Memorial Day Thoughts - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Memorial Day Thoughts

May 30, 2016

  This year Easter came very early and therefore the season of the Sundays after Pentecost has begun earlier than usual. Since the readings, or propers, for these Sundays are  based on the date I do not have any copies of previous sermons that occurred this early in Year C and cannot share with you a sermon for next Sunday.

  I would, however, like to share with you today some thoughts about Memorial Day and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In preparing for my sermon yesterday, which was based on the healing of the Centurion's slave (Luke 7:1-10), I was exploring material that I could use concerning Memorial Day. I came upon Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which I had not read in quite a long time. I was struck by how incredibly relevant it is to us today, especially with our current political situation. 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

  First of all I am struck by the fact that Lincoln, the first Republican president, begins his most famous speech by stating clearly that our country was not only conceived in Liberty but was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  How far we are from fulfilling that dream, from actually living out the reality of that proposition. With those strong and unequivocal words Lincoln leaves no room for prejudice, no room for denying rights to anyone for any reason. He saw an America that at its founding was dedicated to equality. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

He saw the Civil war as a test to see if a nation based on those ideals could survive. He was fighting to move the country he loved and served toward achieving those ideals.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 

In reading online about the origin of Memorial Day I came upon the report of how after the Civil war ended thousands of newly free ex-slaves went to a horse track in Charleston South Carolina where Union prisoners of war had been held. Many soldiers had died there and were buried in unmarked graves. They went, cleaned up the area, put up a memorial and decorated the graves with flowers as a way of acknowledging those who had sacrificed their lives for other people's freedom.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

He finished his speech with stirring words of encouragement for all of us to be dedicated to the unfinished work which the soldiers buried in Gettysburg had died for. 

It is just as relevant a call to us today on this Memorial Day. There is still so much unfinished work to do to achieve the ideals of this nation and to see that government for the people shall not perish.

Trinity Sunday

Who or what is God? How can we talk about that which is beyond language? Such is the challenge of preaching on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity 2013

Transcribed from a sermon given by

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Today is Trinity Sunday. For those of you who have been Episcopalian for quite some time you are probably used to on Trinity Sunday having a guest preacher, or that your rector is out of town, or that there is a student preaching. That is because there is a certain amount of resistance to having to preach on the Trinity. The problem I have today is that Jeremy, our retired priest, is out of town and I don’t have a student. So I’m here and what I am going to do is ask for your help. And I am going to ask for Jason’s help as well as my assistant up here.

What I want to ask is if you will think of a word or a phrase that describes God to you. How do you know God? Not what you have heard about God. Not what you have been taught about God. But how you experience and know God. So who is going to be brave and go first?

“A shamrock.”

Alright we have a shamrock. What else?

“Love”

She said love. What else? How else would you describe God?

Anybody from the choir?

“A guide.”

We have “a presence.”

And we have “everywhere.”

Anybody here?

“All knowing.”

What else do we have to say about God? Anybody down here?

“God is peace”

We have some enthusiastic people.

“Protection” – I heard.

Any others?

“Love”

Anybody down on this side

“Strength”

And we have somebody way in the back.

“Always there.” That’s a good one.

“Companion.”

“Answers your needs.”

“Everlasting spirit.”

You’ve got to write fast Jason.

Anybody else?

“Peace.”

“Relationship.”

Did you have something you wanted to say Janis

“Majestic”

“Best parent”

We had a lot of different images for God. And I don’t think anybody would disagree with any of those. Now I would like you to imagine that you are now put together in a conference and you have a week where you can’t leave until you’ve come up with a description of God that satisfies all of you. Okay.

Now imagine that it is not just you but there is over a hundred of you and you are all theologians. Church people. Bishops. And you have to sit down together and you have to describe God.

Well that is basically what happened at the early councils, the early gatherings of the church. It had been around 300 years or so since Jesus had died. The church had been going along as an outlawed church, meeting in homes, sometimes being persecuted. Each city had a bishop and each city developed its own sense of how to understand who God was and what Christ was. There were various things being written about him that were being sent around but there wasn’t complete agreement on which ones were authentic and which ones weren’t. Then the emperor became Christian. Now I think in order to be an emperor you’ve got to be a bit of a control freak. Right? I think it goes with the job. The emperor didn’t like being part of a religion that was messy. The Roman empire if anything was not messy. And the Christian church at the time was messy. Different groups believed different things and said different things and had different understandings of just exactly who Jesus was and how to relate to him.

So they had these great councils where they wanted to come together with a description of God that they could all agree to. Now people had different ideas. Some people focused on some of the things that are here – all knowing, everywhere, everlasting. This transcendent aspect of God, this sense of God that is beyond everything, before everything. For others, their primary experience of God was with Christ, Christ in his incarnation as Jesus. They experienced God as friend and companion. Then there were others who experienced God through what we call the Holy Spirit. They felt the love, they felt the protection, they felt the energy, they felt the work of God in the world. And there were probably other things as well.

Now if you have a group of people who have different experiences of God, who have come to know God in different ways, one thing you can do is say, and this would be consistent for the Greeks and Romans of the time, that there are lots of gods. You experience god on the ocean, so we can have an ocean god. You experience god in the love between people, so we can have a goddess of love. You experience god as a companion, well we can have a god who walks with you. You could have a bunch of different gods for each of the different ways we experience the divine.

But of course those who came from a Jewish tradition couldn’t have many gods. They knew there was only one God. That there could be only one God. There had to be something beyond which there was nothing more. Something that was totally transcendent. So how do you put these together these different experiences of God? With a lot of prayer and arguments, and prayer and discussion, and prayer and fighting, they finally came up with, or were inspired with, this concept of the Trinity. The concept of God being both absolutely one, totally one and yet having three, as we translate it, persons. Three personalities or aspects. It was an interesting way to solve that dilemma.

In order to write the Nicene Creed they had to come up with new Greek words to describe it. That which we translate as three persons is a compound Greek word they created to try and get the subtly of the meaning of the relationship, to somehow get this concept that there is only one God, but we know God as three entities. So we have the Trinity. We have what has been called the Father, because that is the word that Jesus used to describe God. When he spoke to God, he prayed to God as Father or Papa. And so we have the Father. The Father is that which is totally absolutely and completely transcendent. The father is before time and after time. It is beyond the extent of the universe and the universe is all contained within it. There is a complete and total transcendence of this aspect of God.

But there also is way to experience God in human form. Someone said that sometimes people need God with flesh on. Sometimes its hard to identify with and be in relationship with something that is so magnificently and totally transcendent. How do we relate to that? And so we have Christ who came in human incarnation as Jesus. That is the one who can be our companion. That is the one that we can help us have a sense that this God that we worship, this transcendent God, also is with us right now and knows what it means to be a human being. That this one cares about each human being. When we focus on that transcendent God it is hard to believe that we individually could matter. Many people had the experience even three hundred years later, even two thousand years later, of Christ’s presence with them in an amazing and personal way.

Finally, we have the Spirit. One of the things that they were trying to grapple with is some of the language that was used, especially in John’s Gospel, of the Father and of the son being one and sharing everything while also pointing to this third thing. Like the Gospel today it is described as the spirit who will guide and teach you everything. Who will have everything that is mine just as I have everything that is the Father’s. That odd language in John’s gospel that talks about the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit being one and yet separate. The kind of language that when you read it gets you a little bit dizzy and you may find it hard to focus because it is so… But it is profound and beautiful and there is clearly a truth in it. So there is this Holy Spirit, this Paraclete, that we talked about last week. This action of God in the world right now. That power and presence of God. That compassion. That love. That all knowing. That wisdom like we heard described in the first reading as Sophia. That wisdom, that Holy Spirit. So we have this sense of God, this description of God, as Trinity. Three person but one being.

In one of my theology classes the professor said, “I want you to understand that everything that is ever said about God is heresy. Because the word heresy means it is not the complete truth. And there is nothing that you can say about God that would be the total and complete truth about God.” We need to remember this as we wrestle with understanding the trinity. We can move toward God. We can move toward understanding God, but we are human beings and our brains and our languages are limited. So anything that we say about that which is beyond and before has to be incomplete. The best we’ve come up with is this idea of the Trinity of these three aspects of God that are in relationship with one another and in relationship with the world.

One of the disadvantages of having the Trinity be the description of God is that it is intellectually uncomfortable in some ways. So when we try to talk to people who are not Christian it is a hard concept to understand. One of the things that missionaries talking to cultures that come from an Islamic tradition struggle with is that Islam is radically monotheistic. There is only one God that is the source of everything, so this idea of a trinity and of the divinity of a human being is incomprehensible and almost insulting to them in their sense of God. So it is a struggle to try and explain that yes we agree there is only one God but there are three persons. It is confusing.

The gift that we have, however, with the trinity, is the very fact that it is hard to comprehend. That we are always in the process of wrestling with it. The wonderful gift that we can relate to God in different ways. That we can see the transcendence of the universe when we are out by the ocean, and we can see the stars and we can think of God as transcendent. Or when we are studying physics and the amazing complexity of the universe we can think of God as transcendent. Yet when we are hurting and lonely and afraid we can think of God as walking with us and being our partner. When we are struggling and need energy and support we can feel the Holy Spirit working through us. That is a gift. It is also a gift that we are always in a process with it. We are always struggling with the Trinity. It is a sense of God where we can’t be complacent, we can’t say “Okay, I know what God is now I can go on and think about something else.” It is always an ongoing process of discovery and challenge to try to understand and relate to this one God known in three persons. That is the gift we have, and the challenge we have, and part of the joy and wonderful mystery of being a Christian.

Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C

John's beautiful, poetic and mystical gospel can be difficult to preach about. In this sermon I use the image of a stew in an attempt to illustrate what those illusive words, "...that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us..."

The Sunday after AscensionThe Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C

Transcribed from a sermon given

On May 16, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

John 17:20-26

I love John's gospel.  There's something about reading John's gospel that I can't just read it straight through.  I'll read it for awhile and then I'll reach something that just moves me and I have to stop and be with it.  It's not like reading a textbook.  It's something else.  It's like poetry.  It's transformative.  I love to read John's gospel. 

Preaching on John's gospel however is a whole other thing because John was a mystic.  In every spiritual tradition there is a mystic tradition.  In the Jewish tradition it's Kabbalah.  In the Islamic tradition it's the Sufis. And there have been Christian mystics since the beginning. Some of them you might know like St. John of the cross or Teresa of Avila.  A mystic is someone who has had an experience of God, a sense of union with God, and then tries to share that experience with others. 

What the mystics always end up doing is writing poetry because you can't describe an experience of God in normal language.  It would be like going to a concert where they perform Beethoven's 9^th Symphony and you are so moved by that final movement that when you come back and you go to tell your neighbor about it.  Now your neighbor has not only never been to a symphony or heard Beethoven's 9^th but they don't even know what classical music is. You are trying to describe to them that experience when the chorus comes in and just blasts everything away. It's just totally transformative. And they are going to go, "Huh?"   

So all you can do is sort of paint pictures, talk in poetic terms. You know what you want to do. You want to go get your stereo or CD player or MP3 player or however it is you listen to music – and give it to them.  Say, "Listen to this.  Experience this."  That's what John is trying to do I believe in his gospel. 

One of the commentators I read talks about John's gospel as not so much attempting to convey information as to elicit an experience.  As poetry elicits an experience from us or a great painting elicits an experience from us.  So you run into things like we have today where it states, "That they may be one as you and I are one, that I may be in them, and you in me and I in you and them in us."  And as you read it, if you try to follow it logically what you end up is one plus one plus one equals one, and then the mind kind of goes, “oh”.  But if you read it as poetry, if you read it as trying to elicit that experience of unity that sense of oneness with God, it can be transformative. 

This particular passage is Jesus praying during the last supper.  It's called the High Priestly Prayer and this is a part of it. He is praying. He is praying for His disciples.  And He is praying for everyone who would believe in Him based on that Word.  That means you and you and you and me.  Here He is, the last night, getting ready to go to His death and He is praying.  Now that last prayer, the last words, the last things we say are sometimes the most important. 

And what does He pray for?  What is it that Jesus wants from God more than anything else?  He wants for His followers to be one.  He wants them to be one as He and the Father are one.  That's what He wants for us. It's like a father about to die. He's in the hospital and his children are all gathered around him and his last request is that they get along with each other.  Treat each other well.  Don't fight.  That's what the heart of a father, or a mother, wants for their children and that was Jesus' final prayer. 

This piece of poetry about union reflects back, reminds us of, the prolog of John's gospel.  Remember John's gospel begins with that enigmatic, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God?”  How can something be with something and also be it?  That what is written at the beginning of John's gospel.  It's a little like a Zen koan.  It's poetry; it’s mystery - that relationship between Christ and the Father where there is oneness and yet separateness.  John is trying to elicit in us as we read this that sense, that intimacy with God. 

So, I'm trying to think about how do I preach on that?  How do I put that into some other words?  Something that might be a little more concrete, a little more grounded, and so I came up with the image of a stew.  Now, if you take vegetables, you have a carrot and you have onions and you have potatoes and you have broccoli and you have whatever else happens to be in your refrigerator or out in the garden at that time. If you put them all in a pot and they sit in the pot not much happens.  They are just being stored in a pot because when a carrot stored next to a broccoli, they don't really interact with each other.  They don't change each other.  They don't learn from each other.  They're just there together. In order for them to come into relationship with each other you have to add the water.  You might think of the water as Christ, and each one of those pieces of vegetable has a relationship with the water.  But of course not a whole lot happens until you turn on the heat and that's the Holy Spirit, right?  And the water starts to heat up and as the water starts to heat up that carrot begins to soften a little bit and some of the flavor of the carrot gets out into the water and spreads and starts to be picked up by the other vegetables.  The onion is also softening up and some of its flavor gets out into the water and gets absorbed by the carrot. Gradually with the water and that heat over time all of the vegetables change and change each other.  If you cook a bunch of carrots together they taste one way, but if you have carrots in with a lot of other vegetables, they pick up the flavor of each other.  And in a good stew that has taken its time, when you have a bite of that carrot you know it's a carrot but it has the flavor of everything else that's in the stew because they've come together.  And so there's a way in which they're all one.  They all form one stew but they each have their own identity, their own essence.  And each one tastes better because of their interaction, because of that chemistry that happens together. 

It's like that for us, for a community. Jesus never talks about Christians as being individuals.  It has been said that you cannot be a Christian in isolation.  The relationship between the individual and Christ is important, but you can't really be a Christian without being in community because you need that stew around you.  A carrot in the water by itself is okay, but it's so much better when it's in the stew. 

So when we come together, as we sit in Christ together, we are enriched by one another.  And you know sometimes hot water feels really good when it's been a long day and you're a little achy and you've got a hot tub and you sit in it and oh, the hot water just feels wonderful.  Other times we can say, "Oh, my gosh – hot water.  I don't want to have anything to do with it."  It's a little uncomfortable because the hot water kind of softens the things, and it can be uncomfortable, and we change.  When we come together as community we are changed individually.  When we really become a community we open ourselves to be changed by the people around us.  And the people around us are changed by the gifts we bring.  And each one of us brings unique gifts. 

One of the great joys that I have is getting to know people.  When new people come to the church and are becoming involved in the church I try to go and visit them.  It is such a delight to discover the backgrounds of people, what their passions are and the work they've done and the unique things that they bring to this community.  Each one has a different flavor, a different taste, different experiences, and each person enriches the whole.  That's how we become one by sitting in the hot water together, by being together, by being there for each other, by showing up and getting to know each other better. 

And this was Jesus' prayer.  Notice His last prayer, His prayer to God when His death was about to arrive was that you and I and each one of us and all Christians everywhere in the world would be one.  He didn't pray that we'd get the theology right.  He didn't pray that we would figure out how we were supposed to live and what the rules are.  He didn't pray for that.  He could have.  He didn't.  He didn't pray that we'd all be nice or we'd all be good.  He didn't pray that the world would all become a Christian nation. 

His prayer was that we would be one as He and the Father are one.  That would be His glory.  His glory is the oneness of His community and his followers.  And that's what we're called to focus on. 

How do we build up the relationship?  How do we enrich ourselves by the people who are here?  We do it by showing up.  We do it by coming to activities.  We do it by picking up the phone and calling somebody you haven't seen for awhile and say, "Hey, I haven't seen you for awhile.  How are you?"  Or going up to a new person or somebody who may not be new but you just don't know very well and saying, "Hey, let's have coffee together.  I want to get to know you better."  Or finding out that someone is hurting and reaching out to help them.  Or celebrating something and sharing that celebration with others. 

It's about relationship.  It's all about relationship, the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  The essence of the universe is relationship and Christ wants for us to be in relationship with one another.  He wants for us to love one another as He has loved us.  Amen.