Musings

Daring to Trust

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, January 26th, 2020 (Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23

Of all the big, broad, spiritual virtues that Christians are exhorted to embody, my least favorite by far is trust. I mean, I like it fine in theory. Intellectually, I can appreciate why it’s virtuous. But when it comes time for me to actually apply it, you can find me busily constructing a detailed, well-documented outline about why trusting is for other people, not for me. You can glean a great deal about your character flaws by the advice that different people in very different areas of your life keep giving you. If I had a dollar for every time that somehow has said, “You know, Kristin, you just need to trust,” I would be a very rich woman. 

Trusting is hard. It requires that we let people in. That we relinquish control – sometimes completely – and let someone else be responsible for what is most precious to us. Our well-being, our families, sometimes even our lives. Trusting requires us to be ok with not having all the answers or knowing what the next step is. It requires us to stop fretting about the future and be fully in the here and now. And, for many of us, that goes against everything we’ve been taught about how to succeed, or even just survive, in this highly individualistic society. Trusting is no mean feat. And yet, God calls us to trust again, and again, and again. 

The call of the first disciples is not usually celebrated as one of Jesus’ miracles, but I think there is something miraculous about this story. It is not at all a foregone conclusion that Peter, Andrew, James, and John said yes to Jesus’ rather unusual invitation to come and follow him. The trust required for these four disciples to leave their possessions, their livelihood, their families and follow a stranger who offers them no information whatsoever about who he is or what is to come is…staggering. They were risking everything. In a world where we invest considerable effort in teaching our children not to wander off with random strangers, this Gospel story is downright unimaginable for many of us. 

So what are we supposed to draw from this story? That we should throw caution to the winds and drop everything to follow the next raving sidewalk preacher we encounter? I sure hope not. That we should leave our family obligations without a backward glance so we can devote our lives to fishing for people? That’s certainly what Jesus called the disciples to do, but I don’t think that’s the universal takeaway either. This story is often used as a rousing call to evangelism, and it is that. But I think, even more foundationally, it is a call to trust. To leave behind, not just the security of our possessions and the comfortable routine of our lives, but the need to be in control. To agree to follow, to be guided, to let someone else lead us. 

When Jesús invited his first disciples to follow him, he wasn’t just inviting them to trust him. He was also inviting them to trust one another. To build a community of mutual interdependence that we see at work throughout the Gospels. Today, as our Cathedral community gathers for our annual meeting, how might we live into Jesús’ invitation to deepen our trust in God and in one another? Do we really trust each other? Do we really know each other? Are we really in this together? How could we grow in trust?

Following Jesus isn’t something we can do alone. The closer we draw to God, the closer we draw to each other, into the messy, beautiful, holy reality of a community of trust. I admit to you that I’ve been binge watching the new netflix docu-series, Cheer, which, if you haven’t seen it, is a behind the scenes look at one of the nation’s top collegiate cheerleading teams. It’s fascinating on many levels, but what most struck me is how foundational trust is to everything the team does – unsurprising in a sport that literally involves throwing people in the air and then catching them. Every time these athletes let a teammate fall to the ground, uncaught, they immediately, without prompting, drop to the ground and do 50 push ups. Because they know that failing to catch a teammate is the worst offense imaginable, not just because of the potential for serious injury, but because, when trust is absent, success is impossible. 

I’m not suggesting that the Church adopt push-ups as a form of penance, but what if we as a community took trust that seriously? What if we were deeply committed to catching each other when we fall, to lifting each other up, to having each other’s backs no matter what? What if we trusted each other enough to not always need to be in control, to follow each other’s lead, so that we can do the work that Jesus calls us to do – teaching, healing, sharing the good news with a world in need? In this season of light, what if we allowed ourselves to trust? Amen. 

Radiant Reality

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, August 4th, 2019 (Feast of the Transfiguration, transferred)

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99:5-9; 2 Peter 1:13-21; Luke 9:28-36

Audio here

You’d never guess it by looking at me now, but I did not grow up in the Church. I was raised by two thoroughly non-religious parents, who were suspicious of organized religion and never really mentioned God. My introduction to Christianity happened by accident when I was ten: my best friend, who was Roman Catholic, invited me on a playdate on a Sunday. For logistical reasons that I no longer remember, it was easier for her parents to pick me up before church. I had no idea what church entailed, but I gamely went along. In an unexpected twist that surprised me as much as anyone else, I had what can only be described as an epiphany. God happened to me. I fell in love with what I saw, and heard, and felt in that sanctuary. I came home from my playdate and astounded my mother with the announcement that I wanted to be baptized immediately.

And my mother made me wait. With wisdom that I didn’t appreciate at the time, she told me I couldn’t be baptized until I was 16. I think she hoped I’d lose interest. But I didn’t. And so, 6 years later, I was baptized into Christ’s Body at the Easter Vigil. The service was glorious. Transcendent. And afterwards, I had no idea what to do with myself. I had been living for that moment for so long, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. My baptism was a mountaintop experience, much like the one we just heard about in Luke’s Gospel. But, like the disciples in today’s reading, I had to leave behind the glorious, the holy, the once in a lifetime, and do the hard work of figuring out what in the world it had to do with my ordinary life. 

All of us have mountaintop experiences, memories of days or hours or fleeting seconds when everything seemed to go perfectly, when we understood something with perfect clarity, or felt radiantly happy. Often, our instinct is to preserve those memories in amber, to immortalize them and stash them away, so that we can bring them out and remind ourselves of them when things start going badly. 

That is what I hear in Peter’s exclamation on the mountaintop, when he sees his Teacher, mysteriously changed in appearance, flanked by Biblical celebrities who have come back from the dead. “Quick! Maybe if we set up some tents, you’ll all stay here forever!” Peter is trying to preserve the moment. He is trying to hold on to the glory. And, of course, as he does so, the glory slips through his fingers like sand. The Glory of God is not something we can hold on to, it is not a resource to be squirrelled away for our future benefit. The Glory of God lives in the here and now as pure gift. We can open ourselves to it, but we can never manage it. 

The problem is, we like shiny things. We like holy things. And we easily forget these moments of glory cannot last forever. After this dazzling moment of Transfiguration, Jesus and the disciples then have to trudge back down the mountain. They return to their daily lives. And it seems, at first glance, like this moment has changed very little: the disciples are as obtuse as ever. The religious authorities remain suspicious of Jesus. There are still miles to be walked and too many demons to be exorcised. Nothing has changed… 

Or has it? These mountaintop experiences, these moments in which we are blessed with near perfect – albeit very short-lived – clear-sightedness are about removing the veil from our faces. It’s easy to behold God’s glory on the mountaintop. It’s much harder to keep our eyes open as we climb back down the mountain into our daily reality. But we need to keep lifting the veil from our eyes so that we can clearly see the brokenness that surrounds us and discern how we must address it. We need to rip off the blindfolds of apathy and fear so that we can bring the divine love and justice we have glimpsed into a world that continues to be racked with violence and hate. In a weekend where our newsfeeds have brought us word of two mass shootings within 24 hours, it is more important than ever that we keep our eyes – and our hearts – open. Once we have seen God’s radiance with our own eyes, there is no going back to the way things were before. 

Today, in the midst of our collective grief, we also have the joy of welcoming 19 people into the Body of Christ in the sacrament of baptism. For Christians, baptism is the ultimate expression of transfiguration, of the ordinary becoming charged with God’s glory. Water becomes a flood of God’s grace, oil becomes a mark of royal priesthood, human beings are set aside as Christ’s own forever. We speak of rebirth, of new life in the midst of death, and, in stark contrast to the voices that surround us, a bond of divine love that no force on earth has the power to undo. For many of us, this is a mountaintop experience. It will not last forever. And that’s okay. 

These moments of transfiguration, these mountaintop experiences are meant to give us strength for the journey. They are a reminder of the presence of God that is always with us, that we are always God’s beloved, no matter what. We read this story of the Transfiguration and we deliberately renew our own baptismal vows (whether or not we remember our baptisms) to remind us that God is always transfiguring us, even when we don’t see it. Transfiguration doesn’t always look like a transcendent, mountaintop experience. The transformation of our hearts happens in all kinds of humble ways that are easy to miss. The moments of dazzling glory are there to remind us to open our eyes to see God at work in us and in the world, and then to keep them open, even and especially when we are walking in darkness. 

The journey of transfiguration does not end on the mountaintop. And the journey of baptized life does not end at the font. These pivotal moments are only the beginning of a life full of wonder, full of grace, and full of God. They are touchstones that we can keep coming back to, not to keep us trapped in the past, but to remind ourselves that God is always with us – if only we have eyes to see Her. So open your eyes. Keep them open. And carry the joy of this moment out into this world as a testament to our belief that nothing is beyond God’s power to transfigure. Amen. 

Found in Translation

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, June 9th, 2019 (The Feast of Pentecost)

Readings: Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17

In my previous life, when I served as a priest in a mostly Spanish-speaking congregation, I prayed every day for a Pentecost miracle. Quite aside from the fact that translating my sermons took up a distressing amount of time, there was always so much in our shared life that got lost in translation – often due to my imperfect Spanish. There was the time I scandalized the altar guild by thanking them for washing, not the altar linens – but the altar diapers. Or the time when I asked my confirmation students to please pass me their eyeballs – instead of their worksheets (thankfully they declined). Or the fact that my inability to correctly pronounce the letter “d” caused me to routinely address my congregation not as “you all,” but “you bulls” (which, to add insult to injury, is a homophobic slur in certain parts of Latin America – and definitely not what I meant).

During the 3 years I served there, I would have given anything for access to the Holy Spirit driven miracle that we celebrate today – the miracle of universal, simultaneous translation. The miracle of effortless, mutual understanding in the midst of incredible diversity. The translation bloopers I shared with you are, while plenty embarrassing to me in the moment, minor in the grand scheme of things. But we all know that our inability to understand one another, be it because we translated inaccurately, inadequately, or not at all, can cause serious and lasting harm. Too often, instead of celebrating our diversity, we get lost in our divisions.

It is no accident that this is the miracle that we celebrate on the Feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church as we know it. A Church that has, from its origins, included members from a staggering array of ethnicities and religious backgrounds – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Jews, proselytes, and so on. A Church that, unlike other world religions, has never assumed a single, common language but has always existed in translation. A Church that has, therefore, always been vulnerable to human ego and human error.

It’s worth paying attention to the details of how this Pentecost translation miracle actually happens, because it has a lot to say about how we approach issues of diversity and inclusion today. So often, instead of doing the hard work of intercultural competency, we confuse equality with sameness. Which is where we get attitudes like: If all immigrants just would hurry up and learn English, we wouldn’t have to waste all this time translating. If only people of color would behave more like white people, we wouldn’t have to have difficult and necessary conversations about race. If only gender fluid people could decide whether they were male or female, we wouldn’t have to weep and gnash our teeth about how grammatically incorrect and inconvenient it is to use “they” as a preferred pronoun. If only everyone could be just like us.

This kind of forced sameness, where everyone is made to fit the mold of the dominant culture, is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit does at Pentecost. We do not get to go back to the mythical time before the Tower of Babel, when everyone spoke the same language. Instead, the Spirit gives the disciples the ability to speak to each member of the incredibly diverse crowd so that everyone can understand in their own native language. So that no one’s uniqueness is erased. So that everyone who wants it has access to the fiery, life-giving Word of God.

As heirs of the Holy Spirit’s legacy, as the Body of Christ in the world today: how are we partnering with the Spirit in her work of breaking down barriers to understanding and connection? How are we, in our communities, working towards unity without erasing diversity? How are we translating God’s Word so that all who are drawn to God may understand and feel welcomed?

When I talk about translation, I don’t just mean translating from one language to another (though heaven knows we have plenty of work to do on that). Even in monolingual settings, the Church is constantly interpreting and reinterpreting itself as it engages new communities in new contexts. How do we speak grace to young people who weren’t raised in the Church and don’t share our insidery vocabulary? How do we speak of God’s love and redemption to the LGBTQ community and others who have been wounded by the Church? How do we reimagine the ways we teach and preach and structure our communities so that we’re working with the Holy Spirit instead of getting in her way?

Today, as we rejoice at this fiery outpouring of the Spirit on our lives and on this community, we also recommit ourselves to living as Pentecost people, to joining in the Spirit’s work of translating, interpreting, and reimagining. To knocking down the walls that divide us while honoring and celebrating our God-given diversity. The Holy Spirit never stops pouring out her holy fire on us, never stops urging us to push toward a more just society and a more inclusive Church. And she never stops facilitating those little, magical moments of understanding and connection that when we set aside our suspicion and open our hearts to grace.

For each time that I committed an embarrassing translation faux pas in my previous parish, there were many more occasions when, somehow, with the Spirit’s intervention, everyone understood each other even when no one spoke the same language. Like when a whole group of Latina women volunteered for a week to help an elderly parishioner (who only spoke English) clean out her apartment and move into assisted living. They communicated exclusively in pantomime, but they understood one another. Or when neighbors from some of the wealthiest suburbs of New York City, who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, showed up in force to sit with a terrified Honduran teenager in a cold federal building as she awaited her immigration hearing. No words were exchanged, and they didn’t need to be. Love was clearly communicated. The Spirit’s presence was clearly felt.

This Pentecost, we proclaim that diversity does not have to divide us. That there is room enough in this Church for each of us to be the person God created us to be. And that there is no human barrier, no division that can stand for long when the Holy Spirit pours out her fire on us.

Deep Darkness

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, March 17th, 2019 (The Second Sunday in Lent, Year C)

Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor explores the spiritual value of darkness, the ways God works in the shadows of our lives when we fear nothing is happening. She is quick to point out that, although we live in a world obsessed with illumination and riddled with light pollution, there is something we miss when we strive to eradicate darkness. This is true for all humans and especially true for Christians: nearly every pivot point in our salvation narrative happens, not by the light of the blazing sun, but in darkness. The creation of the cosmos occurs in watery, chaotic darkness. Moses and the Israelites cross the Red Sea at night. Christ’s birth happens at  night. The Crucifixion happens at mid-day, but, as Jesus draws his last breath, a sudden and mysterious darkness covers the land. And the Resurrection, though we celebrate it by the light of Easter morning, actually happens in the double darkness of the tomb at night. The list goes on and on, suggesting that God does some of God’s best work in the dark.

Today’s reading from Genesis reminds us of another pivot point in our history that happened in darkness – God’s covenant with Abram, God’s promise to bring life out of barrenness, to create abundance from scarcity, and to be faithful until the end of time. The covenant that unites Christians, Jews, and Muslims as siblings who worship the same God is forged in a deep and terrifying darkness – a darkness that appears to be both literal and metaphorical.

Abram’s story reminds us that, if we wish to encounter the living God, we cannot run from the darkness. We can wrestle with it, question it, and yell at it, but we can’t escape it. We know this all too well, still reeling from the news of a white supremacist attack in New Zealand in which dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in their own house of worship. As news of relentless violence and hate continues to assail us from around the globe, it is easy to feel overpowered by the darkness. It is easy to despair, to wonder how bad it will have to get before things get better, to wonder if there even is a way out.

And yet, Abram’s call (and all of Scripture)  reminds us that it is precisely in the deepest, darkest, most painful places of our world and in our hearts that God most reliably shows up. That doesn’t mean we need to go looking for darkness or wallow in our suffering. It is a simple but powerful recognition that God is not afraid to visit our deep and terrifying darkness, that God stands with us when we are in panic and pain.

The message of hope that resounds in the darkness, from Abram, to Jesus, to our own day, is simply this: God keeps God’s promises. Always. The timing might not be quite what we had in mind and we will almost certainly be surprised along the way. But in a world that is fickle, unpredictable, and cruel, God is trustworthy. That is the piece of stability that we can pin our hopes on. That is the light that shines in our darkness and that the darkness cannot overcome.

By Another Road

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, January  6th, 2019 (The Feast of the Epiphany)

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-2; Matthew 2:1-12

On Christmas Eve, I had the distinct honor of helping to dress the several hundred children who participated in our Bishop’s Christmas Pageant. I was stationed in the angel department, elbow deep in halos and wings, and the cuteness was totally overwhelming. But I have to confess, when I escaped from angel-land to watch the hordes of tiny humans process to the manger, it was the kings who totally captured my heart. You see, the kings had the best costumes: bedazzled crowns, plush robes…and they also had the most creative costume adaptations. One king wore neon blue rainboots and a spiderman hoodie under his costume (it was very Love Actually). One girl couldn’t decide what she wanted to be, and became the nativity scene’s first angel-shepherdess-queen.

But all cuteness aside, the pageant costume confusion points toward the real ambiguity of Epiphany, of the wise men who made their way to Bethlehem to worship the Baby Jesus. As with all things Nativity related, we make a lot of assumptions about the story based on the ways we’ve seen it portrayed. But if we really take a look at the text, the Epiphany story raises more questions than it answers. Who, exactly, are these mysterious wise men? Are they kings? Matthew never says so, but every pageant in Christendom suggests otherwise. How many of them were there? Matthew never gives a number, yet we have become so convinced that there were three of them (perhaps because of the 3 gifts they brought?) that, over the years, the Church has even given them names. Where did they come from? How far East, exactly? India? Japan? Hawaii? If you do some geeky linguistic archaeology, there’s evidence to suggest that our strange visitors were Zoroastrians from Persia, but even that is just a guess.

The truth about the Epiphany is: well, we don’t really know what happened.

But what we do know is this: God is using an astonishing number of tools and strategies to draw all kinds of unlikely people to the baby in the manger. And none of God’s moves come from the “official,” “church-sanctioned” playbook. God is breaking all kinds of rules here. We may not know who, exactly, the magi were, but we can be fairly certain that they weren’t Jews. There’s a significant boundary crossed, right there: Gentiles, foreigners, worshippers of another God seeking audience with a Jewish king to worship a Jewish Messiah. What’s more, these wise men have quite the dubious background, which Nadia Bolz-Weber describes perfectly:

“they were Magi, as in magicians, and not the cute kind you hire for your kid’s birthday party. More likely, they were opportunistic, pagan, soothsaying, tarot-card-reading astrologers. Yet history made them out to be kings, maybe because the reality that they were magicians is too distasteful, since no one really wants the weird fortune-teller lady from the circus with her scarves and crystal balls to be the first to discover the birth of our Lord.”*

And yet, that is exactly what happens. Then, to go with the sketchy astrologers, we we have the star itself – the natural world collaborating with God to herald this cosmos-altering birth. And, for good measure, Matthew closes the scene by telling us that God spoke to the magi through a dream. Because why not?

The Epiphany story is a collage of all the sources of revelation that the Church has scorned in its long history, all the things that we have come to fear, or see as heretical: non-Christians, leading the way to Christ, aided by divination and astrology. Interpretation of natural phenomena. Dream analysis! And yet God shamelessly uses all of these suspicious strategies to point toward this extraordinary thing she’s doing: joining heaven and earth, coming to live among us in a human body.

Despite our best efforts to describe and contain the divine, our God cannot and will not be put in a box. The story of Epiphany is a beautiful testament to the ways in which God transcends all human categories and constantly disrupts our expectations of where, how, and to whom God will appear. God is an opportunist, who will use any tools at her disposal to draw us back to her love, from tiny humans in mismatched pageant costumes to stargazing Persian magicians. So what unexpected means is God using to speak grace to you? What unexpected road might you take to reach the Christ Child? This Epiphany, may the God who spoke through strangers, stars, and dreams open our eyes and our hearts to the wildness of God’s love.

*Bolz-Weber, Nadia. Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (New York: Convergent Books, 2015), 73.

Whole and Holy

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, December  30th, 2018 (The First Sunday After Christmas Day)           

Readings: Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

For audio, listen here

On Christmas Day, while recovering from the joyful exhaustion that was my first Christmas with you at Grace Cathedral, I watched the Christmas special of the BBC series, Call the Midwife. If it’s not a show you’re familiar with, I highly recommend it. Based on a true story, it tells the tale of the sisters of St. Raymond Nonnatus, an order of Anglican nuns working as nurses and midwives in London’s East End in the 1960s. These sisters work tirelessly in their community to deliver thousands of babies, often in circumstances only marginally preferable to a Bethlehem stable – and manage to make Anglicanism look really good while they do it. The series is poignant and funny, tender and profound – a testament to the holy realness of human life and the extraordinary power of ordinary acts of compassion. In its unflinching portrayal of the messy, risky, sometimes heartbreaking process of childbirth, the series bears witness to the truth that we are celebrating these twelve days of Christmas: that, against all odds, God comes to dwell among us as a baby, in human flesh and blood.

What Call the Midwife manages to do so brilliantly is draw attention to the holy complexity of being human: our flesh is, at once, perilously fragile and unimaginably precious; painfully broken and mysteriously whole; too often neglected and supremely worthy of care. With unusual clarity for a TV show, it tells the story of God’s grace showing up in unexpected places, mediated, not through words or doctrine, but through embodied acts of love. It is into this messy, vulnerable, joyful business of embodied life that God comes to meet us, not as a distant observer, but as one of us. The Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us.

God so loved the world, God so loved us and our flesh, that God chose to come and live as one of us in a human body. An actual body just like ours – a body with skin and organs, a body that breathed and cried and got hungry, a body that felt pain and experienced the adrenaline surge of excitement. There are other ways God could have elected to be with us – yet God chose this one. God chose human flesh. God went all in.

In church, we talk about the Incarnation a lot, we recite in the Creed every week that God “became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made human.” But do we hold the good news of the Incarnation at a safe distance, keeping it as an interesting but abstract theological concept? Or do we let the God who met us in the holy immediacy of a specific human body communicate the good news to our own flesh, with all its unique stories, needs, and longings?

Here at Grace Cathedral, we have spent the past year living into the theme of Truth. In 2019, we will shift our attention to a specific kind of truth – an often uncomfortable truth – as we transition into observing the Year of the Body. And these 12 Days of Christmas are the perfect time to introduce it. As I have excitedly told friends and family members that Grace Cathedral will be devoting an entire year to deliberate reflection on embodiment, their reactions have ranged from polite shock to outright horror. Many responded with something like, “Really? You’re going to talk about bodies? IN CHURCH!? Is that even allowed?” Their reactions are telling.

Generally speaking, the more uncomfortable something makes us, the more we need to talk about it. Truth telling is an uncomfortable business. And the truth is, the subject of human bodies is littered with taboos – perfectly normal parts of being human that we talk about only in code, things we don’t talk about in polite company, and certainly not in church. The result is too often deep, paralyzing shame – and a divided life, where we’re constantly hiding the parts of ourselves we’ve deemed unacceptable, keeping them outside these walls. So, in 2019, we are breaking the taboo and shining the light of God’s truth on the messy, holy reality of our own embodiment. Not to be trendy or provocative, but because God broke the ultimate taboo by having a body and being a body. We’re only following in God’s footsteps.

So what truth about human bodies did God reveal when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us? The truth of the baby in the manger is really quite simple: our own flesh – our imperfect, fragile, beautiful, holy flesh – is loved and lovable RIGHT NOW. Regardless of what illnesses and diagnoses assail us, what scars mark us, or how betrayed we feel by our bodies. God takes on, not just any flesh, but the flesh of an infant refugee in occupied territory to show us, once and for all, that bodies matter, and that all bodies are holy in God’s eyes – immigrant bodies, trans bodies, women’s bodies, aging bodies, incarcerated bodies. God is not afraid of the mess and imperfections of embodiment. Which then begs the question – why are we?

The Word is made flesh to remind us that we don’t have to be perfect to be loved. We don’t have to wait to get it right for God to meet us, and heal us, and forgive us. By taking on a human body, God shows us that there is no aspect of our humanity that God is not willing to share. That no secret pocket of shame or fear is too much for God to handle, that no brokenness is too great for God to heal, that there is nothing we need to hold back from God for fear of being ridiculed, judged, or punished. The Word became flesh to heal our deeply fractured relationship with our own bodies, so that we might be whole and holy, so that we might have the abundant life that God promises us.

Honoring the divine wholeness of our flesh is never an easy or perfect process, though it’s easy to paint an overly rosy picture of what this looks like in real life. Think of how easy it is to idolize and sanitize the manger scene – when, in reality, it was probably crowded, smelly, and full of the awkward realness of bodies colliding in close quarters. A terrified mother, going into labor with her first child in a strange city, without secure lodgings, with no extended family to support her. And then, just hours after giving birth, offering hospitality to a strange parade of shepherds, sheep, and exotic kings – in a stable that wasn’t hers, when probably all she wanted to do was sleep. Purity laws around women’s postpartum bodies are shattered; bodies of wildly different backgrounds and classes stand shoulder to shoulder with blatant disregard for social norms. There is nothing neat, tidy, or particularly respectable about the birth of Jesus, but there is a wild wholeness and an astonishing holiness. In Bethlehem, the whole, messy reality of human flesh is on full display, no holds barred – and God makes a home right there in the middle of it.

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. What would it look like for us to celebrate that truth in our own flesh? To imagine that Christ came, not just to save our souls at a far off judgement day, but to communicate God’s radical, unconditional love to our bodies in this life, right now? What would our healthcare system look like if we really believed that every human body was worthy of healing and care? What would our immigration system look like if we believed that no human body can be labeled as illegal, deportable, or expendable? What would our lives look like if we treated all human flesh with the same respect and dignity that we treat the bread and wine of the Eucharist?

Because the thing is, the Word wasn’t just made flesh once, 2000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem. The Word is constantly being made flesh, every moment of every day. In our bodies. At this altar. And in this body that is us, this community, the Body of Christ. So as we celebrate this season of Christmas and as we cross the threshold into this Year of the Body, may we remember that the radical invitation of the Incarnation is always open to us: to allow God’s grace and truth to meet us in our own flesh. To recognize the wholeness and holiness of our bodies. The Word is made flesh and dwells among us. What if we really allowed ourselves to believe it?

Solo Dios Basta

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, July 8th, 2018 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)

Readings: Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

On Friday, I returned home from Germany, where I spent two weeks visiting my family, and where the national motto may as well be: “be prepared.” I think the Boy Scouts got it from the Germans. Germans love organization, efficiency, precision, and being prepared for every eventuality. One day, my family and I went on a bike ride. My aunt wouldn’t let us leave the house until she had double and triple checked that everyone had enough water, snacks, band aids, tissues, sweaters, and rain jackets. It was 95 degrees out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But you never know when the weather might change suddenly, and God help you if you’re not prepared.

If the apocalypse comes, pray that you’re standing next to a German. They will have you covered.

So I laughed, hard, when I read today’s Gospel text while sitting in my aunt’s immaculate German kitchen, because this is just about the least German verse in the whole Bible. Jesus is effectively telling his disciples, “whatever you do, don’t prepare! Don’t bring an extra shirt, don’t bring money, don’t bring food, just go. Don’t waste precious time running “what if?” Scenarios in your head and worrying about a future that hasn’t happened yet. Trust God. Trust yourselves. Trust that you already have everything you need. Just go.”

I can feel my German relatives squirming from across the Atlantic.

But whether or not you share a neurotic cultural obsession with being prepared at every second, I’m willing to bet that this verse strikes a note of discomfort for all of us. Because, whether or not we are genetically predisposed to over-preparation, we like to feel like we’re in control of our own destiny. We like to know what’s going on. We like to feel like we have agency and power, not like we’re at the mercy of forces too great and too powerful for us to understand. And yet Jesus is very clear: take nothing. Make no plans. You are not in charge here. Go, and leave the rest up to God.

The truth is, no matter how expertly we prepare, we can never really know what awaits us on the path ahead. We can remember to bring an umbrella for 99 days, and the one day we forget is the day it pours. Preparation has its limits because life is random and messy and unpredictable. But there’s a concern here beyond the purely practical: When we plan every detail of our lives, when we schedule ourselves down to the last nanosecond, there is no room for God to surprise us. When our hands are so full of extra tunics, and money, and snacks, we have no way to accept the new life God is trying to give us. We have to empty our hands so that God can fill them. And that means letting go, not just of material possessions (though goodness knows they can get in the way), but of our preoccupation with being in control and our desire to micromanage the future.

I’m willing to bet that, had Jesus given the disciples an extra day to pack and prepare for their journey rather than simply sending them out as they were, they would have had a very difference experience. They would have gotten self-sufficient, maybe even arrogant. They would not have needed to rely so heavily on trust, on faith, on God – and so they wouldn’t have been able to heal as many people, or to communicate the grace and love of Jesus Christ as widely and as authentically as they evidently did.

It is precisely in those terrifying moments when we feel inadequate and unprepared that God can do amazing things through us. Last summer, I served as a supply priest at a Haitian congregation in the Bronx. There, they celebrate the Mass in French (which I speak) but preach in Haitian Creole (which I speak not a word of). I had been assured by the priest I was filling in for that I could preach in English and someone else could translate into Creole. So that is what I prepared.

Well. The Holy Spirit had other ideas. I arrived and discovered, 2 minutes before the service, that I was expected to preach IN FRENCH. I had never preached in French. I had not written a sermon in French. A large percentage of my stress dreams feature me getting up into a pulpit and realizing that I’ve written a sermon in the wrong language. This was my nightmare come true. I had 2 options: I could preach a sermon that no one would understand, or I could take a huge risk and pray that God would show up for me. I did the latter, because it seemed like exactly the kind of hare-brained scheme that Jesus so often puts us up to. I trusted that God would have my back.

And God did. I somehow, by grace alone, preached an intelligible sermon with only a few Spanish words thrown in by accident. The congregation was thrilled and promptly invited me back. And the thing is, if I’d been properly prepared, if I’d known ahead of time and obsessively practiced my French, I would have missed an astonishing opportunity to see God’s grace at work. When we let go of our need for control, when we get out of the way and let God be God, then amazing things start to happen. Healings. Reconciliations. Loaves and fishes. Linguistic pulpit miracles.

In times of uncertainty, when the road ahead is unclear and were not sure if we have the strength to make the journey – those are the times when we really need today’s Gospel. In times of transition and anxiety and impending change, that is when these words from our Lord can be a lifeline. When we need to remember, in the words of St. Teresa of Ávila, that God alone is sufficient – we don’t need a fancy education, or a foolproof strategy, or even a plan B. We don’t need to have everything figured out to follow Jesus. We just need to say yes and go. Exactly as we are. And trust that God will meet us. Because, even though we don’t know when or where or how exactly God will appear, God always, always shows up. Amen.

Our Mother, Who Art in Heaven

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, May 14th, 2017 (The Fifth Sunday of Easter – and Mothers’ Day)

Readings: Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

One of my favorite moments of my time with you at St. Peter’s happened two years ago, when the Bishop came to do confirmations. We were sitting in a circle with all the confirmands, letting the candidates introduce themselves. At the end, the Bishop asked the group if anyone had questions and was met with stunned silence, as though everyone was afraid to open their mouths. Finally, just as he was about to give up and head upstairs to the church, a 12 year-old girl from my class piped up fearlessly, “Hey, Bishop, in our confirmation class, Mother Kristin told us something really cool: that God is a she! What do you think of that?”

Never in my life have I been so mortified and proud in the same moment. Of all the things she could have asked the Bishop, and of all the things she retained from a year of confirmation class, what stuck with her was the idea that God might not be a man. She was curious about the gender of God – and something tells me she’s not the only one.

I have no idea what exactly I said to my confirmation class, but I doubt it was literally, “God is a she.” Although I love the idea of divine feminine, I recognize that the situation is much more complex than that. But I did spend a lot of time talking to my young confirmands about the consequences that our words have, especially the words we use to describe God. If we spend our lives calling God “He” and “Father,” then it’s no wonder that we construct a mental image of God as male, with characteristics we traditionally associate with men: power, strength, etc. In Spanish, and other languages where nouns have gender, the maleness of God is even more entrenched because the word “Dios” is masculine. Grammatically speaking, God is, in fact, male.

But there are other ways of imagining God. And, since today is Mother’s Day, I’d like to explore the often neglected idea of God the Mother. And before I even get into that, let me say from the outset that changing our conceptions of God is hard. Until about 9 years ago, I fiercely resisted the idea of calling God “she.” I thought it was ridiculous and unnecessary, to say nothing of incredibly uncomfortable. But the church I was attending at the time had the proud custom of calling the Holy Spirit “she” in the Nicene Creed –  “with the Father and the Son, she is worshipped and glorified; she has spoken through the prophets.” The first time I heard it, I hated it. I refused to say it. But, I loved the church otherwise, so I kept attending. And every week, as we said the Creed, my resistance crumbled a little bit more. Because the thing was, without my permission, hearing the Holy Spirit referred to as a she began to change not just the way I imagined God, but the way I related to her. And all from changing one pronoun in the Creed. Language is powerful.

To that end, I wonder if you’ll indulge me in a quick experiment. Let’s take the Lord’s Prayer, which most of us have known from memory for most of our lives. What happens if, instead of opening with “Our Father,” we switch it to “Our Mother?” Does the image of God that your brain conjures up as you pray change? What reaction did you have just to hearing those altered words? If you reacted strongly and negatively, that’s normal. But I invite you to explore your reaction. The words we use matter.

If, by now, you’re looking for the exit because there’s a rogue feminist heretic in the pulpit, know that the idea of the divine feminine is nothing I invented. It’s not even a modern development. The Bible is full of images of God as Mother, even though they’re not as prevalent as images of God as Father or King. In fact, our second reading from 1 Peter gives us one of the strongest Biblical images of God the Mother: “like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

I could not have asked for a more perfect Mother’s Day reading. Here, God isn’t a mighty King, or a strong father, disciplining his rebellious children. Here, she is a mother, breastfeeding her children, nursing us. What a tender, intimate, vulnerable image of God. This is a God who feeds us from her own body. Show me a man who can do that and tell me that we’re dealing with a male God. We need images like this one, uncomfortable though they may make us, to balance out the forceful masculine images of God we are bombarded with. It’s not enough that God is our Father: we need her to be our Mother, too

Today, we celebrate mothers of all kinds: living mothers and deceased mothers; single mothers and adoptive mothers; sick mothers and mothers in prison; mothers who are separated from their children and mothers who have lost children. Today, we remember those who may not be biological mothers, but who mother us anyway: grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends, etc. Today, we honor the pain of broken relationships, recognizing that, for so many people, this day is an excruciating reminder of being abandoned or abused by their mothers. Today, we remember the many women who want to be mothers but can’t. And we pray that this church might be a sanctuary for all of us, whether we are mothers or not, whether we are celebrating or holding back tears. All are welcome here today.

Because today, we don’t just celebrate human mothers. Today, we celebrate the maternal love that God, our Mother, has for us – a love that no one can take away. And we celebrate the eternal presence of our Heavenly Mother here with us today.

Last summer, when the Bishop got over his astonishment at being asked about God’s gender and gathered his thoughts, he replied that one of the most difficult things in the spiritual life is imagining that God could be like us. So many of us, myself included, still harbor an image of God as an old white man sitting on a cloud…and that’s just not helpful. What is helpful is to imagine that God is not a distant dictator, but intimately involved in our particular human situations. For example, a sick person might need a God who knows what it’s like to have a fragile human body. Or an immigrant might need a God who knows what it’s like to be an outsider and a stranger. And maybe a woman needs a God who knows what it’s like to have a female body; maybe a mother needs a God who is intimately familiar with the joys and challenges of motherhood. As difficult as it may be for us to imagine that God could be all those things at the same time – she’s well up to the challenge.

To have a mature faith, we can never stop broadening our imagination about who God is, because God is always infinitely more than what we can imagine. We can’t just say “God is a she” or “God is our Mother,” and call it a day, because that’s only a tiny part of who God is. But it is a part of the divine identity that has been excluded from the official theology of the church. It has been labeled as heresy and rarely, if ever, gets air time in our liturgy. And because of that, it takes work to recover this vision of God as female, of God as mother. For most of us, it is quite an exercise of our imagination to unlearn the idea the idea that God is male and open our minds to other possibilities. And so, to that end, I invite you to do something totally crazy and pray with me the words of a very familiar prayer with an very unfamiliar opening image. Say it out loud with me if you dare, or just listen to it and see how it echoes in your soul:

Our Mother, who art in heaven; hallowed be thy name…

Angry Jesus

A sermon preached at Christ Church/San Marcos, Tarrytown, NY on Sunday, March 4h, 2018 (The Third Sunday in Lent) 

Readings: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Anger is a complicated business. It is a universal human emotion and yet it’s a taboo subject. We don’t like to talk about anger. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we fear it. Even the way we speak of anger colloquially reveals some of our underlying fears: we speak about “losing our cool” or “losing our temper.” That language of loss implies that anger takes something away from us, takes us out of our right minds, makes us less human. Certainly, unchecked anger can have disastrous consequences, as we know too well from personal experience. Anger, when unaddressed, can lead to violence and hate. But does it have to? Is anger bad? Or is it more complicated than that?

The Bible, as with so many things, does not speak with one voice on the subject of anger. This is important to realize because, over time, certain Biblical voices have been given preference to others and have dominated the conversation. Often, we remember that anger (or wrath) is one of the 7 deadly sins and we stop there. Anger = sin = bad. But the truth is, the Bible has so much more to say about anger, and we hear some of those alternative perspectives in today’s readings. In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with a very angry Jesus. There is no avoiding it, or glossing over it. Jesus is mad and he acts on his rage, storming into the temple with a whip, chasing sacrificial animals, and knocking over furniture.

It is a scene that provokes deep discomfort. How would we feel if someone barged into this sanctuary with a whip and started overturning the furniture? At best, this is Jesus having a very bad day and, at worst, it’s Jesus engaging in criminal destruction of property. There is no shortage of ways to explain why Jesus might have been angry about the practices he saw in the temple, and many of those reasons are both plausible and valid. But I’m not interested in explaining away Jesus’ anger today. We do enough explaining away of emotions in our own lives; we don’t need any more practice. What I’m interested in is: what do we do with this uncomfortably angry Jesus? How do we make sense of him? And what does he have to offer us?

As Christians, we believe that God chose to become incarnate in the person of Jesus to share our humanity, to bridge the gap between us and God. The Incarnation is the ultimate act of love – God chooses to have a human body, with all its limitations and complications, to better understand what it’s like for us. Jesus, we believe, was like us in every way except for one thing – he never sinned. Well. That has some interesting implications for the way we read today’s Gospel, doesn’t it? It becomes a kind of logic puzzle: If anger is a sin, and Jesus got angry, but Jesus never sinned…something doesn’t fit here! But which part is it?

It all comes back to Jesus’ humanity. In the Church, we talk a good game about Jesus’ human nature, but we so often try to soften the sharp edges, make the idea of a human God more palatable. And it’s really important for us to pay attention to the parts of Jesus’ humanity that make us squirm because, chances are, those are the same parts of our own humanity that make us uncomfortable. Bodies are a chief culprit: we’re good with the idea of an Incarnate God in the abstract, but when we really start thinking about all the imperfect and troublesome things that bodies need and do…well, we tend to change the subject rather quickly. So let me say it: Jesus got hungry! And tired, and sick, and hot. Those things are not sins, so Jesus is not immune from them.

And Jesus, human being that he was, also had feelings. Just like we do. Strong, complicated, deeply uncomfortable feelings. And I dare to say that is extremely good news for us. Because it means that our most vulnerable, most human moments of anger, or grief, or anxiety, or sadness are not beyond God’s ability to comprehend. Jesus has been there, done that. And by entering with us into our deepest, darkest emotions, God has pronounced them holy.

How might that change how we experience an emotion like anger? Often, the anger itself pales in comparison to the stories and value judgements we attach to it: we feel the prickling of rage and quickly go to a place of, “Oh no! This is bad! I can’t get angry! What will people think? What’s wrong with me for feeling this way?” Today, Jesus offers us a simple and stunning answer: there’s nothing wrong with us. Strong feelings are part and parcel of what it means to be human – Jesus gets that from personal experience.

This story of Jesus cleansing the temple (a rare story that appears in all 4 Gospels and is therefore especially worth our attention) is here to remind us that feelings are not sins. What we do with them might be. But the feelings themselves are not only normal, but holy. They are opportunities for us to encounter God. Anger, for example, tends to crop up when something isn’t right, when some boundary has been crossed or some expectation has been violated. It can be as mundane as being grumpy about some unexpected traffic or as potent as civil disobedience in the face of societal injustice. Anger can break us down, or it can be a catalyst for action. We’re seeing it with thrilling clarity in the witness of the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting, who are demanding a better future. Anger exists to alert us to the fact that something isn’t the way it should be and something needs to be done. Anger is an invitation to action.

That’s perfect, because Lent is also an invitation to action: an invitation to explore the wilderness places in our own hearts, the parts we’re ashamed of, the parts we try to forget about. If you’re anything like me, there might be some anger in the wilderness of your own soul that’s crying out for recognition and healing. What anger might you be ready to let go of? What anger is calling out for action? If it’s not anger that’s asking for our attention, it might be grief, or sadness, or anxiety. Whatever it is that awaits you in your wilderness: be not afraid. There’s nothing out there or in here that is unfamiliar territory for Jesus. And that is extraordinarily good news. Amen.

Transfigured

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, February 11th, 2018 (The Last Sunday of Epiphany)

Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

There is something beautifully consistent about this Last Sunday in Epiphany, this last deep breath before we plunge into Lent on Wednesday. As some of you know, our readings are on a rotating lectionary cycle, meaning that, once we’ve heard a reading on a given Sunday, we typically won’t hear it again for 3 years. This has the double function of keeping us from getting bored and exposing us to the different voices of each of the four Gospels. But there are exceptions to this rule, and they are worth paying attention to – certain days when we read the same Gospel every year because it’s just so important. Ash Wednesday, for example. Maundy Thursday. Those readings never change. And then there are other days, like today, when we celebrate an event that is common to multiple Gospels: on this Last Sunday in Epiphany, we always hear the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, from Matthew, Mark, and Luke in turn.

Why is the Transfiguration so important that we hear about it every year? Why is this the event in Jesus’ life that we use to mark the transition from the brightness of Epiphany to the wilderness of Lent? How does the Transfiguration of Christ mirror what’s going on in our own lives? What wisdom does it have to offer us, here and now?

In all three Gospels that tell the story, the Transfiguration is all about light, brilliance, revelation. Jesus, we are told, is literally glowing, dazzlingly white. That light is what the season of Epiphany is all about – the same star that shone in the night sky above Bethlehem on Christmas continues to shed its light on our lives, revealing all the surprising ways in which Jesus is present. But we don’t get to stay in that place of blinding radiance forever. Our lived human experience is a constant cycle of light and darkness, joy and pain, trauma and redemption – and our liturgical calendar mirrors that reality. Every year, right around this time, the lectionary allows us to stand with the disciples on the mountaintop to witness this Transfiguration. We revel in Jesus’ glowing appearance – and then we follow him down the mountain and into the wilderness.

That journey from the joy of the mountaintop to the desolation of the desert is not a super fun one. And yet, it’s a path that all of us have walked at some point in our lives. We all know what it feels like to have glorious, fleeting moments of perfection, split seconds where everything makes sense and everything is ok. And we also know what it’s like to feel the ground crumbling beneath our feet, to watch our world fall apart, to feel crushed by the lonely weight of despair. The relentless, cyclical movement from mountain peak to desert and back again is part and parcel of what it means to be human – and by ritualizing that journey every year in the liturgical calendar, the Church honors that. This passage from Epiphany to Lent reminds us that we are not alone, either at our most joyous or our most despondent. Not only do we accompany one another in community; Jesus himself walks with us.

Every one of us has a deep-seated and often unexpressed desire to know that we are not alone in whatever difficulty we’re experiencing. Each one of us craves recognition that, no matter how broken we feel, we are not beyond help. It is human nature to fear our own darkness; there is always a nagging voice of doubt that if only people knew what we were really like on the inside, they would run away in horror. It is so easy for us to feel isolated in our darkness, chronically misunderstood, irreparably damaged.

When Jesus leaves behind the dazzling perfection of the mountain, where he is surrounded by love and understanding from the prophets who went before him and the voice of God resounding from the heavens, he is doing something quite extraordinary. He is voluntarily entering our darkness, our brokenness, accompanying us and assuaging our fears by reminding us that we are not alone. Jesus could have stayed up on that mountain peak forever, prolonging the magic, enjoying the glory. But he doesn’t. Because that’s not what he came to do. By deliberately walking down the mountain and choosing to enter the darkness of the wilderness, Jesus is expressing a fundamental truth about our relationship with God. He is showing us, not by his words, but by his actions, that there is no darkness within our world or our hearts that God will not willingly enter and that God is not capable of redeeming.

We still don’t have to like the descent from the mountain peak. Like the disciples, we can try to stretch out that mountain top moment as long as possible, offering to build tents that will keep Jesus in a place that is safe and comfortable for us. But a Jesus who only relates to us on life’s mountain tops, when we’re at our best, ultimately isn’t much use to us. Those aren’t the moments when we need salvation and healing. We need a God who sees us, loves us, and heals us when we’re at our worst. If we want to experience the true power of grace, the full potential of redemption, then we have to follow Jesus down the mountainside, into the wilderness, and all the way to the Cross.

That is the journey we will be taking together over the next six weeks. Starting on Wednesday, we will leave behind the splendor of Epiphany, with its bright joy and plentiful Alleluias for the murky austerity of Lent. We will trade dazzling white light for crumbly grey ashes. And we will do all of this in the knowledge that Jesus has gone before us and continues to walk alongside us. The good news that we celebrate and proclaim is that we never experience darkness alone. May the transfiguring brightness of today give us strength for the journey ahead and courage to enter the wilderness with trust and boldness. Amen.