The fourth week of Advent (this year a full seven days, thank God), promises to be active with preparations, last minute purchases, and social engagements. In my parish office, we are busy getting ready for the Festival of the Nativity and the many guests we expect on Christmas Eve.

Spiritually, the goal is the same: getting ready. We must try to find a way to turn activity inward as we approach the last few days before Christmas and become centered, open to the tremendous mystery at hand. Our model is Mary. Despite what must have been a stressful late-pregnancy, rough travel, and the uncertainty of where she would actually deliver, she is ready. Since that surprising day when her cousin Elizabeth told here she was blessed in her believing, Mary has been waiting expectantly. For us too, the time draws close. We believe and wait for the fulfillment of God’s promise.

I think of my own daughter Rebecca, in her late pregnancy, and her unborn child expected in late December or early January. The waiting is nearly over for her and her husband Nate. Beyond the labor there will be fullness of joy, though perhaps initially, joyful exhaustion!

It’s important to realize as we turn toward Christmas, that joy runs deeper than happiness, which is so often predicated on favorable life circumstances. Joy is the quiet, confident assurance of God’s love and presence at work within us–no matter the challenges that life presents. Coupled with this conviction, I find the practice of gratitude helps to re-direct negative cycles of thinking toward positive things, especially in times of adversity. There must have been times in Mary’s life when her circumstances left her feeling discouraged and unhappy. Yet there can be no doubt of her deep joy and assurance whenever we hear or sing her wonderful Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

This distinction between happy circumstances and confident joy can help us enter into the mystery of Christmas as we are and where we are, without trying to achieve our own or someone else’s expectations. We cherish the story of Christmas precisely because it is such a human story and because in that story, we find inspiration and hope for our own lives and for the world. May the story of God’s coming as a child of blessing and peace find a home in all of us once again.

]]> http://www.ricklord.org/archives/3542/feed 0 http://www.ricklord.org/archives/3497 http://www.ricklord.org/archives/3497#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:51:20 +0000 Rick Lord http://www.ricklord.org/?p=3497

The author David Dark, in his book titled, “Everyday Apocalypse” offers this helpful insight:

“Apocalyptic literature cracks the pavement of the status quo.  It is the place where the future pushes into the present.  It’s the breaking in of another dimension, a new wine for which our old wineskins are unprepared” (p. 12).

I wonder if that isn’t a penetrating insight, not only about apocalyptic literature, but about Advent itself – it “cracks the pavement of the status quo.”  There’s something on the horizon, this literature says, something breaking into our ordinary world that needs to be looked for, paid attention to, and be invited in. If you think about it in that way, then maybe we can better understand why it is that we start every liturgical year, with these apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, not to remind us of doom and gloom, but to invite us to pay attention, to reflect on how God is coming into the world, and how are lives might be different and changed in the here and now.

This of course, is the exact opposite of what our culture is urgently telling us to do, which is to get busy in the marathon of shopping and social engagements which leave us depleted and exhausted by Christmas Day. It is hard to believe that stores are now opening on Thanksgiving Day.

Perhaps you saw the outrageous incident on the news where at a Los Angeles Wal-Mart, a woman used pepper spray to get an edge on shoppers in a rush for Xbox game consoles.  And while we may criticize the commercialization of Black Friday, it is interesting to note that some of the people are waiting for hours in line on Black Friday because they can’t afford to buy what they need at full price, and these teaser sales are incredibly helpful to them.  The people standing in line on Black Friday are not usually the wealthy or the well off. It is those with far less income than we have who are most often forced to stand in those lines.

What are we to do?  Can we even celebrate Advent in a culture so out of tune with the liturgical year?  Is it even remotely possible in the month of December to give ourselves time to notice the “cracks in the pavement of the status quo,” to apprehend the ways that God’s future kingdom is “pushing into the present?”

Well, yes, of course it is, but it will require us to make some choices about what we will give our attention to in the days ahead.  It takes faithful effort to avoid rushing towards Christmas. And so I would like to authorize an official slowdown for ourselves in the next four weeks. I invite you to make a deliberate, counterculture decision to spend a few minutes each day in quiet, to create space for Christ to come into your life in a new way. Take a ten-minute break a couple of times a day while you are at work and simply go outside and breathe. When your boss asks you what you think you are doing, just answer, “My priest has authorized this.”  Our health and our future require a more contemplative way of being and seeing.  Find a way each day to slow down and be quiet.  Notice the cracks in the pavement of the status quo.

Listen to the full sermon here.

A Pastoral Prayer for Advent.

Blessed are you, O Lord Most High, God of all creation: in the darkness and in the light. Blessed are you as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. In this time of waiting we again watch for the signs of your coming. In this changing and broken world where all is not peaceful, we watch for the signs of your coming.

In this world where children are hungry and ancient hatreds continue to fuel division and suffering, we watch for the signs of peace, we pray for courage to embrace our enemies, and we pray for an end to warfare. In this community of faith, where we have known the inspiration of worship and the warm acceptance of friends, we wait for the day when all peoples will be reconciled to one another. In this parish where we have witnessed and experienced loss and brokenness, loneliness and sorrow, we wait for your coming with healing in your wings, especially upon those who are walking the journey of grief.  Give them faith to believe that the lives of those they love but see no longer have changed, not ended. 

O Lord, help us to see that this season of Advent is not only about waiting, but also about offering ourselves to be your light in the world; to pray for those unable to pray, to offer ourselves as answers to their prayers.  Inspire and move us to take the light of our compassion to the world; to come alongside those who are suffering in body, mind, or spirit that we might be Christ for them. 

Help us to move beyond our current mindset, our current ways of seeing, that we may  behold with wonder the many ways you are present in our lives and in our world.  Through ancient prophecies, hymns, and songs of praise, help us to celebrate this season of Advent as the momentous reality it proclaims: Your coming into our midst, sharing our human nature, not only in the past but as a constant possibility in the here and now. We offer our prayers to you in the name of Jesus, the glorious Son of God, the reason for Advent and Christmas, the source of our joy and our strength, now and forevermore. 

Lately, at Church of the Holy Comforter, we’ve been exploring possibilites for improvements to our main sanctuary built in the early 1960′s.  Three central goals have emerged:

1. To Unify the Assembly (to emphasize a community gathered rather than audience observing participants)
2. To Illuminate our Sacred Space (more natural as well as digital light to uncover the beauty of holiness)
3. To Install a New Digital Organ (more fully enhance congregational singing and the ministry of music)

It has been encouraging to see between 35 and 40 people attend each of our recent “Listening Sessions” to consider possibilities for further improvements to our liturgical space at Holy Comforter. There have been a lot of informal conversations in the Narthex between liturgies, and at various committee and ministry meetings over the last several weeks. The process of “listening together” continues, and I believe from this process, a unifying sense of direction will emerge as the Vestry seeks to provide needed leadership in the coming year.

One of the important questions to ask when we consider investing in our physical plant is how such investments relate to achieving God’s mission in the here and now. The Gospel calls us to be passionate about a very few core values and flexible on everything else. What are those things that truly matter, and what are those things that don’t? It is clear that love of God, of neighbor, and of our deepest selves held priority for Jesus and his disciples. Compassion, forgiveness, speaking for those who have no voice, and being generous with our resources were also among the core values Jesus illuminated with his unique life and teaching. This Gospel challenge resonates strongly with our own Baptismal Covenant in The Book of Common Prayer (page 304-305).

In a world where everything is changing so rapidly, core values such as the ones outlined in the Baptismal Covenant might serve as helpful benchmarks for us in all areas of Christian life. This is particularly true when we are called to be good stewards of God’s money as we renovate or build church structures flexible enough to adapt to the needs of today’s world and beyond. In the final analysis they remind us that the church’s “customers” are not singularly our parishioners, the clergy, or even the diocese . . . our “customers” include those who are seeking a way of life that helps make sense of the challenging world we live in–those who need to hear and see the Good News of Jesus Christ lived out in a welcoming and inspiring way.

How can our sanctuary space communicate the transforming message of Jesus in this welcoming and inspiring way?  What architectural or liturgical improvements will be the most inviting to those potentially interested in our community, yet also preserve a sense of mystery that lifts up the centrality of Baptism, Eucharist, God’s voice speaking through Scripture, and the Community gathered as partners in God’s mission?  What will I sacrifice for those who are not yet here?

That last question might be one to add to our listening process as we discern the good steps God may be calling us to pursue in the months ahead. If there is a “wideness in God’s mercy,” perhaps our sacred space can help make that truth become more visible and experiential to all who enter.

We give you thanks, O God, for the gifts of your people, and for the work of many hands, which have beautified this place and furnished it for the celebration of your holy mysteries. Accept and bless all we have done, and grant that in these earthly things we may behold the order and beauty of things heavenly; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Book of Common Prayer, p. 573)

I was privileged last Sunday to worship with the community who call Liverpool Cathedral their spiritual home. The magnificence of the Cathedral, completed just 30 years ago, gives your spirit wings simply by the beauty of the holiness that surrounds you on every side. Or is it the holiness of beauty?

Whether in a towering cathedral or a simple hut made of earth and wood, the people of God deserve nothing less than worship that takes us to the threshold of heaven, and if this is not our experience at least some of the time, something is seriously amiss, and we will need to start again.

At Holy Comforter, we work hard each week to get worship as right and as true as is humanly possible, not because we want a moving liturgical experience merely for our own benefit, but because we know that worship can be a pathway for many to find meaning, community, and joy. Many can trace back their spiritual journey to a liturgy where they awakened to a deep awareness of God’s transforming love for the first time. Worship changes us, forms us, and ignites our passion for making a difference where we work and live.

This weekend, we gather once again around the bread and wine to retell the story of God’s relationship with the world, this time through Isaiah’s powerful and emotional image of a landowner’s disappointment that his carefully tended “vineyard,” in which he has provided all the conditions for a rich harvest, has not lived up to his expectations. Jesus will offer the religious leaders of his day a parable based on Isaiah’s story that carries an urgent message. If they fail to care for what the landowner loves, they will lose the vineyard and it will be given to a people who produce the fruits of faithful living.

 All of us have been given a trust from God to care for something that God owns, loves, and cherishes. We have been entrusted with a vineyard planted by God. It includes our life, our families, the wider human family, our career, our church. That is what stewardship is all about. It is about knowing in a deep place, that everything we have has its origin in God and God wants us to take faithful care of it all. Good worship has the power to move that knowing from the mind to the heart, and from the heart, to the fruit of grateful and generous living.

“Praise the Spirit in Creation, breath of God, life’s origin: Spirit moving on the waters quickening words to life within, source of breath to all things breathing, life in whom all lives begin.” (Hymn 506)

This Sunday we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the third great feast of the church year after Christmas and Easter for which the Church of the Holy Comforter is named. It reenacts the story of a small group of disciples who were still confused and adrift after the death and resurrection of their Lord. All they knew to do was to keep their routines, getting together, waiting, and hoping that God would do something new. They did not have to wait long.

It helps me to think of the Holy Spirit in this way, as God coming to breathe life into our world, into our work and our rest, into the faith we share as a community seeking to make a difference in the world.  I marvel at the myriad number of ways the Holy Spirit animates our life together at Holy Comforter.  It is always inspiring to reflect on the incredible variety of talents and abilities that help make us the unique community that we are.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been easing into my sabbatical and appreciating the open space of time to rest, read, practice guitar repertoire, and visit my mother and brother in Winter Park, Florida.  I managed to fit in a Diocesan ordination and also was called to testify on behalf of the Diocese of Virginia during last week’s property dispute trial in Fairfax Circuit Court.  That’s a story for another time!

Before I left for Sabbatical, I told the Vestry and Staff that I would return for Pentecost Sunday to honor those who are renewing their baptismal vows through confirmation, reception, and reaffirmation.  I also wanted to honor my good friend, David Jones, Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Virginia as he makes his last visit to Holy Comforter before retirement.  It should be a wonderful and spirited day.

From my Easter Sermon:

It’s not theories about the historical basis for the resurrection that we need, but the practice of resurrection in our lives and communities. We build the resurrection into our thinking about what will happen to those we love and what will ultimately happen to all of us.  We know that can’t redeem the world by our own efforts; it will take a mighty act of God to complete it at the last.  But we can build for the kingdom.  Every act of justice, every word of truth, every act of genuine beauty, every act of forgiveness, every act of generosity, ever act of self-sacrificial love, is an act of resurrection.

The prayer that comes from the heart on behalf of one in need, the setting aside of my own longings in order to support and nourish someone who depends on me; the work done in the office or home with integrity and care; all of these and many more are ways we practice resurrection and make it a verb.  We may not yet see, in this often-dark world, how these actions will fit into God’s eternal purpose; but the fact of the Resurrection, assures us that they will.  We have a destiny beyond death.  That hope is born today.

Let me end with a few lines from the wonderful philosopher and poet, William Berry:

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Put your faith in the two inches of hummus that will build under the trees
Every thousand years.
Listen to carrion–put your ear close,
And hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
Some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Full sermon here.

Where are you? It’s a question I’ve whispered in my heart numerous times since death robbed me of the warmth and physical presence of my father nearly two years ago.  I thought of him during our slow procession through the Stations of the Cross yesterday.

The impermanence of human life is one of those “hard truths” we come face to face with in our human journey, and most certainly on this day of emptiness in the space between Good Friday and the dawn of Easter.

Holy Saturday is not a day for answers.  It is a threshold day, a liminal day, a day of watching and waiting.  It is a day of remembering that God in Christ descended into the places of our deepest pain and darkest fear.

For the disciples and the women at the tomb, death has fully arrived.  It can seem for a while that all our hope has died as well.  Even we, who live on the other side of resurrection faith, lose our hope and find our souls aching to know if what we believe is in fact within the realm of possibility.

On Holy Saturday, I will make my way to the Church, don my cassock, and gather the members of the altar guild who will be busy preparing for the Feast of Easter.  Other parishioners will join us, and as we pray we will seemingly hang between two worlds—the world of darkness, death, and despair, and the world of resurrection life and creation reborn.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.  (Hymnal 204)

It is an in-between and all-too-quiet time, this Holy Saturday.  A time when all is still and death seems to have the last word.  The dogwood’s are in full bloom on this rain soaked morning in Vienna, Virginia.  I admire their courage, their answer to the dead of winter, the wisp of resurrection hidden in their delicate scent.  Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

The season of Lent ends at sundown today and we enter the Paschal Triduum, the three ‘Great Days’ which commemorate the Last Supper, Passion, and Death of Christ. These, together with Easter, are the most solemn and distinctive celebrations of the liturgical year.

The washing of feet and the sharing of a meal are the two transforming gestures of Maundy Thursday. The gestures are at once utterly simple and profound, speaking, as only gestures can, more eloquently than the most polished words.

In the sharing of his final meal with the disciples, Jesus creates a new covenant community.   No one can sustain a life of faith by himself or herself.  To eat this meal together is to meet at the level of our most basic human need which involves our need not just for nourishment but for each other.  This first gesture reveals our need for community, the second gesture reminds us of our need for love.

Washing the disciple’s feet is a gesture of surprising reversal, and it jolts Peter and the others into thinking things out anew. The one to whom we tend to look for leadership and in whom we invest authority is seen kneeling and tenderly serving others.  In John’s account (John 13:1-16), Jesus is quite explicit about the gesture’s meaning.  This is a new command.  Love a new way.  Love by being available to one another.  Love by serving.  Love by literally putting our hands underneath one another’s feet, caring, helping, serving.

In this gesture, Jesus is telling us that love is demonstrated behaviorally and love is manifest when the importance of another’s needs and desires rises to the level of our own.  We can “wash feet” in many simple ways, and Jesus tells us, that as we do, others will begin to recognize that we are his disciples — ordinary people seeking to live in a distinctively human way.  The gestures of Maundy Thursday remind us that the “church” is not something we go to, but something we are.

Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night (John 13:27b-30).

This gospel reading, which continues the lection we will use on Maundy Thursday, tells the story of Jesus’ singling out Judas as the betrayer.  Coming right after the intimate moment of the footwashing, this statement of Jesus startled the disciples.  No one had any idea who he was talking about.  Judas was simply one of them and it is important to remember that Jesus had washed his feet too.

After being identified by Jesus when he gave Judas a morsel of bread, we are told that “Satan entered into him” (27).  We should not read this to mean that Judas became “possessed” in the same way as other individuals we meet in the synoptic gospels.  The word ‘satan’ in Hebrew means ‘accuser’ and is used as a legal term for someone who brings a charge or accusation against someone else.  What we do see is Judas becoming an instrument of darkness to bring a charge against Jesus, the true light. The end of verse 30 offers a powerful image as the door opens on to a dark night and Judas disappears into it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that just 8 verses later, Jesus says to Peter, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.” Not only Judas, but Peter will betray Jesus, in fact all the disciples will abandon him in the end.  Though Judas’ betrayal is the most egregious perhaps, he is not qualitatively different from the other disciples, nor is he qualitatively different from you and from me.

To enter into deep friendship is also to know the wounds that only friends can give.  Love and betrayal are possibilities for each of us.  In this story, we learn that even the darkest wound is held ultimately in the greater design of God’s purposes of love and redemption.  The light will go on shining in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.