that practice, leaning on scripture and sermon.  This is still clear today even if you look across other protestant denominations.   For example, Baptists typically have much longer sermons, and they put little emphasis on Eucharist.  That said, they do tend to like the other main sacrament of Baptism…  Lutherans like the Eucharist, but with less focus on the Common Cup, which is quite central to our theology.  The religious habits of our country alone reveals how these deep fissures in practice have developed.

Anyway, the creators of the 1979 Prayer book tilted the scale ever so slightly, they studied who we are called to be, and they made course corrections.  Because of that, the Episcopal Churches in the USA, as well as VA churches, have been growing into the changes the 1979 book brought.  It is one of the favorite criticisms of the Episcopal Church that we can’t pray without our BCP, a criticism that can be well earned, but the beauty of our book is that it allows us to enter into thanksgiving with consistent ritual and liturgy that is consistent theologically and thoughtfully considered.  

After prayerful reflection liturgical theologians helped us better define who we are as a people.  And over the last forty or so years our changing theology has returned us to the practice of the Eucharist as central to our worship.  This transition is in keeping with the very early days of the church where we were people of the table.  Where the earliest Christians gathered, remembered sacred words, ate bread and wine, and gave thanks.  So too do we, 2000 years later.

If you want to, you can open that BCP in front of you to page 13 and look at the first sentence.  It reads: “The Holy Eucharist (is) the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.”  It then basically goes on to say the other offices are fine too.  For contrast, the 1928 BCP lists Communion, Daily offices, and the litany as “regular services”.  This means that our embedded theology in 1928 did not recognize the Eucharist as a central or principal or primary act as a community.   In fact, we didn’t even call it Eucharist, we called it communion.  But in 1979 the we turned back to ancient practice and we turned the object of our communal gathering into a celebration of what theologians call the Paschal Mystery.  That is, the miracle of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as absolutely central to the Christian faith.  Each week under normal circumstances, when a priest is present, we celebrate God’s sacrifice for us in our liturgy.  We join in Eucharistic celebration of God’s unfailing Love.  

And it is just that word, “Euchariston”, that the oldest Greek manuscripts of our gospel today use.  When the tenth leper returns to Jesus and prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet, the tenth man gives thanks.  Eucharist means to give thanks; it is as simple as that.  Now, Communion and Lord’s Supper are synonymous with Eucharist, but that is not what they “mean”.  We have changed our language around our primary gathering as a people to say that we gather fundamentally To Give Thanks. There are surely other things happening, and each of us experiences the holiness of our liturgy and sacraments differently, but from the time we exchange the peace in our Eucharist liturgy everything is about appreciation hear the words of the Sursum Corda:

The Lord be with you

And also with you

Lift up your hearts

We lift them up to the Lord

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

Yes, even for the poorly tuned, the Euchairsitic prayer is intended to be sung, all of liturgy is intended to be thankful, lived out by lifting our voices in praise.  This is the shift we made in 1979.  We now mark our normal Sunday gathering principally with gratitude.  With Eucharist.

Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury said it a little differently when he was speaking in post Katrina New Orleans in 2007, he offered:

We are indebted to one another. I am indebted for your existence. Because I would not be myself without you.

And a society, a community, a city that can get to that level of recognition, is one that lives from a deeper place than one that simply talks about contract or even respect.

And it's this perspective which I believe, this perspective above all that the church brings to bare. Because the church is a community which lives from and in gratitude.

And if the church does not live by thanksgiving, I don't know what the church lives by. And when the church fails as it so often does to live from thanksgiving, I wonder whether it lives at all.

During this season of Stewardship, I ask that you give yourself the time to reflect with gratitude on the wonders that surround you.  I do hope that your budget allows you to give the gift you desire to Grace, but what I am asking is truly more than that.  Money will grow programs, but it will never grow passion.  Your passion in this place, and your passion in thanksgiving for the mystery that is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are the goal.  Focus and wonder on God’s call in your life.  

I ask you to look at the deep rhythms in your life, like the deep rhythm of the Eucharist, that can go unnoticed if you don’t pause and consider.  I invite you to consider where God is calling you, and what talent you may want to focus upon anew.  I pray that when you do pause and consider the wonders in all of God’s creation that you can joyfully give thanks for those wonders and celebrate them with me in the coming year.  

Thank you.

Amen

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, October 2, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

October 2, 2022

Proper 22, Year C

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. 

Amen.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

How do you think Jesus said it?  

“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”

“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”

I mean, sure, he was speaking in Hebrew, but you get the idea.  

When I was a kid I think I always heard the last version, emphasizing the size, or the quantity of faith.  I always just assumed that Jesus responded directly to the plea of the disciples to “Increase our faith”.  It functioned as a ledger in my mind where we were all to trying to get more faith, or at least to act like it.  Greater faith meant more ability.  Basically, anything is possible with more faith.  It can sound a bit like a Genie in a bottle.  With right amount of faith you can do anything, like moving trees or mountains!  

Of course, one of the challenges of this reading, and the reason that I no longer hear this passage in the same way, is because when things don’t go our way, it can be heard as a reflection of one’s lack of faith.  It begins to sound like: “If I was more faithful I would have gotten that job.  If my faith was a little stronger my prayers would have been enough to help my dying parent.   If I was a better person, God would have rewarded me with a bigger house, car, or bank account.”  It can begin to sound like faith leads t prosperity.  This is an dangerous way to hear the words of our Gospel this morning.  

The ultimate problem with this understanding of our passage from Luke is that it makes God very small.  Believing that faith allows us to control God’s creation places us on a pedestal adjacent to God.  Or worse, we can start to imagine that God is here to do our bidding, and the more we strive to achieve the more dedicated God is to us.  It affords us an unhealthy belief that if we are good enough or faithful enough, we can somehow be in control.

While attending Seminary, I participated in a small group conversation each Thursday morning called “Colloquy”.  This was a group that engaged in theological conversations.  More specifically, we talked about how we saw God breaking into our lives through stories shared by group members.  One person shared an event that happened in their life, and we reflected on the theological themes and questions that emerged from those stories.  

On one Thursday morning the story elicited the topic of control.  Specifically, we were considering what role control can play in the priesthood.  How unhealthy it is to think we must dictate the outcome of a situation, and how easy it is to feel that a situation must go a certain way or it will hurt the church.  It was a rich and thoughtful conversation, and it revealed, as you might imagine, how ubiquitous this notion of control is throughout our culture.  

Through the entire conversation the man with whom I was ordained a Deacon, Samson (I did ask if I could use his name), was silent.  Samson didn’t really speak a lot, and I loved listening to his reflections because he was always measured and thoughtful, but he was never totally silent.  Over time I came to listen for his wisdom and his insight, so I noticed his behavior, and I reached out later that day to make sure nothing was wrong.  

Maybe you already know, but for those who don’t I should mention-

Samson grew up in Sudan.  In what is now South Sudan, but he made his way to the United States decades ago, leaving prior to the country formally splitting into Sudan and South Sudan.  Anyway, he lived there in his youth, so his accent reveals that his first language is not English, but that said, he is now a fluent English speaker. 

When I caught Samson later that day and asked about his silence, he was quick to smile and assure me that all was well.  He explained that he had gotten caught up in reflecting on this word, control.  Being fluent in English and having lived in the US for years, he knew exactly what we meant, but he was thinking of his home and his native tongue.  You see, they have words for what an army, government, or the police might do to “control” a people.  He could describe the guiding by a parent of a child to “control” them.  But this word, this concept, this understanding of control that we were discussing, he said: 

“I can’t translate it into my native language.  This thing, not just the word, but this concept of control in this way, it doesn’t exist in my home country.”---  

I mentioned this incident to a friend of mine, and he thought a minute and said:  “Nah, can’t be, they must have another word.  How could they not, maybe he didn’t understand?”  I want you to hear that the concept of control is so engrained in us that my friend wanted to argue that Samson didn’t know his own culture.  He wanted to, in a way, to control the dialogue!  Control, like it or not, is part of our DNA.

Thinking back on this conversation, I have often reflected on the possibility that we would not even assume we could control our lives.  That we would not even possess the language to give voice to the notion that we could manipulate the system to our gain.  I suppose in many ways I have wondered and about and wished for that ignorance.  Because it is only in giving up the notion of control that we find faith.  

You see, I don’t believe that doubt is the opposite of faith, rather, I agree with theologian Paul Tillich who says that doubt is an element of faith.  I believe it is this insidious notion of control that works against faith.  The “dogged self-reliance” that we celebrate as a nation must be unbound from our spiritual existence, maybe from our culture all together.  Why do we expect to be completely prepared and secure in our lives.  Why do we think we create our own destiny?  These notions, especially when compared to the people of South Sudan, expose a profound challenge in our way of approaching the world.  A challenge that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin captured when he said “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  

This is the paradox and the good news that we live in.  We are called to be active agents in our own salvation, we are to seek to change our behavior to become closer to God.  Yet, the whole time we are to recognize that this work is completely out of our control.  That this is not work we could ever begin to do without God’s mercy.  Because the more we do it ourselves, the farther we get from the goal of faith in God’s love.  The harder we work as physical beings to have a spiritual reality, the more distant that reality becomes.  We are called to recognize ourselves as spiritual beings, and to give ourselves over to that faith.  It only in giving ourselves over to that spiritual reality that we can begin to do that work. 

I suppose when theologian NT Wright reads this passage he hears it as: 

“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”

Because Wright offers that it is not the amount of faith that should be emphasized, but rather the presence of faith in a Great God that is transformative.  We might consider faith more like a portal that a possession to be quantified.  When we think of it in this way, the size is far less important.  We start a pinhole in the fabric of our lives that allows God’s radiance in.  It is not then the quantity of the light that is let in, but the quality of that light.   

Amen

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, September 25

William Yagel

Grace Radford

September 25, 2022

Proper 21, Year C

God of all mercy, 

we confess that we have sinned against you, 

opposing your will in our lives. 

We have denied your goodness in each other, 

in ourselves, and in the world you have created. 

We repent of the evil that enslaves us, 

the evil we have done, 

and the evil done on our behalf. 

Forgive, restore, and strengthen us 

through our Savior Jesus Christ, 

that we may abide in your love 

and serve only your will.

Amen.

It wasn’t that the rich man hated Lazarus.  We read of no indictment in the passage today that tells us that the rich man was angry or mean.  There is nothing here that tells us that he wanted to see Lazarus suffer.  We are not even led to believe that the rich man had some thoughtful reflection about Lazarus needing to pick himself up and dust himself off and get back into the game!

None of that.

We know that the rich man was well dressed, lived in a house with a gate, and presumably walls, and that he ate well enough to leave crumbs on the floor.  We know basically the same amount about Lazarus-he was hungry, envious of the rich man’s food, and a sick man who seems to have kept company with dogs.  As the story unfolds, we learn some more, so hold that thought.  

Right now, I want to ask you to see that in the first part of our story there is nothing inherently evil about the rich man, or inherently noble about Lazarus.  We don’t hear a grand story of Lazarus freeing people with his last Denarii!  He didn’t give up all he had like St. Francis of Assisi to live in solidarity with the poor!  The most notable trait we have is that he simply didn’t have any money.

As for the rich man, we don’t hear of how badly he treated his parents, his wife, his kids, or even his pets!  We don’t get the list of unethical decisions that he made to get to the top of his profession.  IN FACT, he was wearing purple, so he was likely part of some royal family, and probably there wasn’t even a real “profession”, as we might think of it, for him to excel at!  We might assume that he was born into his wealth, and never knew anything different.  This was simply how his life went.  What we know of the rich man is just that, he was rich.

Wealth is the profound difference between these two men, at least as far as we are told in this parable.  Each of the other binaries that we are provided can be understood as a derivative of binary divide between rich and poor.  The rich man robed in purple and fine linen vs Lazarus who is dressed in sores.  The rich man feasted sumptuously every day, vs Lazarus who didn’t even have the crumbs.  In the comparison Lazarus is bothered by dogs where he himself is the “dog” of the rich man, living outside the gate.  In the final binary Lazarus finds himself in in heaven and, of course, the rich man is in hell, their fortunes reversed, but continuing to live on polar ends of the spectrum.  

Their lives seem to be magnets of the same polarity, forever pushing away from one another.  It is not only in their deaths that there was a great chasm between them.  That chasm was always there, and it is in the second half of the passage that we see that a pattern in life has repeated in death.  The rich man calls to Abraham and tells Abraham to “send Lazarus over to help”.  It seems that even from the fires of hell, this rich man saw fit to ask the man in power to send old Lazarus over to do his bidding.  Never mind what Lazarus was willing to do.  Even then, he wouldn’t stoop to ask Lazarus himself for help.  He still operated as though Lazarus’s opinion and desires were of no consequence, almost as in his life, the person of Lazarus was so distant from the rich man that it was as though he was not even there.  

Lazarus was effectively invisible to the rich man.  

The rich man had lived at a great distance from Lazarus, and from the rest of the world.  And it is likely that this was always what was expected of the rich man, yet here he is.    

Decades ago I was fortunate enough to travel to France.  I lived there six months with my brother who was working at that time for a French-American firm and part of his work took him there to live.  I was fresh out of College so I tagged along.  During that stay I made a visit to the town of Oświęcim, Poland.  And, as I was leaving that place on a train the man opposite me and I began a conversation.  He had been born in that town in the late 40s but as the iron curtain fell on Poland he fled to neighboring countries and ultimately to South Africa, where he lived as a doctor.  He had been back visiting family.  It was a unique piece of history for me to sit with this man and hear his reflections on his life and that of his parents.  His  parents, obviously I suppose, had survived the second world war in this small town that more is infamously known by its English pronunciation, Auschwitz.  

What has always stuck with me from that conversation about his life and the reality of being from that town was when this man looked away and he said of his parents.  “They knew.”  Surely, they didn’t know everything, but they knew enough.  Letters, or more like pleas for help, would make their way out.  They could see the train cars going in.  

They were to keep up appearances.  The people of this town were to act like there was nothing going on.  That evil right outside their gates had nothing to do with them.  But, of course, the keeping quiet had a tremendous impact on them, and has scarred them for generations.  They had never reconciled how they were complicit in that great evil.  Their willful ignorance had a price.  It may have been necessary for their own lives, being under occupation as they were, but it exacted a toll just the same. 

I know I have felt a similar pressure in my own life.  I love my cell phone, I like to pay the cheapest price for my jeans, I scoff at the price of corn in the market, but don’t relish a conversation about the conditions that the workers who make or provide those goods live in.  I know there are chasms between me and many who support my life.  Not unlike the rich man, or the people of Oświęcim, I can easily choose a life where I don’t see them. 

In reflecting on this I was reminded of the words an alternate version of our Confession of Sin that I offered at the start of my sermon.  These words are from a resource called “Enriching Our Worship” which offers alternate language for our liturgies that can be used in whole, or in part, to help assist worshiping communities wishing to expand their worship.  I am not sure if you remember it, but “repenting of the evil done on our behalf” always gets me.  

We come here this morning primarily to give thanks, to wonder in the glory of God’s creation.  And as we move to the confession of sins we recognize not our particular sin as an individual.  Surely, that is part of our call, but here as we worship we are called to confess on the part of the whole world those things done, and left undone.  We confess those evils done on our behalf.  The Gospel this morning, and the corporate confession which we will offer in a moment ask us to see the fullness of the system from which we benefit, and to strive to find justice and to seek God’s love within it.  To admit to and push back against those evils from which we benefit but which maybe we would rather not admit.  

As we move toward the table this morning, where we will remember Christ’s love for us.  We will resume our work of closing that chasm, and of reversing those magnets, to draw us ever closer to God who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us.

Amen

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Sunday, September 18, 2022

William Yagel

Grace Radford

September 18, 2022

Proper 20, Year C

Eternal One,

Silence

from whom my words come;

Questioner

from whom my questions arise;

Lover

of whom all my loves are hints;

Disturber

in whom alone I find my rest;

Mystery

in whose depths I find healing

and myself;

enfold me now in your presence;

restore to me you peace;

renew me through your power;

and ground me in your Grace.

Amen

-Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace

As most of you know, I spent the first half of my adult career working in construction.  I began my work as a carpenter for several years, then moved to supervision and did a lot of work in Hampton Roads working on a variety of jobs at the military installations in the area, which is where Eve and I met.  We moved to Charlottesville, and I managed the construction of Apartment complexes around central Virginia.  Then, I was the Operations Manager for a Structural concrete firm out of Charlottesville.  No, I’m not looking for another job…:)

I tell you that to say I that I did that work for a long time, and that I always enjoyed the work, but even more, I think I mostly enjoyed the people.  My days were always filled with the strongest cast of characters you could ever want to meet.  I would consistently come across personalities that were larger than life.  I would come across men, and less often women (there just weren’t that many in the field), who had their own very particular rules for how they interacted with the world.  Jay would always provide moral and relationship advice, whether solicited or not, and it was not possible to disagree with him unless you were yelling!  Smitty was one of the funnier guys I ever met, and he would show up each day on site with a new joke.  Charlie refused to eat in the presence of someone who didn’t have lunch-I bet I saw him tear his sandwich in half about fifty times.  Thomas would not start his day until he finished his biscuit, and the hour that work began had absolutely no bearing on this ritual. 

Stephen was one of those characters.  I should begin by telling you that Stephen had not had the easiest life, and though he was in his twenties when I worked with him, the mileage on that body was much higher.  The Latina crew called him “Mamorta”, which is Spanish for “groundhog”, a nickname he garnered because he loved to dig.  The best gift you could give Stephen was a day with a shovel, really.  I think the heavy physical activity and repetitive work allowed him to exist in a bit of a contemplative trance, probably calmed his ADHD and allowed him to focus and would let him sleep well at night?  As you might suspect, this is something of a valuable trait when a crew is digging footings, so he found place and purpose quickly in the concrete world.   

Stephen would, however, find himself in trouble periodically and would miss and day or two here or there, but given his skill set he would usually be welcomed back.  But on one occasion I didn’t see Stephen for about a week, and nobody seemed to “know where he was”.  This actually means that everyone knew they just weren’t going to say, but in that I knew he hadn’t been hurt, so he wouldn’t be in the hospital.  I went by his home to check on him with no luck.  I called the jails to make sure he hadn’t been arrested, at least not locally, so I just let it go.  I was more than a little surprised when he walked in after two weeks of being off the radar, looking for his job back.

This, I thought, would need to be a pretty good excuse.  Well, you could have bought me for a nickel when he looked at me and said: “Mr. William, I have used just about every drug that you could name, and I am no stranger to using, I’ve been around it all my life.  But the crystal meth that I started using about two weeks ago was nearly impossible to put down.  I have had a hard time with that stuff.  It almost got me.”  It seems a friend of his had been murdered and instead of acknowledging the anger, sadness, and loss, he medicated himself, heavily.

Have you ever been in a moment where you thought, you know, you could have just lied to me.  I sat and listened and thought of the number of excuses for missed work I had heard in my career.  I was so surprised by the truth in the words coming out of Stephen’s mouth that I almost wept right there in front of him.  I have many reflections on that conversation, and I have considered A LOT of reasons why Stephen told the full truth, when discretion would have been much safer, and “I was sick” would have also been true?  I think in the end, it was what he had to offer.  He may have been a lot of things, but not a liar.

Now that moment was almost as confusing as our Gospel today!  This passage, taken as a whole, is terribly confusing and seems absolutely contrary to the Good News of Love that we know to be the Gospel message.  I want to assure you that if you heard the parable of the dishonest manager with confusion and surprise, you are in good company.  The standard intro in most every commentary I read was some version of “this is a tough one, and it surely doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.”  Not a single theologian I found offered that we should behave like this manager, but all of them sat with this confounding information and listened for the good news. 

Joseph Fitzmeyer followed historical critical research and offered that the parable from today really ends somewhere between verses 8 and 9, when the master praises the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.  The verses that follow in this passage are a series of sayings of Jesus that are kind of collected here.  Meaning that although we read them as a unit, the verses in the second half weren’t really intended to speak directly to the parable in the first half.  That does help a little as it separates these discordant messages from one another.  There is plenty of discussion about which word it the parable actually stops on, but in broad strokes I think you can kind of see the change in tone.  

The other suggestion that theologians offer is that we must remember the historical reality of the Jewish culture.  Leviticus 25:35-36 forbids the taking of interest from the poor or from fellow Israelites.  It is possible that the manager had been charging the debtors interest on top of their bills, lining his own pockets in these transactions.  It would make sense, then, that the manager is removing the interest charge from the debtor’s bills in keeping with Jewish law.  This would be shrewd because the rich man wouldn’t argue since it was in keeping with the law. If this is the case, we see that the manager is securing a place for himself by finally dealing honestly and in accordance with the law with the debtors.  

He is worried about his future, he knows he can’t dig and he knows he can’t beg, so in this reading of the passage, he resorts to the only thing he has left - honesty.  And in the end, that served him better that the underhanded dealings that got him in trouble in the first place.  

We are reminded this morning that this is exactly how God knows each of us.  God doesn’t know us as the polished and curated version of ourselves that we offer the world on facebook.  God knows us as the complicated and nuanced beings that we truly are.  Because it is those beings that God has created, God has redeemed, and God has sustained. 

Amen