Proper 9 A

Proper 9 A

Transcribed from a sermon given

July 3, 2011

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

I know that there are some of you here that are old enough to have been formed on the 1928 Prayer Book. For those of you who are new to the Episcopal Church, that’s the “Old Prayer Book.” The “New Prayer Book” is the 1979 one that we use now. It is only 30 years old so it is called the “New” Prayer Book. But there are some of us here, and it shows my age, who were formed on 1928 Prayer Book. There was one line that was read whenever we had communion that stuck in my mind and in my soul; and I think those of you who are like me and formed on the 28 Prayer Book, will respond to it.

“Hear what comfortable words our savior Christ sayeth unto all who truly turn to him, ‘Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.’” “Come to me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.” That’s how they introduced the Eucharist at communion, with the quote from the scripture that we read today, “Come you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

I remember as a child it took me a while to understand what travail meant. Of course I thought of traveling, but travail refers to labor. It was the same word that was used to describ a woman who was in childbirth. It refers to that intense, painful, difficult, exhausting process of labor. Come you who are tired, who are hurting, who are in the process of giving birth but are really having a though time. Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.

 One thing about being a parish priest is that you have the opportunity to know what the burdens are that some of the members of the congregation are carrying. Some people have burdens that lots of others know about, some burdens that I know about and no one else does, and some have burdens that no one at the church knows about because they have not chosen to share them.

But we all know what those burdens can be like. We know how they can tire us out. Burdens like grief - there are people in this congregation who have recently lost spouses, or parents, or children, or friends, or brothers or sisters. That is a burden and it is hard. And there are people in this congregation who have recently been diagnosed with cancer or who have been living with cancer or other chronic illnesses for many years. There are people in this congregation who have lost their jobs and are concerned about whether they will lose their homes. There are people in this congregation who are lonely.  There are people in this congregation who carry many different kinds of burdens.

Those are just the outer burdens, but then there are also inner burdens. As Paul so beautifully puts it, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” We all have that struggle within us of knowing what our intentions are and yet discovering that we are not following through on those intentions. I’m going to get my house clean today. Then you go home and you’ve got to check Facebook and you have to respond… You know how it goes. I have made many intentions. When I was growing up I was never going to talk to my children the way my mother spoke to me. But sometimes I recognized my mother’s voice, and I felt like I looking at a mirror in front of me.

We all do what we don’t want to do and it is a burden for us. And of course for those who have struggled with addiction of one sort or another know that in the worse kind of way. Over and over again you make the intention that you are going to stop that addictive behavior, and then suddenly you find yourself with a glass in your hand, or a piece of chocolate, or looking at the wrong thing on the internet, or whatever your addiction may be. It is not your intention. You want to be free of it, but you are doing it anyway.

We carry lots of different kinds of burdens. It is almost as if we are donkeys who are pulling a cart. We do fine pulling the cart until somebody puts something in it. We can handle it with one thing in it. Then another thing comes along, and then another, and pretty soon we are struggling. We are tired and we are not able to move forward. We become weary, carrying too many heavy burdens.

For those of us that know what that feels like, and I think that is most of us here, when we know what that feels like, when we are tired, when we feel like we can’t do one more thing, when we are wondering how are we going to get through this day, when we are feeling like that, Jesus says these comfortable words, “Come to me those who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you.” The way that he will refresh you is, he says, “Take my yoke upon you”. 

Now let us think about what a yoke for an animal is. Imagine you are a farmer and you have a cart and you have a donkey pulling it. Then you get another donkey, and you want to put the two donkeys together. You make a yoke that fits them just right. It has to fit the shoulder just right so it won’t hurt when they push on it. But once you have the two donkeys pulling they can pull much more than one donkey by itself.

That’s what Christ offers, to be yoked to us so that all the burdens we are carrying he is carrying as well. We are doing it together. We are not doing it alone. In fact he is much stronger than we are so we don’t have to work so hard. We don’t have to get so tired.

But of course there is a but. That but is that when you put two animals yoked together they can carry much more as long as they are both going in the same direction. But if one of the donkeys is kind of stubborn and wants to go off in a different way the shoulders are going to get soar, the cart is not going to get anywhere. It is going to be a struggle. So what our part when we are yoked to Christ is to try and walk with him because he really does know where we should be going, and he really does have more wisdom than we do. If we can give ourselves over to follow where he leads, the burden becomes light and we can make wonderful progress. We can deal with whatever comes into our lives. In the 12 step programs they talk about giving it over to a higher power, or as Paul would say “I do what I don’t want to do and I don’t do what I want to do, but there is hope, thanks be to God, in Christ Jesus.” When we open ourselves and yoke ourselves to Christ we find that life is much easier and filled with peace and joy.

Amen

Proper 8 A

Small acts of hospitality, even giving someone a cup of cold water, can make a great deal of difference.

Proper 8 A

Transcribed from a sermon given by

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

On June 26, 2011

In the Gospel reading today Jesus talks about hospitality. He says that even small acts of hospitality, like giving someone a cup of cold water can make a great deal of difference.

I had a chance to see that at work this past weekend at my son’s wedding. I didn’t know the family very well. I had met them a few times, but I didn’t know the whole family. At the wedding I had a chance to really get to know my new daughter-in-law’s family, the family of which my son is now a part. One of the things that told me a lot about this family was how they treated a stranger. There was a man at the wedding who had never met anyone else at the wedding. He had been invited to the wedding, but he came in having never met anyone there. You see, my daughter-in-law was adopted, and her birth dad had given permission for her to find him. When she became an adult she had looked him up and contacted him over email. They had communicated a little bit on Facebook and email, but it never worked for them to meet in person. So she invited him to her wedding.

Now you can try and imagine what it would be like to be a man meeting your biological daughter for the first time at her wedding. Walking into a wedding where you don’t know anyone at all takes a lot of courage. What really impressed me was that he was made one hundred percent welcome. Everyone from her family, the whole wedding, treated him like family. He was sitting at the same table that I was. He was family. People spoke to him and made him feel comfortable and welcome. To me that said a huge amount about Sarah’s family, about her parents, about their love for one another, about there love for Sarah, about their love for people. I knew that if this man was so welcome at a wedding that my son was certainly going to be welcomed into that family. A little bit of hospitality that made all the difference.

Of course it can work the other way as well. I was reading ideas for the sermon today and I read a story of a pastor who spoke about a man in his town that he knew well - very well respected business man - a good man. A man who lived a good and generous life, but he never came to church. This pastor would keep inviting him to come to church and he would say, nope, not coming. So finally the pastor asked him why and the man was ready to tell him. He said that when he was eleven years old his family had decided that it would be good for he and his brothers and sisters if they had some religious training. So they took him to Sunday school. He got to Sunday School and he loved it. He loved hearing the great stories of the Bible. He loved the music. He loved coloring. He loved the whole thing of Sunday school and he was all ready to come back. But at the end of the Sunday School class, the Sunday School teacher pulled him aside and said to him, in a very nice way I suppose, “You know son when we come to church we always dress in our best. I don’t want to see you coming back to church dressed the way you are today.” He looked down at his handed down overalls with holes in them which were his best clothes, and he never came back to church dressed that way. He never came back to church until he was dressed in a brand new suit and laid out in a box for his funeral. I am sure that that Sunday School teacher meant well, but it wasn’t being hospitable. It wasn’t being welcoming. It wasn’t seeing the need of the child. Little acts of hospitality can make a huge difference, even giving a cup of cold water.

It is interesting when you read the Gospels that Jesus doesn’t give many “Thou Shalt Not’s”. Oh, occasionally he does, but usually he is telling us what he wants us to do. To love one another, as he loves us. To be hospitable to one another. To feed the poor. To give a cup of water to the thirsty. He doesn’t dwell on rules and regulations, but on compassion and love.

If we look at the reading from Romans find that Paul teaches that we are free from the Law through grace. That things have changed. That with the resurrection of Christ everything has changed. We are no longer slaves to a bunch of rules. We are not ruled by the “Thou Shalt Not’s.”

But Paul had a dilemma because there were some people who when he told them they were free from the Law said “Okay good, I can do whatever I want.” They were doing things that weren’t good for them or weren’t good for the people around them, or that weren’t respectful of their own bodies. And Paul responded, “No, no, no, you don’t quite get it. We are free from arbitrary laws but we are slaves to Christ and therefore we want to serve Christ.”

There are places in Paul’s letters what that look like a set of rules, especially in the letters to the Corinthians. It appears that the Corinthians didn’t quite understand the concept of freedom, so Paul had to delineate some “Thou Shalt Not’s”.

But what is most important about what Paul says is that we are a new creation. He uses that same language in some other places. We are a new creation in Christ. Everything changed with the resurrection. Our relationship with God, our relationship with one another, has all changed.

Just as everything changed with Abraham. Abraham at the beginning of this story feels like he needs to sacrifice his son to God, because that is what you did then. You made sacrifices to the god. You sacrificed that which was most valuable to you, and often it was your own child, because you wanted to appease God. You wanted to appease the anger of God. It was as if human beings could do something to take care of God and then God would owe you something. But things changed with Abraham. Abraham was willing to offer his son. He loved God that much. But God said that is not what it is about. “I will provide the sacrifice.” God doesn’t need anything from human beings, God has everything that God needs. God wants relationship with human beings. With Abraham the relationship with God became one of friendship rather than one of duty and fear.

Then God provided the sacrifice in Christ to take another step in the relationship with humanity. It was a new creation, a new way of being with God. God has handled it all and we can live in grace. This is the new creation.

Every day we say the Lord’s Prayer. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” And then we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Right there, central in that prayer, is the coming of God’s reign. The coming of a time when God will really rule the earth. When the earth, all of the creation will be as God intends for it to be, for God will be in charge. Where God’s will is how people respond. The resurrection of Christ opened a window to that new world. That is the new creation, where this earth will become what God intended. Where human beings will treat one another the way human beings are supposed to, with love, and compassion.

We are called to be part of the transformation. We are called to bring in that new kingdom.

If you look at history it is pretty amazing that a small band of followers of Jesus in less than three hundred years, expanded to cover the entire Roman Empire and to become a force to be reckoned with, even though they were illegal and persecuted. It spread like crazy.

What was it? What was it that made the church grow so much then? It had to do with how the Christians lived their lives. They lived their lives bringing in the new creation. They lived their lives to be the new kingdom. They treated each other with compassion and love. They brought in and welcomed everyone. There was hospitality for everyone, male, female, free, slave, rich, poor, gentile, Jew - anywhere, any language.

When you were part of the community, this was a community that fed one another. It was not like the rest of the Roman Empire, where when plague came people were left to fend for themselves because they didn’t want to catch the plague. Christians took care of one another, nursed one another back to health. When people were hungry they fed one another. When someone was alone they were invited into community. Everyone shared what they had. They experienced a little taste of what the kingdom of God looks like, a place here people love one another as Christ loves us. By the way they lived communities they taught people what love looked like. They didn’t have and army. They didn’t have much money. Most of the early Christians were poor. But they had something more powerful. When you look at the history of the Christian church as it went into different areas, the mission that were often most successful where ones where it was a doctor who brought healing, or they brought food, or they in some other way were being hospitable and caring people.

We are called, each and every one of us, to help to bring on the kingdom of God. When we pray that Lords’ Prayer it is our responsibility to do what we can to make this world what God intended - to let the reign of God come through us. That shows up in those small acts of hospitality - those times of charity and love. When we feed people, when we welcome people, when we comfort people, when we give them even a cup of cold water.

7 Easter A

Christ prayed "That they may be one as you and I are one" and as he prepared to ascend to the Father he told his disciples "You will be my witnesses." One of the most important ways that we witness to the world is through our love for one another."

7 Easter A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

June 5, 2011

By The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

I’d like you to imagine that the patriarch of a family is dying. He’s in the hospital and he knows his death is near, so he gathers the whole family together - the sons and daughters, their spouses, the grandchildren. They are all gathered together and he looks at them and says, “I have loved you and cared for you and had concern for you, but I am soon going to be gone. My prayer to God at this moment is that you will stay together as a family, that you will love and support one another.”

You can imagine that happening. And that is basically what we have here today in the Gospel. It is the night before Jesus is arrested. He is talking with his disciples. He is giving them the last of his teachings. He is trying to prepare them for what is ahead. Then here he prays for them. He prays of all of those who have been given to him, which means us too. We too are his disciples. We too are those whom God has given to Christ. And his final prayer, his last request, is, “That they may be one as you and I are one.” Christ’s last passionate prayer is that his people will be together and united in the way that he is united with the father. That we, as he gives his command earlier, would love one another as he has loved us. That is his final request. And any of you who know anything about church history know that the Christian church has not been really good at doing that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying.

Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter. It used to be called the Sunday after Ascension. On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension which happened forty days after Easter. Jesus spent 40 days in his resurrected body interacting with the disciples. Then he took the disciples up on the hillside and as he stood there and told them, “You will now be my witnesses. I’m leaving. You will be my witnesses.” Then a cloud came and he disappeared from their sight. Now throughout scripture whenever there is a cloud that appears it represents the presence of God. It was as if a door opened between earth and heaven and Christ walked through it. He was gone.

In the reading today from Acts that describes this, what stood out for me was what happens immediately after the Ascension. The disciples had all been looking a Jesus and they continued to look at where he had been. Now he is gone and two men dressed in white, who obviously must be angels because they are messengers from God, appear. They say, “Why are you looking there were he left? Why are you staring at empty space?” So the disciples stopped and they looked at each other. The next thing we hear is that the community is gathered together in the upper room for prayers, for food and for sharing. The whole family, the disciples, some of the women including mother Mary and Jesus’ brothers, the whole family is there gathered together. It is the family loving one another.

Architecture has a strong effect on what we can do in a church or in a house. Think about an airplane. Now the goal in an airplane is to get lots of people close together for a long time without causing too much of a fuss. You don’t really want them interacting with each other. You don’t want them getting up and moving around, so you have all the seats lined up facing forward, That the only thing you can see is the back of people’s heads. And maybe the person sitting next to you, but you don’t look too much at the person sitting next to you because that is not really socially acceptable. You look straight ahead.

Now if you have people over for dinner you are going to sit around a table, or gather around in the living room. Where you can see one another, and you can talk to one another, and you can interact with one another.

Think about how we set up a church. We have all these pews and you are all sitting here and looking up at the cross. Except for the choir. The choir gets to look at the people. We have the cross up there so we are all looking at the cross. And that is a fine thing to do. But the angels said to the disciples, don’t look at where Jesus was - and they looked at one another. So I would like to invite you to be very counter cultural and turn around and look at one another. If you are sitting up in the front you might have to stand up. Look behind you. Stand up and look behind you. Look at these wonderful people. Look at this variety of human beings.

Every Sunday I get to look at all you and see the smiling faces and the sleepy faces, and the young ones and the old ones, the familiar and the unfamiliar as you look around at the people. Now there are some people here that maybe you have never seen before. Who are they? I wonder if they are new. Well maybe not.

Or maybe there is someone you see and you think I recognize that face. I wonder how long they have been coming to church? You might see other people whom you know their names because the name tags they wear but that is all you know about them. And there may be others here that you are really close to and you have come to really value and share deeply with. This is our family. This is the family that Jesus prayed that we would be one as Jesus and the Father are one. This is it.

Now to be one with one another as Jesus and the Father are one with one another we kind of need to get to know each other. When you love someone you want what is best for them. You do what you can to help them. But how can we help someone if we don’t know what their situation is. If we don’t know who they are. When we love someone we value them for who they are, we listen, we appreciate, we celebrate with them, we grieve with them, we support them.

In order to do that we have to know one another. A little bit more than just hello. A little bit more than just shaking hands on Sunday morning. So I would like to invite you to be brave and trust the Holy sprit. You will find on most of the pews, or at least every other pew, a basket that has some little pieces of paper and there should be a writing implement it it.

What I am inviting you to do is to write your name and a way to contact you. It might be a phone number or if you prefer to be contacted by email you can put your email address. Then what I am going to do is to collect all these and mix them all up. Then everybody that has put one in, takes one out. We are going to trust the Holy Spirit that whatever name it is you pick out is someone you need to get to know. I’m going to put my name in here too.

So what you will do is you will pull out a piece of paper and you will contact the person that you get. And you’ll say let’s get together. Maybe you will go have a cup of coffee together, maybe you’ll take a walk together. Maybe if it is someone who has physical limitations you may need to go to their house. Whatever. You may even go to the beach together. Whatever it is it is a chance to listen and get to know someone on a little bit deeper level.

I trust the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit works very efficiently. Trust that that person whose name you get has something you need. Maybe a story of their life. Maybe some encouragement. Maybe a new idea. And trust that you have something for that person. Maybe they need a ride, or a listening ear, or a good friend. Who knows what the Holy Spirit will do with this. I had one person at the 8:00 services that said, “I got just the person that I need to talk to.” I didn’t ask any further about why the need to talk.

We don’t know, but I am going to be real curious to find out what happens. I am going to be real curious for people who want to share their story of who they talked to. Now there is a small chance, a small probability that you will get yourself. If you get yourself that means the Holy Spirit is saying you better hang out with yourself a little bit. Take some time, listen to yourself, love yourself. Or you may get your spouse, and once again you better spend some time with your spouse. It might be a message that you need to do that You may get someone you know well. You may get someone you have never met, but it is an opportunity. An opportunity to practice loving one another.

And so I invite you to put in your little slips. I’ll get the choir over here.

Mix the all together and we’ll hand them out. Take one and pass it on. Don’t look. Trust the holy Spirit

Jesus said to his disciples before he went up to heaven, “You will be my witnesses. In Jerusalem, in Judea in Samaria and to the ends of the world.” We will be God’s witnesses. What does that look like? We can witness with our voice. We can tell what we know. But it is a much more powerful witness when we witness with how we live our lives. When we witness Christ’s love by loving one another. Most of you may know the old song “They’ll know we are Christians by our Love” Let us witness Christ in our love for one another.