Category: Sermons

Second Sunday of Pentecost – Bill Harkins

Luke 1:39-57

1:39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country,

1:40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit

1:42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

1:43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

1:44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.

1:45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

1:46 And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord,

1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

In the Name of the God of Creation, who loves us all…Amen.

Grace and peace to each of you on this Second Sunday after Pentecost, and welcome to Holy Family…we are so glad you are here. On Friday of this week we in the Episcopal Church observed the Visitation of Mary to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth. These Feast Days often occur mid-week, so it isn’t always the case that we observe them on Sunday. Today, I’d like to focus on this beloved story in our heritage because like Mary, we too are waiting, and hoping in this season of transition. And this asks us to be resilient and courageous too.

In the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, we are presented with two women living in expectation. Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary, with Jesus, both of whom embody the hopes and expectations of Israel. Theirs was not a passive waiting, but rather one full of promise. In his essay “A Spirituality of Waiting,” Henri Nouwen writes: “People who have to wait have received a promise that allows them to wait. They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow.” This kind of waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. Rather, it is a movement from something to something more. We, too, are in a season of waiting for something to be born…for something new to grow in this sacred place.

Back in Advent Pete and June Giglio graciously hosted the choir at their lovely home, and we sang what is actually one of my favorite Advent Hymns, “Mary Did You Know?” It’s a lovely hymn, but for the first time it occurred to me that this hymn is an example of “man-splaining” if ever there was one—that is, the assumption that until a man explains something to or about women, nobody else will get it. In any case, if the author of this hymn had read, or remembered the passage from Luke for this past Friday, he would have known that, of course, Mary did know—and she knew in ways no one of my gender could fully understand.

I hope it’s not too irreverent to think of this meeting of Mary and Elizabeth as a first-century baby shower of sorts. It was a gathering like 21^st-century baby showers in some ways; pregnant women and their friends and family, getting together to support one another. Conversation that runs the gamut from the mundane to the monumental aspects of pregnancy and motherhood: cravings, hopes, and fears about a new role in life, which pediatrician to choose, and so on. Having been on the periphery of many such gatherings I can tell you that countries have been founded on less.

In other ways Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting was not like any shower I’ve ever been to—that is, when I was invited. There were only two women present, and the only gifts exchanged were those from God: an awareness of their place in salvation history, and the guiding, inspiring presence of the Holy Spirit in living out their roles. The other key difference is that the impact of this meeting extends many centuries into the future, to the present day, in several significant ways. This scene is part of a larger, overarching story of salvation. The overarching story line with which Luke opens his gospel is the story of John and Jesus, the relationship of the forerunner of the Messiah (John the Baptist) and the Messiah, Israel’s expectation and its arrival. The two stories of John and Jesus intersect in the meeting of their mothers. This meeting draws on prior themes in the traditions of bold women in Israel’s history and it reaches into the present to inspire us, men and women alike, with boldness today.

It’s significant that this is a scene the two women meet and converse without the presence of any male character (other than their unborn babies). Biblical scholar Richard Bauckham points out that the Bible is an “androcentric narrative” or male focused, and as such rarely includes scenes in which women appear together without men (51). There are some exceptions to that rule; several “women only” passages we find in the Hebrew Bible (from Bauckham, 51): this includes the lovely story of Ruth and Naomi in the Book of Ruth—Ruth refuses to leave Naomi in a deeply moving and compelling story, and the two travel from Moab to Judah and amicably work out the details of their future in a new land.

Well, I am so very grateful to have had female role models who were fiercely smart and independent, and to be married to a thoughtful, strong, and compassionate woman who is in many ways my superior. Our two sons have found bright and remarkable wives, and we now have two granddaughters who are such a joy to this father and grandfather—who learns from them all, every day, about seeing the world through their eyes. Here at Holy Family women are so often at the heart of our parish life in so many ways, leading, forming, teaching, serving on our vestry and nominating committee, caring for others and tending to this flock that is our beloved parish. For several weeks now a group of women have been learning together about women in history whose spiritual lives have inspired generations. We have added three

For a long time now, I have wondered what MARY might think about the passage from Luke’s Gospel. During the Evensong service in our tradition, the choir sings the Magnificat or, “the Song of Mary,” also derived from Luke’s Gospel. Once, as our choir sang this in the lovely way they do, I had what might be described as a vision of sorts. The vision, or daydream, was that I was watching the scene we just heard read, in the Gospel for today, from Mary’s perspective. And I heard those words of grace and forgiveness just as you must have heard them. I realized that every time I have imagined this, my thoughts eventually lead to that day on Calvary. I have imagined myself on some distant hill, watching from afar. Why? Would I, like others who loved Jesus, have been afraid, and kept my distance, when Mary and the other women remained steadfast and fully present there beneath the cross? And what’s more, how do I know I would not have been on either Jesus’ left or right. As my ordination brother Thee Smith reminds me, quoting Terence the Playwright, “Because I am human, nothing human is alien to me.” Perhaps I need to be prepared move closer to the cross, one way or the other. I wonder if during that time Mary spent with Sarah you had any idea how your life would unfold. I wonder what it’s like to look back on it now. I wonder.

And then I remembered a song by someone named John Prine, a songwriter and singer whom we lost not too long ago. It may be that thinking about John Prine during the Magnificat, as the incense fills the air, is like going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but bear with me. In one of his lovely songs he imagines what it would be like to be an old woman. He was intrigued by the idea of “a song about a woman who feels even older than she is.” And he had a vivid picture of this woman standing over the sink with soap in her hands…She wanted to get out of her house and her difficult life, filled with pain, and loss. “She just wanted an angel to come to take her away from all this, Prine once said.” The song goes like this:

I am an old woman named after my mother

my old man is another child that’s grown old.

If dreams were lightning, if thunder was desire

   This old house would have burnt down a long time ago.

Make me an angel who flies from Montgomery.

Make me a poster from an old rodeo.

Just give me one thing I can hold on to;

to believe in this living is just a hard way to go.

Somehow, remembering this song helped me to imagine Mary’s life—almost as if I were standing in her shoes….almost, that is, as if viewing the world through her eyes, imagining how she might be feeling. And so I wondered about the view of the cross from the ground up real close, where Mary and the other women were that day.

I recalled these lines, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” Perhaps by staying in Jerusalem, Mary was teaching us, reluctant students that we are, that paradoxically it is through acknowledging and living into our vulnerability that we find courage, and what peace we may find.

I wonder if Mary stayed in Jerusalem because God’s own self remained just enough in the dust of the streets and the resilient mud of the walls to keep her deeply connected to the one to whom she gave birth. And the one whom you saw die here. You must have asked, as we are asking this morning in our season of watching, and waiting, and hoping, “Where am I? Where is my spiritual journey taking me?” I wonder, were Isaiah’s words in Mary’s heart? For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. ¹⁸But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.

I hope Mary was able to find joy in Jerusalem. She had so much perseverance. She must have longed for justice, and for hope, and perhaps that is what sustained her and what sustains us all, come to that, for hope is a good thing. It may be the best of things. Did she remember the words of Jeremiah? The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. ⁶In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” I have so many questions about how Mary and Joseph managed all that they did, in a time when women were stoned for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and when the father was in question…a time when women were marginalized in so many ways. It is a story available to us all, in our own brokenness and vulnerability and deep fragile beauty, and our miraculous capacity for compassion. And that’s it, really, isn’t it? Compassion means to suffer with another, and to do justice in response to that suffering. It is no surprise that the Hebrew for compassion is Rachamim—which means “womb-ish” or womb-like. And so it was that the one who taught us compassion grew in you, and it is in God’s womb-like embrace that each of us is held, and in that image that we are created. And so it is that we, too, are called to do justice, and seek mercy, and walk humbly, just as Mary did, and as her son taught us. We need mercy, and justice, and forgiveness in this season.

So I imagine Mary in her old age, and I imagine her knowing that her son belongs to everyone. I pray that one day, God made her an angel, and she was able to fly. I pray that we might have even a fraction of her resilience and faith in our journeys in the ministries to which we have been called as the Body of Christ. It’s the inner journey that’s essential as we seek to be Christ-bearers. And I give thanks for the strong, resilient women in my life, and in this parish. Thank you for your steadfast faithfulness among us. As the mystic Meister Eckhart said, “What is the good if Mary gave birth to the son of God two thousand years ago if I do not give birth to the son of God today? We are all meant to be mothers of God. For God is always needing to be born.” And we are called, each in our own way, to prepare the way in our own hearts first. I am grateful for Mary, who taught us something about how to do this faithfully and well. Amen.

Trinity Sunday – Bill Harkins

John 3:1-17

3:1 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.

3:2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” 3:3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 3:4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 3:5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 3:6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 3:7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 3:8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 3:9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 3:10 Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? 3:11 “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 3:12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 3:13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 3:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 3:15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 3:17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Grace to you and peace, and welcome to Holy Family on this Trinity Sunday in this season of Pentecost, and on a morning when we hear a Gospel text providing us with nothing less than a template for transformation. If you are visiting today, please let us know, and regardless, we are so very glad you are here. Today we observe Trinity Sunday, a day set apart in the life of our church to reflect on the nature of God, and on our experience of being in relationship with God, with ourselves, and with others. Although the history of the great doctrinal councils of the fourth and fifth centuries regarding the Trinity is rich and interesting in its own way—as much for contentious debates as for the conclusions reached—it all comes down to this truth: the Trinity reveals that the essence of God is found in relationship, and we are created by God to be in relationship with God, and with one another. And we are called to go forth in love, with the comforting assurance of the Spirit as our advocate and comforter.

Indeed, as advances in neuroscience are now showing us, it’s written in our very DNA that we are creatures of relationship—and maybe even of compassion. But to explain the trinity is not now nor has it ever been easy. Indeed, it strikes fear in the hearts of preachers, and with good reason. St. Augustine once said that anyone who denies the trinity is in danger of losing his salvation, and anyone who tries to explain it is in danger of losing his mind. I don’t agree with the first proposition, but I can relate to the second! A few years ago at the Cathedral, a family with three teen-aged children approached me in the Narthex after one of the services, and said that one of the children, a bright and inquisitive young theologian of 14-15 years, had a question about the Trinity. I desperately looked around for a colleague to whom I might suggest she speak, and seeing none, asked the young lady what her question was. She promptly, confidently asked: “How is it possible for God be God, and at the same time be the Son, and the Spirit? In the Garden of Gethsemane, was Jesus praying to himself?” Then she looked at me imploringly, and with utter earnestness, confident that one of her priests could answer her question. I was momentarily silenced, but then, out of nowhere, I said, “Think of the Trinity as being like water. Water can take on three forms: solid, and liquid, and steam, and yet it is the same element. By analogy, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also take on three forms, yet are one in the same.” I waited for what seemed an eternity, holding my breath, and she said “OK…now I understand. Thank you.” And she turned away satisfied. I kept waiting for her to come back to tell me that this analogy only goes so far—that it breaks down because temperature produces only one of these at any given time, actually leading to a false doctrine of the Trinity, suggesting that it’s only one person taking on one of three forms at any given time….and, well, you get the idea. This can be really tough.

Often in this season, including the Feast of the Holy Trinity, we are reminded that we are called by our vocation to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ, who emptied and humbled himself on the cross. This emptying, we imagine, might even result in our being born again, like Nicodemus. The Greek word for emptying is kenosis, and means relinquishing our ego control and our ultimate authority. As a psychologist, I can tell you that from a clinical perspective this is not easily done. When we mark ourselves with the symbol of powerless submission I need to be reminded what this really means. I’d rather not give up control, and yet it is precisely the vulnerability that comes with doing so that leads to humility, and grace. And giving up control, as we know from the deep wisdom to be found in any 12-step process, is a form of suffering. After many years of benefitting from Al-Anon support for those with addicted family members, I have reduced the 12 steps to four: show up, pay attention, speak my truth, and let go of attachment to outcomes we cannot control. That fourth step creates an emptiness that can be life-giving, if we allow the Holy Spirit in Her wisdom to be poured into that space. And, this can lead to endurance, and character, and hope. And hope, as we know, is a good thing…indeed it may be the best of things.

And, my friends, we may need to walk for a time in darkness to fully understand what this means. Yet, this is exactly where Jesus would have us be – emptying ourselves, coming out of darkness into light, and promising that he will be with us regardless. Like everything else about him, the way Jesus died—the cross we observe—represents the paradoxical way he asks us to live. Marked as Christ’s own forever, we are marked with the real suffering of a broken world and we are called to heal it from our own vulnerable places, with compassion. Sometimes this can be scary, because vulnerability is the road to compassion, it is often accompanied by the shadow of defensiveness, and this compromises our self awareness.

When I was a freshman at Rhodes College I was befriended by a track teammate who was a year ahead of me. I was scared, and lonely, and I had left far behind my high-school sweetheart and football teammates—most of whom were at local schools back in my home state—for a small liberal arts college 8 hours away. My new friend Mark sensed my isolation, and during our training runs that fall he was a steadfast and reliable companion. He had a lively and delightful sense of humor. We were both there because we wanted to learn in an academically rigorous context, and we loved to run. Both of us had given up the gridiron for track, and he was a wonderful distance runner who would go on to run a 2:38 marathon at Boston in April of 1992. In February of that year a cancerous lymph node was removed, and still he qualified for the Boston marathon. In early summer the cancer returned, and after a clinical trial at NIH, by December he was gone. In typical care-giver fashion, I responded to the loss of my friend by over-functioning in relation to our beloved running community. After giving Mark’s eulogy at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, I drove home and went back to work. Over-functioning in this way is one of my golden calves, so cleverly disguised in various professional roles—and often connected to my need for control. In my pain I withdrew, and I would not let anyone in. I needed to allow my grief to do its own good grief work—to begin to let suffering lead to endurance, but I would not acknowledge this to myself, or to anyone else.

One day, late in the fall of the following year, I drove to the mountains, alone, and set out running on a trail near Amicalola Falls, near the beginning—or end—of the Appalachian Trail, and just around the corner from Holy Family as the crow flies. Mark and I had run the same trails together often over the years, and we loved the freedom from urban streets, and the gift of God’s presence, the sheer wildness of the southern Appalachians. Although the day had dawned cool and clear, a fierce low pressure system churned up the east coast while cold air poured in from the west. It began to grow cloudy, and the wind began to blow through the high passes beneath Springer Mountain. As today’s Gospel reminds us, “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  Soon, it began to rain. Running on, I reached a spot called Nimblewill Gap where 5 trails intersect, like spokes in a mountainous wheel spinning off in different directions. There, the wind blew through the gap, driving the now steady rain. My map—in those days prior to GPS, now useless, dissolved in my hands, and in my confusion I took the wrong trail. Hypothermia was beginning to set in as the temperature fell and the wind and rain made that declination all the worse. I realized I was completely lost, and that darkness would be upon me in due course. Where am I going? I wondered, and how did I get here?

Suddenly, around the bend on the rutted forest service road an old, battered pick-up truck appeared. I waved it down, and inside sat a farmer and Deacon at lovely High Shoals Baptist Church, which I had passed miles, and what by now had been hours, before. He was as worn and weathered as his truck, looked as old as Abraham, and extended his hand…”Name of J.R. Chester,” he said. I told him I was lost. “Climb in, son” he instructed, opening the passenger side door. Inside, the truck smelled of leather, and wool, and oil, and it was blessedly warm and brought back dear memories of my paternal grandfather’s hardware store. He asked me, “Son, what are you doing so far from home on such a miserable day.” And my story came pouring out: the death of my friend, the unremitting grief, and the isolation that led me to run alone on mountain trails. I was sad, and I was angry with God, and I missed my friend. The old man just listened. And, somehow, there in the warmth of that old truck and in the care of a compassionate stranger, I began to feel something shift in my soul—it was almost like…I would say it was exactly like an emptying out—a kenosis. As we made our way over the muddy roads, in the growing darkness, and the wind, and the pouring rain, down the mountain and back to my car many miles away, I began to come back to life, and to feel some sense of healing and restoration, and with it, some sense of courage, and resilience, and hope. This chance encounter with a fellow sojourner—a shepherd of sorts, offered me hospitality. In so doing, he allowed me to name my lament out loud, to become reconciled to myself, and to those whom I had cut off, including God, and return to relationship, to express and experience gratitude.

In so doing I began to embark on a journey into a new country, a journey less Odyssean than Abrahamic, the outcome of which was uncertain, but was, to be sure, no longer one of despair. We finally arrived at my car, and as he let me out of the truck, the old man said “Well, son, it looks like we’ve gotten you back home.” “Yes sir,” I said, “In more ways than you know. Thank you.” And, it was a home to which I arrived, as TS Eliot said so well, only to know it for the first time.

There is a lovely African American spiritual, the words of which go something like this: Deep River, My home is over Jordan. Deep river, Lord. I want to cross over into campground. As I drove back to Atlanta, to my wife and sons, to that precious linen on the altar in the world woven of the grace-filled threads of relationships I had almost lost, I remembered a last conversation with Mark, weeks before he died. I told him how much I would miss him. “Keep running the Peachtree Road Race for us both, “he said. And I promised I would. And so I have. God willing this July will be my 48^th consecutive PRR. And then he said something I will never forget. “God put us here to learn, and to love, and to be thankful. I have had so much love,” he said. “Yes, there are so many who love you,” I replied, “and I am among them my brother.” “What I mean,” he said, “is that I have had so much love to give, to so many. And that is how we are fully alive. And I am so grateful. “Gratitude, that’s the word. And that is what my friend Mark knew and tried to teach me as he emptied himself, and came into the light. Now, I run primarily for relationships. Campground is that home to which we come, and know for the first time, and where we are willing to risk the vulnerability that comes with being reconciled, with not cutting ourselves off from God’s Creation when our hearts are broken. It is that broken place from which we extend compassion…for others, and for ourselves. Rabbi and family therapist Ed Friedman once said that grief that is not transformed is transmitted. I had been transmitting my grief, and I am so grateful for the gift of relationships with Mark, and Mr. JR Chester, a stranger, and shepherd, who taught me something about how to transform my grief. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit, who guides our journey as we allow the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus, even if we have to walk for a time in darkness to become children of light. On that journey we may find some measure of suffering, endurance, character, and hope. Thanks, be to God. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs– in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

`In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

The sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ “

In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen…Good morning, and welcome to our beloved Holy Family on this Pentecost Sunday. Today brings to a close the Easter season, and the Feast of the Pentecost is the liturgical marker of Christ’s promise to send the Holy Spirit among us. It was, after all, the occasion of his Baptism on which he received the Holy Spirit, a Spirit that henceforth informed every action of his earthly ministry. On the Day of Pentecost, the power of the Spirit was given to the community of faith—the disciples, wherever they might be gathered—to remain with them for all time.

As we heard read so well in today’s passage from Acts, the disciples were gathered together in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, as it was known among Greek-speaking Jews. This festival occurred fifty days after Passover, and was originally an agricultural festival in which the first harvests of the season were offered. Over time it became an opportunity to commemorate the giving of the Laws to Moses at Sinai as well, so this festival day was significant indeed. On this particular day, ten days after the Ascension of Christ, the disciples were no doubt scared, and sad—grieving the loss of their risen Lord. I imagine that they were still uncertain as to the true nature of the events swirling around them. I wasn’t there of course, but in my imagination I hear them saying one to another, “Where do we go from here?” On some level, they must have felt abandoned, and wondered, “What do we do now?” Like most of us, I know what it is like to be in search of meaning, and purpose, and to be afraid. I suspect we all know how this feels. And we sometimes ask ourselves, “What do I do now…where do I go from here?” This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, as Eliot reminds us in this brief poem:

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

In a real sense, the Day of Pentecost is the final, answering verse in the tone poem that is the Paschal Mystery—that process of transformation by which we are given new life, new spirit, and a new way of looking at the lives we lead. And it is fitting that Pentecost brings us full circle in the liturgical cycle of Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. In this sense, following Eliot’s musings, we come back home to arrive where we started, and know what it means to be at home with God for the first time. But what does this mean, really? I want to suggest that it involves our grieving what is past and what has died or needs to die, followed by a period of waiting and hoping, then claiming and living into our new births, and finally accepting the spirit of the life that we are in fact already living. We see this process writ large in our liturgical year, especially in the cycle of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter, and Pentecost. The disciples went through each of these stages, and on the day of Pentecost so long ago, we are told that “a sound like the rush of a violent wind…filled the entire house where they were sitting….All of them filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Now, we know that one interpretation of the Holy Spirit is that this is the one who comforts us. I find it fascinating that the root of the word “orphan” in its Latin form means “one without comfort.” So, in precisely this sense, the Holy Spirit is one who comes to comfort us, and serves as an Advocate for God, who has adopted all of us in the Spirit of Baptism. As Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. In other words, until our restless hearts are finally at home in and with God, we are orphans, among those without true comfort, without a home. That house where the disciples were gathered on the Feast Day of Pentecost was in this sense an orphanage, into which the wind of the Spirit blew, and they were filled with the Spirit and adopted by that Spirit and in this way, they, and we and the whole church, were transformed. I invite you to picture a time and place in which you felt at home, and safe, and where you experienced, perhaps even despite loss and grief, a sense of the peace of God. And, I invite you to consider with me the implications for our lives of relationships like this, those sacred moments in which the gift of love, breathed upon us by the Holy Spirit in Her wisdom, can transform our lives.

When I was growing up my maternal grandparents had a small farm in north Fulton County in what was then very much the country. It had a pond, and a small lake, and acres of fields and woods with streams, wildlife, and a large garden to which they lovingly tended. The land was in many ways a sanctuary for me, in no small part because of my grandmother. I would spend hours fishing, or walking with the dogs in the woods, or lying in the hammock, or sitting by the fire reading. My grandmother was always glad to see me. She was never preoccupied with my academics, or how many touchdowns I had scored, or the other daily concerns of my—at times—too-busy adolescence. I spent as much time there as I could. Often I would whistle up the dogs and be gone for hours in the woods. And always, upon my return, there would be on the dining room table a piece of her homemade pound cake and a cold glass of milk. It was almost like—I would say exactly like this gift was an outward and visible sign of her love and care. Through her pound cake she seemed to say, “I am glad you are here, and you are home, and here you are loved.” From time to time she would ask me to help her make the pound cake—she knew I liked to cook, in part because she had taught me how—and she often said that someday I would need to write the recipe down, because she knew it by heart and did not have it in written form. As the years went by, I married and had children of my own who also loved to visit there. And one year, while we were living in Tennessee and visiting the farm, she called me into the kitchen. She wanted me to watch her as she made pound cake, and write down exactly what she did, just the way she did it, and take the recipe back to Tennessee. She was insistent, and persistent, and I did as I was told. It was to be the last time I ever saw her. Months later, sitting out on the front porch after her funeral, I tried to imagine my life without her in it. It seemed a much-diminished world. And then suddenly I made the connection with our last visit. There was no pound cake on the table this time, but she had, through her persistence and out of her love for me, provided me with a gift of grace–the means to create it myself and the desire to do so. Yes, and to share it with those whom I love and others as well, in times perhaps of sorrow or joy. Today’s Gospel is just like this, and our lives can be like this too.

This is wonderful, I found myself thinking, and it perfectly describes how the work of the Holy Spirit, our comforter and advocate, gently guides us in the direction of God’s sustaining, nourishing, and healing presence, piecing our lives back together no matter the damage.

Diane Ackerman, writing in a New York Times editorial, suggests that what we are learning is that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life, just as the windows at Westminster were lovingly replaced. When we participate in loving relationships, for example, just holding your partner’s hand is enough to subdue blood pressure, ease stress, improve mental health, and even lessen pain. “In the end,” Ackerman writes, “what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.” A baby’s first attachments imprint its brain, but this is not the end of it by any means. This neural alchemy continues throughout our lives. Supportive relationships, neuroscience is teaching us, across the life-cycle, are the most robust predictors of medical and mental health, happiness, and even forms of wisdom. In short, loving relationships can alter our brains. This includes our loving relationship with God, and our worship in spaces just like this one. We now know that spiritual practices such as mindfulness meditation and centering prayer can change our neural pathways and neurochemistry, and that acts of compassion inform who, and whose, we become. The brain changes with experience throughout our lives, and it’s in the context of loving relationships of all kinds—partners, spouses, children, parents, close friends, parishioners, and yes, dear one’s, the Holy Spirit leading us, turning us, to God—that brain and body really thrive.

So, there it is. We can respond to the Disciples’ questions, which are after all ours too—“Where do we go…what do we do now?” by turning to one another in love. If you’re in a committed, loving relationship to another—including a relationship with God—this can change your life. What we bear witness to in Baptism, and in the Eucharist, is a commitment to this community and to that love, God’s love, which binds us together. We can turn, like sunflowers in a Kansas field, and face the source of love, and compassion, and our best selves. “Practice Resurrection,” the poet Wendell Berry wrote, and that may begin with reaching out in hospitality and love, to others. And that’s how the “better angels of our nature” come to us, become part of us, sustain and transform us, with the help of the Holy Spirit, throughout the long green season of Pentecost, and beyond. Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins

John 17:6-19

17:6 “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 17:7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 17:8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 17:9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 17:10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 17:11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 17:12 While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. 17:13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 17:14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17:15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 17:16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17:17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 17:18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 17:19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. Good morning friends, and welcome to Holy Family on this Seventh Sunday of Easter. I am glad you are here. In the passage for this Sunday, we hear a heartfelt passage as Jesus looks to the heavens, praying for his friends. Surrounded by his loved ones, Jesus begs God to watch out for his friends while he’s gone. “I am asking on their behalf,” Jesus says as he offers his supplication. “Now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” He pleads for God to “protect them in your name.” With both crucifixion and ascension on the horizon, the thought of being gone, and his awareness of this comes from his soul; “While I was with them, I protected them,” he says to the stars, “I guarded them.” For the third time in this short passage, Jesus pleads for God’s protection— using the same word again and again. He has lived his life for them—“for their sakes”—and now glimpses a future without them. His spirit is in pain because he can’t imagine being away from them; “you in me, and I in you.” All of this is a very difficult trail to be on.

Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century theologian, is compelling in her vision of Jesus’ thirst for reunion with his friends. “We are his joy,” she writes in chapter 31 of the long text of Revela­tions of Divine Love:

“He has longed to have us.” Julian explains: “For this is the spiritual thirst of Christ, the love-longing that lasts and ever shall do until we see that revelation…. Therefore it seems to me that this is his thirst: a love-longing to have us all together, wholly in himself for his delight.

As Julian says, Jesus thirsts for companionship with us. We are his delight. Our union with him is his hope, and his burden. “For that same longing and thirst which he had on the cross—a longing and thirst which it seems to me had been in him from eternity—those he still has,” Julian comments on the passion of Christ, “and shall have until the time when the last soul which is to be saved has come up into his bliss.” On this Mother’s Day we give thanks for all who have been mothers to us—including Julian of Norwich and her many spiritual sisters.  Christian theology is in this sense a love story. “For God so loved the world,” the Gospel of John declares at the beginning (3:16). That love is Jesus. And in chapter 17 he reveals that his heart beats with this longing for communion with us. This love proclaims the truth of the gospel, the truth about us: that we are the beloved of God, and that in Christ the eternal love of God longs for connection with us.

In his wonderful book “Tattoos on the Heart,” Father Greg Boyle, recently awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom, tells of his work with “Homeboy Industries,” a gang-intervention program in Los Angeles. In one chapter he quotes Mother Teresa, who said that most of the world’s ills can be traced to the fact that we have forgotten that we belong to each other. With kinship as a goal, Boyle says, we would no longer be promoting justice, we would be celebrating it. Boyle describes kinship as a “circle of compassion… outside of which no one is standing, and we gradually move ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there,” he says, “with those whose dignity has been denied…we locate ourselves among the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join with the easily despised…we situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.” At Homeboy Industries they seek to tell each person this truth: they are exactly what God had in mind when God made them. I think Jesus is saying the same thing to us in today’s Gospel. And I think he is talking to me and to you, and asking what walls we may have been building, and why, and when.

Boyle tells the story of driving on an errand with three members of the community when he says to the one riding in the front seat, “Be on the lookout for a gas station.” The companion leans leftward toward the gas gage and says “You’re fine.” “Como que’ I’m fine—I’m on ECHALE, Cabron,” Boyle says. Waving at him, Boyle says “Hello, E means empty.” JoJo, his friend, looks at him with shock. “E means empty?” “Well, yeah, what did you think it meant?” Boyle asked. “I thought it meant ‘Enough’.” “Well, what did you think F stood for?” Boyle asked? “I thought it meant ‘Finished’,” JoJo says. Boyle writes, “After I thank him for visiting our planet, I realized this is how the journey from change to transition has to play out. When others stare into the mirror and pronounce EMPTY, our collective kinship task is the suggest instead ENOUGH—enough gifts, talent, goodness, enough love to go around…and when the verdict is “FINISHED” we are called to lead instead to fullness—that place within—where Boyle suggests we find in themselves, in ourselves, what God had in mind. Dear friends, in this season of transition at Holy Family, can we practice a theology of abundance—can we say there is enough love and empathy and connection to go around when, in our anxiety we might be tempted to say we are on “empty”? I believe we can. I believe we are. But we have to work together.

I’ll never forget my sophomore year of football at Sandy Springs High School, entering the stadium with my teammates at mighty St. Pius for the Regional play-offs on a cold November night, and hearing 6,000 screaming Catholics telling us to go home. I knew we were in trouble, even though we had beaten them at our home field earlier in the season. I will never forget what it was like to be the opposing team on that night. And, I was to remember that night for other reasons as well. Just before this big game, the senior wide receiver in relation to whom I had been apprenticed that season was injured. I was given the task of filling in for him until he recovered, and I was scared. St. Pius—a stadium reminiscent of Clemson, or LSU’s “Death Valley”—is a tough place to play, and the game was hard fought until the end. I remember how, late in the game, a ghostly, menacing fog emerged out of the ivy covered ravine on the visitor’s side of the field, a fog into which a deep post pattern took me with only a few minutes left to play. In my fear, and in front of those 6,000 fans, I dropped a pass that I usually would have caught. My coach called me to the sideline and said, “Harkins! You’re killin’ me!”—which was actually an excellent but painful example of hyperbole for effect as a pedagogical tool. For the next week I had to stay after practice with my right arm duct-taped to my chest while the receivers’ coach fired passes at me almost, but not quite, out of reach.      

My coach sat me down at the end of the week and said, “William, the point of this exercise is not that you should never drop a pass. The point is that you let your being afraid compromise your ability to be in right relationship with your teammates, and with yourself. You let being anxious about starting on first string unexpectedly—about change, cause you to give in to fear.” I have successfully avoided thinking about this memory for a long time, but it came back to me in the reading of this text, and I found myself wondering why, in the context of this Gospel, it resurfaced. This made me curious, and I’ll say more about that in a moment, but any way you slice it, these passages are hard to hear. It is hard to bear witness to Jesus’ painful, heartfelt prayer. And yet, he is fully present to his pain, and he does not allow his anxiety and pain to mask what he is feeling. It’s all right there, and he’s giving it over to God. As we should, too.  Friends, when we are in a time of change, we are more tempted to give in to anxiety, which Family Systems Theory reminds us can spread like a virus. I am so very proud of each of you—of the members of the vestry, and the nominating committee, and everyone who continues to show up here each Sunday and serve in the choir, as Eucharistic Ministers and Vergers, as members of the various committees so engaged in sustaining and nurturing this parish. Let’s remember that as the author William Bridges has said, change is inevitable, while transition is not. Transition is not just a nice way to say change. It is the inner psychological process through which people come to terms with a change, as they let go of how things used to be, and reorient themselves to the way that things are now. In an organization, transition means helping people to make that difficult process less painful and disruptive. Family Systems Theory helps church leaders see the congregation as a system of interrelated parts. This asks of us that we be more self-aware and self-differentiating—paying attention to healthy boundaries, engaging in “good gossip” rather than allowing anxiety to be the occasion for spreading unhelpful gossip in parking lot conversations…it can help us be better equipped to identify those in our congregation with good leadership skills, as we are doing, and for each of us to consider how we might grow and contribute to Holy Family in generative and life-giving ways. We can better recognize and deal with unhealthy anxiety in the system; longing, for example, for the past in ways that keep us from what God is calling us to in our time. When we manage our own anxiety it enables us to function more effectively as a whole. So let’s give freely of ourselves, and our gifts and graces. Let’s promise to go above and beyond financially, and examine our hearts to see if there are other ways we might give to the common good. A robust financial picture, and an engaged, enthusiastic congregation positions us in the best possible way to call our new rector, whoever she or he may be.

Oh, and one more thing. The night after my first post-practice one-armed catching drill I went home and told my parents I was quitting football. I was ashamed, and angry, and anxious about being seen as a failure. They wisely suggested I give it ‘till the end of the week, and that I not make a hasty decision about something that was so important to me. The next day, with my right arm taped to my chest, I took my place on the goal line, ten yards from my coach, and we began the drill. Then, he suddenly stopped throwing passes my way, and looking toward the field house, I saw why. Headed back out onto the field were three of my teammates in the receivers’ corps, each of whose right-arm was duck-taped to his chest. Without saying a word, they took their places on the goal line, where for the next three days they could be found after practice in solidarity with me. I’m sure they had better things to do, but each of them stayed an extra hour, in friendship and loyalty. I had threatened in my shame to consign myself to the alienation of estrangement—and instead, because of the generous, extravagant searching of their hearts—because they “read between the lines” of the football field and said “enough” when I was saying “empty”—I found instead on that field a little bit of heaven; a vision of beloved, blessed community, and the connection for which Jesus prayed in our Gospel for today. May it be so for us as at Holy Family, as well. Amen.   

Sixth Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins

John 15:9-17

15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

15:12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.

15:15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

15:16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

15:17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Good Morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, and a day on which we consider what it may mean to call one another “Friend” as Jesus now refers to his disciples and, by extension, to each of us. In this passage from John’s Gospel, we hear again about the importance of abiding in love, and the core value of Christian fellowship as “friendship.” I believe Jesus is calling us to lives of integrity—and my favorite interpretation of this is “wholeness.” In responding elsewhere as he does to the Pharisees—and in referring as he does to the heart, thought to be the center of one’s capacity for courage and compassion—Jesus is asking us to consider the heart of our own faith and tradition, and the practices and disciplines that sustain it in “wholeness.” What activities, ritual and otherwise, help us be in “right relationship” with our neighbors, practicing hospitality, and grace, with a spirit of friendship? What allows us to maintain and deepen what theologian Paul Tillich referred to as “self-integration,” that process of finding our center of spiritual health and moral integrity? For Tillich this corresponded to a therapeutic model familiar to pastoral counselors…that one’s spiritual health is the wholeness of a person’s center, or “the ground of one’s being” as Tillich called it. What does it mean in this sense to call another one’s “friend”? What might be your examples of true friendship and, conversely, what might we learn when we miss the mark, and how might we seek forgiveness? I don’t know about you, but I can think of examples of both in my life.

In the synoptic gospels the concept of friend is not nearly as prominent as it is in the gospel of John. In Luke and Matthew, the concept is found in rather negative contexts. Luke refers to friends as handing over Christians in times of persecution (21:16). In Matthew, Jesus as friend is a source of criticism for his opponents. They accurately accuse him of being “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (11:19). He is criticized for recognizing no boundaries in friendship, for disregarding ritual purity. (Ford, 108) I see myself in these less positive images too, and they call upon me to recognize times when I have not been the kind of friend I would prefer to be, but, I’ll say more about that in a minute.

The gospel of John is a different story. Here the word friend (philo) occurs six times. Jesus mentions the “friend of the bridegroom” in a positive context in 3:29. Jesus refers to Lazarus as “our Friend” (11:11). We are told that the good shepherd “lays down his life for his friends” (10:11). The disciples are elevated from servants to friends in John 15:13-15. The crowd taunts Pilate, calling him “no friend of the emperor”—if if he releases Jesus—in John 19. Then there is the verb to love: phileo. The Father loves the Son and shares his plans and purposes with him, which is what friends do (Jn. 5:20). Jesus loves his friend Lazarus (11:36). The one who loves his life will lose it (12:25).

In this week’s text, John 15:19-17, immediately following on the metaphor of the Vine and the branches, Jesus teaches the disciples that discipleship means friendship with him and with God. Discipleship is being a branch of the vine. It is ultimately relational. Hence Jesus’ use of the term “friends” for his followers: “I no longer call you servants . . . I have called you friends” (v. 14). Jesus distinguishes friendship from servanthood. To be a friend is to share a personal relationship and to be made aware of the plans and purposes of the other. And he states the core value of friendship in the community of followers: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn. 15:13). In this love, we are understood as who we are without mask or pretension. The sometimes superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away; one can be authentic. Where we are understood, we are at home. And understanding nourishes belonging, and hospitality, values we seek to embody here. I wonder how thinking of ourselves as friends, gathered together as the Body of Christ that is Holy Family, might inform our understanding of hospitality. What might it mean to be a “soul friend” or, “anam cara” as John O’Donohue called it? In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom one confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of one’s life. With a soul-friend, we could share our inner-most self, our mind and our heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship. I would add here that one can be a soul friend to canine and other animal companions. They have certainly been among my best friends. And I wonder how we might be better friends to the natural world that, after all, nurtures and sustains the very lives we live. Say what you will about those who hug trees—and I have been among them—but trees literally eat sunlight, and in so doing produce oxygen that gives us life. Anam cara indeed.

Of course, there are precedents for this sacrificial notion of friendship. If we do a historical rewind, we encounter the notion of friendship in the Old Testament, in Jewish writings between the Testaments and in Greek and Roman philosophy. For these contexts, competition and rivalry have no place in friendship. Trust is essential. Falsehood is not to be born. Much of this Pythagorean thought was adopted by the Stoics and by the early Christian communities as well. Socrates viewed friendship as the most precious of all possessions, the greatest blessing that a person can possess. A friend shows generosity and courage in caring for her or his friend. Being an anam cara requires of a purposeful presence — it asks that we show up with absolute integrity of intention and often, without the need to “fix” or change the other. It means giving ourselves away in love and friendship. I am so grateful to call my wife Vicky my best friend, and my sons and daughters-in-law have become adult friends as well. They continue to teach me. I hope to live long enough to be friends with my grandchildren. And I’ve recently returned from Nashville where with three friends from graduate school where we working on a book about the friendships born there some 40 years ago. I continue to learn from all of these anam cara friendships. I also continue to learn from times when I fell short of true friendship. These, too, can be teachable moments.

In the fall of my senior year at Sandy Springs High School a new student arrived. He was from southern California, and he fit the stereotype perfectly. With blond surfer good looks and an easy manner, he quickly stole the hearts of the girls at school and was the envy of all the guys, only we didn’t want to acknowledge his presence among us. And when he asked for permission to join the football team, along with my teammates I was not happy. After all, he had not suffered through the 2-a-day practices in August; he had not been among us all those years of Gray-Y and Pop Warner football at Chastain Park; he was a stranger among us—he was the “other.” We felt it unfair for the coach to let this latecomer to our little kingdom on the team at this late date. Not this year. This was our year. And so the cadre closed its ranks in an effort to ignore his existence. He didn’t seem to mind this, and quickly made friends with others at school who, according to the proscribed rules of a football oriented society, were also social outcasts. Truth told; we were jealous. And when the coach let him join the team, it only made matters worse. Problem was, he was very good. Lightening fast with excellent hands, he was perfect for our power-I option offense at the position of flanker. This also happened to be my position. So we shared starting duties over the course of a very good season, and I came to admire and learn from him. But I would not let him in. I was a reporter for the school paper during basketball season, and admired from the stands the translation of his skills from the gridiron to the basketball court—a gift I did not share. When track season began in the spring he replaced a dear friend on the sprint medley relay team, of which I was a member, and partly due to his speed we finished third in the state at the GHSA finals in Jefferson, setting a new school record in the process. One afternoon, late that spring, I found him sitting alone in the locker room. He was crying. I sat down next to him and asked him what was wrong. Slowly, his story unfolded: his father was a prominent LA psychiatrist who was an inveterate womanizer. My teammate had moved with his mother to a religious commune in northern California—what we would now call a cult, after his parents divorced. Slowly her mental health began to unravel, and he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Atlanta. His mother had just that week been committed to a state mental health institute, and his father was divorcing, yet again. He worried about his younger sister, who was becoming involved with drugs and alcohol, and he did not really want to go to college. It meant yet another change. He missed home back in California. I sat there and listened, and stewed in the juices of my own self-righteous jealousy. I realized that his good looks and easy manner had hidden his pain and that we, all of us who might have been his friends, had been instead effective gatekeepers to his emotional prison. I felt deeply ashamed. I tried over the last weeks of school to befriend him, but it was too late. The forces of time and destiny swept us up in a river of change, and after graduation I never saw him again. When our only measure is friendship with those who think like us, look like us, share our history and context, we become, dear one’s, victims of the very idols we create in the service of this way of being in the world. We lose touch with a sense of God’s grace and compassion and hospitality. And these outward and visible signs of integrity are not about who deserves what; not about our envy which is, after all, nothing more than a mask for the fear that we aren’t somehow enough to obtain whatever earthly kingdom we seek to secure us in our anxiety. Jealousy does not allow for the abundant grace and radical compassionate justice of the kingdom of heaven, and it prohibits true friendship…true love expressed through friendship. A Friendship Blessing from John O’Donohue reads this way: May you be blessed with good friends. May you learn to be a good friend to yourself. May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness. May this change you. May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you. May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging. May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey. May you never be isolated. May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara. May I live this day Compassionate of heart, Clear in word, Gracious in awareness, Courageous in thought, Generous in love.”Amen.

5th Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins

John 15:1-8

15:1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.

15:2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.

15:3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.

15:4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

15:5 I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

15:6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.

15:7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you,

ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

15:8 My Father is glorified by this,

that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. Good morning! And welcome to Holy Family on this 5^th Sunday of Easter, and blessings to those of you who in any way have given of themselves in the service of compassion, the Hebrew word for which is, after all, Rachamim, meaning “wombish” or womb-like. So whenever we reach out to another in the womb-like embrace of compassion, we are, each of us, abiding with the other, just as Jesus abides with us. Begging the question, what does it really mean to “abide” with someone? How do we recognize this quality in others and perhaps more important, cultivate it in ourselves and live this out in our commitment to Holy Family?

Some time back Vicky and I attended a clinical conference in San Francisco, and we visited Grace Cathedral for the early morning service. We were entranced by this remarkable place of worship high atop a hill overlooking the city. Inside, we explored its various chapels, a labyrinth, lovely murals depicting the history of the city, and stunningly beautiful stained-glass windows. One is invited to enter this holy space, and to allow one’s spiritual imagination to come alive. The last available window space has recently been filled with an incredible stained glass piece, depicting a spiral nebula—a lovely galaxy much like our own milky way, spinning beautifully deep in outer space. I was reminded again of the words of Eucharistic Prayer C—“the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.” Somehow the depth and expansiveness of the cathedral seemed to contain a hint of all that, and more—a kind of mysterious engagement with the holy, as if the Spirit blew gently, constantly, lovingly through the cool depths of the very soul of the building holding us in its embrace.     

After the celebration of the Eucharist we emerged into the brilliant northern California sunlight on a cool April morning. On a plaza just below the doors of the Cathedral is an outdoor labyrinth, encircled by Japanese Maples only now in full leaf, and luminous in the morning light. On the perimeter of the labyrinth nine or ten Cantonese women from a Buddhist monestary down the hill engaged in their morning ritual of Tai Chi, the lovely, synchronous form of worship, exercise, and meditation. We stood for a long while at the top of the steps, entranced by this rich, resonant sychronicity of worship and culture: our own celebration of the Eucharist, this labyrinth of ancient Celtic origins, and the deeply moving Chinese ritual of Tai Chi, all brought together by the grace-filled welcoming embrace of one of our Cathedrals.

My primary feeling was that of gratitude—a deep, abiding appreciation for the moment of Kairos we experienced. It was moment when the Spirit seemed so present, so close, so available. And that Spirit-time, that Kairos, points us to something that lies at the very heart and soul of who we are—what the world is, the very force that emanates from God and gives life to us all. This morning—in this light-filled space—we hear the remarkably poignant words spoken by Jesus, Abide in me as I abide in you. Put simply, Jesus’ incarnation of the ancient ideal of abiding, and love embodied in this term, was to become the pattern of how the disciples, and that includes us, were to love one another, the pattern, that is, of how we ought live our lives. St. Augustine once observed that Jesus loved each one he ever met as if there were no other in the entire world to love. He radically individualized and made incarnate the affection he acted out toward others. I was reminded on the steps of Grace Cathedral that morning that we are all made in the image of that extraordinary love—all of us—and this Holy space was an outward and visible sign, if you will, of the love which led Jesus to say that he would take us into himself.  

That is the place he prepares for us. Jesus’ love for us was not just a radically incarnate, individual love. It was also a universal love, and it includes this planet earth, our island home, and everything in it, including Grace Cathedral, and this sacred space, and each of us, who are called to be earthen vessels of that love. The eyes with which he looked upon the world were never filled with disdain or contempt. We must never forget that the opposite of love is not anger, but rather indifference. Jesus loved each of us as if we were the only ones in the world, and he loved all as he loved each. And this speaks to the wisdom of C.S. Lewis, who made a distinction between what he called “need love” and “gift love.” Need love, says Lewis, is always born of emptiness—a kind of possessive acquisitiveness that is the relational, spiritual equivalent of a vacuum, like a black hole in outer space, sucking everything into its dark center. Lewis acknowledges that many times when we humans say, “I love you,” what we really mean is “I need you, I want you…you have value to me that I desire to make my own, regardless of the consequences to you.” Over against this image, Lewis contends that another form of love is radically, ontologically different. It is what he calls “gift love.” Rather than being born of emptiness, or impoverishment, and the needs to which they point, this form of loving is one of fullness, and grace, and gratitude. Its goal is to enrich and enhance the beloved rather than extract value. Gift love moves out to bless and increase—to enliven, nurture, and sustain the other. It is more like an ever-flowing spring than a needful vacuum. Lewis concludes by saying that the uniqueness of the biblical vision of reality is that God’s love is “gift love,” not “need love.” He reminds us that, “we humans are made in the image of such everlasting and unconditional love,” we are created Imago Dei—in the image of God. Not only are we loved by God in this way, we can choose to live our lives this way. We are most likely to fall into “need love” when we are feeling scared, or vulnerable in some way—when faced with new situations or people who are different in one way or another. But even then, in the midst of our uncertainty, we can choose, with God’s grace, to grow into the wonder of “gift love.”

Sometimes the examples of this come from places we might not expect—sources that catch us by surprise, origins that fill us with awareness of the fullness of that “gift love.” On a summer day in 1998 more than 300 PBS stations across the nation aired a very special episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood that featured KoKo, the sign-language-using gorilla. Mr. Rogers’ visit to KoKo’s home at The Gorilla Foundation helped launch a week of programming entitled “You and I Together” which addressed the confusion and fears of young children when confronted with new situations or people who are different. The weeklong theme of “inclusion” featured KoKo and helpful talks about feeling included, no matter the nature of one’s disability, infirmity, skin color, race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. It turned out that “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was one of KoKo’s very favorite TV shows. And when this gentle Presbyterian pastor, beloved by so many, entered KoKo’s room, she immediately embraced him in a gentle gorilla hug, and in sign language said, “Love you, neighbor, KoKo love.” KoKo then bent down to help Mr. Rogers remove his shoes, as she had seen him do every day, for so many years, on his show. She then helped him remove his sweater. So, you see, gift love is available to us all, and can come from unexpected sources. And with the grace of God we can choose to embrace that love, just as KoKo embraced Mr. Rogers. The Spirit of that love infuses and energizes and enlivens. It was present in the Cantonese women doing Tai Chi—and no doubt they will be there this morning. It was present in the seekers walking the labyrinth that day. No doubt they will be there again.

It was present in those who gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist, 2000 years ago, and at Grace Cathedral and all such places, and it is present for us, here and now, in this sacred space we have come to love. In some versions of our Eucharist the priest may say “Behold what you are…become what you receive.” This phrase goes way back to St. Augustine, who in the 5^th century preached a sermon in which he reminded us all that by our participation in the Eucharist we are transformed into the Body of Christ, broken and blessed, and given for the world. Like the bread we break this morning, each of us is broken too—we each have places of loneliness, fear, disappointment, shame…And so accepting and making friends with this part of ourselves, is a part of the journey of giving ourselves to something bigger than we are…we call this entrusting ourselves to God’s care, and allowing the Holy Spirit in Her wisdom to guide us. And when we know ourselves as God’s beloved, like KoKo and Mr. Rogers, we become the love we have received. With the help of that Spirit, and God’s ever-present and unfailing grace, we can grow into the deep mystery of loving each one as if there is no other in the world, and loving all, as we love each. As Wendell Berry has written:

The Incarnate Word is with us,

is still speaking, is present,

always, yet leaves no sign

but everything that is.Amen. 

3rd Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins

In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all. Amen.

Good Morning and welcome to Holy Family on this the 3^rd Sunday of Easter! I’m so glad you are joining us today.       

In this chapter of our lives at Holy Family, I find myself empathizing with the Disciples in ways perhaps new for me. Maybe you do so as well. We know they have been scared, and in the reading for today, they don’t recognize Jesus when he appears. Begging the question, when we are in a season of uncertainty and transition, can we recognize Christ in the face of the other, our sisters and brothers, and can we remain relatively non-anxious enough to lead with wisdom, and resilience? And, let’s remember we have only recently emerged from an unprecedented time of social distancing and quarantine, and we’ve all been on a post-pandemic journey of sorts. One of our daughters-in-law is an epidemiologist with the CDC, now working remotely from Houston, and so I pay attention to CDC notices of various kinds. Not only are we all still adjusting to life after the pandemic, we are also in what the Surgeon General has called an “epidemic of loneliness,” exacerbated by the pandemic and the real and ambiguous losses, as well as the anticipatory grief and anxiety we all feel to varying degrees. We are also in a season of political discord which, while not unprecedented, is quite real. The loss of life in Gaza and related conflicts add to our sense of dislocation. Let’s covenant to pray for one another, for the world, and for resilience and patience in this time together. And let’s seek to look for life-giving ways to contribute to Holy Family with love, and when needed, forgiveness. We need one another.

On Tuesday night of this past week our vestry and nominating committee met with Scott Kidd, an old friend of mine and rector at our neighbor church Resurrection, in Sautee Georgia. I’m so glad to be on this journey with you all, and I am grateful for those serving on these committees. I am also aware of being in a new leadership role among you. A few days ago I was walking out to the car with Andy Edwards after services. Now, Andy and Melinda were here many years ago, back when I was a Postulant at Holy Family, many years ago, and he said “Well, your priesthood has come full circle from here, to the Cathedral, and now back again.” And so it has. My first thought was one of deep gratitude for this parish, and for all it has meant to me and my family. I was also aware of a moment of anxiety, being as I am in a new role among you all.  Because of the overlapping relationships we have had, it has been a kind of developmental challenge. I am reminded of this continuity and overlap of life themes in the story of the mother who was getting breakfast ready for her son. She noticed that he not only had not appeared but he seemed to be making no sounds of preparation upstairs. She went to his room and, finding the door closed, asked if he was OK. He said he was fine but that he was not going to school today. The mother, being of the modern sort, decided to engage her son in reasonable conversation, and asked him to provide three good reasons why he should not go to school. The son obliged: “Number one, I don’t like school; number two, the teachers don’t like me; number three, I’m afraid of the kids.” “Okay,” said the mother. “Now I’m going to give you three good reasons why you are going to school. Number one, I’m your mother and I say school is important. Number two, you’re 40 years old and, number three, you’re the principal!” 

Well, truth told we are, each of us in a new role at Holy Family, and I am only one among many asked to step up in this season. As our beloved Katharine Armentrout said on the occasion of her retirement, lay leadership will be—for many reasons—increasingly important in the coming chapter. We’re not alone in this. The new mission statement in the Diocese of Colorado is “Lay Led…Clergy Supported.” This is the new zeitgeist in the church for many reasons. We will each have to discover in ourselves opportunities for leadership, and this may mean facing fears, uncertainty, and leaving our comfort zone to be an integral part of the Body of Christ in this place. We each have an opportunity to grow in new ways. Let’s covenant to do so, shall we?

And so, like the disciples in the Gospel for today, we are each walking, talking with one another about what has happened, finding some meaning in what we’ve been through, and trusting that God is listening to us and bearing witness to our concerns and fears. Carl Jung once said that the soul rejoices in saying out loud what we feel inside, just as our Psalms teach us to do, even when it is hard to do so. As the disciples experienced in this Gospel, Jesus is available to hear both, and we are called to do likewise.

Jesus invited the disciples tell about their anxieties and pains; he let them grieve and mourn. Jesus listened to them, as they poured out their fear, uncertainty, sadness and grief. Jesus patiently guided the disciples “from hopelessness and sadness to celebration, to hope, to relationship restored and renewed; in short, to resurrection.”    

And yes, we are living in a time of transition and change. Rabbi and family therapist Ed Friedman has reminded us that grief and loss that are not transformed get transmitted.  We’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Anticipatory grief is a general sense of unease. I suspect the disciples felt much the same as we do now, a king of not knowing with the sense of dislocation that attends it.

The author Rachel Naomi Remen has suggested that “The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else,” she says. And when we tell each other stories of hope and resilience, they tell us about who we are, what is possible for us, what and who we might call upon. They also remind us we’re not alone with whatever faces us and that there are resources available to us. But we must each be committed to hope, and compassion, and grace. As Goethe said, “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth…the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves too.”  The Disciples believe Jesus to be a stranger, and their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread. In this text and related passages, this is a common theme. What does it mean to really see? How often do we miss what is right in front of us and how often do we miss the face of Christ in the stranger whom we encounter on the road?  In the Gospel story for today we have a signpost of sort; a guide through the uncertainty in this season of transition at Holy Family.

Last summer a friend and I were hiking and trail running high in the mountains of Colorado, and at certain points above the tree line where the trails can become diffuse, cairns, towers of rock guiding the way, were so very helpful. “Inuksuk”—or little people—as the Inuit tribes call these signposts, can be like lighthouses on a distant shore, guiding us along. Jesus is just such a guide in the Gospel for today, and as such he helps the disciples move from grief and loss and despair to hope, and to compassion.  “My peace I give you.”

On Tuesday night this past week, our consultant gave us a list of things we must do together as we seek our new rector—and this list included coming to terms with our history; acknowledging the past, being honest about the DNA in that past… and dealing with both grief—letting go—and moving forward together…holding on; beginning to discover a new identity; allowing for and empowering new leaders among us; strengthening relationships and enriching hospitality; asking ourselves where we have been, and where we are going, and what kind of leadership is needed in this new chapter…and we are called to love one another with grace, and compassion. And with love.Well, some time ago a dear friend and clergy colleague died after a courageous, year-long struggle with leukemia. A priest for more than forty years, he was gifted in the areas of ministry he most deeply loved; contemplative prayer, spiritual formation, and liturgy. We served on the Cathedral staff for several years, both of us part-time, and in some ways we were very different…and we became close perhaps not in spite of this, but because of our differences. He was a wise and gentle mentor to those of us younger in “priest years,” and a gift to each parish he served. After several hospital stays, two extensive rounds of chemotherapy, and a joyful but short lived remission, the cancer returned with new vigor. My colleague, in consultation with family and friends, decided to cease all but palliative care, and to die on his own life-giving terms. In one of our last conversations on his back porch, with the birds singing in the early spring air, he said to me “Bill, I have had so much love.” I said “Yes, there are many who love you, and I am among them.” “That may be, “he replied, “but what I mean is that there are so many whom I have loved. I have so much gratitude for the love God has enabled me to give away.” Dear ones, we are given by God the freedom to love—and this requires release from any fears and the bondage of unnamed grief that would keep us from giving this love. It requires the peace of God, breathed on the disciples and each of us. We are rightly suspicious when we are called only to joy. Yes, and even amidst our struggle with various forms of loss and uncertainty, we can find life-giving possibilities, in conversation with each other, widening the circle of care, and guided by love. And remember, as Jesus taught us, that wholeness includes all of our wounds, just as it included all of his. It includes all of our vulnerabilities. This is the way we connect to one another. Our shared humanity allows us to be available to one another. In sharing his wounds, and in the breaking of the bread, Jesus was known to the disciples, and to us. Let us go and do likewise. Amen.

Second Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins

The Collect of the Day: Second Sunday of Easter

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Gospel: John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen.

In the Gospel lesson for today we find the disciples behind locked doors, hiding together in fear in the upper room. No doubt the words of the women at the tomb were ringing in their ears, only worsening their isolation and fear: “They have taken away our Lord and we do not know where they have taken him.” Suddenly Jesus appears, and speaks those remarkable words; “Peace be with you”. And he breathes upon them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And in John’s version of the story Jesus says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” It may be that forgiveness is at the heart of today’s Gospel story, and this includes both forgiving others, and ourselves. These are parables of grace, and resurrection.

But where was Thomas? Perhaps he needed to be alone. He needed time to think, to question, to ponder the events swirling around him. Maybe he went to that place we all may go, in the midst of deep grief and confusion, where we believe that no one can reach us, even if it is not true. It’s easy to be drawn to Thomas because he seems so human. After all, it was Thomas who asked Jesus how they could know the way. Jesus replied “I am the way, the truth, and the life”. But Thomas needed proof. He was perhaps among the first purveyors of the scientific method. His hypothesis in this instance was that unless he saw “the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands and unless he put his hand in Jesus’ side, he would not believe.” The elegant beauty of the scientific method is that it allows us to test one hypothesis against others. And this is how we learn. Jesus understood this, and was not critical of Thomas. Rather, he affirmed Thomas in his doubting, and helped him recognize doubt as part of our faith journey. I’ve never understood those who vilified Thomas for doubting. Martin Luther King, who died 56 years ago this month, said that “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

It’s easy to have empathy for Thomas because we may recall times in our own lives when we felt the same way; times when it seemed that we wandered lost, and scared, and we questioned our faith. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. The world of Jesus’ followers had been turned upside down and was in utter chaos. And yet, Thomas possessed two great virtues: he absolutely refused to say that he understood what he did not understand, or that he believed what he did not believe. There was an uncompromising honesty about him. He refused to respond to the anxiety of his own doubts by pretending they did not exist. Thomas, like the other disciples, was lost. And he had the courage to name his disorientation. As Wendell Berry said so well, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

In today’s Gospel Jesus is reminding Thomas, and by extension all of us, that it is often relationship that heals us when we no longer know what to do or where to go. Relationship is where the real work begins. Jesus reaches out to Thomas in his isolation and his questions. It is not doubt that is the enemy my friends. Rather, it is responding to it by cutting ourselves off from others that is most risky. And we are most likely to do this when, like the disciples, we are scared, sad, angry, and lost, and we hide ourselves behind closed doors. Often, what locks us in are our fears, insecurities, illnesses, compulsions or addictions, past hurts we have experienced and hold inside, and hurts we have caused. The social scientist Brene’ Brown has said that faith communities, in order to be safe containers for beloved community, must be “shame free.” They must create safe spaces for honest, authentic transparency in relation to those things that would keep us in the bondage of disconnection. In striving towards hospitality, excellence, and grace we seek to create that safe space here at our beloved Holy Family parish, each connection born of relationships. Jesus gives us an alternative to being cut off from ourselves, and others, and from God.

The grace and forgiveness in today’s Gospel may assist us when we have had to piece our lives back together after they have been turned upside down, and our doubts prevail. And we have similar examples. The story is told that the Great Window at Westminster Cathedral was destroyed during WWII. After the war, pieces of glass of all shapes, sizes and colors were collected from the dust and rubble, and lovingly fixed together and placed in the frame of the old west window, bringing the Cathedral to life again. Careful examination of the window would reveal the faces of angels, disciples and kings, all jumbled up with pieces of colored glass; small fragments of writing in Latin, next to drawings on glass of clothes, hands and feet. Bit by bit the window space was filled in with old glass until the most amazing window was completed, a feast for the eyes, and a thing of beauty. It didn’t tell stories from the Bible exactly as it had originally, but told a different story. This story was of good overcoming evil, of sadness turning into great joy, of conflict replaced by forgiveness and peace. It put the words of Jesus into action by showing what could be done when people worked together to do good things. Today’s Gospel is just like this, and our lives can be like this too. Thomas understood this well.

Well, some time ago I attended the “birthday” of a friend who was celebrating his 10^th year of sobriety. I first met him in 1978 when we began working together as counselors on the adolescent psychiatric unit at Peachford Hospital. Just out of college, a little scared and uncertain what to do next, I learned so much from my colleagues, and from the patients and families with whom we worked over the next two years. My life and that of my friend took different paths, but we kept in touch. I knew he had struggled with alcohol, but I did not realize the depth of his addiction. And so on a cold and rainy night some 35 years after we met, I drove up to Cherokee County as he picked up his 10-year chip. I walked into a room filled to capacity—maybe 70-80 souls in recovery. Dressed like the seminary professor I was, I felt a little out of place when the first person to greet me was a leather clad member of “Bikers in Recovery,” who welcomed me with gracious hospitality rather than suspicion and with a bear hug so fierce it awakened an old football injury. I will never forget his warmth and sincerity. That night I heard the testimonies of those who knew my friend, and stories of life—his and theirs—before and after sobriety. I was moved by their openness, shared vulnerability, and honesty. I noted the utter lack of shame in that safe space. I heard my friend recount how drinking almost killed him, and how he had said to those gathered in that very room, some ten years earlier, “I am lost. Tell me what to do, and if you tell me, I will do it.” And then, through tears of one who has come back to life from the edge of the abyss, “You saved my life, you know… I asked, and you gave, and you told me to work each step, and that you would be there with me each step of the way. And you were. I was among the living dead, and I slowly came back to life. I am here tonight, standing up here talking to you, because you people saved my life.” As I listened, a phrase came to mind from St. Augustine: “In the midst of life we are in death, and in Christ, in the midst of death we may find life.” Here was a perfect example of a man whose life had in many ways ended…who was no longer fully alive, and who had come back to being fully present in the world, freed from the numbing distraction of alcohol abuse. And so it was that those gathered that night were practicing resurrection; It was Thomas’ story of grace and forgiveness, and ours.

And so you see, dear ones, those souls had chosen not to remain trapped and hidden behind the locked doors of their addictions—a living death cut off from relationship, but rather to be in community, out in the open. In so doing, they had to face with brutal honesty—a searching, fearless, and unrelenting moral inventory— as they say in the recovery community, the truth of what had kept them imprisoned. I found myself inspired by this connection of relationships, and I understood my friend better too. And, I understood the power of the Paschal Mystery of Easter a bit more clearly: that in the phrase “one day at a time” we see the truth of that new life. It was as if we placed our hands in the wounded brokenness of my friend’s soul, and we believed. In Christ, darkness and death have been overcome—are overcome—one day, one moment at a time, here and now. Jesus wanted the disciples to see his wounds so that they could understand the resurrection hope those scars represented. The Easter miracle of this Gospel passage is that Jesus comes again and again to these confused, frightened disciples, and offers himself in relationship. And like Thomas and his brothers we are called to move through times of doubt to moments of grace. To move, that is from Good Friday losses, to Holy Saturday ambiguity, and on to Easter. To give of ourselves, our stories of doubt, grace, and forgiveness, we must know ourselves—that’s the fearless moral inventory. “Practice Resurrection,” the wonderful writer Wendell Berry says to us, and every time we choose to do this, the grace-filled Easter story continues. When I got home that night, I sent my old friend a message thanking him for the gift of his story, and for inviting me into that sacred space. He sent a text message that read like the Holy Week Triduum we just observed: “Life and Chaos; Recovery and forgiveness; New Life and Gratitude.” And I realized that is almost like…I would say is exactly like the Holy Spirit had been breathed upon us in that locked room, the doors of which had been flung open by the grace of my friend’s story. And when that happens, because we have asked for it, we can participate in the compassionate, hospitable, beloved community, yes, one day at a time. Amen.

Easter Sunday – George Yandell

One day, three men were walking along and came upon a raging, violent river. They needed to get across to the other side, but had no idea how to do it. The first man prayed to God saying, “Please, God, give me the strength to cross this river.” Poof! God gave the man big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours.

Seeing this, the second man prayed to God, saying, “Please, God, give me the strength and ability to cross this river.” Poof! God gave him a rowboat and he was able to row across the river in about three hours.

The third man, seeing how things had worked out for the other two, also prayed to God, saying, “Please, God, give me the strength and ability and intelligence to cross this river.” And poof! God turned him into a woman; she looked at the map, then walked across the bridge.

Humor aside, the prominence of women as the initial ones to experience the power of Easter cannot be denied. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were the first to hear the angel say, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised”.

These two Marys were among the brave women who had watched Jesus die his agonizing death. They had followed his lifeless corpse to mark the place where it was entombed by Joseph of Arimathea. A legitimate question follows: where were the men at the same time? Where were his bravest, closest disciples—Peter, James, and John—the “pillars” of the community? Where were the “Sons of Thunder,” Thomas, and Matthew? Where were Andrew and Philip? Had all of them scattered like frightened sheep after Gethsemane and Golgotha? When Jesus had needed them the most, had they left him completely in the lurch? Why hadn’t they the courage and loyalty to suffer with Jesus, as had the women from Galilee?

Jesus had told his disciples that he would be crucified and raised on the third day; but despite what Jesus had predicted of an ultimate vindication, none of his followers could envision a personal resurrection.

In all four gospels, the first evidence that Jesus has overcome death is the empty tomb. Although the details of the Easter narratives vary, in all of the accounts the women are first to arrive at the tomb and to proclaim the miracle of Easter. Mary Magdalene is a principal witness to the resurrectionin all four Gospels.

With dramatic details unique to Matthew, we read that when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived at the tomb at dawn on the first day of the new week, there was a great earthquake. The shaking earth underscored the apocalyptic nature of the event. Then an angel of the Lord appeared and rolled back the stone at the entrance. The soldiers standing guard were terrified at the sight of the angel, whose appearance was “like lightning,” and whose clothing was “white as snow”. The angel reassured the women as he told them that Jesus “is not here; for he has been raised”, just as he had foretold.

As proof of this astonishing news, the angel told them to see for themselves that the tomb was empty, and gave them a message to take back to the other disciples. “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him”. This was to fulfill the promise that Jesus had made on the night of his betrayal that “after I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee”.

As the women ran “with fear and great joy” to tell the others, Jesus appeared. The women immediately bowed down and held his feet, showing that the proper response to the Risen Lord is to worship him. Jesus told them not to be afraid and repeated the message that the disciples were to meet him in Galilee.[Adapted from “Synthesis: A Weekly Resource for Preaching”, April, 2014.]

In John’s story of the resurrection, Mary makes a second trip to the tomb, after she had seen it empty when she first visited. She looked again inside the empty tomb and saw something neither Peter nor the other disciple saw—two angels in white sitting at either end of where the body had been.

If angels are going to scare us out of our wits like Mary experienced, at least give us information about where to meet Jesus and directions to the meeting place. But in John they just ask a really obvious question: “Woman, why are you weeping?”

I wonder if Mary felt a momentary flash of irritation? I wonder if she felt like saying, “Well, angels, why do you think I’m weeping? I’m weeping over the crucifixion of my most cherished hope in life. My eyes are wet with the tears because I’m grieving to my core. Why do you think I’m weeping?”

One might suspect that the angels, while Mary is explaining about weeping, might be pointing behind her as if to say “turn around, turn around.” They might well have come to give directions, after all. To a Resurrected Lord who, from now on, is always standing right behind her, whose presence doesn’t depend on whether she feels him there or not, whether she’s ready or not. Because, according to John’s story, Christ rises in the dark. Christ rises for everyone. Easter is precisely for those who are not ready for it. Easter is for Peter, too absorbed in the pain of his past to take it in. Easter is for the Beloved Disciple, who believes in Jesus’ resurrection but needs time to process what difference it makes. Easter is for Mary, weeping over her loss while her Lord stands right behind her.

According to the story, Easter is for each of us who is all of them. [from Alyce McKenzie in “Ready or Not: Reflections on the Unexpected Easter” from Patheos.com (4/17/11).]

Here we uncover the paramount nature of undeserved love revealed in the Resurrection of Jesus. Call it the Gospel of Easter. Deserving the worst, the disciples were given the best. God raised Jesus up into their community despite their cowardice, despite their betrayal. Whereas in human relationships desire is the cause of love, here in the Resurrection, we see that love is the cause of desire. God’s love is the cause of desire. God’s love reigns, regardless of human failure.

The disciples, therefore, were not anticipating the Resurrection of Jesus. Why else would they have been such reluctant believers? Why else would they have dismissed the report of the women about the empty tomb as “an idle tale”?

Reginald Fuller, the noted New Testament scholar and professor of mine at seminary said: “Even the most skeptical critic must posit some mysterious ‘X’ event to get the Christian movement going.” Think about it. How did any kind of a beginning come out of such a disastrous end—let alone a beginning that would change the face of the world? How did this Jesus—executed as a heretic and as a seducer of the people—come to be known as “Lord”? How could a condemned criminal and a disowned prophet become revered as “Savior”? How could this blasphemer come to be called “the Son of God”?

Lastly, how could such an utterly defeated group of hammerheads emerge proclaiming not only the Gospel of Jesus, but Jesus himself as the Gospel? [King Oehmig in “Synthesis: A Weekly Resource for Preaching”, April, 2014.] Because God intervened in history, directed the angels to the women and changed the destiny of humanity. God’s love reigns, regardless of human failure.

Easter unlocks the power of new life, of life transformed into love beyond fear, beyond death. That’s why we are here. That’s Jesus resurrected, right behind us, urging us to live, fully live, for one another and for God’s reign in this world.

Good Friday – George Yandell

Forty years before the birth of Jesus, Rome’s first heated swimming pool was built on the Esquiline Hill, just outside the city’s ancient walls. The location was a prime one. In time it would become a showcase for some of the wealthiest people in the world.[From Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland, Basic Books, New York, 2019, pp. 21- 24]

Not far from the Esquiline, it took a long time to reclaim the Sessoriumfor gentrification. Years later the vultures still wheeled over that site. This remained what it had always been: The place set aside for the execution of slaves. Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses.

No death was more excruciating, more contemptable, than crucifixion. To be hung naked, ‘long in agony, swelling with ugly welts on shoulders and chest’, helpless to beat away the clamorous birds: such a fate Roman intellectuals agreed, was the worst imaginable. This was what made it so suitable a punishment for slaves. Lacking such a sanction, the entire order of the city might fall apart. Luxury and splendor such as Rome could boast were dependent on keeping those who sustained it in their place. [ibid]

As Tacitus wrote, “After all, we have slaves drawn from every corner of the world in our households, practicing strange customs, and foreign cults, or none—it is only by means of terror that we can hope to coerce such scum.”

The Romans were reluctant to believe crucifixion had originated with them. Only a barbarous people could have developed such savage, cruel torture. Everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross, a crux, was repellant. Order was what counted. 

Such was the opinion of the Roman governor of Judea and Galilee in Jesus’ day. Herod Antipas, the “King of the Jews”, collaborated with the Roman authorities. He supported Pontius Pilate’s attitude. That’s why on the road leading up to Jerusalem there were permanent wooden pillars with crossbeams on which the bodies of the crucified were displayed.  Just as on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. The message was clear- follow the rules of the empire, keep order, or you too could wind up here. Terrorists, beware.

The two men crucified with Jesus were not bandits, as we sometimes translate the text, but insurrectionists, freedom fighters, or “terrorists”, depending on the point of view. Crucifixion was used specifically for people who systematically refused to accept Roman imperial authority. Ordinary criminals were not crucified.  Jesus was executed as a rebel against Rome between two other rebels against Rome. [Borg/Crossan, The Last Week, p. 147] How to comprehend the horror, the stench of that road- it’s beyond understanding. Yet that’s what the friends of Jesus did- they braved the stench.

They watched, some closer by, others from a distance, as Jesus was nailed to the crossbeam which was in turn raised and fastened to the pillar. The Roman guards nailed his feet to the pillar. Everywhere around him was the stench of death, the cries of those already crucified ringing in his ears. His body on the cross was not high above the onlookers, but just above eye-sight level of those watching him. So close.

Not crucified as a slave, not as a bandit, but yes, crucified as an insurrectionist. Rome couldn’t tolerate anyone who was acclaimed as the Son of God- that title was reserved to Caesar Augustus and to the emperors who followed him. 

His friends were in a macabre theater of death. To see someone you love suffering in great pain and to be unable to make it go away is one of the greatest agonies we endure as humans. It can be worse than actually suffering ourselves. Physical pain damages and wounds our bodies, but watching someone you love suffer goes deeper. That is emotional pain born out of love. It cuts right to the heart of you…. We can alleviate the pain of the dying one, but no pill can ease the pain of grief of those who survive him. [Some of this from an article “Grief is the Price We Pay for Love” by Kevin Morris in The Anglican Digest, Spring 2016 issue.]Most of the disciples of Jesus could not stand by and watch their teacher and friend suffer. They loved him greatly. But they ran off. They hid. Maybe they were afraid they’d get arrested too. But they couldn’t bear watching their beloved mentor die in such excruciating pain. [Adapted from the article above.]

At the end, the only ones standing by, present near the cross, were women and one man. John’s gospel tells us they were Jesus’ mother Mary, his aunt, Mary wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala and the beloved disciple. Luke says there were other women as well.

Where were the other disciples and friends of Jesus? Where were the crowds of people he had fed and healed? All gone away. Afraid to face the pain, afraid to look into the eyes of someone whose agony they could not relieve. Those who stayed by the side of Jesus were few, but they probably loved him more than the others. 

Luke records these events at the time Jesus breathed his last: “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” John Dominic Crossan says the tearing of the temple curtain was symbolic- God tearing his clothes in grief. Think of Mary, his mother. She was the first to hold him when he came into the world, and she was likely one of the last to hold him when he went out of it. Her presence there at the cross fulfilled the words the priest Simeon had said to her when Jesus was born, “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” And now it had happened. The centurion could have pierced her own side with the lance and it would have hurt less. [ibid] And so we grieve with Mary, with all the friends of Jesus. The horror pierces through 1990 years to us, today. The Lord of Life is crucified.