The Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia shares this reflection at a live stream Celtic Evensong worship service on April 16, 2020.
homily
The seeds within us
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.
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 HookerEver 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.”
It begins with feet
The Maundy Thursday Homily from the Rev. Deacon Carey Chirico, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | April 2, 2015
Psalm 116:8
For you, O LORD, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. Amen.
It begins with feet. Small, innocent feet which have never touched the ground.
Small feet which kick and wave in the air.
Feet that will grow and stretch and carry a grown man around the countryside, walking miles and miles each day – hot, brown, dusty and sweaty.
It begins with love.
The love of Mary’s words in the Magnificat. The love of teacher for his disciples.
The love of a shepherd for his lost sheep.
It begins with shame.
The shame of an unwed mother.
The shame of an unexpected pregnancy.
The shame of sheltering to be born -in a cave not a palace, among animals not friends.
And so we come to this day. The night when having journeyed with our Savior through the giddy days of Hosannas we arrive at the meal which will be our last.
On this night the disciples have gathered to eat together as they have on so many occasions yet surely they must have sensed, known that things were about to change. Jesus has given them the best he has, the best he can. In one final gesture he kneels down and again upending the Kingdom washes their feet.
Gently wiping, pouring, cupping their tired, dusty feet. Their protests are the final sign of their lack of understanding of this man they have followed.
Tonight we will walk in their steps. We will come forward, sit down and let someone take our foot and gently, lovingly rinse it with water. Then they will pat it dry, carefully returning it to the earth. Tonight we will have the opportunity to let ourselves be loved, be served, be cared for, be cherished. Is this not the greatest of His messages to us – care for each other, love one another as I have loved you?
And we will struggle just as they did.
We will resist showing someone else that which is imperfect, unmanicured, unlovable. We will protest. We will resist, we will want to stay in our seat. But when we relent.
When we let go…….. then we will get it. Then we will begin the work of understanding.
My friend Jane tells a story about an experience she had right here in this Church. Jane is a teacher, and one year she had – that child. That child that you struggle to love, struggle to reach but who defies your every attempt. And she was ashamed. Her inability to love this child made her feel ashamed.
At her wits end, dreading school the next day, Janie prayed here in this Nave. Then she stood up and walking up the aisle to the altar for communion she pretended that she carried in her arms this child. And at the rail she knelt beside him, offering up what was broken between them and her inability to fix it.
Three months later she asked the children to write an essay about something significant that had happened to them during the school year.
The unloving, unlovable child wrote about the day, that day, in the middle of the year when his teacher ……started loving him.
“Generally speaking,” says the great Fredrick Buechner,“if you want to know who you really are, keep an eye on where your feet take you.”
It begins and it ends with feet. Feet battered and pierced. Feet, which the Gospel of Matthew tells us, were grasped and worshipped by the women at the empty tomb. Feet, which carry us into the world, humble, misshapen, dusty and hot.
As it began, it ends in shame. The shame of a slave’s death on a cross, tried, beaten and defeated. Deserted and denied by disciples. Alone between two thieves.
And as it began, it ends in love, the greatest love mankind has ever known or will know. Love that takes all our cares, all our shame, all our brokenness and hands us back – hope, joy, growth and healing.
Tonight I invite you to take a chance and experience in a small way how hard it is to share that which is rough and unpolished even shameful about ourselves.
And I invite you into a small experience of the joy of being entrusted to care for someone else’s hard, embarrassing place.
Love one another as I have loved you and by this the world shall know that you are my disciples.
Amen.
Hosannah!
Palm Sunday Homily from the Rev. Joe Hensley, Mar 29, 2015
Hosannah! Hosannah in the highest! Today, Palm Sunday, we hear these words with new ears. We sing or say them every week when we celebrate the Eucharist together. Today we remember that the crowds who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem shouted those words from Psalm 118 as he rode on the donkey colt. They shouted Hosannah as they covered the road with leafy branches. That word, “hosanna,” literally means “please save.” Today, as we begin our Holy Week pilgrimage, we put into our hearts this same same word: “Hosannah! Save us, please.”
The origins of the Hosannahs and the leafy branches of willow or palm come from the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the festival of booths, which is a fall, harvest-time celebration. Bible scholars have long puzzled over why the crowds who are making their way to Jerusalem with Jesus for the springtime Passover festival would invoke the words and signs of Sukkot. One possibility is that the hosanna prayers were offered while praying for rain, for literal salvation from drought. “Please save,” becomes a plea for life-giving water. By reenacting the Sukkot liturgy as Jesus enters Jerusalem, perhaps the crowds are emphasizing their hope that he is a “rain maker.” These are a people who have long-suffered under the yoke of oppression by their own leaders as well as the Roman Empire. Hosannah becomes a political and spiritual cry: “Here comes the one who will rain down justice upon the heads of our oppressors.”
Jesus does not deliver the rain like the crowds expect. He does not ride into town on a war horse but upon a humble donkey. He does not occupy the temple but instead hides on the outskirts of town. He does not announce victory but instead teaches in parables. By the time Jesus is arrested, perhaps the crowds have become impatient. Maybe this teacher is not the savior they had hoped for. Their hopeful “hosannas” give way to frustrated cries of “crucify him!”
Holy Week is our journey from “hosanna” to “crucify him.” The pilgrimage will take us from the hope for salvation to the realization that the one who offers it to us has been slain. This raises some questions for us. Have we been among those who have denied knowing Jesus, like Peter? He we been among those who have stood by helpless or silent while other suffered, while the light of the world was cloaked in darkness? Have we been among those who played a role in the unfair suffering of others? The answer is ‘yes.’ We know our guilt. The purpose of this Holy Week pageant, though, is not to feel guilty. The reason why we dwell on this tragic story and come back to church this week night after night is not to wallow in our sin and shame. We take these steps together so that we can come face to face with the brokenness of the world, the brokenness of our own souls, and realize that we have a companion in Jesus. Jesus walks with us and will not turn away from our worst. Jesus accepts our hopes and our failures, our hosannas and our cries for blood. He accepts them and he redeems them. He is the true rain maker, the one who waters our dry and cracked souls with mercy and forgiveness. In Gethsemane garden, at Calvary’s cross, even from the stony tomb, he rains down grace in the face of violence. He rains down right in a world of wrong. He rains down love in the midst of hate. This Holy Week we are invited to walk with Jesus on the road of suffering and surrender so that we might better know the gifts he showers upon us. Hosannah, Jesus, Hosannah. Save us, please. Save us and help us, we humbly pray. Amen.