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Second Sunday of Lent, 28 February 2021: Pastor Joe Britton, preaching

2/28/2021

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​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.
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Last Sunday of the Epiphany: The Transfiguration, 14 February 2021, Pastor Joe Britton, preaching

2/14/2021

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​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.            
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Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 7, 2021: Pastor Joe Britton, preaching

2/7/2021

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​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.
 
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