All

Sermon for Year C, Fifth Sunday of Easter

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

April 28, 2013 // April 26, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church // Diocese of Iowa Clergy Retreat

John 13:31-35

“All”

LISTEN

It’s human nature to overthink things,

  But this is simple; I really don’t want to complicate it.

In our first lesson of the day, Peter is led to understand

  That he is “not to make a distinction between them and us” –

  “Them” being Gentiles, and “Us” meaning Jews.

The way this is depicted visually for Peter

  Is by a feast of animals he’d have normally thought of as off-limits

  Being prepared and let down for him to eat.

(If you want to make a point, you can usually get people’s attention using food.)

But however it’s done, the meaning holds:

  “Make no distinction between them and us.”

This Gospel of Jesus is for everyone.

In the Psalm for today, the heavy repetition of the word “all”

  Answers the question of just who and what it is that gets to offer praise to God:

  “All” angels, all hosts, all shining stars and all deep places;

  All hills and all cattle, all peoples and all rulers of the world.

Not wanting to put too fine a point on it, the psalmist says,

  Hey, everyone … hey, everything: give praise to your Creator!

In the reading from Revelation,

  God comes down to earth in a heavenly vision,

  And the home of mortals becomes the dwelling-place of God.

Using the language of Peter’s experience, there’s no distinction anymore.

The promise is given of God’s eternal, loving presence.

God comes to us; we don’t go to God.

And the voice of God announces a mind-bending new deal

  With the whole of the creation:

  “See, I am making all things new;

    … I am the Alpha and the Omega [meaning A through Z],

      The beginning and the end.”

Or in other words, if I may be so bold, to borrow from 1 Corinthians,

  God is “the all-in-all.”

Everything that is or will ever be will find its origins and meanings in the Holy One.

Finally, the giving of a new commandment in the Gospel of John by Jesus,

  That we, his followers, should love one another,

    Just as he has loved us.

Love one another.

Make no distinction.

All the earth, give praise.

And know that all that is, is God’s.

These four lessons should give us pause …

Who, or what, makes you want to make a distinction or to draw a line?

Who, or what, makes you so uncomfortable that you just have to say:

  I’m not 100% sure who or what that is, but I know it’s not me?

We all have a list like that, shameful as it may cause us to feel if we admit it.

The real sin, though, is in not writing it down,

  In order that we can keep refining it, honing it, lengthening it, sharpening it.

Keep holding our grudges and adding to accounts.

Richard Nixon, they say, kept an enemies list.

Mostly people no one remembers,

  Except the actor Paul Newman and the journalist Daniel Schorr.

Schorr read the list live on-air

  And he was genuinely surprised when he came to his own name.

Newman always said being on Nixon’s list was his greatest accomplishment!

To be perfectly honest I have a list just like you (it’s vague, unwritten)

  Although I fear that if I told you who and what might be on it,

  It would become a chance for me to preach against those things and people,

    And that would be profoundly opposed

    To the points God would have us hear today.

Rather, I should have written down the list only to burn it.

To watch, helpless, the vanities of my ego consumed by holy purging fire.

Last Sunday, in the sermon, reflecting on events in Boston,

  I mentioned how hard it is to pray for people who want to do you harm.

It reminded me of a couple that frequented a church I served.

It was on the west slope of Colorado, where trout-fishing is revered and taught.

This couple lived in an RV:

  Pulled in to Colorado, summer 2007,

  In order to teach young people the art of trout-fishing.

You may know: it’s a beautiful thing to behold, requiring much patience.

You can learn a lot about yourself standing in the river.

These folks were friendly and fine, regular old Episcopalians.

At the Prayers of the People, at the appropriate moment in the Prayers,

  She would always say,

  “I pray for all terrorists worldwide: that all may come to know the love of God.”

And at the time I thought, I’m glad she can say that because honestly I cannot.

I was honestly glad she said it, and I was honestly troubled

  That I could not bring myself to say it along with her.

And I wondered for how many of us she spoke when she spoke those words.

And I wondered how many were agitated beyond words by her words,

  And I wondered how many were unsettled but in a hazy and undefined sort of way.

And I wondered how much of one mind we all were.

I was reminded of Arthur Paul Boers’ book on church conflict,

  The beautifully titled Never Call Them Jerks,

  In which he says that trouble,

    Or at the very least being troubled,

  Is the church’s basic business model.

We had, after all, law enforcement in that congregation,

  And a strong lineage of firefighters, and a retired Navy doctor,

  And a retired Captain, and a retired Major General.

And was it a finger in their eyes, or was I being too sensitive?

No one ever said; Western Colorado is taciturn cowboy country.

This Small Thing was, and it remains, the most quintessential example I can think of

  Of what you might the revolutionary nature of intercessory prayer.

I think if I’d thought about it, I, too, might have come to the conclusion

  That I’d rather pray for people bent on my destruction –

    And ask, again and again, as this woman did with such conviction, on bended knee –

  That their hearts be turned to good because they could know the love of God – …

    I think, if I’d thought about it, I might have found myself in agreement

    That all always means all.

I guess, if I’d thought about it, and not regarded her prayer as just being silly or naïve,

  That I might have found myself

  Not drawing a line between myself and a terrorist

    But rather drawing an ever widening circle of inclusion.

I will tell you that several years on, this is still very, very hard work for me.

Suzanne Guthrie tells us one of those gut-punch stories of a similar nature. She says,

  “A friend of mine who served in the military during World War II

      (And is now a nun)

      Was once at a conference with two men, a German and an American.

    As they wiped dishes one evening after dinner they exchanged stories about the war.

    The American told of the horror he felt as a young pilot

      During a particularly savage bombing of a city in Germany.

    He had orders to bomb the hospital,

      Which he would know by the huge red cross painted on the roof.

    The second man – after regaining his compusure – revealed

      That his wife had been giving birth to their baby in that very hospital

      When it was being bombed.

    My friend tiptoed out of the room

      As the two men fell into each other’s arms weeping.”

How hard must it have been for these two men

  To forgive one another after all those years?

According to the story, they had been more than ready for a long time.

Indeed, it was precisely because of the passage of time

  That they no longer perceived each other as enemies.

“All” could really mean “all” in that space and time.

And now it’s 2013. Our technology is amazing.

A simple DNA test can show you that you’re related to the person

  You’d always thought was your enemy.

In our holy quest to eradicate diseases by discovering who we are,

  Some of our most bedrock presuppositions might have to be dismissed as childish.

Those who have always thought of themselves as, say, Portuguese

  Are discovering themselves to be Russian and Polish and Italian and Celtic.

Folks from Tibet are turning out to have roots in China, yes,

  But also in Japan and North and South India and Australia.

A lot of Christian folks from the Horn of Africa have Muslim Arabian blood.

My own people fished Nova Scotia and farmed The Netherlands

  And settled themselves, willy-nilly, over what is today Philadelphia and Kansas.

You never know. Trace yourself upline.

Your family and mine might not be so very different:

  In point of fact, they may be precisely the one and the same family.

“Love one another” might just be the only advice that’s going to save us,

  Unless we’re willing to destroy ourselves by destroying each other,

    In effect spilling our own blood. And how silly is that.

Unless “all” doesn’t mean “all.” But it does.

From my youth, I have a distinct memory of a sticky-note applied to a bathroom mirror.

Whatever it was that had actually been written on the note itself,

  I can’t recall in the least.

Around the outer edges, though, was something that has seared itself onto my heart.

It was very simple.

It said, “GOD IS LOVE … LOVE ONE ANOTHER”

  “GOD IS LOVE … LOVE ONE ANOTHER”

  Going all the way around the border.

I had a vague notion, as I looked at it,

  That these two verses came from two different parts of the Bible,

    As indeed they do: The First Letter of John and the Gospel of John.

But I also put together that although they came from two roughly different sources,

  They seemed to be constructing a very important and simple concept.

When we love one another, then we present God to one another.

When we love one another in the name of Christ, we bring Christ to each other,

  And there, sometimes in the breaking of bread, Christ is realized in our midst.

When we fulfill Jesus’ commandment, we turn the world upside-down

  And we subvert every expectation about how we think the world is supposed to work.

This is a hard teaching, but it’s very good news.

It’s good news because if we can live it, even just a little more,

  We can make the world a little bit safer and saner.

And if we can’t love all – and when can we? – thank God we can confess it.

I suspect for most of us, myself included, we need both

  The glory of God and the confession of our shortcomings –

    Even these being two sides of the same coin.

So we can say, in all our blunt limited naked honesty before our Creator,

  I want to do better loving all from now going forward,

  And thanks for everything so far, and all that’s to come.

Patterned

Sermon for Year C, Easter Sunday

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

March 31, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

John 20:1-18

“Patterned”

How many Easter Sunday sermons have you heard in your life?

I’m going to guess:

  An average of about, mmm, one a year for every year you attended services, right?

Okay.

Let me tell you something you’ve probably already figured out.

Each one of those Easter Sunday sermons was a way of trying to get the folks

  Who wouldn’t normally come on a Sunday

  To become more regular members of the congregation. No secret there.

It was an ad, in other words. A hook.

A hook about Jesus, yes, but a hook.

Doesn’t matter where you were. You were getting sold on something.

It’s nothing like “Mad Men”

  Where folks sit around and try to concoct the perfect way

    To get you to buy! buy! buy! our product;

  Nothing so overt, so malicious, not in my experience –

    But Easter Sunday has always seemed to have this subtle message

      (The “B” side of the record)

    That you should be convinced that the church you’ve selected to come to

    Is somehow better than all the other churches you might have chosen today.

Even though it’s perfectly obvious they all have their pluses and minuses.

When you fly, what do they say?

“We know that when it comes to air travel, you have a choice of carriers

  (Except at Sioux Gateway Airport);

  Thank you for flying with XYZ today.”

Consumerism, right? Customer loyalty! Build the brand!

 

In the sermon, the preacher is bright and articulate (!); the flowers smell fabulous;

  The building is lovely; the choir is perfectly pitched;

  In the music, you feel okay about yourself ’cause as it turns out you can carry a tune;

  In your suit and tie or in your new dress – well, it feels nice, doesn’t it,

    And feeling nice is, ah, well, it’s nice, isn’t it?

    And you know that spring is in sight

    And that there’s chocolate back on the counter at home.

C'mon: Easter Sunday rocks!

It seems scandalously lazy on our part,

  But this is the church’s whole advertising ploy!

So, the thinking is pretty simple:

  You see or hear something you like, you come back again.

Mister or Miss Repeat Customer, right?

Which makes sense enough. But. But.

Well, … I guess I’ve kind of come to think that this is, um, sort of dumb.

I mean, dumb on the part of the church. A real failing.

Yes, Father Torey is saying on Easter Sunday morning at St. Thomas

  That the church has failed me! That the church has been dumb!

And why? Why would he say that? I’m gonna talk to him about that.

No, I mean failed outright. As in the fact

  That you have come for something real and transcendent and enriching

    And maybe even just a little bit of a challenge;

  And we have instead handed you a list of reasons to Join Our Club.

Here’s our literature.

Like this is Sam’s, and the samples have been set out.

I mean that kind of disservice.

And. Well. Talk about the cart in front of the horse.

See, instead of engaging in converting potential customers into loyal customers,

  And instead of carping about customer retention

    The other 364 days and 51 Sundays out of the year,

  Let’s just talk about what really brings us here, okay?

The real stuff.

Because each one of us has a bottomless, gnawing hunger and longing

  That comes from way down inside

    To have our spirits challenged and fed at the most basic level of our being.

I’d like to call it something like this:

  It is, to me, the desire to transcend the humdrum everyday ordinary beat of my life.

To achieve some kind of … escape velocity

  From the endless grind of living in a fearful world where resources seem scarce

  And people are naturally suspicious of each other, cynical with one another,

    And willing to talk each other down when they’re not in the room.

I have, and I suspect you might too, have this hunger to get away from a world

  Built on fakery and sleight of hand, and cleverness and irony, and false promises.

… I have a deep longing

  To not be so tired or frazzled or pulled in so many directions at once,

  And I wonder if you might, too.

I have a desire, instead, for stopping, and for truth and the telling of truth as we see it:

  Not a truth that dismisses or excludes other sources of truth automatically,

  But instead, it’s just a hunger to see the world in a bigger way than I did yesterday.

It’s a hunger to be, well, sort of reckless and poetic

  And to burn every falsehood to the ground.

I mean, at least, that’s what I’d call it.

A longing to rise above the usual and the ordinary.

Even though I know good and well

  That everything we do and sing and act out in this space

  Is very much about the details of my ordinary everyday humdrum life.

And don’t confuse the fact that I am here the other Sundays of the year

  Or that I wear a white collar and a black shirt

    Or that I stand in this pulpit with the church’s authority behind me

    As my way of absolving myself from that hunger I’m talking about. I’m hungry, too.

We all are;

  To be a human being is to hunger and to long for something more

    Than what we already have, or who we already are.

To be human is to get so hungry that finally we break out and go on a quest for answers.

I don’t mean easy answers; there are no easy answers in this life; no good ones.

If there were, we wouldn’t need Easter

  Because life wouldn’t be about walking a hard road.

It would be about eating candy, and we can do that any time.

We wouldn’t require the idea of resurrection in our lives

  And we sure wouldn’t need to fuss around about the resurrection of Jesus.

Dare I say it? If life was all easy answers, would we really even need God?

Would we really be hungry for anything at all outside ourselves?

So you don’t need a commercial for St. Thomas today. I get that.

Just this, then: to be marinated for a while in the fact of resurrection.

Just to soak in the idea

  That the basic pattern of all of life, as far as I’ve come to see, is this:

    Life/death/resurrection … life/death/resurrection.

The bits of green we see popping off on our lawns this morning

  Are only the most literal version of this truth.

Living and dying and rising, and living and dying and rising:

  Once you’ve ingested that basic pattern and it hits your blood,

    You start to see it everywhere; you can’t unsee it.

It seems almost ridiculous in a way to even point it out,

  But the fact is, because it’s everywhere, we’ve become so accustomed

  That we’re almost immune to seeing it, or learning from it anymore.

So we need to marinate in it. We need to talk about it. We need to see it.

It’s the basic philosophy of all training in the armed forces

 That a person can’t be a useful soldier

    Until he or she has been broken down, taken apart, and put back together.

Old identities, old ideas, have to die off in order for that process to work.

Life/death/resurrection.

Recovery and support communities like AA see it all the time:

  People coming in almost totally damaged by life, slave to a disease,

    And walking these impossibly long and heroic and quiet and often disappointing paths

    Of death and resurrection just to be able to keep living their lives.

Life/death/resurrection.

We start each day with some energy and hope

  And by the time we reach the night, we have to recharge,

  So we go down to our beds.

We must, if we want to be able to rise and live again the next day.

Life/death/resurrection.

Even at our own deaths, at the end of our frail physical existence,

  Something holy and indescribable occurs.

I have attended at enough bedsides

  To have seen it and felt it for myself a number of times.

The death of another human being

  Feels to me much more like a passing-on than a ceasing-to-be.

Life/death/resurrection beyond our sight.

Living and dying and rising. It’s everywhere. THE pattern.

And it makes me say that I believe in God.

I believe in God, in part, because to me the alternative just seems too selfish.

I believe in Jesus.

I believe in Jesus, in part, because I’m kind of a numbskull about these things

  And I need evidence that I am loved and that I need to give love,

    But I also need a way to take that massive concept beyond all knowing

      That we call God

    And to have it placed in a frame that will enable me to understand, if I can, at all.

I need a way to physically, tangibly translate the fact

  That all things proceed from the love of God

  And give of themselves.

They give and give and give, like Jesus, til at the last they give the last of what they have.

And their end is their beginning.

“We shall not cease from exploration,” TS Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration


And the end of all our exploring


Will be to arrive where we started


And know the place for the first time.


Through the unknown, unremembered gate


When the last of earth left to discover


Is that which was the beginning

So I stand before you today as a fellow traveler, as one amazed and shocked

  That the thing that amazes and shocks me each year at this time

  Still has the power to amaze and shock me.

That God’s holy grace and power have been extended to us

  In the bounding-forth from the tomb of the Son of God, Son of Man.

I stand before you as someone just in awe of the fact

  That the pattern has repeated itself yet again.

In his life, Jesus the Christ teaches us to listen to one another, walk with one another,

  Feed and heal and care for one another, and to pray with and for each other.

In his death, he teaches us to acknowledge him for who he is:

  Surely this man is the Son of God.

And in his resurrection, he teaches us that nothing in heaven or earth and no force in hell

  Can separate us from the love of God.

It’s foolish, I know, for me to ask you to take this pattern into yourself,

  Because it already lives there.

The love of God is steadfast and everywhere,

  And God’s holy Word lives and dies and rises

  Always and everywhere.

So it was. So it is. So it shall be.

Commanded

Sermon for Year C, Maundy Thursday

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

March 28, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

John 13:1-17,31b-35

“Commanded”

“Maundy” Thursday. What in the world is a Maundy, anyway?

We first see that word appear in the year 1440.

The word “maundy” creeps out of the language we call Old French:

  Maunde, derived from the Latin:

    Mandatum, as in “mandate,” as in “commandment.”

As in, something that must be done.

“Do this.”

It’s something we have already heard and will continue to hear quite a lot tonight.

After washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus says, by way of commandment,

  “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet,

    You also ought to wash one another’s feet.

    For I have set you an example,

      That you also should do as I have done to you.”

Or in the institution of what we call the Holy Eucharist,

  We hear it again, in this same night in the upper room:

    This, my body … This, my blood … Take them …

      Do this and remember me.

Then, if we still haven’t gotten the point, we hear it again in the garden

  In the challenges that Jesus issues to his followers:

  Stay with me, remain here, watch and pray, put away the sword.

Mandates. There’s an old joke in The Episcopal Church:

  “We follow four commandments and six suggestions.”

But the footwashing, and the meal: these are clear commandments, not suggestions.

“Do this.”

If you are here tonight, you are fortunate,

  Because Maundy Thursday is all about instructions –

  Getting clear, direct instructions and following them.

Being told, in a very plain way, to Do This,

  And then doing it.

But. The way of Jesus-followers has been frustrated at times

  By an impulse to emphasize the opposite of “Do This,”

  And Christians have become world famous for what they would rather others not do,

  Or, you may say, what you shouldn’t do.

Do Not Do This. Do Not Do That.

Fairly or unfairly, Christians are painted as the scolds of the world –

  Those who shake their heads and warn: ah-ah-AAh.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

In our political and sexual ethics,

  In matters of taste and art,

  In how we train each other up to see and engage the world,

  Even in how we read our own holy scriptures:

    Christians have come to be defined

      So much more by what they Do Not Do than by What They Actually Accomplish.

In the minds of many, we seem have come to expect the name Christian

  To be equated with prudish finger-wagging.

Certainly Jesus places prohibitions on things

  In the course of his life and ministry and teaching,

  And we are meant to heed those prohibitions:

    … Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth

    … Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them

    … Do not look upon others with lust in your hearts

    … Do not resist an evildoer.

But all this, you see, is really just splitting hairs.

Jesus’ life and his work and his ministry are all crescendoing into this moment –

  These three days into which we have already entered –

  And those three days,

    Together with what is already and what is still to come,

    Are all saying the same thing:

    In whatever you do … in whatever you choose not to do,

      Make life and share your stuff and tell the truth and love God and love each other,

        And do the things that make for lasting peace.

May I suggest that the list of things to do

  Strongly outweighs the list of things not to do.

What is this desire we have to phrase things in the negative?

If we could somehow pray and work our way into a vision of what we need to do,

  To do better and to do more of,

    And spent less time focusing on what has been prohibited,

  Wouldn’t we get further along?

So we have these new commandments tonight placed upon us as joyful burden:

  That is, things we must do.

Things that Jesus-followers do, to be redundant, because they are the followers of Jesus.

Otherwise, … ?

He said do them; so we do them.

We do them without a perfect comprehension of what they are or what they mean,

  Even though we must strive to understand,

  Because simply to strive is a form of praise to God.

We do them even though they are difficult or make us uncomfortable.

Is staying up half the night in prayer my idea of a good time?

Even though you know me as your priest?

Not really, no.

I’d rather get my rest and feel like a more effective person of prayer.

Yet there’s Jesus, asking me to perform one more inconvenient act on his behalf.

Is our coming here night after night, Thursday-Friday-Saturday,

  And then Sunday morning when it seems to be all over with, a form of hilarious fun?

For most of us, no.

But it’s the commandment. To keep the community intact and worshipping.

If we can, at all, we should.

Is walking the dangerous path of the cross of Christ on a Friday afternoon

  More fun than going to a movie or a long lunch with my friends?

No. But if I don’t give God a chance to show me something in that cross

  About how God wants to love me

  Or about how I’m supposed to live my life,

    Then something essential will have been lost on me.

Is my constantly taking in the Body and Blood of Jesus

  Or committing myself to prayer and solitude

  Or contemplating the depths of human depravity and bloodlust on the cross –

    Is any of this convenient, or fun?

No. Frankly it’s a little terrifying.

It’s also what it takes to get it through my thick skull.

So we follow the commandments, the mandates.

In the same way, then:

  Is taking off my shoes and socks and letting someone wash my feet

  And then turning around and doing the same for someone else my idea of a good time?

No, not really. Not on the surface.

It’s an idea that quite honestly makes me pretty squeamish.

But I do it anyway; because, well, it’s “maundy.” It’s a commandment.

I’ve been told to do it, so I do it.

And here is what I have found in the times I have done this in my life.

At first, in all truth, I really am a little put off by it.

But God clears out a space where transformation is possible.

And then something happens.

I guess what happens is … the world I live in gets bigger.

I am reminded in footwashing that I am not the center of the universe.

Taking another person’s foot in my hands,

  It may as well be someone’s very heart.

There is something in it

  That makes me feel responsible somehow for the other person’s welfare.

There’s a lifeline that runs between me and the other person:

  Silent, unspoken, but it’s there.

A holiness.

I can only just try to be present to it.

And then when it is my turn to receive this gift,

  I have felt God speaking through it,

    Saying: See? Maybe the world isn’t such a terrible place after all.

      Maybe there are still ways we can care for each other

        And not have to feel defensive, or perfect, or jaded, or cynical,

        Or never feel that we really have time to spare for each other.

      Maybe the world is safer, and saner than I go around thinking

        Because someone really could carry out this commandment of Christ.

      And not really even on my behalf, but on behalf of Jesus,

        Because he was the first one who said to Do This.

It’s a teaching I can’t get to in my head;

  I have to engage my whole body and stoop down for the sake of another human being

    And then receive the same gift, on my crummy old feet,

      And then I get it. I know it in my heart.

…

Somehow … That’s goodness. That’s beauty.

Shining out of this little church tonight.

To our tired-out, busted-up old world.

See, most of the time we keep our guard up,

  And we find ourselves wondering if there are any other people in this world

  Who really do care and who really can show love.

We know that in our family lives and with people we’re really close to,

  We can do that. It’s easy.

But there is such hunger in people

  To know that they really are loved.

A mandate.

And I guess that’s really all Jesus is showing us:

  How to feed that hunger in this simple way.

To show them that they are capable of receiving love and care,

  And to give them love.

To place an image of Jesus right before them,

  And then receive the very same thing from someone else.