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Avengers Endgame: Summer Pop Culture Sermon Series

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Summer Sermon Series_2022 The Rev. William S. Dickinson gave the below sermon on July 31, 2022. This sermon is part of St. George’s Summer Pop Culture Sermon Series. Unfortunately, we were not able to livestream the worship service that Sunday, so we are providing a transcript of Fr. Will’s sermon. Additionally, our Assistant Director of Music Ministries has provided a recording of the special music interlude he played to introduce the sermon.

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity!” Between the words spoken and the words heard, may the Spirit be present.

In all fairness, if a giant, interdimensional, purple-headed tyrant had recently arrived on your superhero-infested planet, snapped his fingers, and instantly disappeared half of all beings in the universe out of existence, you too might feel a little bit depressed.

Alright, let me back up.

If you hang around me long enough, you’ll end up hearing two things:
1) It’s hard to be a human.
and
2) God’s Grace isn’t earned, and it’s enough.

Now, neither of these things is particularly interesting, nor is either of them new wisdom, but that’s just sort of how the Gospel goes. Humans are humans, and always have been, unfortunately. In fact, it is such a ubiquitous truth that to live on this planet as an incarnate human is a difficult task that people have been complaining about having been born since…forever.

So with apologies to Gen Z, I’m afraid you all did not, in fact, invent existential dread.

One of the great aspects of Scripture is how we hear within its pages the whole of the human emotional gamut.

Outnumbering all of the very pious people saying very pious things are the writers of Scripture who are, in a word, upset. Much like us. And the weird thing is, God can do incredible, transformative things through them, too.

For every Mary, mother of Jesus who sings her assent to the trials of her life, there’s a dozen James and Johns, who are annoyed by leaving the comforts of home, or Peter, literally betraying Our Lord out of fear and grief. In half of the parables, even, Jesus shows us people who have lost their way that God uses to do great things. Remember, the prodigal son doesn’t earn back the money he squandered before his father welcomes him home with open arms.

Scripture is full of people finding it hard to be a human. And none more so than the writer of our first reading. Now unfortunately this is literally the only time we ever hear from Ecclesiastes in the entire three-year lectionary, so we’ve got to make it count.

“Vanity of vanities,” the writer says, “all is vanity!” “I hated all my toil…under the sun, seeing I must leave it to those who come after me – and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish!” In other words, “nothing matters.”

Being a human has always, always been hard, and sometimes the only thing to do about is to shout to God about how nothing seems to matter. And the great thing about God is that we don’t have to protect anything from Her. God can handle whatever we throw, and boy do we sometimes need to throw it.
Because, say it with me: “it’s hard to be a human.” But that doesn’t stop God from using us to do marvelous things.

This truth is so universally acknowledged that it even finds its way into Marvel superhero movies! That’s right, it’s Avengers day in the last week of our pop culture sermon series, and we’re talking about Thor’s grief.

Thor, God of Thunder and erstwhile wielder of the mythical hammer Mjolnir, is one of the original band of superheroes called the Avengers who are at the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Turns out it’s handy to have a god on your side when it comes to fighting evil. (Of course, we in the church knew that already).

Anyway!

In Avengers: Endgame, we’re at the culmination of ten years and twenty-something movies. All of the characters (fifty-plus at this point) have come together to fight against this one villain: the evil Thanos, who sees the brokenness of living beings as a kind of blight on the universe. His grand plan is to eliminate half of all sentient life to start again, to give life a chance at not overwhelming the resources of the universe. He thinks this is the only way to save the universe from destroying itself. For years and for ten movies, the Avengers and their fellow superheroes have been fighting against Thanos to stop him from executing this mad plot. They’ve all gathered together and mustered their collective strength to fight him and…with apologies for spoilers, they lose.

Thanos accomplishes his goal, and with a snap of his fingers, half of all beings, including superheroes, simply disappears.
Five years pass. Nothing has changed; the vanished are And the Avengers begin to think to themselves. What was the point? Was it all vanity after all? Did any of it matter?

Thor, the God of Thunder himself takes this failure and loss particularly hard. He isolates himself in (where else?) Scandinavia and falls into a deep depression. He sits around all day wallowing. When the other Avengers have a plan to go back in time to stop Thanos from halving humanity in the first place (it’s complicated), Thor refuses to join them.

What if he fails again? Why even bother?

Now as an aside, one disappointing way that the movie illustrates Thor’s grief and depression is by showing him gain significant weight, spawning many memes about “fat Thor.” Now this is a true reflection of some folks’ journeys in grief and it’s worth depicting, but in this case, it’s played for laughs. So I just want to acknowledge that this is dumb and lazy film-making, that it shames people for how their bodies manifest grief.

In fact, ‘fat Thor’ as a plot device is just another way of getting around how hard it is to process grief at all. Rather than actually talking about what it’s like to lose half of your friends and have to keep living, the audience is supposed to laugh instead. It’s a clumsy device, but an all too human one. What we need to learn is that Thor is broken – sad, angry, and lost to thinking that nothing matters.

He’s basically the writer of Ecclesiastes at this point. All of this superhero-ing was just vanity. Why bother trying again?

Now I think sometimes we’re taught that Thor, or Ecclesiastes, or people in our lives going through such things are just whining. That we’re just supposed to get up, keep going, power through, and those that can’t just aren’t trying hard enough. What a sad thing. Or we’re told that we have to process through our grief before we can get back to how our life was before.

But as anyone who has processed a trauma, or experienced major grief, or felt the fragility of their mortal body can tell you: it’s not an either/or.

What really happens is we accept that we’ve changed, and our lives have changed. And with the help of community, and plenty of reminders that we’re enough, we muddle through, and we decide to try again. The grief doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get fixed. But we take those first brave steps of trying again. Yes, we might fail again. But what if we don’t?

Eventually, Thor says okay, when enough of his friends convince him to try. And without giving too much away, he has an important conversation with his mother (in a different timeline – I told you it was complicated) who reminds Thor that failure, and brokenness, and pain, and joy, are all a part of being alive. That they make us who we are. That there’s nothing to fix. That it’s from within our places of brokenness that our strength comes.

And y’all, I’m as surprised as you are to say this, but that is the Gospel, smack dab in the middle of a Marvel movie. Those are the words of eternal life. That God didn’t come to fix us, that we don’t need to earn Grace, that it is from our places of need that God’s Grace empowers us to love the world. You don’t have to be fixed to help fix the world. You do not have to be good to do good. You simply need to ask for help. Thor’s mistake was thinking he alone needed to be strong. Because when he failed he had nothing left. But that’s not how Grace works. God doesn’t waste anything.

Thor isn’t healed before he tries again and saves the world. His grief isn’t gone. God doesn’t wait for us to be healed before showing us the good She can work through us. It’s in the space of our need that God works.

The writer of Ecclesiastes writes: “It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.” “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after the wind.”

He says all this, he’s so sure that all of this God mumbo-jumbo means nothing, has no power, and yet here we are, 2300 years later and learning from him. Here he is, in the pages of Scripture, reminding us that we will have seasons of joy and of grief, and that nothing goes to waste in God’s Kingdom. Rahab was an infamous person of ill repute, and God used her to deliver the entire people of Israel. Martha was devastated at the death of her brother Lazarus, and God used her to give the disciples a safe place to rest.

The prophet Ezekiel is a victim of post-traumatic stress, and God uses him to deliver a message of liberation that gave hope to a people in exile. St. Paul was disabled, and God evangelized the world through him. We are broken, we have places of need, we have failures, and, look around, see what God is doing through us. Not because we succeeded, not because we are good, but just because. Dear Church, The only perfect person God ever used was Jesus Christ.

It is because Thor was able to share his grief that his friends could lift him up so he could try again. That’s it.

And if you hear one message of Grace today, hear this, y’all: God doesn’t need you to be fixed, or healed, and certainly not “good enough” to love you, or to use you to do profound things.

Whatever place in your life needs healing, wherever you are broken, wherever you struggle, even if you haven’t acknowledged it yet, wherever you think is the furthest place from God, that is precisely where God will heal others through you.

You do not need to be perfect to receive grace.
You do not need to be well to help others to heal.
You do not need to deserve love to love others.
You do not have to be good to do good.

Because here’s the key – when we know our need, when we know we are not perfect, when we know our need for forgiveness and grace, then a strange thing happens – we start to have forgiveness for others. We start to meet others’ needs. We start to live lives of grace.

Mary Oliver says it better than I:
“You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”

I only take issue with the world meanwhile. The world does not go on despite us sharing our struggles and our fears and our hopes.
The world goes on precisely because of it.

The world does not go on despite broken, healing people working to do good. The world can only go on because each of us broken humans decides to try.

Jesus Rerouted

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ReroutedA Sermon Preached by the Reverend Areeta Bridgemohan
at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Fredericksburg, VA
RCL Proper 18, Year B
September 5, 2021

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord our strength and redeemer. Amen.

In our Gospel story today, it seems like Jesus is trying to take a vacation again. The scripture says: “he didn’t want anyone to know that he had entered a house, but he couldn’t hide.” (NRSV)

To understand why he might have wanted a break, I’ll give you a quick recap of the highlights from the last couple of chapters: in Ch 6 he’s rejected from his hometown, his cousin gets killed by Herod, he feeds 5,000 hungry people, he calms a storm and walks on water, he does more healings and then has a public argument with the Pharisees and legal experts.

No wonder he needed a break! He sets out and goes to the region of Tyre. Tyre was mostly inhabited by Gentiles, it was a wealthy port city, and was also at odds with the Galilean Jews.

Josephus, a Roman-Jewish first century historian who was born shortly after Jesus died, listed the Tyrians among the Jews’ bitterest enemies. According to one commentary, Tyre imported its produce from Galilee, the breadbasket of the region. In times of abundance, this relationship worked well for both parties. In times of crisis or famine, Tyrians were able to purchase the harvest of the land and often made large profits, and Galileans were left with little for themselves. ,

In addition to this uncomfortable economic relationship, there was a troubled history between the Tyrians and the Jewish community. Just 130 years before Jesus was born, Tyrians had assisted King Antiochus IV, one of the great persecutors of the Jews, in the siege of Jerusalem and the terrible desecration of the Jewish temple.

This is where Jesus chose to take refuge.

Maybe he thought he would be less likely to be sought out, maybe he figured that Tyrians would rather not associate themselves with him: a poor rural Jewish general contractor. They might let him have the rest he craved. But he had no such luck. Our story tells us that when he got there, word spread and a woman approached Jesus to plead with him to heal her daughter, who was plagued by a demon.

Jesus’ response has thrown Christians into knots for centuries.

He replies: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (NRSV)

This is the only time Jesus says no to someone who comes to him for healing, and on top of his refusal, he insults her too. It sounds harsh to us, but it might have been even harsher to contemporary ears. Dogs were not sweet lovable pets that are part of the family, but more on par with rats, scavengers who lived on garbage.

This is not the kind, compassionate, inclusive Jesus. It is a Jesus who unsettles us, and not in that “be-more-loving” kind of way, but in the cringey way that reflects back to us some of our prejudices and blind spots.

Christians have tried to explain his answer in a variety of ways. Some say that his response is not that bad – after all the Greek word he uses for dog is “kynarion”, which means a little dog, a puppy, which is less insulting. Others observe that he doesn’t outright refuse her request, he prioritizes his mission to the Jews – which was a source of great debate in the early Christian church, Mark’s audience. Yet others have made sense of his response by saying that Jesus was testing her faith.

Some ancient Christian traditions hold that she was wealthy, which adds another interesting layer of disparity between them.

Today I’m going with: Jesus had his prejudices, and I wonder whether there was a small part of him that felt that withholding healing redressed some of the economic and social inequality between the Tyrians and Galileans. Maybe he did think of his mission as first for the Jews and then the Gentiles, and he might have been less compassionate with her because her wealth, status and otherness made it hard for him to be touched by her suffering.

I prefer to read the story this way because without that the healing that she affects upon him and the grace and openness that he shows are diminished.

In this story, Jesus models what it’s like to be wrong, that most human of qualities.

As I was reflecting on this story, I wondered how this encounter might have played out today.

In an article on the evolution of the concept of “cancel culture”, the author describes how the meaning of the term has drifted further and further away from its original intention as an instrument for traditionally marginalized communities to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of privilege.

She says that it is often now used as shorthand to describe an aggressive style of communication on social media which treats public debate as a battlefield.

She quotes journalist Zeeshan Aleem who says: “It’s … a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. … What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.”

And I would add that it eliminates the possibility of just plain being wrong. Ambiguity and self-interrogation are both important parts of being able to admit wrongness. Being wrong is hard even in the safest and most loving of environments. Being wrong when it feels like there’s not much grace is so much harder.

A core part of our journeys as Christians is metanoia, or conversion. Our baptismal covenant wisely includes 6 questions as part of the examination of the candidates – 3 of them are called the ‘renunciations’, three opportunities to renounce the influence of evil over us. The next three are the ‘affirmations’, three opportunities to affirm our desire to turn towards Christ.

Conversion can’t happen if we’re always right.

The renunciation of evil and the commitment to follow Christ represent the journey of a lifetime of conversion. A conversion that is taking place every day of our lives, in every relationship.

The Syrophoenician woman creates the space for Jesus to have a change of heart by persisting. She challenges him to exercise the values that he’s been practicing in his ministry – the reality of God’s love and grace for everyone, this time even Gentiles. She invites Jesus to expand the fellowship of his table and opens the possibilities of the breadth of his kingdom. She invites him to go beyond a binary, beyond either/or towards both/and.

The story tells us that he returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of the Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. This is like saying he went from Fredericksburg to Richmond by way of D.C. (the traffic on the 95 would have extended his time with us here on earth). It seems like the Syrophoenician woman inspired him to go further into non-Jewish territory.

She is the second non-Jewish person that he heals and the third follows right after her, after which he feeds 4,000 people still in Gentile territory.

This story reminds us that the disappointment and hurt that we cause each other can all still be used by God for the good of the kingdom. Even our prejudices can’t keep God’s grace out.

To close, I want to share the words that Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber shares at house brunches to welcome newcomers to the church. In her greeting, she tells them:

“At some point, I will disappoint you or the church will let you down. Please decide on this side of that happening if, after it happens, you will still stick around. Because if you leave, you will miss the way that God’s grace comes in and fills in the cracks of our brokenness. And it’s too beautiful to miss.
Don’t miss it.”

May our Christian journey follow in Jesus’ footsteps and may it be a wonderful adventure of stumbling, making mistakes healing and growth. Amen.

Annual Meeting – Sermon from December 8, 2019

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Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The Second Sunday of Advent Year A: December 8, 2019

To view the Treasurer’s Report by Tom Meredith, click here. 

Please pray with me. Gracious God, put into my mouth the words you would have me to speak and put into our hearts the words you would have us to hear. In Your Holy name we pray. Amen.

The prophet Isaiah describes a vision a vision of the coming of the Messiah when the whole creation will be changed. The wolf will live with the lamb. A child will play over the whole of the snake. So, I look out at this gathering today, and I see Isaiah’s vision lived out. People of all stripes and personalities and dispositions somehow, someway dwelling together in Christ’s name. Now I’m not going to say who’s the wolf and who’s the lamb. You all can figure that out. Or sometimes we might be both the wolf and the lamb, depends on the day. But it is a joy, it’s just a joy to look out and see this parish in all its variety. It’s a joy to look up here in the gallery and to see all of our music ensembles and all of your wonderful variety showing us how we can somehow come together in harmony. [baby crying] Thank you. So, in that spirit, just turn to your neighbor this morning and say, “welcome in the name of Christ,” just “welcome in Christ’s name,” just welcome each other.

Because it’s Christ who brings us together, and today this second Sunday of Advent we are waiting for Christ to return. During this season we focus on what is really, just for a few weeks we’re focusing on something that is a year-round reality that we are always preparing and waiting for God to be embodied with us. Waiting is not something many of us like to do. It’s an in-between place, but in the waiting and in the in-between is often where God likes to work, and that’s where the prophets tend to show up.

Today we heard from the prophet Isaiah and from John the Baptist, and they are stepping into the gap between what has been promised and what has yet to be fulfilled. They announce that things will need to change and things are going to change. And they also proclaim that this time in the middle, this threshold time, is an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to go deeper in our faith. So, we are gathered today in this annual meeting of St. George’s parish, and in many ways our parish is in a threshold time, standing at the threshold. We’re on the threshold of a watershed 300th anniversary of the founding of this parish, but we’re not quite there yet. We’re on the threshold of developing a master plan for our space that is more accessible to all, as well as additional and improved space for ministry, but we don’t have the plan yet. We still need your feedback about that, by the way. Go to our website and look at the plans that we are putting out there. Give us your feedback so we’ll know better about which way we need to go.

Beyond our parish, we see thresholds in our world. We see religious institutions at the threshold as they watch attendance decline. We see the culture at large standing at thresholds when it comes to climate change or the widening political divides. We’re waiting at a lot of thresholds wondering what is coming next. We’re in a full-time Advent, and it’s not easy. And in times like this the world’s advice is often to hunker down, store up supplies, make plans for your personal survival. The prophets, on the other hand, call us to venture out, to be vulnerable, to go into the wilderness, to wade into the waters of chaos, open our hearts and listen for God’s guidance as we take the risk of being in community together.

John the Baptist appears not in the streets of Jerusalem. He doesn’t baptize in the courtyards of the temple. No, he appears in the wilderness by the river Jordan. He draws the people out from behind their gates, from behind their walls to enter a threshold territory, to take a risk. So, you might remember that the river Jordan was the boundary that the ancient Israelites crossed over after they had been wondering in the wilderness for forty years. They crossed the river Jordan into the promised land. By baptizing in that river, John recalls a time before there were temples in Jerusalem, before there were synagogues, a time when the Israelites were strangers in the land of their ancestors. And he’s calling them to stand at that threshold again and to repent and re-enter the promised land with a new vision.

So, as we approach the 300th anniversary of the founding of the parish of St. George’s, we too are called to repent, to examine ourselves, and renew our vision so that we might continue to bear the good fruit. And it might help us to remember that there was a time before this building ever existed, a time when this parish was founded when there are hardly anything at all, and from that came centuries of ministry. During our anniversary we will tell the stories of our historic past, stories of glory, and stories that remind us of our ongoing need to repent, and we will also celebrate the ministry of the present. For a few weeks now, we’ve had brochures in the pew that talk about our 300th anniversary and the ways that you can get involved in it. Our Communications Commission worked hard this year to create a beautiful calendar to help us mark the next eighteen months, beginning in January, and on the cover is this painting by St. Georgian Elizabeth Seaver. Many of you have wondered about this, what’s this bird doing on the church? In some ways, this bird represents sort of the Holy Spirit, sort of the wings of the Spirit covering God’s people, inviting everyone into this space. As I’ve meditated on this image, part of what has come to me is that part of what the mother bird does is kick the young ones out of the next. So maybe part of what’s going on here is that the Spirit is also sending us out into the world to cross the thresholds again. So, during this celebration we will also pray and talk about our future.

What is our mission, and how is God pushing us out into the neighborhood? Because we can’t rest on the legacy of our ancestors, we can’t just assume that because people know our steeple and recognize the bell chiming out the hours of the day that they will recognize the love of God in Christ that we show. We can’t assume that just because the founders of the city sleep in our graveyard that the citizens today are coming to know the love of God in Christ through us. We do make a big impact in Fredericksburg, St. George’s does, but it’s still a good time to listen with fresh ears to the voices of our neighbors, maybe the neighbors we don’t know yet, asking where is the Holy Spirit sending us next? This is part of the work of our young adult missioner David Casey, Pastor David, as he is going out to the college campuses and connecting with young adults in our community who are yearning to make a difference and have a lot to say. In your bulletin today, don’t look now. I know you’re tempted to get it out and start reading it during the sermon, but there is an insert that lists just a few of the ministry highlights of the past year. This is just a small sample of the many ways both welcoming inward and going outward that we are about our mission.

So many things going on, and as we live into this threshold time, we also might see ourselves standing on the threshing room floor. John the Baptist warns that the Messiah is coming who will clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into the granary. Like many of you, I’m not a farmer so I had to learn more about what the threshing floor actually meant. The threshing floor is the place where the farmer would beat the protective outer chaff apart from the inner kernels of wheat, and then the farmer would toss it all into the air with this winnowing fork so the chaff would blow away in the wind. So, what are the aspects of our parish life that continue to be the wheat, the kernels of our life? And what might be the chaff which has had its use, but now we can let go of it? During my sabbatical this summer I thought a lot about what’s wheat and what’s chaff, what’s essential, and what could I let go of. While I was away our clergy and church staff also wrestled with these questions of how much there is to do, and what’s essential, and how can we let go of some things. In that process there were new people who were involved in ministry, particularly pastoral care. Thanks be to God for the many ways our parish thrived during my and John’s sabbaticals over the summer. Thanks again to everyone who took on additional roles. I’m particularly grateful to Pastor Areeta who took on many of my roles, and it is a joy to share in the priestly ministry of this place with her. She’s blessing us with her considerable gifts.

So, what is wheat, and what is chaff? This may be a question you’ve asked in your own lives. It’s not always an easy discernment. Last February we revealed our new St. George’s branding, a new logo and bulletin and web formats. The purpose of this work has been and continues to be making it easier for people to recognize our message, to receive it, and to share it. So, in that re-design of our bulletin we looked for ways that we might simplify, and we took out the list of the weekly worship servers and the staff and the vestry, which took up a lot of room. I thought it might be something we could let go of. We got a lot of feedback from people who use that list as a way to connect with those who are serving and learn their names and talk to them after the service. I actually got a written petition from the Episcopal Church Women about this. When you get a written petition from women in their 70s and 80s, yeah. It’s hard in a congregation our size to know each other. So, we have heard you, we have listened, and we’ve added a new insert to the bulletin with the servers and the staff and the vestry. And I especially want to thank Laurel Loch, our parish administrator and communications director, for the amazing amount of work she has done to bring us into this rebranding process to clarify and enhance our communications and help us transition to these new formats with a lot of grace. So many of you wanted that bulletin insert to know each other better, and, yes, we need to know each other better. This is one of the main challenges we face, and we know each other better not just so that we can say hi on the street, and that’s important, but it helps you so the ministry doesn’t have to be from the top down but can be from the bottom up. And so I challenge us to reach out across the pews and across the aisles, across the services and get to know each other and tell us what you need to help you get to know each other.

Here’s an example of what can happen when people get to know each other. There is a new ministry in our community called SAWS Virginia, and it was born in St. George’s in many ways from members who were nurtured and nourished through this church and supported by our staff and ministry leaders, and who are now building wheelchair ramps for home-bound disabled persons in our community. And it doesn’t say St. George’s on it, but it is an amazing example of how people can connect in a place like this and go out and do amazing things in Jesus’ name beyond the church walls.

So, that bulletin insert, it also teaches us something about stewardship. Although it may not seem like much, it’s just a small sheet of paper, the cost of the staff time spent producing it, the additional materials, and the copying costs we calculated come to about $50 a Sunday, $2,600 per year. Or you can break it down the other way and say roughly 12 cents a person on an average Sunday. As we stand at the threshold of our church growing, we do need to be more transparent about the resources that we need to support our mission. Thanks be to God for all the ways that you all are giving of your resources to support that mission, the ways you give that support the large and the small details of our ministry together. Your financial generosity has allowed us to grow.

Over the five years that I have been your rector, you have grown in your giving, and our staff has grown too. The work they do has grown. I think you all know, but we have an amazing staff. I wish I could tell a personal story about every one of them, our two full-time clergy, our two part-time clergy, our four full-time lay staff, and nine part-time lay staff, including two that work almost full-time on a non-stipendiary basis. And add to that our nursery care givers and our preschool teachers. And yet we often find ourselves feeling stretched thin. The reality is that for a big church we are operating on a medium-sized budget. So, for our 2020 budget, the personnel committee of the vestry studied our staffing and listened to the voices of ministry teams and is proposing some additional staff positions that I want to tell you about.

One is a part-time communications assistant who will help with all the additional communications that are going to be a part of the 300th anniversary. Another is a part-time Grace in Action coordinator to help organize the volunteers and the resources for The Table and the community dinners and other ministries with our neighbors on the margins. Another is a full-time facility director to oversee the care of our buildings and grounds from top to bottom as they’re used seven days a week, often from morning until night, and the extensive maintenance that comes along with having an older building. We have tons of volunteers that I’m going to talk about in a minute. And our volunteers, they want and they need our staff, the support of our staff. In a time when many organizations are leaning on the same people and overworking people to do more with less, I want to be an organization that strives to work sustainably with the right amount of volunteers, the right amount of staff, to model an organization with faithful balance. So, in order to do this, we are going to need to continue to grow in our giving. And the vestry has hired a consultant who will help us over the next year to better connect with our supporters to communicate our thanks and tell the story of our ministries, and that consultant will guide us as we look ahead to next fall when we will have a capital campaign to fund our long-term infrastructure improvements.

I’m going to say two additional quick things about the stewardship. One is we currently have a deficit for this year, and we can close it by all of our folks who are currently pledging giving of their offerings before the end of the year. And the second is that if you are able to increase your pledge for 2020, that growth will help our ministry grow toward balance and sustainability. We need you to let us know soon if you’re able to do that as we are planning the budget for next year, and we want to balance the budget next year.

So, let’s talk about volunteers who really are signs of God’s grace in action in this place. Thanks be to God for the many people giving of their time and their talents in small ways, in great ways. I wish I could thank all of you by name because you are the primary ministers of this place. You are. We’re just here to help. I do want to name a few individuals whose ministry has crossed a threshold, who are stepping back after years of dedicated service. Many of us saw Linda Carter, Linda Miller, and Chris Cook, otherwise known as the LLC, they were featured in the Free Lance Stars as difference makers in our community. They have been champions of our weekly feeding ministry known as The Table for years. Linda Carter and Chris Cook are both taking a step back from their roles that sometimes have had them here full-time. We thank them. Many of you don’t know Dot Morris, but Dot is one of our altar guild members who’s stepping back after many years of faithful service supporting our Wednesday noon Eucharist. I got permission to tell you this, by the way. It’s hart for her to step back, but it’s just time. And hers is an example of the kind of humble ministry that so many quietly and faithfully contribute toward the mission of sharing the love of God in Christ.

Later in the service we will elect four new vestry members and thank the four members of our vestry who are ending their terms. And I give thanks to the vestry volunteers for their continuing service overseeing the stewardship of our resources, connecting with all of our ministry groups, and discerning where God is calling us. I have to especially thank Marilyn Farrington, this year’s senior warden, who is also crossing the threshold as she ends her service. Marilyn supported our staff and the parish this summer significantly while I was away on sabbatical. As she ends her service, she’s still chairing, along with Lisa Durham, the 300th anniversary committee. She’s been a champion of champions in recruiting others to help. There are so many others that I wish that I could name. I will draw your attention to the Stephen Ministry little flyer in your pew this Sunday as an example of those quiet but powerful volunteers at work. There are so many others I wish I had time to name. Thank you and thanks be to God for your offering.

If you’re wondering to yourself, how do I get more involved? Just ask, and sometimes you might have to ask a second time. We’re trying to clarify the process by which people go from being newcomers to offering their gifts in ministry, and I want to thank Pastor Bob for offering an important workshop in spiritual gifts discernment two times this year that has resulted in people finding joyful ways to offer themselves in God’s service.

So, as I’m getting ready to close, I promise I’m getting ready to close, let me say that this threshold space, this waiting space, this Advent space, this is Holy space. This is where God works in our lives as a community and in our individual lives. As I said, you might be facing a threshold in your life. Well, now’s the time to claim that as Holy time, a Holy opportunity. So, as we prepare to cross the threshold into a fourth century of ministry in this community, now is the time for us to renew our commitment to being God’s Holy people. So, I want you to start thinking now about what you’re going to do during the 300th anniversary to ground those celebrations in faith. I’m putting out the challenge, putting out the challenge that we would read the entire Bible over the course of the 300th anniversary. It can be done in roughly 300 minutes a month, 10 minutes a day. We’ll be sharing more about that challenge. What is the challenge that will make a difference for you as we live into this Advent threshold time?

In the coming year between now and next November when we’ll cross another threshold, I want to claim this Holy space, this is Holy space, where we cannot allow the bitterness of politics to disintegrate our bonds of affection for each other and distract us from our mission. Our primary allegiance is to Christ, and that means if we disagree, and that’s okay if we do, we can do so with kindness and with care. We can listen to each other with love. We will continue to pursue justice and truth, and we may not always agree on how we pursue that, but we can do that with the love of Christ because in this Holy place, it is more important to reveal Christ to each other than to prove we are right. And if you are ever concerned about messages that you hear in this place, please say something. Too often I hear of people quietly upset. I want to invite us to share our concerns, to take the risk of opening our hearts so that we can grow in our understanding and so that we can practice loving each other. Our doors are open. We want to listen.

The hymn we sang at the beginning of this service says, “On Jordan’s bank, the Baptist’s cry announces that the Lord is nigh.” Someone told me after the 7:45 this is like a Baptist sermon, it was getting on pretty long, so I am bringing it to a close. Christ is coming. We stand on the threshold of that return. We are an Advent people, waiting to see how Christ will lead us into a new creation, preparing for the mission God has for us here and now, a mission that we have already been on for a long time but that is being revealed to us in new ways. As we wait, as we watch, as we hope together, may we with the prophets of old proclaim the good and the challenging news that the kingdom of heaven is coming near.

Beautiful Proportion – Sermon from September 29, 2019

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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.