Third Sunday of Easter - Mother's Day

Here is a sermon I gave on the Third Sunday of Easter in 2011. That year it also happened to be Mother's Day. It begins with a story that can be used either with the reading for 3 Easter which includes the Journey to Emmaus or for mother's day.

The Third Sunday of Easter

Transcribed from a sermon given

May 8, 2011 - Mother’s Day

at

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Hart

Once upon a time there was a king and the king decided that he wanted to honor the greatest citizen of his country. He wanted to give an award to that one person who best manifested all that was good in their country. So he sent out his advisors to scour through the country, talk to people, ask and find out who is deserving of that honor. Well a few months later they came back to the king and they had four nominees. It was up to the king to choose which one of these four would get this great honor.

So the first one came in. He was a successful businessman who had made a fortune but who continued to live quite simply and gave his money away. He was a wonderful philanthropist, had helped thousands of people by sharing all of his resources. Ah, indeed, someone worthy of the award.

They brought in the next person. The next person was a doctor. He had spent his life serving the poor. He would share his gifts of healing with anyone, regardless of whether they could pay. And while he had been doing that he had also been studying and learning and finding new ways to heal people. He had touched thousands of lives. Ah, indeed, someone worthy of the award.

The third one was brought in, and this was the main judge of the country. And this was a judge that was respected by all. Anyone who came before him knew that they would receive justice, that they would be listened to, that they would be heard. He had a wisdom and dignity and integrity that everyone respected. Some people compared him to Solomon, which he, of course, in his humility said that was not at all true. Ah, indeed, another worthy person.

And then the king said, would you bring me the fourth. And they brought in the fourth. And this was an older woman, dressed simply, humble but carrying herself with dignity. He had never seen her before and he asked, “what is it about her that you would think that she would be deserving of this reward?” And his advisors said to him, “Well, sir, she was the teacher of the three others.”

Sometimes we don’t recognize Christ when Christ is with us. That’s the message of the journey to Emmaus. And sometimes we don’t recognize greatness when it stands among us, especially when it comes in the form of someone who nurtures, like a mother, or a teacher, or a Sunday School teacher, or a nurse, or a friend or a sponsor, or someone else who helps us, who teaches us, opens up the world to us in ways we couldn’t have imagined. We sometimes don’t notice them, don’t acknowledge them, don’t realize how incredibly important they are in the world. Sometimes we don’t recognize Christ in other people.

The story of the journey to Emmaus is one of my favorites and it is the favorite of many people. The reason it stands out so strongly is because it is really the story of all Christians. It is our story, not just those two disciples. See those two disciples were leaving Jerusalem. Jerusalem was seen as the place you encountered God. They were walking away from God. And they were unhappy. They were going through a dark time. They had seen someone that they had hoped was going to be the salvation of their country arrested and crucified. They had lost hope. They were grieving. They were confused. You might have said they had bottomed out.

Here is one thing to remember as disciples on our journeys, because we are all on a journey. It is those times when we are broken and grieving and hurting and confused that we are most likely to be open to hearing about hope and love.

As they walked along suddenly there was a stranger with them. Now the stranger doesn’t preach at them, and he didn’t tell them what they were supposed to believe. Instead it says that he opened up the scriptures to them. He spoke to them in a way that they began to understand for themselves another truth. They began to suspect, to realize, that there was much more going on then they had ever imagined.

That’s what happens on our spiritual journey. Someone, something, comes into our lives and we begin to say, “Maybe things aren’t exactly the way we thought they were.” Maybe there is hope. Maybe God is real. Maybe there is something more.

Then disciples on the road demonstrated their hunger for more. When Jesus went to leave they invited him to stay with them. They wanted to learn more, and what they got was the next step on the spiritual journey.

When we open up to the possibility that there is hope, to the possibility that God works in amazing ways, we may have that moment when our eyes are opened and we experience the presence of the risen Christ.

It can happen in a lot of different ways. We can experience the presence of the risen Christ when we are reading scripture, or when we are on a mountain top, or when we are deep in loss and praying at the hospital. One of the ways that the church has constantly remembered and reflected the presence of the risen Christ is in the breaking of the bread.

That’s how I came to know. That’s how I came to have no doubt. When I went to college I got away from the church for about 15 years. I was just beginning to start to go back a little bit, exploring, you know, tentatively putting my toe in but not committing. Then one day at church, when it got to the Eucharist, and priest broke the bread, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by love. And the love was profound and around me, and in me, and through me, and it was one of those mystical experiences that I will never forget. At that moment I knew the presence of the risen Christ. No one will ever convince me that Christ is not with us, because of that one experience in the breaking of the bread.

The church gathers together every week to open the possibility for people to experience the risen Christ in the community of the believers, to experience the risen Christ is scripture, and to experience the risen Christ in the breaking of the bread. And that makes all the difference.

As the letter from Peter says, once you’ve decided that there is a reality there, once you have committed to God the father of Jesus, once you have come into that community, then you have a responsibility. You have a responsibility to love one another - to love as Christ loves - to love and be an instrument of the risen Christ - to be Christ for one another.

Christ comes to us in many different forms. Most of the time we don’t recognize him, but every now and then our eyes are opened. Sometimes we experience Christ through nature, sometimes we experience Christ through a book, or a movie. Sometimes our eyes are opened by a song or a friend, or a teacher, or a mother.

Amen

Maundy Thursday Sermon

Here in the midst of Holy Week we remember the last time Jesus gathered for dinner with his disciples. It was a very intimate opportunity for Jesus to share his final teachings. In this sermon I explore why he chose to break bread, bless wine and wash feet. May you deeply experience Christ's love during this holy season.

Maundy Thursday Sermon

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Holy Week 2010

Rev. Valerie Hart

Whenever I am in a pine glen or a pine forest where the pine needles are on the ground and it’s warm and the sun is shining on them, there’s a certain smell.  It’s not the same smell as a Christmas tree.  That smells green.  This is the dry brown pine needles with the sun on them in the summertime.

There’s a certain smell, and whenever I smell that smell, I remember the place where I spent my summers in Ontario, Canada.  It was on a lake where there were lots of pine trees.  In the summertime, that smell triggers that memory.  It feels like I’m standing right there. - Scientists have found that the sense of smell is the sense that most clearly triggers memory. 

Do you have any memories that get triggered by smell?  Maybe a certain food that when you were a child was made at the holidays.  Maybe your mother’s perfume or the smell of your father when you gave him a hug.  Do you have any of those kind of memories?  Sensual and vivid?  Those kind of memories are not of words.  You don’t think about that memory.  You relive it. 

On the last night that Jesus had with His disciples, He could have done a lot of different things.  We all know about someone who’s dying and may want to pass something on to their family and their friends.  Sometimes you might even think about what it is you would want to pass on.

There are lots of ways that Jesus could have spent that last night.  He could have written out instructions.  He could have written a whole book like Mohammed did.  Or He could have told a scribe to write it for Him.  He could have told His disciples a clear set of beliefs, spelling out in great detail the nature of The Trinity and the relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Don’t you kind of wish He’d done that instead of us trying to figure it out ourselves?  But He didn’t.

He could have given them a list of rules, something like the Torah.  If you’ve ever picked up Leviticus, you know that there’s a whole set of rules of how you’re supposed to do things.  On His last night He could have said, “These are the things that I really care about, so make sure that you do this, this way and that that way”, but He didn’t. 

He didn’t choose to do it that way.  Instead He had dinner with then.  He ate with them.  They tasted.  They smelled.  They touched.  Some of us had dinner before this service where we had some of the parts of what a Passover meal might have been like, and it would have had bitter herbs.  Horseradish is what we usually have.  And then a sweet thing made with honey and apples and raisins, bitter and sweet.  There was bread and lamb, unique textures with different flavors. And, of course, the flavors of the wine.  And the smells would have been rich, sensual, material, incarnate.  A very human experience.

Then He took this dinner, and He used it to teach.  Not by giving a grand explanation, not by talking theology, not by setting up rules, but by taking the bread and adding to the blessing when He broke it, saying, “This is broken for you.  This is my body, broken for you.”  And He gave it to them to all eat.  And as they ate it, they tasted, they savored, they consumed it, they chewed it in their mouths and swallowed it.  And that bread that Jesus had blessed became a part of them and fed them.

And then after dinner He picked up the cup of wine.  The smell of wine.  One of my memories of church as a child was that on those days when there was communion I could smell the wine.  It’s a unique smell.  And, of course, there was the taste.  Wine is such a wonderful image.  Back then wine was what you drank all the time.  You didn’t drink water without putting some wine in it because you had to have something to kill all the bugs that were in the water. 

Bread and wine was what you subsisted on.  It’s what you survived on.  That was the main part of every meal.  And here He took the wine and He blessed it.  And He said, “This is my blood, which is shed for you.” 

Now, that is a very powerful statement for us, but for a Jew at that time, that is an extraordinary statement because, you see, the blood of animals was considered to contain the life force, the spirit of that animal. So when a Jew had meat, the animal was sacrificed to God, and the blood was poured out on the altar because they felt that they had no right to consume the blood.  When an animal is killed according to kosher rules, it is hung upside down and its throat is slit so all of the blood can be drained out of it. Jewish people don’t consume blood.  Blood is offered to God.  It is the spirit.  So for Jesus to say that this wine is my blood and that you should drink it must have been an odd experience for his disciples. 

But wine also has another thing about it; it’s an intoxicant.  It’s called a spirit because, you know, when you drink a little bit of wine, you feel different.  You drink a lot of wine, you feel a lot different [Laughter].  You drink too much wine and it’s not good.  But it changes your consciousness. 

He didn’t give them grape juice.  He gave them wine.  And He said that that’s how we should remember Him, by breaking bread and sharing it among us, and by blessing wine and sharing it among us.  He didn’t give the disciples a lot of rules.  He told them to do something - to break bread and bless wine.  Then He did the most remarkable thing of all.

Now this dinner, this Passover dinner, was a really great meal.  At that time they ate in the style of the Greeks, so people are not sitting in chairs.  They were lying on their sides on their left elbow and eating with their right hand.  In John’s Gospel it says that the head of the disciple that Jesus loved was on Jesus’ breast.  This just meant that He was to the right of Jesus, and his head would have rested right there. 

So they were lounging, eating, enjoying the Passover together.  And then Jesus just got up for no particular reason; he got up and took off in his outer garment. It would be sort of like Mr. Rogers taking off his jacket when he gets home.  He took off His jacket, and He just had on His simple garment.  Then He took a towel and a basin of water, and He began to wash the disciples' feet.

Now, washing feet was something that only servants did.  And, according to the law, according to Torah law, you couldn’t force a servant to wash peoples’ feet.  It was against the law to tell them they had to do it because it was considered that demeaning.  And He washed their feet.  What a sensual thing to do.

A friend, for my birthday, took me to go get a pedicure.  You sit in a chair, and someone comes and soaks your feet and then massages them and washes them.  And it is extraordinary to have someone fuss over you like that. 

Now, imagine that it is the teacher that you have been following for months, who you have seen walk on water and bring people to life and preaching with strength, the person you think is the Messiah. This is the person that you walked down the hill from Bethany with. You heard them cheering for the king of kings, yet here he is kneeling there washing your feet.  No wonder Peter said, “No.  Don’t do that.”  Hard to let that kind of love in. 

Jesus did give one command that last night.  He didn’t write it down, but it was simple enough that it could be remembered.  He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  “Love one another as I have loved you.”  He said that after He had washed their feet.  Love one another in humility.  Love one another with compassion.  Love one another in service and in action. 

Jesus didn’t talk about what the disciples should think about.  He wasn’t concerned about what they believed.  He was concerned about what they would do.  And He was very visceral and material and incarnate.  This was not an abstract teacher of ethereal knowledge.  This was about bread and wine and dirty feet.  This was here in the body, and it was about action. 

So what Jesus left His disciples with as the last thing was to do.  Do.  Act.  Act in the material world.  Be with one another.  Love one another not in some abstract sense of oh, yeah, I feel a warm fuzzy feeling about everybody in the world.  “Love one another as I have loved you”, on my knees washing your feet.  Love with your actions, as well as your heart. 

That’s what He taught the last day of His life.  That’s what we’re to remember.  And that’s how He wants us to remember Him.  And so we gather on this Thursday night as we remember each year the last week of Jesus’ life.  As we get prepared for tomorrow, for Good Friday, when we’ll remember His crucifixion, so that we can be ready on Easter to receive the great grace and gift of His resurrection. 

Tonight we do.  We do in a very material incarnational way.  We will wash feet, we will break bread, we will share wine, and we will remember the one who told us that we are to love one another as Christ loved us.

Amen.

Palm Sunday

Next Sunday we begin Holy Week with the remembrance of Christ's entrance into Jerusalem and read of his passion. It is an emotional Sunday. Here is a sermon I wrote in 1999 that looks at this emotional roller coaster and connects it with the times in our lives that we have felt lost and forsaken.

Passion/Palm Sunday

March 28, 1999

Passion According to St. Matthew

St. Alban’s, Brentwood, CA

The Rev. Valerie A. Valle

         What an emotional roller coaster this Sunday is. We move from the emotional high and joy of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem to his death on the cross in less than an hour. What an emotional roller coaster it was for Jesus’ followers during that week of the Passover so many years ago. The service this morning is designed to encourage us to feel these emotions, to get a taste of the experience of that fateful week. We are asked to speak the words that represent so much of the story.

We cheer, “Hosanna in the highest”

And quickly, before we know it, we shout “Let him be crucified!”

We mock “He saved others; he cannot save himself”

and we speak those words from the psalm “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”

         Let us think about this incredible week from the perspective of Jesus’ followers. What a high, what a rush it must have been for them when Jesus was welcomed to Jerusalem. All Jesus’ talk of death must have been easily forgotten in all the excitement. Finally he was being acknowledged. Finally all the wandering and sacrificing was coming to fruition. Finally he was being hailed as the savior, as the new king, everything was going to be wonderful from now on. Such joy they must have felt. Such confidence in God. Such a sense that everything was fine now and would always be fine. A joy that they were sure would last forever. A total faith in this man who was being celebrated. There were no doubts then, no questions, no fear, just unbridled joy.

         Most of us have felt like that at some point in our spiritual lives. Perhaps after we first were introduced to Christ, or came back to the church. Perhaps during or after a spiritual retreat, where we felt Christ’s presence so clearly, so totally, that all the questions were gone. Perhaps after having a particularly profound personal experience where we knew, we knew deep in our hearts, that Christ was there with us. At such times there is a deep joy. Not the sort of superficial joy that we might get when things go right in our lives, but a deep joyousness that wells up from the depths of our beings. A joyousness that fills our lives. A joy that makes us want to shout “Thank You.” A joy that burst from us in songs of praise. When we feel this, when we experience this, we feel that it will never end. We feel a sureness in our faith, and unquestioning confidence in the truth of our Lord. And we really feel that this will never end, that finally we have found the answer, that all our questions all our doubts have been swept away. We sing Hosanna, Hosanna in our hearts and feel that if we did not sing it, the very rocks would shout out.

         But that high, that spiritual high, does not last forever. The spiritual journey is not that simple, that straight forward. We discover that we must come down from the mountain top. And sometimes the climb down is steep, as it was for Jesus’ disciples. In less than a week, everything had changed. What should have been a triumphant conclusion to the story, quickly turned to tragedy. The hopes and dreams that had been put on the carpenter from Nazareth were being shattered at an alarming rate. And the followers self concepts were also being shattered. All that is the worst in human beings was coming up.

         Betrayal. With the news about Judas, the others must have though, “How could one of us betray him? Could I have betrayed him?” 

         Cowardice. All the disciples fled and hid. No one stayed and stood beside him. What had happened to the fearlessness they had felt just a few days before when the crowds were on their side?

         Denial. Peter, his closest disciple, denies he even knew him. “Would I have denied him if I were in Peter’s position?”

         Hatred. “How could the same crowd that had cheered him as messiah now be calling for his death?” “Do I have inside me the hidden hatred that could want to see someone dead?”

         Arrogance. Did Pilate really think he could wash his hands of this choice? Jesus’ followers must have wondered whether they too might have had some responsibility that they wanted to deny.

         Cruelty. Mocking a dying man. Mocking a gentle man dying in great agony. The worst of human cruelty emerged that day, that horrible and dark day.

         And hopelessness. That stark cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The anguish of feeling forsaken by God. Jesus spoke not just for himself, but undoubtedly echoed the feelings of his followers. They had lost their leader, they had lost their dreams, they had lost their hope, they too felt forsaken by God.

         And what of us? What of our spiritual journeys? Most of us, I believe, have known all of those emotions. What happens when we no longer feel the presence of God? What happens inside us when we are no longer on the mountain top, praising God, but find ourselves suddenly in the valley?

         We have known betrayal. Most of us have felt betrayed at some point in our lives, sometimes by a close friend or relative. And, when we look at ourselves honestly, we have betrayed others, or certainly betrayed God when we have not acted as we know we could have.

         Cowardice. We all know cowardice. We all have experienced the horrible feeling of knowing that we have not stood with a friend in need. We all have wondered inside if we would have the courage that we read about in the saints who were willing to die for their beliefs, and, if you are like me, you suspect that you would have run away when the soldiers came.

         We have known denial. Who among us has not at some point chosen not to acknowledge their Christian beliefs because it would be too uncomfortable? The story of Peter’s denial lives on so clearly because we can all identify with it. We all know what it is like to take the easy way out.

         Hatred. We all like to believe that we are beyond hatred. That we would not be among the crowd yelling crucify him. But are we? I’m not sure about myself. If someone hurt or killed one of my children, would my broken heart cry out to have him killed? Is it that hard for us to assent to capital punishment when the crime is particularly ghastly? Who among us could be sure that with the right provocation we would not know hatred?

         Arrogance. If we can deny that we would know hatred, we certainly have to accept that we have all felt arrogant. In fact we even use our religiosity to feel better than others. I’m not like them, I’m purer, holier, more in tune with God. Arrogance, that we can wash our hands of what is happening around us, that we can deny responsibility for the acts of the crowd, as if we were not part of the crowd. As if we had done all in our power to stop it. We indeed can easily fall into arrogance, washing our hands of all the pain and suffering around us. Oh, yes, we do know arrogance.

         Cruelty. We hope and pray that we are not cruel, but sometimes our cruelty comes out. Every now and then we find ourselves saying or doing something that we know to be cruel. We find ourselves caught up in the crowd, in the teasing, in the mocking. We have all known cruelty.

         And finally hopelessness. We can easily identify with the ring of those words, those powerfully mournful words “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” We sometimes find ourselves unable to experience the presence of God. We discover that somehow we are no longer on the mountain top with God, but deep in a crevasse where we are unable to find God. Perhaps we find ourselves there because of grief, the loss of a loved one, of a job, of a position. Perhaps we find ourselves there because of illness. Perhaps there is nothing different in the outside world, but something has happened inside us, and we cannot find God. That joy, that love, that peace that we felt not so long ago is but a memory and we begin to wonder if it had been real at all. We all go through on our spiritual journeys times of hopelessness, times when we feel forsaken by God. The writer of the psalm, felt it, felt it so strongly that he was able to express it eloquently. Even Jesus felt it, Jesus who had lived his life fully in the presence of God, felt it gone, felt forsaken, felt that anguish.

         When we are deep in the experience of God’s presence it is hard to imagine or remember when we didn’t feel that wonderful love surrounding us. And when we feel forsaken, when it has gone away, it is hard to imagine or remember what it felt like to know God’s presence. We have all felt at times forsaken, hopeless. We have all had times when our hearts have cried out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

         We have all known times when even that is too much for our hearts to say, and all we can express is a deep and painful question “Why?”

         And sometimes we are left in the dark stillness of that question - waiting.

         Waiting for the first sliver of sunrise. Waiting for the dawn.  Waiting for the resurrection that transforms the darkness into light and our sorrow into joy. Waiting to know, to really know that even in the darkest tomb, in the most forsaken moment, God is still present and working.