Article in The Living Church

This article was originally published in the October 12th issue of The Living Church.

North Dakota Bridge Builder

A priest and poet make connections in North Dakota

By John Schuessler

Open spaces and dark comedy may come to mind at the thought of North Dakota, but what about bridges? Probably not, even with 5,000 of them spread across the state.

The Rev. Jamie Parsley is a North Dakota bridge builder of sorts. As the state’s associate poet laureate, his bridges are made of images, history, words, and relationships rather than hardened steel and concrete.

Fr. Parsley stays busy making connections as priest, teacher, and writer in the state where he grew up. The first of his seven books of poems was published when he was 22. Fr. Parsley received degrees in fine arts and theology and was ordained a priest on 2004. He was an assistant at Gethsemane Cathedral in Fargo until last month, when he became priest in charge of St. Stephen’s Church, Fargo.

He has served as the Bishop of North Dakota’s assistant for communications since 2005, and has taught theology, ethics, philosophy, literature and writing at the University of Mary in Fargo since 2003.

Four years ago, North Dakota’s poet laureate Larry Woiwode designated Fr. Parsley as an associate poet laureate to ensure that the state would continue to be exposed to “the living arts,” Fr. Parsley explained. The position received formal recognition from the governor.

Being a poet laureate in North Dakota “means being a face for poetry in state that people elsewhere might not think about as a state that produces poetry,” Fr. Parsley said. He speaks at schools and gives poetry readings wherever people will have him—at retirement and nursing homes, in churches and parks, and in libraries and hospitals.

One of his roles is to inspire people to reach out beyond the bounds of the state, he said. “I’ve been amazed by how surprised people are to find someone form North Dakota who writes books that people outside of North Dakota are reading,” he says.

He especially enjoys visiting schools. He helps students try their hands at poetry and discover poetry in the lyrics of songs and other writings.

“A lot of farm kids never considered poetry in their lives,” he said. “I hope they come away seeing that there is so much more out there, rather than just dead white men writing in a certain kind of rhyme.”

Fr. Parsley’s latest project, completed this summer, is a book of poems about a 1957 tornado that killed 12 people, including his mother’s cousin and her husband. Fr. Parsley said the story had been “under the surface since I was a boy,” but few people talked about it, much less wrote about it. In writing Fargo, 1957, Fr. Parsley conducted extensive research into the lives of each victim. Some suffered injuries that eventually took their lives. His mother’s cousin was in a coma for 2 ½ years before she died. He learned about the “tragic, sad life” of another person who the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.

Fr. Parsley considered writing a book of non-fiction, but that more critical, “stand offish” approach wouldn’t allow him to “get into the story in the same way,” he said.

“Poetry deals with the emotions, and certainly mine deals with spirituality in it,” he said. “There is this Scandinavian/Lutheran mentality up here in North Dakota—let go and let God. I wanted to explore that spirituality and do it true justice without making it trivial or trite. Poetry allows you to let people be how they are.”

He continued, “A lot of people don’t like talking about their spiritually. I can’t write poetry without it. Poetry is a way to articulate spiritual depth. Job wrote gorgeous poetry convey the depths of despair he went through.”

Fr. Parsley compared writing a poem to preparing a sermon. “Certainly there is a similarity between the sermon and a poem, in structure and the goal to convey something deeper than straightforward words can do sometimes. The problem is sermons sometimes can’t wait around for inspiration.”

Not surprisingly, he finds beautiful poetry within the liturgy. “Poetry is important even if the congregation might not realize that what they are praying is, in fact, poetry,” he observed. “There is certainly one of the reasons I am so attracted to Anglicanism and The Episcopal Church. I love the liturgy and I love the poetry contained within the liturgy.”

“I love The Book of Common Prayer because it is one of most profoundly spiritual books and poetic books written,” he said. “Of course, why shouldn’t it be? Look at its authors. Most of them were poets. If you open The Book of Common Prayer to the Eucharistic prayers they are, quite simply, poems—beautiful religious poems that wonderfully profess our faith. And of course The Book of Common Prayer is chock full of scripture. And what is more poetic than the Bible?”

“What I like about being an Anglican poet and priest in the tradition of Donne and Herbert and Vaughan and Thomas is that relationship between literature and faith,” Fr. Parsley said. “We have a long tradition of using fine poetry in helping us to worship God. But personally I find that poetry becomes the primary expression of my faith, as it did for Donne and Herbert and Auden. In my poems I am able to struggle, to vent, to rage, to calm myself, to nestle inside my faith. Others might have journals, or might resort to proselytizing to help them process and express their faith. I have poetry. And for me, poetry suits me in just the perfect way to help me make sense of what I believe and what I long for spiritually.”

John Schuessler is Managing Editor of The Living Church.

Sanctus

by Jamie Parsley

Unlike one aunt
who caught the Spirit,
was born again and spoke
in tongues, we couldn’t
praise that way.

Holiness, for us,
was something subdued.
It came up from
within us slowly
and made us
quiet with contentment
rather than shout for joy.

This was the other extreme
to the depths we went into
in those long hot days afterward.
From that despair that made us
bite the insides of our mouths
to the fist-clenching exuberance
we found bubbling up
from within us,
we knew—
in no articulate way—
it was somehow
going to be all right…
or at least as close to it
as possible.

(from the unpublished book of poems, Fargo, 1957 in remembrance of a tornado that killed 12 people)

27 Pentecost

November 16, 2008
Pledge Sunday
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

Matthew 25.14-30

Every time pledge season rolls around, I am reminded of when pledge season would come to Public Television as a kid. I watched a lot of public television as a child. Whether it was Sesame Street, the Electric Company, Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood, 3-2-1 Contact, or any of the other shows on in the 1970s, it was by far my favorite station. Of course, back then, we only had four stations . But when Pledge Season rolled around and these shows were constantly interrupted by announcers asking for money, I often groaned aloud. The good thing about pledge season on Public Television was they oftentimes showed films and documentaries they didn’t show at other times of the year.

One of the films I always looked forward to seeing again and again during Pledge Season was that wonderful cinematic classic, Auntie Mame. I always loved watching Rosalind Russell in all her 1958 Technicolor glory.

We, in the church, on this, our Pledge Sunday, don’t get anything even close to Rosalind Russell or even Technicolor today in our scriptures Instead, we get the parable of the talents, of money lent and the reward awaiting those who were entrusted with the money, complete with its not-so-subtle wag of the finger at us. It’s a good story for us, though. Most of us can relate to it. We understood how good it is to have people invest money for us and to receive more in return. It certainly speaks in a very special way to us in this strange, scary and unstable financial environment in which we are living at this moment.

Of course, this parable isn’t really about money at all, as we probably have guessed. The parable is about taking what we have—and in the case of today’s reading Jesus is talking about the Gospel—and working to expand it and return it back to God with interest.

We, as Christians, are called to just this: we are called to work, to do something with what we’ve been given. And the worse thing we can imagine is being called by that ugly word we discover in today’s Gospel: “lazy.”

Lazy is a word I hate. And the reason I hate it, I realized as I sat down with this scripture this past week, was because I once was called lazy. I was in the fourth grade and I was being lazy, although I didn’t think I was. My grades were mediocre at best. I got my homework done and in on time, but I didn’t really work on it. I did what I was supposed to do: I followed the rules, I managed the deadlines. In other words, I coasted. But I didn’t do anything special. One day, my teacher called me out into the hallway for one of THOSE discussions. We all remember them. We remember how embarrassing and frightening it was to be called out, to make that journey past our classmates who knew full well that something was wrong, to be separated from them and then to be reprimanded. And in this case, I was. My teacher told me that she was disappointed in me. My work, though it was in time and it was done, was sloppy and showed no real dedication or purpose. She then ended her reprimand of me with words that stuck with me for years. She said to me, “Jamie, you’re just being lazy and you need to shape up.”

It sounds fairly innocuous now, but at the time I was embarrassed and hurt. And that word—lazy—cut very deep. It became a swear word to me. Nothing could be worse, I imagined, than being called lazy. But…I eventually shaped up. I concentrated a bit more, I hunkered down and I worked hard.

An interesting postscript to this story was that I saw this teacher once at a banquet a few years ago. She came up to me and asked if I remembered who she was. I told her, of course, I did. She said to me: “I just wanted you to know that I’ve kept up with you. I’ve read the books you’ve written. I read in the paper about your ordinations. I’m pleased to know that you’re an Associate Poet Laureate of the state. I’m really proud of you.”

That statement really blew me away. But it also drove home to me the meaning of our scripture today. What is we ultimately want to hear? Is it that shaming admonition: “You wicked and lazy slave!” Or do we want to hear: “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

Over and over again in Scripture, we find this one truth: God is not really ever concerned with what we have; but God is always concerned with what we do with what we have. And we should always remind ourselves that it is not always an issue of money that we’re dealing with. The rewards of this life include many other things other than money—an issue we sometimes forget about in our western capitalist society. The fact is, God is not always concerned about who we are and what we do. God is always concerned with what we do with who we are and what we do. And when we’re lazy, we purposely forget this fact. When we’re lazy, we think we can just coast. We think we can just “get by.” We think we can just give lip service to our gratitude and that is enough. But it isn’t enough.

To be a "good and trustworthy” servant is take what we have and do something meaningful with it. By doing something, we are showing our gratitude for it.

In these weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, we might find ourselves thinking about all the things in our lives we are thankful for. And we might be expressing our thanks to God for those things. But what God seems to want from us more than anything is to let that thankfulness be lived out in our lives. Our thankfulness should not simply be the words coming from our mouths, but the actions we do as Christians. Our thankfulness should be in our stewardship—in the fact that we are thankful by sharing what we have been given. And in that sharing, we find the true meaning of what it means to be gracious. In that sharing, we find purpose and meaning in our lives. In that sharing, we find contentment.

So, maybe in the end, we DO, on this Pledge Sunday, get something somewhat like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame. Auntie Mame teaches us all a wonderful lesson—a lesson that, let’s face it, was radical even in that 1950s Technicolor world. Mame, the radical, eccentric, outspoken, wealthy, party-loving matriarch of the story, learns a wonderful and powerful lesson by the end of the film. Even after she loses her money in the Depression, after she loses her husband (Forrest Tucker) to an unfortunate mountain climbing accident in the Alps, even after facing her bigoted potential future in-laws—even despite all the hardships life threw at her, she emerged from it all, glowing and self-assured and strong. She emerged from it knowing that it wasn’t what she had, but what she did with what she had that made all the difference. She emerged from it all with a gratitude that glows on her face. What Mame had was integrity and love and compassion and, by sharing those things—love and integrity and compassion—she found herself. She found in her life what truly mattered.

To see it from this perspective means to know full well that the things this life throws at us don’t defeat us. We go through this life prepared when it gives us something extra. Of course, we can take it and we can sit on it. We can store it away and not let it gain interest. And in the end, all we have is a moldering treasure. Or we can take a chance, we can invest it and, in investing it, we can spread it and share it.

During this pledge season, we are saying to ourselves, be grateful. These are the things we have—our talents, our God-given abilities, the material blessings—and to be truly thankful for those things, we need to be grateful for them and to share them. We can’t hoard them, we can’t hug them close and be afraid they will be taken from us. And we can’t go through life with a complacent attitude—expecting that others are going to take of these things for us.

We must share what we have. And we must share what we have with dignity and self-assurance and with a graceful and grateful attitude. We must not be the lazy slave who hoards what is given him, afraid to invest what he has. We must instead be like the wise servant, the one is alert and prepared, the one who is truly gracious. And if we are, we too will hear those words spoken to us—those words we all long to hear—“Well done…enter into the joy of your master.”

26 Pentecost

Matthew 25. 1-13

What does it mean to be wise? No doubt we find ourselves, when we hear that word, with visions of sages and great teachers, of someone like Confucius or Buddha, serenely staring off into the world, all-knowing .

From a scriptural perspective, we find two kinds of wisdom. We find the wisdom of the world, which more often than not, is seen as base-less according to scripture. World-based wisdom is fleeting. By one definition, it is seen as “based on intuition and experience without revelation, and thus has severe limitations.” (The New Bible Dictionary). The other kind of wisdom we find in scriptures is, of course, true wisdom and that is the wisdom that comes from God. It is a wisdom instilled within us by the Spirit and, by the Spirit, shared with others.

True wisdom is a beautiful goal to work toward. Certainly, we all strive for wisdom in one sense or the other. We long to be smarter than we are sometimes. We all expect wisdom to descend upon us gradually over time, with the years, so that when we are finished with our journeys here on earth, we will have a nice stockpile of wisdom at the end.

The fact is, life doesn’t really work that way. Wisdom is often elusive. Just when we think we have it, when we think we have grasped it, it wiggles away from us and we are left empty of it. But wisdom is the ideal. It is the better place to be in our world.

And this morning, we find Jesus telling us this parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, complete with its not-so-subtle wag of the finger at us. The parable we encounter this morning truly is a strange one to say the least. Reginald Fuller, the great Anglican theologian, found several questions unanswered in this parable. Fuller wondered: “Whose house was the groom entering—the bride’s or his own—and in whose house did the marriage feast take place? What made the groom arrive so late? Would a wedding feast have taken place after midnight? Were the bridesmaids bridesmaids, and if so why did they have to escort the groom?” And of course, if you notice, no mention is made of the bride at all. Ultimately Fuller conceded that we know too little about the marriage customs of the time to answer these questions proficiently.


Still, the parable is a strange one for most of us, but one that still makes us sit up and take notice of it. We find ourselves finding an analogy in it, as we attempt to do in all the parables. Without the analogy, these stories are essentially pointless to most of us. And so, we find that in the story the bridegroom is Jesus; his return, the second coming; the bridesmaids are the good and the bad among us Christian; and the wedding feast is that great feast that awaits all of us at the end of our journeys. This is probably the best way to proceed with this story and as such, it gives us plenty to take with us to chew on.


In examining the parable from this perspective, we find ourselves asking: who is it we want to be? Do we want to be the foolish bridesmaids, the ones who go about in the night with our ears closed and not thinking ahead to what awaits us? Or do we want to be like the wise bridesmaids who are ready—who are ready to heed the calling, and to be ready for the Bridegroom when he comes to us?


Certainly we can look at this parable from the perspective of the end times—of that time when Christ makes his return among us on the last day. But we can even—and should—apply it to the simple fact that Christ often appears to us in our lives now. Christ often appears to us in disguise, as those people we want least to meet.


Think for a moment of the person in your life at this moment who drives you crazy for whatever reasons. Think of that person who just triggers in you a feeling of agitation, frustration and avoidance. That is Christ in our midst. And that is how we should remember he comes to us sometimes. Christ appears to us sometimes as persistent as a phone call from someone we don’t want to talk to. Christ appears to us as that person who nags us, who challenges us, who jolts us out of our complacency and pushes us just outside the limitations we have set for ourselves.
I’ll be honest with you: In my life, this happens more often than I care to admit. Just a few weeks ago, I had one of those moments in my life. I was coasting beautifully in my life. The future looked bright. I was as content as I have been a long time. That morning I woke up and felt joyful and hopeful about the day ahead of me. And then—it all came crashing to a halt. I found myself faced with a situation I naively thought of as nothing but being blown out of proportion and I found myself in the midst of a personal emotional maelstrom. The person through whom this situation came became a dark shadow in my life. As I struggled to gain some balance in my life, I found myself raging inwardly toward this person. I felt betrayed, hurt and uncomfortable. And only later did I finally confront myself and ask: what if this person was Christ in our midst? It was then that I caught myself again and reminded myself that this person WAS Christ in our midst.


When Christ comes to us, he will often appear to us as someone just like that person we least want to deal with in our lives. He will appear to us as someone who opens our eyes from complacency and forces us to see the present for all its stark, ugly reality—a reality we did not necessarily see before as ugly. When Christ appears to us, he will challenge us. He will nudge us outside the boundaries we have set for ourselves. He will shake us to our very core and make us tremble there. And when he appears to us, will we be ready? Or will we find ourselves annoyed and put out by that visitation? Will we find ourselves devastated and hurt by it? Will we simply turn into ourselves in some defensive mode and block him from us.


The message we can take away from today’s parable is this: are we ready when Christ comes to us in the guise of those we least like? The parable today reminds us that we have a choice: we can either be wise or we can be foolish. Wise here means more than just being smart. It means more than just having read the right books and went to the right schools. It means being prepared. It means being savvy enough to know that life is going to throw us a few surprises and in those moments we need to be ready.


To be truly wise means to know full well that the things this life throws at us doesn’t defeat us. To be wise means that we go through this life prepared. We go through this life knowing and expecting that this life is going to throw some ugly things our ways. We can either stop and curl up into ourselves and refuse to go forward. Or we can be prepared and when life throws us curve balls, we can catch them, we can shake it off and we can go on with life a little more wise, a little more prepared, a little different than we were before that curve ball.


As we near the Advent in a few weeks, we can already hear that familiar rallying cry: be prepared. We need to be like the wise bridesmaids. We need to prepared when Christ, the Bridegroom comes to us. Like them, we need to be wise and savvy. We can’t go through life with a complacent attitude—expecting that others are going to take of these things for us. We must not be the foolish bridesmaids who wander about aimlessly, unprepared for what life throws at them. We must instead be like the wise bridesmaids, who are alert and prepared, who are ready to heed the call of the bridegroom—Christ—when he calls upon us in the dark night of our lives. We must be wise and ready in case he shows up at times other than we expect.


So be wise. Be prepared. Bring with you the oil to fill your lamps through the long night. And if you do, you will be prepared when the Bridegroom calls you by name and invites you in to the banquet.

Nashotah House Convocation -- Oct. 29, 2008

Photos from Convocation at Nashotah House on Oct. 29, 2008

All Saints Sunday

November 2, 2008
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
Fargo, North Dakota

Revelation 7.9-17

Today, of course, we are celebrating All Saints Sunday. I love this feast day, not only because today we commemorate all of our loved ones and others who have passed on to the “nearer presence of God,” but because today we also have an opportunity to ponder and reflect upon our own views of what awaits us as well.

First of all, lets’ talk a bit about the saints. For most of us we no doubt give little thought to saints in our regular lives. Most of us probably think veneration of saints is almost an exclusively Roman Catholic practice. Certainly, Romans Catholics seem, in some ways, to have the market cornered when it comes to saints. We maybe know Roman Catholic friends who invoke St. Jude for impossible causes or St. Christopher when traveling or St. Anthony when something is lost. I had a great-aunt who often talked about St. Therese of Lisieux, the “Little Flower,” as though she were a dear friend—somebody she knew well, talked to on a regular basis and who took care of her when she needed to be taken care of.

But we Episcopalians do have our saints too. We name many of our churches after saints—like our own, after St. Stephen the Martyr. We commemorate their feast days. And we recognize our contemporaries as saints. We find most of our saints in the supplemental book we called The Book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. This is a wonderful book and one I always encourage Episcopalians to purchase for themselves and read through daily. Here we find a wide variety of saints, reflecting in many ways the wide variety of people in the Episcopal Church.

As you know, I was in Wisconsin this last week, at Nashotah House Seminary and in the cemetery there, two people we commemorate in Lesser Feasts and Fasts are buried—namely Blessed Jackson Kemper and Blessed James Lloyd Breck. I also visited the Dekoven Center in Racine, Wisconsin, on Monday and there is buried another person we commemorate in the Episcopal Church, Blessed James Dekoven.

But we also have newer additions in The Book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. For example, we now commemorate the ordination of Blessed Florence Li Tim-Oi, the Chinese woman who, on January 25, 1944, became the first woman in the Anglican communion ordained to the priesthood. She died in 1992.

Another recent addition to Lesser Feasts and Fasts is Enmegahbowh. Enmegahbowh lived and worked on the White Earth Reservation north of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota and was the first Native American to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Unlike the Roman Catholics, we don’t invoke our saints—we don’t pray to them. We do, however, look to them as examples of how to live out our Christian lives. Saints like Jackson Kemper, James Lloyd Breck, James Dekoven, Florence Li-Tim Oi and Enmegahbowh help us to see that even ordinary Christians can sometimes do extraordinary things.

We do, though, have to ask ourselves: are there saints among us still? If so, who are these saints who live and work beside us? More often than not, you’ll think of some exceptional person you knew who truly lived a “Christian life.” Some of us might think of our mothers, or our fathers or some priest or a missionary we knew at some time or some social worker. But do many of us think of ourselves as saints? Can any of us look in the mirror and, with all honesty, see a saint?

The fact is this: we too are the saints of God. We don’t necessarily have to do extraordinary things. We simply need to live out our faith in Christ to its fullest. And we need to hope in the fact that this life is not all there is. Yes, we need to live this life to fullest and make the most of it—that’s what the saints teach us again and again. This life is an opportunity to do good and to bring about goodness. It is an opportunity to work toward holiness in our lives and to participate in the mystery of Christ.

But, in this life, we also hope for the life that comes after this—the life of absolute wholeness. The life that will never end. That’s the wonderful thing about All Saints Day. Today is a day we get to reflect on where we’re going as Christian saints. We are a part of a much larger Church than we can even imagine. The Church is so much more than the church on earth. It extends far beyond our imaginations and our conceptions. The larger Church exists in that place we, as Christians, strive toward. The larger Church is the one that dwells in the “nearer presence of God.”

We very rarely give heaven a lot of thought. I hear so many people tell me about how they will “worry about heaven when they get there.” I have also been with people as they neared the end of their earthly journey, and I have been able to see these people as they glimpsed something beautiful and spectacular ahead of them.

In today’s collect, we prayed to God to “give us grace to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you…” In the original version of this collect the word “unspeakable" was used instead of "ineffable." “May we come to those unspeakable joys” Either way, that, I think, is the key to what we are longing for in our lives as Christians. We have no clear picture of where we are going. Scripture does not paint any crystal clear pictures for us of what heaven will be like. Yes, there’s a good amount of poetic language, written by people who imagined only the most beautiful place for heaven—with streets paved in gold and crystal buildings all about.

In today’s reading from Revelation, for example, we find some gorgeous images of heaven—of multitudes of saints standing before the throne of the Lamb of God with palm branches in their hands and their robes washed white by the blood of the Lamb. It’s a beautiful image and one we can cherish and hold close when we think about heaven.

But ultimately these are vague symbol-heavy images for most of us and ones that are hard to wrap our minds around.

But in our collect today, we hear words given to our hopes. That idea of ineffable joys—of joys that leave us speechless, joys that are beyond our understanding, awaiting us—that is what we are hoping in. And that is the place we believe our loved ones to be at this moment. That is where the larger Church is participating at this very moment in its unending worship of God.

We know that this goal—that place of heaven—is the place to which we are headed. To some extent—and I am not talking about predestination here—we, in a very real sense, as Christians, as people who profess, and in professing, believe, know the end of our story. We know that heaven awaits us, with its unspeakable joys, and we know that if we keep our eyes on that goal, then that goal will be our reward. Certainly, we also know the beginning of own individual stories. We know what we have done up to this point in our lives. We are fully aware of the joys and the hardships we have experienced up to this moment. It’s the middle part of the story—the part of our lives that we are living now, as we speak—that is for the most part unwritten. And this is where the mystery of our lives lie. The mystery doesn’t lie in our ultimate goal. We know it’s there. We know we are slowly—day by day, moment by moment—headed to that place. The mystery of our lives is in the here and now. It is in that foggy, gray area between this moment and that moment we arrive in our True Home. While we are living the middle part of that story right now, we know that sometimes it’s not a pleasant story. It’s sometimes a very difficult story. We have no idea what awaits us tomorrow. We have no idea of the hardships that lie ahead for us around the next corner. But we do know that beyond those unseen hardships, lie joys beyond words for us.

And with that goal in sight, we know one other thing: we know that we are taken care of. Through it all, Christ is there with us, taking care of us. This journey we are on is a journey with Christ toward that place Christ lifts the “veil” to give us a glimpse of. This is what it means to be a saint.

So, who are the saints in our lives—the ones who will be able to share in this glorious vision? They are the ones who know that they are “taken care of.” Or to use the language we hear today in Revelation:

“the one who is seated on
the throne will shelter them.
They will hunger no more, and
thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
for the Lamb at the center of the
throne will be their
shepherd,
and he will guide them to
springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every
tear from their eyes.”


They are the ones who know that the beginning and the end of the story are already finished. They know how their story is going to end. And that ending will be glorious and beautiful. It’s what they do with the middle of the story that makes all the difference.

But there’s one more hitch to the story. The message of All Saints Day is that the end isn’t really the end of the story at all, but actually a whole new beginning. Our journey doesn’t end simply because we die. Our journey goes on, but now on a whole different level. We continue to grow.

In The Book of Common Prayer, there is a wonderful prayer from the Burial Service that describes death as growing from “strength to strength.” With it comes a sense that our growth into Christ will go on. This is our story and it really is a wonderful one, isn’t it?

Who are the saints among us? We are the saints among us. Today—All Saints Sunday—is a celebration of ourselves just as much as it is a celebration of those who have gone on before us. So, celebrate our loved ones who are no longer with us. Celebrate those saints who have paved the way for us on our path toward that goal of heaven. They are celebrating today, in that place of joy and light and beauty, before the throne of the Lamb. But also, celebrate yourselves today, because those ineffable joys await you as well.

24 Pentecost

October 26, 2008 Matthew 22:34-46 One of my biggest problems has always been that I occasionally get myself in trouble with my big mouth. I think this is a common malady among people who go into clergy professions. Sometimes we get riled up, sometimes we see in ways others might not, the unfairness and inconsistencies in the world. Sometimes our egos get in the way and dominate our lives. I think, in many ways, this is simply an extension of following (or not following) the Gospel of Christ. Jesus, as we all know, got himself in deep with some of his comments over the course of his ministry. He did not remain quiet when he saw hypocrisy abound, nor did he think twice about coming to and defending the marginalized. As a result of this view of the Gospels, I have ended up making some comments over the years that are not popular. As almost everyone here can remember, in the Summer of 2003, the Episcopal Church met for General Convention in Minneapolis. Because it was so close to home, I wanted to attend, but because I was loaded with work at the time, I was unable to attend. As if to make up for my non-attendance, I kept close tabs on the proceedings. One of the most controversial, of course, was the approval of the Diocese of New Hampshire’s election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, to be their bishop. At the time, as a good progressive,  I was voicing my support of New Hampshire’s decision, especially after listening to and witnessing much of the not-so-thinly veiled homophobia that seemed to swirl around the decision. Some of my comments that summer were published on the front page of the faith section of the Fargo Forum. Others were recorded for Public Radio and the local radio stations. At the time, I felt my intentions were innocent; certainly it was not my goal to anger or frustrate. I simply spoke my mind on an issue I felt was important. As a result of comments I made on radio—namely, a comment about how, 27 years after the ordination of women, it was my sincere hope that 27 years after the ordination of this Bishop of New Hampshire, his homosexuality would not be an issue in the Church any longer. My comment, overheard on Public Radio, warranted the following email from a fellow priest. He wrote: Jamie, …if I heard you correctly, may I lovingly say to you that I pray to God that your perception is very, very wrong. Women's ordination has nothing to do with sin or calling for the Church to bless and call holy that which God will not bless and does not call holy. In a clear and simple reading of Romans 1 and 1 Cor. 6.9ff, it is so very clear that God calls homosexuals/lesbians/transvestites unrighteous and they will not inherit the kingdom of God. Jamie, the great tragedy of this past General Convention is that it has thrown the authority of Holy Scripture out the window--the very scriptures that identifies us all as Christians and now identifies you as a Priest of God's Church. If we throw out the texts that speak to the sinfulness of same sex sexual relationships then we can throw out the texts that say that you and I are the redeemed people of God; we can throw out the texts that substantiate your ordination to the Priesthood. We cannot and must not be engaged in scissors and past theology and scripture reading. I pray God that in and through your ordination he will bless you with a great and uncompromising love for his most Holy Word Written and its authority for your life and the ministry he has called you to participate with him for his glory, the strengthening of his church, and the spreading of his kingdom. Blessings in the name of Jesus, Signed, “Bernard”+ (not his real name, of course) I never did respond directly to this priest’s email and, for some time afterward, I scolded myself for not doing so. What I did do was respond not to him—the person—so much as to the person he became to me in the days following Convention. He became, in my mind, a personification of all of those people who throw scriptures around carelessly, using the Word of God as ammunition in a war of so-called holiness. Who I addressed was not so much the priest in out-state North Dakota, but the person I have been battling inside me for years, the person whose voice of condemnation I have heard in the back of my own head, the person whose voice sounds, at times, like my very own voice. The response that I made to him was based squarely on the Gospel reading we hear this morning. So, here was the response I wrote and never sent: Father Bernard, As you might know, I was raised a Lutheran. For the first fifteen years of my life, I was raised with a deep and abiding love for Scriptures and it was those fifteen years that have heavily influenced so much of what I believe and hold true in my faith. It was also in those years that I first read the Scriptures and let them permeate into my whole self. There is a wonderful icon of William Stringfellow, the great Episcopalian street lawyer, social activist and commentator, who has long been one of my heroes. The icon was painted by one of the best contemporary icon writers, William Hart McNichols. Entitled “William Stringfellow, Keeper of the Word,” it shows the Word, symbolized by a Bible, open to Deuteronomy 30.14 (“The Word is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it”). In the icon, the scriptures glow in the place where Bill Stringfellow’s heart should be, a luminous circle in the middle of his chest. For me, this is what happened to me in those years among the Lutherans—the words of the scriptures were burned into my heart. So, Bernard, to put it simply, your heartfelt and wonderful prayer for me for God to bless me “with a great and uncompromising love for his most holy written Word” was answered years ago. Our response to your petition should be a hearty “Amen!” There is no doubt as to my love for Scripture and its authority in my life. Which leads me to respond to your well-intentioned email. As a Lutheran, I was taught many wonderful things about God and the scriptures, but one has come in very handy over the years of scripture study: if we have an issue with any part of scripture, whether it be from the Old Testament (which was the usual place we seemed to have issues—for example, the stoning of disobedient children in the book of Deuteronomy) or from the Epistles or from Revelation, we were taught to always return to the Gospels, for there we would find ultimate authority for whatever question we might have. “The words of Jesus—who is truly the Word of God—will be the answer,” the pastor of the church taught us one Sunday morning when I was about ten. And those words always stayed with me. Your email concerned me greatly, as I believe you knew it would, especially when I read your choice of Scriptures (Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6)—which, despite your belief, can not be read clearly nor simply—and your choice of words (“We cannot and must not be engaged in scissors and past theology and scripture reading” and especially “it is so very clear that God calls homosexuals/lesbians/transvestites unrighteous and they will not inherit the kingdom of God”). To single out these scriptures and to use those self-same scissors you spoke against and to take them from their context to hold up as authoritative flies in the face of what I perceive to be true love of God’s “most holy written Word.” This scriptures you quote, as all scriptures, as you very well know, only receive their authority from Christ, who called to Paul on the road to Damascus and who compelled Paul—who drove Paul—to preach the Gospel. Do I at any point disagree with what Paul is writing? Not at all. But I think you—and everyone who uses these scriptures to condemn—knows full well that these scriptures are not to be used as a condemnation of gay and lesbian people. That is not what these scriptures necessarily mean. And I do use the word necessarily because I do think Paul is condemning a practice—a practice incompatible with being a Christian. Namely, he saying that this what pagans do—they cheat on their wives, they have sex indiscriminately, they frequent temple prostates—both male and female. All of which I agree. It is not right, under any circumstances, to do any of those things as a Christian. To put in modern terms, it is not right for Christians to cheat on their spouses. And for gay Christians, it is not right to have multiple sexual partners. When we become Christians, Paul is saying, we need to put away our old ways. We need stop acting like the Pagans do. Why? Because, using my good old tried and true Lutheran method of scripture reading, I simply returned to the Gospels. In fact, it was there in the Gospel of Matthew. In Chapter 22, a scripture with which I’m sure you are very familiar, a lawyer comes to Jesus and begins arguing with him. He asks Jesus “which commandment is the greatest of all?” You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” Then Jesus made a wonderfully direct statement—a forthcoming answer to the lawyer’s question: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Bernard, how much clearer can Jesus be? Now, for a moment, let’s place this scripture from Mathew alongside the scripture from 1 Corinthians (which, by the way, condemns not only “sodomites” and “male prostitutes”—lesbians and transvestite are simply not mentioned anywhere in the scripture—but also drunkards, the greedy, etc). Which, Bernard, do you see as more liberating? If one loves God and loves his or her neighbor, isn’t that what truly brings us close to the Kingdom of God? Maybe Paul wouldn’t think so. Maybe you wouldn’t either. But certainly Jesus did. Can one be a drunkard and still love God? I can tell you in all honesty, yes. I have known far too many in my life. They have been my friends, they have been family. They have been a very important part of my life. I have been able to see alcoholic behavior up close. I’ve seen narcissistic behavior—not unlike the behavior I find within many people suffering from a disease, whose world has closed in on them, who are, quite simply trapped. I’ve seen destructive behavior. I have seen behavior that is sad and painful. I have known a lot of greedy people as well—people who have placed money or position or fame before everything else. I have known many “workaholics” and have known many people who simply want something better for themselves more than anything else in the world. But is homosexuality quite the same, Bernard? Certainly there are people who are consumed with their sexuality (and certainly not by any means just gay people either). There are people (straight and gay alike) who use and abuse sex. There are many people of all orientations who have messed up views of what sex is. But is that what we’re talking about? I have no doubt that is exactly what Paul is talking about. The question is simple, Bernard: Can one love God with all of one’s heart and still be gay? My answer, in light of the Gospel, is YES. Emphatically, without a doubt—Yes! So, Bernard, can scripture trump scripture? Certainly Jesus was able to trump Old Testament scriptures. We see it when we read his admonition to “turn the other cheek.” Likewise, I have no doubt that the words of Jesus trump scriptures that hadn’t been written yet. And I have no trouble believing that the words of Jesus trump the words of Paul—no matter how inspired Paul might have been. I have found myself praying over both the scripture from Mark and the scripture from 1 Corinthians. As I prayed over the 1 Corinthians reading, for some reason I was not thinking about the homosexuals you say are condemned under that verse. Instead, I thought about my grandfathers, both of whom went to their graves as unrepentant alcoholics. I think of my uncle who died, alone and drunk, when his stomach literally burst from years of heavy drinking. I was thinking of the teenage friend of my niece who died when he drank too much and drove his car into a high line pole. I was not thinking of my gay friends and acquaintances, especially the ones who are either celibate or who are in committed loving relationships, the ones who come to the Episcopal Church because of their love for God and for others, the one who, like you, serve in the church, who hold scripture to be true, who have made the declaration at their ordination that they believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary for salvation. I have no doubt, in many cases, of those people’s unfailing love for God and for their brothers and sisters. I have no intention of taking scissors to the scriptures. I took the vows I made at my ordination seriously and I continue to do. I do believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the Word of God and as such the idea of taking cutting and pasting them is abhorrent to me. In all honesty, I agree with you to some extent. The scripture from 1 Corinthians 6 is meaningful to all of us. As Christians, we should strive not be drunkards, we should strive not to be greedy. We should not be male (or, for that case, female) prostitutes, nor should we be making use of prostitutes. We should be in committed relationships—relationships based on love for each other and love of God. I don’t want this scripture thrown out. But at the same time, I don’t want this scripture to drown out the words of Jesus who is offering all of us freedom and redemption, not condemnation. God loves us, Bernard—you and me, sinners as we are, as well as the sodomite and the drunkard and the greedy and the prostitute. God loves us, Bernard, and God is commanding us to love one another as you want to be loved. How can one truly love God with all of one’s being, when one condemns and allows condemnation? God loves us, Bernard. It is this love we find in the Gospel reading from Mark. Love—love God, love one another as you would be loved. You can’t do one without the other. It’s God’s love that prevails and trumps condemnation. It’s love—that holy love that comes from God—that ultimately wins out. Bernard, it is this love that I will hope and pray descends upon you like a cool summer shower. In God’s love, Jamie+ I regret the fact that I never sent the letter, but I also know that my letter would not have much of a difference to someone like Bernard. I do know that, on occasion, the rest of us, including I myself, need to remind ourselves where we stand with regard to scripture and these big issues. This past weekend I gave a talk for at a Minister’s retreat in Richardton, ND on the issue of divorce and remarriage. Scripture is blatantly clear about this issue; in fact it is much clearer about divorce and remarriage than it is about homosexuality. The point for me is this: when did we struggle and somehow find consensus as a Church on the issue of divorce and remarriage? The fact is, we didn’t really. At some point, we simply saw it as a pastoral issue that we must deal with in love and understanding. My point is that this is exactly how we should deal with other issues, such as homosexuality. All that we should do, should always be in the spirit of loving our neighbor as ourselves. In our collect for today, we pray to God to “increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command…”\ Let that not only be our prayer, but the basis of our lives of Christians. It should be what think and feel and believe with every beat of our heart. We should be striving for that wonderful combination of being instilled with the gifts of faith, hope and charity and that we should truly love what we are commanded by God to do: to love God and to love our neighbors as our selves.

Thin

The miles converge here.
The distances you covered
and the ones I traveled
have come together
in this dark place,
hidden in the long shadow
dusk makes when it crawls
toward night.
This is where we’ve come—
in this place
others have come for decades before us.

Near here lies buried a stewardess—
that’s what they were called
then
in 1963
when she and 42 others
fell from the sky
one stormy afternoon
outside Miami.
I think of her who—
let’s face it—
isn’t really here
at all, but somewhere else
we, in those moments of
fevered half-sleep
we ascend to in the night
long for and hope in
like naïve children
wishing for a happy ending.

And you and I also
here, and yet
we might as well
be in our distant places.
for I may sense you, but you—
you refuse to allow yourself
this easy pleasure.
You hope not in happy ending—
in that joy I hunt down
in long dark night like tonight.

I long for you!
just as I long for
the One who stands elusive
as the crescent moon—
thin as a thread of
silver embroidery—
which leans toward us
here
where everything converges.