Christmas Eve

December 24, 2019

+ Most of us, throughout our lives, find ourselves clinging to life’s little pleasures.

Occasionally, something fills us with such joy and happiness, that we find ourselves just wanting to savor that moment, cling to it, hope it will never end.

They don’t happen often.

And we can’t make those moments happen by own concentrated will, even if we try really hard.

Even more often, we don’t ask for those special moments.

They just happen when they’re meant to happen and sometimes they come upon us as a wonderful surprise.

Now, having said this, I’m going to admit something to you that will come as no surprise I’m sure.

I really am a church geek.

I love being in church.

I always have.

And the best times to be in church were always Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.

One of life’s pleasures for me has always been Christmas Eve.

And more specifically a Christmas Eve Mass.

Some of my most pleasant memories are of this night and the liturgies I’ve attended on this night.

Another of life’s small pleasures is Christmas morning.

I especially enjoy going to church on Christmas morning.

The world seems to pristine, so new.

Well, maybe not tomorrow with a blizzard, but you know what I’m getting at…

And one of my greatest pleasures as a priest, is to celebrate the Eucharist with you on this evening that is, in its purest sense, holy.

And tomorrow morning I am looking forward to celebrating the Eucharist right here.

I also understand the tendency we all have of getting caught up in society’s celebration of Christmas.

It’s easy to find ourselves getting a bit hypnotized by the glitz and glamour we see about us.

I admit I enjoy some of those sparkly Christmas displays.

I understand how easy it is to fall to the temptations of what the world tells us is Christmas.

But what I think happens to most of us who enjoy those light and airy aspects of Christmas is that we often get so caught up in them, we start finding ourselves led astray into a kind of frivolousness about Christmas.

We find ourselves led off into a place where Christmas becomes fluffy and saccharine and cartoonish.

Christmas becomes a kind of billboard.

That, I think, is what we experience in the secular understanding of Christmas time.

The glitz and the glamour of the consumer-driven Christmas can be visually stunning.

It can capture our imagination with its blinking lights and its bright wrapping,

But ultimately it promises something that it can’t deliver.

It promises a joy and a happiness it really doesn’t have.

It has gloss.

It has glitter.

It has a soft, fuzzy glow.

But it doesn’t have real joy.

The Christmas we celebrate here tonight, in this church, up here in northeast Fargo, is a Christmas of real joy.

But it is a joy of great seriousness as well.

It is a joy that humbles us and quiets us.

It is a joy filled with a Light that makes all the glittery, splashy images around us pale in comparison.

The Christmas we celebrate here is not a frivolous one.

It is not a light, airy Christmas.

Yes, it has a baby.

Yes, it has angels and a bright shining star.

But these are not bubblegum images.

A birth of a baby in that time and in that place was a scary and uncertain event.

Angels were not chubby little cherubs rolling about in mad abandon in some cloud-filled other-place.

They were terrifying creatures—messengers of a God of Might and Wonder.

And stars were often seen as omens—as something that could either bring great hope or great terror to the world.

The event we celebrate tonight is THE event in which God breaks through to us.

And whenever God beaks through, it is not some gentle nudge.

It is an event that jars us, provokes us and changes us.

For people sitting in deep darkness, that glaring Light that breaks through into their lives is not the most pleasant thing in the world.

It is blinding and painful.

And what it exposes is sobering.

That is what Jesus does to us.

That is what we are commemorating tonight.

We are commemorating a “break through” from God—an experience with God that leaves us different people than we were before that encounter.

What we experience is a Christmas that promises us something tangible.

It promises us, and delivers, a real joy.

The joy we feel today, the joy we feel at this Child’s birth, as the appearance of these angels, of that bright star, of that Light that breaks through into the darkness of our lives, is a joy that promises us something.

It is a teaser of what awaits us.

It is a glimpse into the life we will have one day.

It is a perfect joy that promises a perfect life.

But just because it is a joyful event, does not mean that it isn’t a serious event.

What we celebrate is serious.

It is an event that causes us to rise up in a joyful happiness, while, at the same time, driving us to our knees in adoration.

It is an event that should cause us not just to return home to our brightly wrapped presents, but it should also send us out into the world to make it, in some small way, a reflection of this life-changing joy that has come into our lives.

Tonight, is one of those moments in which true joy and gladness have come upon us.

That’s what makes this a holy time.

So, let us cling to this holy moment.

Let us savor it.

Let us hold it close.

Let us pray that it will not end.

And let this joy you feel tonight be the strength that holds you up when you need to be held.

Tonight, God has reached out to us.

God has touched us.

God has grasped our hands.

Our hands have been laid on God’s heart.

This is what Christmas is all about.

God is here, among us.

This feeling we are feeling right now is the true joy that descends upon us when we realize God has come to us in our collective darkness.

And this joy that we are feeling is because the Light that has come to us will never, ever darken.

3 Advent

(Gaudete Sunday)

Isaiah 35.1-10; James 5.7-10; Matthew 11.2-11

+ Today, of course, is special Sunday. (Every Sunday is a special Sunday)  Only twice in the Church year do we get to “go rose.”

Today is Gaudete Sunday.  Today we light our pink candle on the Advent wreath in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And we wear these rose vestments because it’s an important day.   

Today, in the midst of the blue season of Advent, we get to rejoice—or rather rejoice a little louder than usual.

Gaudete means “Rejoice.”

We also get to “go rose” in Lent in Laetare Sunday. I love these Rose Sundays!

But for now, we are here, on this Sunday.   And it’s very appropriate that we are rejoicing on this Sunday.

As we draw closer and closer to Jesus’ birth, we find ourselves with that strange, wonderful emotion in our hearts—joy.  Real, living joy.  After all, we feel real joy when we think about the birth of Jesus, and all that that birth means to us.

It is a time to rejoice.  It is a time to be anxious (in a good way) and excited over the fact that, in just a few week’s time, we will be celebrating God coming to us.

Or, as St. James says in our Epistle reading this morning: “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord,” and then goes on to explain how farmers wait patiently for their precious crops.

We are like farmers waiting patiently for the seeds of our faith to grow and blossom.

“Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”

Certainly, so far in the season of Advent, we have been doing just that.

We have been waiting.

We have been praying.

Two weeks ago in my sermon, I mentioned that when we pray that prayer, “Lord Jesus, come quickly” what we are praying for is that Jesus will actually come to us.

That has been our prayer and continues to be our prayer in Advent.

However…I hate to be this person.  On the surface, doesn’t all of this seem kind of…dare I say? Fluffy and precious? I mean, here we are on this Sunday, with our pink paraments, lighting a pink candle, praying a seemingly sweet and precious and overly simple prayer?

Appearances are important, after all.

On the surface, it seems we are not really embodying the spirit of what we experience in our Gospel reading for today.

There we find Jesus discussing St. John the Baptist.  There is nothing fluffy or frivolous about John the Baptist.  He seems to me kind of like a wild man, out there in the desert in his clothes made from animal hides (that man was no vegan!), shouting about the coming of the Kingdom.

If he was here this morning, at St. Stephen’s, my reaction would be: He is not going to like all these rose vestments.

So, when Jesus asks the crowds, “What did you go out in the wilderness to look at?”

Did they go out to see a reed shaken by the wind?  Or someone dressed in soft robes? Did they go out to see something soft and frivolous?  No, they went out to see a prophet.

So, are we, this morning, not living yp to our ideals as prophets by decking ourselves in these rose vestments?  Are we proving to our critics that we are just flash and no substance?

Awww, that’s what I love about Gaudete Sunday.

Let me tell you, appearances can be deceiving.

Here, at St. Stephen’s, we find something else on this Gaudete Sunday.  Yes, it may see all pink and rosy this morning.

But what we see is exactly what those crowds in our Gospel reading were looking for.

We, this morning, are a community of prophets.

We are proclaiming the coming of the Lord.

We do it in our ministries we do here.

We do in the witness we make in this world.

We do it in our welcoming and including of all people—no matter who they are—within these walls.

And sometimes doing that means that people will look down on us.

Sometimes people will look down on us for being welcoming, for being inclusive, for being this strange, unique place we are here.

Nope, we don’t get huge crowds of hundreds of people here that some of the bigger Lutheran and Roman Catholic congregations get.

Nope, we don’t have all the flash and band of those churches.

Nope, we don’t have bands playing pop hymns or screens overhead.

Nope, we’re not here for entertainment value.

Nor was John the Baptist in the wilderness.

People didn’t go out there to be entertained by the Baptist.

He didn’t customize what he said to suit the crowds.

But look what we do have!

We have Jesus in the Holy Eucharist!

We have real worship of a real, living God!

We have true Catholic worship and true evangelical preaching and substance.

But, I will repeat to you what Jesus asked the crowd: “What did you expect?”

After all, we are not reeds shaken by the wind.

Being prophets, proclaiming the way of the Lord, is hard. It’s hard, yes, being on the forefront, being different, being prophets.  

But it’s not impossible.

We are safe on this journey, because, I can tell you, we know that our pathway is safe.

Those images we find in our reading today from Isaiah speak loud and clear to where we have been and where we are going as we follow the path of Jesus.

“A highway shall be there,” we hear Isaiah say,

“And it shall be called the Holy Way…

It shall be for God’s people…

No traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.”

This path we walk is the right path for us. We have remained committed to our path and to our vocation as prophets, even when it all seems overwhelming.

Over and over again, we have found that our weak hands been strengthened and our feeble knees have been made firm. When our hearts have been fearful, you have it heard proclaimed within these walls, again and again,

“Be strong, do not fear!”

We know that our God will come with vengeance, with “terrible recompense.”

Our God, we know as prophets, will come and save us.

And our pathway will be made straight.

This is why we rejoice on this Gaudete Sunday.

Whenever we have doubted the path on which we talk, whenever we are tempted to stray from the road, our God who is coming to us nudges us forward toward the goal.

That is why we rejoice on this beautiful rose-colored Sunday!

So…rejoice today.

I say it,  Rejoice!

We are following the right path.

We doing the right thing.

We at Stephen’s are making a difference in people’s lives, and will continue to do so.

That is why we are out here in the wilderness, (or up here in Northeast Farg0) proclaiming God’s coming among us.

Let us continue forward.

Let us set our sights on our goals.

And let us move forward.

And let us know, as we journey, that “everlasting joy” will be on our heads.

We shall obtain joy and gladness in our lives.

And we will rejoice—we will REJOICE!—because sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

2 Advent

December 8, 2019

Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

December 8, 2019

Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

+ So, do you want to feel good on this Second Sunday in Advent? I feel this good this morning. I feel really good this morning. After 11 years as your Priest-in-Charge, I’m about to become your Rector. This is a big day.

And not just for me. It’s a big day for St. Stephen’s. But I’ll get into all of that in a moment.

It is also a big day for me too, I have to admit.  It is my birthday today. I’m 50 years old. So, I’m feeling very good and very thankful this  morning.

But do you want to feel good this morning? Do you want to remember something that will warm the cockles of your hearts (I don’t know what cockles are or where they are, but it sounds nice to have them warmed).

OK.

So, let’s go back.

Let’s go back to when we young and innocent.

Let’s go back to this time of the year when we were kids.

We have just turned on our big 1960s 1970s 1980s console TV.

And what do we see?

We see a blizzard, people pushing their cars from snow drifts.

We see newspaper headlines coming at us:

COLD WAVE IN 12^TH DAY and FOUL WEATHER MAY POSTPONE CHRISTMAS.

Then we see the credits:

RANKIN/BASS PRESENT

There’s Sam the Snowman, voiced by none other than the great Burl Ives, who proceeds to sing the title song.

RUDOLPH THE REDNOSED REINDEER.

You feel pretty good right now don’t you?

Our own Kris Vossler says that the film is actually not a very nice one, because the actual message of the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is this:

People are mean.

People are jerks.

Everybody made fun of Rudolph because he was different.

Then, when they needed him, when they needed help from his very imperfection—his shining nose—then they were nice. They used poor Rudolph. And that story is sad.

Rudolph shines with this bright beautiful light and he has to constantly hide his glow.

Poor Rudolph!

But for any of you who have been here at St. Stephen’s for any length of time, you know where I’m going with all of this. You know that I’m going to my favorite part of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.

Yes, it’s the Island of Misfit Toys.

When I was a kid, that’s the what I loved the most. Or maybe I should say, that’s what I related to the most. After all, I always felt like a misfit toy. I never really felt like I fit in. I felt always a bit odd, a bit different.  (I know that’s hard to  believe because you have this with-it, together, normal priest standing before you this morning)

And so, I understood this place—this Island of Misfit Toys, this magical place where all the misfit, slightly off toys went.

A place where the toy train has square wheels on its caboose, or the cowboy who rides an ostrich, or a water  pistol the squirts jelly,

You’ve heard me say this over and over again, but if there was an Episcopal Church on the Island of Misfit Toys, it would be St. Stephen’s.

I could be the Priest, I would be the Rector.

I think the Island of Misfit Toys is a great analogy of what the Kingdom of God is like. Probably some hipster, pop theologian has already made this connection somewhere.  If they haven’t, I should probably put a copyright on this idea I had.

A kingdom built up not of the perfect ones. But a Kingdom built up of Misfits, though misfits made perfect in the eyes of God.

We, at St. Stephen’s, are a kind of Island of misfit Toys. We are place made of people who didn’t quite fit in in the other churches we belonged. And even we as a congregation are not quite like other congregations around us.

Our own Senior Warden shared a wonderful story a few weeks ago. Steve Bolduc was relating how there was a Regional Gathering here at St. Stephen’s about twenty years ago.  (This was before I got here). As the people were lining up for lunch, Steve overheard a long-time priest of this diocese say to someone else:

“Ah, St. Stephen’s it’s so low-church and plain, it should be called Mister Stephen’s.”

Well, we ain’t that anymore. We, this Island of Misfit Toys, went from the lowest low church congregation in the diocese to the highest Anglo-Catholic congregation.

You don’t believe me?

Did you smell the incense when you came in?

And come next week.

We’re the only congregation in this diocese bedecking ourselves in rose-colored vestments next week.

So, why do we do this? Because that’s just who we are. We like to keep ‘em guessin’… Just when anytime tries to peg us, we rebound and surprise everyone.

I, for one, love that and I love that that’s who we are. I love the fact that we are a place made up of people who felt like we just didn’t quite fit in there, but here we really seem to hit our stride, even despite the fact that our pews our don’t match and our bell doesn’t fit in the tower, and we have really smart mice who are really good at avoiding the traps we set for them ( as a vegan I’m actually kinda happy about that)

Imperfect as we are, we still celebrate a truly beautiful mass, we have lovely windows, we wear lovely vestments, we ring our bells really loud and we smoke the place up with incense and we actually go out into the world and try to change that world for the better.

The joke among the Catholics who know about us is that St. Stephen’s does Catholic better than some of the Roman Catholics.  And we do.

And none of what we do should be working.

We’re hearing people around us telling us the church is dying. But here we are doing what we do in our own way, and, for us, you know what? It works. And it works well.

For me the story of Rudolph is about really embracing our imperfections, and how what seems like imperfections to others, can be used in positive and wonderful ways.

Well, this morning, this Island of Misfit Toys, this strange, eccentric, slightly odd congregation of St. Stephen’s, is celebrating.

And we’re not just celebrating your imperfect, misfit  priest being 50, or even the fact that he’s being made your Rector.

We are celebrating what this Rectorship means. Rectorship is not just about the priest. It is about all of us. It is about a congregation that, although seemingly outside the norm, we have built ourselves up, with God’s love and grace. This is about all of the ministry we do here. It is about being a fully-functioning, fully independent congregation with a Rector—someone we get to choose, we get to call, we get to have share with us in our ministries.

For the first time since 2000, and with the change of policy in this diocese, we can now call our own  Rector. And, within the next few short months, we’ll have a deacon too!  And today all of that is what we celebrate.

Calling a Rector after almost 20 years is a sign that we have now returned to that place where we were decades ago, which is something you don’t hear about in churches these days.

You want proof of that?

A few weeks ago, on November 3^rd, we celebrated our 9^th baptism this year here at St. Stephen’s. The last time we had 9 baptisms in one year at St. Stephen’s, Lyndon Johnson was president (that was in 1967). I wasn’t even born yet. And I’m 50.

This year we were the 3rd largest congregation in the diocese. 15 years ago we were the seventh. 

As we hear stories of congregations faltering and losing members, and fretting over closing their doors, we celebrate the growth and the vitality that we have here at St. Stephen’s and, with it, we celebrate that ability to say “we have a Rector.” We don’t say that proudly. We don’t say that with conceit. We actually say all of that with tears in our eyes and true sadness for those congregations that cannot do that.

In fact, we, as a congregation, were, only 20 or 30 years ago, in the same place many congregations are now.  

Some of us here remember well those days of uncertainty, those days when these pews were not full, when we went years and years without any baptisms or weddings or new members or even visitors, when people were transferring their memberships in droves out of St. Stephen’s to other congregations, when the future of St. Stephen’s seemed uncertain, when people were saying, “St. Stephen’s should just close.”  We remember those days.

And if don’t, we should.

And we need to say, “Those days will never happen again.”

This is why we are grateful today.

See, it’s not just about Fr. Jamie being Rector today. It is about all of us today. And that is important.

In a few moments, after I am installed, we will process back to the baptismal font, we will renew our baptismal vows, we will be sprinkled with holy water and we will be renewed in ourselves to continue to do the ministries we do.

Today, we are being called.

Called to follow Jesus.

To be true disciples of Jesus in this world.

To be Jesus’ hands and feet and voice in this world.

Today we are being built up.

Today, we are all being affirmed, each of us, as truly loved children of a living, loving God.  Each of is being affirmed as individual special children of that loving God—a God who does not see misfits.

And it is very appropriate that we are doing this in this season of Advent, this season of excruciating expectation and hope.

Hope.

Today is all about hope. .

Hope.

Hope for us, as Christians, is a matter of confidence.

It is a matter of believing that no matter how fractured and crazy this life gets, there is the promise of newness and fullness to this life.

Hope means that, yes, we might be misfit toys on some exiled island, but we are not just misfits, but we are special and perfect in the eyes of God.

And we can make that island misfit fabulous!

Hope means that yes, like Rudolph, people are going treat us terribly at times, people are going to use us, but we will still rise above all of that because we are loved by a God who really does care, who does love us and know us

And you know what? like Rudolph, we will shine. We will shine with light of Christ!  And nothing can hide or dampen that light within us.

Today, though, we celebrate. We celebrate God’s goodness to us. We celebrate the wonderful things God has granted us. We celebrate the grace of our lives.

The kingdom of heaven is near.

That Kingdom of people—misfits, people on the fringe, people who swim against the stream, people who step outside the expected boundaries of the world a bit.

That Kingdom is near.

In fact it’s nearer than we can probably ever hope or imagine.

So, let us be prepared.

Let us watch.

Let us wait.

Let us hope.

For this anticipation—this wonderful and beautiful hope—is merely a pathway on which Christ’s shining Light can come to us here in our darkness and shine within us a brightness that never fade.

1 Advent

December 1, 2019

Romans 13.11-14

+ I have realized this in my life: there are two types of people in the world. There are morning people. And there are people who are not morning people. I don’t know what you would call those people.

I don’t think it comes as surprise to anyone here that I am, very much, a morning person. I love mornings. If you notice, I am often sending out text messages and emails fairly early in the morning.  I love getting up early in the morning, and I love getting most of my work done early.  I always have.  There is nothing like that moment of waking up to a new day. It’s always been special to me.  And I think I’m not the only one.

Which is why I love, on this first Sunday of Advent, this theme of waking up. That is what Advent is all about, after all.

Waking up.

Waking up spiritually.

It’s an important theme for us as Christians.

Jesus tells us in our Gospel reading for today, it is time for us to “Keep awake.”

Keep awake, we hear him say. Why? Because something big, something wonderful is about to happen. God is about to draw close to us. The veil between us and God is going to get very thin. And holiness will draw close.  It is a time for us to wake from our slumber, from our spiritual sleep, to be awake and aware.

In the reading from his  letter to the Romans this morning, we find Paul saying to us: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”

We know the time. It is definitely the moment for us to wake from sleep.

Just a bit later Paul gives us another  wonderful image, “”…the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…”

On this First Sunday of Advent—the beginning of the Church Year—there is no better image for us that this.

What a great image for us! We know that feeling. Any time any of us have been through hardship in our lives, any time we have known the dark night of the soul in our lives, we know that true joy that comes in the morning after those dark situations. We know how glorious the light can be in our lives after having lived in spiritual darkness.  

On this First Sunday of Advent—the beginning of the Church Year—there is no better image for us that this. This season of Advent is all about realizing that we, for the most part, are living in that hazy world.  Advent is all about realizing that we are living in that sleepy, fuzzy, half-world.  Advent is all about recognizing that we must put aside darkness—spiritual darkness, intellectual darkness, personal darkness, anything that separates us from God—and put on light.  For us, this Advent season is a time for us to look into that place—that future—that’s kind of out of focus, and to focus ourselves again.

I love the image that Paul puts forth this morning of “putting on the armor of light.”  That is perfect, and precisely to the point of what this Advent season is all about.   Our job during Advent season is to “put on” the God’s light.  

But how do we do this?  How do we “put on” light, as though it were some sweatshirt or fancy Sarum blue vestment?

The fact is, we have already put God’s light on.  We put on that light on that wonderful day we were baptized.  We were clothed in God’s light on that day and we remained clothed in it to this day. This morning, in just a few moments, little Rory will be putting on God’s light when he is washed in the waters of baptism.

Still, even clothed in God’s light as we may be, we still occasionally fail to recognize this wonderful reality in our lives.  This moment of spiritual agitation and seeking after something more has been called the “Advent situation” by the great Anglican theologian Reginald Fuller.

The “Advent situation” is recognizing the reality of our present situation.  We are living now—in this present moment.  At times this present moment does seem almost surreal.  This moment is defined by the trials and frustration and tedium as well as the joys and all the other range of emotions and feelings that living entails.

But, for the most part, we don’t feel like it all “fits” for some reason.  It seems like there must be more than just this.  Instinctively, spiritually, we yearn for something more, though we aren’t certain exactly what that might be.  And that might possibly be the worst part of this situation.  We don’t know what it is we want.

The Advent situation of Reginald Fuller reminds us that yes, this is the reality.  Yes, we are here.  Right now. Right here. In this moment.  But we are conditioned by (and for) what comes after this—the age to come.

Many, many times you have heard me share a quote from the great Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said,

“We are not physical beings having spiritual experiences; we are spirits having a physical experience.”

Or as I saw on Facebook recently,

“You’re a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made from stardust, riding on a rock hurtling through space. Fear nothing.”

Baptism—that physical event in which we were spiritually clothed with light, in which we “put” the armor of God’s light—essentially translates us into this Advent situation.  And the Baptismal life—a life in which we are constantly reminded that we are clothed with Christ—is one in which we realize that are constantly striving through this physical experience toward our ultimate fulfillment.

We are spirits having this physical experience.

It is a wonderful experience, despite all the heartache, despite all the pains, despite all the losses, despite all the set-backs and frustrations.  And this physical experience is making our spirits stronger.

We should be fully awake for this wonderful experience our spirits are having.  We should be sharpening our vision as we proceed so that we can see clearly what was once out of focus.

In this Advent season, in which we are in that transparent, glass-like world, trying to break out, let us turn and look and see who it is there in the future.

Let us look and actually see that that the One who is standing there, the One we have been looking for all along.

That One is the One we have been searching for all along.  That One is, in fact, the source of the light with which we have been clothed.

Advent is here.

Night is nearly over.

Day is about dawn.

The One for whom we are longing and searching is just within reach.

Our response to this Advent situation is simply a furtive cry in this blue season.

Come quickly, we are crying. Come to us quickly