​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.
  

​10 January 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Baptism of Christ
 
“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee
and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” (Mark 1)
 
            After the events of this week, I’m tempted to preach today on the Lord’s Prayer. That would be a nice easy dodge—but it’s not the way we as a congregation cope with things. We try to take on the world around us as it is, look it square in the face, and deal with it. So in that spirit, here goes.
            When I was a chaplain intern at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City, I had as a supervisor a salty old priest named Chaplain Hart. His greatest passion in life was the Metropolitan Opera, and he went almost every night of the season. He was also an unrepentant New Deal Democrat, so the morning after Ronald Reagan was elected president, he fumed in our daily staff briefing, “I never thought I’d live to see the day, when a second rate movie actor, would hold the same office as Franklin … Delano … Roosevelt!”
            Now, whatever your take on Reagan may be, I think that after the events of this past week, we all know the feeling of wanting to start a sentence with those same words, “I never thought I’d live to see the day …”
            And if you’re like me, those words quickly flow into another related sentiment, “I just can’t believe it.”
            We commonly use those two phrases when something truly shocking or horrifying happens, as a way to express that we just don’t know how to take it all in, or how to make sense of it. But if you think about it, they are also phrases we use when something truly wonderful and glorious happens. We might say, “I never thought I’d live to see the day when I won the lottery. I just can’t believe it” (if such a thing ever happened!).
            Think back, for example, to the story of Jesus’ birth, which we have just finished recounting in the Advent and Christmas season. I think you can feel that kind of speechless amazement running all the way through it: Mary hearing the angel’s message, Joseph and his troubling dreams, the shepherds and the choir of angels, or even the aged Simeon when Jesus is presented in the temple—none of them thought they would live to see the day of the messiah, nor can they quite believe what they are told.
            And the fact that we use such similar words to describe our reaction both to what is truly horrifying, and to what is truly wonderful, is a convergence we ought to pay close attention to. For it is perhaps a sign that most of the time, we inhabit a pretty narrow band of human emotion. We don’t really want to know about the worst that is happening around us, and we really are a bit afraid of anything that seems too good to be true. As sentient creatures, we are programmed to seek the middle ground of equilibrium, and it keeps us stifled in a haze of denial. Yet the world is both much more violent, and more splendid, than we usually allow ourselves to be aware of. As David Brooks observed in a piece on the events of this week, “Human beings exist at moral dimensions both too lofty and more savage than the contemporary American mind normally considers.” (“This is when the fever breaks,” New York Times, 7 January 2021).
            Weeks like this past one, however, have a way of lifting the veil off of human affairs, and they force us to confront the fact that much more is at stake, even on a daily basis, than our own coveted balance and tranquility. This week has reminded us that the peace which we so crave, is ultimately achieved only at the price of naming and then harnessing the energies of our highest principles, in order to resist the forces that strike against them. This was a week when ideals like “democracy” and “freedom” could not be taken for granted, but had to be actively defended, and such a week should remind us that our lives cannot simply be lived on a quiet plain, but that we must seek both the highest peaks and endure the darkest valleys. Life, to be lived at its fullest, has to embrace the whole. And values, if they are to be meaningful, have to be protected.
            Unfortunately, one result of our natural reticence to embrace the whole range of human experience is that it encourages us to lapse into a dichotomous way of thinking, whose unacknowledged purpose is to preserve our own sense of moral stasis. Everything is seen in binary terms: You’re wrong, and I’m right. You’re prejudiced, and I’m not. You’re elitist, and I’m ordinary. You’re uneducated, and I am. You’re a socialist, and I’m an American. On and on it goes, back and forth.
            But this is where today’s gospel comes into play. Think back to the story we heard: Jesus comes to the River Jordan, seeking to be baptized by John the Baptist who is preaching repentance. This is certainly rather odd, for Jesus would seem to be, among all others, the only one who has no need of such repentance. And so the puzzling question at the heart of this episode always comes up: Why? Why does Jesus want to be baptized, when he would seem to have no need of it?
            In this particular week, when we have been made conscious of both the loftiest aspirations and the most savage resentments that are both a part of our human nature, Jesus in his baptism identifies himself--with all of it. By stepping into the waters of the Jordan, he steps into the messiness of what it means to be human, along with everyone else. The meaning of his baptism, you might say, is that there is no part of being human which cannot and will not be touched by his presence. His baptism sets the context for the rest of his ministry: nothing and no one will be off limits.
            In David Brooks’ article, he went on to say, “This week wasn’t just an atrocity, it was a glimpse into an atavistic [or primitive] nativism that always threatens to grip the American soul.” It’s the same spirit, for instance, that had no qualms about the systematic attempt to exterminate the Native Americans; it’s the same spirit that self-righteously lynched African Americans with impunity; it’s the same spirit that only recently felt no compunction about separating immigrant children from their desperate parents at our borders.
            But there was another spirit at play this week as well. It was a spirit whose voice came through the words of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was attacked ten years ago this week by a gunman outside an Arizona supermarket. Reflecting back on that event, she wrote, “All my life, I’ve studied President Lincoln. In the summer of 1862, just a few months after a cold and desperate wartime winter when his young son Willie died, and a few weeks before he gave the original Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to a faltering young cadet, Quintin Campbell. ‘Adhere to your purpose [he said] and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life. Take the advice of a friend, who, though he never saw you, deeply sympathizes with you, and stick to your purpose’” (“10 Years Ago, a Gunman Tried to Silence Me,” New York Times, 8 January 2021).
            I think that, in effect, is the message that now comes to us through the baptism of Jesus: let your life take stock of and engage with everything, both the best and the worst of human nature. Then decide how you will stand firm for what is right; stick to your purpose; and your steadfastness will get you through. Amen.