A Story Not Yet Done:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

God says to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them:  O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones:  I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.  I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”  And that’s just what Ezekiel does.  He talks to those dry and brittle bones.  The valley full of them.  As he talks he hears the rattling of the bones coming together, the sound of flesh coming upon them and skin stretching over them.  He hears them come to life.  Well almost come to life.  They’re missing just one thing—breath, the breath of life.

Every time I read this passage or hear it read aloud, I go right back to the dry bone days in my own life—the times I’ve felt there’s no life, no hope left in me.  Those times of utter despair when I can’t see or imagine a way out of the darkness I’m in.  I think we all have dry bone times in our lives—times when the darkness threatens to swallow us up, times when we see no way out, times when we are as brittle as bones bleached white and dried in the sun.  Times when only a powerful gust of wind can change things up for us.  

That’s how it was for the people hearing Ezekiel’s words that day.  Their lives were as brittle as bones bleached white in the hot desert sun.  A people defeated, taken captive, uprooted, a people broken and in despair, a people sapped of life and faith.  A people made weary from repeated reports of new indignities to those they left behind.  I wonder how they hear Ezekiel’s words?  Had they numbed their hearts?  Or was there a place, a small place, where the hope Ezekiel promised took root and settled in?

Remember it doesn’t happen all at once.  First Ezekiel prophesies to the bones and then he’s told to prophesy to the wind.  First bones rattle, then sinews appear, then flesh, then skin but still not breath.  Breath, life—it takes time to regain those.  And yet there comes a time when those bones come together, take flesh and breath and stand on their feet.

We hear these words from Ezekiel in the context of our own individual lives.  They give us hope.  They give us strength.  But Ezekiel was not talking to individuals.  He was talking to the whole house of Israel.  Just as that divine wind, that holy spirit, came not to Mary or Peter or James or Mary Magdalene on their own, but to the whole group of people huddled together in that upper room.  

So I wonder, “How do we, the community of Live at Five, hear these words spoken to us as a people joined together in one skin?”  

There was a time not so long ago when we might have said, “Dry bones, brittle bones—that’s us.”  There was a time not so long ago when we were deep in grief.  We’d lost the priest we loved—our founding priest—and we wondered if there was a place for us.  Yet we kept going.  First the sinews, then the flesh, then the skin appeared.  People pitching in.  People—us—doing the work of building community.  People worshipping in community.  All of us, our bones rattling together, listening for the Spirit of God drawing us into the future.

But remember Ezekiel’s work wasn’t done when he finished prophesying to those bones.  He still had the wind to deal with. Those bones had not yet come to life.  Those bones had not yet stood and claimed their place as a people of God.  So Ezekiel prophesied to the wind and the breath of God came into those assembled bones and they stood on their feet.  They stood on their feet.  They were ready to move.

But still God was not done with Ezekiel or the exiled people of Israel.  God had more in store for Ezekiel and for his people.  God had a vision for the future.  A vision of a temple rebuilt, a people restored, a new way of being and living with one another and with God.  God gives that vision to Ezekiel and tells him to share it with his people.  

We don’t know what happens next.  We don’t know what happens after the people hear Ezekiel’s last vision.  The book of the prophet Ezekiel ends with that vision of a temple rebuilt and a people restored to their homeland.  But it’s just a vision.  What we do know is what the prophet Joel knew so well—“Without a vision, the people perish.”  Perhaps the converse is true as well—“With a vision, the people begin to thrive.”

Almost nine months ago, we came together as a community.  We listened for the voice of the Spirit.  We had visions, we dreamt dreams, we even began to prophesy.  I looked back at those dreams and prophesies this week.  Here are a few of the words and images that surfaced that day last September:  meditative, mosaic, silent prayer, a slower pace, welcoming, emerging, family, bilingual music, taize music, outdoor mass, rainbow flag, bringing in those hurt by church, seeing ourselves as an integral and vital part of the whole St. Michael’s community, Mas Espanol por favor, beyond bi-lingual, color, simplicity, different, unique.

Like the people of the exile, our story is not done, our song is still unfinished.  But the wind is blowing, the walls are breaking down.  Who knows what the Spirit has in store for us as we move into the land that lies before us!

St Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church – Live at 5
Seventh Sunday of Easter; John 17
May 20, 2012
Rev. Kristin Schultz                


Jesus is at dinner with his disciples.
It is a Thursday night – the night of Passover.
It is the last meal Jesus will eat with his friends before he dies

Like so many teachers, or parents, given one last chance to hand over some package of wisdom for their charges to remember, Jesus tries to tell the disciples what it has all been about.
For three chapters, John’s Jesus preaches to his disciples – trying to sum up three years of ministry together and prepare them for the next step.

Jesus knows what will happen in the coming days –
his arrest, his death, and his resurrection.
And he knows that after the resurrection, he will be with the disciples only a short time.
He is truly going away, and leaving them to tell the story –
    the amazing, life-changing story of his life, death, and resurrection.

He knows it will not be easy.
Jesus knows there are challenges ahead,
and so he has promised his disciples help.
He will send an Advocate, he says – one who will guide and protect them
as they carry out their mission in the world.
He will leave them –
but he will not leave them alone.

Then we come to chapter 17, the chapter of today’s gospel lesson.
In this chapter, Jesus does something wonderful:
he prays for his disciples.
David Lose, who writes a wonderful weekly blog for preachers,
calls this “The other Lord’s prayer.”

Once, when they saw him go apart to pray,
the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray.
so he gave them a prayer to teach them to pray – for themselves and for others –
in a way that would shape their faith and bring them closer to God.

Now, again, Jesus gives them an example of prayer,
when he prays for them, with them.

So what does he pray?
He does not pray that all their problems will be solved and their work will be easy. He knows it won’t happen that way.
He does not pray that all their enemies will be defeated
and they will never make mistakes.

As Lose says:
So what does he pray for? He prays for them to hang in there.
And for them to hang in there together.
He asks that God would strengthen them,
care for them, protect them, and keep them together.
In fact, Jesus asks that they would be one,
one fellowship, one family,
not just modeling the “oneness” of Jesus and the Father but actually living into it, participating in it, making it real and in this way sharing in Jesus’ joy.

What’s important for us in all this is that Jesus is not just praying for his disciples back then.
When I read the gospel lesson, you may have noticed that I read a little beyond what was chosen for today.
There is a very important piece in those verses I added on:
Jesus says,  “”I ask not only on behalf of these,
but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word”
That’s us, my friends.
We are the ones who believe through the words of the apostles;
    we are the ones for whom Jesus prayed, and prays still.
We, too, benefit from Jesus’ prayers for strength and courage,
his prayers for community and love.
Each time we read these words, we are reminded of Jesus' constant care and concern and compassion for us,
     and for all the world God loves.
This, indeed, is the work of the Spirit, the advocate and comforter:
to remind us of Jesus' active and ongoing love and compassion
and to draw us more deeply together.


Now I want to invite you to enter a bit more deeply into this message,
    and give you something to take with you when you leave here tonight.
Think for a moment about what you would like Jesus to pray for, for you.
What bit of comfort, or strength, or courage do you need.
Try to boil it down to one or two words – words that express what you need Jesus to pray for for you.

Now I invite you to write your word or words on the cards JP passed out.  
You can take that with you, put it in your purse or billfold or on your desk,
    and remember throughout the week that Jesus is praying for you,
that the Spirit of Jesus is with you to guide and care for you.

(Pray – invite people to share the words they wrote):
Gracious and loving God,
We give you thanks that your son came to live among us, to teach us to live.
We thank you that he lived a life of prayer and service, that we may learn to pray and serve. We thank you that he loves us – that you love us – that you wish for us abundant life. We pray tonight for :

For all these things, and whatever else you see that we need, we pray in the name of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Mothering Love:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Need I tell you, “Today is Mother’s Day”?  A day fraught with complexity.  For some this is a difficult day—one that reminds them of what they did not have or of what they have lost.  For others this is a Holy Day of Obligation—the flowers, the cards, the Sunday brunch.  Some preachers wrap the day in cliché.  Others avoid it all together.   After all, it’s a Hallmark holiday, not a Holy Day in the church calendar.

And yet this is a day that offers us an opportunity to reflect on love—the kind of love that brings us to life, the kind of love we know in Christ, a mothering  kind of love.  

Jesus says to his disciples, Jesus says to you and me, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  “Love”—it’s a word that appears again and again in the Gospel of John and in the letters of John as well.  In the Gospel of John, the word “love” appears twenty times and in the First Letter of John which we hear today it appears thirty-three times.  

When I was in seminary, I took Greek.  We all did.  It was a requirement.  The text we read was the First Letter of John.  Midway through the course, after maybe the sixteenth sighting of the word “love”, I raised my hand.  I wanted to know just what John meant by that word.  A three-sentence explanation would have sufficed.  The professor dodged my question.  “Hmm, aah,” he replied and then went on with the lesson.

He never did answer my question.  Today, I’m beginning to think that it was a question best left unanswered, a question I needed to answer for myself.

“Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus says to his disciples.  What does that mean?  What kind of love is that?  What does love like that look like?  What does love like that feel like?   

Answers to questions like that don’t come from books or scholars or even poets.  Answers to questions like that come from life, from experience, from being on the receiving end of love.  

There’s a picture I keep on my bookshelf.  I look at it every morning as I’m praying.  I keep it on my laptop too.  It’s a picture of my mom looking at me.  She’s looking at me with love and delight.  I’m always brought up short by that picture because the looks I often got from my mom were looks of frustration, confusion or exasperation.  And yet, when I look up, I see mom looking back at me with love.  It’s not that she has forgotten the time I mixed cookies on the kitchen floor or the time I spilled her best perfume on her dresser or the nights I came in rather late.  She remembers those but in the love that picture captures, those trifles do not matter.  The psalmist says of God, “She rescued me because she delighted in me.”

Perhaps you noticed.  I’ve changed the pronouns.  That’s because the love I know, the love of God and Christ, I knew first through my mom.  

“Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus says to his disciples.  He’s not talking about a feeling.  He’s not talking about a kind of extended liking.  He’s talking about a way of living that involves coming back again and again to those one loves.  A way of forgiving time and again.  A love that welcomes people as they are.  A love that delights in people.  A love that says in ways big and small, “You are my beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  A nurturing kind of love.  A life-giving love.  The kind of love we all long for.

Today is Mother’s Day—a day fraught with complexities.  For some this is a day that reminds them of the nurturing love they longed for but never received.  Others find in this day a painful reminder of losses—mothers gone, children never born, children dead before their time.  I like to think of this day as a day that invites us to remember the nurturing, loving mothering that runs through every life.  Mothering we receive sometimes from our mothers, sometimes from our fathers, sometimes from our friends, sometimes from teachers or bosses or neighbors, and sometimes from total strangers.  Mothering that is not gendered.  Mothering that is simply an expression of deep, life-giving love.  Mothering love—the love of Christ and the love Christ calls us to.

And Both Were Changed:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Two lives converged that day on the road to Gaza—two men encountered one another in the wilderness and the noon-day sun.  One, a foreign dignitary, a court official, draped with the trappings of wealth and power, riding in a chariot down a wilderness road, the other, propelled by the Holy Spirit, running to catch up with the man in the chariot.  The former we know only as the Ethiopian eunuch; the latter we know by his name--Philip.  Two men separated by a wide gulf of class and race and sexual identity.  Two men drawn to one another by the Spirit and the word of God.  Two men meeting at the margins of their lives.  Two men changed by an encounter on a road through the wilderness.

As he approaches the chariot, Philip hears its occupant, the Ethiopian eunuch, read from Isaiah, “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth.  In his humiliation justice was denied him.  Who can describe his generation?  For his life is taken away from the earth” That Ethiopian eunuch turns to Philip and asks, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

I wonder what was behind that question.  Do you think that that Ethiopian eunuch was remembering the treatment he received at the temple?  Was he recalling the words from Deuteronomy that were hurled at him on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem?  The words that banned people like him from the assembly of the Lord.  Was he remembering the temple gates slammed shut when he approached.  Was he recalling the humiliation he felt?

I can imagine Philip telling that court official about Jesus and his promise to let the oppressed go free.  I can hear Philip recalling the people Jesus healed and the people Jesus welcomed in his midst—prostitutes, tax collectors, the blind, the lame, even a bleeding woman.  And I can imagine the Ethiopian eunuch wondering to himself, “Does that include me?  Does Jesus welcome me into his midst?”

Maybe he then points to another passage in Isaiah—the passage where the prophet says, "and do not let the eunuch say, 'I am just a dry tree.' For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off."

Do you wonder if maybe, just maybe, Philip found himself wondering just how broad God’s love really is.  Do you think Philip was going back and forth is his mind about baptizing that Ethiopian eunuch?  Maybe that’s why that Ethiopian eunuch points to the water and says, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  “What is to prevent me from being part of God’s family?”  “What is to prevent me from sharing in God’s love?”

It’s the Ethiopian eunuch who spots the water.  It’s the Ethiopian eunuch who stops the chariot.  I like to think that it’s the Ethiopian eunuch who leads Philip to the water.  Both go down to the water—the baptizer and the baptized.  Both come up out of the water.  And both are changed by the encounter—the baptizer and the one baptized.

It’s that way sometimes with encounters at the margins.  You meet the other, the outsider, and things change.  Not always, but sometimes.  You get a different perspective.  You see a different side of things.  Maybe even of yourself.  New possibilities open up.  I think that’s what’s happening in our church right now at this moment in our history as a denomination.  For over thirty-five years our lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered brothers and sisters have challenged the church to open the doors to all the sacraments.  “What is to prevent us from receiving communion or having our children baptized or being ordained a deacon, a priest, a bishop?  What is to prevent us from being married to the one we love, to the one who shares our life?”  “What is to prevent us from being a full member of the Body of Christ?” our LGBT brothers and sisters ask the church.

Come down to the water they say to the church.  Step in.  When we come out of those waters, we will all be changed.  And that is what is happening to our denomination, to our worshipping community and I hope to you and me as well.  As we see the witness of loving commitment manifest in the lives of those whose relationships shower blessings on all whom they encounter, we ask ourselves, “What is to prevent this relationship from being blessed?”   As we step into the waters of same-gender blessings, as we look at the words of commitment and the theology that undergirds those words, as we witness God’s love made manifest in the couples in our midst—be they same gender or different gender, maybe we will all be changed, maybe we will all draw a little bit closer to that ideal of loving, life-giving and reconciling covenantal relationships that Christ calls us to and that our liturgies proclaim.

Step into the waters of love.  They come from God.