faith

The Signs We Bear, The Bread We Bring

August 7, 2015 by Leave a Comment

From the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | Proper 13 Year B, August 2, 2015

In this week’s Gospel lesson, the crowds ask Jesus: “What miraculous sign are you going to give us or do so that we may see it and believe you?” What sign will you do? At first we might want to dismiss the crowd – they just want Jesus to perform another miracle for them. They have seen him feed five thousand people and cure the sick already. Signs, though, are important in the life of faith. Many of us have probably asked God for a sign at some point in our lives. We gather here this day and every Sunday and Wednesday at noon to celebrate the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. The sacraments are outward and visible signs of God’s inward and spiritual grace. As the church, we are entrusted with these holy signs of God’s love. I believe we are also, as the church and as individuals, invited by God to lift up other signs as well in order to get the world’s attention, to remind the world of both God’s justice and mercy. What signs are we being, are we giving the world that we and they might see and believe?

When I talk about religious signs, our thoughts might flash to the literal sign wavers: “The End is Near – Repent” (or some other negative message I would rather not repeat in this pulpit) or “God loves you” or “John 3:16.” We may think of the church marquee signs that inspire faith with such words as “Don’t let worries kill you. Let the church help!” I was impressed by a picture I saw of an Episcopal church with a somewhat bold financial marquee message which read, “Tithe if you love Jesus. Anyone can honk.” I’m not sure if it got people to increase their pledge, but it was creative. St. George’s has our own “Wayside Pulpit,” and the communications and evangelism commission would welcome suggestions about ways to use that sign to really inspire passers-by. Signs, though, go much deeper than posters, billboards, and bumper stickers.

In the Old Testament lesson we heard today, the prophet Nathan has been sent by God to call King David to account for his many transgressions. He has been sent to be a sign of God’s justice. David’s story is worth retelling briefly. God chose David, a shepherd boy, over all his older brothers to be the next king of Israel. David fought and defeated the giant Goliath with only a sling and a stone. King Saul felt so threatened by him that he tried to have him killed. Eventually God gave the kingdom to David and David promised to serve God. His story is one of the Bible’s examples of how God’s grace can do anything.

But power corrupted David. One day he spied on a married woman named Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop. He used his power and authority to take her into his bed. Her husband, Uriah the Hittite, was a dedicated soldier serving abroad in David’s army. When Bathsheba became pregnant, David tried to cover the whole thing up, and when it didn’t work, he arranged for Uriah to die on the battlefield. Then he took Bathsheba as one of his wives. The scripture refers to her repeatedly as the wife of Uriah to remind us that David broke God’s law in so many ways. David, so faithful in other parts of his story, did wrong, really wrong. God sends Nathan to deliver that message. Nathan could have walked in with a big sign that said, “You are a sinner.” He might have gotten his head chopped off. Instead, he takes a more subtle approach and tells David a story of an injustice committed against a poor man by a rich man. When David reacts strongly against the actions of the rich man, it creates an opening for Nathan to present David with his own crimes. “You are the man!” he cries. Because of the story, David sees his own hypocrisy and is able to hear the truth about his actions. The story is a sign. It gets David’s attention so that David repents on the spot: “I have sinned against the Lord.” Psalm 51, which we said today, is attributed to David after Nathan confronts him about Bathsheba. The verses, “have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness,” show David’s contrition and his desire for God’s help. The sign was effective.

God’s prophets have not always been as clever as Nathan. Many prophets have faithfully shaken their fists at the powerful hypocrites without making much headway. Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann once noted that “It is permissible to talk about speaking truth to power. If truth is to have a chance with power, it must be done with some subtlety.” Perhaps this is why God sends Jesus. Jesus is so subtle, most people do not recognize him immediately as the son of God. They see him as a teacher and miracle worker, perhaps even a prophet, but Jesus is not a prophet with a sign. Jesus is the sign. Jesus is the one come to show us not only how we have wandered away from God’s path but more importantly how we are called to a new life. Jesus comes to show us what we can become through God’s grace.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” He is the sign of God’s sustenance: spiritual nourishment that can make all our earthly hunger and thirst seem insignificant. Jesus uses the image of bread, the basic food that sustained life in those days, to get the people’s attention and interest them in going deeper.

What signs, then, are we called to bear? There is so much injustice in the world. We can shout about the wrongs and condemn those who do them. How can we, like Nathan, bring a word of condemnation that inspires repentance? What signs might we perform that not only get the attention of the powerful but open their hearts? We live in a world that has been increasingly skeptical of religious people and their signs. If we tell people, “Jesus is the bread of the life,” they might respond, “I can’t have Jesus, then, because I’m on the paleo diet.” Lauren Winner, who keynoted the St. George’s Shrinemont weekend a few years ago, has a new book called “Wearing God…Overlooked Ways of Meeting God.” There is a great chapter about bread as a sign for God. She mentions a study of women with eating disorders: two-thirds of those women who regularly participate in Eucharist reported they received communion less often because they were worried about calories in the bread and wine. What signs do we offer for any people who have been victims of our culture’s love/hate relationship with food and the body? What signs are we offering the Bathshebas of our day, women who suffer unjustly? How can we say, “God loves you” in a fresh and authentic way to any of us who have been victimized? What signs will not further wound but will open our hearts, minds, and bodies to a deeper and life-giving encounter with God? This is the challenge of evangelism in our world.

During the latest General Convention, I saw several posts on social media asking whether Episcopalians were the snarkiest denomination, based on all the cynically witty posts we were making on Twitter and Facebook in response to happenings at Convention. It might seem harmless for religious people to put each other down in amusing ways. Meanwhile people with little interest in faith are scrolling past our posts without a second thought. What signs might we perform so that others see them and actually want to know more about a deeper, abundant, fulfilled life that is only possible through God’s grace?

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In that statement, he invites us to become bread too. In her book, Lauren Winner talks about asking church people what kind of bread they imagine Jesus to be. Think about it: what kind of bread is Jesus for you? Winner says, by the way, that no one chose the convenient but barely edible wafers we use in communion! Her question makes me want to pose another question: If Jesus is the bread of life, and we are called to be bread too, then what kind of bread do we want to be? What kind of bread-like sign do we want to be, with God’s grace, that nourishes, delights, and invites a table conversation? Perhaps we are rolls gleaned from the sandwich shop to give away at The Table. Are we white or whole wheat or rye? Are we crusty on the outside with a richly textured interior? And we also remember the people who have been Christ-like bread for us. How can we share the miracles they have showed us?

One of the enduring images I have of grace comes from a story a friend of mine told about serving in the Army rangers. Once during a really tough field maneuver, a sandwich miraculously appeared from a superior officer at a moment when he needed both something to eat and a gesture of kindness. That bread and cheese was the body of Christ for him, and the story has stuck with me. Whatever bread we are, whatever sign we bring to the world, God can give us the grace to perform it with the cleverness, courage, and subtlety of Nathan the prophet, Jesus the Christ, and all the evangelists who preach the Gospel and, when necessary, use words. Signs are important. We may not be able to bring manna from heaven. We might, with God’s grace and in hopes of renewed life, give people something good on which to chew.

The seeds within us

June 16, 2015 by 1 Comment

From the Rev. Carey D. Chirico, Deacon, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | Third Sunday of Pentecost Year B, June 14, 2015

I was born in the 1960s. In the time of the Vietnam war; drive in movies and folk music and at a time when many people’s understanding of the Kingdom was changing. I was born before CNN, before Amber alerts and before the term ‘free range children’.

I was a free-range child. I ranged freely by bike, foot and small sail boat. We children ranged and looked and explored and miraculously survived.

I discovered very early on those long easy days of exploring swallows’ nests under the bridges of the Lafayette River and the small clams that dug themselves back into the mud at low tide that Mystery is the greatest of all motivators.

That mystery is not the absence of something but the presence of more than we can begin to comprehend.

“The Kingdom of God is like a seed that falls to the ground, sprouts and grows in the dark rich earth and the planter – has no idea how.” Those early days of my life were one science lesson after another and they led me to inextricably link mystery to physical to mystical to faith. God moment after God moment.

Allium Seed Head, shared by Flickr user Xerones, Creative Common License

The great Charles Darwin explored many of nature’s mysteries, among them the mystery of something called ‘drift seeds’.

Mystified by how seeds ended up on volcanic atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean–seeds carried thousands and thousands of miles–he wondered about the impact of traveling birds and fish that might carry and scatter them. Back home from his travels he actively investigated how this mysterious action happened, soaking seeds in salt water and timing their ability to float and placing them in tanks filled with fish.

My dear Hooker
… Everything has been going wrong with me lately; the fish at the Zoolog. Soc. ate up lots of soaked seeds, & then I imagined swallowed, fish & all, by a heron, being carried a hundred miles, been voided on the banks of some other lake & germinated splendidly,—when lo & behold, the fish ejected the seeds vehemently, & with disgust, equal to my own, from their mouths.—
Goodbye my dear Hooker 

Ever yours C. Dar

Science inquiry opened the mystery and we now know that certain seeds are seemingly made for dispersion by drift, their pods impervious to water and filled with air and their taproots ready to quickly grab sandy soil. But none of this is obvious; none of this was quickly seen. Really, it makes no sense that a seed would float over 30,000 miles and turn into the glorious flora of Hawaii.

Physical, tangible mysteries like these help me see the sense in the way that Jesus taught. This that makes me see the sense in obscure parables, indirect references and veiled images.

Mystery is not the absence of an explanation but the presence of more than we can comprehend.

The Kingdom is here, among us, active yet elusive, just within sight yet hidden from view.
Growing yet we know not how.

Is it possible, even probable that within each of us there resides a drift seed? That within each of us there is a seed germinating, humming, growing planted there by a loving God who knit us together in the womb? And as we go into the world, we carry that seed with the potential to let it go and to flourish?

And that we are the ocean current carrying it along?

We have heard a great deal in recent weeks about the decline of organized religion, of Church in the West. Surely it must make those of us in the pews feel like we have missed something that everyone else knows. What we have not heard as much about is the fact that 44 percent of Americans say that faith is of great importance in their lives, germinating and alive, looking for soil to hold onto. That Christianity is flourishing in Korea and China. What we do not hear about is the resurgence of attendance at Compline services, a monastic tradition of sung prayer to mark the end of the day, or the vast numbers of young people at services in Taize, France, or of the huge interest in social entrepreneurship by Church communities.

We have not heard about the fact that those who are in the pews are more committed and more engaged than ever since they are making a conscious choice to be there.

Rachel Held Evans, a modern-day Evangelical turned Episcopalian, writes that when she requested, on Facebook, title suggestions for her new book about looking for ‘Church’– one suggestion was “Jesus went to Heaven and all he left us was this lousy Church.” And she writes that as much as that made her smile, it in no way captures the mystery of Christian Community that is Church.

Church is a place that has the power to point to the Kingdom. It is a place where we who want to understand, want to question, want to look beyond the words come together. It is a place of followers, followers of Jesus the one who gave the authority to heal – not cure.

Church at its best is place that asks hard questions – understands that life often hurts, that brokenness exists and shows up to hold those pieces with each other. In community and in love. That is what takes us into Haiti, Congo and South Dakota. That is what leads us to host 12-step groups, divorce recovery groups, grief groups and to and explore hunger in our communities.

The mystery of this Church community invites us to plant and watch and wonder at the magnificence of life beginning anew.

When Moses stood on the banks of the Jordan, 40 years after the journey began for a rag tag group who would replant the Kingdom of Israel, he cautioned against forgetting, against the amnesia of success, the amnesia of affluence. He cautioned against forgetting whose and who we are.

Seeds lying in the earth, waiting to germinate to bring hope and green and oxygen into the world. New life emerging as mysteriously as it began. That is our invitation as the Church of Christ – to nurture the mystery, the dark, and the seed. When we live in the everyday and stop to make it sacred, we are marking the way of the Kingdom. When we bring to our work and to our play, to our meals and to our life transitions a moment of prayer, a moment of remembering whose and who planted and nurtured us, we bring into the world the signposts of the Kingdom.

Is it possible–even probable–that within each of us Children of God, is a seed, mysterious and wonderful, that we are carrying with us out into the world each day? A seed we can scatter and allow to bear beautiful fruit even though we know not how. A seed we scatter through our choices and engagement with God’s world. This is a seed that will mysteriously grow and thrive and bloom in ways that say, “The Kingdom is here.” This is the way. Follow me.

Rachel Evan’s response to her Facebook followers says it very well: “Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, “Pay attention, this is holy ground. God is here.”

A reflection on the Feast of the Annunciation

March 26, 2015 by 1 Comment

By the Rev. Joe Hensley, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | March 26, 2015

Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation. It’s nine months before Christmas. I explained this to my daughter, and her response was, “Wow, so Mary meets the angel this week and Jesus dies next week?!” It’s a bit of whiplash to be reminded in the midst of Lent, on the verge of Holy Week, that Jesus’ life miraculously began in Mary’s womb. It seems harsh to hear Gabriel address Mary as “favored one” when we know that next week Jesus will speak to his mother from the cross. What kind of favor is it to endure the torturous execution of an innocent son?

It reminds us that God’s favor, God’s grace, is not measured in earthly terms. Mary is not spared agony or suffering; she isn’t granted any favors. Her favor is measured in terms of devotion. Her devotion enables her to bear the son of God, raise him, and watch him die. Her love is so profound, that no wonder Christians look to Mary as a shining example.

One of my favorite hymns of Holy Week is the “Stabat Mater dolorosa,” the last verse of which reads: “Jesus, may her [Mary’s] deep devotion stir in me the same emotion, Fount of love, Redeemer kind; that my heart fresh ardor gaining, and such a purer love attaining, may with thee acceptance find.”

This feast is our occasion to ask for the prayers of Mary and all the saints that we might receive such grace and favor which Mary received. May we have adoring hearts conceived within us, so that we may say in sorrow or joy with the mother of Jesus: “Let it be with me according to your word.”