Tag: childhood

Poetry: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 22, 2024, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 1:39-55, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth.

Holy Sacred Spirit/Vanishes noiselessly/Shining Rivers, Dying Trees/Quietly Grass Whispers

This little verse is in a magnetic frame on our refrigerator, and I’m somewhat self-conscious to admit that it’s a poem I wrote in 3rd grade, while sitting with my class in a field in rural northern California. I think the class assignment was to write a haiku, and I didn’t meet the sentence structure or standards of that venerable art form at all, but hey, I was 8. 

I share those few lines with you not because they’re anything remarkable, but because they remind me, whenever I see them, that from a very early age, as kids we are already aware of the sacredness of the world, no matter what words we might attach to this awareness. 

When we are young, wonder and love and fidelity and that vivid, almost-tangible presence we call God are all as natural as breathing. I was not raised going to church, but I could write a poem about the Spirit whispering to me in the brown field grass because, well, I was young, and the whole world felt alive. That’s childhood. We find it easier to accept that God is at work wherever we look.

And then we grow up a bit, and our capacity for poetry falters. The grass is just the grass. It wasn’t until much, much later, after many faith-uncertain years, that I began to wonder what had ever happened to that holy, sacred Spirit who used to whisper and hover and suggest herself to me on the wind.

She hadn’t gone anywhere. One day, years later, I was back again in rural northern California, driving down a winding road with some friends and I looked up into the forested hillside and I saw a mantle of fog unfurling down among the green boughs of the trees and those words came back to me again….holy sacred spirit…and I thought, oh, there you are, old friend. I had almost forgotten. I need to remember to name you when I see you.

Calling God by name, and naming God’s presence. That is, in many ways, the primary vocation and the mission of the Church. We have inherited the story of how God named things—how God made the world and named it good, named it beloved, named us as the bearers of God’s image. 

And in a way, all of Scripture is one long record of us trying to give a name back to to God—to  pronounce that unspeakable holy word disclosed to Moses, I AM THAT I AM—a word in Hebrew, sometimes translated as Yahweh, which isn’t really a word at all, but the sound of breath, of dynamic silence. The sound of the wind stirring the grass. 

And the names we have given this nameless One are many—Elohim. Adonai. Shaddai. And later, in our own language, God. Lord. Creator. Holy, Sacred Spirit. 

But here’s the thing: we aren’t called or tasked with simply coming up with new names to address God.

No, more importantly we as the people of God are asked to name those moments and movements and things in our world that are revelations of God. We are asked to look for God at work and to point him out when we see him, so that others might understand what God is all about—

We are to say, look! There! Yes! That is what God is like. That is the One we speak of! There he is, filling the hungry with good things. And there is God, leaning against the bus stop in a shabby coat, smiling in the rain. And there she is, doing her children’s laundry with just a few dollars left in her purse. And there, too, there is God, in the grasp of my beloved’s hand when I am frightened, and in the laughter between old friends, and in the candlelight, and in the taste of bread and wine. There is God, and there, and there, and there…This naming is one of our primary jobs as disciples. 

But we forget about it as we grow up. We forget how self-evident is the sacred dimension of all things. We don’t hear God in the grass anymore. The world is a bit more matter of fact, a bit less poetic. Growing up, growing older, can do that.

Elizabeth, who we meet in todays Gospel, would have known something about that. 

Now, we don’t know much about Elizabeth, other than that she is Mary’s much older relative and Zechariah’s wife and that she has been, til now, unable to have a child. In her time and place and culture, this would have been an especially great source of sorrow and shame. 

And we might imagine that Elizabeth had long given up on trying to figure out where to look for God at work in her life, or how to name his presence. She has not lived a life with much poetry in it. 

But then, a miracle. Despite being advanced in age, Elizabeth has been blessed by that holy, sacred Spirit, and in the great Biblical tradition of barrenness transformed into promise, she, like Mary, now carries a child in her womb, a child who will be named John, who will grow up to be sort of wilderness poet himself.

But before John, and before Jesus, and even before Mary sings her own Magnificat, that powerful song of hope and redemption we heard today, Elizabeth does something quite remarkable. It’s easy to overlook. Let’s revisit the text, so that we don’t miss it:

Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

Do you see what Elizabeth does there? She names the baby in Mary’s womb as Lord. She is the first one—the very first person—to call Jesus Lord. 

She, Elizabeth, she the forsaken, she the unfruitful, she who had capitulated to an unpoetic life, she is now speaking the first verse of a new creation—the first human person in the Gospel narrative to speak of God and flesh as one—the first person to say that this child is God and that God could be a child and that a new poetry is emerging, being birthed from the deep mystery of life. 

Elizabeth names what thus far only angels have dared to say—that the shining rivers and the dying trees and the whispering grass and the whole laboring creation are about to become ONE with the substance of heaven. 

And in seeing this, and saying this, Elizabeth is, we might say, the very first Christian disciple. The very first to name God where she sees God at work in the world, in the most unexpected of places.

So what does that mean for us, we who are doing our best to make Christ known, here, in another time and place?

It’s means we must do what Elizabeth did. Look for God at work in the world, and take part in God’s labor in the world—the work of peacemaking, of compassion, of justice, of service, of loving our neighbors, of loving the earth—and—this is very important—call it what it is. Call it the work of God. 

Not just a nice deed or an act of human kindness. No, not just that. Give God back his name. Give the world back its divine poetry. Name the work of love as the true work of God, the true nature of God—the God who is love—the God who saves and sings and comes to us in frailty and gentleness. 

Because the problem of our own time is that the Christian message has been de-poeticized. It has been stripped of its creativity and robbed of its lush beauty. It has been turned into a cultural weapon or a social club or a benign pastime we fit in between brunch and grocery shopping when what the Kingdom of Heaven really is, is the insistent, upwelling, powerful transcendence of the living God that saturates and spills out of every cell of creation and asserts its advent into every moment of our day. If only we would look for it and name it and take part in it. 

The world needs us to take part in it. The world needs to hear the true name of God, which is love, which is undying, reconciling, proactive, poetic love, which is what we are waiting for in Advent, which is what we are naming when we speak the name of Christ, and when we speak the name of that holy, sacred Spirit who still sings, in wind and grass and in the Magnificats that well up in our hearts. Let them well up, my friends. Let yourself see the world as poetry again. 

And when we do, then we, much like Elizabeth, will be able to say,

Blessed are we, and blessed is the fruit we bear. And blessed are those who know that God has a name we are finally able to speak, and that it is Jesus, and that it is love. 

And blessed are those who speak it. 

Free: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on September 17, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 18:21-35.

As I have shared with many of you, when I was a kid, I would spend the summers in Michigan with my dad and my grandparents. There were a number of things about those vacations that I looked forward to all year long, and a lot of them had to do with food. First there was my grandma’s cooking and baking, which filled the house with mouth-watering fragrances throughout the day. Her fresh strawberry pie was the stuff dreams are made of. But another thing was the little general store that was just down the block, an old-fashioned kind of place that sold a few groceries and sundries, but in which the main attraction, at least for an eight year old, was the selection of ice cream and penny candies and trading cards.

My cousin, Mike, and I were particularly interested in that selection of trading card packets, and it was our singular mission each year to get our hands on enough money to buy them. Now, of course, we could have just asked our family for spare change, but at some point we decided to get a bit entrepreneurial. 

So, for several summers we would take over the enclosed, rarely used front porch of my grandparents’ house and we turned it into a couple of “shops” of  our own, cobbled together with odds and ends from some spare room of the house, and offering what was, in retrospect, a rather underwhelming selection of goods and services. One iteration was a restaurant that served plastic play food and real glasses of water, 10 cents a piece. Another, perhaps my most efficient business model, was simply setting up a desk in the porch and declaring that the house was now a hotel, and that our family members now had the privilege of paying 25 cents a night to sleep in their own beds. 

But our parents and our grandparents were dutiful customers, and so we collected up our coins day by day and ran down to the general store, and spent them all on cards and candy, quite pleased with ourselves. 

This is a very happy memory, of course, but I was thinking about it this week because it occurred to me that for all those summers, while my cousin and I were focused on the nickels and dimes and quarters that would buy us all of those treats we daydreamed about, we were less aware of the most wondrous thing of all: that when we got tired of playing and scheming and striving for coins, we could just go down the hall to our grandma’s kitchen, and there would be more food and more love than we knew what to do with. And in the end, that was the truly priceless treasure. I don’t have much use for those trading cards anymore, I don’t even know what happened to them, but I would give just about anything for another bite of my grandma’s strawberry pie at that kitchen table, surrounded by loved ones who are now long gone. 

We spend so much of our lives, I think, in a similar posture—so focused on the measurement and acquisition of the things we want (or think we want) while failing to sit up and recognize the immense—but less quantifiable—blessings in our lives: the relationships that shape us and sustain us and guide us forward, the simple gifts of time and care freely given by the ones who love us. And if we’re not careful, we might spend our whole existence scrounging for penny candies while the true feast sits, beckoning yet unappreciated, just down the hall. 

For me, at least, this image has helped me think about the parable that Jesus offers us in today’s Gospel, which is also, at its heart, about a person who doesn’t really understand what he is being given. 

A king forgives the debt of a slave, or a servant, as some translations put it, but then this servant refuses to do the same for someone in debt to him, and is thrust back into the fear and scarcity with which he started. 

We are told that this is a parable about forgiveness, and that somehow it should model for us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. The tricky part is that this King, who many of us interpret to represent God, ultimately rescinds the forgiveness originally offered. So is this a “be good or else” type of story, such that we should be forgiving others out of fear of eternal punishment?

I don’t think so. I don’t think God’s mercy has conditions like that, and I don’t think forgiveness under duress is a healthy or life-giving way of understanding human relationships. No, I think this parable is suggesting that the heart of forgiveness—and the heart of really every virtue we try to embody—is rooted in a proper understanding and appreciation of what is truly important in life. And it is not the things that can be counted. 

We are not hearing this parable in Jesus’ own time and place, so we might miss the key point that the amount of debt forgiven by the king, 10,000 talents, is not just a big amount, it is an absurd amount—it is more money than any empire had, more money than someone could conceive of. And so the king in this parable is not just telling the servant he can walk away from his debts. He is essentially saying to the servant, walk away from the entire notion of indebtedness. I am uninterested in measuring it anymore. You are free now. Everything is free now. Live as if this is true.

This is good news, but it is also strange news, for we are all too accustomed to counting the cost of everything, both literally and figuratively. And so the real mistake that the servant makes is that he does not comprehend the gift that has been given. The servant doesn’t understand that he is living in a kingdom where there is no longer any need for calculation, where there is no grasping and groveling, where there is no currency at all. Just the current of goodwill that encompasses all things, all people. 

He doesn’t see it,  or he refuses to see it, and so he keeps on counting the cost, he keeps on demanding payment from others, because that is what he knows how to do, and his inability to understand that another way is possible, his refusal to trust that another way has been given to him, sends him right back to the dead end where he started, back to the world that is easier to believe in, where Kings torture and no payment is ever enough. And to the extent that we have treated love and forgiveness and grace as commodities to be bought and sold and bartered, the same will be true for us. We will have missed the point. We will have squandered the true gift. That other realm, where everything is possible, will be lost to us. 

So no, Jesus is not just saying be kind and forgiving or else. Jesus is saying, if you would enter into the Kingdom of God, if you would understand mercy, if you would know what it truly feels like to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, then look up from your games, beloved children, stop playing shopkeeper.  You have to realize that the important stuff is all free. You don’t have to spend your life scrounging for coins to purchase paradise. 10,000 talents are worthless in my sight; your heart is the true treasure.

Because this Kingdom is not, in fact, a hotel with a 25 cent nightly rate; it’s just the house we get to call home, if we choose it, and the light is always on in the front porch, and there’s a feast at the end of the hallway, luscious as strawberry pie, a slice for everyone, free of charge.

That’s what forgiveness is, when you get down to it: love without a price tag. And when we realize it is all free, then we will be free, too. Forever.