Wisdom for Today

There is a widely accepted misconception among us that when one becomes involved in work at home or in business, immediate­ly one steps out of the godly realm and away from God-pleasing activities. From this idea, it follows that once the desire to strive toward God germinates, and talk turns toward the spiritual life, then the idea inevitably surfaces: one must run from society, from the home - to the wilderness, to the forest.

Both premises are erroneous!

Homes and communities depend on concerns of daily life and society. These concerns are God-appointed obligations; fulfilling them is not a step toward the ungodly, but is a walking in the way of the Lord.

Theophan the Recluse

from the book "The Monastic Way: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Living"

Sermon: 4th Sunday of Easter

This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday…

Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Our beautiful stained glass window shows Jesus holding a sheep and the rest following him, they hear his voice and they follow him…

Those who are baptized here are given a sheep at their baptism, reminding them and us that we each are added to his flock…

At the next service, I will tell the Children the story of the Good Shepherd through our Godly Play Curriculum, where it is called the Good Shepherd and World Communion… The words tell us a delightful story:

“There was once someone who did such wonderful things and said such amazing things that people wondered who he was. Finally they couldn’t help it. They had to ask him who he was.” When they finally asked him, he said, “I am the good shepherd.” “I know each one of the sheep by name and they know the sound of my voice.” “When I take the sheep from the sheepfold, they follow me.” “I walk in front of the sheep to show them the way.” “I show them the way to the good grass.”

“This is the table of the Good Shepherd (the altar).” “Here is the bread and the wine of the Good Shepard. Sometimes it seems like we need to have a something on the table to remind us that this is the table of the Good Shepherd, but the Good Shepherd is in the bread and the wine, so we don’t really need anything to remind us.” “Sometimes someone comes to read the very words of the Good Shepherd, and to give us the bread and wine.” “Sometimes the people of the world come to this table and even the children come.”

(words are from Lesson 11, Volume 4 of the Complete Guide to Godly Play)

And the world shares communion with their creator through Jesus, the Good Shepherd. But as I consider the Good Shepherd, I also think of his love toward others, toward his sheep. I think of Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” from 400 years ago and what it might say to us…

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by Christopher Marlowe
mid-1580s

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods or steepy mountain yields

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flower, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

And I think of Jesus leading his sheep, and I hear the voice of the passionate shepherd calling our souls to come follow and be loved. It is Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, who calls to all of us this day, calls our souls, our bodies, all of us, to be amongst his sheep, to feast at this altar, to live with him and be his love. May we when we hear his voice, know it is the Good Shepherd who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads. Amen.

Water for Sudan

During my Good Friday sermon, I preached:

When Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, "I am thirsty." Thirst is something we all experience. I think of a long summer day, we want something to quench our thirst.

In Jesus own life, we have seen him perform his first miracle in Cana., turning water into wine, helping to quench the thirst at a wedding party, we have seen him ask for a drink after a day’s journey from a Samaritan woman at the well, and of course, at the last supper he takes, blesses, brakes and gives both bread and wine and reminds the disciples to do this in remembrance of him.

But in Jesus’ words at the cross, “I am thirsty” it reminds us of his humanness, his pain and suffering that he experienced after a night of beatings, mockery and now upon the cross, he is suffering and with his parched mouth, he utters his dying words and they are for us: “I am thirsty.”

As Peter Gomes wrote, “to state’s one’s thirst is to invite someone to quench it. Suddenly, we are no longer mere bystanders, voyeurs, kibitzers. We are invited, by implication and sympathy, into the narrative. If we are looking for a place of resonance, of response, this is it. Jesus does not do his kingly death scene in silence or alone. We are now invited in.”

Jesus’ pain was real and so too his thirst. When I am thirsty, I can open the refrigerator or turn on the faucet, I don’t really know thirst. When I think of others in our world, like Africa for instance, so many there among the poorest of the poor are emaciated, lacking the proper nourishment, lacking the clean water that keeps us alive.

Salva Dut, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, fled for his life from Sudan in 1991 at 11 years old, eventually coming to this country in 1996 with the help of St. Paul’s Church, Rochester, NY. In January 2002, Salva learned that his father was very sick and sensing that this could be his last opportunity to see his father, Salva returned to Sudan for the first time in 11 years. Salva discovered that his father was suffering from worms from unclean water, and a hernia from carrying heavy jugs of unclean water many miles each day. After his father’s operation, his father was told not to drink unclean water if he wanted to live. They had to move his father about a hundred miles away so he could find clean water. Salva, too, became infected with water-borne parasites during his trip to Sudan.

The trip opened his eyes wide to the terrible truth of everyday life for the people of southern Sudan and he said he wanted to do something to help his father and his friends. So Salva formed a charitable organization in 2005, Water for Sudan, to enable him to drill wells and provide clean, fresh water in his homeland. The past two dry seasons, he has put in 7 wells, trained the villagers to maintain the wells and has brought clean water to 26,000 Sudanese.

Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” Much like Salva’s brothers and sisters in the Sudan. And Salva responded to the need. “I am thirsty.” Those words are spoken every minute of every day on our planet.

As the Rev. Grover Zinn put it. “'I am thirsty'--words from the Cross; words heard in the midst of drought stricken lands, in the poverty of inner cities, in the midst of wars. I am thirsty--words of spiritual emptiness heard in urban centers, in green groves and on barren plains. Perhaps our greatest challenge is to find the deep wells of physical and spiritual nourishment that will slake the thirst of a wounded and weary world.”

As we stand beneath the cross on this Good Friday, and remember the sacrifice that our Savior made on behalf of the world, let us hear his words, I am thirsty and know that we are invited to quench his thirst in our world today.

You can learn more about him in an Episcopal Life article here. You can find info on Water for Sudan and how to make a donation here.

Africa Malaria Day 2007 (Episcopal Relief & Development)

Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) commemorates Africa Malaria Day 2007, April 25. The theme for this year, created by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, is "Leadership and Partnership for Results." It is also the first Malaria Awareness Day in the United States.

ERD is committed to combating this deadly disease through the NetsforLife malaria prevention program, which aims to distribute one million long-lasting insecticide-treated nets and educate three to four million people in 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The program teaches people about the disease through community health education and awareness programs. NetsforLife is a partnership of private donors, churches and corporations including Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, Standard Chartered Bank, the Exxon Mobil Foundation and the Starr Foundation.

To date, the program has trained more than 2,000 community malaria agents and distributed more than 210,000 long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in countries including Zambia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. NetsforLife addresses Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) #1, 4, 5, 6 and 8.

Read the entire article here.

Go to Episcopal Relief and Development here.

Go to Nets for life here.

Study: Religion is Good for Kids

Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.

The conflict that arises when parents regularly argue over their faith at home, however, has the opposite effect.

John Bartkowski, a Mississippi State University sociologist and his colleagues asked the parents and teachers of more than 16,000 kids, most of them first-graders, to rate how much self control they believed the kids had, how often they exhibited poor or unhappy behavior and how well they respected and worked with their peers.

The researchers compared these scores to how frequently the children’s parents said they attended worship services, talked about religion with their child and argued abut religion in the home.

Read the entire story here.

Sermon: 3rd Sunday of Easter

We just want things to return to normal…
-it happened after 9/11
-it happened after the tragedy at VA Tech
-even in the midst of mourning, there is a need to return to some type of normalcy in our lives…
-the disciples experienced that after the death of Jesus, they went fishing, they returned to what they had always done, how they made a living…

Jesus shakes all that up in the resurrection…
-giving them an abundance of fish
-and they recognize him
-and again they share a meal with Jesus

Others didn’t recognize him until they had a conversion experience…
-think of Paul -> Saul, persecutor of Christians
-he did not know Jesus when he was alive.
-he only saw the threat of his followers, those who believed in Jesus.
-he was determined to stamp it out! A violent man…
-conversion on the road to Damascus…
-risen Christ who calls him.
-he is made blind, like the blindness he had to Jesus before his conversion
-Annanias: is sent, he protests, but God assures him, and he ministered to him, in Jesus name, and his sight returned, he was baptized and ate and regained his strength. He became a changed man because of his experience…

Sadly, Seung-Hui Cho, the VA Tech gunman will never have such an experience as Saul, and turn away from the violence and evil that overtook him…

But as one author put it about Saul, “The light on the road and the voice that spoke out of the light stopped Saul cold, but his transformation is taken the next step by the ministrations of Ananias as a representative of the believing community in Damascus. The insight that Saul claims in the last verse of the passage, that Jesus is the Son of God, is not a private matter between him and Jesus: "It took a community." And a man of violence is then transformed into a missionary for God..” (Mary Schertz)

And this does happen today, good is brought out of evil and people are transformed by their encounters with God, even in prison…

James Tramel was 17 years old in 1985 and was part of a so-called thrill killing of a homeless man in SF. He was sentenced to 15 years to life for second-degree murder, even though he did not actually commit the murder. During his years in prison, Tramel would earn an undergraduate business degree in prison before applying in 1997 to study for a master's degree in theology from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley…

I remember his application coming into the registrar’s office, as I was helping there before graduation from CDSP. He was ordained while in prison, having finished his studies and he has shown deep remorse and proved his faith and was paroled last year… One person couldn’t imagine a clergyman who had a role in committing murder, "I cannot imagine any church having him," she said. "As Christians, we have to welcome him, but I can't see him in a leadership role."
And yet, Jesus is not done with him or any of us yet, and like Paul being transformed from his violent self into a man of God, James Trammel has likewise been transformed from his old self, touched by God in prison, reformed his life into a priest and now is preaching the Good News, of one who was saved by the grace of God…one who was lost but now is found, was blind but now sees…

And on this earth day, as we consider God’s creation and our part in it, I am reminded that God still moves things from evil to good, from useless to useful…

A drug that was introduced in the 1950s to help pregnant women with morning sickness which was not properly tested for safety among pregnant women called Thalidomide, caused over 10,000 birth defects worldwide and the drug was shelved. But Thalidomide is back because it has been found useful in some specific treatments with a certain cancer and with a painful skin infection associated with Leprosy and is being investigated to see if it can help with certain diseases associated with AIDS.

And God brings life out of death, good out of evil and through the resurrection of Jesus, God has given to us new life… We gather, we share a meal here at communion, and our eyes are opened to see God at work about us, even in the midst of tragedy and violence, God is at work in you and me, transforming what is dead, what is evil, into what is life and what is good for us and for our neighbors…

Let us celebrate that in our midst, in our Eastertide Jesus walks with us still. That wherever we find ourselves, Jesus will be with us and he asks us to do his ministry in the world now, a world full of hurt looking for that new life. Let us pray using the words of the Collect of the Day...

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayers for VA Tech

Loving God, Jesus gathered your little ones in his arms and blessed them. Have pity on those who mourn for all those killed at VA Tech yesterday, innocents slaughtered by the violence of our fallen world. Be with us as we struggle with the mysteries of life and death; in our pain, bring your comfort, and in our sorrow, bring your hope and your promise of new life, in the name of Jesus our Savior. Amen.

May their souls, and the souls of all the departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

An Episcopalian blogger has added links on his site to morning and evening Offices of the Dead, which can be found here.

Episcopal Campus ministry reaches out in response to campus shooting (ENS)