16 Pentecost

 

September 25, 2022

 Ok.. . .I  weirdly love the parable we heard today.

 I think I might be one of the very few people who do actually love it.

 For some, it’s just so weird and…well, bizarre.

 It’s such an interesting story.

 There’s just so much good stuff, right under the surface of it.

 So, let’s take a look at it.

 In it, we find Lazarus.  

 Now, if you notice,  it’s the only time in Jesus’ parables that we find someone given a name—and the name, nonetheless, of one of Jesus’ dearest friends.  In most of Jesus’ parables, the main character is simply referred to as the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son.  

 But here we have Lazarus.  

 And the name actually carries some meaning.  

 It means “God has helped me.”

 Now the “rich man” in this story is not given a name by Jesus, but tradition has given him the name Dives, or “Rich Man”

 Between these two characters we see such a juxtaposition.  

 We have the worldly man who loves his possessions and is defined by what he owns.  

 And we have Lazarus who is poor, who seems to get sicker and hungrier all the time.

 In fact, his name almost seems like a cruel joke.  

 It doesn’t seem like God has helped Lazarus at all.

 The Rich Man sees Lazarus, is aware of Lazarus, but despite his wealth, despite all he has, despite, even his apparent happiness in his life, he can not even deign to give to poor Lazarus a scrap of food from all that he has.

 Traditionally of course, we have seen them as a very fat Rich Man, in fine clothing and a haughty look and a skinny, wasted Lazarus, covered in sores, which I think must be fairly accurate to what Jesus hoped to convey.  

 They are opposite, mirror images of each other.  

 But there are some subtle undercurrents to this story.  

 Lazarus is not without friends or mercy in his life. In fact, it seems that maybe God really IS helping him. 

 He is not quite the destitute person we think he is.

 First of all, we find him laid out by the Rich Man’s gate.  

 Someone must’ve put him there, in hopes that Rich Man would help him. Someone cared for Lazarus, and that’s important to remember.

 Second of all, we find these dogs who came to lick his sores.  

 The presence of dogs is an interesting one.

 Are they just wild dogs that roam the streets, or are they the Rich Man’s watch dogs?

 New Testament theologian Kenneth Bailey has mentioned that dog saliva was believed by people at this time to have curative powers. (We now know that is definitely NOT the case)   

 So, even the dogs are not necessarily a curse upon Lazarus but a possible blessing in disguise.

 Finally, when Lazarus dies, God receives him into paradise.

 In fact, as we hear, “angels carried him to be with Abraham.”

 The Rich Man dies and goes to Hades—or the underworld.  Lazarus goes up, Dives goes down.

 The Rich Man, in the throes of his torment, cries out to Father Abraham.

 And Abraham, if you notice, doesn’t ignore him or turn his back on him, despite the fact that the Rich Man did just that to Lazarus.

 Abraham does not even really scold him.  

But he does let him know that those who are still alive will not listen to someone raised from the dead, just as they did not listen to Moses and the prophets.

This is all obviously an allusion to Jesus' own death and resurrection.  

There really is a beauty to this story and a lesson for us that is more than just the bad man gets punished while the good man gets rewarded.

 And it is also not really about heaven and hell either.

 I get a lot of people who, when they hear that I do not believe in an eternal hell, remind me of this parable.

 I, in turn, remind them that it is a parable.

 It is a story that Jesus is telling.

 He is not talking about literal people here.

 And he is not talking about literal places.

 It is poetry and poetic imagery.

 And that is vital to remember.

 What we find is that, by the world’s standards, by the standards of those who are defined by the material aspects of this life, Lazarus was the loser before he died and the Rich Man was the winner, even despite his callousness.

 And the same could be said of us as well.  It might seem, at moments, as though we are being punished by the things that happen to us.  

 It is too easy to pound our chests and throw dirt and ashes in the air and to cry out in despair and curse God when bad things happen.  

 It is much harder to recognize that while we are there, at the gate outside the Rich Man’s house, lying in the dirt, covered in sores, that there are people who care, that there are gentle, soothing signs of affection, even from dogs.  

 Actually, there have been times when I have been soothed more by dogs than humans.

 And it is hard sometimes in those moments to see that God too cares.

 I have done that.

 I have actually done that not all that long ago in my own life.

 Since we’re discussing last things this morning, since we’re talking about heaven and hell and feeling sometimes as though God does not care, let’s take it up a notch.

 As many of you know, I do have a gravestone.  

 My gravestone is actually entirely inscribed, save for the last final date of my life.

 You can actually go and see it if you’d like.

 And it’s actually the backside of my parents’ gravestone.

 And if you want to see some defiance even in death, notice as you look at it that it n has a Celtic cross on it.

 I’m kind of proud of the fact that among all those Swedish Lutherans, there is a Celtic cross on my stone.

 But what people who see my gravestone take note of is the epitaph I chose for myself.  

 It’s actually the final line of a poem I wrote toward the end of my “cancer experience” 20 years ago which felt to me very much like a Lazarus experience.

 The poem was written as my father and I were driving to Minot on a particularly cold night 20 years ago next months, in October 2002 shortly after the first snow fall of the year.  

 We were driving up there for my final interview with the Commission on Ministry before I was ordained to the Diaconate.  

 As we neared the city and came up over a hill, I could see the city laid out below us.  

 Above us, the sky had cleared after a particularly gray and gloomy day.  

 When the clouds had cleared, we could see the stars, which, on that cold night, looked especially crisp and clear.  

 And in that moment, after all that I had went through with my cancer, I suddenly knew for the first time, that, somehow, everything was going to be fine.   

 At the end of that poem, I wrote what would become the epitaph on my stone.

 I wrote in that poem, “Dusk” (I’m not going to inflict the whole poem on you, but it’s in my book, Just Once, which I’m giving away for free):

 “…I look up into the sky

and see it—a transformation

so subtle I almost didn’t notice it

as I sit there trembling

behind the tinted windshield.

I say to myself

‘Look! Just look!

 

Look how the dusk—

full of clouds and gloom—

has dissolved into

multitudes of stars!’”

 

My epitaph is just that:

 Look how the dusk—

full of clouds and gloom—

has dissolved into

multitudes of stars!’”

 

To some extent, that’s what it’s like to be a Christian.  

To some extent, that’s what it’s like: when we think the darkness and the gloom has encroached and has won out, we can look up and see those bright sparks of light and know, somehow, that it’s all going to be all right.

And in those moments, we can remember one important thing:

Paradise awaits us.

That place to which Lazarus was taken by angels awaits us and, for those of us striving and struggling through this life, we can truly cling to that hope.

For those of us still struggling, we can set our eyes on the prize, so to speak and move forward.  

We can work toward that place, rather than “diving” like Dives himself, into the pit of destruction he essentially created for himself.

In a real sense, the Rich Man was weighed down by his wealth, especially when he refused to share it, and he ended up wallowing in the mire of his own close-mindedness and self-centeredness.

What happens to this Rich Man?

Well, the chickens came home to roost.

The rich man, full of hubris and pride, full of arrogance and selfishness and self-centeredness.

The rich man, who did not care for the poor, who ignored the needy, who cared only for himself,

The rich man who boasted and blew smoke and walked around with his puffed-out chest,

The rich man fell, as all such people we find will fall.

Scripture again and again tells us such people will fall.

History again and again tells us such people will fall.

The chickens ALWAYS come home to roost.

The moral of this parable is this: let us not be like the rich man.  

Let us not follow that slippery, dangerous slope to destruction.

But for those of us who, in the midst of our struggles, can still find those glimmers of light in the midst of the gloom, we are not weighed down.  

We are freed in ways we never knew we could be.  

We are lifted up and given true freedom.

We are Lazarus.

God has truly helped us.

And God continuous to help us again and again.

And when God does help us, it is then that we see moist clearly those multitudes of light shining brightly in the occasional gloom of our lives.

Let us pray.

Loving God, open our minds and our hearts that we may always be willing to serve those who need to served and help those who need to be helped. Make us truly aware of those around who cry out, however silently, for help, so that we may do what you call us do in this world; in Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 Pentecost

 

September 18, 2022

 

Amos 8.4-7;1 Timothy 2.1-7; Luke 16.1-13

 

+ Yesterday was an important feast day in the church, and for us here at St. Stephen’s.

 

It was the feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen.

 

Oh, how we love St. Hildegard!

 

We love her because she was something else!

 

She was a defiant force.  

 

And she was one of the first feminists.

 

In fact, we love St. Hildegard so much that we even named our bell after her.

 

St. Hildegard was a German Benedictine nun, a mystic.

 

She was also a great musician, which is also another reason why she is the namesake for our bell.

 

But the real reasons she was chosen as the patron saint of our bell is because she was quite the force to be reckoned with.

 

And let me tell you, St. Hildegard would’ve loved St. Stephen’s and all it stands for.

 

She would fit in very well here.

 

At a time when women were not expected to speak out, to challenge, to stand up—well, Hildegard most definitely did that.

 

She was an Abbess, she was in charge of a large monastery of women, and as such she held a lot of authority.

 

An abbess essentially had as much authority in her monastery as a Bishop had in his diocese.

 

She even was able to have a crosier—the curved shepherd’s crook—that is normally reserved for a bishop.

 

And she definitely put Bishops and kings in their place.

 

There is a very famous story that when the emperor, Fredrick Barbarossa supported three of the anti-popes who were ruling in Avignon at that time, she wrote him a letter.

 

My dear Emperor,

 

You must take care of how you act.

I see you are acting like a child!!

You live an insane, absurd life before God.

There is still time, before your judgment comes.

 

Yours truly,

Hildegard.

 

That is quite the amazing thing for a woman to have done in her day.

 

Even more amazing is that the emperor heeded her letter.

 

And as a result of that letter, she was invited by the Emperor to hold court in his palace.

 

By “judgement” here, Hildegard is making one thing clear in her letter.

 

There are consequences to our actions.

 

And God is paying attention.

 

For us, we could say it in a different way.

 

If you know me for any period of time, you will hear me say one phrase over and over again, at least regarding our actions.

 

That phrase is  “The chickens always come home to roost.”

 

And it’s true.

 

One of the things so many of us have had to deal with in our lives are people who have not treated us well, who have been horrible to us, who have betrayed us and turned against us.

 

It’s happened to me, and I know it’s happened to many of you.

 

It is one of the hardest things to have to deal with, especially when it is someone we cared for or loved or respected.

 

In those instances, let’s face it, sometimes it’s very true.

 

“The chickens do come home to roost.” 

 

Or at least, we hope they do.

 

Essentially what this means is that what goes around, comes around.

 

We reap what we sow.

 

There are consequences to our actions.

 

And I believe that to be very true.

 

And not just for others, who do those things to us.

 

But for us, as well.

 

When we do something bad, when we treat others badly, when gossip about people, or trash people behind their backs, who disrespect people in any way, we think those things don’t hurt anything.

 

And maybe that’s true.

 

Maybe it will never hurt them.

 

Maybe it will never get back to them.

 

But, we realize, it always, always hurts us.

 

And when we throw negative things out there, we often have to deal with the unpleasant consequences of those actions.

 

I know because I’ve been there.

 

I’ve done it.

 

And I’ve paid the price for it.

 

But there is also a flip side to that.

 

And there is a kind of weird, cosmic justice at work.

 

Now, for us followers of Jesus, such concepts of “karma” might not make as much sense.

 

But today, we get a sense, in our scriptures readings, of a kind of, dare I say, Christian karma.

 

Jesus’ comments in today’s Gospel are very difficult for us to wrap our minds around.

 

But probably the words that speak most clearly to us are those words, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful in much.”

 

Essentially, Jesus is telling us this simple fact: what you do matters.

 

There are consequences to our actions.

 

There are consequences in this world.

 

And there are consequences in our relation to God.

 

How we treat each other as followers of Jesus and how we treat others who might not be followers of Jesus.

 

How we treat people who might not have the same color skin as we do, or who are a different gender than us, or how we treat someone who are a different sexual orientation from our own.

 

What we do to those people who are different than us matters.

 

It matters to them.

 

And, let me tell you, it definitely matters to God.

 

We have few options, as followers of Jesus, when it comes to being faithful.

 

We must be faithful.

 

Faithful yes in a little way that brings about great faithfulness.

 

So, logic would tell us, any increase of faithfulness will bring about even greater faithfulness.

 

Faithfulness in this sense means being righteous.

 

And righteousness means being right before God.

 

Jesus is saying to us that the consequences are the same if we choose the right path or the wrong path.

 

A little bit of right will reap much right.

 

But  a little bit of wrong, reaps much wrong.

 

Jesus is not walking that wrong path, and if we are his followers, then we are not following him when we step onto that wrong path.  

 

Wrongfulness is not our purpose as followers of Jesus.  

 

We cannot follow Jesus and willfully—mindfully—practice wrongfulness.

 

If we do, let me tell you, the chickens come home to roost.

 

We must strive—again and again—in being faithful.

 

Faithful to God.

 

Faithful to one another.

 

Faithful to those who need us.

 

Faithful to those who need someone.

 

Being faithful takes work.

 

When we see wrong—and we all do see wrong—we see it around us all the time—our job in cultivating faithfulness means counteracting wrongfulness.

 

If there are actions and reactions to things, our reaction to wrongfulness should be faithfulness and righteousness.

 

Now that seems hard.

 

And, you know what, it is.

 

But it is NOT impossible.  

 

What we do, does matter.

 

It matters to us.

 

It matters to others.

 

And it matters to God.

 

We must strive to be good.

 

Hildegard would say the same thing to us.

 

She would wave her finger at us and say, “Do good! God is watching!”

 

Those good actions are actions each of us as followers of Jesus are also called to cultivate and live into.

 

As Christians, we are called to not only to ignore or avoid wrongfulness.

 

We are called to confront it and to counter it.

 

Hildegard did it when she wrote to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

 

And we too should do it.

 

We are called to offer faithfulness in the face of wrongfulness.

 

So, let us do just that in all aspects of our lives.  

 

 

Let us offer kindness and generosity and hope and truth and forgiveness and  joy and love and goodness, again and again and again whenever we are confronted with all those forces of wrongfulness.

 

Let us offer light in the face of darkness.  

 

Let us strive, again and again, to do good, even in small ways.

 

For in doing so, we will be faithful in much.

 

“For surely I will not forget any of their deeds,” God says in our reading from Amos today.

 

What we do matters.

 

God does not forget the good we do in this world.

 

We should rejoice in that fact.

 

God does not forget the good we do.  

 

What we do makes a difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

 

So let us, as faithful followers of Jesus, strive, always to truly “lead a…peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”

 

Le us pray.

 

Holy God, like St. Hildegard, make us strong and bold to speak up and speak out against injustice, and make us aware that what we do in this world makes a difference to you and to each other. Help us to do right, and in doing right, let the consequences of our right actions spread far and wide, and bring about your Kingdom in this world; in Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dedication Sunday

September 11, 2022

1 Kings 8:22-23,27b-30;

+ This past week, has been an exciting week for us here at St. Stephen’s.

Yes, the windows arrived!

And, yes, they look great!

Also, today, we are celebrating our Dedication Sunday.

We are commemorating 66 years of service to God and others.

And something else.

We are really showing that we have moved beyond the pandemic.

Of course, Covid is still with us.

But we are really moving beyond it all and moving forward.

And as a sign that we are, today we are re-dedicating the Children’s Chapel again.

The last time we had Children’s Chapel was in March of 2020.

 Last night when I came over to pray Evening Prayer in the Nave, I saw the chalkboard in the Children’s Chapel and got a little teary.

 So, it so good to have that back again.

 And we are baptizing Trevor!

 And we are welcoming some great new members.

 And we are blessing backpacks.

 It’s all very exciting.

 And I especially love our scripture readings for today.

 I love all this talk of a building being God’s house.

 I think we sometimes forget that fact.

 We forget that this is God’s house.

 God, in a very unique ways, dwells with us here.

 But this is Sunday is more than all these physical things.

 It is about than just a building, and walls, and vestments and paraments.

 It about us being the House of God.

 It is about us being the tabernacles in which God dwells.

 It is about us and our service to God and others.

 And you know what it’s really all about.

 It is about LOVE.  

 Yup, it’s gonna be another love sermon.

 Years ago, I read an amazing biography of the American poet Denise Levertov, I came across this wonderful quote, from another poet, St. John the Cross:

 “In the evening of our lives, we will be judged on love alone.”

 Later I heard a friend of mine comment on that quote by saying

  “we will be judged BY love alone.”

 I love that!

 That quote has been haunting me for years.

 And it certainly has been striking me to my core in these days leading up to our Dedication Sunday celebration.

 If this congregation could have a motto for itself, it would be this.

 “In the evening of our lives, we will be judged on love alone.”

 Because this, throughout all of our 66 year history, is what we are known for at St. Stephen’s.

 Love.

 We are known for the fact that we know, by our words, by our actions, by our faith in God and one another, that it is love that makes the difference.

 And by love we will, ultimately, be judged.

 That’s what the Church—that larger Church—capital “C” Church— should be.

But sometimes we forget what the Church should be.

This morning, there are many people here who have been wounded by that Church—the larger Church.

I stand before you, having been hurt be the larger Church on more than one occasion.

And for those of us who are here, with our wounds still bleeding, it is not an easy thing to keep coming back to church sometimes.

It is not any easy thing to be a part of that Church again.

It is not an easy thing to call one’s self a Christian again, especially now when it seems so many people have essentially highjacked that name and made it into something ugly and terrible.

And, speaking for myself, it’s not easy to be a priest—a uniform-wearing representative of that human-run organization that so often forgets about love being its main purpose.

But, we, here at St. Stephen’s, are obviously doing something right, to make better the wrongs that may have been done on a larger scale.

We, at St. Stephen’s, (I hope) have done a good job over these last 66 years of striving to be a positive example of the wider Church and of service to Christ who, according to Peter’s letter this morning, truly is a “living stone”—the solid foundation from which we grow.

We have truly become a place of love, of radical acceptance.

As God intends the Church to be.

On Friday I posted our announcement of Dedication Sunday and I mentioned in that we are celebrating 66 years of Radical ministry.

Someone asked the question, “please define radical ministry.”

And I refused.

Why? You might ask.

Well, because if I have to define what it is, it’s going to lose something.

I hear so many sermons and talks and conference about Radical ministry, and how to rejuvenate a parish or what have you.

Yes, I know.

I’ve read all the same books as the people who give those talks.

And we talk and talk about it all until we’re blue in the face and our pockets are empty from giving money to these speakers.

But the reality is this.

If you want to see what Radical ministry is, just come here and see it for yourself..

I told the person who asked about it to look at our website and see for herself what it is.

Because guess what?

We’ve been doing it here consistently for 66 years.

And everything we’ve done has run counter to all those conferences, all those books, all those statistics we read about.

Remember during Covid when there were all those articles of gloom and doom about how the Church—capital C—was never going to recover.

I remember one article proclaiming: “They never coming back!”

Well, look around here this morning.

Even during the pandemic, we kept going.

We never missed a Sunday Mass, and we only miss one Wednesday Mass.

Of course, we had only our safe pod of people in the pews.

But droves of people joined us through Livestream, some as far away as Paris and Kenya.

That is just a clue to the amazing way this parish not only survives, but thrives.

Even in the face of all the naysayers and the prophets of gloom who proclaimed their dark messages.

In these last 66 years, this parish has done some amazing things, some truly radical things.

It has been first and foremost in the Diocese of North Dakota in acceptance women in leadership, when women weren’t in leadership, when in fact there was open opposition to women serving as acolytes or Wardens or Lay reader or Deacons and Priests.

It was first and foremost in the Diocese in the acceptance of LGBTQ people, when few churches would acknowledge them, much less welcome them and fully include them.  In fact, we ourselves experienced the backlash not that long ago of all that happens when we stand up and fight for full inclusion of all people in our church.

It was the first parish in this Diocese to do something as simple as changing its liturgy—the words of these service we use to worship God—to use language that address God without referencing God’s gender.

Doing so has been a source of consolation for people who have struggled with the false image of a vengeful, fearsome white male God.

And instead has shown us a truly loving God who is so much bigger than all the images we can put on God, which limit God and make God in our image, rather than us in God’s image. 

How many countless people who have been hurt or abused by the church have spiritually limped through that door and found a home here?

And not just a welcoming home.

But a home that included them, that saw them as one and equal with everyone else here, that not only told them, but showed them that they were truly loved Children of a loving, accepting God.

Certainly in the last few years,  certainly St. Stephen’s has done something not many Episcopal Churches are doing.

It has grown.

In fact, just this year alone, we have welcomed 13 new members.

And that alone is something we should be very grateful to God for on this Dedication Sunday.

On October 1, I will be commemorating 14 years as your priest here at St. Stephen’s.

 I can tell you, they have been the most incredible fourteen years of my life.

 Personally, they have been, of course, some very, very hard years.

 As a priest, they have been years in which I have seen God at work in ways I never have before.

  Seeing all this we need to give the credit where the credit is truly due:

the Holy Spirit.

Here.

Among us.

Growth of this kind can truly be a cause for us to celebrate that Spirit’s Presence among us.

It can help us to realize that this is truly the place in which God’s dwells.

In our reading from First Kings today, we hear Solomon echoing God’s words, “My name shall be there.”

God’s Name dwells here.

As we look around, we too realize that this is truly the home of O God.

We too are able to exclaim, God’s name dwells here!

And, as I said at the beginning of my sermon, by “the home of God”  I don’t mean just this building.

After all—God is truly here, with us, in all that we do together.

The name of God is proclaimed in the ministries we do here.

In the outreach we do.

In the witness we make in the community of Farg0-Moorhead and in the wider Church.

God is here, with us.

God is working through us and in us.

Sometimes, when we are in the midst of it all, when we are doing the work, we sometimes miss that perspective.

We miss that sense of holiness and renewal and life that comes bubbling up from a healthy and vital congregation working together.

We miss the fact that God truly is here.

So, it is good to stop and listen for a moment.

It is good to reorient ourselves.

It is good to refocus and see what ways we can move forward together.

It is good to look around and see how God is working through us.

In a few moments, we will recognize and give thanks for now only our new members but for all our members and the many ministries of this church.

Many of the ministries that happen here at St. Stephen’s go on clandestinely.

They go on behind the scenes, in ways most of us (with exception of God) don’t even see and recognize.

But that is how God works as well.

God works oftentimes clandestinely, through us and around us.

This morning, however, we are seeing very clearly the ways in which God works not so clandestinely.

We see it in the growth of St. Stephen’s.

We see it in the vitality here.

We see it in the love here.

We see it in the tangible things, in our altar, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in our scripture readings, in our windows, in the smell of incense in the air, in our service toward each other. In US.

But behind all these incredible things happening now, God has also worked slowly and deliberately and seemingly clandestinely throughout the years.

And for all of this—the past, the present and the future—we are truly thankful.

God truly is in this place.

This is truly the house of God.

WE truly are the house of God.

This is the place in which love is proclaimed and acted out.

So, let us rejoice.

Let us rejoice in where we have been.

Let us rejoice in where we are.

Let us rejoice in where we are going.

And, in our rejoicing, let us truly be God’s own truly loved people.

Let us be God’s people in order that we might proclaim, in love, the mighty and merciful acts of God to those who need to hear them and experience them in their own lives. Amen.