Empty Space is not Empty: The Power of Not Preaching

You may have come here looking for my Palm Sunday sermon, and now, here you are, and there's no sermon.

No, I wasn't sick.

Our deacon wasn't preaching.

No one else was preaching.

There was no sermon.

As I was preparing the script for the reading of the Passion last week, with all of its beauty and power and range of emotions, I wondered what I could say that would add to it.

And I came up with...nothing. Not the same kind of nothing you feel when you are in the midst of preparing a sermon and there are no fresh ideas, no compelling message, no clever "hook."

No, this was something different. It was clear to me that there was nothing I could say that would give the folks in the pews more than the reading itself, God's Word.

Now, I must admit that when I thought of NOT preaching on one of the signal Sundays of the church year, I was stricken with the fantods.* Would my parishioners think I was simply lazy, not preparing a sermon for Palm Sunday? Would they feel cheated, since they (generally) like what I preach?

But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that we should simply have a time of meditation and then a meditation hymn afterwards, so we could let the story sink into our bones.

And so we did. We sat in silence for a bit. There was none of the usual anxiety over how long we would meditate, would people get antsy, how long to wait before we started the hymn. We simply sat and thought, and it was blessed silence. And then we sang.

The meditation hymn was #458 from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. The text is exquisite, the creation of the poet Samuel Crossman (1624-1683):

My song is love unknown, my Savior's love to me, 
love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
O who am I that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need, his life did spend.

Sometimes they strew his way, and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day  hosannas to their King.
Then "Crucify!" is all their breath, and for his death they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run, he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries! Yet they at these themselves displease, and 'gainst him rise.

They rise, and needs will have my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save, the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet steadfast he to suffering goes, that he his foes from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine:
never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine.
This is my friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. 


And so the rest of the service of Holy Eucharist proceeded. We had our gathering at the table, our remembrance of that first eucharistic feast. There was a sense of calm and peace beyond the norm.

And I think one of the contributing factors to that mood was the time of silent meditation in lieu of a sermon.

People needed that time to process the horrific story of Jesus' Passion and death without mediation or explanation from me, or any other preacher, and they appreciated it.

Even someone who is  occasionally cynical about liturgy said that it was the most powerful experience of Palm Sunday she had ever had. Others had similar comments.

Does this mean that I will stop preaching? No, even though there might be a few folks in my parish who would be glad if that happened. I still think that part of my vocation is to teach, exhort, explain, question, rejoice, aggravate, light a fire beneath...and that means I preach.

But it is a good thing every now and again to NOT preach. To let the people feel the Word filling all the empty spaces in them, to wonder at it, to fall in love with it, to hear, really hear.

There is power in not preaching, I think. Not in relief from work for me, but in helping others realize that they are capable of hearing and interpreting on their own. That's a good and necessary part of my work.

But I will be preaching this week, several times, and will most definitely be preaching Christ's Resurrection next Sunday. And now I think I'd better turn to my sermon preparation for the days to come...

A blessed Holy Week to you all.





*Fantod: fan·tod, [fan-tod] 
noun

1.

Usually, fantods. a state of extreme nervousness or restlessness; the willies; the fidgets (usually preceded by the  ): We all developed the fantods when the plane was late in arriving.

See Edward Gorey's "Mystery" lady, slapping about on top of a coffin whimpering and moaning. 

Sermon for Sunday, March 17, 2013 Lent V John 12:1-8 “The Wrong Question”

In recent weeks, we’ve spent our Adult Forum time pondering the problem of evil and suffering in the world, and how a good and all-powerful God allows bad things to happen. We’ve wended our way through the Bible, which has different viewpoints depending whether you’re reading Job or the Psalms or the New Testament, we’ve heard about the views of ancient theologians like St Augustine and Irenaeus, modern ones like Karl Barth, James Cone and Rosemary Ruether, and most recently we’ve looked at a group of theologians who say that we’re asking the wrong question. They say that we cannot know the will of God, so all that matters is how we respond to suffering.

All we can do is recognize when something isn’t right, and do what we can to change it.

This idea of “you’re asking the wrong question” has great potency as we listen to today’s Gospel, and hear the story of Mary bathing Jesus’ feet with very pricey scented oil. A pound of that oil, nard, was worth an average person’s wages for a full year.

This got the attention of Judas. Judas was a practical man, and because he was a practical man who stayed on top of the details, he had been given the task of keeping track of the money that the little band of Jesus and his disciples shared. Of course, he skimmed a little of that money off the top – this was the way people with responsibilities like this made money, even if it wasn’t the way Jesus taught people. Judas thought to himself, “That oil cost a lot of money – 300 denarii at least – and I could have had a little of it, if she had just donated it to Jesus’ cause rather than wasting it in that extravagant gesture.

So he threw a little hissy fit and complained. He asked a question. “Why did she waste the money on this nard?”

A question. But, in Jesus’ mind, the wrong question.

It was an utterly extravagant gesture, that oil, poured on Jesus’ feet. And then Mary wiped the excess off, not with a towel, but with her hair. Her hair! Talk about extravagance on top of extravagance! A more practical, pragmatic person would look at that and say precisely what Judas implied: “What a waste!”

But Jesus saw it differently. That oil, the gentle caress of Mary’s hair? Of course it was extravagant. 

But it was also a needful thing: a preliminary anointing of his body for the grave. He knew that although Mary might not realize it, she was preparing his earthly body for what was to come. Not an extravagance, but a necessity. Dead bodies were prepared in those days before embalming by washing, anointing, and packing them in fragrant herbs and spices. Otherwise, even in the short time between death and burial, the odors of decomposition would be troublesome. And so this first step of preparing his body made sense to Jesus, even if it didn’t to Judas.

Extravagance might not necessarily be a bad thing…

But it requires us to shift our minds from one question to another. The first question - why not save the money for a more appropriate use? – is tied to the kind of consumer economy that values things in terms of commerce, where things gain value by being hoarded. The alternate question – how can we give it away in a way that multiplies its value with love? – is tied to a different kind of economy, a gift economy, where things gain value by being circulated and shared.

This notion of a gift economy is the thesis of a philosopher named Lewis Hyde, who talked about how we have been seduced by the model of the market economy. In a market economy, one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding--- although we generally call it 'saving'. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift within the community that leads to increase--- increase in connections, increase in relationship strength.

Now, I know that this feels counterintuitive. We are daily bombarded by advertisements saying that we need to gather resources in, not give them away. But this is precisely what Jesus was thinking about when he chastised Judas for his comment about Mary’s oil. It was the alternate question – how do we multiply the value of something by giving it away? How do we give extravagantly, so that the value of what we give is multiplied by the relationships it sparks, by the love that is shared?

If we think about the moments that have felt most precious and full of love in our lives, I suspect they are marked by some sort of extravagant giving.

I’m not talking about extravagance in terms of dollars and cents, although sometimes it means that. I’m thinking of the person who donated a kidney to a perfect stranger. There’s a web site called Matching Donors and people who need a kidney transplant can post on it, describing themselves and their situation in the hope that someone will respond positively. Remarkably, people have received this gift of life from people whom they do not know. That’s an extravagant gift.

A woman I know has ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease. She is in her forties and has school-age children. She is writing letters to them, for their father to give them on their birthdays each year, because she will not be there to share those birthdays.

Sometimes, it is something seemingly small, a widow’s mite, if you will, that is the extravagant gift. At a time when my life was in flux, and I didn’t know what would come next, my daughter wrote me a long letter telling me how my support and encouragement had kept her going through her own challenges. In the world’s economy, the letter was valueless. To me, in my gift economy if you will, it was priceless.

Gift economy is about grace and the things that build relationships. The letter was infinitely valuable because it told me about the nature of our relationship as mother and daughter in ways I might not have otherwise realized. My friend’s letters to her children maintain a relationship that will extend beyond her passing. The kidney from a stranger is not merely about extending someone’s life, it is about giving them the ability to live into existing and new relationships. And here’s the thing: it pays back the giver in remarkable ways.

One man who donated a kidney to a stranger wrote, “Since my kidney donation,  I feel richer than Donald Trump and Bill Gates combined!” He felt blessed that he would be able to help another person live.

My friend with ALS said, “I’m so grateful that the kids will remember me through these letters. It is a little bit easier to let them go if I know I’ll still connect with them.”
 
And that letter from my daughter? It helped me through a tough time, and it is always in my memory when she needs some kind of help or emotional support from me.

Extravagant generosity, that mark of the gift economy, multiplies, it doesn’t divide.

And it shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus prefers it to Judas’ snide remark about the cost of that sweetly scented oil. After all, it is his extravagant generosity, his willingness to give rather than to hoard, that will be remembered when we read the story of his passion and death next week, when he gives his very life for our benefit.

His very life. It was worth more than a flask of nard, wouldn’t you say? That same life that Judas, wedded to the commercial economy, sold for a mere thirty pieces of silver.

So what do you say is the right question? Why did she waste the money on a flask of scented oil? Or How can we give everything, even our lives, so that our generosity will multiply joy and faith and grace? 

Amen.

Our Annual Letter to Family and Friends (A Little Late This Year!)

St. Patrick’s Day, 2013

Dear Family and Friends:

Yeah, we know, first it was a Christmas letter, then it slipped back to Valentine’s Day and we pretended we had made the switch on purpose, and now we’re only getting around to writing in the middle of March.  But it’s actually fitting that we should write at St. Patrick’s Day because the high point of 2012 for us was the week we spent in the west of Ireland.  For seven days in July we enjoyed poetry, myth and music for the soul with the poet David Whyte and 35 fellow pilgrims.  Our days blended David’s inspired talks and poetry on the theme of pilgrimage, rugged hikes in the limestone hills of the Burren region, and music ranging from Gregorian chant to traditional Irish to hip-hop. 

Our Irish adventure got off to a comic start when Doug’s suitcase was claimed off the luggage carousel in Shannon Airport by another passenger.  Delta Airlines assured us the other passenger would realize the error as soon as he arrived at his destination and would be responsible for delivering the misappropriated bag to our cottage in Ballyvaughan.  Twenty-four hours later there was still no report from our errant fellow traveler, and Delta was having no luck tracking down his relatives back in the States.  Doug had resorted to borrowing Mary’s spare clothes to keep warm in the 60-degree Irish summer, and eventually walked into town to buy an Irish sweater.  Then the mystery was solved and the bag returned.  The other passenger, an elderly Irish-American, had been flying back to Ireland with the ashes of his recently-deceased sister, hoping to lay her remains to rest in the land of her birth.  Between fatigue and grief he managed to claim the wrong bag at Shannon.  When he reached his Irish sister’s home he went straight to bed.  She helpfully unpacked “his” suitcase.  It was only the next day that he realized his error.  Most impressively, she managed to repack everything into Doug’s severely overloaded suitcase and arrange a rendezvous with one of the drivers of our tour.  So Doug’s clothes have now visited a real Irish home, he enjoyed (?) a brief period of cross-dressing, and an Irish woman’s cremains made several extra turns around the luggage carousel before resting among their ancestors in peace.

Visiting Ireland not only fulfilled Mary’s long-held dream of seeing the country of her Brennan forebears, it also celebrated both our 15^th anniversary and Mary’s MAJOR MILESTONE birthday.  We’ll leave you to guess which one, with one hint – she was born in the last days of the Truman administration, when “I Like Ike” was just beginning to gain electoral traction on the campaign trail. 

Other than visiting Ireland, Mary only wanted one thing for her birthday: to have her kids cook for her.  And cook they did.  After considerable backing-and-forthing on email, and a fair amount of trash talking about each other’s recipes and culinary prowess, the five of them put their creativity together and came up with a menu worthy of the woman who first taught them the difference between a soupcon and a soup spoon.  An afternoon of competitive cooking produced a feast that would have pleased Julia Child (had she cooked American-Italian-Asian fusion cuisine in Virginia). 

Earlier in the spring Doug finished his term as president (plus two years as VP) of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.  He’s glad he took on the job and glad to be done. The pastoral counseling movement, which will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2014, is thriving.  His four years took him to every region of the country and introduced him to wonderful people stretching to the limits of their creativity to find new avenues for helping others.  And even though air travel has lost most of its glamour, there’s something about the early-morning sun on the walls of the Grand Canyon or the sight of Chicago from seven miles overhead that makes up for the 3 a.m. stopover on the redeye home from Seattle another day.

Lest she grow bored with pastoring a church, serving as dean of her region, and chairing the diocese’s Committee on the Diaconate, in September Mary began a Doctor of Ministry program at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.  In less than two semesters she has already picked up valuable tools for assessing congregations and understanding their life.  She hopes ultimately to improve the process of matching clergy with congregations.

Finally, a sad farewell.  No, not a beloved relative, or even a pet.  Just a few weeks ago Doug’s trusty 1999 Specialized Allez bike, the one he rode in the Race Across America in 2008, logged its last mile.  The frame broke near the back axle, an fatal fracture in an aluminum frame.  After 25,000 miles he can’t really complain, but he was sad to see the bike go.  He now rolls on a bright orange 2011 Motobecane 30-speed.  Maybe the new ride will motivate him to cut back on the ice cream and get back into his skinny jeans.  (More likely it will give him a new excuse for more Cookie Dough ice cream.)

Here’s wishing each of you a St. Patrick’s Day filled with joy and a 2013 (what’s left of it, anyway) of peace and good health.

Slainte,

Mary and Doug

Sermon for Wednesday Interfaith Lenten Series Matt 26:69-75 “Fallible”

We’ve been watching the news casts from Rome in recent days. 115 cardinals gathered there to elect a new pope. Each day, we were watching to see the smoke. Was it black? Was it white? Does the Roman Catholic Church have a new pope or not? A wag on the internet posted a guide to conclave smoke, offering some different smoke color options: red means a cardinal has gone missing, brown means an espresso break, yellow means a cardinal has left the lights of his car on and so forth…it’s funny stuff, culminating finally in what it means if there is pink smoke: Hello Kitty has been elected pope!

This afternoon, we saw white smoke, and discovered that the new Pope is Pope Francis, a Jesuit from Argentina originally named Jorge Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, a man who rides the local public transit system to get around the city. We pray for him, and for the Catholic Church in this time of transition.

We laughed at the talk of Hello Kitty smoke, but we also knew that this was serious business, this electing of a pope, the spiritual leader of some 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. Popes have been game-changers in the world: look at John Paul II and his opposition to the Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union. For some of us from other denominations, the actions of Popes have triggered the birth of a new denomination: Clement VII’s unwillingness to grant Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon led to Henry pronouncing himself supreme head of the church in England, which led to the birthing of the Church of England, and eventually to the Episcopal Church in which I serve. 

             Popes are important, whether we are Catholic or not, and one of the many titles they bear is a particularly ancient one: successor to St Peter, the Bishop of Rome.

            This is, of course, the same Peter that Jesus named as the rock upon which he would build his church. The same Peter who, just a bit later, riled up Jesus so thoroughly that the Lord said “Get behind me, Satan!” The same Peter who, in the gospel passage we just heard, so miserably failed in the time of crisis by hiding and pretending that he wasn’t one of those followers of the Lord, by denying him not once, not twice, but three times.

            The man who often didn’t understand what it was that Jesus was saying…a humble man, most likely without much in education. A fisherman. Probably a good fisherman, but still…a fisherman, not a rocket scientist. Not a theologian. Not ordained. Utterly ordinary. A guy in homespun clothes that probably still smelled of pickerel and perch, a man with a bit of a temper when upset, a passionate man whose emotions sometimes got the better of him, but a solid buddy who would lend a hand if you needed it.

             Compare that to the candidates for successor to Peter in Rome. These men who hold advanced degrees in theology and related disciplines, who write learned articles and books, who dress in the finest satin and silk and lace, these careful and faithful men who probably never set a fishing net in the water or tied a knot other than that of their cinctures…they are careful not to appear too hungry for the title – the saying is “Go in a pope, go out a cardinal. Go in a cardinal, come out a pope.” Appearing to be vying for the papacy is apparently unseemly. But there are conversations, and there are thoughts about who might take on this complex and difficult task of leading the church…to be a new rock upon which the church will rest for the next decades. Some favor a strong reformer/administrator type. Some favor someone from the parts of the world where the church is growing the fastest. Some want a pope with a deep heart, and all of this plays into the voting, I would expect.

               But none of them smells like perch or pickerel. None of them has rough hands from the labor of tying and tossing and pulling the nets and wrangling the boat across rough waters. The successor to Peter will most likely not seem like Peter – that diamond in the rough fisherman – at all.

And yet we look back at the story of that fisherman that we just heard and we see such interesting glimpses into the man.

              It is Peter at his weakest. He thought he’d be brave after Jesus told them all of what was coming. He thought he’d defend Jesus to the end. At the last supper, when Jesus said that they would all fail him, Peter defended himself: “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

You can picture him, can’t you? Jesus said they would fail him. They all said, “No, no, not me!” You can see how red Peter is, the hot blood creeping up from his neck to suffuse his whole face – even his ears are now bright red with hot temper – and he cries out “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

              But then the story unfolds, and Peter and James and John accompany Jesus to Gethsemane. Do they stand guard to protect him as he prays? No.

               They fall asleep.

               Even Peter, the rock, the hot-tempered man who has sworn his allegiance, now dozes in the garden. Even the man who was so offended that Jesus would suggest that he would abandon the Lord, snores as he leans against a rock.

               An ordinary man, this Peter, with all the human failings that we recognize in ourselves: egotism, anger, pride…a man who sometimes says thoughtless things, who makes promises that he clearly cannot keep. This Peter. This rock, upon whom Jesus has built his church.

              I think that when we hear the story of Peter denying Jesus – “No, I do not know the man!” – it makes us intensely uncomfortable, because it feels so much like what we would do if we were in his position. If we were afraid. If we felt like an outlaw. If we were challenged by people who would gladly turn us in to our enemies for a few coins. We might find ourselves with not a drop of courage in our veins in that moment…

             And then we say to ourselves, “Well, we will never be in that situation, so I guess we’re safe. We will never be tested in that way.”

              We breathe a sigh of relief, thinking, “No, I am not like Peter.”
 

              But is that really true?

             When does our courage fail us? When do we deny the Lord, even after we have sworn that we will not fail him?

              When someone tells a joke at the expense of another, perhaps playing on that person’s ethnicity or skin color, we deny the Christ who taught us that we are all beloved of God. When we see the opportunity to help someone in need, and we stop short, thinking that the person makes us nervous because she doesn’t talk like us or smells bad, we deny the Christ who said that we are to help others. When we say that those who are hurting should shape up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get themselves a job, because doesn’t it say that “the Lord helps those who help themselves,” we deny the Christ who said that even an adulteress didn’t deserve to be stoned, even a demoniac deserved relief from his demons, even the child of an enemy should be healed…

               We are all Peter. We are all Peter, hiding in a courtyard, saying “I do not know the man.” True words, because if we truly knew the man, we wouldn’t deny him.

               But if Peter’s story ended with his ignominious denials, we would miss out on the most important part of what this story and this man is about.

               Yes, Peter denied his Lord, the same Lord he cherished above all others. Yes, his shame was great, and he wept for it. But he gathered himself afterwards. He joined with the other disciples. He became something more than the craven who denied Christ…he became the rock upon whom the church was built. This ordinary, flawed, uneducated, hot-tempered man who failed at the moment of greatest crisis became the leader of a religious movement that reshaped the world. His leadership was not perfect – he regularly got into disputes with others, no surprise there – but it was faithful and powerful, as attested to in the Acts of the Apostles.  

                Peter grew into being the rock. It wasn’t an elegantly sculpted piece of marble, like the statues in St Peter’s in Rome. It was a rough-hewn imperfect solid chunk of strength. But it was solid and strong and unshakeable. He grew into being a rock, being The Rock.

                I expect that those 115 cardinals in the papal conclave, voting on who will be the next successor to Peter, are painfully aware of their imperfections. They know that any of them, should they be elected pope, will bring their brokenness as well as their gifts. Silks and satins and lace may cover the exterior flaws, but their humanity will still remain. But they pray that the one whom they elect will grow into the task, as Peter grew into being the rock
 .

                We share much of the same struggle, even though we aren’t about electing a pope. We know we would  be as likely to deny Christ as we would defend him, if we were afraid. We know that we are imperfect followers.

               
                  But the lesson of Peter, who failed but still persevered, is that imperfect followers can learn and grow and become, if not perfect Christians, at least better at following the task that our Lord set before us when he set his eyes on Jerusalem.

                  You are the rock. Upon you, I build my church.

Amen.