​In the name of the One who guides us along right pathways.  Amen.
 
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.  Both the psalm and the gospel remind us of that.  But how many of us have even seen a shepherd--let alone a sheepfold? 
 
So I've taken the liberty to transpose the psalm--and parts of the gospel too--into a metaphor that works for me and I hope for you as well.  As I sat with the words of the psalm and the gospel throughout this week, I kept returning to that shepherd and that sheepfold.  But in my mind's eye I saw--and see now--not a shepherd but a teacher--a gifted one at that; and not a sheepfold however they might look I really do not know--but a warm, inviting classroom--a place where folks feel safe, a place where folks can thrive.  The kind of teacher--the kind of classroom--we all have likely experienced at least once in our lives.  Or so I hope.
 
Hear the psalm and the gospel that flows from it:
 
            You are my teacher;
            I shall not be in want.
 
            You welcome me into your classroom--
               one that inspires me and feeds my curiosity
               a place where I find books and ideas and computers and crayons too
               my senses are awash with possibility.
           
            You quench my thirst for learning.
            You believe in me and cheer me on.
 
            You open worlds to me
            and through your questions guide me deeper into them.
 
            Though I stand at the gate of possibility and change
               a place that can be somewhat overwhelming and downright scarry too
 
            I am not afraid
                        for you are with me
                        my teacher, my guide, my companion on the way.
 
            Your smile, your word, your comforting gaze
            Your hand upon my shoulder
            Make me feel safe
                        safe enough to take a risk
                        safe enough to cross the thresholds of new worlds
 
            Worlds you open to me even when I'm surrounded by skeptics and bullies
                        who roll their eyes and snicker at my comments and my questions.
 
            You have listened carefully to me--
                        always encouraging me,
                        always pushing me to go deeper,
                        always delighting in my delight,
                        always gentling me on.
 
            I cannot ask for more.
 
            Your kindness and respect.
                        Your zest for life,
                        Your love of learning
            Shall be with me all the days of my life
 
            And I will follow your lead forever
 
For You are the good teacher who sets aside Your needs to meet mine:
            You stay up late preparing for the day ahead;
            You rise early to finish reading the papers that need to be graded;
            You spend your summers and your vacations too
              taking classes, attending seminars, planning for the year to come.
 
You never "work to rule".  How can you?
You have a sacred bond to those within Your charge.
           
You know Your students
            what lures us in
            what puts us off
            what plagues us
            and what intrigues us;
You know us and we know You.
 
We know You love Your work, Your world.
And we know to our very bones just how much You love us.
 
We--the people of St. Michael's and those with whom we share the planet--are living in a moment that cries out for trusted guides and wise companions to lead the way, to usher us form the darkness and isolation, from the weariness and wariness that have been so much a part of the last year into sunlight and community, into the future.  It has been a very rough year for all of us.  We need a model, we need a guide.
 
Or maybe not.  We have that guide.  We have that model--the Good Shepherd, the Good Teacher.  The One who leads us, the One who loves us,  into life.  And we can be guides to one another--gentling one another,  supporting and encouraging each other, reaching out, showing patience, pushing just a little when a push might help, never judging, always loving.  We know how to do this.  We have been well taught. 
 
But we're rusty.  And maybe just a little bit unsure. 
 
So let me close with a suggestion. 
 
Bring to mind those Good teachers in your life.  Remember their names.  Recall their faces.  Put yourself back into their classroom.  Hear their words.  Feel their gaze upon your face.  Remember how they loved you into taking a risk.  How they loved you into learning what they themselves so loved.  Try your hand at loving others into this new life we now find ourselves.  And when you mess up as you surely will for we are all so very human, remember how it felt when you couldn't fold your paper right or balance that equation and your teacher just looked at you and said, "Next time...next time you'll get it right.  Don't you worry.  Just keep on trying."  Just keep on gentling one another into this new life we now are living.
 
Then  pause--pause to give a little of prayer of thanksgiving for the teachers who have loved you on. Say their names.  See their faces.  Say thanks be. 
 
And when you have, enter their name in the chat or say their name right here.  Our worship will be filled with tmemories the wise teachers--the good shepherds of our lives.  Thanks be to God.  Thanks be to them.
 
 
 

​18 April 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Easter
 
“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24)
 
            In the pilgrimage that we made here at St. Michael’s on Easter Day, we took the various episodes recorded in scripture that happened on the first Easter Day, and put them together into one narrative. Turns out, a lot happened for just one day! Not only was there the discovery of the empty tomb, but also Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdalene, and then to the other women who came looking for him; then there was Jesus on the road to Emmaus, stopping to have supper with two disciples; and then Jesus appeared in the upper room, breathing the Holy Spirit onto the disciples … Jesus was popping up all over the place! It must have been a truly head-spinning day!
And today we read about yet another Easter Day episode, which is Luke’s own account of Jesus’ appearance in the upper room, when he not only gives the gift of peace, but opens their minds to the meaning of the scriptures about him. And if we were to read a bit farther to the end of Luke’s gospel, we would discover that in Luke’s telling, Jesus was not only with the disciples that day, but also led them out of the city to Bethany, where he was lifted up and disappeared from them. All in one day!
The strange thing is, though, that if you flip ahead to the Book of Acts, which is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke and presumably by the same author, you find a rather different story. There, Jesus continues to appear to the disciples over a period of forty days, and is taken up from them only at the end of that symbolically important time. Same author, two very different accounts.
These conflicting stories might remind us of the discrepancy that shows up right at the beginning of the Bible, in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, which have two radically different accounts of creation. In that case, the rationalization is made that the two accounts are by different authors (the famous Jahwist and Priestly, or J and P, sources), each with a particular theological point of view that leads to a different telling of the story.
But in the case of Luke/Acts, which have the same author, how does one account for the two completely different versions of Jesus’ resurrection appearances and final departure—one on Easter Day, the other forty days later? One could, I suppose, simply dismiss it all as so much gobbledygook: a confused mind telling predictably confused tales. That’s what our modern, rationalist perspective would have us to do.
But scripture doesn’t work that way. When it offers conflicting accounts of the same thing, it’s trying to get us to pay attention to the fact that the meaning of what is being related is larger than any one telling can provide. And so, in the case of the resurrection, the risen Jesus is not any one thing, and he is not known to us in any one way. He will make himself known to us where and how it is needful for us to encounter him. That’s why the stories are all different: they were experienced, and remembered, in distinctly individual ways. They are not linear and consistent, but multiple and divergent.
But there is another dimension to all of this that I want to draw out, and it is the primary message for today. Like the stories of Jesus, the stories of our own lives are also inconsistent and divergent. We human beings are a patchwork of thoughts and emotions and actions that are often at odds with one another, and that leads us to behaviors that are not entirely dependable—far from it. Add to this the fact that over time we change—thank God, more than we expect—so that what was true of us at one time, may be virtually unrelated to who we are now. No one is ever fully consistent or morally coherent. As Father Easter, a beloved retired priest in this congregation now deceased, used to say, “We’re all of us a mixed bag.”
And this, I think, is where the Christian emphasis upon reconciliation and forgiveness is radically at odds with the strident partisanship in our own day with which we are all too familiar. Whether we are on the left or the right, we look for a kind of moral and intellectual purity in one another that human beings simply aren’t capable of. Most of our lives, we’re too immature to know better, and the rest of our lives we’re too old to be able to do much about it. “We’re all of us a mixed bag.” And so out of simple compassion we have to make room for the reality of the mixture of good and bad that we all are.
When the risen Jesus appears to his disciples and greets them with the words, “Peace be with you” (and that’s one thing that remains pretty consistent across various accounts), I hear in that statement two things.  First, there is an implicit acknowledgement that the disciples are all guilty of having betrayed him, and therefore have reason to be fearful of his anger.
But second, there is also Jesus’ unexpected forgiving embrace that is ready and willing to move beyond that guilt. If anyone ever had reason to feel a righteous anger, it was Jesus toward his disciples. But the first words out of his mouth are not of anger, but of peace—he seems intent to say, “Let’s move on.”
So he quickly begins to turn the disciples’ attention not toward the past, but toward the future, telling them that they will be his witnesses among all nations to the pattern of forgiveness and reconciliation that is at the heart of what he came to teach and to inspire. That is the mission with which he leaves them, and it is the mission to which we ourselves are heir in our own day: to speak over and over again the gospel words, “Peace be with you.” Amen.   

​4 April 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Easter
 
“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. … He is not here.” (Mark)
 
            At the heart of the idea of God, lies a great paradox. If God is infinite, then there is no room for anything else to exist. But if God is finite, then there is something bigger than God, and God is only limited and partial, and not God at all. What to do?
            There is an idea known as tsimtzum in the Jewish mystical tradition that tries to address exactly this conundrum. It holds that in order for creation to exist, the infinite God had first intentionally to draw back to make room for created being (the Hebrew word “tsimtzum” means to contract). God pulls inward, to make room for the existence of what is not God—the other.
            Now think of the implications of that idea: in order for us (or anything else) to be, God first has to create an empty void. Emptiness is the prerequisite for existence.
            In his poem “Emptiness,” the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu wrote these words:
 
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
 
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
 
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
 
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
 
            How interesting, then, that the first indication of the resurrection is not anyone’s personal encounter with Jesus, but simply the discovery of an empty tomb. As the angel says to the women who come looking for Jesus, perhaps almost sarcastically, “He isn’t here.”
            And even when the disciples do later encounter Jesus, more often than not the emphasis in the resurrection stories is on how elusive Jesus is, disappearing just as he is recognized—think of the supper at Emmaus, when just as the disciples realize it is Jesus with whom they are breaking bread, he vanishes from their sight.
            And of course this pattern of retreat and withdrawal culminates in the story of Jesus’ ascension, when he withdraws from the disciples altogether.
            We spend a lot of mental effort trying to make sense of the resurrection, but I wonder if it might not help to ask if what it is really about, is God drawing back from the ordinary human world, where we know only violence and death, with the purpose of making room for a new way of life to come rushing in to fill the void (much like the primordial moment of creation)? What if the resurrection is a kind of, well, a kind of new creation? (After all, that’s what St. Paul says our life in Christ is, a new creation [2 Cor. 5:17, Gal 6:15]).
            It’s interesting, isn’t it, that no one actually saw the resurrection—in fact, we know almost nothing about it, except that it was accompanied by a great earthquake. All that we really know, are its effects. And those effects are the deep-seated conviction of Jesus’ followers that in him they have been given a way of peace to pursue, and a Spirit of hope to trust, as they—and we—remake the human community.
            So what if the message of Easter is that through an empty tomb, God has opened up the space in which we, by following him, can cross over from an old life circumscribed by violence and death, into a new and larger space where life opens out before us, like the experience walking from inside a dark enclosed house into the fresh radiant brilliance of the morning sun? No wonder the resurrection happened just at sunrise.
            Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet, once observed that even Jesus refused to say much of anything about the resurrection itself. What Jesus did focus on, every time he appeared to the disciples, was the new way of life by which they were to move forward in the path he had cleared for them. And so, for Cardenal, the point of the resurrection is that the tombs of all those who in their life loved as Jesus taught them to love, are existentially empty. Sure the bones are there, but not the spirit. Their spirit is “hid with Christ in God,” as St. Paul puts it (Col. 3:3).
            Parents know well this pattern of pulling back to enable growth: indeed, one of the principal tasks of being a mother or father to children, is first to equip them with a sense of confidence and direction, but then gradually to draw back to make room for the child to find his or her own way of being in the world.
            Or a teacher knows the same truth: at the heart of being an educator lies the importance of forming students with an instinctive curiosity and the tools for discovery, but then of turning them free to explore and create on their own.
            In fact, much of life is about having an adequate self-awareness and self-assurance, to be able to draw oneself back in order to make room for the freedom of others. And that is a lesson our nation is still struggling to learn.
            The great Christological hymn in the second chapter of Philippians is built around this very theme: Christ, says the writer, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. It’s yet another instance of God pulling back, to let something new take its place.
            And isn’t something like this, also the spiritual truth that we draw from the desert that surrounds us here in New Mexico—that it is in the emptiness of a landscape seemingly denuded of life, that we become most vividly aware of the preciousness of life itself? Emptiness inspires clarity. Absence precedes presence. (And that’s also what the Eucharist is all about, isn’t it?—revealing the absent Jesus to be present in our midst.)
            In a poem called “Seen” (which we read at this morning’s Easter pilgrimage), the poet Jan Richardson describes the dynamic emptiness of the tomb this way:
 
You had not imagined
that something so empty
could fill you
to overflowing,
 
and now you carry
the knowledge
like an awful treasure
or like a child
that roots itself
beneath your heart:
 
how the emptiness
will bear forth
a new world
that you cannot fathom
but on whose edge
you stand.
 
There is no other word
you need.
There is simply
to go
and tell.
There is simply
to begin.
 
Ó Jan Richardson, janrichardson.com
 
Amen.

​28 March 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Palm Sunday
 
Based on Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname (Orbis, 2010)
 
On this Palm Sunday, let’s listen in on a Bible study for Holy Week led by Padre Ernesto Cardenal among the campesinos of the Solentiname Islands in Nicaragua. Seated in a circle inside the village church, in the blistering heat of the Nicaraguan dry season, they are discussing Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, or Jewish Supreme Court:
 
Bosco says: “This looks like the Military Court that’s operating in Managua.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “They probably first asked Jesus his name, age, profession or trade. That’s the way they begin questioning in the Military Court. Maybe he answered, ‘Profession: Revolutionary.’”
 
Mayra: “Not only here in Nicaragua, but in many other countries of Latin America the same thing goes on now. Those who are struggling for freedom are taken before courts. Not to judge them and hear their defense but to condemn them. And as they can’t accuse them of wanting the freedom of humankind, they seek false charges instead.”
 
Felipe: “At that time Christ was all alone. Now there are many Christs being sentenced in many places.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “Jesus has said so many subversive things, how is it that they couldn’t find any evidence?”
 
Felipe: “It’s just that everything Jesus said was the truth. Even though he was against them, it was the truth, wasn’t it? So they couldn’t accuse him.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “So they accuse him on account of the temple. He had just taken over the temple. He went in there in a commando action, and they’re probably referring to that in the trial.”
 
Oscar: “I think they misunderstood. With his death and resurrection …  the world was going to change. That’s the way I understand it.”
 
The next day, Good Friday, the Bible study continues with the story of Jesus before Pilate:
 
Olivia: “It seems to me that when Pilate heard ‘kingdom,’ all he thought of was a kingdom of injustice like their own kingdom, but Jesus is telling him that his kingdom is a kingdom of love. But that doesn’t suit Pilate either, the kingdom of love, because love is against injustice; and that’s why the powerful still go on being against this kingdom of love, this revolution of love. For them, the kingdom of love is subversion.”
 
Raul: “Christ’s mission was to bring truth to the earth. He says to Pilate, ‘I am a king, and my political order is to put an end to lying and exploitation; my followers are all those who struggle for the transformation of the world.”
 
Moving ahead, the group begins to talk about Jesus making his way to Golgotha.
 
Francisco: “They forced Simon to pick up the cross. He was just coming in from the fields, coming from work, going home to lunch. But it was because they saw he was lower class. If he’d been Mr. High and Mighty they wouldn’t have called him; they’d call someone else, someone as screwed as the one they were taking away. That’s why they screwed Simon.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “And then there were the women, who were real revolutionaries.  And among them was his mother, the most revolutionary of them all. It was she who had said during her pregnancy, ‘The powerful will be toppled from their thrones and the rich will be left without a thing.’ Those ideas she had received from the prophets of the Bible. And those ideas Jesus sucked in with her milk. She shaped him, she influenced him, she contributed greatly to his being what he was.”
 
Mariita: “Well, those women were people who understood him. They understood his sacrifice, and that afterwards they also had to be ready to suffer. Lots of people in Holy Week think only about the sufferings of Jesus, and they don’t think about the sufferings of so many Christs, of the millions of Christs that exist everywhere.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “Jesus made the start so we could continue the work. ‘Redeem’ is a word from antiquity that means to ransom a captive by means of a price. It has often been said that Christ’s death redeemed us, but it’s not true; no death redeems anyone from anything. It was his message that redeemed or liberated us, and his death made his message have an impact on the world. With his death he tried to give strength and bravery to the poor. He teaches us to fight for that same liberation that he died for as a man, as a brave man (for he didn’t die a coward).”
 
Maria: “I realize that Christ didn’t give himself a Holy Week of devotions and processions and religious ceremonies or any of that stuff. He died beaten and tortured, giving a message of liberation to the poor. Although they imprisoned him and they sentenced him and they killed him and they did everything to him, they really didn’t do anything. He triumphed over death.”
 
Padre Ernesto: “It was to love that Jesus delivered up the life he received from the Father; he is one with love itself. One day the whole life of the earth is going to die, like these fields that are dry. The earth will be a dead planet in space, and in it will be buried our bones. But all that part of humanity that, like Jesus, delivered up its life to love will be alive in the universe. Christ is only the first-born of a resurrected humanity.”
 
There is a prolonged silence, broken only by the lowing of the cows in the hot, dry fields.
 
Padre Ernesto: “Hasn’t anyone anything else to say?”
 
In his little book, The Sign and the Sacrifice, Rowan Williams describes the cross as “the sign of the transcendent freedom of the love of God.” God, in other words, is shown to be a god who is absolutely free to be who God is: always ready to love and to forgive, never exhausted by what we human beings do. God is always there, always capable of remaking the relationship we break again and again. On the cross, Jesus shows himself to be free from the vicious circle of retaliation by which we ordinarily live. And it is that dynamic of freedom that reveals him to be at the same time both all-powerful and completely vulnerable.
Love is like that. Love can risk everything, because in the end it can’t be defeated. Love is therefore the source of freedom. Love means not having to acquiesce to the world as it is, but to be emboldened to struggle for its—our—conversion. That is the message for today.
As Padre Ernesto concludes his Bible studies with his little flock, “The Gospel ends with a final word, Amen, which means a very strong ‘Yes,’ the assent of a community to Jesus’ invitation to love. That is our response to his word, to the one who, as John said at the beginning of his gospel, is the Word that has existed from the beginning.”
Jesus said, “I give you a new command: that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you must love one another.”
Amen. Yes!

21 March 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
 St. Michael’s Church
V Lent
 
“It is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” (John 12)
 
            “Vocation is the residue that is left when all the games of self-deception have ceased.”
            Vocation is a word that gets thrown around a lot in church, but like a lot of words that get frequent use, we don’t know much about what we mean by it. We associate it with some idea of being “called” (it’s Latin root, vocare, does mean to call), but exactly how we are to know by whom and for what is a bit unclear.
            And so, like a lot of words whose meaning we casually take for granted, it is Rowan Williams who takes the idea of vocation and opens the true complexity within. During the Wednesday evening Lenten contemplative service, we have been reading excerpts from his essay, “Vocation,” and it is there that one finds those haunting words with which I began: “Vocation is the residue that is left when all the games of self-deception have ceased.”
            Throughout this season, we have had as our theme “In the Looking Glass: Knowing Ourselves to Understand Others.” What we have been focused on is the idea that if we are to bridge any of the chasms that separate us from one another, we must first be able to see ourselves clearly—to recognize our prejudices, to know our motivations (both good and bad), to name our deepest fears. And Williams would have it that this need for such a brutal self-honesty lies at the heart of finding our own sense of calling, or purpose, in the world.
            The trouble, he suggests, is that we all tend to have a rather dramatic idea of being what it means to be called—a bit like a theatrical casting, where God has a very big script (and a rather good one at that), but is rather arbitrarily assigning each of us our part in it. Yet the role we get, is often not much to our liking. We may be quite sure that we would make an excellent Hamlet, if only we were not trapped in the obscurity of Second Gravedigger—or we may be cast in a very large role for which we feel ill-prepared, and long for the relative anonymity of a small walk-on role. Either way, we have a sense that God hasn’t got it quite right, and that it all feels a bit capricious.
            And so we feel the weight of having to try to be some one that deep down, we truly aren’t. And that is a heavy burden to carry—the weight of having to pretend to be something that is more—or less—than our true selves.
            It reminds me of time when I was a graduate student, working during vacations for a temp agency in New York City. One assignment was to a fledgling investment banking firm, that in fact had only two employees. They had rented a very beautiful office in the Chase Manhattan building overlooking the harbor, but in fact it was just the two of them, and me (the secretary). When it came time for important conference calls, they would ask me to get on the call and act like I was part of the professional team, to make the firm seem bigger than it was. But that was always tremendously awkward, since I didn’t talk the lingo, and didn’t really know anything about what they were up to. Trying to be someone you aren’t, isn’t easy.
            And so, the challenge is to do the hard work of becoming radically honest with ourselves, unmasking the external social structures and interior emotional needs that cast us into parts we are uncomfortable playing.
            It is, says Williams, all about learning to hear our own true name spoken amidst the cacophony of other voices that call out to us. God, you see, in the act of creating is also naming—giving to each of us an identity that is uniquely ours. And so in the first instance, our vocation is simply to exist, to respond to the call to be. But in the second instance, our vocation is to exist as ourselves, as who we uniquely are.
            And so, we are born into a web of social identities, from among which we try on a variety of possible roles. Like an adolescent teenager, we try out various ways of being our own person, looking for the one that fits.
             But what we too often fail to keep in mind, is that these roles are ultimately not just ways of being me, but also of responding to God’s call to mirror back to God the same love and joy and mercy and compassion with which God looks upon us. Vocation, in other words, is finding the particular way in which I myself am best able to reflect back the divine light that shines upon me.
            Which implies making a certain kind of commitment. If I am to live in the divine light as a musician, for instance, then I must be committed to a certain rhythm of study and practice. Or if I am to live as a spouse or a parent, then I am committed to a certain pattern of care and concern. Not that such life-long commitments claim to predict the future of who I will be—but they become the path along which I am continually moving, learning to be me.
            Think back to today’s gospel—over the last few weeks, we have seen Jesus struggling to come to terms with his own sense of identity. The question for him, as it is for us, is how to reflect back God’s presence in himself (or to “glorify God’s name,” as John puts it). In what we read today, Jesus clearly has come to some kind of realization of what that means, and of what is to come, and willing takes it upon himself, for as he says, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” There is a clarity in his sense of purpose, a “residue” (if you will) of all that his search in the wilderness for his true self has revealed, that now marks his vocation.
            We human beings have an extraordinary power for self-deception. Somehow, we can easily look reality in the face, and then without any compunction simply deny it, if it suits our need. We can likewise look at ourselves, and refuse to see the structures of privilege or bias that cast us in roles we are not suited to play, not if we are to be truly our self. This Lent has asked each of us to look at what we reflect back to God through the manner of our own life, and to unravel the games of self-deception that we play at others’ expense—to find the residue that is our own truest self. For it is only when those games of self-deception have ceased, that we will for the first time truly hear God calling our own true name, and be able to respond, “Here I am.” Amen.  
             

14 March 2021
Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch
St. Michael’s Church
4 Lent


In the name of God:  Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver, Mother and Father of us all. 
 
We're beginning somewhere else today--we're beginning where the gospel of John starts.  But listen carefully.  You might just hear it slant.
 
In the beginning.  In the beginning was Love, and Love was with God, and Love was God.  Love was in the beginning with God.  All things--all things--came into being with Love, and without Love not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in Love was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 
 
In the beginning was Love.  And with the Love light.
 
Oh, there was darkness.  Plenty of darkness.  No denying that.  Brother raising hand against brother.  Foremother enslaving and then pimping foremother.  Fratricide. Genocide.  Enslavement.   Flagrant abuse of power. People turning against their God.  People turning against one another. 
 
But still there was Love.  Still there was light.  Still there was God.
 
Remember--God so loved the world she made, the world she birthed, the world she gave to the future, she gave her Begotten One--Love made flesh--so that everyone who believes------
 
Believes?  What has belief to do with all of this?  That word makes no sense to me.  At least not in this context.  This story is  about Love--God's love. Love enfleshed in human form.  Love made visible.  Love made tangible.  A noun become a verb and a verb become enfleshed. 
 
What if we heard that verse--John 3: 16--a verse folks know so well--with just a little different slant?  What if we heard it like this: 
 
            God so loved the world she birthed, she gave her Begotten One, her        
            Beloved--Love made flesh--so that all who loved with God and with Love  
            made flesh would live as one with God; as one with Love; as one with one another.
 
What a wake-up call to a world of division, a world of violence, a world of death, a world enshrouded in darkness.    A Hail Mary pass from God.  Not God's first Hail Mary pass.  Not by any means.  God has tossed more Hail Mary passes that even Aaron Rodgers.  But this one is different.  This one really is a game changer.  A living, breathing, dying lesson in loving as God loves.  An invitation to come and see Love at work in the world.  An invitation to come and be a part of that work, a part of that love.
 
Not long ago, three black women--all Episcopal priests--launched a Hail Mary pass to the Episcopal Church when they wrote and spoke "Speaking of Freedom:  A Letter to the Church on Breaking Free of White Supremacy."  In a letter rich with uncomfortable truths and hard challenges, Kelly Brown Douglas, Stephanie Spellers, and Winnie Varghese offer a vision of church-- a vision of community that calls on those who would join in the work of love "to be...a beloved community marked by compassion, love and justice--one in which followers of Jesus proclaim good news to the poor, free the prisoners, help the blind regain their sight, and set the oppressed free."  That's living as one with God, one with Love, one with one another. 
 
The thing about Hail Mary passes is that they require at least three elements--excluding of course the ball:  an urgency to the moment, someone to throw the pass, someone to catch it and then run it into the endzone for a game changing touchdown. 
 
There is an urgency to the moment in which we now live:  400 plus years of enslavement and its aftermath; 500 plus years of genocide and oppression; a toxic white supremacy that ensnares us all; and the emerging consequences of a reckless disregard for all the species who share life on this planet.  We live in an era crying out for Hail Mary passes from God and from what Howard Thurman calls the Angelos of God--the human hands that do God's work of Love in this world. 
 
Sometimes our work is to toss a pass ourselves; sometimes our work is catch that pass, cradle the ball in our arms, and run like the dickens to the end zone.  Always our work is to keep our eyes open to the conditions on the field and to the passes that might come our way and the passes we might throw ourselves.
 
In her most recent book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of one such pass.  The story comes at the end of the book.  In the very last chapter.  A chapter entitled "The Heart is the Last Frontier."  Wilkerson closes her book with a story about an incident that happened to her just weeks after her mother died, a few months after Trump was elected, and a little over a year after her husband died.  You can imagine how fragile she was.
 
Then her basement flooded.  So she did what any of us would do if we lived in a land with basements that flooded--she called a plumber.  And therein lies the rub.  For the plumber that came to Wilkerson's door came wearing a Maga hat.  After establishing that Wilkerson was indeed the owner of the house (an insult black and brown women frequently experience), that plumber, sporting his MAGA hat grunted, "Where's the basement?"  Things went down hill from there until Wilkerson, nodding at her mother's wheelchair said, "My mother just died last week."  Then, in a last ditch effort to change things up, Wilkerson tossed that MAGA hatted plumber a Hail Mary pass.  "Is your mother still alive?"  To which the plumber replied in a very different voice, "No.  She died when I was young."  It was their shared experience of loss that finally bridged the gap between them and sent that plumber scurrying to find the source of the leak.  What changed things up?  Wilkerson's Hail Mary pass to that plumber's most human heart.  And that plumber's outstretched hands.
 
In the beginning.  In the beginning was Love, and Love was with God, and Love was God.  Love was in the beginning with God.  All things--all things--came into being with Love, and without Love not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in Love is life, and the life is the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. 
 
In the beginning is Love.  

​28 February 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Lent
 
 
Jesus began to teach his disciples
that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering … (Mark 8)
 
 
            When I was in divinity school at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, I made a point every term of going uptown to take at least one course at the Union Theological Seminary, a school known for its more liberal orientation.
            At the time, there was a young African American theologian named James Cone teaching at Union. He had made quite a name for himself by developing what he called A Black Theology of Liberation. His message was that Black Power, defined as black people asserting the dignity of their humanity denied by white supremacy, was the gospel in America. God, he said, always puts himself on the side of the poor and those who are robbed of the freedom to realize their potential: God didn’t side with Pharaoh, he was with Moses and the enslaved people of Israel. Jesus didn’t hang with Herod or Pilate, he aligned himself with those weighed down by the oppression they exercised on behalf of the Roman Empire. Defining supremacy simply as the power any group has to make the rules, Cone argued that white American churches preach a gospel based on the rule-making dominance of their membership, and that such oppressive power is antithetical to the liberative gospel of Jesus. God always liberates, Cone says, and never oppresses. And so, Cone concludes, God is not to be found in the white churches of America.
            Now, that’s a hard message. And I regret to say, that in my own seminary studies, I perfectly acted out exactly what he was talking about. You see, in the Episcopal Church, seminarians are held accountable to the so-called “seven canonical areas” of study (theology, history, bible, and so on), and what is included in those areas of study is defined by the church. Not surprisingly, black liberation theology is not on the list—at least not when I was in seminary. The powers that be had implicitly let it be known that we were supposed to be reading the Greek and Latin fathers, Anselm, Aquinas, the Caroline Divines, Luther, Bultmann, and Barth—a conformity enforced by the administration of the dreaded “General Ordination Exam” in the senior year of seminary.
            And so I dutifully took classes in which we read the required authors, passing Cone by entirely. I saw him in the hall from time to time, but I never attended one of his lectures, I never took a course from him, I never read his work. I followed the rules—maybe rules not explicitly stated, but we students knew what they were, and who had made them: bishops and Commissions on Ministry who had scant interest in anything but traditional Anglican theology. Certainly not anything called a “theology of liberation”!
            Not only did I ignore Cone in seminary, but I didn’t really encounter his work until just this Lent, when suddenly he came roaring out of my theological subconscious, where he had apparently become lodged despite my cultivated indifference, and then suddenly made himself known quite emphatically in my awareness. It’s been a revelation, in the full sense of the word.
            Suddenly, I found myself reading not only his book, A Black Theology of Liberation (now 40 years old), but also one of his most painful and personal books, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. In that book, Cone takes his theology a step further, observing that on the cross Jesus was, in effect, lynched by the Roman authorities, who used crucifixion in their day in the same way as white America used lynching during the Jim Crow era: to keep powerless people in their place through mocking and deadly intimidation.
And so in our own day the cross becomes God’s critique of power—white power—a critique of a system in which white people still set the rules for what constitutes brutality against a black person, and what does not. It’s as if, in today’s gospel, the text had read, “And Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must be lynched …”
And this, Cone says, is the place one has to look truly to find God in the American experience: “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together,” he writes, “until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy” (p. xv). That’s strong medicine, and bitter to swallow.
            But what Cone seems to be trying to push us to recognize, is that the American story is not one-dimensional, as we so often tell it. It is not all about the American dream—although it is also about that. It has many layers, including 400 years of black suffering at the hands of white taskmasters. And if we want to heal the wounds of that history, we have to be willing to complicate the telling of our national story. As Cone said to Bill Moyers in a televised interview, “The one thing I most wish for in America is that we could lose our innocence about ourselves.”
            Yesterday in the Saturday morning mini-retreat, we watched a TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story,” given by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie. As an African woman, she recalled how surprised she was when she came to the United States to go to college, and discovered how simplistic her roommate’s idea of Africa was. The roommate assumed Adichie would be poor, speak a native language, and listen to tribal music. Instead, the roommate discovered a middle-class English-speaker who loved Mariah Carey. Adichie’s story, it turned out, was so much more complex than her roommate had imagined.
            We might draw out of this episode, the conclusion that we owe it to one another, to recognize that our individual stories are not simple, but complex and multi-layered; and that the stereotypes we hold of people different from ourselves are, as Adichie put it, “not necessarily wrong, but incomplete.” Only with that awareness, can we really begin to understand empathetically someone different from ourselves.
            And there is a corollary to that point as well: the stories we tell about ourselves are also too simple. We are both more dignified than we give ourselves credit for, and we are capable of greater wrong than we imagine. Our imaginations remain locked in a simplistic reduction of who we truly are. And hence our Lenten theme, “In the Looking Glass: Knowing Ourselves in order to Understand Others,” symbolized by the mirror there on the altar.
            When we look at ourselves, we must learn to see a complex web of experiences and characteristics: the hurts and traumas we’ve endured, the hopes and ambitions we hold on to, the love we have to share, and the prejudices we hide deep within. Seeing ourselves in that light, we can then step back and make room for the complex web that makes up other people as well—especially those who are most inscrutable and even baffling to us.
            This, I think, is the biggest task before us in our day: to let the tensions of the current moment complicate our lives, by opening our eyes to the variety of stories that need to be told, both by us and by others. Cone tells a theological story that is very different from the one we are used to, but that doesn’t render it invalid. A Native American would tell yet another story, as would an immigrant, or someone we so often derisively dismiss as a “redneck.”
            But the good news is that all those stories, are held together as one story in the encompassing reality of God—not to be harmonized into a single metanarrative, but to be heard and registered in all of their extraordinary uniqueness. Perhaps that is one reading of what Jesus meant, when he said that we must lose our life in order to save it. If we are truly to know our own story, we must first hear and attend to the stories told by others. For we really only know ourselves, when we have come to know the other. And perhaps we only really understand the cross, when we can see in it a lynching tree. Amen.

​14 February 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Last Epiphany: Transfiguration
 
 
And he was transfigured before them,
and his clothes became dazzling white. (Mark 9)
 
           
            Think back, if you will, to Christmas for a moment. Do you ever pay close attention to the interior verses of the carols that otherwise are so familiar and just float right by us? From Hark! the herald angels sing, verse 2: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate deity.” Or from O come, all ye faithful, again verse 2: “God from God, Light from Light eternal, … only begotten Son of the Father.” Or, as it was all summarized in our opening hymn, Jesus is “God in man made manifest.”
            If you’re like me, you’re always a bit astounded at the claim those words make: the same God who created heaven and earth, is now born in human flesh. And if we’re truly honest with ourselves, I think we all come away from Christmas a bit mystified and maybe even nonplussed by that idea.
            Coming back to today’s gospel, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mount, I think we are given some clues about how we might glimpse the meaning of what those carols say a bit better. We’ve talked before about how the transfiguration is not some exterior phenomenon that is laid upon Jesus, but that it’s really more of a turning-inside-out, a revealing of what was hidden beneath the surface all along. As his appearance turns from the ordinary human form, to a state of brilliant light, and then back again, we see both the human and divine natures that are within him.
            But here is the deeper thing to grasp: the point of Jesus’ transfiguration is not that he is so different from us, but rather that we are so like him, except that the fusion of the divine and human in him is utterly uninhibited. In the transfigured Jesus, we are meant to be reminded of the image and likeness of God in which we are created—a beauty and brilliance that has become masked under the tarnish of our faults and frailty, but which is still there to be revealed, if only we could turn ourselves inside out.
            I am very grateful to be part of a colleague group where we share some very profound spiritual reflection with one another. Recently, the discussion was led by Roland McGregor, a retired Methodist minister. In a poem entitled, “How Is It with My Soul?”, Roland wrote:
 
            How is it with my soul, my God touching?
            If I could just dig deep enough,
            If I could toss dross left and right,
            Would I come to my beginning and my end?
            Would I come to the Alpha and the Omega?
 
Commenting on the poem, he observed that, “I notice that coming up in me is something that is not of me. God and I are a mix, I am not just a lone individual. Where my interior is hollow, it is filled by God. The emptiness of me is filled with the fullness of God.”
            Let me see if I can help open those words up a bit. Sit back, focus your attention, and take a moment to call to mind the consciousness you have at this very moment, of where you are located, what it is that you are doing, of what you are hearing.
            Now let your consciousness step behind the present moment, to become aware of all that you bring to it. The events of this past week. Your life circumstance: work, family, home, health.
            And now take a further step back, and let your consciousness become aware of what led you to those circumstances. Your childhood, parents, school, friends, teachers.
            And now take still a further step back, and let yourself be aware of your earliest memories as a child. What first made you aware of yourself?
            And now, take yet another step back, and imagine yourself as an infant even before you became fully aware of yourself as a person.
            And now, going back still further, imagine yourself in your mother’s womb, a bundle of interconnected cells and tissue, not yet fully formed into a human being.
            Do you begin to feel yourself moving closer and closer toward the point at which the divine gift of life brought you into being, the very beginning of being you, the alpha point of your existence?
            And suppose we were to go the other way, and rather than moving backward in our memory, to imagine what is our destiny? Can you imagine yourself in your final moments, conscious in some way of breath leaving your body, as you hand your life back to the divine sources from which it came? There is the omega point of your physical existence.
            Roland’s poem, I think, wants to make us aware of that underlying continuity of divine presence that lies deep within us, or as Paul put it in our reading from Second Corinthians, the presence of the one who said, “Let light shine out of the darkness,” and who has shone that light into our hearts, mixing with our own humanity and sometimes rising to the surface—as it does in a particularly intense way in Jesus’ own transfiguration. So as I said, it is not that Jesus is so utterly different from us, but rather that he is more like the human being we are meant to be than we are ourselves. He is, you might say paradoxically, more human than we are. That is what I think Roland’s poem tries to describe, welling up from deep within.
            In the coming season of Lent, we are (as I mentioned last week) proposing as a theme “In the looking glass: knowing ourselves to understand others.” As we enter into the various opportunities we will have to explore that theme together, one thought that I hope you will keep in mind is that among the lessons we have to learn about ourselves, is to be aware of the divine presence that is within us. For if we see that clearly enough by turning a looking glass on ourselves, then we also become better able to see it in others. The transfiguration, you might say, is God holding a mirror up to humanity, and the human being infused with God’s presence is the image we see. And so this might be a season in which you see both yourself, and your fellow human being, as also transfigured by the divine presence.
            And with that image before us, one can only wonder what then might be our approach to overcoming the divisions and animosity which currently so beset us. Amen.            

​7 February 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
V Epiphany
 
“I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some” (I Cor. 9)
 
            I’ve always wondered what Paul meant when he wrote that line, “I have become all things to all people.” It seems to run so contrary to our usual attitude that that is exactly what we should not do. Trying to be all things to all people will only frustrate us and disappoint everyone else.
            But I wonder if in the current day, we might not take an important hint from Paul about what is in fact necessary if we are to reach across the divides that separate us as a people—what might be called, according to the old adage, putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I, at least, feel a huge gap in myself in trying to understand the sense of alienation and anger that is said to drive the religious right. Maybe you do too, or maybe it’s some other religious or political grouping that you don’t get. But I would really like to understand what it is that drives that anger, because truth be told, I too find myself sometimes thinking (as I drive along the urban wasteland of Coors Boulevard), how have we managed to create a world such as this, that at some level we don’t really wish to inhabit?
            So when I picked up last Sunday’s NY Times, and saw an article titled “How to Reason With Unreasonable People,” I thought, “Oh good. Here’s a practical piece that will help me to have a productive conversation with someone who thinks very differently from myself.” It seemed like a potentially positive and welcome way forward.
            Except that, the title should have already been a give-away, that this wasn’t really about having a two-way conversation. If I start from the attitude that I’m reasonable, and the other person who is … a liberal, a conservative (you fill in the blank), is unreasonable, well you’ve already undercut the premise of trying to step into their shoes. You’ll actually be trying to get them to step into yours.
            At any rate, the article started out by advising against the impulse of trying to change someone’s mind by arguing for why I’m right and they’re wrong. OK. So far so good. Then the article moved on to suggesting instead what it called “motivational interviewing,” that is, instead of trying to talk someone into changing, try to help them discover a motivation to change, by asking open-ended questions that hold up a mirror to them so that they can see the inconsistencies of their own thought more clearly. So, for example, to a person opposed to receiving the Covid vaccine, rather than arguing for vaccines’ effectiveness, pose the question of how he or she would propose stopping the pandemic instead. And then perhaps ask the question of whether vaccines have any place in that strategy. You get the drift.
            The article carried with it a drawing of one person holding up a mirror for the other person to see himself in, which at first seems like an attractive image. But on closer inspection, what stands out is that the person holding the mirror (and asking the questions), doesn’t turn it on himself, only on the other person. There is still built in to the conversation a self-righteous assumption of being right.
            The harder strategy—and the one which I think Paul had in mind in trying to become all things to all people—is to reckon with the limitations and distortions of our own assumptions first, in order to clear the ground, for finding common ground. I’ve been struck, for instance, by the revulsion with which many of my liberal Episcopal friends view the Christian nationalist movement, forgetting that it is our own church that owns and operates the self-proclaimed “National Cathedral” in Washington—where we are all too eager and willing to put ourselves forth as the referee of what an appropriate national religious life should look like. And I find it deeply instructive that at one point, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (our church) seriously considered dropping the words “Protestant” and “Episcopal” from its name, so that it would have been simply been known as “The Church” in the United States of America. If that isn’t hubristic, I don’t know what is!
            So with Lent fast approaching (Ash Wednesday is only 10 days away!), I want to propose that we as a parish adopt as our Lenten theme, “In the looking glass: knowing ourselves to understand others.” Rather than focusing this year on penitence for things done wrong, it might be more helpful to focus on increasing our self-awareness of what lies behind those shortcomings. We might, in other words, let God do some “motivational interviewing” of us. What shapes our attitude toward other people, especially toward those whom we so easily dismiss as “deplorable”? What assumptions of privilege and entitlement do we each carry into our social interactions? What blocks us from being able to imagine the lived reality of other people? In short, what limits our ability to find empathy in ourselves, for people different from us?
            At the annual meeting, I spoke of building bridges to people outside of our personal worldview and social realm, which seems to me to be the essential challenge of our day. But before we can authentically begin to build those bridges, we first need to have a brutally honest, clear-eyed understanding of ourselves.
            So be thinking about what you want to learn about yourself in the days to come. What needs unpacking in the structure of your life? What blocks you from true relationship with other people—whether it’s a son, daughter, spouse, neighbor, immigrant, colleague, radical, conservative … the list goes on.
            Somehow, we have to find the humility of spirit that will allow us to ask these hard questions of ourselves, to become like Paul willing to become all things to all people, meeting them where they’re really at, rather than where we think they ought to be. You might even say, that is precisely what Jesus did, and does, for us. Amen.
 

​24 January 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Annual Meeting
 
“For God alone my soul in silence waits.” (Ps. 62)
 
            Many of us woke up Thursday morning with a lightness in our step that had not been there for a very long time. It was as if the inaugural events of the previous day had lifted from our shoulders a great burden that had been weighing us down even more than we were consciously aware.
            Reaching this milestone put me in a reflective mood about all that we have been through together as a parish over the last five and a half years. Looking back as pastor of this congregation, it really amazes me how much we have had to respond to as a community, both out of a sense of social responsibility but also to preserve our own emotional well-being.
            There were the victims of mass shootings, for whom we have tolled bells, held concerts, and kept silence. The very first month after I came, the attack at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church. Then the Pulse Night Club. The Clovis Library. Sutherland Baptist Church. A concert in Las Vegas. A Walmart in El Paso.
            And there also came the busloads of immigrant families whom we readily met, offering shelter, food, medical care, transportation, and a kind and welcoming word. They were the lucky ones – we also had to listen in horror on the radio to the cries of the children who had been separated from their parents at the border, put by our own government like beasts into cages.
            And then there were the almost daily assaults from our national leadership on the basic values of human society— values such as truth, decency, and integrity. How often from this pulpit I and other preachers have had to state our resistance as Christian people to such moral degradation, reasserting our core belief in the inalienable dignity of the human person.
            And then came the pandemic, and we as a congregation have done our best to rise to the occasion both by observing the necessary public health restraints, and by working hard to find creative ways of remaining connected and in communion with one another. Above all, week by week, we’ve gradually figured out how to do worship online—believe me, with a lot of trial and error—and overcoming a host of technological challenges along the way.
            Do you remember for instance our first virtual choir, which sang “Draw the Circle Wide,” what might be called St. Michael’s theme song? Or the Sunday we solemnly observed the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in “a service of loss, mourning, and resilience”? Or the contemplative evening services during Advent? Or the online Christmas pageant, with a different Mary in every scene, and the angel Gabriel caught on mute? What a year it has been!  
            So there have certainly been some hard times, these last several years, and some great things have happened too. I would have to say that navigating these troubled waters while trying to keep us together has been a pastoral challenge unlike any other I’ve ever known. Yet by the grace of God even in the midst of it all, we have found energy and strength and resilience amongst ourselves.
            Scores of volunteers turned out to help with the immigration ministry. In Sunday forums and online commentaries, we turned to such prophetic voices as Jeremiah, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Frederick Douglas, and the Martyrs of Memphis, to find mutual strength and encouragement from their words and example. Parishioners repeatedly stepped up to make calls on those at home. The staff too has put the shoulder to the wheel to keep our worship life active not just weekly, but on a daily basis. Financial support from you has remained amazingly steady. And we have turned wherever we could to find musical and liturgical resources to give voice to our pain, our fear, and our hope.
            Do you remember for instance what we did after the shocking news of the Pulse Night Club shooting? While we were still struggling to figure out an appropriate response, in through the door of the church office walked a young woman from Bosque School, who said she wanted to put together a memorial concert, and asked if we would consider hosting it. “Yes! Yes!” we replied. And a few nights later a pick-up orchestra of students, teachers, and friends played their hearts out on Barber’s Adagio for Strings before a packed audience, invoking Leonard Bernstein’s famous words after the assassination of JFK, that “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” And indeed they did.
            So now here we are, having finally crossed over the great sea of anxiety and despair of the last four years, and yet even here on this further shore many of these dangers still lurk. The pandemic is far from over. Violence is certain to erupt yet again. The border is still an unresolved morass of human misery.
            So like the Israelites after they had crossed through the Red Sea, we have to ask, “Now what?”
            Well, you may remember that a year ago at the Annual Meeting, we talked about how if the mainline church is to survive, it has to change, and change radically. We were going to spend this year thinking about and studying that challenge, but then life happened as what used to be called “the novel coronavirus” first hit. And the kind of change we might have only discussed hypothetically, began to happen all on its own.
            Pushed out of our comfort zone, wae’re discovering that worship is becoming more relational, and less transactional. The intimacy of small groups is overtaking the anonymity of large gatherings as our primary way of gathering. The experimental rather than the customary is becoming a way of life. The dynamism of the local congregation is re-emerging from under the inertia of centralized church structures. In short, after the pandemic, church will never again be the same. There will be no normal to go back to, when Covid is finally over. Who we are as a community of faith, and the shape of our spiritual lives, will have changed irrevocably.
            And in this brave new world, I wonder if what we will most need is what was so on display in Washington this week: a sense of common purpose that moves beyond the anger, the bitterness, and the resentment of these past several years. I heard it in the voice of Amanda Gorman, whose inaugural poem “The Hills We Climb” said that “If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all of the bridges we’ve made.”
            Perhaps the task of our time is for all of us again to become bridge builders. Bridge builders to those who are unlike us. Bridge builders to the next generation. Bridge builders to a new church just beginning to emerge. Bridge builders to the future.
            So I wonder if it isn’t time for us as a parish to commit ourselves this year to engaging in some deep thought and reflection on what the post-Covid church and world are going to look like. Today’s psalm gives us encouragement to do so: like many psalms, it comes out of a place of deep anguish. But unlike the psalms of lament, that struggle to rise out of their despair, Psalm 62 abounds with a quiet confidence in the future: “For God alone my soul in silence waits.” And just in case we might miss it, the psalm reminds us that God has spoken once, but twice have we heard it: that the unifying force in creation is the steadfastness of God’s love. It doesn’t wane, it doesn’t waver, it doesn’t slip away.
            And so it is in that confidence that we can entertain a future very different from the present, not with a sense of alarm and resistance, but with a spirit of anticipation and wonder. A future where bridges will have been built where now there are only chasms; where links will have been forged where now there is only isolation; where connections will have been created where now there is only alienation. The future is ours to build.
            As Amanda Gorman so beautifully finished her poem, “there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.” Amen.