Advice for Pentecost Sunday

What Bishop Brewer Said

"The great burden and annoyance that I have is that the church plans a little work as if it were to be done in our own strength and as cheap as possible. We go home and set timidly about it as if we had overestimated our ability, then we falter and hesitate; we begin to murmur, then to grumble, and finally become indifferent.

"The church that prides itself on its historic continuity with the apostles, who took the world in their embrace and dared to live and die to save it, sighs and declines.

"We drop our parish net at the corner of a fine avenue and tie it to a splendid building, and a good many of us come over on Sunday mornings, and a few on Sunday evenings, to see if any fish have been wise or foolish enough to come into our handsome net. And yet, but a block away, there is a great multitude of men to whom the heavens are brass, the earth a martyrdom, the church but a name, busy with nothing but hanging about the neck the millstone of human weakness that it may sink out of sight and die.

"I say that we fear to launch out into the deep of humanity and instead go all our lives long coasting along the shore of opportunity, privilege, and power. Someday soon the church will have to give an account, and I fear for it."

Bishop Leigh Richard Brewer of the Episcopal Diocese of Montana
In a speech given to the 1909 Diocesan Convention

Spilled Chalice

On Sunday, April 28th, at our later service, I held aloft the chalice at the words of institution. In moving the cup back down to the table, I inadvertently caught the edge of the chalice on the altar missal, causing the wine in the cup to precipitously slosh this way, then that, hitting the brim on either side but miraculously not spilling a drop. I thought of the story of the child who, upon seeing consecrated wine spilled on the carpeted sanctuary floor, intoned, "Well, Jesus was smart enough to get in there ..."

Which brings us to yesterday, at our earlier service, when a good deal of consecrated wine offered to me was inadvertently spilled on my hands and over much of the tiled floor under and around the altar. The Eucharistic Minister unintentionally exclaimed, "Jesus!" (which seemed more or less to be the precise point). He then apologized profusely and we dealt expeditiously and reverently with the issue - well, as expeditiously and as reverently as you can in such situations.

A story about Martin Luther at age 58. The year was 1542, the place Wittenberg:

... a woman wanted to go to the Lord’s Supper, and then as she was about to kneel on the bench before the altar and drink, she made a misstep and jostled the chalice of the Lord violently with her mouth, so that some of the Blood of Christ was spilled from it onto her lined jacket and coat and onto the rail of the bench on which she was kneeling. So then when the reverend Doctor Luther, who was standing at a bench opposite, saw this, he quickly ran to the altar (as did also the reverend Doctor Bugenhagen), and together with the curate, with all reverence licked up [the Blood of Christ from the rail] and helped wipe off this spilled Blood of Christ from the woman’s coat, and so on, as well as they could. And Doctor Luther took this catastrophe so seriously that he groaned over it and said, “O, God, help!” and his eyes were full of water. (Johann Hachenburg, quoted in Edward Frederick Peters, The Origin and Meaning of the Axiom: “Nothing Has the Character of a Sacrament Outside of the Use” [Fort Wayne, Indiana: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 1993], p. 191)

Alas, I had no such presence of mind. I was all practicality.

The service finished, I shook hands with folks on the way out. My own hands were still a little sticky from the doings.

As I went to put away my vestments (miracuously not a drop of wine on the entire lot [nor for bonus points the fair linen]), it struck me that when I'd just shaken hands with folks, I was putting a little wine on everyone as they left. That is, putting a little wine on the outside of everyone. Smearing the Blood of Christ, if I may be so bold, upon their bodies, rather than neatly aiming for the gut as we have become inured by a few thousand years of liturgical practice.

What happened? Something as common and as holy as human hands were marked with something sacrosanct that in the end just didn't hit its target. The material was supposed to be reverently dealt with as the remainder of a holy meal - consumed, poured into a piscina, given to the ground. Instead it left the church in tiny drabs written onto people's bodies where, perhaps, the idea might infect and perturb them enough to want to go and wash themselves.

We Christians write on each other's bodies. We write BAPTISM with water and HOLY SPIRIT with oil and MORTAL CHILD OF GOD with ash. We write BELOVED DECEASED, COMMENDED TO GOD with the oil of unction. We figuratively write SANCTUARY OF THE MOST HIGH in holy incense.

In practice and practicality, too, we write all over ourselves. We write JESUS LOVES ME in crayon and I LOVE YOU with aprons and sweat gained through acts of hospitality. But as a rule we don't write on each other with wine.

All I'm left with in the wake of it, then, is simply this: What, if anything, was written upon those who left our service with wine staining their fingers? BELOVED? SERVANT? BELIEVER? FELLOW TRAVELER?

Woman-Led

Sermon for Year C, Sixth Sunday of Easter

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

May 5, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Acts 16:9-15

“Woman-Led”

If I think back to the summer of 1992,

  I can still recall the distinct feeling

    Of almost having my hand squeezed right off the end of my wrist.

I was engaged to be married to Jacquie at the time.

We were both still in college in Oklahoma,

  Going to school about 90 miles away from the town where I grew up.

Thought maybe it’d be good to show up back

  At my old home church in my old hometown one Sunday

  With my fiancée on my arm.

Show ’em I wasn’t too good for them.

One sunny, windy Sunday morning, up we went to worship, hand in hand.

It was nice seeing all those folks again.

They seemed reliable and dependable to my tired student eyes,

  Which had fairly recently been opened to a sense of how the world actually works.

The singing was reliable, too,

  But most everything else had changed.

There was a new pastor,

  And he had introduced this thing –

    A time of intentional prayer, he called it –

  Where the men would come forward

    And kneel on the carpeted steps around the altar

    And pray for God to send righteous moral leadership in the form of men

    Who would turn around the direction of the country

      And put an end to notorious things. This should have been a clue.

Then came the sermon.

I don’t remember anything else the preacher said,

  But I do remember him saying the following:

    He said, “God will not bless a woman-led church.”

And then, for good measure, he said it fourteen or fifteen more times.

“God will not bless a woman-led church.”

I had a gut feeling he was wrong about that.

I also had a feeling I was about to lose my hand,

  Because the compression Jacquie was putting on it –

    Heaping up all her frustrations at the preacher in the room –

    The compression was so tight as she was holding my hand

      That I thought I might not make it out of there with both hands intact.

She had to register her displeasure with the content of the sermon somehow.

It was an iconic moment for me.

It would cause me to be sensitive to how you, too,

  Might not always be in agreeement with me, and how you might respond,

  And who you feel safe transferring the pain of your disagreements to,

    Although I have long maintained that if you have a problem with me,

    I sure hope you’ll feel free to come see me privately about whatever it is.

But what was that squeezing on my hand, really, that sunny Sunday morning?

I’ll tell you precisely.

It was the legitimate complaint of a righteous woman to a corrupt biblical teaching,

  And if I didn’t have complete proof before that point that I should marry her,

  It was all I would ever need from that moment on.

She vetoed and invalidated a blowhard sermon with a simple gesture.

She was right, too. Very right.

She knew good teaching from bad, and she wanted to let me know,

  And to blow off a little steam. Well: message received.

And Lydia was right, too.

If ever you needed proof that God does bless churches led by women,

  Look no further than her story, in the Acts of the Apostles.

Lydia, who we met in our first reading of the day.

“A dealer in purple cloth”

  Who heard the message about Jesus Christ loud and clear from Paul

  In the shade down by a creek on the Sabbath day.

There seems to be a fair amount of agreement among biblical scholars

  That someone who sold purple cloth in that day and age

    Would probably have been a person of means,

    Or at the very least not been at the rock bottom of society,

      Despite the fact that women were not accorded the same respect as men.

A person of means was someone with “a household” –

  Someone with authority, with a house and servants to manage –

  Someone on whom many others depended for their livelihood.

A highly capable person. A self-sufficient person.

Like an awful lot of the women I know

  Who’re keeping their households and their businesses intact and sane,

  All at the same time.

And Lydia was the first European convert to the Jesus Movement –

  A link on an ever-lengthening chain expanding out of Jerusalem.

Acts is all about how the Gospel of Christ moves out into the world,

  And here we have important symbolic evidence of that.

What is more, the message about what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ

  Has found a reliable home in which to lodge and from which to spread:

  A home that is both intelligent and self-sustaining.

The New Testament mentions plenty of women

  Who helped the Jesus Movement along in its infancy:

  Lydia, yes, but also Dorcas, and Chloe, and Phoebe, and Johanna, and Rhoda.

Uncounted women present at the moment of the Pentecost when the Spirit went wild.

Also the unnamed daughters of Phillip, and Eudia, and Syntyche.

Prisca, and Nympha, and Lois, and Eunice.

They all passed along the news of Jesus and sacrifically gave of themselves

  And blessed the workings of the early church.

And God blessed them.

And God blessed their enterprise.

And God blessed their churches.

And the Word spread like wildfire.

Last week we heard Peter being told that with respect to Gentiles and Jews,

  He understood himself as being instructed to no longer make any distinction.

That was a big move – one we haven’t quite been able to surmount even to this day.

The evidence from the early days of the Jesus Movement seems to say

  That whoever can help, and whoever wants to help,

  And understands what it means to be a helper and what it might cost,

  Should be allowed to do so.

That whoever can lead, and wants to lead,

  And understands what it means to be a leader and what it might cost,

  Should be allowed to do so.

That yet again we don’t get to make distinctions.

That power and authority should be shared equitably and generously,

  And that healthy respect will flow from that sharing.

It sure is a mighty big leap in logic

  From this biblical understanding of the church

  To a preacher feeling well within his rights

    To criticize the work of women in the church.

It certainly overlooks an awful lot of history

  To suggest the women in your church aren’t doing any good.

Not only that:

  I also recall leaving that service with Jacquie on that sunny Sunday morning

  And walking a short distance down a hallway to a reception space

    Where we enjoyed hospitality prepared by the ladies of the church

    And stood around and visited with the nursery workers who were also women.

We walked over carpet freshly vacuumed by a female volunteer

  And out into the world through glass doors

    That had been shined up the day before by that woman’s cousin, an unpaid woman.

Whoever would stand on the holy work of women and eat their lovingly prepared food

  And cast an eye over the faces of their children

  Must be accounted a fool to shame them on the same day as a whole class of people.

As for us, we don’t play that game.

I don’t get to say that your gift to God on this holy altar

  Is less worthy than mine.

I don’t make such pronouncements out loud,

  And if I so much as think them I ought to confess them.

God is God. You’re not. Neither am I.

So we do as instructed; we make no distinction.

Every gift given in God’s service is a good gift.

Let those who can lead, and those who want to, come forth and take a part.

Because this much is true:

  God alone judges the human heart.

Take this word from this altar and spread it around.

And let those who have ears truly hear this truth.