Seeds

Lectionary Readings: Lamentations 1:1-6; Lam. 3:19-26;  2 Timothy 1:1-14;  Luke 17:5-10

How great is your faithfulness, O God! Amen.
Lord, increase our faith!
We don't know what we're doing. We need more people. We can't start yet - we're not ready. We need more information. We need more training, more experience, more money, more time...  Enough already!

That's what Jesus tells his disciples – you have enough already.
They say, "Give us more faith" – he says, "You've got all the faith you need – if you have this much, you've got more than enough" How much? The size of a mustard seed.

They're not very big, are they? Seeds themselves are not much to look at – small, nondescript, kind of dead-looking. You can't tell what a seed is going to grow into until you've had some experience. So unless you've seen that kind of seed before, you can't tell by looking at the outside what kind of plant it will become – and you can't tell by cutting it in half to look at the inside, either.

You have to put it in the ground and see what grows.

A lot of things are like seeds.

A baby is like a seed – I got to hold my little cousin Wyatt last week when he was only a few hours old. There's no way to know who he's going to grow up to be – you can't tell by looking; we'll have to wait till he starts growing to even begin to guess.

Faith is like a seed, too – in today's epistle, faith gets passed down in Timothy's family almost like DNA, from his grandmother to his mother to him. Faith gets planted in us at baptism and confirmation and all the sacraments – it's ready to germinate and grow when the conditions are right. Like it says in Timothy, "rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of… hands."

The words of scripture are like seed – sometimes called logos spermatikos – the implanted word. Every time somebody stands up here to read the Word of the Lord, you're peppered with little seeds. When and how they take root depends on lots of factors. If nothing is growing at all, you may need to condition your soil. The seed itself is good; when you create an environment conducive for it to take root, it will.

Experiences are seeds – even hard ones like pain and death. When the church was under so much persecution in the 300s and people were being killed left and right, Augustine wrote that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church – because that's what grew out of the deaths. The gospel also says that when a seed dies and falls to the ground, it grows up to produce 30, 60, a hundred fold return. What looks like the end of something is many times more of a beginning.So I think grief is closely connected to the growth of new and unexpected things. Grief sometimes involves digging up things that haven't been touched in a long while, pulling things out and turning the ground over and over and over, until it looks chewed up and bare – with bits of what used to be growing there poking out all over. This is what it sounds like in Lamentations – things look nothing like they used to

"How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become!"

I don't think grief itself is the seed; I think memories and experiences are. Relationships grow like flowers or trees, and when a person in your life dies, the blooms drop off, and you're left with stickers that poke you when you touch them or velcro things that grab onto you when you walk by, or delicate fluffy things that float away when you breathe on them. Your memories and experiences are like seeds. They're not what they were – but also, you have no idea what they might become.

A lot of things are like seeds.
On the outside, a seed looks dead. And basically, it is until it's put in the ground, but when conditions are right - the ground begins to warm, it receives water, suddenly the skin splits open, a root snakes out and a stem pushes up, unfolding a couple of green leaves

– and it turns out the inside of the seed is hundreds, thousands, millions of times bigger than the outside.

Even after all these centuries, it's still a process we can only describe, not really explain. You probably don't know what kinds of seeds you're carrying around – you can't tell by looking at them. And anyway, as seeds, they probably don't look very impressive, but what's inside is way more than you can guess. You need to put them in the ground. Ecclesiastes (11:6) says,Who plants a seed trusts God – maybe not even very much, but it doesn't take much. Do you still have the seed in your hand? Look at it. That's more than enough faith for God to work in you. Don't ask for more of this, more of that – the faith you have is enough; put something in the ground. You don't have to know what will grow from it, just start planting.

"in the morning sow your seed and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good."

I love the story of Gideon; God asks him to save Israel and he says 'Oh I can't, my tribe is the smallest, and my family is the most insignificant of the clan, and I'm the youngest… blah blah blah… I can't do it!' and God says to him, "Go in the strength you have… Am I not sending you?"(Judges 6:14-16) In other words – do you think I'm asking you to do this by yourself? I'm right here.

The writer of Lamentations says to God,

"You are my portion…therefore I hope in you. You are good to those who wait with patience, to every soul that seeks you."

 God is with us, he is more than enough for all we need; he is our portion. He feeds us with his own life. The Eucharist is also like a seed; when you come to receive it today, think of it this way: you are planting the life of Christ in yourself; now wait patiently for it to grow.

And while you're waiting, go in the strength you have, with the faith you have – it's already enough, and plant your own seeds in the world around you.

Amen.

Bless the dying

5th Sunday in Lent, Year C - Readings

Mary anoints Jesus' feet with aromatic oil and wipes them with her hair; the house fills with the fragrance of the perfume. What is she doing? Jesus explains that she is anointing him for burial.

Not long before, Mary had rubbed the same kind of oil on her brother Lazarus's feet and helped wrap his body with spices in long strips of cloth before they buried him. Earlier, when Lazarus was sick, they had sent word to Jesus, but he hadn't come, and her brother died. She cried for days. Then finally Jesus came, and he raised her brother from the dead.

Now, they are all here together again, in Bethany, a small town outside Jerusalem, where Jesus knows his death is waiting. This evening, about a week before Passover, he has come to his friends' home for dinner. Lazarus is sitting at the table; Martha is serving the food. Judas is glaring at his weirdo little sister, who has now untied her hair, and perfume is filling the house.
Before we go further, I want to clarify some mix-ups that you may have about Mary and about this situation.
You are not alone (but you are also not correct) if you think this is Mary Magdalene. You're also wrong if you assume she is or ever was a prostitute. But this is not completely your fault; it used to be an official interpretation, articulated by Pope Gregory in a sermon in 591. Now, however, people officially agree this interpretation was wrong, but it's hard to change a story people have become so committed to. ("Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner?")

Why did the Pope say these women (Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene and another woman in Luke's gospel) were all the same? One actual theory is that there were just too many Marys and it was confusing, so the church combined them to clean up the story.
There are a lot of Marys in the Bible: there's Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary the mother of Joses and Salome, and "the other Mary" as well as this Mary – Mary of Bethany. But you can't just amalgamate them.
Imagine if we decided: It's too confusing to have three Carols in our congregation. From now on, let's just say they are all the same Carol. Won't that make things clearer?
We also have several Johns: we even have several Father Johns in our history. Why not, for the sake of economy, just combine them all into one conglomerate priest we could name "Fr. John William Bedingfield Sonnen" – "Fr. John" for short. And if there are priests whose names we don't remember, they can also be included as part of "Fr. John."


This is basically what happened to Mary of Bethany. But she is her own person, and who she is and what she does in this story are important in the Gospel, which is also part of our story.
We are Christians; Jesus is the Christ, and Mary of Bethany is someone who acted toward Jesus in a way that was exactly appropriate. As Episcopalians, we also strive to act in ways that are exactly appropriate in each situation – so it would be good for us to pay attention to Mary of Bethany.

Who was Mary of Bethany, and what allows her to respond to Jesus in a way that is so fitting?
Mary of Bethany is that same Mary of Mary & Martha fame – she sat a Jesus' feet while her sister was busy in the kitchen, and when Martha complained to Jesus that he should make her help with the work, Jesus said, Leave her alone; she's doing the right thing.

One thing I learned from Bishop Doyle's scripture reflections this week was that some scholars say Mary is also Judas Iscariot's sister. Imagine that! What a family group: Mary & Martha, Lazarus, and Judas. And their dad is Simon the Leper.
In this story, Judas is complaining about his sister's behavior. She has basically just poured a year's salary down the drain as far as he's concerned, so he complains to Jesus about the waste. Like he'd said to Martha, Jesus tells Judas, Leave her alone - she's doing exactly the right thing.


A lot of commentaries make what I consider to be a patronizing and idiotic assumption that when Mary poured the perfumed oil on Jesus feet, she had really no understanding of what she was doing or why.
I think she knew what she was doing. There is a long tradition of people, particularly the prophets, acting out messages: Jeremiah wearing a yoke to illustrate Israel's enslavement, Hosea marrying a prostitute to show how God is faithful to his unfaithful people, Ezekiel making a tiny model of Jerusalem and besieging it, and on and on – and they all did these things intentionally, putting the meaning into words later.
In the same way, Jesus put into words the meaning of Mary's actions, to clarify what she was doing and why. Every week, we do something similar when we participate in the Eucharist to remember Jesus' sacrifice for us and the new life we have in his new life: "We remember his death. We proclaim his resurrection…" Actions help us remember, and the words explain the meaning.

When it comes to memory, the senses are the best triggers - and the most powerful is the sense of smell. Nothing can pull you so powerfully or so quickly back into a particular time or place as a familiar smell. In this story, it's clear that people remembered the smell of the perfume filling the hosue, because they specifically wrote that into the story. The smell was a powerful part of their memory of what happened there. What might it have triggered for them on that night?

If people at that time were familiar with preparing bodies for burial, those smells would already be associated for them pretty powerfully, but especially for that particular family. Remember, it was not long ago that Lazarus had been raised from the dead – but before that, he died and had to be anointed for burial.

Lazarus himself was at the table that night; what would the smell have triggered for him? He was the one who had been embalmed in those oils and spices. As he sat there, maybe he smelled their sharp scent stinging his nostrils and was back in the dark of the tomb again, waking up bound head to toe, trying to suck air through layers of linen cloth around his face, struggling upright and pulling at the shroud, lurching forward and suddenly blinking in the sunlight. And now, with that same smell filling the air, Lazarus watches his sister anoint with embalming perfume the feet of the man who brought him back from death.
Martha stands nearby, the smell taking her even a few days further back, to the day of her brother's death: no time to grieve, too much to do, but then working together with her sister to prepare his body for burial, closing his beautiful eyes and then finally binding his face in white linen cloth. When Lazarus came out of the tomb four days later, restored – it was like a dream. After Jesus brought her brother back, it seemed impossible to imagine that smell ever coming into their home again – but here it was, filling her with fresh grief, even though her brother was sitting at the table in front of her, alive. How is it possible to equate that smell with Jesus? How could it be possible that he would die?

This is a family very recently acquainted with death, so it may be that not everybody needed to have it explained. Except Judas – all he could smell was money. But possibly for the others, a much deeper realization was settling in. Just because Lazarus had been raised, that didn't mean death would never touch them again. It would – very soon.
Mary paid attention and knew Jesus well enough to realize that this man, whom they loved and who had done so much for them, was preparing to die. As impossible as that seemed to be to imagine or accept, she had already accepted it and she had made preparations. Now, though she didn't want it to be, the time was right, and the house began to fill with the fragrance as she poured out her offering of love and grief.

Some of the most beautiful and mysterious works we perform as a Church are our prayers and service for those who are dying. Many of you have experience of offering this kind of service to those you love.
Mary of Bethany blessed Jesus in this way. May we take her as a model for how to "bless the dying, soothe the suffering and pity the afflicted." (BCP p.134 from the service of Compline in the Daily Office)
Amen.
Given to St. John's, Silsbee on March 21, 2010

Third Word

"Woman, behold your son." ... "Behold your mother."

Did you ever try to comfort a child who's upset because their pet died? Parents sometimes try this:
"We'll get you another fish..." "I don't want another fish! I want my fish!"
Similar is not the same.

'Better' is also not the same. 'Better' even if it is better, mainly just feels 'different' at first, and 'different' feels about the same as 'bad.'
People sometimes tell parents who are marrying off their daughter and watching her leave home and move away, "Don't think of it as losing a daughter; think of it as gaining a son."
Maybe in the future, they'll have a great relationship with the son-in-law also and maybe grandkids who bring a lot of joy to their lives, and that will even be better, but there's no way to know at the time how it will be in the future.

What about a mother sending her son off for military service?
You can see the group of them walking through the airport - him, his mom, his younger sister and his good friend from school.
He's in his uniform, has a bag, really short hair. They come up to the line for security. He sets his bag on the floor. They're all looking at him. He leans down and hugs his mom; her eyes are starting to well up. She shakes her head; she can't say anything.
He looks over at his friend and back at her.
"Mom, Jake's your son now, till I get back. Take care of her, man."
He picks up his bag and walks over to the line, shows his ticket and ID, puts his bag on the conveyor belt and walks through. On the other side, he picks it up, looks back, waves, and goes through the revolving door. They're standing there watching him. She's really crying now. The friend steps up and puts his hand on her shoulder.

What do you say to her?
"Don't think of it as putting your son in danger; think of it as protecting our nation."
It doesn't matter whether or not that's true. It doesn't change the grief and fear of letting him go.

Mary stood, looking up at her son. He says to her, 'Woman, behold your son," and to his friend and disciple, "Behold your mother."
Mary doesn't speak. But what may her heart have been saying?

YOU are my son; I don't want another son.

Don't think of it as losing your son, Mary;
think of it as gaining the whole world...

I don't want the whole world -

I want my son.

Trinity

Year C, Trinity Sunday
Gospel Reading: John 16:5-15


Trinity
Today is Trinity Sunday, celebrating and recognizing God in the three persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s not common in the church calendar to have a day dedicated to an idea or a doctrine, but the idea of the Trinity is central to the way we as Christians understand our relationship to God.
Today’s scripture from the Gospel of John is one of several in the Bible that talks about relationships between Father, Son and Spirit. The word ‘Trinity’ is not in the Bible, but as the church worked out how to explain what it believed, this word was created to express the mysterious way in which Christians encounter God as Father, Jesus as God’s Son and the Holy Spirit in relationship to both and to us.
Though it seems contradictory, the idea of something being many things and one thing is not totally unimaginable. A family is one thing even though there are separate, distinct members; whether there are two or five or sixty people; it’s still the same family. Likewise, a country – we have on our money ‘E pluribus unum’ – ‘Out of many, one.’ The Church also - though we are many people, and we are very different from each other, still we are one body.
Similarly, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct, but they’re one God. How this works is the subject of defining the doctrine of the Trinity.
The idea of the Trinity, though in one way simple, is hard to explain exactly; it took the church a few hundred years to hash out descriptions of it and even still, there are arguments. One of the results of those many, many, many discussions was the Apostle’s Creed, where we say ‘I believe in God the Father,.. and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord..." and "I believe in the Holy Ghost..."

Analogy of Love
Augustine, a bishop in North Africa, spent a big part of his life trying to understand and explain the Trinity. He wrote a 15-volume book about it, even. One of the ways he came up with for describing it is an analogy – the Analogy of Love. Augustine said that the Trinity is a relationship. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father back, and the Holy Spirit is the love between them.
Augustine felt that, though good, this analogy didn’t completely work, and he tried to refine it with many variations. He concluded that really no image or analogy can exactly describe the Trinity, but he also thought that, even though he could never perfectly describe it, it was worth trying. And I’m glad he went to all that trouble, because I think his analogy is helpful.

Heart Strings
It helps me, anyway. I think of the Father loving the Son, and the Holy Spirit as love – and I imagine the Holy Spirit, the love between them, like an elastic string tying their hearts together.

This image also helps me in thinking about my relationships with other people. My heart is tied to all the people I love, so when someone leaves, or moves away, or dies, those strings stretch out, pulling on my heart. Sometimes it’s quite painful, but I think of the ache as a reminder that my heart is still tied to the person I’m separated from, and so wherever they are, part of me is there also.
I thought about this when my grandmother on my mom’s side died a few years ago. I felt she had taken part of my heart with her but that it was still tied on to me. In a way, though, that made heaven seem closer, because wherever it was, I knew she had to be there, and part of me was there with her.
You may feel this way about people you love. Some of you may feel like this about Anna. I do. She brought so much life and joy to this church through her music and her spirit. I think she has taken part of us with her to heaven, and we feel our hearts pulling us there, wanting to be with her.
In Matthew, we read that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. So tie your heart to real treasures that will pull you toward heaven. I’m sure we did that by tying our hearts to Nan Nan.

I think this is what happened with those who knew Jesus. Because he lived among people as one of them, they got to know him and love him. They followed him, investing their lives in him, and when he died, it was very painful for them. The wind went out of their sails; they didn’t know what to do. When he rose and ascended back to the Father, though, he pulled their hearts with him toward heaven and blew the Holy Spirit as a following wind to push them on. It changed their direction and their drive; they became more sure of their faith in Christ. Where before, Peter waffled and even denied knowing Christ, later he died for him.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is saying ‘goodbye’ to his disciples. They love him and don’t want him to go away, and Jesus knows it’s hard for them. ‘Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth: it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.’
A little after this passage, Jesus prays to the Father for his disciples, as we read together earlier, and in that prayer, we hear what was supposed to happen later after Jesus went away. "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them, and that I myself may be in them."

Signs
The Gospel of John is a very carefully organized work, and it seems to be in two main sections, which scholars call the Book of Signs and the Book of Glory. In the first part, Jesus performs signs or miracles to show and explain to people who he is – God’s Son – and that God loves them. In the second part, his final, most important sign shows the world God’s love in a complete and definitive way, through a total self-giving act.
Many people today are interested in the idea of signs or miracles. I think it’s pretty universal for people to want to hear from God, but we’re not always the best at recognizing how God speaks to us. Today’s reading seems to indicate the Holy Spirit will help open our eyes to what’s true, remind us of what Jesus taught and offer comfort in our struggles. Often, signs of God’s love are all around us but we have to pay attention and look with eyes of faith – faith seeking understanding.
There’s a song by Carolyn Arends that I like which says, ‘I was hoping for a miracle and waiting for a sign/ as if each breath I take is not a gift,/ and I was acting just as if the way you gave your life for mine/ didn’t have my foolish heart convinced. What did I think could cause this hunger – did I ever stop to wonder why every time I open up my eyes...There you are."
In another song, she asks, "Do we dare pay attention, dare even mention, the mystery we find ourselves caught in...And do we dare to remember all that we have forgotten?"
The cross remains for us a sign and reminder of God’s love in Christ’s sacrifice. Jesus told his disciples, "when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself." In the same discourse as today’s passage, Jesus also commanded his disciples to love one another, and this love would be a sign to others.
So the love – the Spirit - that ties Jesus’ heart to the Father ties our hearts together as well in community and communion, creating a web of interconnections – like a huge net. And as Christ is lifted up, the net is pulled up behind him, catching and drawing even more people all together toward God – God who is himself a community of love.

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Given to Vidor Presbyterian
and in memory of Anna Lee
June 5, 2007