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Beautiful Proportion – Sermon from September 29, 2019

October 3, 2019 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C: September 29, 2019

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story, a parable, a teaching story, and this story is told to the Pharisees and to his disciples about a rich man and a poor man. Parables are supposed to be mysterious, so I don’t want to try to wrap it all up and tell you exactly what it means. But I do want one thing to be abundantly clear, and that is that God is always coming to our assistance, helping us to live the life that really is life, a life of wholeness and beautiful proportion.

Why does Jesus tell this parable, this story? After he tells the parable of the unjust steward which we heard last week, Jesus is ridiculed by the Pharisees, the Jewish teachers and law experts, and the text of Luke tells us that they were lovers of money. So Jesus is telling these stories about money, and they are immediately criticizing him. In response to their criticism, Jesus really calls them out. He says, “You try to justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is prized in the sight of human beings is detestable before God,” and he’s talking about money. Then he goes on to remind them of the enduring truth of the scriptures, of all the law and the prophets, and then he tells the story of this rich man and this poor man named Lazarus. Notice the rich man is not given a name. The rich man is disproportionately wealthy. He wears the finest clothes of purple and linen every day, and he is feasting every day as if it were a holiday every day. The poor man Lazarus is disproportionately poor. He has absolutely nothing and is disproportionately ignored by the rich man. Only the dogs notice his suffering and come to lick his wounds.

Now the Pharisees would have been surprised by the turn the story takes. Because it was often thought, as Bob told us in his sermon last week, that people who suffered in their earthly life were being punished by God for their sins or for the sins of their forebearers. Likewise, people who prospered in the world were seen as blessed by God and being rewarded for something. But Jesus reverses the order when he says that Lazarus when he died was carried by the angels themselves to be with father Abraham, the faithful ancestor of the Jewish people, whereas the rich man suffered in Hades, the land of the dead. Jesus dramatically shows the gap between the rich man and the poor man, and this probably shocked the Pharisees. I think this is why Jesus tells the parable.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has described parables as bombs thrown into our status quo, bombs thrown into our status quo to explode our understanding, and so while we might wonder is Jesus saying that the rich people go to the bad place, and the poor people go to the good place, is this what heaven and hell are going to be like? I think that the purpose of the story is not to predict what will happen, not to paint a definitive picture of what heaven is like, or the afterlife. But it is to surprise the hearers, to explode their understanding such that they might wonder in some new ways. I think Jesus tells the parable to the Pharisees so that they, and us, may take a hard look at our own disproportions and do something about them. And that we might consider that our disproportions in this life have spiritual consequences for us now and in the life to come.

I don’t think I need to spend a disproportionate amount of time in this sermon talking about the disproportionate way our world has become in terms of wealth and poverty, but I’ll just say a couple things. Just as in Jesus’ time, we have people who are so rich, who have so much it is obscene. And we have people just as in Jesus’ time who have so little it is sickening, and we have ignorance of the needs of the poor now just as there has always been. Just as in Jesus’ time, there are self-righteous persons who justify their abundance and who maybe give a little bit here or a little bit there, but in their hearts there is only the impoverished love of money.

Now I think most of us are somewhere in the middle, somewhere on the spectrum. We might be at the high end of the spectrum, in the middle, or at the low. Most of us are not obscenely rich, nor are we desperately poor. And we may not even love money, but we feel like we have to give a disproportionate amount of our time and our energy worrying about it. We may feel trapped because money and the system of money rules our lives. The funny thing is that compared with most of the world and compared with humanity through most of human history, we, most of us in this room, have so much more than we need, and yet we worry that all it will take will be a turn in the markets or a crisis in our life, and we will be, we will not have enough. Such disproportions in life are not what God wants for us individually and us as a community.

So, what bomb does this parable drop into our status quo? How might this parable challenge us to look at our disproportions, to look in the ways in which we are out of balance, in which some parts of our lives take up way too much room and other parts do not have enough room? I can’t answer that question for you, you’re going to have to wrestle with that yourselves because I don’t know your individual circumstances, but I wonder if this parable also invites us to ask about the proportions we would like to see. How can our lives be proportioned such that it shows wholeness and the life that really is life?

Several years ago, my wife Sarah and I got together with four other couples for some dinners and some conversations in each other’s homes around the topic of Sabbath economics. We got together to explore and imagine how our lives might more proportionately reflect the Biblical values of Sabbath. Sabbath is not just taking one day off a week for rest. Sabbath is a way of living that is centered around the fact that God is God, and we are not, and that God provides what we need, and that everyone is invited to share in rest and abundance. So, as couples we talked with each other frankly about the reality of living in a world that worships money and how hard it is when we would like to order our lives differently but it’s difficult to see how. We talked about the joys of giving and sometimes the challenges of not feeling like we can give as much as we wanted to or the invitation to live more simply and yet how difficult it can be to live in such a complicated world. Like the parable, some of these conversations were a bomb dropped into our status quo, they really blew our minds open. I think that everyone who participated ended up doing something differently as a result. None of us changed our lives dramatically overnight. It certainly wasn’t enough, but it was a start, it was a start.

We’re entering as a parish into this time of year that we often call stewardship season, a time of praying about our sacred financial offerings, our gifts that we give back to God through the church in gratitude for the wonder in all that God has done. I think many of us feel like we wish we could give more. We’re not sure how to start. We’re talking about money after all, and money is one of the most difficult topics, especially in church, and as Paul reminds us, the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil, that is not money itself but the love of it that gets us into trouble. Maybe it’s time for a bomb in our status quo. This year as you consider what you might give back to God in the form of financial offerings here at St. George’s that you discern whether you can commit to that, your offerings in the coming year and let us know what those are in the coming weeks on your pledge card. The invitation may be not just to consider what you can do but to consider the proportions of your life. And not to start with what’s realistic, but to start with what you’d like to see, what proportion of your time and energy would you like to give to the people and the things you care about most? What proportion of your income, what percentage of your income would be a fitting offering to God in thanks for all that God has given you? Where would you like to be? If you really want to throw a bomb in the status quo, find some people that you trust and talk with them about it. It might open your eyes in some new ways. Start with the right proportions and then work back to what you think you might be able to do to make those proportions more a part of your reality. Dream audaciously, and then see how those proportions might start to come into balance.

This idea of proportionate giving is thinking of your giving as a percentage of your overall income, so the Bible gives us the tithe of the ten percent as one standard. That may not be where you are but thinking of those gifts not in terms of the amount but in terms of the proportion of the whole. This way of thinking also though kind of invites us to think of our lives not as fragmented pieces that are fighting with one another but our lives as one whole that fits together. One of the things I’ve said after my sabbatical is I don’t want to try to fit my life in around my work anymore. I want my work to be a part of the whole of my life, and I want my giving to be part of a greater whole of how I take care of what God has given me. How is God inviting us to live lives of wholeness and beautiful proportion? Maybe your pledge this year to give one part in ten or one part in twenty or one part in a hundred, whatever it is, maybe it will be a stretch, maybe you can make it a stretch for you, not just as a sign of what you’ll give but as a sign of your desire to live a life of wholeness and proportion.

If you figure out how to do this, please let us know because we’d love to hear your wisdom. Most of us feel daunted by this in some way, shape, or form. So the good news from the parable today is that the poor man in the parable is named Lazarus, and Lazarus in Hebrew means my God has helped, and God has always and will always help the poor, and that includes, thanks be to God, the poor in imagination, the poor in courage, the poor in resolve. When we turn our hearts from seeking the things of this world to seeking the things of God, God will give us a disproportionate measure of grace because that’s how God’s economy works, and possibly God might give us a bomb in our status quo because that’s also how God often works. So, watch out for that. God has helped, God is helping, God will help us to live lives of beautiful proportion. Thanks be to God.

Annual Meeting and Combined Worship Service

December 18, 2018 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon for the St. George’s annual meeting December 9, 2018. The Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr.

Let me quote the apostle Paul as he wrote to the Philippians in the reading we heard earlier: “I thank my God every time I remember you.” Good morning beloved St. Georgians. I thank our God when I remember you and when I remember all the ways that God is at work in our midst. And I say with Paul, “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion.” God is up to some good work at St. George’s. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to you, beloved parishioners, for all the ways you are cooperating and participating with God in this place. It’s been almost four years since I began my work here as your rector, and still, I thank my God every time I remember our community and our ministry. It’s good to be here. Can you turn to your neighbor and tell them, “It’s good to be here?”

The text that I would like to focus on this morning is a text from both Luke’s Gospel and the prophet Isaiah.As Luke describes the appearance of John the Baptist who is preparing the way for Jesus, Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah writing several centuries earlier: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” Prepare the way of the Lord. We are in the season of Advent, the four Sundays leading up to the feast of Christ’s incarnation, God becoming human. We often say that it is a season of waiting. Waiting for Christmas. Waiting for Christ to enter the world. Waiting. We also say that Advent is a season of preparing the way.Note that several of our music selections today include the phrase: “prepare the way.” This is our season, as we are waiting, to also be preparing.

Since this is the annual meeting Sunday, I have a few things to say about the parish. I am preparing to do that!And so let me get there by talking about preparing the way for God. This time of the year, we talk a lot about preparing for the holidays. Are you prepared for Christmas? I’m not even fully prepared for Advent and it started last Sunday. The answer really is “no,” I am not prepared. Because when people say,“are you prepared,” what they really mean is “are you ready? Are all your plans in place?” Let’s just say I’m planning to get my plans in place. But let’s go back to Isaiah for a moment.

The word in Hebrew that Isaiah uses to say “prepare” has a different meaning from “get ready.” The word has more of a meaning of clearing. Clear the way. Prepare the path by clearing it of obstacles, smoothing the rough spots, filling in the potholes. So there is,perhaps, a difference between preparing and planning. Planning is buying presents and putting up decorations and making food. Preparing is clearing sometime in the calendar just to sit in God’s presence. Planning is putting things in place. Preparing is making space. Planning involves stocking up. Preparing involves cleaning out. Planning is important, don’t get me wrong. But I think the call of Isaiah is to clear the way, to prepare for the coming of God by making time and making room for God to enter our world. So during this Advent season, we take care not to let our planning overshadow our preparing. For it is when we prepare, when we clear room for God, that God can show us things we could never begin to plan for.

So now I would like to shift into talking about the parish, and I want to talk about St. George’s both in terms of planning and preparing. Both are essential. Let me begin by saying that we do not have enough time in this sermon or in one annual meeting to tell the story of everything we have done in the past year and everything that we are looking ahead to. The vestry and I are “planning” to offer a more complete annual report of 2018 early in the new year, once this year is complete. Be prepared for it!

Planning and preparing. We planned in our budget at the beginning of 2018 to hire three staff members, one new position and two expanded roles. We ended up hiring seven people. Our initial plans did not involve our associate rector, Gay Rahn, retiring or our director of children’s formation and outreach, Carey Connors, going to seminary. Nor did we foresee the opportunity to partner with Christ Lutheran and Trinity Episcopal to hire a young adult missioner. But we were prepared for these opportunities, because we had made some room, both materially and spiritually, for God to do some new work. So, in order of their arrival this year, we welcomed Parish Administrator, Laurel Loch, Parish Secretary, Barbara Miller-Richards, Facility Manager, Riley Mullins, Table administrator, Katie Wendt, Young adult missioner, the Rev. David Casey, Associate Rector, the Rev. Areeta Bridgemohan, and Director of Children’s and Youth Formation, Hecti Musa. Thanks be to God we have an incredible staff of 15 that works so hard and so well to support our ministries and to empower our parishioners to focus on their ministries. As another way to help parishioners plan and prepare for their own ministry, the vestry also put into place a new commission this year,the “connections commission” whose mission is to help connect parishioners who want to get involved with ministries that can use their gifts. As you prepare to get more involved, see the “help wanted” page on our website, and look for upcoming invitations from the connections commission. Part of our preparing and planning in the coming year is going to be calling some new leaders so that current leaders who are ready for a break can step back while they still have energy to give. Although we have a beautiful building and facility, it is the people who gather and minister, work and worship here every day that make St.George’s a church where we can grow and then share God’s love. It’s the people who are the church.

A church with the amount of people and activities that St. George’s has needs a dedicated and skilled staff to provide consistency and stability so that volunteers can have what they need to succeed. To be transparent, staff costs are the majority of our budget expenses. This year, we managed to minimize a deficit budget by reducing staff expenses during some significant gaps of time when positions were unfilled. We plan to begin 2019 with our full staff and will not have that same wiggle room.

We are able to hire this wonderful staff and fund all our ministries through the generous support of parishioners. I often say that the finance meeting is one of my favorite meetings because it reminds me of your generosity. The spreadsheet numbers represent your faithful and consistent gifts. Finance is often a “planning”meeting for sure, but it is also a preparation meeting. In those meetings we often have to remember to clear away our negative thinking and prepare a way for God to show us what is possible. Your gifts, gathered together, have showed us what is possible, over and over again. We have grown since I arrived in 2015.At some point, we might say, “haven’t we gotten big enough?” But then more and more people want to join our parish. Our amazing volunteer leaders hear God calling us to respond to more needs in the world. We want to prepare for what God is going to do next right here. To be frank, growing in ministry means growing in giving. Back in September, Bishop Bob Ilhoff asked some of us to think about giving not until it hurts but until it feels good. Give until it feels good. Part of how we prepare the way of God is by clearing away our hesitancy and offering as much as we can with joy. I believe our parishioners together have the resources to fully fund and even to exceed our needs for the coming years.I know many are already giving a very joyful proportion of their gifts to St. George’s. Many of us, though, could consider offering to God a more joyful proportion. This would enable us to even more joyfully share the ministries of this place, to share the welcoming love of God.

There’s more to say, and my time is growing short. As I said, we plan to offer a complete picture of 2018 early next year, from pastoral care to Christian formation, from home communion visits to forums about wholeness, from grace in action locally to mission around the country and world, from the Table in Fredericksburg to Notre Dame in Haiti, from worship and music to fellowship and hospitality, from deaf ministry to newcomers, buildings and grounds to finance and stewardship, from care for God’s creation to time, talent, and treasure; from St. George’s preschool to St. George’s Catechesis of the Good Shepherd to St. George’s youth, from Youth in Global to Glory Ridge, from young adult community ministry to ecumenical and interfaith partnerships, from racial reconciliation to evangelism, from our first annual “round up” storytelling event to our 300^th anniversary in 2020-2021. For now, I want to share one last thing about our planning and preparing.St. George’s is planning and preparing for me to take a sabbatical break next summer. My departing Sunday will be the parish picnic on June 2 and my returning Sunday will be the rally for service Sunday September 8. The theme of my sabbatical is “rooted in wholeness” which was our theme for the Shrine Mont parish weekend in October and for our adult forums this fall and next spring. I am excited to share that I received a generous funding grant from the Lilly Foundation to support some travel and retreat for me and my family and also to support St. George’s in several ways during my absence. I truly hope this time will be a time of preparing the way of the Lord, of clearing away obstacles and smoothing out rough edges. In this season of Advent, I hope each of us can find some mini-sabbaticals, some times to rest, slow down, and listen so that we can prepare to receive God who is coming into the world.

In a few minutes we will cast ballots to elect four new vestry members. As I bring this message to a close, I ask us to set aside our plans for a moment and simply prepare. Prepare our hearts to listen for God’s guidance. God is already at work: in our parish, in our neighborhood, in the world. How is God inviting us to be part of that wonderful work of love and welcome, of grace in action, of giving and receiving? Now is a time in the life of our parish not only to plan but to prepare. Prepare the way.

All Saints’ Sunday

November 8, 2018 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | All Saints’ Sunday Year B: November 4, 2018

Today we celebrate All Saints Sunday. It is one of the major feasts of the church year, right up there with Christmas and Easter. In some places the celebration begins on the night before, on the eve of the feast. You may be familiar with the name for the night before All Saints Day…All Hallows Eve. I will say that Halloween is one of my favorite nights of the year, because it is the one night when neighbors go knocking on each others doors and are greeted with grins and sweets. The dead come to life. People walk the streets and can be whoever they want to be. It’s a beautiful thing. All Hallows Eve, the eve of the feast of all the hallowed ones, all the holy ones, all the saints of God.

Last night, on the eve of this All Saints Sunday, the Fredericksburg community had a different kind of All Hallows Eve as we gathered in the Beth Sholom Synagogue for an interfaith vigil to remember the victims of the Tree of Life massacre a week ago in Pittsburgh. It was a gathering of the holy ones of God, the saints of many faiths, not only to remember victims but to share hope for the future. Rabbi Jennifer Weiner, the new rabbi at the synagogue, asked ministers of the wider community to light eleven candles, one for each of the slain at Tree of Life. She wanted our presence there to be a sign of unity. I was asked to say a few words on behalf of the interfaith community. Since the summer of 2015, I have been helping to organize a monthly gathering of interfaith leaders where we discuss and respond to the concerns of the community. Because that group has been meeting for over three years now, when the call came from the new rabbi to come and support her congregation in their time of grief and vulnerability, we were ready. Last night we filled the synagogue almost to its capacity. The president of the synagogue said he had never seen that many people in that space before, not even for their high and holy celebrations. It was a beautiful thing for all of us. I wanted to share with you what I said last night, on your behalf.

I began by saying: “I recently heard a wise minister say this: ‘You have to do the work in the good times to be prepared for the bad times.’

The fact that so many of us are gathered here tonight is a testimony to the work we have done in the good times to prepare us for a time such as this where we must come together. We must come together to mourn the dead. We must come together to lament the loss. We must come together to reassure each other that we are still here. We do not crumble and dis-integrate when crisis strikes. We re-integrate. We further integrate.

Rabbi Weiner asked me to say a few words tonight, as a representative of many Fredericksburg area faith communities. We are here tonight to stand in grief and support, to stand also in hope with our Jewish sisters and brothers. I use family terms intentionally. We stand with our neighbors to whom we are related by virtue of being children of one God. We may have our theologically nuanced ways of understanding our relationship, but we ARE related. And as kin, we share many values in common including the affirmation of love and the renunciation of evil which corrupts and destroys the creatures of God. Although some in our various faiths at times have targeted and in some places still do target Jewish people and communities, we come here tonight firmly opposed to anyone who would use faith of any kind as a reason to kill. We come here tonight firmly in favor of a clear position – that love wins. Hatred in any form is not a path to the peace which we seek. The word, “peace,” in Hebrew, “Shalom” and in Arabic, “Salaam” can also be expressed as “wholeness,” “completeness.” We come here tonight, because we believe that it is only by being together, being the whole community, that we will overcome the haters and seek the peace and wholeness of the city in which we dwell. May God bless us all as we do this work together in a difficult time with the hope of better times and with the hope that in time, we will be better.”

At the end of the vigil, the congregation was invited to join in what is called, in Jewish tradition, the kaddish prayer. It is a prayer recited by mourners during the bereavement period. But is not a prayer to remember the dead. It is a prayer of praise to God. The word, “kaddish” means holy. And it struck me that we also say a kaddish each and every Sunday, and we invite our kaddish with these words: “Now let us join with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your name: “Holy Holy Holy.”

This is the song of the communion of saints, Holy Holy Holy, because God is holy and so are we. And whether we gather in good times or in bad times, we sing our song. At the beginning of my remarks last night, I referenced a wise minister who said, “You have to do the work in the good times to be prepared for the bad times.” That minister is an Episcopal priest named Cass Bailey. He’s the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. I heard him speak those words last Friday at our Diocesan convention in Richmond. He was reflecting on how the community in Charlottesville had been able to come together recently around their Jewish neighbors, because they had been in the practice of coming together since the white supremacist rally in August 2017. They had already done the work to build relationships. We saints have to do the work in good times to be prepared for the bad times. We nurture relationship with God and with our neighbors in the good times so that when hard times come, we can sing together by heart. We can receive God’s grace so abundantly provided. We are here today, celebrating all the saints, in this good time, and we baptize a new saint into the household of God this morning. We celebrate the holy women and men of God who knew and lived out this truth. We celebrate them today so that when we need their support, we will remember that we are joined with all the company of heaven.

Today’s scripture lessons are all readings that remind us both of death and the possibility of new life. They are often read at funerals. We the saints know that death and tragedy are real. Today we will read the necrology of those who have died in the last year. And we will keep in our hearts those who died at Tree of Life in Fredericksburg, those who were killed at a grocery story by racist violence in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as those who were killed at a yoga studio in Tallahassee just a couple of days ago. Tomorrow, who knows what horrible news may come. We grieve. We mourn. But even at the grave we make our song, holy holy holy, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. We recite our kaddish, gathered as God’s holy people, and in so doing we are reminded that death is not the end. Hatred, bitterness, and enmity are not the last words. They are not the last work, because we are still here, with all the saints. May God bless all the saints as we work together in difficult times with the hope of better times and with the hope that in God’s good time and by God’s good grace, we will be better.