Holy Ground

31 August 2008/Proper 17A * Exodus 3:1-15/Matthew16:21-28

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

Holy Ground

Peter’s story is compelling. Peter’s story is our story. Just last Sunday Peter correctly declared Jesus as “The Christ, the Son of God.” This week Peter is a stumbling block – literally in the Greek, a skandalon – a scandle.

It should be striking to us: the first assumption Peter, the keeper of the keys, makes about Jesus as God’s anointed one is wrong, satanic even. It is a cautionary tale for all of us and for the Church – the heart of the good news is the cross which always scandalizes us. Whenever we feel we fully understand Jesus, his relationship to God, his relationship to us, our relationship to the world , our next step, like Peter’s, is likely to be wrong.

Our rightful place is behind Jesus – not being in front trying to lead Jesus.

As Jesus made clear last Sunday, the only reason Peter answered correctly is because God had revealed Jesus’ identity to him. So also, for us to understand Jesus’ ministry, and in turn our own ministry and mission, it must be revealed to us by God through the Holy Spirit. We can never stumble upon it on our own.

We return to the denial of self, to turn outward toward God and others. It is a call to modesty and humility in our theology and moral deliberation. It takes a lifetime to grow into a full understanding of God’s mission, purpose and methodology. The road to understanding is strewn with missteps, stumblings and misunderstandings. God’s church does not have a mission. God’s mission has a church. We are that church, the body of Christ – incorporated into his body and his mission by the waters and Holy Spirit of Baptism.

As it is for Peter, so it is for us – what God demands is ongoing, complete reorientation. We are called to a life of daily Baptism. Christians, suggested Martin Luther, “are always one day old.” We are as much in need of being put behind Jesus today as on any other.

This is why we are taking one day together on Saturday, September 13 to hear what God is saying to God’s people. To take our place behind Jesus. To listen to what Mission God has for God’s church. Always remembering that any attempts on our part to cement our understandings, all attempts to root them in any kind of surety, will lead God to always confound us, turn us around, reorient us, and call us to begin again.

I believe one dimension of our misunderstanding and tendencies to stumble around are rooted in forgetting where we are. Like Jesus, and like Moses before him, we are standing on Holy Ground. All theological hubris, all attempts at surety in what God is calling us to be and to do, result from not taking seriously where we are.

We come into this place, or step outside back into the mission field, or into the woods, or even into The Mall at Columbia, and we forget that wherever we are, whatever time it is, we are standing on Holy Ground – for we are standing before God, or God’s image, God’s imago. In a moment we will promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons.” It is a call to recognize where we are standing – on Holy Ground before a bush that burns and is not consumed.

It seems the earliest liturgical ritual around all this is taking off our shoes. Asian culture has retained this custom longer than we have! It means to adopt an attitude of humility. This is an attitude missing from much of American society and culture. We are so saturated with notions of Roman and English property law that we completely forget that this is God’s world, God’s creation, and that we are designated as God’s imago to be stewards of all this, not merely consumers.

Further, we forget that each and every person we know and see and meet is part and parcel of this imago of God, this image of God. In the language of the New Testament, each person is God’s Beloved. Yet rarely do we take off our shoes before each imago of God we meet. Rarely do we recognize the earth and all its resources as God’s precious gifts, but rather we treat the earth and everything therein as commodities. Worse still, we accept the commoditization of people – even ourselves. How else to explain our utter willingness to wear clothing with manufacturer’s logos, in effect becoming human billboards or walking advertisements? And we do so with a sense of pride mixed with a kind of smug hipness!

Some years ago, at least 60 or more, Woody Guthrie wrote this song – a modern-day psalm, really. Singing it may help to bring us back to an understanding of where we are, which may help us remember who we are and whose we are. With any luck we may, like Peter, get back to our rightful places behind Jesus and let him lead us the way to life in its fullest. Or, like Moses, against all odds, strive for justice and peace for all people, leading people out of bondage into freedom – helping the world to be a place where all people are recognized as God’s people.

May this song remind us that every day Christians are one-day old, standing on Holy Ground.

Holy Ground

Take off, take off your shoes
This place you’re standing, it’s holy ground
Take off, take off your shoes
The spot you’re standing, its holy ground

These words I heard in my burning bush
This place you’re standing, it’s holy ground
I heard my fiery voice speak to me
This spot you’re standing, it’s holy ground

That spot is holy holy ground
That place you stand it’s holy ground
This place you tread, it’s holy ground
God made this place his holy ground

Take off your shoes and pray
The ground you walk it’s holy ground

Every spot on earth I trapse around
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground

Every spot it’s holy ground
Every little inch it’s holy ground
Every grain of dirt it’s holy ground
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground

Words –Woody Guthrie, copyright Wood Guthrie Publications, Inc 2001

To hear the Klezmatics sing this song go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1PjT_QSyWQ

To learn more about Woody Guthrie and his music, go to:

http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Holy_Ground.htm

Drifting Too Far From The Shore

24 August 2008/Proper 16 – Romans 12:1-8/Matthew 16:13-20

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

God’s Mission Has a Church

It is not that God’s Church has a Mission, but that God’s Mission has a Church.

It is good to be back. Not that being on vacation was not wonderful, but it is good to be back in the fellowship of God’s People called St. Peter’s. And it is Peter’s day – the day he is renamed by Jesus. No longer Simon, but Peter. Which in the New Testament Greek makes for a kind of pun – for the word for “rock” is petra, while Peter is Petros. Petros is petra – the rock, the foundation upon which Jesus builds his church.

We say “builds” because we know His church is still under construction in so many ways. The church is always growing, changing, under construction, searching for new, more nimble, more creative, more flexible ways of being God’s people. Each time a new member is added to our rolls, each time a person is Baptized, we must be prepared to be called to new and different ways to “do all in our power to support one another in our life in Christ.”

A life which Saint Paul asserts is quite different than that of the world around us. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Paul does not envision a people focused on our lives in and of themselves. We are those people who trust that being in the right places at the right times – the places where God promises to be – God will transform. Our hope is not that our resolve will hold, but that God’s resolve will hold.

During an all too short week in New Hampshire, surrounded by family and friends, I found myself being visited by God in some unexpected places. In the Morgan Hill bookstore, a favorite haunt for the Kubiceks on vacation, I sat down in a wing chair, glanced at the books on the shelf next to me, to find The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittester, O.S.B. – that would be Order of Saint Benedict.

Now Benedict lived a long time ago – just some 400 years or so after God in Christ walked this earth as Jesus. He tried to get away from the world – a world of Empire marked by power, wealth, violence, aggression. He tried to live in a cave, but others heard of his special gifts in finding a way to live with God so that he was coerced to join and lead a community of like-minded followers of Jesus. Benedict encouraged a disciplined approach to community life, work, study, and prayer. Some thought his methods too difficult and tried to poison his wine. Benedict was onto it, made the sign of the cross over the jug of wine, smashed it on the ground, forgave them for what they had done, and moved on to found a number of monasteries.

Benedict eventually put his ideas on how to know God all down on paper, The Rule of Saint Benedict. It begins with the words, “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart….” I sat there in the book store reading Benedict’s Rule and Sister Joan’s reflections upon The Rule. In what was surely only a few moments out of an otherwise glorious day I felt I had time-traveled back to that cave on the cliffs overlooking Anio to listen to the voice of a fellow traveler whose wisdom draws one closer to a place where God can have at us and transform us.

The next morning I went bird watching. Some in my immediate family cannot understand why one would wake up before daylight and set off into the woods looking for birds. After all, Dad, we are on vacation! Sleep late! But off I go, my Peterson’s Field Guide in my back pocket, binoculars around my neck and a generous spray of insect repellent around my neck and ankles and hands.

About half way through the two hours in the field is when it came to me – bird “watching” is somewhat of a misnomer. Because watching and looking is not the primary skill necessary for seeing birds, but rather listening is what leads the eyes to see that solitary, magnolia warbler or indigo bunting. Bird watching is an apt metaphor for the spiritual life as Benedict imagines it – listen carefully with the ear of your heart and God stands ready to show you the way.

Down on the dock in Herricks’ Cove it would be another book that brought me a little further along the way – Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love. Richard O’Dell lent it to me, and it too has its origins in Italy. It is a look at how the architecture of a church, Saint Agnes’ Outside the Wall, expresses the very essence of what it means to join with Peter and say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

It is a book alive with examining every detail of what makes a church a church, a living expression of God’s will – what is good, what is acceptable, what is perfect. Visser explores how the center aisle invites one to understand the Christian faith as a journey – a pilgrim journey from the world outside in to the sanctuary of the living God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. We move closer and closer to the Tabernacle where reside the Body and Blood of our Saviour Jesus, God incarnate.

And she writes of how it is a church is not just a pile of rocks by the side of the road, but a living reminder returning us to those times and places where we met God along the way – those mystical, privileged experiences of the Holy. She is careful to distinguish that a church is not so much meant to induce such moments of epiphany as to acknowledge the experiences its visitors have had. It is a collective memory of such spiritual insights and mystical moments.

And with the obvious sign of the cross, crucifix and Stations of the Cross we are reminded that in order to live we must die to self – choose the transcendent over and beyond the immediate present. The call to follow the Christ, the Son of the living God, is a call to look outward towards others and toward God. Only then can we know what it means to be fully alive. It is not that God’s Church has a mission, but God’s mission has a Church. And we are that Church, the Body of Christ.

The church in bricks and stone and wood and glass tells this story and invites all who would be Christians to continue this story, so at the end of the day we are sent away: “Ite missa est,” – Go, you are sent! From which we get the word mass: to turn our lives toward others and toward God. To complete the work we begin in here in actual fact we must return to the world beyond our doors. We are to live with other people and love them, just as we are to live with God and be loved by God. God’s mission has a Church. I find myself wondering, Are we willing to continue God’s story, be transformed by that story, and so become active participants in God’s transformation of the world in Christ Jesus? Or, have we drifted too far from the shore?

Listen to the Emmy Lou Harris version of the Charles E Moody song (1923):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLrI47_WyKQ

A Pearl of Great Value

27 July 2008/Proper 12A – Genesis 29: 15-28/Romans 8:26-39/Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

A Pearl of Great Value!

An observation: anyone insisting that we turn to the Bible for any kind of definition as to what marriage is might want to revisit that thought after reading the story of Jacob’s wedding. We might also ask ourselves how it is that Jacob the Deceiver becomes the father and namesake of a great nation of God’s people, Israel? After all this is the younger son who stole the older son’s birthright through disguised deception. Despite the deception, God promises Jacob will become the father of numerous offspring, the same promise made to Abraham.

Act One: Jacob’s wedding: We may recall that last week God said to Jacob, “I will be with you always….” And we might note that in this narrative of Jacob’s wedding God seems to be absent. As we all ask sometime or another, “Where is God? Why does God seem to be absent?”

One answer would be that unlike his father Isaac, Jacob does not pray for God to help him find a wife. Instead he continues to rely on his own cunning. So one has to crack at least a smile when Jacob wakes up the morning after his marriage, and after seven years of working for his Uncle Laban to win the hand of Rachel, only to find out that, “When morning came, it was Leah!” As Uncle Laban observed upon meeting Jacob back in verse 14, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh.” It turns out that this means, “Jacob the Deceiver, huh? Boy, you have met your match!”

Now it helps to understand ancient Middle Eastern marriage customs just a little: the woman is veiled throughout the ceremony, at night, and wrapped in a cloak, at night, and taken home to the husband’s tent, at night. No doubt everyone has been drinking more than five cisterns of good wine! Jacob disguised himself as Esau; Laban disguises his daughter Leah as Rachel. Jacob complains. Laban replies, “You may have gotten away with putting yourself before the first born, but that’s not how we do things around here! But for another seven years, you can have Rachel too.” Lest we think this is all a tad old fashioned, rest assured that women are treated like this throughout many cultures to this day, and recent events have revealed that this kind of treatment is carried out right here in the U.S. of A.

So both Leah and Rachel move in, and we know that life is not easy or tranquil in Jacob’s tent. So where is God? Why doesn’t the Lord intercede? Well it turns out God has been there all along adjusting the plan. For in the sequel, in verse 30, God observes that Leah is unloved. So God opens her womb, and Rachel is at least temporarily barren. Leah has four children: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. The children of Levi eventually come to serve the Lord in the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem, and from Judah come King David, Solomon and Jesus. Leah testifies to the Lord’s leading even through human deception! Lowly, outcast and unloved Leah!

What the story seems to be saying is that the Lord’s plan for salvation refuses to be derailed by human failings as clumsy as Jacob’s and Laban’s. Even more amazing is the suggestion that the Lord fulfills his promises even using human deception!

As Sidney Greidanus observes, “Today we often wonder where God is when people deceive each other. Nations go to war and kill innocents; Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and all manner of people are persecuted and killed; children are abused. Is God absent? Is God not aware of what is going on? The wedding of Jacob tells us that God is not absent and is aware of what is going on. But God has also given us humans the freedom and responsibility to plan and act. Because we are sinful creatures, we often mess up, but even then we can be sure that somehow the Lord will use us to fulfill God’s purposes even with our failings.” [The Lectionary Commentary: The First Readings (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids:2001) p.60]

Act Two: In the words of Jesus, Jacob, the even more notorious Laban, and lowly, outcast and unloved Leah are Pearls of Great Value. It sounds odd, but consider this.

Years ago, long before becoming the Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, Tom Shaw SSJE, spoke to a group of clergy and addressed one of the Parables of the Kingdom, “The Pearl of Great Value.” Bishop Shaw began by saying that our God is a very frugal God and does not waste one iota, not one jot or tittle, of our life experience. Each moment we live and breathe on this fragile Earth, our island home, God values and savors who we are and what we are doing – especially the work we do for God’s kingdom – but even when we or circumstances are not so good.

Shaw went on to say that a hidden truth embedded in the Good News of Jesus, and hidden in these parables like yeast in dough, is that at the end of the day each one of us is the Pearl of Great Value. Through our Baptism, we are made God’s Beloved. To show how much our God loves us, he sends his only Son to walk among us, dwell among us, to show us the way of the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.

So much does God savor our life experience that the Lord did not let us get away with killing his Son, his only Son whom he loves, but returned him to us, so that wherever communities of Christians gather in his name, Jesus himself is in the midst of them, calling us back to the God from whence we come: We come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. We are God’s Beloved.

Bishop Shaw urged us to think of ourselves as Pearls of Great Value, hidden in this world, for which God was willing to pay a great price: the ultimate price. God sold all that God had to obtain us, to retain us, to bring us back home to him.

So precious are we in the eyes of our God, said Bishop Shaw, that we really need to take time each day in our prayers to allow God the time to thank us for what we have done for God today. Every day we are to sit in silence in our prayer time and allow ourselves to feel God thanking us for all that we do for God in this world.

Are we really capable of believing and knowing that God loves us that much? Can we feel like Pearls of Great Value? It is central to the life of faith to accept and receive God’s love – to know how much our God values us and everything that we do.

We do not need to do big and heroic things. And like Jacob, we can mess up big time. The truth is, as God’s own pearls of great value, most every little thing we do brings a smile to God’s face. And God forgives us the rest. The more we let God thank us for what we can do for God, the more confident and empowered we become as God’s own people. And soon the people around us and the people we meet begin to feel like pearls of great value as well.

It all begins with faith: Faith that God is with us even when it doesn’t look like it, and Faith that God will use all of our experience for a greater good. All we really need is faith as small as a mustard seed to make the whole creation new; to give new life to our own tired bodies; to put a smile on the face of a stranger; to plant seeds of God’s love throughout the neighborhood in which God has made his home. We are all Pearls of Great Value!

Says Paul: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

I am with you all the time

I am with you all the time

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you all the time

I am with you everywhere

I am with you everywhere

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you everywhere

When it seems like I’m not there

When it seems like I’m not there

Let me thank you for every thing you do

When it seems like I’m not there

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

Copyright Sounds Divine

Season With A Prayer and Song

13 July 2008/Proper 10 – Romans 8:1-11/Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, St. Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

“…You are in the Spirit,

since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

- Romans 8: 9

We don’t often think of it, but of all the New Testament literature, Saint Paul’s letters are the oldest sources we have about Jesus – pre-dating the Gospels by a couple of decades. And Paul writes that for those who are “in Christ,” and “Christ is in them,” “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” This ought to strike us as an astonishing assertion. Not something we should take for granted. And we might ask, just how does Christ come to be in us?

And “us” is the operant word here, since Saint Paul writes in the plural (something the English translation cannot indicate) – Paul rarely speaks of an individual’s relationship to Christ. He speaks almost exclusively of the individual in the context of the worshipping community – the community of Christ’s Body, the priesthood of all believers. How does Christ and the Spirit of God come to “dwell in us?”

Along comes the Parable of the Sower rich with varied depths of meanings to help us to see just what things, as our collect for the day urges, we “ought to do,” and just how we might find ourselves equipped with the “grace and power to accomplish them,” which things very well may prepare ourselves as a community to receive Christ and the Spirit of God into our midst – so that God’s spirit might “dwell” among us, a technical word in the Greek for pitching a tent, setting up shop, move into our neighborhood.

And the first thing we might notice is the repetition, “A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed…” That is, this is no random person scattering seed hoping gravity and good luck will take care of the rest. This sower is sowing, which points to a practiced skill. This seed goes where it is supposed to go. No soil is left bare. No soil is overplanted. Yet, even with such a sower, some seed lands on the road, or on stones, or among thorns.

Vincent Van Gogh, the 19^th Century Dutch artist understood this. He understood that the seeds were God’s Word of the Kingdom – and Gogh knew as we all know that Christ is God’s Word of the Kingdom. Christ, the Word of God’s Kingdom, came to proclaim a message: I will set you free, I won’t let you be anything but holy, good and free.

Now what most people do not know is that the young Gogh set off to follow in his Protestant Pastor father’s footsteps – and spent some years evangelizing, bring this good news of God’s Word, to the poor, beginning with mine workers in Borinage. During this time he was able to identify with the miners, their families, and their lifestyles. His religious beliefs made him want to alleviate spiritual and physical suffering.

Only later did he turn to painting as another way to express his desire to bring people closer to God, closer to each other and closer to themselves. In 1888 he painted The Sower, a pivotal work in the history of art, and surely a scene related to our story here in Matthew. One sees the sower, practiced in the art of sowing, deliberately planting the seed in the soil. For Gogh the color yellow symbolized faith, triumph and love. The color blue represented the Divine – and so he combines these colors so they seem to move together shows the relationship of all living things. And there is something holy, good and free in the figure of The Sower – who in the parable of course is God in Christ planting the Good News of God’s kingdom in the soil of our hearts.

And the very thought that this seed, the Word of God, could yield a hundredfold would be heard by the farmers and fishermen Jesus addresses as simply fantastic! No seed known yields such bounty! Maybe ten, twenty or even thirty fold, but sixty or one hundred is unprecedented, unknown, simply unimaginable! We are meant to respond with awe that God’s Word possesses such grace and power – we are meant to want this Word planted in the soil of our own hearts, where we can tend to it, hear it, and be transformed a hundred fold ourselves. What a truly awesome gift from an awesome God.

Of course, the dangers of not tending to it are outlined. It is a parable of self-analysis: Are we fertile, well tilled, deeply mulched soil? Or, are we rocky ground? Do we welcome and make opportunities to tend to God’s word every day? Or, do we spend more time tending to the thorns of wealth and the cares of the world, such that the Word yields nothing?

Many who first heard Jesus tell this story figured out its meaning: we are the soil, the seed of God’s Word comes to rest in us, and for those who till and water and mulch and care for God’s word, we become sowers of the Word ourselves – like the young Vincent Van Gogh, like Saint Paul, like the fishermen, tenant farmers, soldiers and others who first heard this story.

Once upon a time I played music for a living, often in the great state of Maine. In Maine lives a truly wonderful singer/songwriter by the name of David Mallet who has written a song that I believe speaks to what Jesus is calling us to do and be, and at the same time addresses the ecological crisis we face on the Earth, this fragile, island home of ours. As we sing it, or as we listen to it, perhaps it will move us to become more disciplined disciples of Christ – like the skilled Sower may we become more practiced in letting the Word take root in our lives so we might begin to feel and to know that what Saint Paul says is true: we are in the Spirit, God’s Spirit dwells in us. God’s son Jesus desires to pitch his tent and plant his Word in our hearts and minds and souls so that we might truly become holy, good and free!

Garden Song

by David Mallett

 CHORUS:

Inch by inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

Gonna mulch it deep and low

Gonna make it fertile ground

Inch by inch, row by row

Please bless these seeds I sow

Please keep them safe below

'Till the rain comes tumbling down

Pullin' weeds and pickin' stones

We are made of dreams and bones

Need a place to call my own

'Cause the time is close at hand

Grain for grain, sun and rain

Find my way in nature's chain

Till my body and my brain

Tell the music of the land

CHORUS

Plant your rows straight and long

Season with a prayer and song

Mother Earth will make you strong

If you give her loving care

An old crow watching hungrily

From his perch in yonder tree,

In my garden I'm as free

As that feathered thief up there.

CHORUS

©Cherry Lane Music Co (ASCAP)

Get To Work!

29 June 2008 * Genesis 22:1-14/Matthew 10:40-42

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

“Let’s put our clothes on and get to work!”

- The Right Reverend Eugene Taylor Sutton

Friday was spent with our Presiding Bishop, The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts-Schori, and yesterday was spent at the Consecration of Eugene Taylor Sutton as the XIVth Bishop of the Diocese of Maryland! In the course of these two days, a lot was said – all very positive and very hopeful.

At the very heart of the Consecration is the investiture of the new bishop – he is clothed in the vestments symbolic of his office: stole, mitre, chasuble, cope, ring, staff and Bible. As the Presiding Bishop remarked, “This service is always a bit like taking a bath or getting dressed in public!”

The recurring theme over the two days in the life of our diocese is summed up best in Bishop Sutton’s remarks at the Peace in the Washington National Cathedral, “Let’s all put our clothes on and get to work!” Those would be our Baptismal clothes which clothe us to join with Christ in his ministry of reconciliation. As we heard from Saint Paul yesterday, “…in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us!” II Cor 5:16-20

This is the good news with which we are entrusted, and this is in fact at the heart of our lessons for today. What God in Christ is asking in the Gospel from Matthew is quite simple: Is our mission here in the Diocese of Maryland and in this parish church of Saint Peter’s consistent with the mission of Jesus and with the kingdom of God? There is no more important question to be asked.

And as difficult as it may be to see in what is perhaps the single most difficult story in all of Holy Scripture, the story of the Binding of Isaac is asking essentially the same question. One immediately is struck by the fact that the text has little interest in the emotional side of Abraham and Sarah losing a son, “your son, your only son, whom you love.” Rather, the text is primarily concerned with one thing and one thing only: God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant that is to lead to the blessing of all the nations of the world!

That is, as we observed a couple of weeks ago, Isaac means “laughter” or “he who laughs,” and suddenly what is at stake is the death of Laughter – the laughter of all nations because from him was to spring the promise of redemption and salvation for all people. God had placed all his trust in Abraham and Sarah becoming the parents of a great nation, and that nation becoming a blessing for the whole world.

We naturally ask, just why would God test Abraham in what strikes us as such a horrific test of faithfulness? The answer lies, as always, in the back-story. The story begins, “After these things….” These things are a running tally of Abraham’s failures of trust in God and God’s promises. Twice Abraham passes off Sarah as his sister rather than his wife because he feared for their lives despite God’s promise that nothing would happen to them. Then there are those times Abraham and Sarah laugh at God’s promises that they would somehow give birth in the geriatric ward with Medicare picking up the bill! Because of their doubt Abraham and Sarah conspire a way around God’s promise by having Abraham rush God’s plan through his having a child with Hagar.

This all comes after twelve chapters of Genesis in which humanity is portrayed as steadily moving further and further away from God. So it is “After these things” that God tests Abraham to see if indeed he is to be entrusted with God’s plan for the salvation and redemption of the whole world. This was a unique test for a unique figure in history. A figure who was to give birth to those who would give birth to the Christ child. None of us wants the death of Laughter, but we often want the Laughter without the tears.

Such a text challenges and tests our faith as well. We tend to resist the notion that there exists an evil so deeply entrenched in this world that God must go to such dangerous and shocking measures of sacrifice to root it out. But then, our faith begins with a cross on Calvary. We want to overlook the truth of the matter, that our God’s grace often comes with blood on it. In Genesis and in Jesus, God himself “provides for the sacrifice.”

Jesus is making very much the same point in Matthew: unless you honor the prophets who criticize your social ills; unless you accept the righteous ones among you, who for Jesus often are identified as sinners; and unless you attend to the needs of the “little ones,” you will not be recognized as one of my ambassadors. Unless you are about the work of reconciliation, healing and building up the life of my Father’s kingdom, you will never be recognized as one of my disciples. Is our mission consistent with the mission of Jesus and with the kingdom of God?

This is what I believe our Bishop means when he asks us to “get our clothes on and get to work.” Or, as our Presiding Bishop put it, we are to become Healthy and Transformative congregations “so we can do what we are called to do: like lobby our state legislatures and lobby Congress to begin to enact Millennium Development Goals in our own desperately poor urban and rural districts.”

As Matthew’s Jesus says later on in chapter 25, if you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, welcome the strangers, you are welcoming, visiting, clothing and feeding me. I am the stranger, I am the hungry person, I am the little ones.

The XIVth Bishop of Maryland invites us all to get to work in this prayer he offered as a gift to each and every one of us: O Lord our God, look with favor on your pilgrim people in the Diocese of Maryland. Help our lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons to lead lives worthy of the calling to which we have been called, with all humility, gentleness and patience. May our life together be infused by the grace of truth and the spirit of reconciliation; in times of celebration may we freely rejoice, and in times of distress may we listen to and forgive one another in love, always eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Open our hearts to receive the Living Christ in our midst; may we never tire to seek him in prayer and action, and in works of mercy and justice throughout the world. This we pray in the name of Jesus our Savior.

It is indeed time to put our clothes on and get to work! Amen.

22 June 2008 / Proper 7-A: Matthew 10:24-33

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter's at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

The Light of the World

"…nothing is covered that will not be uncovered,

and nothing secret that will not be known."

Jesus says we are to be fearless in our witness to the new kingdom life he comes to proclaim and live. We can be fearless because there is much about God and kingdom life that is yet to be revealed. That which is covered or hidden will be revealed. Revelation continues. It does not end with tradition or scripture. God's revelation is not limited to a handful of Biblical writers and editors who gave us our scriptures. God, says Jesus, is not limited at all except by the limits of our own imagination as to the nature of God and God's intended kingdom.

There are those who live among us, fortunately, who every day seek to help us see that which is covered, hidden and secret about God and God’s kingdom. In our tradition we call them mystics because they are able to recognize some of the mysteries of God's hidden-ness in the midst of our everyday surroundings and encounters with one another.

One such person is remembered in our Calendar of Saints: Evelyn Underhill who died on June 15, 1941. Underhill was a lay person, and someone with little formal religious training. Yet, her abilities to recognize the hidden dimensions of God's presence in our life and to write about these mysteries of God makes her one of the most significant witnesses to Christ in recent history. That few Christians have ever heard of Evelyn Underhill speaks to the hidden nature of God's ongoing revelation itself. Yet, she left us what I consider one of the most important prayers next to our Lord’s prayer:

Lord! Give me courage and love to open the door and constrain You to enter, whatever the disguise You come in, even before I fully recognize my guest. Come in! Enter my small life! Lay Your sacred hands on all the common things and small interests of that life and bless and change them. Transfigure my small resources, make them sacred. And in them give me your very self. Amen

Some years ago while in London I fell in love with the gallery of Pre-Raphaelites in the Tate Museum. Prominent among them is William Holman-Hunt whose painting, The Light of the World, shows Jesus standing at a door and knocking, a lantern in his hand. I was absolutely drawn into Hunt’s mystical and luminous rendering of the 20th verse of the third chapter of the book of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…” The same scene was featured in a stained glass window next to the pulpit in my parish in Connecticut. And I only recently learned why it is I am so attracted to this mystical image: while moving my mother to Sykesville from Chicago she found this: a prayer card I made in Sunday School at First Congregational Church, Oak Park, Illinois, with Hunt’s The Light of the World on the front, and the words, “I come that they might have life,” on the back

This image reveals an inner and well hidden truth about God in Christ: he is in fact always standing at the door and knocking, waiting for us to open our door. Which reveals a not so hidden truth about us, even those of us who are disciples of the One we call Lord: we tend to keep our doors closed. And we tend not to hear the knocking. Why? That's right: we are too busy doing so many important things that we just do not hear Jesus knocking on our door. If we are not busy with work or family, we are so busy with church busy-ness that we cannot hear Jesus knocking at the door. That is Jesus' constant complaint about organized religion and tradition: it keeps us too busy to hear or participate in God's ongoing revelation. And so whatever new thing God is presently calling into being remains hidden to us.

Then I don't know about you, but when I do hear the knocking, I tend to look out the peephole to see who it is. Oh, no! I say. It's Jesus! I know what he's all about and he's going to want me to do something for someone. So I run and get my Palm Pilot, run back to the door, and without opening the door I speak through the keyhole and say, "Look, Jesus, I am awfully busy today! I am a week late with the Newsletter, I have a 67 email messages to respond to, but look, I have an opening a week from Thursday at 2:00 PM. Could you come back then?"

All this shambling and dodging when I know that what verse 20 also says is true: “If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you.” It is an invitation to Eucharist – to Thanksgiving – to a heavenly banquet with our Lord and Savior!

So it is we pray, “Lord! Give me the courage and love to constrain you to enter.” To constrain means to force, to urge, to compel. Hunt’s rendering of The Light of the World has no door knob or handle on Jesus' side of the door. Only we can open the door to let God in. Or else God remains hidden from us and we remain hidden from God. The Holy Habit of Daily Prayer and Bible Study is a time-honored way to open the door and let Jesus in.

What Underhill’s prayer acknowledges is that in so opening the door to Jesus we are hoping Jesus will bless and change everything in our common life together. He will make things new. Help us to understand our life together in whole new ways. We pray for change!

Today we have an opportunity to open the door together and let Jesus reminds us of what words he taught his disciples to pray – the Biblical Lord’s Prayer that calls us to live for today, to live on bread that is given daily, bread that is his body given for us and for the whole world. We pray that we might forgive others the very same way we wish our sins to be forgiven. Every now and then we need to renew our prayers. In this case we will be going back to the kinds of language Jesus uses in Luke and Matthew rather than the colloquial and politicized cadences of the time of King James and Queen Elizabeth. Jesus wants to come in and teach us his prayer anew so as to shed new light on how we might live into the life of his kingdom.

It is a good thing to learn new ways to pray so that we might hear what Jesus says to us in whole new ways. He desires to bless and change all “the common things and small interests” of our lives.

And in our prayers we must thank God for mystics like Evelyn Underhill and William Holman-Hunt! They teach us to listen for that knocking on the door, and encourage us to open the door. Only we can open that door and welcome the Risen Lord even before we recognize our guest, whatever disguise He comes in. The Kingdom of God is at hand for those who have eyes to see it and the make the time to welcome it into our midst. "…nothing is covered that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not be known.”

Amen.

A Theology of Laughter

15 June 2008/Proper 6 * Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7 / Mathew 9:35-10:23

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

Why did Sarah laugh?

“The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.”

-Frederick Beuchner, Telling the Truth (Harpers:1977)

“Why did Sarah laugh?” God asks. To which anyone remotely familiar with God and God’s good news in Jesus Christ might answer, “And why not?!” And besides, laughing is better than crying, and maybe not all that different. Abraham and Sarah are laughing because if by any crazy chance they should have a baby boy, then they really would have something to laugh about! It has been suggested that they are laughing at God and with God, and they are laughing at themselves too because laughter has that in common with weeping. No matter what the immediate object of either your laughter or your tears, suggests Frederick Beuchner, the object of both ends up being yourself and your own life.

After all, they had had quite a life. He was nearly 100, and she was ninety. They had a nice house in the suburbs, a two car garage, a wide-screen HD TV with satellite hook-up to 300 channels! They had prepared a room for the babies to come, but alas it had become a storage room over time since the babies never came. Sarah got her clothes at Nordstrom’s, Abraham was pulling down an excellent salary with fringe benefits and an early retirement plan. And then they got religion, or religion got them. Abraham was convinced they should pull up stakes and move the whole scene to some other country God would pick out where God promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation which would in turn become a blessing to all nations. So that’s what they did, and that’s when the troubles all began.

Off they go with the station wagon loaded with a handful of friends and relations and a U-Haul trailer full of idols behind. The friends included their brother-in-law Lot for whom the trip turns out to have been a bad mistake. The first thing that goes wrong is that Pharaoh is struck by Sarah’s beauty, and so Abraham passes her off as his sister and lets the chips fall as they may. This results in a complicated domestic situation which almost cost Abe the woman who would be the mother of a great nation, and from which he extricates himself by finally telling the truth at a considerable loss of face and credibility.

Next thing is that when they get to the Promised Land, Lot and his crowd claim the place isn’t big enough for all of us. So they split the land, giving Lot all the fertile and good pasture land, leaving Abraham with the area around Dead Man’s Gulch. Some parts of the Promised Land were more promising than others! The years roll on like empty baby carriages when suddenly some strangers arrive to announce that God has a plan. The plan is that Sarah will have a baby boy after all. She laughs, hiding in the tent, laughing so hard she falls on her face with tears streaming down her long wrinkling and aging cheeks. God says, “Why does Sarah laugh?” This sobers the old girl up and she denies the whole thing.

The interesting thing is that God simply says, “Oh yes, you did laugh.” And then far from getting angry, God says, “You will have a boy and you will name him Isaac,” which in fact is Hebrew for “he who laughs.” So God not only tolerates the laughter, he blesses it and joins in on it himself, which makes it all very special laughter indeed. God and man laughing together, sharing in a glorious joke – one that later only Hannah and Mary will ever truly understand.

We might ask, Where does this laughter come from? And the answer would be, from as deep a place as tears come from. Much like tears do, laughter also comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons perhaps the most missed, except that it comes not as an ally of darkness, but its adversary; not as a symptom but as its antidote. The laughter of Sarah and Abraham does not eliminate the darkness of endless childless years of tears, and the long years ahead wherein lies even more darkness, as in when Abraham is asked to take his long awaited son and sacrifice him on top of a mountain as a burnt offering. There is much darkness behind and ahead.

And they both have to face the darkness both of death and life in a world where God is seen at best from a distance. But with their laughter and the blessing of God something new breaks into their darkness, something unexpected, something so preposterous and glad that all they can do is laugh at it in astonishment. I often wonder if we have lost the capacity to be astonished.

Meanwhile, Jesus calls us to join his laborers to bring in the harvest – a metaphor for bringing more people into God’s community of faith. He offers authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. We are to proclaim the good news, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers and cast out demons. All without expecting anything in return. Nothing. Nada. Oh, and later he will say that in our spare time we should work on becoming perfect! Perfect, he says. It is his word for us: Perfect, “like my Father in heaven is perfect.” Apparently he read the first chapter of the book of Genesis and believed it where it says we are made in God’s image, male and female are we so made. If that’s not enough to make us laugh I don’t know what is! Oh, and as in the Abraham saga, Jesus states clearly that joining in the labor of the harvest will not necessarily make the darkness go away.

It is the Gospel as comedy, with comedy being that which is unforeseeable. As in how can Donald Duck foresee that after he is run over by a steamroller, he will pick himself up on the other side as flat as a pancake for a few seconds, but alive and squawking, and just as suddenly pop back into his old self? So imagine the disciples first being asked to pray for God to send laborers into the harvest, only to learn a few verses later they are the ones the Lord is sending! Imagine further that when Matthew writes “disciple” he means us – you and me – we are meant to be the laborers God is sending! Anyone laughing yet?

Consider the evidence, however: Abraham and Sarah do have the baby, Noah who drinks too much saves humankind, David the runt of the litter becomes King of Israel, the disciples do carry on the work Jesus asks them to do, Lazarus stands up and walks out of his tomb, Jesus does rise from the dead, Saul who persecutes Christians becomes Paul the only reason we gentiles are here, and, of course, we are here. We are here because of all these unforeseen things God has done in the past. This same God in Christ Jesus says we will do even greater things than Jesus did! It is our time to join the laborers and bring the harvest in, laughing until the tears run down our cheeks all the way home – home with the God who sent us here in the first place. It is time to say, “Here am I, O Lord send me!” Amen.

HERE AM I, OH LORD SEND ME

Mississippi John Hurt

Don’t you hear my Saviour callin’

Sayin’ who will go and work today

The fields are ripe and the harvest waiting

Who will go bear those sheaves away

Here am I, oh Lord send me

Here am I oh Lord send me

Here am I, oh Lord send me

Here am I, oh Lord send me

If you can not sing like angels

If you can not preach like Paul

You can tell of the love of Jesus

You can say that He died for us all