Proper 9 C, July 4, 2010

The Fourth of July fell on Sunday in 2010. In this sermon I explore what brings someone to, like the seventy Jesus sent out, go out and tell others, or like the founders of our country put their lives on the line for something they believe in.

Proper 9 C

Transcribed from a sermon given on

July 4, 2010

By the Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Galatians 6:1-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

I’d like you to imagine in your mind that you live in village in Africa, a village that is way off the beaten path. To get to your village here are some ruts that a car could go on, but vehicles can only go on it at certain times of the year, and it is not easy. This is a village where there is no health care, where there is no nurse and no doctor. Imagine that you see the people around you suffering. You see people who get fevers and burn with a fever and often die from it. You have an uncle who is gradually losing his vision, and you yourself have a wound that isn’t healing. Then one day, when it is in the dry season and they actually can drive into your village, up comes a red cross van, and in it are doctors and nurses and medicine. There is a doctor that removes the cataracts from your uncle’s eyes, and he can see again. There are antibiotics that are given to the people with fevers, and they become well again. And there is ointment for your arm, and it is healing. Not only have these people come into your village and healed your physical illnesses, but they have given new hope to the people who live there. They have provided a sense of a future for the people of the village. Farmers who couldn’t work before are able to farm again. Life has changed, and it is good. You are excited. Your whole life has changed, and you feel that sense of hope, and you feel a sense of purpose, and you feel meaning back in your life. You are so excited by what has happened in your village that you can’t hold it in. You can’t keep it to yourself, so you have to go out to the other villages around and say, “The doctors and nurses are here. Come to our village and get better. Change your life. Come! We’ve received something wonderful and I have to share it with others. I have to tell others.”

That is what happened for these seventy in the Gospel. They have been touched by Christ. There lives have been changed, and they had to go out and tell other people. It wasn’t easy. Jesus told them that they would be like sheep among wolves, not to take anything with them, that sometimes they would be rejected. But in their hearts they knew what they had received, the healing of not just body but of spirit and mind. They new of a new life, a new creation as Paul calls it. And they risked everything and tell others about it.

Two hundred and forty-three years ago today a group of men gathered in Philadelphia. They were doing well. They were all wealthy. Most owned land. Many had families. They were respected in their communities. They had it all. And yet they had a vision for something more. They had a hope that their country, that where they lived could be more, that people could know freedom and hope. They got together and we are all very familiar with the words the wrote. “We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal and they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.” These are our founding words. They actually aren’t the beginning to the Declaration of Independence, there is another paragraph before that, but these are the words that we all remember because they sum it up. This is what those people cared about, and they cared about it so passionately that they got together to do something. They didn’t just write about it. What you may not remember is that the last sentence in the declaration of independence says, “and for the support of this declaration, with the firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” The ones who signed the Declaration of Independence were ready to put their lives on the line, their fortunes on the line, their honor on the line because they cared so deeply and passionately about what they believed in. They had such a great hope for the future.

Fifty years ago, at his inaugural, John F. Kennedy had an interesting and memorable line that we all will probably remember, “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” It was a call for people to not put themselves first, but to put something else first. It was a call that in many ways our culture has lost. We tend to live in a culture that is consumer oriented, where people look for what is good for me and what will satisfy my needs. But we all know, we all know that real peace, and real happiness, comes not when we are putting ourselves first, but when there is something else that is more important. When we put ourselves in service of something greater.

Those who have ever helped at People’s Kitchen know how rewarding it is to feed someone. Those who work at the Thrift shop know how good it feels when you have been able to help somebody. Those who have led Sunday School know what it is like to see a little mind opening to the idea of God. Those who have helped at Habitat for Humanity or done any of the many things that people in this congregation do, know that it is when we give of ourselves that we really feel hope and joy.

The church is really made up of two different groups of people, although we go through times when we are either one. There are those who are here, who come to a church, because they need healing, because they are hurting. They may not need physical healing, but they need healing for their minds and for their souls. They need to know that they are loved. They need to be in relationship with God. They need to find hope in their lives. They need to discover the new creation, and they are seeking it. They need a community of faith to tell them that they are loved and that there is hope.

Then there are the Christians who have experienced that. Who have experienced that new life, who have felt forgiven, who have known that they are loved, who have felt their lives turned around. People who know the feeling of the presence of God and how God works in their lives, who know what it is like to be healed, wo know what it is like to be free from addiction, who know what it is like to be freed from guilt. They understand what it means to have new life and to feel that joy and that new creation inside, and who because of that can’t stay still. They have to share that with others. They know that they have received so much from God that they have to tell other people. They have to share it with others. They have to go out into the world. They have to go among their friends and proclaim the wonderful news of God’s love. Because when you have experienced it, when you’ve known it, it is hard to stay still. It is hard to be quiet. When we have received such a precious gift how how can we not want to share that gift with others? How can we not want others to know the love and the peace and the new life that we have found in Christ?

Proper 8 C

What does it mean to follow Jesus? What does it mean to say yes to God?

Proper 8 C

Transcribed from a sermon given

On June 27, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande, CA

Luke 9:51-62

(The following is spoken while walking around the sanctuary.)

Chris, follow me. 

Ted, follow me. 

Maryanne, follow me. 

Nate, follow me. 

You can sit there. 

Fred, follow me. 

All right, all you brave souls, thank you for following.  You can go back and sit down again. What I want you all to think about is what was going through your mind as I was doing that?  Was it, “What am I supposed to do?”  “Am I supposed to follow her?” “Are we both supposed to follow her, or is just she supposed to follow her?” or “What’s going on?” 

Did you think, “Gee, I hope she asks me.” Or were you thinking, “Oh my gosh, I hope she doesn’t ask me because I don’t want to get up.” Or were you thinking, “What are we going to have to do after we follow her because I know she’s got something planned that’s going to be really difficult and humiliating, and I don’t want to have to do that,” or were you thinking, “Ah, gee, I didn’t get a chance to do anything great”?  All those thoughts in your mind as I walked around, maybe other ones, I don’t know.

Jesus was a rabbi, walking down a Roman road, telling people, “Follow me.”  I wonder how they felt?  I wonder what went through their minds?  We have the story in the gospel today of three of them.  We have one who approaches Jesus and says, “I’ll follow you anywhere.”  Now, you have to realize that Jesus is on his way to the cross at this point. So what Jesus is telling him when he says, “Foxes have holes, birds have nests,” is basically, “You don’t know what you’re asking.  Do your really want to follow me?  There’s nothing in it for you to follow me.”  Sometimes it seems that people might say, “I want to follow Christ because it will satisfy them in some way, that they’ll get something out of it. Maybe that person thought he would get publicity, or maybe he thought, “Here is the new messiah, and he’s gonna become king, and I want to be on the ins with this one.”  Maybe he wanted to have some authority.  We don’t know, but we do know that Jesus warned him, “If you follow me, it’s not about you.  It’s not about what you want to do.”

Then he says to another one, “Follow me.” And he says, “Well, let me bury my father first.”  Now, in a Jewish tradition, for a son to bury his father was probably the most important responsibility a man could have, and this sounds incredibly cruel when Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead.”  But Jesus is making the point that if you’re going to follow him, everything else is less important, including the traditions of the culture.  He was also saying to them, “If you follow me, if you follow me today, right now at this moment you will be fully alive.  You will have life that you have never known before.  You won’t be like most people who are walking around half dead.” 

Now, we don’t know what the story was.  We don’t know whether this man’s father had just died and he was getting ready for the burial, or he might have been saying, “You know, my father’s getting up there, and sometime in the next five to ten years he is going to die, and I need to be here to bury him.”  We don’t know, but we do know that Jesus was offering this man life, and suggesting that following all the old rules of the culture was part of being half dead. 

Then the next one said something simple, “Sure, I’ll follow you.  I just want to say goodbye to my family.”  Jesus responds, “Nope, you’ve got to come now.  It’s now or never.”  Then he uses the images of when you’re plowing. If you are plowing and you have an animal in front of you, which is what they would have done, you really have to focus and work very hard to keep the plow going straight ahead because there are rocks and chunks of dirt that it runs into.  If you let go with one hand and look around behind you, it’s just going to go off in who knows what direction. That’s the image he’s using.  You can't say, “I’m going to follow Christ,” and then look back and go, “Well, gee, it was really nice back there.”  It is like the Israelites having left Egypt and saying, “Gee, the leaks were so good when we were in Egypt.  I’m tired of this manna.”  Once you make the choice, you make the choice, and when Jesus calls, Jesus calls.

When I was in the holy land, I was reflecting a lot on what I call the theology of yes. One of the places we went to early on was the Church of the Annunciation, which is built over the place that is supposedly where Mary received the greeting from the angel.  Now, if you ever go to Israel, to the holy land, you will discover that there is a church built over the place where such and such supposedly happened, for everything that ever happened in the bible.  In fact, for some things that happened, there are two or three churches built in different places that are supposedly where this happened. That’s the way they do it because you don’t know for sure whether that was the actual location, but it’s the place where it has been remembered.

When I was there I was thinking about Mary and how she said, “Yes,” to God.  The angel came to her and asked of her something that was not only outrageous but that she knew was not going to be easy. And she said, “I’m the handmade of the Lord.”  She said, “Yes.”  She didn’t say, “Well, sure, I’ll be happy to do that, but can we wait until after the marriage so it doesn’t look so odd.”  She didn’t say, “Well, let me talk to my mother about it first to make sure she’s on board.” And she didn’t say, “Let me talk to Joseph.  I think this is something he should know about. I don’t want to shock him.”  She just said, “Yes.” And the fact that she said yes has made all the difference in the world.  If she had not said yes, all of history would be different, but she said “yes.”

The next place we visited, which is just down the street, was the church where, supposedly, Joseph’s house was. As I was reflecting there, I was thinking about Joseph’s yes.  Joseph didn’t get a direct call from God, but what he said yes to was Mary’s call.  He said yes to supporting the one whom he loved.  He said yes to trusting her in her discernment.  He said yes to being supportive of what she chose. 

Then we went to Jerusalem, and the spot in Jerusalem that is the most powerful place for me is in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the rock where Jesus is supposed to have asked the Father to take this cup from him.  It’s the place where Jesus said “yes,” “not my will but thy will.”  To me, that is the most important spot because that’s where I think I was saved.  Jesus had a choice there.  He could have run away.  He could have left.  He knew that what was ahead was going to be suffering, and pain, and death, and humiliation, and yet, in the midst of knowing that he said yes to God.  And his yes, at that moment, led to our salvation.  From that moment on, it all unfolded the way it unfolded.  The choice point was there, and Jesus said yes, and that’s made all the difference in the world.

We all experience a call from God in some way or another.  You all have been called by God because you would not be sitting here right now if there hadn’t been something in your life that had nudged you to come to church today.  You might think you came for other reasons, but you are here.  God touched you.  God calls to you.  The question is whether you say “yes”. There are lots of ways to say yes. 

Often when we think of people being called by God we assume that it has to do with ordination. I was at an ordination Friday evening, and it was wonderful.  And I saw this person who was on the trip with me, being ordained to the priesthood. This is something that she was called to, and her spouse had supported her, and her community had supported her, and she had worked very hard to get to that moment.  But usually God doesn’t call us to such dramatic commitments.  There are lots of other ways that we can say “yes” to God.

I was talking to another friend this week, and she was telling me the story of something that happened a number of years ago.  She is a tax account.  She prepares people’s taxes and does financial support for businesses so she knows a lot of people in the community.  There was a tragedy a while back where a young man stepped in front of a train and was killed.  She found, in the process of her work, that she was interacting with the engineer of the train, who was devastated. That’s the thing that engineers of trains fear the most – having something like that happen.  Then not too long afterwards she felt she was getting a call from God because she had an appointment with the woman who was the mother of the young man who had died. She finds that her tax work is also a ministry because she does a lot of listening to people.

This woman of course also was very devastated.  She knew that her son had been disturbed and that it was suicide.  Something in my friend put together the idea of the engineer and this woman, and she said to the woman, “Would you like to speak to the engineer of the train?”  And she said, “Oh, yes, that would be very helpful.”  So she called the engineer and said, “Would you like to meet with the mother?”  And he said, “Oh, that would be wonderful.”  And she brought them together. They talked with one another, and they grieved with one another, and it was healing for both of them.  That to my friend was a call from God.  That was as clearly a call from God as anything else in the church because God was nudging her, “Here you are in a unique situation, a unique opportunity to bring healing to several lives.”

I know people in this congregation who have responded to a call.  Not too long ago I had somebody come up to me and say, “I feel called to help with stewardship,” and I went, “Yes!”  And I had somebody else come to me and say, “I want to do something with marketing in the church.” I had someone else come and say, “I want to do something with the kids this summer.”  God nudges us.  Sometimes the calls are big and dramatic, but most of the time it’s that still small voice that we talked about last week, that kind of nudging by God, that thought that won’t go away. And sometimes the call is clearer to other people than it is to ourselves.  Maybe you’ve met someone who’s new to the church, and when you see them, you see them at the thrift shop, so you say, “Hey, I want to show you our thrift shop.  I think you would really enjoy volunteering there.”  It’s about discernment of what God’s calling us to and of saying yes.

So I ask you today, are you ready to say “yes”?  Are you ready to say yes to God, to open your heart and mind to hear His call?  Are you ready to say yes to that?  Are you ready to say yes to discerning where other people might be being called by God?  Are you ready to tell other people what you see and to listen to what other people say to you as a community?  And so today I ask you, are you ready to say yes to God?  Amen.

Proper 7 C 2016

Paul wrote to the Galatians that there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus. This is a message that is as important to hear today as it was almost 2000 years ago.

Proper 7 C

Transcribed from a sermon given at

The Chapel of the Transfiguration

Grand Teton National Park, WY

On June 19, 2016

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 8:26-39

Galatians 3:23-29

We all have voices inside ourselves. If you have ever tried to meditate or do Centering Prayer or even to be quiet for a moment of silence you will notice how busy your mind is. You sit down with the full intention to focus your entire mind on being with God and you start thinking about - “I wondering how long this is going to take.” “Oh, this is an uncomfortable seat.” “My nose itches. Would it be really inappropriate for me to scratch my nose while this is going on?” “How long is this going to continue?” “What am I going to do afterwards?” “Oh, I need to go to the store. What do I need to buy? Well, someone is coming over tomorrow.” Our brains are always talking to us.

There are all kinds of voices. We have voices left over from our childhood. Today is father’s day and some of the messages that we received from our fathers are wonderful, like: “You can do it.” “Good job.” “You are strong.” “Don’t be afraid.” There are any number of wonderful messages we received from our parents. But when we are a child we also get other messages. Like from the bully at school or the cousins or siblings: “You are so stupid.” “You messed up again.” “You can’t do that!” “No one says that!” “You’ll never amount to anything.” So we have all of these voices in our heads. Sometimes it feels like my father is sitting on one shoulder and my mother is on the other and they kind of talk into my ears.

As we grow up we learn to realize that these voices are inside our own minds, and we learn to decide which ones to listen to and what to ignore, which ones are helpful and which ones are not. But some people, for one reason or another, are unable to make this differentiation.  Some people experience these voices in their heads as if there is a person talking to them, inside telling them what to do. And they find these voices irresistible. So when it is a hot day and one of the voices says, “Take off all your clothes.” They take off all their clothes. Or when the voice tells them to hurt themselves or tells them to hurt someone else. They hurt someone.

In our culture someone who hears voices in that way and can’t control themselves we label as schizophrenic. And we treat them by giving them medicine. And sometimes that works really well, and sometime it doesn’t. We don’t fully understand why. This is a disease that has a lot of mystery to. In Jesus’ time they didn’t call it schizophrenia they called it being possessed by demons. They believe that there were demons inside the person that were telling him or her what to do. Because that is how the people experienced it - as if there were voices in their head. And so at that time if someone was diagnosed with being possessed with demons, the treatment option was exorcism, a healer would come and send the demons away.

Jesus had been in Galilee. Galilee was part of the Jewish area. Almost everyone in the area where he has been was Jewish. They identified as being religiously Jewish because they worshiped Yahweh. They also considered themselves ethnically Jewish because they were descendants from Abraham. And they felt that that made them special. They felt they were the ones who worshiped God correctly. They were the ones who followed the law. And they followed all the cleanliness rules. They were clean and pure. Everybody else, everybody who wasn’t Jewish was a Gentile. That meant not Jewish. So there were the Jews and there was everybody else. And there was a clear distinction in that the Jewish people felt that they were cleaner and better and purer.

But Jesus gets on the boat and goes across the lake to a gentile area. It is called the Decapolis. You know it is a gentile area because they have swine, they are herding pigs, and Jewish people do not eat pork. They consider pigs to be unclean animals and a swineherd is the lowest of the low, and they certainly wouldn’t have had any pigs in their towns. So it is clear that Jesus has gone to a gentile area. He is with “them”. But that doesn’t matter. He sees someone who needs his help. He sees this man who is possessed by demons or schizophrenic and doesn’t hesitate to help him. It doesn’t matter whether or not he is Jewish. He is a human being. And when you read the Gospels you see that over and over again Jesus heals and has compassion for everybody. For a Roman centurion, for a woman from Tyre, for people who are outcasts, for people who are sinners, for tax collectors. It didn’t matter. For Jesus every human being was someone that he loved and he did what he could for them. For Jesus it was all “us.” And he loved them.

We get this sense of being rid of the “us” versus “them” in the letter from Paul we read today. Paul is talking to the Christians who were made up of people who were from the Jewish faith and people who were Gentiles. He said: “In Christ there is no Greek or Jew, there is no slave or free, there is no male or female. We are all one in Christ.” Those three differentiations that he made are the basic differentiations in any culture to define who is in your group and who is not in your group. Who is part of the tribe and who is not part of the tribe.

The first one is Greek or Jew. Well a Jew is both a religion and ethnic heritage. Greek is an ethnic heritage. It says it doesn’t matter who your parents were. It doesn’t matter what religion you were raised. It doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t matter whether you have Abraham as your ancestor or have no idea who your ancestors were. It doesn’t make any difference. If Paul was writing today he might say, “It doesn’t matter how you believe in God. It doesn’t matter where you were born. It doesn’t matter where your parents were born. We are all one in Christ.”

The second one he says there is no slave or free. In that society clearly on the socio economic ladder the lowest class were the slaves. They owned nothing. They had no power. They were on the bottom rung. And the free people were on the top rung. He was saying that it doesn’t matter where you are on the economic hierarchy. Today he might say, “It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, we are all one in Christ.”

And then he made the most outrageous statement for his time, there is no male or female. That was a very radical concept in that culture. It is still a radical concept in much of the world even in our country we don’t have full economic equality between males and females. We all know that women get paid less. In Jesus’ time and in Paul’s time males and females were as separate as could be. Jesus went against convention by having women among his followers, and Paul said it doesn’t matter whether you are male or female. It doesn’t make any difference because we are all one in Christ. Our gender doesn’t matter. And today I think Paul would probably say, “It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female or gay or straight. Because we are all one in Christ.”

All these distinctions don’t matter because Christ taught us that we are to love one another as he loved us. And he loved all of us and continues to love all of us. When he was walking around on this earth he made no distinctions. He had compassion and love for every human being, with no distinctions. He even asked forgiveness for the soldiers who put him on the cross. It’s not about “us” and “them”. In Christ it is all “us”.

But we have voices in our heads and there are voices in the culture that tell us that there are distinctions. Depending upon where you are raised which distinctions are most important may differ. We learned while growing up those people that we could trust, those people we shouldn’t. We learned that our people are pure and good, and those people are bad. That our race is better than that other race. There are lots of distinctions in our culture that we were raised with, and we have some of those voices within us. We all have to admit that we do have those voices within us. But we have other voices. We have other voices that call us to love and to care for everyone. And we have a choice. We are not schizophrenic and unable control the voices. We have choice as to which voices we listen to. Do we listen to the voices that make distinctions? The voices that judge other people? Or will we listen to the voices of love, to the voice of Christ and of Paul? Which ones will we use to base our actions? That’s the choice we have today and every day. Do we make distinctions, or is it all “us”? Do we love one another as Christ loved us?