Welcome Home - The dinner party

I don't have any sermons for Proper 27A, so I am posting some of my thoughts about making churches welcoming places for new people. Here I look at how one might treat a new friend at a dinner party as an example of how we might want to treat a visitor to church.

Welcome Home

The Party

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

November 5, 2014

Imagine that you are hosting a dinner at your home. You have invited a number of friends who have attended your dinner parties in the past and you have also invited a new neighbor who just moved in down the street. Think about how you would treat that new person that you don’t know very well and you are hoping will become a friend. What would want that person experience at your home?

When they get to your house they would see the light on and, weather permitting, the door open or at least ajar. Perhaps they would even find you waiting near the door looking for them.

They would be graciously invited inside. If they had a coat you or one of your friends would take it from them and put it in a safe place. They would be offered a comfortable chair where they could feel part of the gathering, even if one or more of your friends needed to rearrange their seating to provide space. They would be offered something to drink, usually an option such as “Would you like a glass of wine? We also have fruit juice and coffee.” The conversation in the living room would immediately change to include the new member of the party. There would be introductions all around and someone would ask them about themselves, like “Where did you move from?” or “How long have you lived here?” If there was an ongoing conversation the new person might be invited to join by someone saying, “We’ve just been talking about what we are planning to plant in our gardens this spring. Are you planning a garden? We could help you learn what grows best around here.”

When it came time for the meal you would explain any expectations and be sure that the new person was comfortable, even if everyone else knew exactly how things were to be done. For example one might say, “We are having a buffet. You can take one of the plates here and choose what you would like to eat. Don’t forget to pick up the rolled napkin with utensils. There are some little tables over on the other side that you can put in front of your chair.” Or “Please join us at the table. We have a seat saved just for you. Most of us use chop sticks, but I always set out forks as well so that everyone can be comfortable.” Or “Please take this seat next to mine so I can tell you about each dish and what is in it.” Or “We like to pass the food around. First we will pass the tortillas, you can take either the corn or the wheat. Most of us take one of each. Then you put the beans, cheese and whatever else you want in the middle of the tortilla and roll it up. Some like to have the beans and rice on the side. We eat the rolled up tortilla with our hands and use the fork for the rice and beans.” Or “You’ll notice at the place setting that there are a number of utensils. There are two forks because we like to use the small fork for the salad which will be served first and the larger fork for the main dish.”

After dinner all the guests would be invited to stick around for dessert and conversation. Your new neighbor will probably have met several people by this time and your friends should specifically encourage the neighbor to stay. You would keep an eye out to see that your new guest was never left sitting alone. You would bring coffee and dessert to your new friend and be sure that the conversation always included him or her.

When the party was over and your neighbor left you would not be the only one expressing hope that they will come to the next gathering. And they would probably be putting the date on the calendar and looking forward to it.

Let’s contrast this experience with a less hospitable host.

The new neighbor has trouble finding the house. It is dark out and the porch light is not on so they are not sure they are at the right home. They go up to a large heavy, closed door. They are about to ring the doorbell and see a small sign that says “Do not ring bell, just come in.” Hesitantly they open the door. Inside they see a number of people sitting in the living room talking with one another. No one notices the new comers. By the door there is a table with a pile of papers that say welcome and have the menu and schedule for the evening. The chairs are in a circle and all the comfortable ones have been taken. There are a few straight back kitchen chairs behind the others that are empty. In order to get to those chairs the visitor has to push by some of the people who are deep in conversation. The visitor sits quietly in their chair and tries to follow a conversation that has already begun about people they have never met.

When it is time for dinner everyone gets up and goes to the table. They all seem to know exactly what to do, but the new neighbor has no idea what the food is or how to eat it. They look around and try to follow what others are doing, but it is strange food they have never eaten before. Feeling awkward, they eat very little. When dinner is over someone announces time for dessert and all stand up and begin moving toward the basement. The new neighbor takes this as an opportunity to get away from an uncomfortable situation. The host is standing at the door, shakes their hand and says “Thank you for coming I hope you will come again.”

How likely do you think it is that this new neighbor will return?

Have you ever gone to church and had that type of experience?

Every church has people who have the gift of hospitality. They just seem to naturally know how to make someone comfortable in their homes. And all of us know basic manners and how to treat someone we invite to our house. Yet too often those basics are completely forgotten when it comes to Sunday morning. We are so busy greeting our friends, finding our own spiritual nurturance or putting on the liturgy that we forget about the basics of hospitality.

It is not that people don’t know what to do or that the clergy are not trying to get people to respond. I remember attending a fairly large church that was at least three quarters full where the preacher focused that morning on welcoming visitors. He included in his sermon that a friend of his from seminary had come to town to visit and attended church the previous Sunday. He had gone to the coffee hour and no one had spoken to him. The preacher did a good job of explaining why this was a problem so I thought that coffee hour should be pretty welcoming this week.

After the service was over there was an individual who spoke to me and said she hoped I would go to coffee hour and pointed the way. She evidently had something important to do and couldn’t walk me over there. I found my way to the correct hall. There were a fair number of people there, but not as many as I would have expected given the size of the congregation. There was a beautiful spread, with strawberries, crackers and cheese in addition to the usual cookies. I filled up my plate and stood near the food and away from the wall, close to the center of the room. I wondered what would happen. It turns out that after a rather long feeling five minutes no one had spoken to me. Not one! After that sermon, a mature woman could stand for five minutes without a single acknowledgement from anyone. I was amazed.

Of course I have been to other churches where people were extremely welcoming. One community even encouraged me to bring my dog into the coffee hour so she was not left in the car. They even brought her water and dog biscuits.

Take a minute to think about some times when you have attended a church where no one knew you. What was it like? Did it feel good? Perhaps you wanted to be left alone and were glad that no one spoke to you. Perhaps you were on vacation and wanted something short and sweet and out the door. Perhaps you were looking for a church home and found one that first day - or left disappointed

If you are interested in making your church more welcoming I encourage you to go by yourself to a church where you know no one else. If you go with another person, you have each other to talk to and cling to, when you go alone you get to really experience what it is like, for good and/or bad.

All Saints Day Sermon

Sunday after All Saints Day

Transcribed from a sermon given

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

November 6, 2011

Matthew 5:1-12

I was exploring the Internet on my IPad this week and came across an interesting advertisement. I wasn’t sure whether it was on Craig’s list or somewhere else, and it wasn’t clear whether it was a help wanted ad or personal ad, but it read something like this:

Wanted - merciful, meek, naïve person, preferably slightly depressed, who wants to change the world. Must be comfortable living in poverty. Persecution to be expected. Rewards heavenly.

Anybody want the job? Or whatever it is? Can you imagine going in for a job interview and saying, “I think that one of my greatest strengths is that I am very meek.” In the world of assertiveness training?  Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth. Or would you say, “Well, yes, I am in deep grief right now and tend to sort of cry at random times, but I am just the person you want to hire.”

What Jesus says is very countercultural. It is countercultural today, and it was countercultural when he said the beatitudes 2000 years ago.

But wait, there was more in this advertisement. It did have the duties if you chose to accept the position.  The duties include trusting and praising God, going to church, proclaiming the good news, serving everyone, loving everyone, and working for justice - and when you fail at any, or all of these, asking to be forgiven. Those are our baptismal covenant - it is what we agree to do when we are baptized.

For me the beatitudes and baptismal covenant are a job description for a Christian, or as Paul put it in the reading today, a child of God, for once we make the commitment to be Christians, we become children of God.

Now I wonder who would possibly accept such a position. Well today we’ve got three people who said yes to that. We have Ethan, and Audrey and Dylan. They have all decided that they want to be baptized. They want to make that commitment. They find themselves at a place where they want to know Christ better. They want to walk with Christ.

We always read the beatitudes when we celebrate All Saints Day. All Saints, to remind you who don’t know, All Saints Day is celebrating everyone who has died. All the saints who have died. Not just people who lived what we might call saintly lives. In scripture, the Greek word that is translated as saints comes from the root word for holy. So a saint is a holy person and a holy person is one that is close to God, or like God. It is not a group of people who had miracles. There was no special kind of decision that they were a saint. It is rather everyone who said yes to God. Everyone who did their best to try and serve God. Or even did a mediocre job to try and serve God, but who wanted to. The saints are all of us, and the saints that we remember on All Saints Day are the ones, the faithful in Christ, who have died and are part of what is called the fellowship of saints, or the communion of saints.  All the people being baptized are joining this great communion of saints. All the Christians alive today, all the Christians who ever lived, and all the Christians who ever will live. When we are baptized we become part of a huge community, and they are here with us today - that fellowship which we celebrate. 

Now the beatitudes are kind of interesting. They say blessed are…. And we can sort of get around blessed are ones who morn or blessed are whatever, because blessed means to us that they are saintly. But there are other translations, English translations like the Jerusalem Bible, that instead of using blessed they use the world “happy”. And they say happy are those who mourn. Happy are those who are meek. Happy are those who are persecuted. Happy are those who are poor. Well that’s really countercultural. Because in our culture we think that you are going to be happy because you’ve got money, and you don’t have any problems, and all that. But happy to me is not quite the right word to translate it, because I usually think of happy as something I feel from something outside. Like happy is how I felt when my daughter called me up and said that her work gave her a new IPad, do you want my old one? I was happy then. Happy is when everything is going great in the external world.

So I think a better word, instead of blessed or happy is the word “joyous” because when we are joyous it is not dependent on the outside world. Joyousness is something that comes up from inside of us. Something that over takes us and wells up from within. And we can be in grief and yet also know that there is that inner joy, in the grief and beyond the grief. That is a joyousness that can’t be taken away and isn’t affected by getting good things or bad things. It is a state of being.

The beatitudes - if Jesus lived today I am sure he would have used Twitter because the beatitudes are just the right length to tweet. You can imagine that, right? If you got a tweet that said, “blessed are the poor.” And you go “Hmmm, I could think about that for a couple of days.” They are easy short summaries.

I encourage you to pick one to spend a year with because the beatitudes are something that you can meditate on for a long time. Each one of them takes you to different places. For example, the one “Blessed are those who mourn.” Joyous are those who mourn. Happy are those who mourn. What in the world could that mean? Because to mourn, doesn’t that mean sadness. That’s just the opposite of being happy. And yet it is honoring that grief is real. And there is a blessing in those who are able to feel their grief, to know their sorrow, because it is only by knowing our sorrow that we can go through it and find the joyousness that lies beyond it. And those who mourn are not just those who grieve for someone they know who has died. There are those who mourn form the world, those who mourn for the people one the other side of the earth who have died in an earthquake, those who mourn for the poor and the children who don’t have a home, those who grieve for the imperfections of the world. Blessed are those who can really feel and acknowledge their grief, and know their grief.

It is interesting that the first reading that we read today is one that is often used at funerals. And it ends with “He will dry all their tears, wipe away all their tears.” So when we grieve, we grieve with Christ and there is a way in which when we are honest with how we feel and with our lose and our grief that we are close to God. God is there with us, walking through it, helping us through it. And so on those nights when we grieve, and we stay at home, and we curl up on our bed and we cry Jesus is there, his arms around us, helping us and promising us that we will make it through. Promising that we will begin to be able to experience that joy again. Not the happy, happy joy, but the deep satisfaction of knowing God.

One can do that kind of meditation on any one of the beatitudes.

(At this point the recording ended. I am not certain of the words I used to end this sermon. I am pretty sure that I reviewed again that the beatitudes and baptismal covenant make up the job description of Christians and then went into the service of baptism.)

Sermon Proper 25 A

Proper 25 A

Transcribed from a sermon given at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

October 23, 2011

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Matthew 22: 34-46

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you mind, with all your strength - with all your whatever. And love you neighbor as yourself. Even though it is translated different ways we’ve heard it so many times. It is the essence. It is simple. It is easy to remember. It is a wonderful little sound bite.

It’s really hard to remember the hundreds, thousands, of rules that the Pharisees tried to follow. Even the Ten Commandments can get intimidating. Do you remember all ten? But love God and love your neighbor - that you can remember. That’s simple. It’s clear. It’s not confusing - until you start thinking about what does it mean to love? How do you love someone? What does it look like when you love God? And how in the world can you be commanded to love? You can be invited to love, but no one can command you to love. We know of the dictators in the world who demand that their people love them; well you can be made to say I love you but nobody can force you to actually love. In fact commanding someone to love you is the best way to get them to not love you. So how can there be a commandment to love God? What does love look like in the every day?

And then the other question that comes up as you read this passage is why the writer of Matthew put Jesus asking about this obscure thing from scripture about David saying the Lord said to my Lord? Why is it right there, after the great commandment? So there are lots of questions. Something that seems so simple ends up looking a bit more complicated.

This particular question that Jesus asked the Pharisees is using the way the Pharisees thought and turning it on them. They went through scripture and took what they wanted to try and explain things. One of the issues was what was the Messiah to be like. Now the Jews did not expect the Messiah to be divine. The Jews expected, and still expect, the Messiah to be a great human being. Like we heard about Moses, who was a friend to God and could do marvelous and amazing things and fully human. Yet Jesus was talking in ways that didn’t quite fit with that. Which disturbed the Pharisees. So he says to them, well look back at your own scriptures. One of the passages hat is seen as predicting the coming of the Messiah was this particular passage from Psalms. The understanding then was the psalms were written by David. Scholars now are pretty sure that David did not write most of the Psalms, maybe he wrote a few, but most of them he didn’t. But then there was no disagreement about who wrote them - David wrote them all. So how could David be referring to the messiah as his lord if the messiah was to be his son? Remember that the prediction is that the Messiah would be a descendant from David. So Jesus is bringing up this issue this question, to leave it open that maybe the Messiah is more than you imagined. Maybe the messiah is more than you ever dreamed - not what you thought.

For us the important issue is how do we come to love. If you have ever met someone who had no love as a child you realize that as an adult they are a very damaged human being because we learn how to love by being loved. We respond to love with love. It has been said that you don’t teach love, you don’t command love, you catch love. It’s almost like a virus, if you get around it and you catch it then it grows in you and then you give it to others. But it is a good kind of virus.

So if love is something that we catch from being loved how are we to love God? By knowing that God loves us. That is the power of the incarnation and the sacrifice of Christ. Some of us have a difficult time feeling a love relationship with an abstract deity in whom we live and move and have our being. For some of us it is easier to feel loved and to love in return when it has a human face - human flesh. So in order for us to obey the command to love God we need to know that we are loved by God. It is God’s love that empowers us and strengthens us to be able to love in return and to be able to love others - to be open to that love.

But what does it look like. What is every day life like when you love someone? Most of us here, probably all of us here, have at some point felt deep love for someone. Whether it was a spouse or a child or a friend. When you were feeling that deepest kind of love, when you went to grocery story the one you love was with you, even if they weren’t physically there because as you walk down the aisle you think “Oh, she would love that!” Or, “He loves doughnuts. I’m going to get the chocolate ones with the sprinkles which is what he likes the most.” Or for your children you may go “Oh, there’s the kind of cereal he loves the most. Well, that’s not good for him but I’m going to get the healthy one he likes the most.” Because love is not always doing what the person wants, but what is best for them. But when you are feeling love, when you are loving, when you are in love, you naturally want to do things for the other person.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently. She had a difficult patch in her marriage including a short period of separation. After working hard on their issues when they got back together the marriage was better then it ever was before. She told me that it was interesting that before the separation when it came time for her husband’s birthday or Christmas she couldn’t figure out what to get him. But after they got back together when it was Christmas time she wanted to buy him six or seven different things. She just spontaneously wanted to do things for him.

 You know the difference when you go Christmas shopping and you have to buy things because you ought to, say for aunt so and so. You can’t figure out what you are going to get her this year. Compare this to when it is not even any special day and you go “Oh, this person would love that. I’m going to pick it up and give it to them.”

When we are feeling that love relationship we just want to give. It becomes natural to give. It becomes what our hearts and minds and souls want to do. And so when we are in a relationship of love with God when we know God’s love for us and we open to that, we just want to give to God. And the only way we can really give to God is giving to other people. So we spontaneously want to give not just things, but of ourselves. We want to express our love. And the more we do that the more we feel God’s love, and the more we feel God’s love the more people around us feel the love that we have for them. It magnifies itself.

So we have this wonderful, succinct summary of all the Law and the Prophets - all that a Christian really needs to know. Love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your spirit, with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

Proper 24 A - Sermon

Taxes? What are we to do about taxes? This is not a new question for 2000 years ago Jesus was asked about whether it was religiously lawful to pay taxes. Jesus' brilliant answer still resonates with truth and wisdom today.

Proper 24 A

Transcribed from a sermon given

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

October 16, 2011

Matthew 22:15-22

Exodus 33:12-23

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

It’s interesting to see that questions about paying taxes are nothing new. Two thousand years ago they were debating about whether it was lawful to pay taxes. Of course it was a little different back then. In fact, it was a lot different back then because the Romans to whom the taxes were being paid were an occupying force.

Now the Romans, unlike some of the earlier empires, were pretty smart in terms of economics. Other empires used to conquer a land and then they would take the people into exile and they would burn and destroy everything. The Romans would conquer a land, put up a puppet king or head of some sort, and then build up the infrastructure. They would put in roads. They would build aqueducts to bring in water. If you visit Israel today you can still see aqueducts from Roman times. And they would fix it up so that people could make money and the economy could thrive so that the wealth could be heavily taxed and sent back to Rome.

The taxes were not being paid to a government that was there to care for the people of Judea. The tax was going to Rome, to increase their wealth, to pay for their soldiers, to pay for the people who would harass them without any reason - the ones who had complete and total power over them. So it is understandable that people did not like the idea of being taxed by Rome.

But there was an additional problem with the particular tax that was being considered here. There were lots of taxes to Rome, but for this particular one there was a question of whether it was lawful or not. It was a tax that was called the temple tax. The temple tax was that every male every year had to give a certain amount for the temple in Jerusalem. It wasn’t optional. There was no sense of percentage giving or anything like that. It was a tax for every male. Some of it was used to keep the temple going but most of it was given to Rome because Rome taxed the temple. Now that made the priests and Herodians, who were the ones who were the puppet government for Rome, a part of sending this money off to Rome. It was a very complicated situation.

The problem was that Caesar had made himself a god. He declared himself a god and declared that people had to worship him. You may have heard about this, how in the early Christian times when the Christians refused to worship the emperor they were put to death. That was why the Christians were so persecuted. They wouldn’t burn incense to the emperor. We get kind of a sense of this in some of the personality cults today, like in North Korea, where whoever happens to be in charge of North Korea becomes like a god and is worshipped.  But Caesar went so far as to say he was a god. So if you were paying money to the temple, and some of that money was going to pay a god, were you blaspheming? Were you going against the Ten Commandments that said don’t support any other god?

Now this was a trick question of course, because if Jesus said, “Pay the tax,” Then the people who don’t want to have to pay the tax would be upset. And people could say that Jesus is saying that we should break the Law of Moses. If he said, “Don’t pay the tax,” they could go to the Romans and have him arrested for inciting the people to not follow the Roman law. It was a no win situation. The reason that this is such a memorable response from Jesus, and it got into the Gospels, is because what he did was he took this impossible question and he took it to another level.

He said, “Give me one of the coins that you use to pay this tax.” You may have seen pictures of Roman coins, and what they are is a piece of metal that has been stamped with the picture of the emperor on it. So he took the coin and said, “Whose picture is this?” They said, “The emperor’s.“ Well there is a problem there, because these Pharisees who handed him the coin are carrying around a picture of an idol. According to the Mosaic Law one is not supposed to make any kind of idol - there are to be no graven images. So he caught them in their hypocrisy.

Then he said, “Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s.” This is just money. This is just a piece of metal with a picture of somebody on it. You can give that to Rome. It is of no of real value. That’s not a deep and true value.

Of course the beauty of this answer is he took it to another level. He made it about what is our duty. You see he is saying that we need to think about what is the important thing. Rome, the Emperor, represents all those things that are contrary to God - all those idols in our lives - all those things that we give our love and attention to instead of God.

We heard God beautifully described in the Old Testament reading today. Moses wants to see God face to face and God says, “You can’t see my face. I’m not a face you can see.” Then God walks by and Moses sees His back. Isn’t that the way it is sometimes - we don’t see God working in our lives until afterwards. We go “Wow, God was in that!” We see the back, after God has walked by. God is too great and too magnificent to be put on a coin or to be made a picture of, or to be represented by a thing that is worshiped. Our God is the God of the whole universe - the creator of everything, everywhere. God is a living god. As Paul said in his letter to the Thessalonians, “You’ve given up worshiping dead idols  and are instead worshiping the living God.”

Now this living God, what are we to give this living God? God doesn’t need anything. God doesn’t need our money. And even though it is pledge season, God does not really need our pledges. The church might, but God doesn’t. God doesn’t need animal sacrifices. God doesn’t need anything. God is God. But there is one thing that God can’t just create by willing it. You see, God is also described as Love. And Love needs to Love, and be in relationship. The only thing that we can give God, that God can’t give Godself is love, is faithfulness, is commitment, is relationship. Because we give that out of our free will. And out of our free will we choose whether to follow God, to do what we can for this God that loves us, or to put our energies and our faithfulness, and our love into something that is dead. Caesar claimed to be a god but he’s dead. So the choice is do we put or energies into that which is dead or to that which is the living God.

Certainly when he says give to the emperor what is the emperor’s he’s saying yes we need to take care of the things of the world. Yes you need to go work. You need to take care of your family, make sure you have enough to live. There are certain responsibilities, things you need to do. No problem with that. Of course we live in this world. We need to brush our teeth, we need to feed our bodies, we need to do various things that have to do with this world and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when those things become an idol.

I took a course in seminary called bringing biblical humor to life. It’s a great course and helped me to see the Bible in a whole new way. One of the things that the professor said was that an idol is something you can’t laugh about. Something that you take so seriously that there is no room for humor. What is it in your life that has become an idol, that you can’t laugh about? Is it your work? Is it respect? Is it power? Is it a 401K? Is it your retirement? Is it a fishing boat? Is it the football team? What in your life takes away from your commitment to God? What sucks you in and pulls you away from life and from love?

When Jesus said render unto the emperor what is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s he meant that at every point in our lives, that at every moment of our lives, we make a choice. We make a choice to give our energies and our faithfulness and our commitment to God, to life, to love or to give our energy and our commitment and our time to idols, to death, to that which is not life enhancing.

There is an ancient spiritual practice of every night before you go to bed you reflect on your day. What did you do during the day that was life affirming, was of God, and what did you do that was life denying, that was not of God? You are not to judge them, not to judge yourself, but just to notice and become aware and gradually become better at choosing life, instead of death, God instead of idols.

Proper 23 A

Proper 23A

Transcribed from a

Sermon given by

Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

October 9, 2011

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I say rejoice! This is one of the most wonderful things, I think, that Paul wrote. Rejoice always! Always!

Paul was already at the wedding banquet. He knew that his relationship with Christ meant a joyous celebration. And he was inviting all of his readers to live a life of celebration, knowing the joy of the relationship with God, knowing that the kingdom had come near and was part of them.

Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I say rejoice!

We are at the wedding banquet. The wedding banquet is an image used over and over again in scripture to describe the relationship between God and God’s people - as a wedding. The imagery of wedding is rich and full and complete. After all what is a wedding but a celebration of a relationship, the celebration of a relationship of love and mutual commitment. It is a celebration of the whole community. It is a welcoming of everyone.

We know that, but we don’t do wedding banquets the way they did it back in Jesus’ time. They knew how to do a wedding banquet. A wedding banquet back then was not an afternoon affair where you had some cupcakes and tea. This was a week long, at least days long, sometimes week long feast. They had meat, and food, and drink, and song, and celebration, and dancing and everything joyous. It was a time when the whole community came together. It served a number of purposes, one of the purposes for the wedding banquet had to do with feeding. People at that time, even the rich, did not have an overabundance of food. The poor lived on very little, and they didn’t get to have meat very often. So when you had a wedding banquet it was a chance for the wealthy, or even the not so wealthy, who did the best they could, to share what you had with others. It was a feasting and sharing. It was a bringing together of the community, of the whole clan. In fact it was the bringing together of two clans, because often it was a matter of the husband and wife representing two different clans coming together to make one.

This was especially true if it was the wedding of the child of the leader of the clan. Which is what this king probably was. This doesn’t sound like a high king in charge of a whole area like David or Solomon. Jesus is probably referring to a king over a couple of cities or a clan, or an area. You have got to remember that this is a tribal area. It still is a tribal area and sometimes when we see what is going on in the news it is hard for us to wrap our minds around that because we don’t live as tribally. But the relationships and the interweavings based on blood relationships was very important then. So, if a leader of an area, let’s say a tribal leader, has a son getting married this was often used to cement relationships or to make a treaty. The son might be marrying the daughter of another tribal leader and the two tribes would become one, would have a relationship. If you remember studying your European history, that’s what the kings in Europe did for many years.

So this wedding, this wedding that Jesus is talking about is much more than just a celebration. It’s about relationship, it’s about bringing people together, bringing the whole clan together. It’s a time to see people you haven’t seen for a long time. It’s a time to be reconciled with people you may not have talked to. Maybe many of us have been to a wedding where there was some cousin you hadn’t seen for a long time and you weren’t too sure whether you wanted to see them, but you worked things out. Well if you have several days of eating and drinking there’s a good chance you are going to find an opportunity to make up. It’s about that relationship that celebration, that joy.

One of the ways that scripture has been thought about, meditated upon, is by taking all the characters in the story and imagining yourself as each one of the characters. So in this story the first character we have is the king. Now I’m going to ask you to think about how you might be that character and I’ll sort of reflect on my thoughts.

So the first one is the king. I have had two children get married, so I know what it is like to send out those wedding invitations. You go through who do we invite and who do we not invite. And sometimes, if it is a small wedding, you only have a certain number of invitations and you spend a great deal of time trying to decide who to invite. So coming from the parent’s perspective it is  a very special thing to invite someone to come to your child’s wedding. And you are so happy when people say yes. And you are disappointed when they say “no.” Now sometimes they have a good reason for not being able to be there and you understand that, but there is still a feeling of disappointment. But if there is a friend or a cousin that doesn’t come and doesn’t explain why, maybe doesn’t even respond to the RSVP, that relationship is kind of severed. You feel like that person doesn’t really care about you. Maybe you aren’t as close as you thought you were. So for this king sending his servants to go invite these people it was an honor, it was something special. Please come. Join in the celebration.

Well the next characters to consider are the first two people invited. It turns out that they are too busy. One has to go to his office the other has to go to his farm. They can’t come to the wedding. I think most of us have at least once in our lives been invited to something that had to do with relationship. Been invited to deepen a relationship with someone and have decided that we are too busy - that we just don’t have enough time to spend to go and be with this person. We’ve all had to make those choices. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes we really want to spend time with this friend or relative or child but other things are calling us, and we feel torn. We know what that’s like. And we also know what it is like in terms of deciding about our relationship with God. Do we have enough time to go on retreat because there is all this business to do. The to do list is too long to take the evening off. We all have to make those decisions about relationships and our responsibilities. It is interesting, these first two are not particularly condemned. They have just chosen not to be in relationship with the king.

The next group of people that were invited are ones who get angry at the servants that are sent to them, and they beat them up and they kill them. Now imagine that you are the head of the clan and you run a couple of cities, and perhaps the reason this city has been invited is that your son is marrying a daughter of that clan and you are inviting the whole city so you can establish a deeper relationship.  And they make light of you. They make light of you so much as to even kill the servants you send. Like we don’t think you matter. Can there be a more direct way of saying, “You are irrelevant to me. You are weak; it doesn’t matter. I don’t owe you anything.” So you can understand that the tribal leader sent his guys and we have to show this group that we are powerful, but it was their choice not to be in relationship.

And then the next thing that happens is the servants are told to go out and invite everyone. Good and bad. Everyone! Everyone! What a generous, welcoming thing to do. To say “I have all this feast, come and share it with me. I don’t care. I want a relationship.” That’s the action of someone who really wants relationship - with everyone. And everyone is invited.

Imagine being invited and not expecting to be invited. It would be like a few months ago when there was that big royal wedding in England one day going to your mailbox and having an invitation to the royal wedding. Wow! I’m invited! It would be exciting. You would be thankful, be all set to go. Which brings us to the next character. The one who showed up at the wedding without a wedding garment. Now a wedding garment back then was not something real fancy. A wedding garment was basically clean clothes. Generally if you had two sets of clothes, one you used for work, the other you used for special occasions. To show up at a wedding without a wedding garment on would be like having a wedding on Saturday afternoon and beforehand you changed the oil on your car and you got oil all over your hands. You have your overalls on and you haven’t brushed your hair and you show up.  What does that say about how you feel about the person who is putting on the wedding? What does that say about how much you value the relationship? It’s obviously not terribly important to you, you didn’t even brush your hair, you didn’t even put on some clean clothes. If I got invited to that royal wedding you darn well know that I’d go out and buy something new - even if I had to go to a thrift shop to find it. And I might even get one of those silly hats. I wouldn’t show up in my jeans, or my short shorts. Or whatever it would be. (God help me if I showed up in short shorts.) But this guest chose not to take the wedding banquet seriously.

You see in the imagery in scripture the wedding banquet is not between two other people, the wedding is between God and the person who shows up. At the end of the parable it says many are called but few are chosen. I would put that a different way. Many are called, but few chose to be in relationship. Because you will notice in these stories the ones who aren’t there all chose to not be in relationship with the king. There were good ones and there were bad ones who were there because they chose to come. It is the ones who chose not to be in relationship that are not at the wedding.

And there is one more character or person in the parable that I haven’t mentioned. Anybody think of who it is? The servants. There’s a group of people. The Greek word is doulos  (δοῦλος) and doulos has often been translated as servant. In the New Revised Standard Version it’s translated as slave. And that is probably a more accurate translation. Because what it means in Greek is someone who has given themselves totally to serve someone else. They’ve given themselves up totally to the other person, which a slave would do. And what the servants do is they go out and they invite people.

I would say that here we are. All of you were invited to the wedding banquet and you’ve shown up. Showing up is a large part of it. How did you hear about it? And now that you’re part of the wedding banquet, now that you are able to rejoice and celebrate the great joy of your relationship with Christ, the next step is deepening that relationship - of offering oneself totally to serve the other - to become servants of Christ. And what is it that servants do? They go out and they invite everybody to come to the wedding.

Amen.

Sermon for Proper 22 A - St. Francis

What follows is a transcription of a sermon I gave October 2 of 2011. We were honoring St. Francis that day and would be blessing animals immediately following the sermon. I always enjoyed sharing our worship with our animal friends. That Sunday I based the sermon on the lectionary readings for Proper 22 A and retold the parable of wicked tenants from a 21st century perspective.

Proper 22 A

Blessing of the Animals

Transcribed from a sermon given

October 2, 2011

Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Please be seated, or should I say “Sit!”

If you were reading along or singing the psalm with the choir you saw where I got that statement that I almost always use to begin my sermons. It is from that Psalm, number 19.

I would like to tell the parable that Jesus gave us today in the manner it might be told in the 21^st century. Let’s imagine that Bill Gates has discovered a new area that is very poor and a town that has absolutely nothing. So he goes there and he builds a factory. He puts in wells. He builds houses for the people who will work in the factory. He puts in a large garden so the people can be well fed. He plants fruit trees for the future and sets everything up for this town to thrive. The people of the town are so thankful, so appreciative of what they have been given. Then Mr. Gates picks out a few of the more intelligent and sophisticated of the people and says; "Now you will be the managers and you will oversee what happens.” You are to send me a certain percentage of whatever you make so I can reinvest it other places, and you are to see to it that everyone has a good life. Then he goes off to another country in another part of the world to help them out.

 Well, at first the people are so thankful to Mr. Gates for having done this and helping them out that when it comes time and they add up how much money they’ve made that year they have no trouble sending the percentage that was expected back to Mr. Gates. They have more than enough now, with enough food and housing, and so forth. Well a few years down the road the managers realize that they haven’t heard back from Mr. Gates and there is no way for Mr. Gates to know how much they are making, so why are we sending him the full percentage? We can send him less and he would never know. So each year they send a little bit of a smaller percentage of what they have made, because after all they are enjoying how they live and they want to live better. Especially the managers who want to build some new houses that are a little bigger than the other houses and they need that extra money to take care of it. Well this goes on for a few years and then comes the rumor. The rumor is, (I think they read it on the internet) the rumor is that Mr. Gates has died. Oh, well, if Mr. Gates has died then this is no longer his factory - it’s now ours. Right? So we don’t need to send him anything. We can just enjoy it, and the managers discover that they need more and more. They work harder than everybody else so they need to have more than everyone else. Some of the people are starting to be a little poor, but that’s their choice that they don’t have as much because they don’t work as hard.

Well after a couple of years Bill Gates say, “How come I haven’t gotten any money from that one town? It has been several years now. I’m going to send one of my chief aids to go and figure out what’s going on.” Well, this chief aid of Bill Gates is a little smarter than the ones in Jesus’ parable and he doesn’t go there and tell them who he is. He just tries to figure out what’s going on. Then he says that this isn’t right. This isn’t yours, this was given to you to use, to take care of and you shouldn’t be treating some people as less than. Some of the people hear and some don’t.

Then that person goes back to Mr. Gates and says, “I’m really concerned. I’m hoping they will change their ways, but there is no guarantee.” Well a few more years go by and they are still not getting their share of the profits so finally Bill Gates sends his son. And his son goes. Well when they find out that it is Bill Gates son they say, “Ah, if Bill Gates is truly dead then if we kill the son it will be ours. We’ll inherit it.”

In this version of the story Bill Gates’ son doesn’t get killed but what do you think of those people? Those people who were given a great gift. They were given a gift of new life. They were given so much opportunity, and they forgot it was a gift. They forgot it didn’t belong to them. What would happen to such a people?

What would happen to us, because after all, everything, everything we have, is a gift from God. The sunshine isn’t ours. The rain isn’t ours. The seeds that are planted and grow up to make food aren’t ours. Our bodies were created by God and are a gift from God. Our intellectual capacity is a gift from God. We didn’t make ourselves smart; we didn’t make ourselves talented. Our hands, with these wonderful opposable thumbs which means we would be able to create all this amazing technology, that was a gift from God. We didn’t will and decide that we would have all of that. It is all a gift.

Now we are celebrating St. Francis today, but I am using the readings that are normally used for this Sunday, not the readings that are for St. Francis, but they certainly fit with Francis.

Let’s begin with the Old Testament reading. It is always good to remember what those basic commandments are. And the very first one, the very first one is, “I am the Lord who brought you out of slavery in Egypt, you will have no other gods before me.” The very first commandment is a reminder that God gives us everything. Our freedom, our lives, all of it. And we are supposed to keep God as number 1. That’s the foundation. That’s the first commandment. No ifs, ands or buts. No I am number 1 except when there is a good football game on. Not I am number 1 but make as much money as you can. Not I am number 1 and if you make me number 1 then I will give you something. It is not a deal. It is not an exchange. I am number 1, period. End of that first commandment.

And when we make God number 1, when we appreciate and realize that God is the source of everything, all of our lives, how can we not live a life of thankfulness and praise. All the time. And that’s St. Francis. St. Francis praised and loved God all the time. No matter what.

He chose poverty because he knew that everything he had was God’s anyway. And he gave away all of it. He wrote some of the words we have been singing today in some of the songs about praising God. One of the last things he wrote was a wonderful ode to God, a poem of praise, which is Hymn 406. So if you look in the blue hymnal for hymn 406 you will recognize the words. “Most high omnipotent good Lord to thee be ceaseless praise outpoured, and blessing without measure. From thee alone all creatures came no one is worthy thee to name. My lord be praised by brother sun who through the skies his course doth run.” And it goes on that everything in creation should praise God. It is a joyous hymn of praise, a poem of praise.

You would expect that someone who could write that sort of praise for God was probably feeling pretty good at the time. But the truth is this was written near the end of Francis’ life. The last few years of his life he was constantly in excruciating pain. His feet were in so much pain he couldn’t walk. So when he wrote this he was in great physical pain. And he was also in emotional and spiritual pain because the order that had founded based on the idea that they would own nothing was now under the control of some of his followers and was starting to buy property. Which he was against. He could see that his order, although still doing good work, was not living up to the deepest commitment that he had. The absolute poverty of Francis was too much for even the Franciscans. And so he was in anguish about that. Imagine being in constant pain and seeing your life work going in a different direction than you’d intended it and being able to write such wonderful praise to God. That was St. Francis. That was St. Francis.

We bless animals around the time of St. Francis’ feast day because it is said that he loved animals. There is a story of him with a wolf and there are stories that he so needed to preach the love of God that if there were no people around to hear it he would preach to the birds. I sometimes try to imagine what Francis might have said to the birds. And I imagine that Francis said to the birds, “You beautiful creatures of God, creatures created by the loving God, sing God’s praise all the time.” And I imagine that if Francis was here today and saw the wonderful creatures we have here, these wonderful dogs who are being so very, very good, he would say, “Animals, you are beloved creatures of God. Created to praise him. Praise and serve God with every breath, with every pant, with every bark. Sing God’s praise.

And I think that Francis might say to us two legged creatures who are gathered here today, “You wonderful creations of God, you blessed of God, know that God loves you and praise God with every breath.”

Amen

Sermon Proper 21A

The readings for this week are all about community and relationship. The bottom line question is what does it mean to love one another.

Proper 21

Transcribed from a sermon given

September 25, 2011

Rev. Valerie A. Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Arroyo Grande CA

Philippians 2:1-13

Exodus 17:1-7

Matthew 21:23-32

There’s an old story from India about two monks that went up into the Himalayas as hermits to find God and purify themselves. They found two caves that were next to each other and each one went into their cave, taking with them nothing but some straw for a bed. They didn’t see each other for many months as each one worked on their own meditation and their own purity. Of course when the winter came they couldn’t see each other. When spring came and with the spring the sunshine each of the monks took their pile of straw and put it out in the sun because after a winter in the cave it needed to be freshened up a bit. They saw each other there, and the older monk greeted the younger monk, “How are you?” Not too many words, but acknowledging him. The younger monk said, “It was a good winter, I have now conquered my anger.” The old monk said, “That’s wonderful. That’s fantastic, that you are now free from anger.” And then the older monk went over and walked over the straw of the younger monk. At which point the younger monk yelled, “How could you do that! Don’t do that to my straw!” And the older monk said, “Ah, I see that you have conquered your anger.

It is very easy to conquer one’s anger if you are living alone. However, if you have to interact with other human beings it is much more difficult. It is fine to think about one’s spiritual journey when you are alone, but when you are in community, when you are interacting with others, ah, that’s where the real growth happens. That’s when you are confronted by your own stuff. That’s when you begin to have the grist for the mill to smooth things out.

Today we have three readings about community. In the Old Testament we have those delightful people of God that God has freed them from slavery in Egypt. He has taken them away from all of the oppression of the Egyptians. He brings them to the edge of the Red Sea at which point they go, “What? You brought us out here to die? What are you going to do about it Moses?” To which Moses says, “It’s not me, it’s God and God will find away.” Then he parts the sea, and they go across the sea, that great miracle. They get on the other side of the sea and they are free, free to have a new life.

Last week, we heard about how after they had been wandering around for a while, suddenly they were hungry. “Back in Egypt we had plenty of food, and you brought us out here to starve,” they complain to Moses. Once again Moses says, “Don’t complain to me, it’s God who is doing this.” And God provides with them meat, of birds that drop from the sky, and manna they can collect from the ground. Once more God does great wonderful things for them.

A week later in our lectionary, they are someplace with no water and they are thirsty and once again they are complaining. Like most human beings they are looking for someone to blame. So they go to Moses, “It’s your fault, you are the one that brought us out of Egypt. It’s your fault that we are thirsty - do something about it.”

Isn’t it amazing how important it is to have someone to blame. If you have ever been home and your spouse is gone and your children are gone and you are there by yourself and you can’t find your keys you discover that you don’t have anybody to blame for the fact that they are missing. So they blame Moses and Moses says, “Don’t blame me. It’s God.” And of course once again God provides for them. They had forgotten, they had so quickly forgotten about God’s provision, about God’s love, about God’s caring for them.

In the Gospel reading we have a different kind of community. It’s a family, and here we have the father that says there is some work to be done. He goes to the first son and says, “Go do it” and the first son says, “I don’t have time. I’m sorry I can’t do it.” He goes to the second son who says, “Sure Dad, no problem.” If you have raised teenagers you have probably experienced this. You go to one and say, “Go clean your room.” “Dad, I can’t possibly clean my room today, I’ve got all this homework to do and then a friend is coming over and we’ve got this video game we have to play and I haven’t checked my Facebook page for days and….” And then you go to the second son, “Clean your room.” “Oh sure Dad, no problem.” Well the sure Dad no problem, whether working in the vineyard or cleaning their room, they are out there and they see their friends. “Oh, hi, let’s go get a cup of coffee. They go to Starbucks. The friend has a new video game. He goes over and to play the video game, by the time he gets home there is no time to clean his room. He meant to clean his room; there were just other more important things that came up. While the one who had said no goes into his room, sits down to do his homework, looks around and goes, “Yeah this room is kind of a mess, I guess I should pick it up.” And cleans it up.

And Jesus asks the question, “Which one was doing the will of the father?” And of course when Jesus talks about the Father he is talking about God. We’ve all had times in our lives when we have said we are going to do something and then for one reason or another we don’t do it. And we’ve all had times in our lives when we said no I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that and then we change our minds and we realize we really should. It is a very human situation. And what Jesus is saying is that when we are talking to God it is not about our words, and what we say, it is not about whether we can say it all correctly, it is about whether we do it. Or as one might say it is not about talking the talk, it’s about walking the walk. Of living it.

And then we have this wonderful passage about community from Paul in his second letter to the Philippians. If you read Paul’s letters you realize that he had a kind of consistent experience. He would go to some town, he would set up a church, he would then go on to another town and then he would hear about how the first church he had set up was quarreling and arguing or changing the theology or doing something inappropriate. And then he would write to them and say come on guys remember what I said to you - we all have to get along, etc. This particular letter to the Philippians was probably written while he was in jail. So imagine, he’s in jail and trying to encourage his flock. And the challenges that that church had are greater then even the churches today.

We’ve all had at one time or another an experience of a church that had some disagreement. Somewhere, at some time. Imagine the Philippians. Back then there is only one church in town, so if you disagree and you have a fight there is no other church to go to. If you don’t like your minister you can’t go to the other one. If you don’t like the music you can’t go and find a better musicians. You are stuck. If you are going to stay Christian you are stuck with this community. And this community is made up of people who would never encounter each other on a day-to-day basis. They didn’t shop in the same stores, they didn’t walk down the same streets, because you had people who were Jewish, and you had people who had been Pagans - worshippers of pagan gods. You had people who spoke Greek, and people who spoke Latin, and people who spoke Hebrew. You had people who were wealthy and people who were slaves. And you had men and you had women. None of these groups would normally interact with each other. Here they are put together into a community because they have all felt called by Christ. Here Paul is writing to them, and I can’t say it any better than he did. “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” In other word, please, if you care about me, if you care about Christ, if your life has been touched, get along, get along. He goes on to say, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” To me that’s what it means to love one another as Christ loved us.

I had a lot of time to think about love when I was asked to be the officiant at my son’s wedding. I wondered what I was going to say to my son and my daughter-in-law about love, about marriage? What little hopeful pearl of wisdom that they might remember could I say? As I reflected on in I concluded that love has to do with caring about the welfare of the other person.

We have a problem in English because we use the word love for so many different things. In Greek, which the New Testament was written in, there are four different words that are translated as love. But we only have one word for love and we use that same word to say I love my car, I love my spouse, I love my child, I love my dog, I love chocolate. We use the same word even thought they are very different meanings. I love chocolate but not the same way I love my children. And so it is a little hard for us sometimes to talk about love. The kind of love that a spouse has, the kind of love that a parent has, is a love in which you care about that other person’s welfare. That means that you desire for that person to be whole. You want that person to be physically whole, spiritually whole, emotionally whole. You want them to take their gifts and thrive. If you are a parent you know what it feels like when you see your child blossom, when all of a sudden you see them being generous. Or you see them discovering their gifts and finding a new thing that they can do that they are good at. You see the joy in their face. Nothing feels better than that. When you see someone you love growing into the fullness of who they can be as a human being. To me that is what love is about. It is wanting that for the other person.

So in a married couple it is a matter of wanting the partner to be whole. It doesn’t mean always giving them what they want, because sometimes giving them what they want is not good for them, but it means wanting them to be whole and to thrive. It means wanting to give up what you may want in order to have what that other one wants and needs, that will make them whole. And if in the couple both partners are that way then each one can be selfless because they know the other is not going to take advantage of their desire to give. It also means don’t let your partner be abusive or use you because it hurts the person who is the abuser as much as it does the person who is abused. It means that you set limits because that helps that person develop limits.

It is caring about the other. Or the way Paul puts it in regard to community, “Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” That is a Christian loving community where each person focuses less on their own interests and more on the interests of others. And that is what, I believe, Jesus meant when he said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love one another as I have loved you. How Christ loved us, loves us, is he wants each one of us to be whole. He wants each one of us to know love and to know God. He wants each one of us to thrive. He wants each one of us to have all our gifts be manifested. He wants each one of us to know how much we are loved. And the way he demonstrated that love was by his willingness to die on the cross. So when he was on the cross, even with the pain and the suffering and the humiliation, there was him a sense of joy because he knew that was the best way for all of us to come to know God’s love and to be the people he yearned for us to be. That was his gift to us. And he invites us to love one another as he has loved us.