God in the Wilderness
Published on 7 Mar 2010 at 10:56 pm.
No Comments.
Filed under Sermons.
A reading from the book of Exodus
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM Who I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.”
In the name of the God who is the I AM. Amen.
As we encounter our intrepid hero today, Moses has not had a good time of it.
How many of you saw the animated feature that came out in 1998, The Prince of Egypt? Like any other movie, it takes some artistic license with the story of Moses, but for the most part it was carefully produced and is a stirring story. In particular, it emphasizes Moses’ background as he comes to Pharaoh to demand the liberation of God’s people. Because, of course, Moses did not come out of nowhere to encounter God in the burning bush.
You may remember the story of Joseph (think Technicolor dream coat), who was second in command to pharaoh and who brought the children of Israel to Egypt in a time when there was famine in Canaan. The beginning of the book of Exodus tells us that the Israelites grew and multiplied while they lived in Egypt. Eventually, however, a new pharaoh arose in Egypt who, the text says, did not know Joseph. This pharaoh was scared of the Israelite people, particularly of their great numbers, and so turned them into slaves. He also sought to kill all the male Hebrew babies. And it was during this time Moses was born. Eager to save him, his mother placed him in a basket in the Nile where he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Raised in Pharaoh’s house eventually he becomes aware that he is not an Egyptian, but that he is a Hebrew. Soon after having this realization he walks out among his people and sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave. He notices no one is watching and so kills the Egyptian and hides his body. However, this does not win him favor with the Hebrews who want nothing to do with the rich man from the house of Pharaoh meddling in their lives. Pharaoh finds out about the killed Egyptian and Moses flees to the wilderness.
Trust me, go rent the movie and watch it with your families. It makes the story much more exciting.
But this is where our text from this morning finds Moses. In the wilderness. He’s faced with the confusion of his upbringing, the sense of dislocation, not knowing who his parents were. He falls in with a Midianite, even marries into the family, but I would imagine he remains haunted by the death of the Egyptian and even more haunted by the fact that the murder he had done had not won him acceptance by his own people. So, living with the shame and sense of rejection, he runs across a burning bush on mount Horeb and God speaks to him in the wilderness.
But God doesn’t speak about his shame.
God doesn’t talk to Moses about what Moses had done or what brought Moses out to the wilderness. After his time in the wilderness, God appears to Moses and gives him new vision.
One of the difficulties of the season of Lent, as we all enter into the wilderness like Our Lord did, is that the season can become profoundly individualistic. Now, it is, of course, a penitential season. And we are called by God in this season to carefully examine our own lives. This is one of the fundamental reasons for the wilderness experience, we enter into it to be alone with God and to find clarity about ourselves. We take up disciplines or give up delights in the hope that we can understand ourselves better and so draw closer to God. But it is very important that we remember that drawing closer to God…that is most important.
The purpose of Lent, after all, is to prepare us for theophany. That’s the five-dollar theological word for the appearance of God. Each of us are in the wilderness to prepare for God’s appearance in our own lives. And it is a bit of a surprise, after all the self-examination that happens in the wilderness, that when God shows up, there are other things on God’s mind.
Movies like The Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments are important culturally and spiritually. They can often help put flesh on the stories of our faith. But the problem is they tend to make the wrong person the main character. So, as we approach the text, we must draw back our lens and see who is the real main character in this story. And we see it, right before our text begins. The very last three verses before our text are:
After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
And then we get our story of Moses encountering God in the wilderness, and where does God—the real main character of the story—ask Moses to look? In verse 7, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians.”
After a sufficient time in the wilderness, after Moses has had time to come to terms with what he has done, God comes to him and says, “Now, Moses, it’s time to look at the suffering right over those mountains. It’s time to look back to where you fled from and for me to redeem your misguided anger. You were angry at that oppression and so killed an Egyptian. I am angry at that oppression and so am calling you to liberate a people.” God gently pulls Moses gaze off of himself and towards God’s suffering people.
What’s your wilderness? I wonder.
Where have you found yourself in this season of Lent?
As you’ve given up delights or taken on disciplines, has that brought you somewhere? Or, perhaps, your wilderness as not self-imposed, perhaps you have been driven into it. Perhaps there are things going on in your life right now that feel like the wilderness, winds of uncertainty blowing through the scarcity that surrounds you.
What’s your wilderness?
Take off your shoes, because that wilderness is holy ground.
It is holy ground because God has seen your pain and joins you in your wilderness. Take off your shoes and look around. Now is the time to begin to move outside yourself, to move from a Lent of pure introspection to one where you hear with God the groaning of someone looking for their redemption.
And I wonder if you, you who have found God in your wilderness, I wonder if you have a word for the person still looking.
Take off your shoes, look for those in need, and walk Lent with us.
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Humble Access
Published on 21 Feb 2010 at 12:46 pm.
5 Comments.
Filed under Anglican Thoughts.
Is it just me, or did Lent show up awfully quickly this year?
Ash Wednesday was a powerful experience for me, as it always is, but I almost feel like Lent has arrived and I’m still catching up to it. Vestments and customaries are changing, I’ve got to stick post-it notes over the “alleluias” in my Prayer Book and the parish altar book. I feel like this Lent I have almost had to hit the ground running.
And then, of course, God finds something to do to slow you down.
Today at our 8:00 AM Rite I liturgy one of the Lenten changes was that we are now doing the “prayer of humble access” before we offer the invitation to come and receive communion. I’ve written before about my love of Rite I, about how it shaped me when I was making my first steps into the Episcopal church. In the parish where I became Episcopalian, where I went to that early morning Rite I service, we always did the prayer of humble access.
In the parish where I serve now, however, we don’t. It’s a short liturgy where I am now. We’re trying to get the 8 AM congregation out and then the next one in for the 9 AM liturgy. So, for as long as I’ve been here, the prayer of humble access winds up in the same place as the gradual psalm and the second lesson: squeezed out for lack of time.
But in Lent, we stick it back in. And so after I broke the bread and said the alleluia-less fraction anthem, my hand turned the page and there it was, waiting to be said.
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
I don’t know what it is about this prayer that hits me so hard spiritually. But as I was going through the liturgy, when we hit this prayer it was as though the entire world slowed down. No need to get right to distributing communion, no hurry. We have to say something true about what we’re doing first. We have to talk about this some.
We have to be sure that we do not presume. Presuming with God will get you nowhere.
I learned in seminary that you aren’t supposed to like Rite I. It’s not really in the language of the people and it’s too darn penitential—at least that’s what you’re told. People have to know they’re forgiven and Rite I doesn’t accomplish that very well.
Yeah, I never really felt that way when I was going to the Rite I service in Abilene.
I felt awful forgiven the whole time.
And even this prayer, which some prefer to skip in the Rite I service because they think people should be cheerful about going to receive communion instead of feeling all down on themselves… even this prayer to me doesn’t seem like a downer. It doesn’t seem like another beating our breast and feeling horrible about ourselves prayer.
This prayer drips with Good News to me. And that’s mostly because of one line. Right after we clarify that we don’t presume that we can walk up to that altar because of our own righteousness, right after we clarify that we know that our righteousness is never enough, and that we’re not worthy even to gather up the crumbs… right after all that we say something very important about God.
“But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.”
Whose property is always to have mercy. To me, back then and even this very morning, that might be one of the most important lines ever written about God. God’s property, that which makes God God, God’s very essence of being is always to have mercy.
Who is God? What makes God God? God is the one who always has mercy. God is “the always having mercy One.” Or, as the ancient prophets used to say, God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness, and relenting of evil. That’s our God.
So before coming to the table during Lent, through praying the prayer of humble access we’re going to try to do a little truth telling in my parish. We’re going to resist the urge to charge through Lent like we charge through the rest of our lives. We’re going to stop and say something true first.
We’ll remind ourselves not to presume… but to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God always always always has mercy.
And so we will evermore dwell in him and he in us.
And so I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Leave Rage Alone, an Ash Wednesday Confession
Published on 17 Feb 2010 at 11:52 am.
No Comments.
Filed under Anglican Thoughts.
Today in the life of the church, we celebrate the liturgy of Ash Wednesday. All of us—lay people, bishops, priests, deacons—come to another human and allow her or him to smudge ash on our foreheads. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We are all reminded of our mortality, of the fragile nature of the lives that we live. We are reminded that we are dust walking around only because we have been enlivened by the breath of God. So we are, as my theology professor taught me and as I’ve said before, beloved dust.
One of the pieces of baggage that comes with being an emotive person, in addition to being a tremendous sap who chokes up at Olympics commercials, is that the emotion can also bubble up in other ways. For me I usually feel deeply through the sap portion of my heart, but I’ve also struggled my whole life with feeling deeply with the angry portion of my heart. I have spent years and years working on keeping my temper in check and I do much better than I used to.
But I still do get angry sometimes.
And I hate it.
I can feel my heart start to beat fast as the anger wells up and I know that I have a short amount of time to redirect it, to breathe deeply and let go of my need to control this moment so that the anger will pass. And after the rush of anger, I often feel so angry and disappointed in myself.
Today in the life of the church, we celebrate the liturgy of Ash Wednesday. And this morning, I drove to a FedEx location to pick up a package I’ve been waiting on that they had attempted to deliver to my house. The door tag hadn’t been properly filled out by the courier, who had only circled the address of the FedEx location in the section telling me what to do. In actuality, they were going to try to redeliver it today so I really had only needed to sign on the tag that they could leave it there. But instead, I spent the first forty five minutes of my morning in DC traffic crossing the Beltway to get to this FedEx location… only to be told that they were sorry the courier hadn’t filled out the tag correctly, but there was nothing they could do. I’d have to go back home.
And it made me so angry. I had tried to do it right and had instead spent forty five minutes fighting DC traffic with nothing to show for it. So I expressed my displeasure to the counter agent. I called FedEx and complained. I called my wife and vented to her. And at the end of releasing all that anger, I felt remarkably empty.
It was, after all, only forty five minutes in my car.
I’ve already come up with the disciplines that will shape my own life this Lenten season. I’ve decided upon the ways I’ll seek to live deeply into the spirituality of this season, the ways I’ll invite God to blow her loving breath through the ashes of my life that I may live more fully in the Triune life.
But I’m also going to try to learn from this morning, from my boiling anger at this Ash Wednesday’s inconvenient start. And I’m going to try a little harder to listen to the advice from the psalmist in Psalm 37, to “refrain from anger” and to “leave rage alone.” Rather than seeking to have the various moments and experiences that make up my life occur only according to my own specific intent, I’m going to try harder to be still. I’m going to try harder to wait for the Lord. Not as a Lenten discipline to pick up only to lay down when Easter comes, but rather as a sign to me of God’s ongoing healing of my soul.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditation on God’s holy Word.
Because we are all indeed dust. And it is so very true that to dust you shall return.
But we are also profoundly beloved of God.
And we are still being redeemed.
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Ave Regina Caelorum
Published on 12 Feb 2010 at 11:29 pm.
No Comments.
Filed under Anglican Thoughts.
For several months now I’ve been spending a bit of my free time each week serving as an honorary assistant at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on K Street in Washington, DC. It’s been a real joy and privilege. Of course, it’s also been a challenge to learn a ceremonial that is much different (and much higher) than the parish where I currently serve. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the style of worship at St. Paul’s resonates deeply with my own spirit.
Most of the time I celebrate a weekday evening mass. That means I get there around 5:15 PM to vest. Mass is at 6:00 PM, but before that is Evening Prayer at 5:45 PM, and before that are Devotions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. We gather at the Lady Altar in the parish, above which is a tryptych with an icon of the image of Our Lady of Walsingham at the center.
The lay officiant hands out the liturgy and the prayer cards people have left at the shrine and the devotions begin with a Marian antiphon appropriate to the season.
Right now that antiphon is Ave Regina Caelorum.
Hail, O Queen of Heaven.
Hail, O Lady of Angels
Hail! thou root, hail! thou gate
From whom unto the world, a light has arisen:Rejoice, O glorious Virgin,
Lovely beyond all others,
Farewell, most beautiful maiden,
And pray for us to Christ.V. Allow me to praise thee, O sacred Virgin.
R. Against thy enemies give me strength.Let us pray: Grant unto us, O merciful God, a defense against our weakness, that we who remember the holy Mother of God, by the help of her intercession, may rise from our iniquities, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
I think I find this antiphon moving because it so perfectly depicts this time in the life of the church. The joy and celebration of Christmas is not far behind. We’ve had feasts for the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles and for the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. This Sunday we will be reading the story of the Transfiguration as the Gospel. We have greeted the joy of our salvation come, and thus in the antiphon we greet with great joy the person who was the gate by which God entered earth. We see Our Lady and we acclaim her who gave Our Lord Christ his human nature.
And yet, at the end of the antiphon, after having greeted Our Lady with a joyous hail we already cry out “Farewell.” As the clarity with which we see our salvation begins to dim, we whisper to the Mother of God to pray for us to Christ. And the collect of the antiphon clarifies our prayer, “That we who remember the holy Mother of God, by the help of her intercession, may rise from our iniquities.”
That we may rise from our iniquities.
Even the joyous din of the past several weeks in the life of the church cannot drown out the ominous sound of a world still groaning and aching for salvation. And in our own lives, as we glance furtively at the coming season of Lent, perhaps we have silent awareness already that we are dust. Because standing in the Light of the Manifestation of Christ, with the Transfiguration not far off, it’s easy to see that you really are dust.
And so, profoundly aware of the pain in the world and the persistent sickness in our lives, we ask the Mother of God to pray for us. We laud her because she had the courage to say, “Yes,” to the angel’s, “Ave.” And we pray for strength against her enemies, knowing that her enemies are the same that assault our own lives. Her enemies are the selfishness and narrowness of sight that continue to afflict the church. Her enemies are the acceptance of comfort instead of pushing for honest conversation. Her enemies are the sins that still seem to cling to our lives. Her enemies are all the Powers in this world that seek to corrupt and destroy the members of the Body of her Son.
And so we breathe out in prayer, “Ave, Regina Caelorum.”
We breathe out and pray that we may rise from our iniquities.
O Queen of Heaven.
Pray for us.
That we may rise.
O alone of all women, Mother and Virgin, Mother most happy, Virgin most pure, now we sinful as we are, come to see thee who are all pure, we salute thee, we honour thee as how we may with our humble offerings; may thy Son grant us, that imitating thy most holy manners, we also, by the grace of the Holy Ghost may deserve spiritually to conceive the Lord Jesus in our inmost soul, and once conceived never to lose him. Amen.
(You can see more of my posts on Christian spirituality through a Marian lens here.)
Slow Down
Published on 9 Feb 2010 at 10:02 am.
No Comments.
Filed under Misc Journaling.
It’s truly amazing how much of reality is based upon our own perception. And then, unexpectedly, something comes along and your perception evaporates.
You’ve probably heard of the snow that hit the Middle Atlantic states last weekend. In my own neck of the woods, we wound up with around 20″ of snow. And if there is one thing that much snow will do, it is to make you slow down.
I suppose I could say that life inside the Beltway moves at a breakneck pace. People work hard, long hours at what they do. Forty-five hour weeks are child’s play. But I know that I’d be only speaking in shades of relativism. Because life almost everywhere in twenty-first century America moves at a fast pace.
We all have somewhere else to go or something else to do. We fear leaving our e-mail inboxes alone for several days because we know that they will overflow. And all of this is true in its own peculiar way for parish ministry. Though there are certainly some lazy people that work at churches, I’ve found that the vast majority of parish clergy and lay staff work remarkably hard. They keep spinning those plates so that the mechanism of parish life doesn’t fall down.
And then twenty inches of snow falls inside the beltway. Then twenty inches of snow blankets twenty-first century America, covering the bounds of my own parish. And all of the sudden everything slows down.
Church still happens, even without some of the normal people able to make it in. A priest doesn’t go into the office for a few days and finds that the parish is still functioning. The plates stop spinning so fast but, remarkably enough, they don’t fall down.
Normally on Tuesday morning the upcoming week hits me like a load of bricks. Mondays are my day off and so on Tuesdays I show up in the office and quickly become aware of all the stuff I have to get done. And yet this morning, as I was getting around, I couldn’t think of a myriad of tasks I needed to accomplish.
Does the world really spin as fast as we think it does?
Over recent decades, there has been an increasing interest in the Hebrew Scripture’s insistence on the importance of Sabbath, the importance of shabbat. Books on spirituality and theology have increased extolling the virtues of this central tenet to the Jewish faith, one that forces us to recognize that the world does not exist because of our labor, but because God graciously upholds it.
For the past few days, the snow piled around my house has forced me to spend some time in shabbat. I shoveled some snow. Read half of a book. Played some video games. Most importantly, perhaps, I spent, some time just being with my wife.
And I’ve breathed.
Perhaps shabbat has the strength and fortitude to hold up the world in which we live. Perhaps we can stop spinning plates and find God’s grace will still uphold our life.
More snow is coming. It’ll likely throw some wrenches in my plans for this week. But that’s OK. Because I’m still learning how to live upheld by grace.
O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
