Tintinnabulation

September 11th and Life: A Journey of and for Forgiveness

2011-09-10T18:42:00.001-07:00

To behonest, I don’t really want to talk about it. I never really do. There are some things that find a way to lodge into those recesses and thenrest very comfortably there. Theyhide in the shadows and we’re grateful for it, not wanting to bring them outfor company. But we still knowthey’re there – together, probably, all sitting together, a party of thoughtswe wish we didn’t have, of memories we not only want to forget but wish neverexisted in the first place.

I botherto mention this because we all have this, we all host this unwanted party ofuninvited guests, with those things that haunt us. I’d hazard that, for the vast majority of us, September 11and all that’s associated with it occupies such a space for you. I know it does for me.

I hadprayed – and I wasn’t that much of the praying type at that point – but I hadprayed for good weather. So when Iwoke up that morning, having prayed so hard that on this particular morning,the skies would be clear and no one would have a weather-related excuse forstaying home from the polls, the first thing I did was to check the skies. When I peered out the bars of my window– the sun was only just about to come out – I saw no sign of clouds. And after I was dressed – very quicklythat day – and the day had really begun, I checked again. The sun was up at 6:32 that day, and we’dalready opened campaign headquarters. And the sky – you remember it, don’t you? – the sky couldn’t have beenmore gorgeous. It was so beautifulthat I remember going out to the front yard and just staring at the clarity ofthat blue, blue sky. And I said agrateful prayer right then.

Many ofus have never been able to see such a clear sky without a little bit of dread,without remembering that particular blue sky and how so much beauty could be sohorribly sullied by the very worst of intentions. To this day I still get angryabout this loss. Which seemstrite, doesn’t it? Because muchworse was lost that morning, that day, of course. Lives, so many lives, sanity, the semblance of decentforeign policy, resistance to the forces that seek war, the ability to turnaway and catch ourselves again – so much of that was lost.

My cousinand I were busy that day. We hadhuge responsibilities – we’d taken Monday and Tuesday – you remember how it wasa Tuesday, right? – we’d taken those days off. Because Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was primary day – do youremember that? – and she and I had hordes of campaign workers to manage as weran my aunt’s campaign. Peoplestarting trickling into the office (based at my grandfather’s house) by 6:45,because the polls were open by then, and our day took off as we braced ourselvesfor the morning rush.

At 7 am,the worst things I could imagine were that a.) our workers wouldn’t show up fortheir shifts and b.) our voters wouldn’t come to the polls. As long as my cousin and I couldmitigate those two “worst-case” scenarios, everything would be fine.

When Idare to pull out this horrible memory – and I rarely do, I promise you – thefirst feeling I get isn’t sadness, it’s not dread, it’s not anything manypeople might expect from the outside. No, the prevailing feeling I get is of guilt. You see, I worked downtown. We had offices at 40 Wall Street and 3 World FinancialCenter – I balanced the majority of my work time between the two. We had clients – lots of them – inthose towers, and I spent a lot of my life there. I had a relationship with people in those buildings, onthose fateful floors, and even with the buildings themselves. Much like other lower-Manhattandwellers, those towers were my guideposts, and when the confusing, winding,halting streets did me and my plans in, I could always find my way with thehelp of those towers. When my2-year-old niece looks up at the sun or the moon, she smiles and greets them asfriends, saying “hi, sun!” or “hi, moon!” Those towers, too, were my friends, and they helped me when I glanced upand saw them.

But Iwasn’t there. I was spared thetrauma of the evacuation, of the sights (at least in person), of the smells, ofthe soot and ash, the confusion. My people, my closest friends, my coworkers – they all had to deal withit.

However, Ihad already decided that the worst things that could happen were that a.) theworkers wouldn’t show and b.) the voters wouldn’t vote, and I resolved todedicate myself to those two thoughts and to nothing else that day.

What thismeans is that as those workers crowded in to my grandfather’s living roomwanting to see the latest news, I turned off the television. Gently….but still. Or when those voters didn’t want toleave their houses, I had already prepped my workers with a speech remindingthem “not to let the terrorists win” and that “there isn’t anything moreAmerican than to vote”. Meanwhile,I would not think about downtown and my people. I could not.

It turnsout that I am brilliant in crisis. My cousin, too. We stayfocused, we rally people, we bring them to a place of action and dedication andwe do not let anyone fall.

Oh God,this had, has a cost. I still paythe price for how I handled that day. As I turned into a more compassionate person, I learned how I shouldhave been more immediately concerned for people’s lives. I was – I got there and obsessed overthat mourning, trust me – but it didn’t begin until – you’ve guessed it – afterthe sun had set – at 7:32 that evening – and the polls had closed 28 minuteslater, and I had started answering the calls and learning about who was ok andwho was missing and I had no space, no strength left to hear it.

September11, 2001 taught me something about what I was capable of, and not only was Iunimpressed, but I couldn’t forgive myself for it. And it is from this macabre and dreary place, on thisparticular day, that I encounter the readings for today. It’s a coincidence, really, that thetexts that are appointed for the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost in Year A (withone exception – we changed the first reading to Lamentations) would just so happen to be about – get this –forgiveness.

And I’m aplanner, so looking ahead months ago, I saw these texts and was sure that Iwould preach to you about forgiveness, and how hard it is, and how we arecalled to forgive, and how Jesus forgives, and how forgiveness isbeautiful. But as the dayapproached, I just couldn’t figure out how to ask you to forgive the ones whocaused so much harm. There was atime when I obsessed over their lives, trying to cull out those stories thatcould show me what would turn a beautifully created being into the kind ofcreature that could cause so much harm. I wanted to find that turn that would help me to forgive them morereadily because I thought, “well, that’s what Christians do.” That moment, that point in the story,well…it never came. At least ithasn’t yet.

But then(thankfully) I learned something different about my faith, and about God, andabout grace, and about forgiveness. It was in the course of a very difficult moment in my own life when Iapproached my theology professor, Serene Jones, and asked her how forgivenessworks. “How can I forgive whenforgiveness seems impossible?” I asked. And Serene (so aptly named) gave me perhaps the greatest give I’ve everreceived, when she told me that we do not force forgiveness. It just comes. Forgiveness, impossible forgiveness,that is, is not our work. It is anact of grace. And grace comes fromGod. So if I hadn’t found thestrength to forgive, it just wasn’t the time for that just yet. God has it, God would have it, Godwould handle it, and the best I could do was to acknowledge that inprayer.

Thesecases of impossible forgiveness for disembodied enemies we can only personifyas constructs within our vivid but imperfect imaginations, those are cases inwhich God has work that God is doing, has done, and will do. But there is a different kind offorgiveness in which we play a much more active role. And that is the act of forgiving ourselves. The Christian story, the Christianpromise is of forgiveness. Throughthe saving grace of God made known to us in the life, death, and resurrectionof Jesus Christ, forgiveness is ours, and that is a hard, fast and true promisefor which I am insanely grateful. I love this promise, and I believe it. But that does not mean that I have figured out just how toforgive myself for some of my moreegregious sins. This is internalwork, work with which God has, thankfully, helped me.

Our lives are, very much journeys of and for forgiveness. And this is hard – it is so veryhard. The thoughts and storiesthat accompany the impulse to seek – or grant – forgiveness are the very oneswe wish to lock away. They’re thatraucous party in our brains we wish someone would just shut down. But they’re there, and they matter, andthey shape who we are. And this isthe stuff that buoys the lingering effects of trauma and it all comes up on aday like today.

All ofus, in our own ways, share in this story. I told mine, and I had the privilege and platform to share it on thistenth anniversary. Many others donot. And it’s not an easy thing,is it? Not just because of thedifficulty we might have in accessing those memories, but also because,culturally, we have this bizarre (and egregious) way of ranking peoples’stories, don’t we? Do you knowwhat I mean? I’ve watched (andshared in, to some degree) how we check to see someone’s proximity to the sitethat day, the number of people they lost (and their degree of closeness tothose people), the impact calculation for the aftermath disruption, etc. Thishappens, yes.

But thetruth is, all of the stories matter. Yours matters. You weren’teven born in 2001? It stillmatters, as do you. Becausehowever you enter into the September 11, 2001 narrative, you are stillengrafted into its effects. It’swhy we commemorate it. There wasindescribable, inexcusable loss that day. People died who deserve to be alive today. There are families that will never be the same. And no matter to what degree that’strue for us, you and I still share in that loss.

Andwhat’s curious about this is that your story, my story, and every other untoldstory of the September 11 narrative is also engrafted into that Christian storyI told you about. The one that opensand concludes with love. The onethat draws us ahead on the road we all travel, the one of, and for,forgiveness. The one that Godknows, and sees, and gifts, and blesses.

The massis all about these stories – the ones that are particular to us, and the one inwhich we all share, the one that culminates at the table to which we are allinvited to experience that forgiveness firsthand. Because, in the end, what matters for us, and for the oneswe mourn today, is just that. God’s forgiveness surrounds us. God’s salvation is ours, becomes ours, through Jesus Christ. In the midst of the trauma, from thebeginnings to the very end of time, we trust and know that God’s grace prevails– giving and forgiving all along the way. May we never forget that truth.

Kaji R. Spellman

September 11, 2011

Saint Peter's Church

In the City of New York

Lamentations 1:1-4, Psalm 103:1–13, Romans 14:1–12,Saint Matthew 18:21–35

Love as Currency

2011-09-10T18:39:00.001-07:00

I think that there is no time when I feel moreconstrained by the limits of language, particularly of the English language,than when I preach on love. Ifyou’ve been around this summer, then you’ve heard us talking about variousaspects of love – the texts call for it – and each time, I wonder if peoplewalk away even getting what I’m talking about. Because our word “love” is a big word that encompasses somuch, so much that is difficult to describe, so much that a number of voicesand interests have tried to master and shape. Our word “love” is a noun and verb, a “thing” that’s hard toidentify and a set of actions that we may or may not agree on. “Love” can describe anything from thecare of a loving parent to the infatuation of romance, and you know how itshows up in songs. Love is allover the place.

And then, we introduce the “love” that comes up inchurch, the love that Jesus commands us to give, the love that the disciplesand apostles and the followers – lovers – of Christ sought to create communityaround. And it’s different. It’s not the love of biological family,of mother to son, of brother to sister. It’s not the love between spouses or romantic partners. This love is something different.

The Greeks are lucky (or just more sophisticated)with this because they have distinct words for all of this. And this part of the Bible, you know,was written in…Greek. So theconfusion we might all feel inconfounding Christ-love with brotherly-love or erotic-love is not a confusionthe early church would’ve experienced. No, because when they talk about love (their word is agape/αγάπη) they arereferring to something specific and different.

This love – agape – is perhaps easiest understood asbeing God’s primary act and expression. Love is what created the world and everything in it – you, me, ourancestors, our descendants. Loveis what redeems the world through the saving work of Christ. Love is what looks at brokenness andrepairs. Love is what heals. Love is unconditional, unending,ultimate truth, the beginning and the end. Love is when thereis nothing else.

God is love. And when you see love in this way, this self-giving, all encompassing,non-preferential love, you see that, in the church, when we use the word “love”(at least as a noun) we can almost always interchange it with the name“God.” God heals. God is the unconditional, ultimate,unending truth, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. God iswhen there is nothing else.

So keep this in mind when you hear the apostle Paultalk about love. He says “owe noone anything; except to love one another”. And this is a curious statement, already, perhaps, confusingin its implications without confusing Christ-love with something else. Because when we think about self-givinglove, we think of it as a free gift, right? It’s something to give without a sense of ownership or,worse yet, debt.

But Paul knows the implications ofindebtedness. He knows that whenwe owe someone something, we give them power over us. I’m sorry to ask this of you, but take just a moment tothink of your own debtors, the people to whom you owe something. There are your financial debts – andfor some of us, these are crippling. When we owe someone money, whether it’s rent or mortgage or a studentloan or a friend or family member who has given us money they’re expecting back(perhaps with interest) these people hold power in our lives. I have a friend whose in-laws loanedhim some money to get started in life. They helped them buy their first house. Sometimes this goes well, but in this case, it didn’t,because all of a sudden, the in-laws had new access to this young couple. They felt free to offer opinions thatturned into requirements, to show up whenever they wanted at the house they hadsomewhat paid for. They began tomake demands that they never made before they had this power.

We’ve all seen this, seen the ways that debts allowa new form of access that lead to new demands, new expectations in ourlives.

Paul had seen this, too. And so when he writes to the Christians in Rome, at thattime, a powerless people huddled in the center of power and seeking Christ, hehad concerns. What might corruptthe beauty of this budding group of Christ-lovers? Paul knew that owing others meant that others could expectthings from them, calling in their due. And, as the people tried to service their debts, who, exactly would beLord? Who would hold the greatestpower in their lives? Would theyfind themselves running around, taking work that, ethically, they couldn’tstomach? Would they owe so muchthat they had nothing left to give to the poor? Would they allow their overlords influence and access to theworkings of this new and growing church, so that, in practical terms, it wouldno longer be clear who the head of the church (who should be Jesus Christ) was? As the church grew into an imperially sanctioned power a few generationslater, these concerns would become ever more acute, and as the world’s largestreligion today (Christians make up about a third of the world’s population), itstill is. Because the size, thegrowth, the power: to whom do weowe these things?

Well, to the degree that the answer is God, then,Paul says, we have something to talk about. If, as we claim in the church, if God is the source of allthat is good and holy and beautiful, if all in which we take true delight comesfrom the living God, then it would seem logical that it is to God we owe our greatest debt. And, of course, God could call in this debt – it’s enormous,demanding quite a bit from us. AndGod does. But not in the way manywould have us think.

It’s not that God requires a certain amount of ourmoney every day, or enforces a certain set of rules we have to follow. No. Jesus commands and teaches us differently. What God requires – the way to respondto this indebtedness, if you will, is to share in what God already gives. It is to love.

All good things come from God, who is love. The only appropriate response to love is…to love. There is no other way. To love in the self-giving,non-preferential, unconditional kind of way – this is how we respond. To place this love first – beforeanything else in our lives, anything –this is how we give. It’s not asmall gift, it’s not quaint or cute. It’s indescribably enormous – it’s all-encompassing. This is a love that demands all – allof ourselves, all that we have, all that we are. It is a love that cannot be sequestered to church-time or tohappy moods – it seeps into our choices at work, at home, in the streets, onthe subway, in the secret thoughts of our minds. This love is everywhere.

But when we give it, when we give in to its power,we can take great delight in the truth that not only is this love everywhere,it is everything. And from there, all else just fallsinto place. Because in love, ourgreatest – in fact, our only – real need is met, now and forevermore. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman

September 4, 2011

Saint Peter's Church

In the City of New York

Owe no one anything, except to love one another…

-Romans13:8

Origins of Being

2011-09-10T18:37:00.001-07:00

Where are you from? When we meet people, it’s one of the first questions weask. Our place of origin plays sodeeply into the people we become; roots and character and being – whether welike it or not – give us the clay our stories and characters mold us into.

For some of us, origins and beginnings are revered,elevated to heights beyond which they ever stood. These are those who reference the “good ‘ole days”; I hearabout them a lot in the church. This is the church that once had “golden days” of full pews and Sundayschools brimming with perfectly behaved little children eager to learn thegospel. Never mind that in such achurch someone like me could never serve openly as a leader and probablycouldn’t be ordained – those golden days were the days, man!

Others of us resist our histories, wanting – oftenfor very good reason – to turn our backs on the past. In these cases, we think that past just needs to rest there– in the past. Origins andbeginnings, especially to those who know the pain of abuse or misfortune, thatpart of the background becomes something to be overcome and certainly not celebrated.

A lot of us reach into various shades of thesetreatments of the past – some things we revere, others we actively (orsubconsciously) ignore. Iknow that’s true for me. But whatI am coming to learn is that an honest treatment of the past – a rendering ofour own histories that, as much as possible, seeks to remember truthfully,understanding past as time of scarring and blessing, oftentimes simultaneously– this sort of remembering openly allows us to confess what we must and move onwith the forgiveness that accompanies a life of joyful being. Wherever we sit in the roles of thestories – as the ones who seek forgiveness, or the ones from whom who othersshould seek forgiveness (everyone has some of both!) it is helpful to remember out in the open so that ourbodies don’t have to remember for us,because trust me, they will – in the patterns our stories draw on us.

These stories are the very rocks from which we arehewn as individuals and as a people. The closer we come to understanding and accepting this, the closer wecome to a point of spiritual health.

But our stories don’t just end in the stories we canknow to tell. Because there’s thestory of the clay, and the molder, and the Source behind it all. There’s the story in which every singlebeing shares, no matter the geographic or socio-economic place of origin. For, thetruth is that our ultimate Source transcends our limited definitions, extendsbeyond any scope we can grasp. Ourultimate Source – the great rock from which we are hewn – is God. When we remember this, when weacknowledge it, when we meditate on it, when we attempt to grasp this truth,the open remembering comes easier.

How so? Because when we understand ourselves to be created, shaped, molded bymore than just our experiences, we understand that we are far more deeplyconnected, far more ultimately blessed than the sum of all we’ve seen, knownand forgotten. When we know that God is and we are and that these two things are forever linked – for us andfor everyone else – we know thatthere is more to the story than just us, and what we have done, or can everdo. When we know all this, then wecan acknowledge that the things of our past included actions and consequencesthat all included the redemptive work of a God who is never inactive.

When we do this, we can look back on a past forwhich we, and others, need forgiveness, a past in which we, and others, havebeen forgiven, and a past in which we, and others, were consistently blessed.

Never forget that grace can take even the worstcircumstances and offer a blessing. When we look back honestly, we will always find this to be true – Ideeply believe this. In fact, itis the foundation of my faith. Grace rises from any pile of ashes – any pile, even unto death.

For anywhere in the history of Creation, the basicstory has always been the same. From nothing comes a beginning, into which stories are woven – storiesthat lead to life and death (both literally and figuratively). And from death comes life – that’s thegift of Christ – and the two are always, always paired.

God is never separated from our stories. This is God’s promise. When we can acknowledge this truth, wecan rest and bask in the glory of the promise of life – life eternal. And, most importantly, we can givethanks.

Never forget the rock from which you were hewn,people. That rock is full of grace.And grace is always good, always sufficient, and always on time.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman

August 21, 2011

Saint Peter's Church

In the City of New York

Isaiah 51:1–6

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness,

you that seek the LORD.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Your Purpose in Life

2011-09-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a topic of conversation that probably comes up most frequently in my life as a pastor – “what is my purpose in life?” There’s no shortage of literature on the matter – in fact, Pastor Rick Warren has pretty much become a household name (at least in some circles) by attempting to help answer this very question. Purpose drives, dictates, inspires, reminds, helps, focuses us in ways that when it is clear, when purpose is understood, we can never be the same.

Unfortunately, even if you do buy a book or attend a workshop or talk to a pastor or pursue this question through any number of means, purpose is often not clear. Some of us believe that we were born for a reason, that we are on this planet with a purpose, and if we can unlock this purpose, we will be ok. And maybe that’s true. In fact, I think it is.
So how many of us are clear on our purpose in life? If you’re not, let me help you out.
You have a purpose. You were born for a reason. God has a plan for you. Would you like to know what it is?

God’s plan is for you to love. Your purpose is to love. Your spiritual gift is… guess what? LOVE. Every creature is born infused with the love of God. And that gift gives back by calling you, driving you, reminding you, focusing your attention, telling you to: love.

You might be thinking that it’s unfair for me to say this in a city of lonely people. It would be, if I were referring to the love they write about in songbooks. But I’m not. I’m referring to something much broader, something unrestricted, something transformative and universally available. The love I’m talking about is something to tap into, not something to find. It’s not somewhere out there – it is. It is precisely what you were born to do and it is where you find ultimate fulfillment.

The Apostle Paul says “for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” This could seem confusing for those of us whose calling in life has seemed to shift from career to career, vocation to vocation, place to place, who seem to understand a line of work or thinking and then shift to something completely different. If the calling was constant, then why would we shift so much?

I think that the answer is that we have to conceive of God’s gifts and God’s calling as something much broader than what shape our work takes, or where we live, or even what we enjoy. God’s calling is – again – to love. Pure and simple. And the opportunities to love and experience God’s love are endless. And God will always give us what we need to answer God’s call. Always.

If you’re not doing this already, imagine what it would be like in your life to conceive of every relationship you have as loving? I mean, what would it be like to love your boss? Your local security guard? Your worst enemy? The smelly guy next to you on the subway who you wish had chosen another seat? If this isn’t how you think of things right now, what would shaping relationships this way require of you?

In some ways, to love everyone is pretty much impossible. But that’s the thing with God – God’s calling makes the impossible possible – that is precisely the realm of grace.
Maybe we can all consider how acknowledging this purpose – to love – might change how we do things. And in so doing, we might just change the world.
Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

August 14, 2011
Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Romans 11:1–2a, 29–32
…for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Mary, Mother of...God. Yes.

2011-09-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

Difficult as it is to admit it, I find myself skating pretty close to some heresy or another probably…weekly. In part, this is because I probably have more explicitly theological conversations than the average person (which makes sense, given my work.) But, in part, this is also because, if you talk enough theology, it isn’t all that difficult to dip into heretical waters after a while.

Now, before I continue, perhaps I shouldn’t assume that you understand what I’m talking about. Admittedly, about 10 years ago, if I’d been sitting in the pews right now, I’d have been lost, because I wouldn’t have known what a heresy really was. (I didn’t really grow up in the church.) So (and this may oversimplify this a bit) – a heresy is a belief that runs contrary to orthodox beliefs as defined by the historically recognized councils of the church and the creedal (creed = belief) statements issued by those councils.

In preparation for today, I’ve been talking to a lot of my colleagues in the ministry about Mary. And as we talked, even we very quickly came close to skating that heretical line. Because a lot of us (and a lot of churches, quite frankly) either have no idea what to do with Mary, or at least treat her with a great deal of ambivalence.

In many ways, this isn’t surprising – patriarchal structures should be ambivalent about Mary because they should be ambivalent about women in general. Mary immediately introduces a wrinkle in patriarchy because… she is a matriarch. So where she’s positioned in relationship to divine fatherhood and how her position affects the resulting structure of the institution of church is appropriately unclear. Otherwise put, if your structure says “limit women” (limiting people based on how they are born) what you do with Mary is important. And her treatment runs the gamut from elevation above all other women… to completely ignoring her (except for the children’s Christmas Pageant.)

So here is where my struggle began (this time around) in thinking about Mary: last year at Saint Peter’s, we followed the ELCA in titling this day “Mary: Mother of our Lord”. In the past few years, you might notice that we switched the language in what may seem to be a small, subtle way, but it’s actually incredibly theologically significant, for it is now “Mary: Mother of God”. And a few folks reached out to me, asking why we use this language. They – and I’ll admit, I was with them – weren’t arguing whether or not the phrasing was correct. Instead, they (we) just felt a bit uncomfortable with it. After all, how could we call any human – a dweller of the finite world – parent of the Infinite One?

Meanwhile, I didn’t struggle to acknowledge that Mary was Christ’s mother. So why not just call the day “Mary: Mother of Christ”? Now. At this point, there are a few folks in the room who know their church history very well. And if they do, then they’ll see just how that very question leads us right into one of the most controversial heresies of the 5th century (of all times, really). Because there was a man named Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who not only asked that question, but taught the principle, which the church deemed heretical at the First Council of Ephesus in 431 and reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon 20 years later.

I share this history – not because I think it’s helpful to go around shooting down questions as heretical (quite the contrary, actually) – but because as we each reflect on our own comfort, understanding, and (hopefully!) questions about the traditions and teachings of the church, it’s helpful to situate ourselves in that tradition. In my questioning about the phrase “Mary: Mother of God” my curiosity about that language led me to read some of what great theological thinkers have written about this, and of course, I started with Nestorius’ most powerful opponent: Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. What Cyril and others point out is that calling Mary Mother of God (in Greek: Θεοτόκος / Theotókos) says much less about Mary than it does about Jesus. Because Mary gave birth to Jesus, the Christ, and Jesus was both fully divine and fully human. Mary, as the human vessel to the Incarnation, is, as American Lutheran theologian Jaroslav Pelikan writes, “the one who gives birth to the one who is God.” And as I think about it this way, I see that my discomfort with the Mother of God phrasing really challenges Christ’s divinity. Jesus Christ was, indeed, God incarnate – I believe that fully. And Mary was his mother. So there we are – shrouded in mystery and paradox – faith’s magnificent realm.

Through all of this questioning, I came to understand and appreciate Mary much more fully. Because she was a very ordinary, normal, poor girl. But she was asked to do something extraordinary and incredibly special. In the mystery of the Incarnation, Mary became a God-bearing woman, and just to conceive of what that could mean – and what that opens up for the rest of us – is just astounding, isn’t it?

For there is something about Mary’s call that is particular and specific to which none of us will ever be called (thank God). But, there is something about Mary’s call that is invitatory – it invites the rest of us into a certain kind of relationship with God that is absolutely transformative. The clue lies in the opening of her song, the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord” and that, along with the theological affirmation of Mary as God-bearer invites us into something new, and, can I say…revolutionary? Because when Mary magnifies the Lord, she’s doing something extraordinary…but there’s something there that we can do, too.

There is a way that you and I can magnify the Lord. There is a way that in seeing each other, we can more clearly see the Lord, because we are all infused with God’s Spirit. In seeing each other, we, the ones made in God’s image, glimpse the face of Christ. Carrying, surrounded by God’s grace, we, then have the beautiful, amazing opportunity to magnify, to make clearer, to show that grace, and in so doing, God allows us to participate in God’s consistently unfolding revelation – in a way becoming, like Mary – Christ-bearers ourselves. Not entirely like Mary, of course. And not “bearing” God of our own will, not limiting God, not creating God, none of this. Instead, what we do is to be bearers of the love God gives us, bearers of the grace God shows us, bearers of the Spirit with which God endows us as God transforms us in our very ordinary-ness to participants in something extravagantly extraordinary.

You’ve heard me, over these summer weeks, encouraging us to pay attention to the ways God’s grace surrounds us. Through Mary’s song – and story – I’m now encouraging us to pay attention to the ways that God’s grace actually infuses us – inside and throughout – to bear God’s spirit and to magnify God’s love. Because when we see and believe this, like Mary, we can more fully understand and know ourselves to be fully and truly blessed by the Mighty One who, indeed, does great things.
Blessed are you. Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

August 14, 2011
Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Saint Luke 1:46–55

Surprise!

2011-09-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

I haven’t yet decided how I feel about surprises. On the one hand, the word “surprise” has a nice ring to it. It usually indicates some sort of kind intention. Execution is another matter, however, as anyone who has ever suffered the disappointment of thinking that all of your closest have forgotten your birthday, only to discover that that special trip to the men’s underwear aisle of the dollar store actually did have a purpose… (I do have creative friends)…

For those of us who value order, planning, control – surprises can be, well…I’m just going to say it: annoying. Surprises don’t let us weigh in with our opinions, needs and expectations. They put the whole thing in someone else’s control. That’s power. And it needs to be based in trust.

So in preparation for this sermon, I posed this question, prayerfully: how prepared am I to approach God in supplication, say, asking God about or for something very important, (“God, I need ____...” “God please help me with _____” and then turning around and saying, “but you know, God, I trust you. Surprise me.”

Because it’s right there – right in that spot where in our relationship with God we’re willing to turn over control, to not even offer a suggestion or a solution, to just exhale, and rest assured that God responds appropriately, to be willing to encounter God’s surprise – this is probably the most difficult aspect of my own prayer life. Perhaps you share in this challenge.

For me, prayer is often an imagining – a conjuring up of images I think would be better, and my prayers are often like a set of suggestions for God… “well, God, not that you asked, but I was just thinking…” And I don’t think that this imagining is necessarily a bad thing. I think that inviting God into the creative process of imagining can be quite holy. But I imagine that there are dimensions of the human-divine relationship into which God invites us that we miss, if our suggestive imagining is the only shape our prayers take.
Because when we do all of the shaping (which could never be possible, anyway, but bear with me) when we make all the suggestions, when we attempt to seize control of futures we can’t control, how exactly are we, then, prepared for God to be God?

I absolutely adore today’s first lesson. It speaks to the likes of me. It gives a beautiful vignette of God’s ability to break through expectations and deliver in the most unexpected, absolutely sufficient, deliciously surprising ways.

Picture Elijah, a man of God, a prayerful, obedient servant of the Lord. Here in 1 Kings we encounter the underbelly of such service. Because we see a different dimension, a very real, gritty and intimate picture, a very relatable moment, for here, we see him as the lonely man he was. His life was far from easy, his work was more than demanding. He was at his wit’s end, and the bible tells us that he was afraid. I would be, were I in his shoes: a very powerful queen (Jezebel) had just promised that she’d make his life miserable. So we can picture this moment. When we encounter him here, he’s just left the broom tree where he’d gone to die. God intervened. And, nourished for the journey, he made his way to Horeb, “the mount of God”, awaiting…something.

It seems that he was looking for a word from God, for answers, for clarity, help, direction, and he just wasn’t finding it back home (where he was in danger). So he retreated to a holy place, an outdoor sanctuary atop a mountain – not just any, but a holy, historic mountaintop – and he waited for a word from the Lord.

And I love the way that the writer of 1 Kings describes this next part, because, in a way, the writer is giving us an intimate glimpse of Elijah’s prayer life. We see where he looks for God, we see it, and we understand, because he’s doing what I imagine we all do – he is drawing on everything he knows to look for God in the places he knows to look.
And then what happens? God – who led God’s people to freedom by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night – God might’ve been in the fire. But wasn’t. God – whose wind “swept over the waters” and set the seas in motion – God might’ve been in the wind. But wasn’t. Oh, Elijah had an idea of where to look, how to recognize God. But he really had no clue. Because God cannot and does not need to be bound by the stories we know, or by our expectations. No, God surprised Elijah by showing up in the “sound of sheer silence”.

I do believe that this is a story worth knowing well. Because, while the Jezebels of the world may not even take notice of us, we will still find ourselves in an Elijah place, lonely, in need of help – in need of God. This has happened, and it will happen. And maybe when it does, maybe, just maybe, we might be prepared to turn to God in the way Elijah did. No need to go to a mountaintop. No need to travel to the desert. What the Elijah story tells us is that God can, and does, break through in the most unexpected ways.

God is never limited to the confines of our imaginations. Imagine if God were – would God have ever been born Incarnate? What a beautiful surprise! Would we have imagined God to be quite as caring, quite as giving as we learn God to be through Jesus Christ? I don’t think so. I think that lessons like the Elijah story remind us that God is perfectly masterful at finding a way beyond anything we might imagine to reach to the lonely, whom God holds in very special care.

So I ask you this: how prepared are you for God’s next surprise? What might it be like, if you haven’t recently done so, to ask for and to eagerly await that unexpected encounter? Because it’ll happen, regardless of whether or not we ask – grace doesn’t depend on us – but maybe, just maybe, the exercise of embracing the surprise and all the trust that’s wrapped up in it, is worth it.

Until then, don’t worry if you can’t find the sound of sheer silence. I don’t know about you, but I’m not zen enough for that. Thank God that God doesn’t depend on what we find or even where we look – God is, God reaches, and God does, and that’s all that ever matters.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York
August 7, 2011

1 Kings 19:9–18

Asking the Tough Questions: Debt & Indebtedness

2011-08-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

This piece is part of an ongoing experimental series of reflections that ask tough questions: questions to and of myself/ourselves, questions to and of God. Please join the conversation!

I am confused - utterly and completely confused. It's unsettling, really.

I pride myself on being and keeping current, on paying attention, on thinking critically about important things - at least sometimes...

I subscribe to the New York Times, for God's sake! I should get it.

But the truth is, I don't. And maybe I'm not the only one.

Last night at dinner I had a chance to catch up with a senior colleague of mine in the ministry. She's savvy - waaaay savvier than I. She is on top of things. She subscribes to the New York Times, too!

But neither of us gets it. We want to feel a certain way about this debate about the debt ceiling. We want to be able to help our congregations connect this concern to our understanding of a mandate to advocate on behalf of the poor. We want to offer constructive advice to our legislators, we want to advocate. But we don't really know what to say. Because we just don't get it.

Oh we get indebtedness, all right. I know that I do. When I start to think about the debt obligations in my own life, I break out in a sweat - it's overwhelming. We are profoundly linked to those whom we owe things. Creditors have access and power, they hover with their influence, they exert control in often unanticipated ways. Meanwhile, they allow us to do things we believe we must. Like attend college, buy books, clothes, food, pay medical bills...

From this place I start to scale out, scaling out to the governmental institutions that borrow on behalf of an expanding populace and I...I feel overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed by the scale of raising the funds to cover $trillions in annual budgets, and I am overwhelmed by the scale and implications of servicing the debt we've taken on to get there. The concentric circles of borrowing into which I personally participate, as an individual, as a citizen, can hover to the point of smothering, if I think enough about it.

I'm overwhelmed and confused.

I want to join the ranks of people who feel passionately about all of this, who are out in the streets protesting and weighing in on it, and yet, I'm just not sure. Not that it matters - that I get - but what to do about it?

So I step back and approach the question of national debt crisis through the lens I suppose I'm always supposed to approach a tough question - a Christian ethic. And Christian ethics appropriately - and necessarily - begin from an ethic of love that privileges the least and the last, most notably the poor.

In real and concrete ways, I want to understand what the legislation that is moving through Congress, to the President's desk, and into the hands of the Treasury Department, will mean for the ones I'm obligated to consider first. And, I really don't get it. In part, because exactly how the cuts will roll out hasn't yet been decided. I hear the rhetoric & claims that the debt is being addressed on the backs of the poor, but I don't know what that means in real terms. What will it mean for the homeless? What will it mean for the programs we support at Saint Peter's Church? Will the Senior Center skim by funding cuts again? Or will the food and programming - critical to the lives of retired people all over NYC - be cut this time? Will the Momentum Project and all of its social services and food and care - will that eke by in the next budget cycle again? Or will they, too, be cut? Will more shelters close?

What, exactly, will this week's set of decisions on our national debt mean?

And how do we approach this issue as people of faith?

The answers aren't universal, this much I know. But they are worth asking - of ourselves as individuals, and as a community.

But this only approaches the set of issues inspired by this debate from one angle, albeit important to any Christian. I also wonder about the ways in which we've engaged one another on this topic.

What are our responsibilities toward "the other" as we discuss this? I wonder which is more important: compromise or resilient persistence? Again, I feel ignorant as I consider this because I truly am unsure which is a more responsible approach.

What do you think? Do you have clarity on this in ways that I don't? Can we help each other discern how to engage this issue?

I know I need help getting there. Maybe you do, too...

Grounded...Here

2011-08-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

There is a trend worth paying attention to, I think. It’s a trend of people reminding one another to be grounded, in the moment, with your feet on this ground and your head in this space, rather than to be preoccupied with some other ground or some other space we’re not in at the time. Our minds can be in many, many places. This isn’t to say that those other spaces aren’t important, it’s just that, for some of us, when we concentrate so much on those spaces and places where we aren’t, we lose sight of the places where we are. It’s that simple. And in those places – the places where we are – there can be wonderful, important things worth noting and perhaps even appreciating.

There’s something to this groundedness, this sense of being here, where we are, planted, rooted – and work with that metaphor (Jesus does) – dug in, deeply connected, sown, woven into the places, around the people where we are.

For those of us whose heads like to draw us away from our grounding, it seems, if you were to listen to Jesus, you’d see that there’s a lot at risk. For, if we are not duly sown, knit, embedded, if you will, where we are, then we might miss things – like God. If you’re like me, you can stand right here but be thinking about something far more troublesome, and when you and I do this, grace and beauty and joy and righteousness and delight and contentment, the great ecstasy of rapturous communion with God, hearing God, paying attention to God – all of this can sweep right past (or even through us) without us even noticing.

Actually, I reckon this happens all of the time. Why? Because Jesus doesn’t give attention to things that are irrelevant – he’s actually deeply grounded in the present, in the immediate needs. He sees things that trouble him, and he teaches his followers – us included – to try another way.

Now. I’m not going to say that the parable of the sower provides a theological justification for a popular trend in self-help and psychology. I wouldn’t go that far. But I would say that a lot of people, from therapists to profiteers and even to Jesus, point out the risks of an ungrounded approach to our lives. Putting all of our energy where we aren’t means we’re not giving enough to where we are, and something about this grieves Jesus, or at least moves him enough to want to show us a different way.

And here’s where so many interpretations of this, I think, get it wrong. It’s pretty normative (unfortunately) to think that when Jesus talks about seeds that don’t take root, he’s blaming the plant, so to speak. So, for example, if we find ourselves “anxious about many things” (with our minds all over the place) while missing out on the “one thing” (God’s gracious love right before us), maybe we’ll think that Jesus blames us when we find ourselves ungrounded.

We are not the sowers. God is! We do not choose whether or not we are on rocky or thorny ground. And, furthermore, God doesn’t want rocks or thorns for us! God created us to be in communion with God. And since God created us out of, and for the sake of, that loving relationship, then why on earth wouldn’t God provide the good soil?

You’ve heard me (and countless others who know what they’re talking about) say that faith isn’t ours, it’s God’s. Faith is a gift from God given, planted in good soil, rooted with the living water that only God can provide. Our work is just to grow, growing with God’s help, maybe even taking note when the rooting takes place, maybe even participating in it however best we can.

And with this in mind, I truly believe that, in this parable, Jesus is not condemning the stony ground or the brambly thistle. Jesus is saying that the faith God gives is strong, deeply rooted, connected, beyond us, durable, firm enough that it is impervious to the scorching sun, enduring enough that it holds fast in a blowing wind. Why? Because faith is God’s, and God can do that.

But then we come in. Circumstances mediate that experience. While our faith can (and will) be rooted, we might not be. And there’s the exercise. The faith is there. But who knows where we are?

Perhaps we do. And that’s where this groundedness exercise can be especially helpful in the life of faith. Faith is here. It is wherever we are. Sometimes our work is just to bring ourselves back to that space so that we can more actively participate in what God’s already doing in our lives. When our energy and thoughts and activities and priorities take us everywhere but here, right here where our feet are planted on the ground, right here where God is at work in, and through, and with us – right now – when we aren’t even here to be active in it, well…God still works. Faith is still there. But the growth? The growth in which we can play a role, the ecstatic growth we experience when we pay attention to God’s work and decide to do something about it…well, what happens to it?

To be honest, I don’t know. How could I? How could any of us claim to know or to understand the exact mechanisms of God’s work or revelation? But I do think that the question of how we can participate in our own groundedness is worth asking. And praying about. And paying attention to.

Because right here, right now, God is here! And that alone is reason enough to bring ourselves back…here. Because when or where else is ever a better time or place to give thanks than here and now, in the presence of the One from whom all good things come?
So. Welcome back.

Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
July 10, 2011
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

The Living Dead

2011-08-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Oh, Saint Peter's Church, you are so beautiful. I can’t tell you how moving it is, what a privilege it is, to have such a perfect view of all of you, at the expanse of this space, at the reminders of city we have overhead, and to see such beauty. Now I can say this, and mean it, which I do. But, when someone says something like this, each of us will hear it differently. Some can hear it and believe it. Some hear it with a little skepticism. Others will hear it and assume that I saw everyone but them. So let’s stay there. Let’s pay attention to that group for a moment.

To the initiated, “they” can be known as the “living dead”. They hear this term now, and maybe they secretly nod, silently sigh, acknowledging a truth that it’s hard – almost impossible to voice aloud. There’s an understanding between them. Many can recognize each other before quickly looking away.

The living dead walk with a constant pain, sometimes sharp, sometimes dull, but always there, held by a knife that seems only to budge for the sake of plunging in a little deeper at some inconvenient moment, digging in just for the sake of reminding its host that it’s there.
Or, let me put it this way, borrowing from a character in a brilliant movie I saw last winter, who describes such initiates as holding the pain as if it were a rock in the pocket of a garment you never take off, a rock you know is there but, might even forget sometimes. But, every now and then, you put your hand in that pocket and you remember, “oh, yes. That.” Oh, the initiated know what I mean about that lingering pain. That. The thing that stands between the initiated and their joy, the thing that tells them that the goodness and delight that others enjoy – for some reason cannot apply to them. Oh yes, that.
This group, these folks, well, they’re worth mentioning today because as I read Jesus’ words, words that evoke an image that is so incredibly important to remember, words that can, do, and should shape a community like ours and how it responds to people, as I hear these words, I think of them. I hear Jesus’ reminder to give and to love wholly, completely, and without reservation and I say, “yes.” Yes, I can give welcome. Yes, I can give love. Yes, I can give care. Yes, I can give a cool cup of water.

We can hear these words from Jesus and we can hear a mandate, a clear call to do. And if you’re anything like me, you can hear Jesus and almost have something of an action plan, if you will. I will welcome! I will give! Right?

But let me ask you to consider this from another angle.

Consider Jesus’ words from the perspective of those initiated to pain so severe that it blocks their ability to receive, whose trauma is so deep that even the most beautiful words of scripture, the Gospel truth, even – these things seemingly don’t apply to them.

Truth is, the initiated can probably give that cup of water. But receive it? To receive it almost requires a miracle. Maybe it does. For initiates, every now and then, it is important that we see each other, recognize each other, stand up and visibly witness to the life we know and the life we pray we’ll know some day.

We want to hear words of love – we want to hear about a God who loves and gives wholly and fully and we want so desperately to believe that those words apply to us. We want the Gospel to include us – which it does – but we want to be able to believe it to be true. And we want to see other people on the journey to getting there. Some can. I see others amongst you getting there, and I thank God for that.

But what do we do? How do we both give and receive – yes, both – give AND receive the cool cup of water Jesus beckons us to hold? How do we recognize each other, recognize that we need nothing more than this drink of living water we were created to drink? How do we share in the giving and receiving and learn to give and to drink so deeply that we never thirst again?

In some ways, I think that as a community, we reach into the places where it’s hardest to receive that love. We look, for example, at the ones who have been denied love – the ones who are attacked politically and scapegoated and blocked from liturgical leadership often for the sake of personal gain and legislated out of love…until (!!!) – and we offer them the love God intends for them. We see the ones denied love standing – against so many odds – with pride – and we stand with them (and maybe we offer them some water in the heat.)
We look on those who know pain first and everything else after, and we acknowledge them. We tell them they don’t have to hide anymore. We don’t ask them to tell stories that are too painful to tell – unless they want to. We don’t assess their pain and decide if their suffering is sufficient or too much, or when it’s time for them to “get over it” (as if that happens, anyway). We don’t exclude them or push them away.

No, we don’t do those things – though we do. But when we’re listening to Jesus, when we’re following our Gospel mandate, we follow his lead and we keep it simple. We see, we recognize the thirst, and we offer the most beautiful thing we have – our love, love that flows from an everlasting font from which it is a delight, an endless delight to drink.
They call us the living dead. And maybe we are. But the truth is that we live. In Christ, we live. We die to the powers of this world that would seek to destroy, that would work to pull us away from love, that would scheme to block our ability to know and believe ourselves to be the beautiful, beloved children of God we are. Because of Christ, each of us – and I mean that, each of us – each is given the gift to live as ones made perfect in God’s sight by the power of a love that repairs, sews and sows, mends and heals, constantly creating, constantly making each of us the most beautiful creatures God could – and did – imagine. And yes, that includes you, too. So yes, Saint Peter's Church. You are beautiful. Whether perfectly coiffed or combed over or covered with a scarf or under a wig or rolled out of bed or too confused or rushed to remember or without access to basic grooming tools – you are undeniably beautiful in God’s sight.

You are beautiful and perfectly eligible to receive the gifts of God’s grace, right here, here in community, here in prayer, here at table, here in love. And by some miracle, by the grace of God, let us dare to receive – and to give – and see God in the middle of it.

Kaji R. Spellman
June 26, 2011
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Love and Relationship

2011-06-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

There’s something beautiful about relationship, relationship that is perfect and true and pure. There’s something gorgeous about relationship gone right, unadulterated by imperfection, bound by nothing but the possibilities of endless love. There’s something compelling about relationship that expresses joy, creates, endows, sustains, redeems, delivers, imbues, holds and lifts and delivers in freedom.

Perhaps we’ve seen some of this. Perhaps we’ve experienced it ourselves. Perhaps we’ve seen signs or glimpses of it in community, in our lives, or even in the deepest corners of our imaginations. Whether or not we’ve seen or experienced a sustained vision of this form of relationship, it is important to pay attention to those glimpses, because they matter.

These glimpses matter because so much of relationship, so many relationships are not characterized in beauty. Rather, they represent brokenness, pain, sometimes, if not often, the very worst of ourselves. For many of us, we can fall into such patterns in relationship that we can forget its original intent, the beauty, the joy, the delight of being. We can start to believe that pain is how we were meant or created to live. We can start to think that relationship is primarily about hardship and sacrifice. We can start to believe that poor treatment and even abuse are the norm, or even that we deserve to experience them.
When the negative narrative of relationship starts to take over, that’s when this alternate vision must step in. That’s when we need to take hold of what can and was and will be in purity of love and being, and we need to see it and remember it. We need to reach into the depths of a vision that teaches us to believe that there’s more and that the more is not for just them but is for us, too. We need to see goodness and realize that the goodness is precisely what we were created to experience. We need the vision because that vision is what we were and are meant to live and to be – it is the focus and locus of our very being. There could be nothing more important than this vision to drive us away from accepting pain and brokenness as the point of existence, our earned experience. It is not.

We need this vision. And we have it. We have it in the purity of the love that we experience from the God who gives it to us. And where do we look for it?

We look for it in many places. God has a way of revealing Godself in infinite, unexpected ways. When we don the lenses of looking for the vision, God provides us with it in ways I cannot anticipate for you.

But there’s somewhere else to find the vision. There’s somewhere God has given us as a constant reminder and sign and symbol and experience of the vision of love that creates, sustains, and pierces through all brokenness of experience. There’s a place to find this vision that holds before us the very pith of existence. That place is in the Holy Trinity.
How? Because we can look at the symbol of the Trinity and we can witness the one God modeling the purity of relationship in true perfection. We can see God modeling love in the constant, consistent interplay of the forms of expression the Trinity represents. The Godhead in powerful source working through the Holy Spirit in consistent, persistent presence, working through the Visible One, modeling while at the same time redeeming human experience. In the Trinity, we see the one God expressing what relationship can and will be, in the fullness of time. In the Trinity, we see three expressions of love made One in mysterious, delightful, self-giving joy.

Let me come back to that sense of mystery. Because there’s a lot that can be pretty confounding about the Trinity. Three-in-One, One-in-Three. One God expressed in different ways. As soon as you think about it, as soon as it starts to make sense, it’s as if you lose control of the thought. (For me, whenever I think about this, it feels as if my head would explode!)

And maybe this is right. It is a major piece of why I love the image of the Trinity. Because it reminds me that I cannot control my vision of God. It is for God to reveal Godself, not for me to figure God out. This is an important reminder. As I try to grasp the fullness of God, as I feel that I have it all worked out, new questions arise. And maybe this is right, too. Because God is beyond comprehension.

Meditating on the Trinity, praying on its mysteries reminds us perfectly that our vision of who God is – is only but a glimpse. It is a glimpse we make in this life with the very promise that the vision will expand…in due time. In God’s time.

But as we glimpse this vision of relationship in its purest form, as we look and pray upon the mysteries of who God is and all that God envisions for us, we experience the reminder that love is for us, too. Love made beautiful and perfect, love that does no harm, love that creates and sustains and builds and never breaks – this love is God’s, and it’s ours, and it’s there for all that is and will be. It is the love that is and will be with us, even to the end of the age – so promises the Lord.

So see the Trinity. Be astounded by it. And give thanks for the possibilities it means for you and for all the rest of us – both now and forever. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
June 19, 2011 - Holy Trinity
Saint Matthew 28:16–20
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Priorities in Memory

2011-06-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

A life coach once told me that you can tell what’s important to a person just by looking at how she spends her time. I’d say that something similar can be applied to a people. Visit a city, and it won’t take long to understand what’s important to its people. What takes architectural priority? How much space is allocated to work? Recreation? Prayer? Education? Healing? Food? For whom are the spaces allocated? Children? The aged? The rich? The poor? The middle class? Just as interestingly, you can look to see how gaps are filled, how unplanned spaces are occupied. And…who’s forgotten? How do they fill the gaps?

I believe that you can tell a lot about what a people care about by looking at how they allocate their resources. Think of this here in New York City, one of the most expensive places in the world to live. What does it take to thrive here? Who do we care most about? Are the two aligned?

I thought about this, in particular, this weekend. Why? Because tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day our country has allocated to memory. When we’re asked to remember, we’re asked to prioritize, to place the memory of our war fallen at the forefront of our thoughts, to turn away from everything else that occupies us and towards the sacrifice we ask of our warriors and those who are effected by our war policies. In memory, we connect. We prioritize. Or so the thinking goes.

But I return to my original thought: when we remember the sacrifices of war, what do we do to prioritize it? What does it mean to memorialize just once a year? What does it mean that this holiday has come to represent the beginning of the summer season, the introduction of leisure and waterside warmth, the start of a slower, longer day, the time when those who can do more of what they enjoy, prioritizing family life, the possibilities of semi-controlled excess, the start of a season of delight? And as we think of this, tell me: what on earth does this have to do at all with the sacrifices of war?

Those who pay attention to the effects of war call on us to become more war-literate as a nation. With only a tiny percentage of the country directly involved in war, as a people, we attach so little personal import to mechanism and the cost of war. Return to my original question: what would an observer notice by looking at how we allocate our resources about how we pay attention to war? Is our care and concern limited to the realm of monuments and plaques? What do we do with the ones who return from the wars fought on our collective behalf? How well are they cared for and treated?

Nationwide, about a third of the homeless population has fought in our wars. This data isn’t so easy to tabulate in the city, but we do know that there are thousands of homeless vets on the streets each night here. Here, those who serve, who have given what we’ve asked of them, sacrificed what was required, return, exactly, to what?

As he entered the city of Athens, the apostle Paul astutely observed the Athenians’ priorities. Their collective concerns were clear to an observer, and he commented as such. Looking at the city, Paul could see what they worshipped, what their idols were, how they prioritized their concerns.

Paul saw all of this and had his own concerns. Reaching towards idols they could never reach, he encouraged the Athenians to look another way. Rather than trying to grope in the dark at gods who were essentially untouchable, Paul wanted the Athenians to reach into themselves, reach deeply into the accessible, the touchable present, and encounter the living God known in Christ Jesus. Rather than dedicate their open spaces to the unattainable, the elite access points inaccessible to the full breadth of its people, Paul wanted them to shift – to shift towards God.

New Yorkers: we give lip service to many things. But how much do we actually give to them? As a people? As individuals? As we see the homeless vets on our streets, is our inclination to turn away, or is it to pay attention to their needs?

What if we were a city that connected our priorities of concern to our resources? How would we approach vets, the poor, children, the aged, all of our people differently? What would change?

These must always be questions at the fore of our minds. As people of the Christian faith, we are called to pay attention to things that others would want to ignore. Reaching into the truth and beauty that is the living God calls us to do just that.

So in that spirit, God invites us all to remember. And to change. Let us do just that.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
May 29, 2011
Acts 17:22–31

We Know the Way

2011-05-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

It appears that we've made it. (Or, at least, some of us did?) If the rapture happened yesterday, then we all missed it. (Nuts!)

But this is serious. Because I got a lot of calls last week, had a few urgent pastoral meetings with some people who were especially anxious about the “end of the world” predictions coming from a certain serial predictor of such things. “You can never know,” they reasoned, and they wanted to talk, however indirectly, about the ways to prepare for the end…just in case.

Well, predictions do this for/to us; at their best, they help us plan. At their worst, they imperil us. From terror alerts to the weather, we look at these forecasts for direction, to point us somewhere, to give us some help, to warn us.

Someone once asked me a question that I’ve never forgotten. He asked: how often do you see a portrayal of the future that casts the time ahead in positive terms? How many movies about the years two thousand something-coming posit the world as a place you’d want to live in? How many adaptations of Christianism would have the entirety of Creation (not just themselves) looking forward to the times to come? Would they have us look ahead and not feel afraid?

Alas, not very many. In fact, for me, at least, it’s quite hard to think of a popular portrayal of the future as anything we’d ever want to see. Within the broad umbrella of Christianity, for those who talk the most about the future, the image is grim, too.

They’ve hijacked the future, which is too bad. Particularly when we pay attention to the Gospels – to John in particular, to Jesus, specifically. Because in today’s passage – a passage so good, so important, that it’s worth committing to memory – Jesus casts an image of the future, of times to come. And how does he begin?

If you pay attention to nothing else, please, please please pay attention to this. If you have a conversation with a Christianist who wants you to be afraid of the future, please remind him or her of this. If you read in the paper about all the gloom and doom to come, please please please bring this to mind. Because, in one of the most oft-quoted passages of the bible (you see this passage on signs at Giants games!) Jesus begins with words of assurance. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Believe.

Believe that a God who would trouble to create would not take delight in destroying the good God has already done.

Believe that a God who would give to and past the point of death would not seek our death.

Tell me this: why would a God who would (and did!) destroy death’s power then cause death – essentially re-empowering death, undoing the work of the resurrection?

Why would the demise of others ever be a celebration?

Or let me ask this: why not just listen to Jesus? The one who goes to prepare a place for you, me, them, and all of God’s creation?

Why not look into the future and try something countercultural: look forward to going there?

Oh, this looking forward to the future is countercultural, indeed. Why? Because there’s control in fear. There’s money to be made, minds to bend, hearts to harden in the cultural machinery of fear. And one of the ways to mold us into that control is to point us towards our future and say: be afraid!

But friends, never forget that those weren’t Jesus’ words. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” And don’t forget Jesus’ answer to Thomas, brilliant Thomas, Thomas who I’ve now begun calling “the clarifier” – he who asks the questions that if we haven’t yet, we should – “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

And then remember Jesus’ response. Oh, we won’t know the exact directions. We won’t know the contours of a future that hasn’t happened yet. But we do know the way. We know the way because we know the Christ. Christ is the way. Christ is the way whether we recognize that we know Christ or not. The way is still there.

Each of us gets a glimpse. A daily, moment-by-moment, glimpse of truth, life, the way. As we gaze into a universe replete with joy and goodness and grace, we glimpse that way. At the table, we taste that way in another glimpse. You see, we glimpse the partial delight of the future that is to come – a future to which we rightfully look forward. All of us.

As a brilliant theologian put it, as Christians, we

see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another, one world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror…and the other world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation,’ an endless sea of glory radiant with the beauty of God in every part.

- Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Eerdman’s, Grand Rapids. 2005.

Jesus’ promise in John 14 is a promise to behold and indwell God’s radiant, beautiful home – a home in which we already live, though we don’t always recognize it. In time, we always will. In time, the two realities become one, minus the terror, the exclusion, the hurt, the pain, the control. In time, the glimpse becomes a gaze that becomes an all-encompassing, unending rapturous joy.

So do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe. Look to the future and see…God – a God, who is and always will be ready to welcome us there. Forever and ever. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Psalm 23, Improvised

2011-05-25T16:18:00.001-07:00

We improvised the Psalm together at Jazz Vespers on April 15.

Watch it here.

Roads

2011-05-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Choices matter.

I know some people who obsess, almost to the point of paralysis, about their choices. For some, the more results-oriented types, the agony is in figuring out which choice or set of choices will yield the best outcome. Choices come to be about getting what they believe that they want, wanting something so badly that they have a hard time even getting there because they feel such a need to get the path to this outcome exactly right.

I know some other people who consider, also to the point of paralysis, whether or not a choice is the one God wants them to make. Presented with opportunities and possibilities, they will pause, and then hover, trying to figure out exactly what God would have them do. So it’s as if they stand at crossroads, and imagine two diverging roads. One would be the road to sanctity, the other to perdition. In such terms, they figure, they’d better choose rightly. I’d guess that if that were true, we’d all get stuck in the anxiety of analysis paralysis, wouldn’t we?

There are others, others who become so fearful of choices, so worn down from the consequences of poor choices, so discouraged from the possibility and lost privilege of being able to exercise choice in the first place, that they don’t even feel that choices are a luxury they get to enjoy. These are the ones lost in the injustices that limit freedoms and choices based on access to choices in the first place.

At any given point, any of us can find ourselves caught in the web of toil around life’s choices. We can ask ourselves – what is right here? What is best? What is possible? And we might have absolutely no clue how to answer. Incorporate questions of faithful living into the decision-matrix, and the possibility of answers may become even more jumbled.
But I’m going to return to that image of the roads, diverging roads before us, roads the represent directions determined by choice after choice, step after step.

I invite you to picture this metaphor as you consider some important choice you face right now.

And then, I invite you to draw yourself into today’s Gospel reading from Luke. We heard the story, a famous story, of two travelers on a road. These were two people who encountered a series of choices that brought them to a road, a road for a long journey between Jerusalem and the northern town of Emmaus. These two were Jesus-followers, people drawn into the narrative of what would become the Christian church, people who had encountered Jesus’ ministry and were compelled to be engrafted into its powerful influence. Think of the sets of choices that they encountered, choices that would bring them to this road. Should they have left Jerusalem? I mean, if they’d paid close enough attention, if they’d made the absolute “best choice”, perhaps, we might think that they would’ve chosen to keep vigil at Jesus’ tomb, or tried their best to be constantly in the presence of Jesus’ closest disciples, off praying in an upper room or running about the city, spreading the news of a “rumor” they’d heard of Christ’s resurrection, or, even, heading back to Galilee.

Instead, puzzled by the events of the time, still deeply stricken by the grief of the loss at Good Friday, gripped with confusion, wonder, and questions, they decided to quit the city and begin the long journey back home.

If you conceive of life as a series of road-choices, where the right turn leads you to sanctity and the wrong turn leads to perdition, then you might hear the story of the man named Cleopas and his friend as a story of two men who made the wrong choice, chose the wrong road. They should’ve listened to the women, they should’ve believed, they should’ve acted differently – they had no business returning to the village of Emmaus, right?
Well. That would be correct, that view of choosing a road would make perfect sense if you were unfamiliar with the gospel. But when you read the gospel, you learn something very, very different. When you hear the message of the gospel, you don’t hear a message of complete loss, of abandonment, of perdition for those, like these two, who chose the wrong road and the wrong destination.

No. When you read the gospel, you hear something very different. You see something, your eyes are opened to a much more beautiful truth: God can take any road. There is no road that leads away from God, because, if that were possible, just think about this – that would limit God’s reach to the confines of our choices! If you turn this way, God can meet you there. If you step that way, God will be just in front of you. When you move, God moves with you, because there just isn’t anywhere in which God is absent. That’s what we mean when we proclaim God omnipresent.

Of course there are choices which I would imagine make God wince. Like what? Well, in essence, Christian ethics (the system by which Christians are invited to make choices) is best defined as finding a way to follow the greatest command: to love God, neighbor and self, in balance, and with God’s help. So what kinds of choices might make God wince? Choices that are made without the consideration of others. Choices that are made that do not take into account the protection and care of those who cannot protect and care for themselves. Choices that are made on the backs of others. Choices that back others into walls. These are all choices that do not take into consideration the careful balance between the love of God, neighbor and self. The truth is, as confirmed by the biblical narratives and promised in the gospels, that a wincing God is not an absent God. That’s the power of redemption. That’s the power of the God who can, and does, take any road, always offering the possibility of better choices, always offering love.

We see the power of evil when we witness the work of those who have willfully ignored God’s possibilities to love. When they have given too much weight to a perverted concept of self with no regard for the broad sense of neighborhood God asks us to live in – a neighborhood that enfolds even the enemy into loving care.

With that in mind, I think about that this week. Osama bin Laden, this generation’s personification of evil, the very embodiment of enemy, is dead. When I learned of this on Monday, I wasn’t sure how to feel. I found myself in that second category, as if I faced the roads of celebrating, or being drawn right back into the sadness of the losses we all have mourned from those whose deaths he caused. What’s the right way to feel in such a moment?

Setting aside the problematic nature of thinking that we can control our feelings, perhaps we should consider a different set of choices, a different angle.

What if, instead, we asked ourselves this: how, no matter which way we turn in the face of this complicated moment in our world’s history, will we know to recognize God standing before us? The man is dead: what now? What’s next? And where do we find ourselves in the story and the response?

To be honest, I do not know. But what I do know is that I want to do what I can to make choices very differently from his (this is an understatement). I want to recommit myself to do what he did not – to take the love of God so seriously that I commit myself to the loving care of neighbor – even enemy – as seriously as I take the loving care of myself, to hold that in balance.

And as you and I take the roads of choices on which we find ourselves, as we commit ourselves and recommit ourselves to see the examples of the bin Ladens of our world (of whatever background, affiliation or persuasion) to seeing them, and resisting their influence. Let us resist the methods of choosing that they so dangerously represent. This kind of resistance draws on the wisdom of those who remind us that the power of evil doesn’t lie with an evil person, the power of evil comes from those who see it and do nothing about it.

So let us remember the God who can, and does, show up on any road. Let us work to recognize when God shows up by seeing the opportunities to love that lie before us. And let us pray that as God shows up for our enemies, too (because any road means any road) let us pray that our enemies will choose the paths of love God always presents. (And let us pray that God gives us the strength to ask that very difficult prayer, that seemingly impossible prayer, the prayer our very faith represents.)

Otherwise put, may we all but choose love – the love that has already chosen us. Thanks be to God.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

If Only We Could Master Death...

2011-05-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

(from the memorial service of Karen Rees)

If only we could master death.

If only we could take hold of it, control it, understand its meaning, determine precisely when it will happen and how – after a long, successful, healthy life of fulfillment and delight, dying in peace, at home, having settled all affairs, left a strong legacy, finding final rest in our sleep. Whether or not we think about this directly, so many of us very deeply desire to shape our life’s ambitions to culminate in this masterful death. And some of us will realize it. Trouble is, most of us won’t, and when we, or others don’t, not only are we saddened by the loss we face, saddened by the way death hasn’t been mastered, if you will, we are in many ways terrified by this very lack of mastery.

It terrifies most of us that we can’t master death – when we think about it. But, since, for many of us, death stands at such a distance, the even more difficult truth is its corollary: we don’t really master life, either. Both sets of thoughts are hard, hard to encounter, hard to admit, and for that reason, most of us just seek to push those thoughts off.

Oh, this is normal. It’s so normal, so consistently part of human existence, so interwoven with the expectations and motivations that drive us – whether consciously or not – that religious faiths have sought to help mitigate the effects of its power over us. This is certainly true in the Christian faith that Karen professed.

And what does this faith say about this question of mastering life and death? In short, it says that we can’t. It’s just not possible. We can make attempts. We can pay attention. We can, and should, plan and care for those who face the consequences of this lack of mastery. But we will never, ever control it.

In life, mastery on a macro scale (an attempt at mastering our entire life) is futile. But mastery on a micro scale is absolutely appropriate. I think of this when I think of Karen. Karen, who devoted herself to mastery in her domain, who studied and honed to perfect her own and her students’ voices, who stumbled into the legal profession and made it her own with extraordinary grace, patience and skill, who could introduce joy and laughter in unexpected moments, who had a spark worth noticing and celebrating today – Karen, no, she didn’t master life. Not as a whole. Why? Because no one does. But she mastered plenty, and she mastered exactly enough.

We gather here because she didn’t master death, either. And, as I said, these unexpected deaths acutely remind us of that hard truth, that none of us does master death.
But, good people, know this:

Sure, we don’t master death. But God does.

This is the message of Easter. It’s funny: I sent a copy of the bulletin you all received to Mary Jane in advance of this mass so that she could have a feel for what we’d be doing today. She called back with a few great questions, one of which was about the back cover, where it quotes the Book of Common prayer saying that “this is an Easter liturgy” and she wondered what that meant. I gave Mary Jane a partial answer, saying “well, we’re in the season of Easter,” which is true. But I should be ashamed of myself, because I failed to include the good news in my answer. The service could’ve been at any time of year and STILL been an Easter liturgy, because we celebrate Easter any time we ritualize death in the Christian church. We have to. Why? Because death is never distinct from resurrection. Not for us. In Christ’s resurrection, the gifts of which God graciously extends to all, the gates to eternal life are opened for the rest of us. Death, then, in Christian terms, is so temporary, so short-lived, so transitional, if you will, that in the grand schema of Time eternal, it’s not even a blip. In other words, death is a transition. Life, which, again in Christian thought, is an expression, a material of divine love, life never ends.
So no. We, like Karen, never master life or death. What we seek to do then, is, like Karen, master what we can – components of joy and fulfillment and care, expressions of our best selves. That we can master, and that’s worth our life’s effort.

As for the rest? It’s already taken care of. We can leave it to God, who masters life eternal, death, and dimensions about which we don’t even know to dream – dimensions we can rejoice – even amidst our sadness – that Karen now has a chance to behold.

May we be inspired by the grace we see so clearly in her life and her death and all that is to come for her, and the rest of us. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Questions (part 2)

2011-05-25T16:12:00.001-07:00

Watch here.

If you heard me preach last Sunday, you would’ve heard me calling us to a new Easter tradition of engaging the mystery of the resurrection. You would’ve heard me say something about how Easter can’t be about “getting it” – because who can “get” the fullness of God’s mysteries? Who completely understands what happened with Jesus’ death, how the resurrection worked (none of the Gospels even begins to go there) or why death and resurrection were even necessary in order to conquer sin and open the doors to eternal life for all of us.

If you’d have heard me preach, you would’ve heard me calling us to embrace mystery by approaching God and life with a spirit of inquiry – waking each morning with a spirit of curiosity and wonderment. “I’m curious to see what blessings God will bestow upon me today.” Or, “I’m curious to know how I’ll see the face of Christ in others.” Or “I’m curious to see how God will answer my prayers today.” Or, “I’m curious to see if God will answer this lingering question I’ve had…” Approaching the day, approaching life, prayer with curiosity and wonderment is a fascinating practice. I’ve been trying it for the past week (following my own advice, for once) and have been enriched by it. Instead of being frustrated at things not going my way, not having all of the answers, not being able to fully anticipate what’s coming, looking at my life and the people in it with curiosity and wonder has been…refreshing. It’s made me more open to so many more of the possibilities of encountering God’s goodness – with a spirit of inquiry and questioning.

How is this backed up biblically? In many ways – we can see many, many examples of prophets and leaders in the Hebrew Scriptures who, also, approached God with questions, with curiosity and wonder. And we see it today, though that’s not always how we describe it.

Who had heard of Doubting Thomas before? He’s often maligned in the tradition (though certainly not always) for not being able to accept the news of the resurrection right away. He had questions! He needed more than words. What’s beautiful about what Thomas did was that he voiced his questions, he didn’t shy away from them. Recall the story: Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, but Thomas wasn’t there. The other disciples had the direct proof, a direct interaction with the risen Christ. Meanwhile, when we read the Gospel of John, it’s not so clear exactly how completely the other followers of Jesus (besides the disciples) accepted this news. We don’t know that Thomas was the only one who questioned – how could he be, what with such radical news? What we do know is that he was the only one who voiced it quite so openly. And God heard Thomas’ question and decided that it was worth responding to. Jesus’ tone was pastoral and loving, understanding of Thomas’ yearning for answers. Thomas’ inquiry did not go unanswered.
What I would suggest is that Thomas, in many ways, acts as a bridge between the disciples and us. I believe that Thomas’ behavior wasn’t recorded for the sake of ridiculing his unbelief; I believe that Thomas’ behavior displays a model for the kind of interaction God invites of God’s followers – inquiry, questions, even doubts. How much better to voice the doubts than to ignore them, shuttering them away!

Meanwhile, the other component of Thomas’ behavior that we might seek to follow, beyond his open inquiry, is his openness to God’s response. When Jesus showed Thomas himself, when he gave Thomas what he knew Thomas needed, Thomas was willing to touch Jesus. He was willing to receive the grace.

It’s not that God’s grace depends on us, because it doesn’t. Thomas could have continued his questioning (and I’m sure that in other ways throughout the course of his life, he did.) Thomas didn’t have to respond as he did in order to be beloved by God. But what’s instructive to us is that in the inquiring, Thomas wasn’t closed to God’s answer. He felt God’s blessing, he was able to receive it openly, because he was willing to have an answer.
Think about that. How many times have you resisted wondering because you didn’t want an answer? How many times have you been too afraid to ask something, for fear that the answer you’d receive would be unfavorable, untenable, too much to handle, too overwhelming, too hard? Thomas inquired and was open to God’s response, evidenced by his enthusiasm to encounter the risen Christ as his Lord and his God.

Friends, I firmly believe that God welcomes this kind of open inquiry, that God answers prayers of supplication, question, lament, whatever we offer. Thomas’ story reminds us of what, sometimes we so sorely need reminding: that there is nothing that God hasn’t seen, heard, or experienced from human behavior.

And so, following Thomas, let us all approach the God of the holy yes, the God of answers, joy, grace and delight, the God of the resurrection that trumps death with everlasting life with all we have – questions and all – and let us watch, curiously, with wonder and joy, for the ways in which God will answer.

And let the church say: amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Questions

2011-05-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Let’s start a movement. What if we took a collective look at this holiest of celebrations, the day of the resurrection of our Lord, and began to work to craft some new traditions around this holiday? What if these traditions could more readily focus us on the absolutely amazing nature of the gifts God gives us this day?

What gifts? There’s a place to start. Because what exactly do we celebrate at Easter?
It seems like such a simple question, but, as the wise keep trying to tell us, responses to the simplest of questions are essentially butchered when we tender simple answers. An answer to what we celebrate at Easter is that we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord!

The church’s answer is easy enough to find in the Prayer of the Day:

O God, you gave your only Son
to suffer death on the cross for our redemption,
and by his glorious resurrection you delivered us from the power of death.

And there we are. God gave God’s only Son, who died on the cross to redeem us. By Christ’s glorious resurrection from the dead, we are delivered from the power of death. This is a gorgeous truth in which we rejoice!

A lot of people can repeat those words, or some version of them, repeat them with confidence and tell others about them. I love those words, but here’s my struggle: I think that they need to be embraced as absolutely confounding.

When the church fails to celebrate the confounding, confusing, veiled, mysterious nature of what we’re celebrating today, we miss the point. Celebrating Easter can never require that we “get it.” Why on earth did Jesus need to die in order to conquer sin? Why would God choose such a brutal means to redemption? Why die to conquer death? What does it mean for death to be conquered? What does that mean, for us?

If we dig back into the church’s tradition, we find more of an answer as the Prayer of the Day continues:

Make us die every day to sin,
that we may live with him forever in the joy of the resurrection…

I don’t know about you, but these beautiful words further confound me! What, in God’s name, does it mean to “die every day to sin”? (Now, of course, a good Lutheran would immediately jump up and say something about living out our baptisms, and they would be exactly right. Fine. But what does that mean?)

Sisters and brothers, we cannot just accept words on the page, reading them and letting them stand, glossing over them as rote without considering what they mean. Because, when we do, when we ponder these words prayerfully, when we talk about them, when we wonder on them, we start to approach something of what I believe the authors of these collects (a “collect” is another word for “prayer”) were hoping to evoke for us today: a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery, cradled in a sense of gratitude. They want us to feel confounded. They want us not to know exactly what it means, they want us to work at – prayerfully work at – a set of answers that make sense for our particular relationship to God.

I talked about crafting a new set of Easter traditions. And what I’d suggest we try is to draw on a very old one, one that begins with children modeling a crucial theological practice for the rest of us. A defining point of the Passover Seder is when the youngest child asks, “why is this night different from all other nights?” And there the tone is set, not just for the night, but for the life of a people seeking relationship with God. And it’s a tone that I would recommend we more formally adapt as we receive the good news of Easter.
Early in the morning on the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb to encounter a story that was already unfolding. They saw their part, but it was only a bit, a piece of the story. Imagine their own confusion in that jumble of emotions Matthew describes as “fear and great joy”. Now, each of us has encountered the limits of words to describe things. But, just for a moment, imagine how limited the evangelist’s words would be to describe these women’s experience. And when we do this, when we try to imagine what it means, what it was like, what it is like, even now, to encounter the risen Christ, then we encounter this great story with the wonder it deserves.

What if our Easter traditions were to engage the rhapsody of this holiest of moments with a deliberate spirit of inquiry? What if Easter were the time to remind us that in the beautifully unfolding interplay between God and us, an appropriate way to encounter the divine is in the very asking of questions?

Why was he crucified? Why does the resurrection conquer sin? I have answers to those questions – I shouldn’t have been ordained without them. But, when the church and its leaders are honest, we admit that there isn’t any one answer to those questions, that the answers are deeply entwined in the particulars of the human experience intersecting with the divine (individually and collectively), and that the answers appropriately lead to more questions.

Truth is, anyone who tries to answer for God is probably selling something. But where I find some answers to the whys inspired by the mysteries of these great Three Days is that at Easter, we see a way in which God reached, and reaches, us differently. Laws, structured to help guide human and divine relationships didn’t quite shape the interaction enough. In the life of Christ, God moved into a new way of modeling behavior and relationship.

Among other gracious acts, Jesus engaged the restless minds of his followers, answering their questions through teaching but also through example, always leaving them with more questions than they began with. For those of us who read the gospels regularly, this can be frustrating…unless…unless we see and accept that Jesus was modeling the possibility that this sense of confusion was exactly right.

It may be that Jesus wanted to draw us to a point of endless questions, because in the questioning, perhaps we are closest to God.

In turn, Jesus spoke to them (and us) in messages of love that they (and we) could begin to understand. Dying for his friends and enemies on a cross was such a message because it put love on high display. And then, in the resurrection, living – living in and among us, living despite, betwixt and between, living, Christ put love on endless display because in so doing, Christ showed us that love does not end.

Well what does that mean?

It means such good and eternal things, and it means all that matters. But beyond that, here is my prayer for you and for all of us: may your Easter traditions ring with that question (what does it mean?) and the others it inspires. And may you take great delight in the ways God is just so prepared to answer, in love that lives and breathes beyond the boundaries of words or understanding. In so doing, may you be lost in the endless wonder, love and praise that God grants us in the glory of the resurrection. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York
Easter Sunday, 2011

Cloud of Witnesses

2011-05-25T16:05:00.001-07:00

The depth of the continuity is stunning. I heard Pastor Derr preach a sermon at noon on these texts, and as he talked, I just kept staring at the cross, this Nevelson Cross here in our chapel, with its many layers and textures, and in a new way, that cross made sense to me.

Pastor Derr was telling us that we are not alone. That the events of the Passion help to assure us that layer upon layer, generation upon generation surrounds us, just as, one day, we will for the following generations. There is a continuity, thanks to the power of that cross, that builds endless layers of witness around the unfolding human experience. That is stunning.

But if the cloud of witnesses surrounds us, as the writer of Hebrews promises, then I wonder this: what have they seen? What contours of the good, bad and ugly of human behavior has this ever-expanding cloud seen?

To me, that becomes an even more interesting question on a day like today, a day once called “Spy Wednesday” because of the Judas story that is read this day. In John’s gospel, we the readers and hearers, are invited to witness to Judas’ action fully aware of his betrayal. We also are invited to witness all this also knowing that Jesus is fully aware of his betrayal, too. He’s no passive dupe, he is conscious of what Judas will do, and makes that knowledge known to Judas. It is a fascinating, heartbreaking, tender moment between, echoing Jesus’ language, friends.

We witness this betrayal and it cuts to the quick. Betrayal does that – it perverts the intimacy of trust, twisting it for something wrong. And what could be more wrong than turning your friend over to an enemy? It cuts to the quick for us, too, because each of us knows the taste of betrayal in one form or another. We know how much it changes us, changes our ability to trust and give freely. We witness the tragedy of the betrayal, we anticipate the desertion Jesus, too, anticipates – and it makes Jesus’ upcoming actions, the gifts we celebrate tomorrow on Holy Thursday – and it just seems impossible. How could it be possible to love so much? It the midst of all this heartbreak, betrayal, desertion, how could God give so much? Contours.

When we think of all that the Great Cloud of Witnesses have seen, in so many ways, this is what they have seen. Ways in which intimacy is perverted, twisted for something wrong. Betrayal. Desertion. Heartache. Pain. Willful ignorance of all this. And so much more. The underbelly, I imagine, could be in full view for the Great Cloud of Witnesses.
But here’s my hunch. Here’s what I imagine is different. We see that underbelly too, and maybe we even fixate on it. My vision of eternity, of the afterlife, of what it’s like to be in that cloud – is that we fixate on something different: we fixate on God. My sense of heaven is the relationship between human and divine unveiled, where the layers are peeled off, where the fuzziness gives way to clarity, where the atrocities are no longer overwhelming because we will be able to see where God is in all of it, and we will see the good incrementally, moment by moment, overcoming the bad.

Where there is pain we will see the work of eternal healing. And, in symbols and moments of death, we will see life. That is, my friends, what I imagine Jesus means when he calls us friends. Friends who share in the beatific vision. Friends who now see but dimly, but will one day see face to face.

Friends, we witness something. Soon, like them, we will witness more. Until then, we practice in prayer and at the table Christ sets for us. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Your Story

2011-05-25T16:04:00.001-07:00

Why does the night differ from all other nights?

Around the world Jewish peoples reflected on this question last night, celebrating the start of the Passover, the night when God’s saving protection for God’s chosen people was made so clear as part of the Exodus narrative. And from Jewish table to table, identity is crystallized, relationships with the divine are celebrated, family is nourished as a people reflect on life and death, danger and safety, their place – and God’s place – in the story.

Why does this week differ from all other weeks? We might as well as this as a Christian people, a people gathered this week under candlelight of an ancient seder table, a table that calls us to remember at mass after mass, and particularly this week as we remember Jesus’ last seder, Jesus’ last meal shared with disciples – friends and an enemy, a people held safe in the face of danger, reflecting on life and death and their place – and God’s place – in the story.

That night – this week – they are special because they invite us into the story that makes us – us, together. They invite us to retell and relive and rejuvenate, reconstitute, recommit, even – to draw us into the story that is at the same time ancient and new and even about to begin again. The Passover and the events of Holy Week, the stories we hear of people and place and call – they are the stories of people long dead. And, they are very much the stories of the living and the not yet born! All at once. And there’s the point.

“Listen!” the prophet said. Listen and hear the call of the One whose voice you were born to hear. Hear the call and pay attention. Hear the stories and know the characters – them, and you, all addressed, all relevant, all important – together. Celebrate the everlasting love of God for God’s covenant people – the Jewish people. Give thanks for the New Covenant poured out on Good Friday in the midst of tragedy, misunderstanding, and distortion. Weep at the consequence of sin made manifest on the Cross. Look to a tomb that will be empty. And see consequence connected to the grace that overcomes it. See death and look for life.

But perhaps I get ahead of myself. We find ourselves in that place this week – wanting to look ahead. Hearing Jesus warn of his death, as he does in today’s Gospel, and knowing something of what happens. In part, this makes sense. We do know the story – many of us do, anyway. Many of us know the words as written, can anticipate what’s next.

But that looks at the story as if it were only a historical account, not the story of a people who continue to live and breathe and create new stories bound into the events we retell at Holy Week. We can’t know everything of how it unfolds. All we know are the beginning and the end, but there’s so much more.

What makes this week special above every other week is that we are given the chance, from the very place and setting in which we live right now, to be engrafted into an ancient story that…continues. It is special because it allows us to be reminded of God’s commitment to us. It is incredible because, as we listen to the many ways folks just like us falter, God’s commitment endures, anyway.

This week is special because it reminds us to live. It reminds us to live, and to live with gratitude. It reminds us to live, and in so doing, to live eternally, there but by the grace of God. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Dry Bones

2011-05-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Let me tell you something good about the weather – not the weather we’re about to have tomorrow, I mean the seemingly endless winter we’ve had. There is very helpful news out of this weather: it gives a very, very helpful illustration to tonight’s sermon.

It has been cold. (I took a look at my closet the other day and, however precipitous this was – and it was – declared myself “free of boots” for the rest of the year because I was just so tired of wearing them…) it has been miserably cold, dreary, dark, rainy, icky. It has kept so many of us from wanting to be out – it’s as if we’ve been somehow shut down since the city shut down so horribly in the snowstorms. We still haven’t recovered.
On top of this, a lot of folks aren’t sufficiently employed. The economy claims rebounds, employers are promising more jobs, but there are a lot of people this hasn’t reached just yet, and when we thought the federal government might shut down this weekend, those who depend on government-related income wondered if they might be able to make it. Will the rent be paid? Will we eat? The economic winter, or even the winter of disaster, with all of the sense of dependency and anxiety and deep, deep concern that comes with them, continues as we wonder what – and when – the next storm will be.

The extended winter around us, the endless “winter of our discontent” places us squarely in the biblical tradition, and right in the path of the prophet Ezekiel’s words. (Now, usually, we don’t want to be in Ezekiel’s path. Let’s just say that he wasn’t the gentlest of prophets, and when Ezekiel addressed someone, they were pretty unlikely to hear something they’d want to hear.) That is not the case today, not in the gorgeous, important passage we hear today.

Because Ezekiel is addressing the endless winter – here referred to as the “dry bones”- and how evocative is that? How appropriate? Do you ever just feel yourself just propped-up like a skeleton? Do you ever feel like the life has been sucked from you, like issue after issue, problem after problem has stripped you bare? Have you ever found yourself feeling like the “bare bones approach” is the only option you could possibly take? Have you ever found that circumstances have gotten to be so much that it’s as if your breath has been taken away – do you, people of God, ever find yourself literally breathless?

Prophesy to these dry bones, says the Lord. Prophesy, and tell them there’s more. Tell them that there is more to them than bones, nerves, synapses. Thus says the Lord to these bones: I will breathe life into you. I will cause breath to enter you. And you shall live.

Maybe you’re not in this place. Maybe you never have been – if so, I give thanks to God for that. That’s why it’s especially wonderful that you’re here today. Because there seems to be a time in every adult life that finds some resonance in the dry bones metaphor – it is a valley that is common to the human experience, so, when this moment comes, perhaps you might remember God’s promise to you and to all of God’s people. Perhaps you’ll remember God’s promise never to leave anyone in a valley.

Well, there’s another dimension to this, of course. Because the truth is that God cares about individuals, but God cares about the collective, too. If one suffers, we all suffer. If one (or some) are dry bones, we all are dry bones. So, the God who sees and cares about the dry bones sees and cares enough to touch us all with the breath that revives – even if we don’t know we need it.

Prophesy to these dry bones and show them that where there is death, there is life, and in so doing, they shall know that I am the Lord. Where there is death, there is life. Never forget this. In the midst of the valleys, God is intensely engaged – this has been true since the moment that death entered this world, and it will be until death simply stops. God revives! God breathes anew! This is precisely God’s work.

Many people thought that resurrection began at the end of Christ’s passion. But Ezekiel, whose prophecies were hundreds of years before , proclaimed this revival generations before. Even Jesus revived people from death before his own resurrection – think of Lazarus. This form of healing happened in more isolated circumstances in the stories we know throughout the bible, and, I’m sure, in countless other stories that have been lost over time.

What changes, what’s different about Christ’s resurrection is in what it accomplishes. Christ’s resurrection makes universal what was previously more restricted. Christ’s resurrection – The Resurrection – delivers the breath, the life to the dead once and for all.
Truth is – and this is the foundation of my faith, actually – resurrections happen all of the time, because God, the breath, the light, the life – sources all of these things. If you were to draw a connective line between the major faith systems of the world that acknowledge a divine presence – they agree on this piece, though less so on the next.

If God breathes life once – wouldn’t God breath life again? And again? And forever? If God gives life – wouldn’t God give life eternally?

Well, that’s what this faith tradition claims. That’s what Ezekiel seems to be promising, too. That the dry bones – whether metaphorically, or physically – so common to the human experience – these dry bones only tell a part of the story. Because even the dry bones – not will, but shall live. The difference? “Will” is a prediction. “Shall” is a solemn promise.

Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.
Perhaps now the winter of our discontent is made glorious summer, not by us, not by some charismatic leader, not by accident of fate, but through the warm sunshine of God’s renewing love that always, always wins out. There is God’s promise.

Good people: experience the new breath, and live, and in so doing, know the Lord your God. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Hope and Disappointment

2011-05-25T16:01:00.001-07:00

Watch here.

Hope does not disappoint us.

In tonight’s reading, the apostle Paul makes this very bold – perhaps even controversial claim.

Hope does not disappoint us.

But do you believe it? Do you agree that hope doesn’t disappoint?

Because any person who has lived has lived through disappointment. Any person who has bothered to hope has been bothered by the disappointment of some hopes that are never realized. Some who’ve been seasoned all too well in the practices of disappointment might even argue that those of us who live in hope are bound, at some point, to shift to living in disappointment. These two experiences hold deep associations that are difficult to break.
Paul knows this all too well. He must, because in his gorgeous (sometimes confusing) treatise on salvation – on the way that you and I and the rest of God’s people are saved – he inserts this message of hope. He inserts the message of hope on top of an acknowledgement of the difficulty in hope.

We suffer. He acknowledges this as one who suffers right along with the rest of us. He’s seen prison time. He’s already walked the road towards martyrdom. He’s been hungry. He’s been mocked, shunned, rebuked, worn. He gets it.

But what Paul wants us to see, what Paul wants us to know – and, again, he’s speaking from a place of suffering himself – is that in the midst of it, in the thick of the worst of it, we have hope to cling to. Not some false hope. Not the kind of hope that disappoints. But a real, enduring hope that always, always comes through.

So how do we reconcile the experience of our own hopes disappointed, with this idea that hope doesn’t disappoint?

I think that we start with the locus our hopes. For what do we hope? In whom? Under what circumstances?

I spent some time with a beloved relative of mine recently, who is doing quite well in her life. Sure, she could use more money. She could use a bigger house for her growing family. But the basics are there: she is surrounded by love, her family is safe and flourishing, and she has almost everything she could want. Most beautifully, she is able to enjoy these things without fretting about what she doesn’t have.

I asked her the secret to her joy. And she introduced me to a practice she’s begun in which she “taps” her hopes in daily affirmations. There are videos on youtube that she watches where a leader guides her through these affirmations.

All you have to do is to select the thing you desire from the long list of catalogued desires, and there’s an affirmation waiting for you. When we were together, she chose the $50,000 savings account one. Together, we watched and listened to our guide who systematically guided us through this affirmation saying things like, “I do not have $50k in my savings account today. I forgive myself for the ways in which I’ve actively blocked this $50k from coming into my savings. I now call upon the universe to send me $50k. I look forward to the day and the ways in which this is going to happen for me.” At the end of several days of practiced meditation and tapping, our leader promised, something about our vibrations would change and in the process, we would be ready to receive the $50k that we have always wanted to have in our savings.

This was a fascinating experience for me as I tried the exercise. On the one hand, it felt nice to imagine my savings account growing. On the other hand, I was sitting there tapping my sinuses, and by the end, I had a momentous headache. Maybe my vibrations weren’t good enough…

But what was profound, for me, was how this exercise in the practice of hope was so…lovely. Here we were naming a hope. We were taking the time to reflect on this hope, feeling hopeful and happy about it. We were working on (some) ways to remove the impediments to realizing this hope. And, in the end (minus my headache) we could feel good about its possibilities.

Maybe you’re waiting for me to mention the problems with this approach. Maybe you’re expecting me to mention things about how this video said nothing about the injustices that keep people in poverty, or the problems with blaming ourselves for our suffering. Oh, trust me, those problems are there – they are precisely why you will never hear me preach or endorse something like “the secret” or anything like it.

But what I found instructive and helpful in the context of the apostle’s deeply Christian message was that this video helped its viewers to develop a practice of hope. It showed them where to place their hope (in the universe and themselves?) and how to focus on their hope.

Alas, a Christian message could never ever ever locate hope in you and me. Christian hope has nothing to do with anything you and I earn. Christian hope is not about amassing riches for ourselves. Christian hope does not blame suffering and difficulty on the sufferer or the victim.

No. Christian hope always, without fail, places every bit of hope in God. Christian hope recognizes that all good is God, and that God wants that goodness for us. Christian hope draws our attention away from things that do not last, and points us to things that are eternal. Because the truth is that, just like any feeling, the sense of security of a $50k bank account, or a nicer apartment, or anything else that the world can give – simply does not last. We can look for these things, and we can work for them. But let’s not ever ever ever confuse that with a practice in the faithful, Christian exercise of hope in the living God.

Hope in the living God casts before us the reality of our experience and soars beyond it. When we hope in the living God, we appropriately hope for things we do not even know how to articulate because they are so far beyond the limits of our experiences and imaginations. When we hope in the living God, we hope for the peace, the goodness, the joy, the fulfillment the world cannot give. When we hope in the living God, we hope in that which will never ever ever disappoint. God promises us this.

So we can tap, meditate, pray, jump up and down, dance, sing, or whatever we like to give thanks for this gift – this eternal gift – made ours through Jesus Christ, who heals, gives and saves, beyond measure and without end. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Dancing with the Devil

2011-05-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

I can’t say that I have, but, if we’re honest, it does sound fun, doesn’t it? There’s something seductive and exciting about this sort of image of the devil. Maybe even romantic. The personified devil is alive, at least in our cultural references, as the one who really knows those good buttons to push, the fun, the excitement of danger, that bad boy so many secretly crave. Dancing with the devil sounds fun, and if we haven’t done it yet, maybe, as we hear the Joker’s question, maybe even just a little bit of us wants to…

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.

Another brilliant, incisive pop-cultural reference to the great tempter that, at least in my circles, has made its way into common parlance. The devil’s greatest trick was convincing us he doesn’t exist.

So maybe it’s a bit odd for me to mention it, especially since I personally don’t think that he does. I don’t believe in Satan. (Yeah, I said it.) I don’t believe in the personage of Satan. After all, who takes a man in a red spandex unitard seriously? Even if he has the horns to match? For God’s sake, we’re New Yorkers! We’ve seen worse. Or maybe we think of him as that really good looking powerful guy who holds the keys to things we really want, the guy who takes us up for a midnight dance (or talk, if a dance with a guy is not your thing) on the rooftop and offers us everything at a price. I don’t know why, but that guy just isn’t so convincing to me. That kind of temptation, quite frankly, is just resistible.
Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was in making us think it’s anything like that, anything that could easily duck in and out of our shallower fantasies. That would be a good trick, indeed.

Because when we’re sitting around, looking out for that guy? When we think the point is to look for him, then we’ve sorely missed the point, and we’ll completely misunderstand the Gospel.

Matthew 4: Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Picture the scene Matthew paints: Jesus has just been baptized by John at the river Jordan. You wouldn’t know it unless you’ve been following along in your bible, but the last sentence in Matthew is when Jesus came out of the water, the heavens opened and a voice from heaven said, “this is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus had just received this blessing and public endorsement in one of the most dramatic moments in the Gospels, and the next thing we know, this blessed one is out in the desert being tempted.

Jesus was human. He was divine, too, but never forget that he was human. Do you think that he needed a man with little red horns to tempt him? To ask him questions he didn’t want to answer? To inspire him to step away from God? In other words, to lead him to sin? Do you think that Jesus, a man, needed another man around to lead him into temptation?

Haven’t you had similar moments? Moments when you’ve just gone the wrong way, knowing it wasn’t best, knowing it would rip apart relationships, destroy your strength, pull you away from the ones you love? Haven’t you been perfectly capable of screwing up on your own, without the man in the unitard?

Friends, in order to “get” Jesus, to understand what a big deal it was for him to have conquered sin, we have to “get” that Jesus faced exactly the same things that we face, just at a different time. He had human thoughts. He just happened to overcome them. And, it turns out, he was the first and only person to pull this off, thankfully, so that we, who can’t, wouldn’t have to.

None of us sits out in the wilderness with that guy. But when we think of the tempter as something a bit broader, a bit more savvy, a bit less anthropomorphic, then I think we start to grasp the depth of what Jesus did in that desert, and what Jesus overcame in his Passion. Because, I believe, we do well to look at that tempter in two ways:

1. Knowing that we’re already capable of the thoughts that can bring us down and pull us away from God. When we go to the dark recesses of our thoughts and we hear that voice, that voice that calls us to think and believe ourselves anything other that God’s beloved, calls us to think that we’re anything other than who we were created to be, when we feel what you may’ve heard me call that hot breath on the back of our necks that tells us we are nothing and worthless and so, why not just screw up? When we feel or hear that voice, that breath, we’re pulling off our own temptation, not that guy.

But there’s another way to look at this that I think is important.

2. I think that the cumulative effect of that hot breath, where bad choice after bad choice and negative thought surrounded by negative thinking has a powerful effect. I think that these moments and the energy that surrounds those moments join together in way, and suck us in, in ways that, if we stand blind to their effects, might prove overwhelming. Evil exists, my friend, and if we just sit and personify it in a little red man, we’re in no ways prepared to recognize it, name it, or resist it.

So. As of last Wednesday, it’s Lent. Lent, which literally means “spring” forward, as we did with our clocks today, thank God. Lent, the season that calls us to examination, to notice the ways that we’re in our own deserts, hearing the voice, feeling the hot breath, making the choices that turn us away from God. And, as we take this desert-journey, we call on Jesus, and we watch. We watch what he did in his own life, and we do what we can, with God’s help, to follow his example. We make a commitment to examine our lives and all that surrounds us to see the desert moments. And we pray for the strength to resist. And when we don’t, we remember that not only has God seen it all before, God’s been through it, too. God’s felt the hot breath. God’s heard the voice. And God’s already redeemed the world, loving it as is and in spite of everything else.

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

In Judgment

2011-05-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

For my ordination, my dear friend Vanessa gave me this lovely gift – a Magic 8-Ball Jesus. Much like the more traditionally designed Magic 8-Ball, you take this figure, ask it a deep question, shake it up, and it gives you an answer. So, for example, were you to ask: “Magic 8-Ball Jesus: who’s right? Her or me?” and you gave Magic 8-Ball Jesus a little shake, he might answer: “I died for this?”

Well, Vanessa, I should say, is one of the most brilliant theologians you will ever meet. Her gift may seem like a gag (and maybe in some ways it is) but, in truth, it is a brilliant gift. Because there is something about who we imagine God to be that asks God to be the magic 8-ball. There’s something very natural about the discomfort with mystery, with the darkness of uncertainties in a world and a life we cannot possibly control that is scary that creates within us this idol of a Magic 8-Ball God who, with a little shake and a little prayer just gives us a definitive answer? Completely unfolds the mysteries? Or, as the apostle Paul put it, will “disclose the purposes of the heart?” “Bring to light the things now hidden in darkness?”

Yes, we want answers. We want to know what is right, what is wrong. But at the same time, we all know that there is so much that exists well beyond our understanding, and that can be decidedly frustrating! Sometimes, it can be so frustrating to acknowledge this that we just stop acknowledging it. Sometimes some of us tend towards forgetting that, in fact, we don’t know everything.

I think it’s with this in mind that Paul writes to his beloved community of Christian sisters and brothers in Corinth. Perhaps in their discomfort with the mysterious and the unknown, some folks took it upon themselves to presume. And this led to conflict. “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes,” Paul says. Do not pronounce judgment. Now, I think that we should be clear that Paul is not talking about civil judgment or legal jurisprudence. He’s talking to a church, and he’s talking about spiritual judgment, the kind that God reserves for Godself but that people love to take upon themselves, anyway. With that in mind, why would Paul discourage this form of spiritual judgment?

First, we cannot pronounce spiritual judgment because we cannot possibly know all of the facts. We cannot possibly know the purposes of the heart, the circumstances behind things, the hidden mysteries that God sees deep below the surfaces we penetrate with our observing eyes.

Second, we cannot pronounce spiritual judgment because, if you look closely at the scriptures – the record we have of God’s consistent and persistent loving relationship with the world and creatures God has made – we always see that judgment never happens without invitation to reconciliation. God judges to cleanse, to restore right relationship, to put an end to wrong ways for the sake of living in right ones. God’s judgment is pronounced so that we can be healed of whatever breach might try to come between us and God. God’s judgment is reconciling – always.

More simply put, we don’t get to judge because we are not God. We do not have God’s power to see, nor do we have God’s power to heal.

What we do have is God’s blessing, God’s presence, God’s faithfulness, and, thank God, God’s judgment. God loves righteousness and says yes to it. God abhors injustice and says no to it, too.

And this is where we come in. When we say that we have no power to judge in spiritual matters, this is a good reminder. This does not mean that we do not have the power to recognize wrong. Quite the contrary – the work of prophets and apostles (and, of course, Jesus himself) is to lift up that which we prayerfully understand to be right and good so that all that is wrong, hurtful, unjust, corrupt, that which breaks down instead of building up, that which must stop in order to allow God’s precious creation to thrive and flourish, so that all this can be healed and restored. We are called to participate in the work of righteousness.

We don’t have the power to judge on spiritual matters – that is God’s realm. But we do have the power – and the responsibility – to name wrongs. We have the power to say no, even when the powerful aren’t willing to listen. We have the power to resist injustice. We have the power to call attention to the ways in which we and others participate in the sins of the world.

People of God, we are not powerless. Even if we find ourselves at the bottom of the ladder. Even if we reach and reach and can’t seem to get up out of it (whatever the “it” is.) Even if we stay in yearning. Even if we live controlled by others who hold power evilly. Even if we find ourselves deeply frustrated and afraid in the great mystery we so deeply want to solve by the end of the chapter. Even if all of this is true for us, we still have power. We have the power of yes and the power of no and the power of God between, even when the world gets it all wrong.

And in all this, let us never forget that at the first and at the last – the answer will be “yes”. Because God, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, created all with a simple yes, yes to life, yes to flourishing, yes to existence, yes to you and to me and to all that God has made. In the middle, in the midst of our freedom, under the influence of that which is not God, there must come some “no”s. God’s no refines, draws creation back towards the yes. And, at the last, God has the final word – and that final word is the same as the first. Alpha, omega. Beginning, end. Yes. Yes. Yes. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Knowing our Place

2011-05-25T14:55:00.001-07:00

Watch here.

I never learned to make coffee. I can’t remember exactly who taught me this. What I do recall is the story behind the lesson: in my folks’ part of the “revolution” (they were activists in the 1960s) women all too often played the double duty of being brilliant…and serving beverages. So someone suggested that, when, one day, in the room of powerful men they dreamed would be my peers, we found ourselves without coffee, it could never be me who was asked to make the pot.

A lot of us have, one way or another, a certain suspicion of the notion of “place”. Reacting against glass ceilings and assumptions and all the forces of oppression that seek to hold the ability to flourish hostage, relegating it to the hands of the few, a lot (though not all) of us shudder at the thought of assuming a/our place in life. We’ll forge our own way, we’ll go places that never existed before, we’ll…we’ll…find ourselves…somewhere…

And yet, when we’re honest, we’ll admit that, at the last, we sure do hope we’ve found our place, because placelessness seems so…lonely. We don’t want to be the wanderers who never rest. So it may be that one of life’s most difficult, ambivalent pursuits, then, is in finding our place in life, and, once we’ve found it, knowing we’re there. Getting this right really, really matters.

Not just for the self, either. In fact, helping individuals find themselves importantly – no, essentially situated in the broader body is crucial to communities of faith. It matters for the church universal, and it matters for Saint Peter's and every other place that draws people together for the worship – work – of God. As we look out on any gathering of people, any congregation on a Friday night or a Sunday morning, any group seated at a table, meeting in an office, pulling together on the streets, people of faith have to ask the question of what God would have them do? What is their place in God’s grace-filled plan for humanity? Where do we fit into the puzzle we can’t always see? What is our place – as people, and as a people?

Our leaders are considering this, here at Saint Peter’s, and we’re going to hear more about this over the course of the next few years. But leaders, emerging leaders all over the world are asking similar questions, aren’t they? There’s much ado as the world questions leadership and place and as people start to question their own roles in all of this. And oooh, that is exciting.

Oh God, place matters. And it’s especially important in matters of leadership. In Christian community, we’re all called to this almost paradoxical place in which we’re all leaders who are necessarily followers. We’re called to leadership, to take something on for the sake of God’s work, to draw others in to share in the work. But, more importantly, we’re called to follow Christ, always, always remembering that Christ is the head of the church, not anyone else. This is better grasped when we stop thinking of leadership linearly, and instead begin to grasp the gorgeous network of patterns and connections in which we find ourselves situated, called.

The apostle Paul explores this point beautifully in his letters, and today’s passage from his first letter to Corinth contributes some important points to his corpus on Christian community-building. Out of this I draw three important points for leadership in Christian community. (I’ll make these points out of sequential order. Please forgive me.)
First: “You” – the people of God – “are God’s temple”, he writes. Each individual has a place, as mortar, clay, materials built up to create a space, each material essential to the other, all situated upon the one, sure, and true foundation of Christ. Paul reminds us that we are part of something bigger and because of that, we have a place. And that place matters, matters to the community, matters to God, who is, of course, the master builder.
Second: (and this is a shift Paul makes in this imagery) while we are part of the Temple, we are, also, like Paul, builders on a project that we won’t be able to see all the way through. We do our part. We build what we can, but while we do, frankly, we HAVE to step away from the arrogance that says that we’re the only ones who can do it. Just as important as the work of building is the work of finding and forming the next set of builders. As Paul puts it, he started the work, but “someone else is building on it” in this great project of God’s design that will continue throughout time as we know it.

Third: this Temple in which we find ourselves is a space to be filled – and is thus necessarily open. So as we build, we don’t build rooms filled floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with stone or brick. No. We build open spaces, doors to be entered (and exited) – room. This Temple must be open to people (more builders!) and open to the Holy Spirit.
In all of this, we have a place, you and I and everyone else. Not a place to be defined by the powerful. Not a place that strengthens oppressive power structures. Not a place that squashes us or others down, or requires us to stand on the broken backs of others. We know our place is God’s place when we, like each other component part, stand and operate in freedom. Otherwise put, we know that we are in the right place when we know that we are free to do our purposeful work there. But until each component part can act out of freedom, then there is corruption in the Temple, and there’s much, much more work to do.

There are forces at work, forces that would rather see us wandering, lost, afraid to assume our rightful place, not believing, even, that such a place exists. There are forces that would rather define our places for us, that would build us into a wall with straightjackets, that would force us down and have us think that’s where we’re supposed to be. Good people: those forces are not God!

God’s force is good, making a place for every bit of God’s creation, setting a place for all at God’s table, and making it good and blessed and free. God does not break. God builds. And God invites us to see and to know all this, and to help others to see and know it, too. This is our place.

Now, in all of this work…maybe we will need coffee. Let the ones with the most access to power make it. That’s their/our? place. May we never forget it.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Satisfaction

2011-05-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Uniting Power of the Cross

2011-05-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

I grew up in a convent. No, not in the way that sounds – it was a house that was built to be a convent. We were steps away from Catholic University, and most of our neighbors were members of Roman Catholic orders. One order of nuns was closing a number of its convents, and sold off the house to my parents.

It is a quirky old house, with the kinds of hiding places that give little children such great delight. And so it wasn’t unusual for me, in my exploring, to come across something special and hidden. In fact, I liked to think that the nuns intentionally left us – left me – little presents. I found my most treasured present in the back of an old kitchen drawer that my parents used to store tools. Under the hammers, nails, screwdrivers, everything you’d imagine in such a drawer, I discovered a shiny piece – tarnished, but still resplendent. It was beautiful. I took my discovery to my mother and asked what it was. She wondered where I had found it, and I told her. “Hmm,” she said, looking at it curiously. “Ask your grandfather when we see him at Christmas,” she said as she handed it back. Of course she knew what it was, but didn’t know how to explain it. Instead, she thought she’d leave it to her father, the pastor, to explain.

Meanwhile, I cherished my tarnished little treasure. And while I knew nothing about what it was, I knew that it was important and special. And beautiful. I started looking for others around the house and, eventually, around the neighborhood. Turns out that there were many, often on the sides of churches and schools, other times, I’d even find them around someone’s neck. Then, I started to notice them lined up and down the streets in power lines, or other intersecting right angles. This cross was everywhere! I don’t know how old I was when all this happened, but I do know that I was old enough to grasp that this symbol held deep power and resonance with people. Even from my mother’s confused and curious initial reaction, my mother who always had an answer couldn’t even find words to explain that power. And so my fascination intensified.

When I finally had the chance to show this treasure to my grandfather, I ran over to him, yelling “granddad, granddad!” and pulled it off my neck to show to him. But then, I remembered. Granddad was blind, and he wouldn’t be able to see it. Holding it in my hand, I stood in front of him, concerned that I wouldn’t get the answer I’d been awaiting, that the mystery would not be solved. Granddad wondered what was happening, and asked. “I had something to show you, granddad, but you won’t be able to see it.” “Let me try,” he said, and I put it into his hand. He rolled it between his fingers and looked at me knowingly. “This is a cross,” he said. Which, of course, explained nothing. “It’s a cross like the Catholics use.” “They call it a crucifix.”

Granddad explained that there were many different ways to look at the cross. In his church, the cross is empty. As a symbol of new life (the word “resurrection” wouldn’t have gone far with me in those days) it shows the triumph, the victory of life over death. “When you see the cross, Kaji,” he explained, “you should be reminded that you have absolutely nothing to fear, because even death is nothing to the power of God. Our cross is empty because even though Jesus died there, he didn’t remain there forever. There’s much more to the story, this powerful, powerful story. And that is what you have,” he said as he replaced my crucifix, “around your neck. Maybe as you wear it you’ll want to learn more about the story.”

I still wanted to know why my cross had a person on it. “Because it emphasizes something a little different, but also important,” he said. “The crucifix reminds people of how much God was willing to sacrifice for us. It’s a symbol of God’s love in the life and death of Jesus Christ.” Mind you, I don’t think I knew anything about Jesus at this point. But I did know something about power and strength and love. And I knew something about the finality of death – or so I thought. Learning that there was more to the story, and that I could come to know more about it set off a lifetime of inquiry into the great joy and mystery of the cross.

Writing to a quarreling but beloved church at Corinth, the apostle Paul draws on this joy, this mystery, this power and appeals directly to its place of bringing joy, and mystery and power – and salvation – to the faithful of every time and of every place. Proclaiming the gospel, Paul writes, is the way in which we can follow Christ, the way to draw upon the power of the cross, the way not to empty it of its power.

To this divided community, notice what powerful rhetoric he uses: “I proclaim the gospel…so that the cross might not be emptied of its power.” BAM! Paul wants us to acknowledge the power of the cross, to give thanks for it, and to behave as if both were true. Petty disputes, quarrelling and the disunity that result – those run the risk of emptying the cross of its power, he says. “Petty” disputes, then, are not petty at all. Look at the disputes that separate the churches today. Arguments over the nature of Christ in holy communion? Who has the power pass along God’s authority? Whether or not we baptize babies? Whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son? To whom are the gifts of the Holy Spirit given, and how do they use them? It seems like we can come somewhere together on these questions. It seems like these questions are not cause for enmity or violence. And we have to believe that, we have to remember that. Because unity matters, and disunity can be more damaging to the work of the spread of the gospel, can sully the message of hope and salvation, can get in the way of the Holy Spirit, can drive apart and asunder the better and more perfect way of serving God, can attempt to strip the cross of its power.

Ultimately, it won’t. The cross – the symbol of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection – is stronger than our sin. It will always prevail. Where we get in trouble is in forgetting that. Never forget that a key mark of the ultimate victory of the cross is when the faithful of every time and every place come together; when the church on earth and the host of heaven consciously and gratefully join their voices in an unending hymn of praise. Disunity will be resolved. Until then, it is our job to follow the leaders brave enough to remind us of this truth. Like Bill Rusch and Gene Brand and the many many others in the sanctuary even today who have committed their life’s work to this gospel truth.

My grandfather might’ve discovered my little crucifix and taken it from me. He might’ve said that it was the wrong kind of a cross from the wrong kind of people. Instead, he was a good pastor – a good Christian, really – and instead, he began the work of helping me become consciously engrafted into the Christian story – a story with news that is good and right and true and, ultimately, unifying. Thank God for the moments when we do not get in its way.

We pray for Christian unity this week. But we must pray remembering that we are basically praying to ask God to deliver on God’s promises. And we must pray remembering that God is always, always, faithful. Marveling over whatever cross we see – be it a crucifix, that Dutch cross, or even an intersection – may we all be reminded of its power, and may we all consistently find the humility to stand in awe of it.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

The Promise of Our Hands

2011-05-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

There’s a lot coming at us out of Arizona, isn’t there? For example, an article I read in the NY Times a few weeks ago has had me thinking something serious. Apparently there’s a new war on babies – more specifically, “anchor babies,” as they’re called – babies who allegedly “anchor” a family to this country because the babies are citizens, even if their parents are not. And so, disturbed by the presence of these babies, there are some who are currently seeking to change Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to make it more difficult for babies born here to be declared US citizens. Never mind the circumstances that might lead a parent to bring a child across one of our borders. Never mind the great personal risk many mothers take on to do this. The idea of extending citizenship, our most expansive form of hospitality as a nation, to these little, vulnerable ones is apparently odious, to some.

Well. Why am I talking about this in church? Because this matters, that’s why. Because since biblical times, border crossings have been dangerous, and God has been concerned. Desperate people escaping persecution, enslavement, oppression and all that comes with these forms of injustice have for millennia crossed sea and desert and foreign land alike for the sake of something better, for the sake of promise. The Israelites crossed the sea and desert to make it to the Promised Land, to experience and receive God’s promise for God’s people.

And where is the Promised Land, now? When destitution, extreme poverty, crippling hunger and danger await you at home, where are you welcome? When you cannot make it where you are, what desert lies between you and the promise God makes to all God’s people – what sea might we have to cross? What pillar of fire by night or cloud by day will guide you there? I’ll come back to this in a moment.

At the time of the Exodus, God ushered God’s people through every extremity, carrying them on the long road from enslavement to freedom in a land inhabited by others who weren’t exactly ready to receive them. So, God placed God’s people into the Promised Land, fulfilling the promise entirely. God’s intervention took a special form, a form we haven’t seen replicated since. Why not? Because the course of history changed with Jesus Christ. Let me try to explain why:

Do you remember the story of Moses’ call? When he stood before a burning bush, and God called Moses to lead the people, read the signs, bring them to the precipice, allow them to cross, and make it to the Promised Land? Moses was called by God to this special form of intervention, to be a human mediator of the divine plan to say a resounding NO to injustice, enslavement, evil. Moses was called, given a responsibility, and (eventually) accepted that responsibility for the sake of his God and for the sake of his people.
The apostle Paul knows a lot about this kind of call, he, himself, called to usher people to God’s promises through evangelism. He has this sense of call, a call given, actually, to all the prophets of old, as he writes his letter to the church at Corinth. “Called to be saints” he says, we are “together with all those who in every time and every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In this, those who are called – by Christ – necessarily turn around and call – on Christ – for help.

Call, then, is never done in isolation. Sure, God may speak in a burning bush, a clap of thunder, a moment of prayer, any of which could be experienced when we’re alone, but the call necessarily brings us to others. And this is comforting, actually, because it reminds us that we are not alone, and that the call that God has offered to us and to all people who call on the name of Jesus is a call to others, with help. Because you know a call from God when you know you’ll have everything you need to do your part in making it happen. You recognize a call from God when you’re inspired to continue calling on God for help. You identify a call as from God when that call compels you to seek out others, to respond to their calls.

God’s intervention need not take on the form of the Exodus from Egypt because, I believe, in Christ, we are called not to resist God’s people as they make their way to our abundance. Rather, we are called, by Christ, to join with those who call on Christ in desperation. We’re called to hear the calls to Christ in the Sonoran or Chihuahan desert. And we are called to respond.

I read today’s epistle as if it were a letter to me. That’s how holy scripture works, really. God continues to speak, God enlightens its reading so that it means something to us. And as I think about women like Inez Vazquez, featured in the article I mentioned, who, at 8 months pregnant risked everything to walk across the desert with not much more than the scissors she brought with her in case she needed to cut the umbilical cord, as I hear some people pointing to her as if she were some kind of demon, as I hear of instance after instance of a host people blocking access to the promises that await in a land of more prosperity, I hear God calling me to hear their calls. I hope you hear this, too.
Jesus lived to show us a way of life, and to redeem all of God’s Creation, expanding God’s people to all whom God has made. Jesus crossed borders, braved the Sinai desert in the face of a ruler intent on killing him – as a baby. Years later, in the course of Jesus’ ministry, he made the promise that those who called on his name would be heard. Heard by God, and, necessarily, by his followers.

The Lutheran Church talks about God’s work in our hands. This means that God has work that requires our hands to do it – with God’s help. Hearing the cries of those who call on God is one of the ways to do it. Because God need not deliver God’s people to the Promised Land in the old way of the Exodus. No, God has millions of Christians around the world who are called – required – to make whatever place they (we!) are in the new Promised Land for whoever needs it, however inconvenient.

Recognizing this, recognizing the face of Christ in all who call on God’s name, helps us to hear this particular and critical call from God: let’s not deport Jesus. Because the Promised Land is right where we are, wherever we are in abundance on this earth, and we’d do well to entertain whatever angels God has to send our way. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, our hands are part of the Promise. This is our call.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

In thy dark streets shineth...

2011-05-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

It would be hard for me to tell you what I was doing or where I was for most of the New Year’s of my adulthood. (No, not for the usual reasons!) But mostly because they’ve been pretty prosaic, non-events, if you will. Time passed a notch from the old year to the next, and whether or not I was conscious for it was more a matter of chance than anything else.
I can, however, tell you precisely where I was as we brought in the new year of 2006. It was somewhere between 50 and 60 degrees, the air was completely still, and I was huddled with my classmates and faculty as we awaited the turn of the new year. The night sky was pitch black, making the stars all the more resplendent in their glory. The streets, four levels below, were empty and we, tourists in a foreign land, were the only ones outside at all.

10.9.8…someone began to shout, and I felt a little guilty. How dare we cause suck a ruckus on such a peaceful night? How dare we disturb the quiet of this little town, lit only by the Christmas lights that adorned its streets? How dare we, brash Americans, insert our noisy celebration into what they had decided to make as a quiet ushering of the old into the new?

It was still Christmastime there. I like to think that someone near me had the brilliant idea of singing the song O Little Town of Bethlehem, though that may have only happened in my head. Whether we sang it or not, the song surely hummed in our ears, because we stood atop the roof of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem that night, and the words rang true:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

I mentioned that the only lights you could see were the Christmas lights hung by the town (which, by the way, is about 80% Muslim.) We were on a major street at Christmas Lutheran. But I decided to look away from the lights, away from the center towards the hills that surround Bethlehem’s humble center. And in those directions, there was absolute darkness. Houses were dark. There were no cars on the road. No street lamps lit. And for this certified City Girl, it may have been the first time I was consciously aware of real darkness.

What’s it like in real darkness? Well, it’s hard to see what’s in front of us, which makes it harder to anticipate things. Not knowing what’s next is a typical, common experience of humanity. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier. I think that this is why this imagery, the darkness and light metaphor is so resonant and striking. Because all of us fear the unknown to one degree or another.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light

It had already been a tough trip. Bethlehem was our first of many stops, though we stayed there the longest – it was our base in the West Bank. We were guided by a young man born in the town, who showed us the landmarks, filled in gaps in the stories we’d all studied so closely, animated the images we’d already developed in our minds of what that place, the City of David, would be. But amongst the joy of the mystery made somewhat less mysterious was the truth of the reality we faced. We were in Bethlehem during the Christmas season. And we were the only tourists there. In Bethlehem at Christmas! In a city whose economy depends on tourism for its survival, and where unemployment was, at the time, climbing beyond 70%.

Without a livelihood, without the means for survival, without really knowing when the water would work or when it wouldn’t, without the ability to provide for one’s family, without the freedom to move about from town to town, without access to some of the most basic needs, the residents of Bethlehem had something profound to share about the nature of darkness, of the unknown, of not knowing what is next.

And yet.

And yet that darkness, so to speak, the overwhelming possibility of despair was not the song that rang loudest in Bethlehem’s streets. For these were a people of hope, of gigantic and extravagant hospitality. I don’t mean that in a patronizing way, nor do I mean to diminish their difficulties. The hope, the light didn’t replace the darkness. Both lived together. And that’s the way it works.

5.4.3.2.1…the countdown continued. I turned around and around on that roof, beholding the darkness and the light, and was reminded specifically of today’s Gospel – what I believe to be the most gorgeous and important words in Scripture – in which the Creation story continues in the revelation of Jesus Christ: the light that shines in the darkness.

This light shines so that the darkness, the possibilities of unknowns, never overcome the light. This light shines so that we may know what lies way ahead, past the possibilities, past the unknown. This light shines so that we may understand that beyond all that we will see and know, beyond all this on the horizon beyond tomorrow, lies God. Imminently transcendent. Shining – with us – now. Shining – before us – forever. Shining – around us – in the world without end.

Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Intervention

2011-05-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

As we, the faithful remnant, gather in this beautiful space in the midst of our first blizzard this year (where the White Christmas began just a day late, I suppose) we crouch together in the safety of this beautiful place during this gorgeous season of merriment. And maybe we do feel merry. Maybe we do feel the joy of the season, the lingering excitement of Christmas.

And maybe we don’t. I’ve talked to several people over the past few days who’ve expressed a common desire – to get through this time of merriment which is anything but merry for them. “I can’t wait until the holidays are over,” they say, “because then I can resume my life again.” They feel this sense of forced merriment because everything around them screams “YOU SHOULD FEEL JOY!!!” and they just can’t. Maybe they can’t because they miss people who have died, people with whom they once shared such formative Christmas memories that they can’t figure out how to form new ones without them. Maybe they can’t because they need more light in their lives and suffer the illness of depression come wintertime because of it. Maybe they do enjoy certain moments of joy, little punctuation marks among the run-on sentences of sadness.

The church anticipates this. You can hear it in the readings. Amidst the great joy of the proclamation of Christ’s birth, you get readings like today’s. Readings that celebrate the goodness of what God has done. And readings that mourn what unjust people have done, like King Herod of tonight’s gospel reading, a wicked man whose fear led him to slaughter the innocents. In this way, we acknowledge the complexity of experience at a time like this. We acknowledge that in the midst of a whole lot of bad, God will do good.

We acknowledge that in a world of pain, God interferes and God intervenes.

It’s important to see this, to recognize it, to name it and to claim it. In this world of pain, of complex human experience and emotion, of laughter coupled by tears, joy with sorrow, excitement with fear, need and longing, God has a place. And God always interferes. And God always intervenes.

Would that we could always see it. We don’t. I believe with every ounce of my being that God intervenes in our lives countless times throughout the day. That God’s grace touches us beyond our understanding. That every experience of goodness is an experience of God. Trouble is, we do not always see it. We do not always recognize God’s interference and intervention. And it’s often not the interference nor the intervention we would have asked for. But in ultimate terms, it is always sufficient.

Well, what about death? What about the innocents? According to today’s gospel, in his rampage to stop the competitive force he believed Jesus to be, King Herod killed all children two years and under in and around Bethlehem. There’s no explaining that away. Amidst the great joy of Christ’s birth, we’re reminded of its danger. Children – babies – were sacrificed for no reason. Stories like this are all too common. We see the unthinkable and we wonder where God was. Why God let it happen.

It’s moments like this when we need a more sophisticated theology, folks. We need the discipline to recognize God at work in tragedy. We need the faith to remember that not everything that happens happens at God’s beckoning. We need the faith to believe that God is present, God interferes, God intervenes, even when the worst happens. A way to approach this kind of thinking is recall that God’s scope and reach extend far beyond what we see and even know. God’s interference, God’s intervention happens in our world, for sure. But God’s interference and intervention in many ways (ways you and I cannot even imagine) extend into a realm about which we pretty much know nothing. In the Christian faith, death ends nothing. God’s realm extends infinitely beyond life as we know it. And so God’s interference, God’s intervention happens sufficiently. But it doesn’t always happen in a way that we can see it.

Innocents are slaughtered every single day. Pain persists from moment to moment. Sometimes we are physically delivered from these. Other times we just aren’t.
The key is to remember that in the midst of it, in the midst of everything we see and everything we wish we didn’t see, God is at work. And God will never fail to interfere and to intervene.

That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. That’s the beautiful and perfect joy of the Incarnation – when God took on our form and life to join us completely in this imperfect endeavor. If you can see anything in the Christmas story, see that God has gone to an unimaginable extreme to interfere in the course of human history, intervening on our behalf, and remaining with us every step of the way.

Merry Christmas. Even if you can’t feel it. Trust in God’s perfect interference. Believe in God’s intervention, because, through Christ – it becomes yours and mine and all the world’s, forever and ever. Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

Christ in Christmas?

2010-12-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

Shhh! Listen. Can you hear it? If you listen closely enough you can. You can hear them. Can’t you? Because preachers all around us are preaching the same sermon on the same theme. There is sighing (though not too much) and a bit of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Why? Because they want to “put the Christ back in Christmas.” Buoyed up by a whole movement, I think created in response to the apparently offensive greetings like “Happy holidays” and “season’s greetings” (I know – can you believe it? I shudder to hear them!) and maybe the idea that the consumer economy depends on the weeks around Christmas for its recovery, this movement to “put the Christ back in Christmas” seeks, instead, to claim Christ publicly.

So no more “Happy. Merry.” Bloomingdale’s. No more “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings.” Instead, at these preachers’ encouragement, Christians all around the land have been wishing anyone they see a “Merry Christmas” since some time after Thanksgiving.
Never mind if you don’t celebrate Christmas…in November.

Proclaiming Christ in this way, laying a stake in the ground, if you will, apparently puts Christ back in Christmas. Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas will, I suppose, rightly focus our attention to see that which came to pass amid the winter’s snow on a cold, winter’s night in the tranquil air of Bethlehem. Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas will clearly draw up that gorgeous image of that quaint family amongst the quaint hay in the quaint and quiet stable with a baby who doesn’t cry and…somehow it doesn’t ring true.

One of my favorite humorists tells the story of a Christmas in her youth, when, completely bored by the sleepy air of her church’s Christmas pageant, she attempted to inject some drama into the story in her own re-telling of it. She needed “to create a more compelling story-line,” she writes, or, as she describes: “I was going to rewrite the birth of Jesus Christ and I was going to make it POP.” The whole quaintly air she’d come to know Christmas by couldn’t captivate her interest.

And she’s not alone.

[Enter: Santa Claus, reindeer, one-horse open sleighs, and all the things added to the Christmas season to bring more excitement to the time.]

Can we blame them?

The quaint Christmas story is dull. It doesn’t pop. It’s one big yawn.

Trouble is (or, thank God! depending on your perspective) the Christmas story as told in the gospels isn’t quaint at all.

The gorgeous snow was added sometime around the reign of Queen Victoria – not in the gospels, but in the dominant tradition surrounding them. Imagine the cave where Jesus was probably born, around some animals. Have you ever spent time around animals in close quarters? Quaint is the last word I would think of…. And what donkey? There’s no donkey, not in this story, not in the Gospels. What three kings? (Magi? Yes. “Kings”? At least from the Greek, we don’t know. And how many? The text never says…)

So much of the popular image of Christmas draws our attention to things that are easier to see, quantify and commodify, easier to hear than the raw images the gospels actually give us.

You want to put Christ in Christmas, Christians? Then we’d better be willing to step far, far away from our comfort zones. Any time our image of the Holy Family depicts the main characters in the image of the most powerful, in the dominant view of beauty and tranquility, in the place where most art patrons would feel most comfortable, we know we’ve already strayed waaaaay off track.

No, when we “put Christ back in Christmas”, or, perhaps, I should say, when we dare to actually focus on Christ at Christmas, we have to step back from our places of comfort and leisure, and we have to go…there. There to a place where no one would have them. There to a feeling of desperation, and, even fear. There amidst the smell of blood and birth. There to the experience of having no resources, broke. There to the first birth of a family who didn’t know what they were doing and had no human help that we know of to do it. There to an unfamiliar land and an uncertain future. There under a star they may not have even seen. There to that place where it’s not so comfortable to go. No. It’s not comfortable and it certainly isn’t quaint.

So…when we sing a song like “Joy to the World” – are we wrong?

Not if we hear the irony.

There’s joy in the Nativity, there’s good in the Good News, there’s hope amongst the discomfort. Because God masters the unexpected, God owns the good in news, and in the mystery and joy and discomfort of the Incarnation in which Word becomes flesh and the divine learns (firsthand!) just what it means to be human – God shines light on all that. There’s nothing in the Christmas story to make the proud or the powerful comfortable. You know you’re starting to get it right, you know you’re paying attention to that on which God shines light, when, from whatever place of power you and I sit – you start to feel a bit uncomfortable, unsettled.

To pay attention to Christ in the Christmas story means that we have to be willing to see everything God highlights here – the quaking fear of the unjust ruler, the level-best effort of the family, and the one who chose to be born not in the palace he deserved but amongst embarrassment, scandal, deep poverty and under pursuit.

When we approach a willingness to pay attention to the Christ at Christmas, we are blessed with the ability to see an element of ourselves, of universal human experience, in the story – not in a quaint way, but in a connected way. We’ve all wanted to draw on hope in times of uncertainty; we’re all born vulnerable, and the connections extend from there. To recognize these connections, to stand prepared to welcome the God who is already with us as Emmanuel, to embrace the ways in which this will unsettle us all to the glory of God, to do all this – is to begin to behold the disruptive joy that comes into the world in and through Christ.

And if we’re not so willing? If we would rather refuse to see the face of Christ in the poor, the refugee, the powerless – the very ones we glimpse in the Christmas story – if we’d rather not see their images reflected in the Holy Family, then let’s just follow the advice of one of today’s most brilliant theologians on air (Steven Colbert) and just take the Christ out of Christmas. Call it X-mas. Willingly marginalizing the poor does that, anyway, let’s just go ahead and acknowledge it.

Well. There is a better way.

We can let the Holy Spirit have its way. We can let God continue to work in our lives. We can be willing to be part of the change that would need to happen in order for another set of tragedies like those we witness in the unjust acts surrounding the nativity to be the stuff of storybooks and history. We can see the merry-ness of Christmas as being the promise of just that.

And so.

May your Christmas be merrily unsettling, church, and may the world be changed because of it.

Amen.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

No Means No

2010-12-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

Watch here.

It is fascinating to observe a child as she first learns things, things like words, meanings, how to express herself, how to manage. Invariably (at least in our language) the word “no” is one of the earliest words she’ll learn. She’ll come to know the sound, she’ll say it, even. She’ll come to know something of its meaning. My niece, for example, when she sees the tempting stove just on the other side of the kitchen, will stand in the doorway, staring at it, repeating “no, no, no” as a reminder learned so early. Then, “no” seems to be learned as a comfortable response to a question. The same niece, when you ask her if she wants something she very much wants, for example, anything having to do with Elmo, will nod her head “yes” while saying an emphatic “no.” And thus begins something of a lifetime struggle with discerning between the two.

So much of the experience of Scriptural interpretation seems tied in to this early learning, this innate comfort with the word “no.” Ask someone who says that they believe that The Bible Is the Inerrant Word of God what they mean, and you will find that connection to The No. In some ways, it’s such a comfortable place to sit. Imagining God’s favorite word as a NO makes things clearer. “No”, God says to this and that and everything we don’t like. “No”, God says to him and to her and to everyone of whom we disapprove.

Thumping the Bible of NO it’s so easy to say:
“No, gay man.”
“No, sexually active single person.”
“No, unwed teenage mother.”

Our Holy Family as described in the Gospel of Matthew lived in a culture of NO. Joseph, the “righteous” as the Gospel of Matthew describes him, was prepared to offer the more “gentle” no to his pregnant fiancée. The “righteous” thing was to set her aside quietly, probably to speak to her father, explain the shame, no questions asked. No questions asked. Never mind how she would have become pregnant in the first place. The likelihood of some passionate dalliance was, well, unlikely. Most likely, one would assume that some more powerful man had had his way with Mary, and the “righteous” thing to do would be to set her aside, throw her away quietly, wink and nod at the structure, further control the woman, push away her body again. To what? Tell me, what was the place of the unmarried, set aside woman in that time? Prostitution? Desolation? Begging, at best? The “gentle” the “righteous” thing would have sent Mary to utter destitution. Let’s be clear on that. Joseph’s inclination towards a gentle “dismissal”, a quiet form of “no” was the best Matthew could imagine for righteousness, I suppose.

Thank God that God’s imagination is broader. Thank God that God’s use of Scripture is not to hear a resounding NO to the world and the people God created. Thank God that God’s emphatic NO is to the very culture of NO that would view a quiet dismissal as righteous.

What does God do? Remember the story. Remember all of the horrors surrounding the birth of Christ. Remember the threats from people in power, the shame, disgrace, even death so commonly visited upon women who fell victim to the more powerful’s appetites. Remember the fist under which the poor lived. Remember all the atrocities of the Christmas story not as a backdrop but as the point. The point God saw, mourned, and said NO to.

NO, Joseph. What’s righteous is not to participate in your culture’s practice of NO. What’s righteous is to listen to God and to do what’s right. NO, world. You await your king, your savior, riding clouds of fire and chariots of gold. Instead, your king comes to you vulnerable, dependent, poor and homeless, raised in a family as dysfunctional as yours. NO, religious leaders, you twist my Word and words for your own use to control and dishonor the very bodies created by God. NO, God will not play into these obsessions. And yes, God shows another way – through Jesus Christ.

Through Jesus Christ we see the body of the outcast – his mother – honored. Through Jesus Christ we hear the most perfect yes to the people created in God’s image – every single person. Through Jesus – whose name means “God saves” – God saves and redeems the world from the comforts of NO to the open arms of a God who says yes, always, to love.

Oh, yes, there’s a place for no. It just isn’t in the place it’s usually uttered. So, as you and I and the rest of us struggle to find the righteous yes and the justice-filled no, look to the example of Jesus. Look to Jesus Christ and you see the place for yes – a place for you and me and ever for the ones who love to point and shout NO. Through Jesus Christ, God saves. In Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God walks with us, saying no to wrongs and yes to all that God has made.

And so we wait until the last no rings out and yes reigns in complete and eternal devotion. Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Matthew 1:18–25

The Vulnerable

2010-12-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

Watch here.

Susan Sontag, in talking about the vulnerability of love, said this once: “it hurts then to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

So, tonight, let’s go there. Let’s talk about vulnerability.

Quite honestly, I shudder at the thought. To be vulnerable is terrifying to some of us, particularly those of us who find comfort in the things we can control. And so, a great number of us go to great lengths to avoid it. We build fences, as if they make us good neighbors. We construct layer over layer over layer of supposed protection, hoping that it will keep us safe. Well safety is important. When we obsess over it, “safety” becomes king and lord in our lives, taking over, in a way. Sheltering us from everything while we enjoy little.

These layers may protect us from the experience of vulnerability, walling us off from risk, but in the process, who knows us? Who can see through the walls, the pretense, the painted visage, the things that separate us from our truths? Who can know who we are, when we won’t even allow ourselves to know us? How can our partners, our lovers, our friends see us for who we are when we will not tell anyone – not even ourselves? It is the avoidance of pain that draws lines between us and in the end, no one even knows. It is a scary (and vulnerable) thought to consider that we might live our entire lives without ever being known.

And it would almost be true, were it not for the one who sees through it all. Were it not for the God who is so familiar with our most vulnerable places that this God would come to us, not robed as the mighty king enthroned on high, not carried about on gilded chariots of fire. No, this God knows so much about vulnerability that God entered the world just as the rest of us have – as a little baby child, a destitute, poor, baby boy, a homeless, impoverished, defenseless child.

Oh, God knows something about vulnerability.

What care did God in Jesus Christ pay to security? What savings account could he boast? What property did he bequeath to his estate? What riches did he carry to his grave? What measure of things that we all so obsessively seek to protect ourselves, which of these things did Jesus give even the slightest care to?

Safety, security, shelter – these are some of our deepest human concerns. And they matter. And yet, as Christians, we are called to be Christ-like. So how do we balance our need for these things with our yearning to do as Christ did?

I think that yes, we pay attention to ways in which we make ourselves safe. But not at the expense of others. If our safety requires the loss of human life, if our “security” kills, then there’s nothing safe or secure about it, is there. If our need to seek shelter causes another harm, then we need to examine the harm. In other words, we do well to check whether or not our lives stand on the backs of others.

Well, the truth is, that they do. As we seek to shelter ourselves from physical or even emotional vulnerability, I believe that the King who would reign from a throne of homelessness calls us – compels us – requires us – to notice the ways in which our lives cause harm. Harm to the ones who depend on us. Harm to the ones we don’t even know we touch.

And then what?

Then, we seek Christ. We pay attention to the ways in which Christ reigns. We look for the living Christ who lives, even today. Where? In the faces of the vulnerable.

I would hazard a guess that you and I go to amazing lengths to avoid being vulnerable. Some of us are privileged enough to pull that off with some success. But as we do, we step miles away from the focus of the one who lived a life so that we might “go and do likewise.” The good news is that this very one is imminently familiar with all of our antics, and has seen them all before, such that, even in his most vulnerable moment – dying with his hands and feet nailed to a cross – he forgave us, the vulnerable. Us, the forgiven. Us, the beloved.

Forgiven by God, the beloved. God, the vulnerable. God, the forgiver. God, the ruler who teaches each of us to risk the vulnerability to love, with God’s help.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

REIGN OF CHRIST
November 21, 2010
Jeremiah 23:1–6, Psalm 46, Colossians 1:11–20, Luke 23:33–43

Imagine!

2010-12-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

Watch here.

These days I’m reading a novel about 1939 Great Britain. (It’s not very good, so I won’t tell you its name.) But one of the things I’m enjoying most about this novel (in a bemused kind of way) is the way it describes British customs and ideals, particularly amongst its aristocracy. Spending so much time in mystery and intrigue with our neighbors across the pond got me thinking about the topic of propriety.

Now, I know this would have Maye Francis, my grandmother, smiling on me from heaven, because considering what is proper, understanding expectations and how to meet them, maintaining a sense of decorum, knowing how to conform to prevailing customs, these were things my grandmother (and many of our grandmothers, I imagine) wanted her progeny to understand. It is critical, Maye Francis would say, that you know the rules.
Well, Maye Francis isn’t the only person interested in educating people on rules. Talk to a child, ask anyone, really, about the rules under which they are expected to operate, and they will know. In more and more schools our children learn the “ships” (citizenship, penmanship) but not so much how to question or even jump ship – adjust, behave, obey, don’t question.

Those are the rules that are turning the ability to dream into an elite privilege.

To some degree, we all operate under the rules mandate, bumping up against the boundaries (some – though certainly not all – good) chafing against someone else’s standards, wanting, within the depths of our beings, just once, to swim upstream in a sea of downstream conformity. Oh, we know the rules, all right. By the time we finish school, most of us have become expert accommodators. Those of us who aren’t are just, well, deviant. (How improper!)

Maye Francis, herself an educator for her entire professional career, was determined that we – and, by “we” I mean all of her children, students and family – would all be perfectly versed in the rules of conformity. Why? So that we could laugh conformity in the face when we broke the rules that needed breaking. Not only would we need to know citizenship and penmanship, have good posture and how to fill a teacup without spilling a drop, we should know how to accompany a hymn, sight sing, stand in first position, look at a painting and…think. We should know these things, we should read novels (even bad ones, from time to time)…we should encounter rules and then? Then, we should see them with wandering eyes. Because only then, only when our minds stray from the ordinary to the extraordinary, only then could the unjust be challenged.

Oh, Maye Francis had such a vivid prophetic imagination!

Speaking of prophets…where does the prophet stand with the rules? Well, I guess it depends on which rule (and which prophet.) So much of the prophetic corpus addresses rules: rules broken, rules unjust, rules under siege. But, like Maye Francis, they always encountered the rules with wandering eyes, wandering to the truth they knew of the Lord their God, and, so inspired, sauntering boldly from the ugly truth they saw to the stunning canvases of their imaginations.

And no text illustrates this holy wandering better than today’s vivid tableau painted for us – and for all humanity – by the prophet Isaiah. It’s an image so clear, so inspiring, so important that even the youngest children will retain it. He describes a land where everything we’re used to, all the customs, all the norms are just THROWN OUT THE WINDOW. Enemies become friends. Wolf and lamb lie together. Strong and weak become equals. The Prince of Peace reigns. Isaiah’s image is absolutely absurd! But we remember it.

As well we must. We must retain the ability to imagine something different from what we know. We have to unlearn the habit of accepting things as is. Our rules must be rules that protect, not destroy. We cannot take injustice as a given. We cannot cut away our ability to promote the vivid imagination that allows people – young and old – to continue dreaming of something better.

Oh, it’s not easy. Can you even imagine what it would be like not to have enemies? For there to be no threat? To live totally without fear? When God would no longer have to feel disappointed by our choices? When there would only be prayer, and no prey? Can you imagine?

Saint Peter's Church, we are at our best when we nurture the wandering eye, when we creatively shape, when we make room for holy imagining. You may not know this, but we’re famous for it. Look at this building, where we worship in the midst of, in full view of, underneath, not above, whoever passes us by. Look at how it stands strong and defiant amidst the bigger and the stronger structures that scrape the sky at a different altitude, while we touch the sky differently. Notice how, in here, we surround each other as we surround Christ’s ever-expanding table as, together, our eyes continue to wander, too. I can’t worship God in this room without looking outside and noticing something. None of this is by accident, folks. The windows are in every sightline for a reason! This space reminds us of a people who dreamed big and who need us to keep on dreaming.

When we remember that, Maye Francis and so many of the saints who’ve seen the fruits of holy imagination just smile. They smile when we take note of the rules that shape our society, our culture. They smile when we change the ones that hurt. They smile when we work hard to make room for the deviant. And they smile when, by the grace of God, we create opportunities to dream extravagantly. For it is in those extravagant dreams of peace and peacemaking and the love that runs through it all, that we remember the deliciousness of following a God who is merciful and just and who is already at work at fulfilling all this and so much more.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Isaiah 11:1–10

The Future IS the Lord's House

2010-11-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

Watch here.

It’s all about new beginnings. Why? Because new beginnings are precisely God’s business; they are God’s specialty, if you will. And new beginnings are we celebrate today, on the first Sunday in Advent.

Advent is a beginning, it is the start of something new, the newness that God has been and is and will be up to in the world.

Otherwise put, Advent, this new beginning, is the church’s chance to invite us to all get even more confused about the concept of time.

If you’re anything like me, you fail to fully grasp time. It’s always eluding us, slipping through our fingers. And, as we age, it seems that the passage of time accelerates, doesn’t it? I remember sitting in the classroom as a little girl at 2:57 in the afternoon. 2:58 and 2:59 could never come quickly enough – time seemed to stand still. Now? I’m always at risk of being late, live under the stress of making every attempt to keep that from happening, consistently look at my watch – or the calendar – and wonder where the time has gone. Even in these little, everyday ways, the future – whether it’s the next appointment, or it’s the next life change – is a source of anxiety, stress.

We absorb this as a culture, too. How optimistic do we feel about our earth’s future? Society’s future? How many films set a few years or even several decades away depict the future as good? There must be some, but, quite honestly, I can’t think of any. (And, even if there are some, the fact that they’re difficult to recall is proof enough) – the cultures we know look upon the future with suspicion & anxiety at best – fear and trembling, at worst. With the time we experience to be so difficult to grasp, and the time we anticipate being bleak and drab, the concept of time is just, well, beyond us.

So it’s here where the church steps between our fears and the future that is coming and says, here’s a new beginning. It starts now. God is in charge of it, God blesses it, and God makes it good. Here, the church welcomes our confused little minds and says your confusion is entirely welcome – it makes sense, even. Because, in this new beginning, we live the joyous truth of what God has already done and what God will do – all good: already, not yet. Confused yet? Good!

Because it’s just in that realm in which we try to grasp and just can’t, just in that place where we think we understand, just where our questions take off with overwhelming complexity where we can even begin to grasp the broadness and the depth of who and what God is.

Well, in part, God is the One who makes all things new – in a good way.

It’s a challenge. I don’t have trouble believing in things beyond my grasp. I do have trouble trusting that what lies ahead will be good. Contrary to my young looks, I am now old enough to have had encounters with the church’s next generation of leaders, I mean, people who know that they’re called to serve the church in various capacities. And already I’m finding myself frustrated at what they’re learning, disappointed in the ways they’re being taught to communicate, exhausted when they bring up new ideas. Not always, but the suspicion and semi-resentment have already started to creep into my mind. (Perniciously, I might add.)

And shame on me for that. Shame on me for not trusting God to be doing something good and new in that generation, just as God had done something good and new in mine and the one before mine and the ones before them all the way back to the apostles and to Jesus himself. Shame on me for falling victim to my culture’s persistent suspicion of time.
My faith – our faith – is supposed to tell me differently.

Well, maybe you can relate. Maybe you’ve heard something similar, or thought it yourself. Truth is, God’s accustomed to it, the church is, too, and it’s a major reason we receive Advent as a celebration – this built in acknowledgement of the importance of God’s new beginnings – every single year.

So here’s how I snap out of it. Here’s some good news: the Good News is that, when I encounter that suspicion, and, I’d imagine, that when you do, too, all it takes is for me to spend some time with the very newest in God’s creation – a little baby – and, for whatever fleeting moment, I’m able to experience the joy and the hope and the trust that God creates anew again and again.

The Psalm says: I was glad when they said unto me: let us go into the house of the Lord. And so Advent tells us this: the future is the Lord’s house.

All it takes is a little babe to make us glad that the future comes. To make us glad that time is God’s, and that beginnings are good.

All it takes is a little babe. And so, we wait.

In nomine Jesu!

FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT
November 28, 2010

Psalm 122
I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD."

Terror

2010-11-15T12:41:00.000-08:00

Watch here.

You’ll often hear it said that the experience of fear stems from a lack of faith. You will not hear that from me. Since faith is our experience of God’s work in us, it would be grossly inappropriate to suggest that, when we experience fear, God is somehow failing.

And I thought that an appropriate place to begin as we approach today’s Gospel, in which Jesus draws on some fascinating imagery – that of terror.

Terror. It just rings with power. Terror. It evokes something beyond fear – as the dictionary puts it – it’s an “overmastering fear” – intense and sharp, intimidating, coercive.

Overmastering, which is an interesting word, because it shows just how much terror can take over, becoming master, gripping its victims, ruling their lives. Terror is all about power and control.

And yet, the constant reprieve of the angels, their standard greeting, if you will, is “fear not.” Throughout the biblical narrative, when angels have appeared, they often have greeted their audience with these words: “fear not.” Fear not – the Lord is your shield, fear not, the Lord is with you, fear not, God gives you treasure, fear not, neither be discouraged, fear not, and do not tremble, fear not, the Lord will not fail you, fear not, for you seek Jesus, fear not, your prayer is heard, fear not, you have found favor with God, fear not, believe, fear not, you are of value, fear not, little flock, fear not, I am the first and the last…

Fear is such a normative human emotion that this command not to fear appears 48 times in the Old Testament, and 15 times in the New Testament. It’s so important that the messengers of the Lord repeat it over and over and over again, and yet? They have to say it again, because we have such a hard time pulling it off.

Fear not – the Lord is with you – fear not. And yet we do. Why? There are many answers, but today, I’m going to focus on one possibility, on one particular fear. Perhaps it will ring true for you. It will certainly ring true for someone you know.

Some of us live in constant fear because it’s not that hard for us to forget God’s consistent presence in our lives when we just go about our everyday routines. It’s pretty easy to push God out of mind when we’re busy.

And then, many of us allow ourselves to twist our image of God into the “Great Fixer of All Things”, the one who does what we ask and gives us what we want, like our own, personal, great big Santa Claus. We can call on “Santa” when we need him, but maybe we forget him when we don’t.

For it is one thing for God to be a consistent presence, it is another for us to realize it.
And when forgetting God’s constancy, when ignoring God’s presence is our everyday practice, well, what on earth do we do when things get rough? When something threatening appears? Ask “Santa” for a present?

A shallow view of God just doesn’t hold up in the presence of pain, hardship, danger, toil. A pretty, wrapped box won’t answer our deepest needs, nor does it help us to even approach the magnitude of that which God actually does for us, with us, through us, in us, around us, even without us.

Like what? As Pastor Stahler preached in his brilliant All Saint’s sermon last week (which I commend to you), when the world gives us wrong, wrong like war, hunger, unspeakable violence, injustice, poverty, hatred, all the horrific “stuff” of what’s now, God sees it, God condemns it, and, at the same time, God is already on to what’s next, knowing that with death comes resurrection, that the hungry will be fed, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that…

Even when we succumb to our fears, even when, rather than letting our love and thanksgiving to God serve as master and ruler of our lives, we let our fears “overmaster” us, even when we turn away, even when we shrink God’s enormous and loving power into a shiny little box – even despite all this that God even anticipates – God still loves. God still gives. God is more.

“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified” Jesus said. “Do not be terrified” when the violence comes, the destruction endures, when they try to lead you astray, when the Temple comes down, when the earthquakes and the famines and the plagues and the persecution and the hatred and even when death comes – because it will. Do not be terrified – do not let that terror be master! the Lord reminds us.

Instead, let love be your masterful response. For, in the end, “not a hair on your head shall perish” and God’s protective love will always reign. Not the “protection” we place in a shiny box. But the enduring, everlasting form of protection that nothing can ever “overmaster”.
And so, good friends, in the face of it all – in the face of that which seeks to replace love as master in all of our lives – why not deliver the message of the angels? Fear not. Why not share that message with those you know who need to hear it? Fear not. Why not offer the reminder of the God whose mastery extends beyond the boxes of even our most vivid dreams? Fear not. Why not listen to Jesus, who, as he always does, takes it even a step further? Do not be terrified.

For the love that is, was, and shall be forever, reigns.

Note that I borrow this imagery from my former theology professor Miroslav Volf. See his book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Zondervan’s: 2006.

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Luke 21:5–19

And the Rhythm Goes on, the Beat Doesn't Stop

2010-11-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

And the rhythm goes on, the beat doesn’t stop.
This is the consistent truth in the life of a drummer – it’s an awareness, a keenness of being, a testament that musicians like Brian Grice offer to us in their life and in their life’s work. The rhythm goes on and the beat doesn’t stop. Not only is this true, but it is as if the drummer taps into the rhythm of the world around them, the beat that has driven their lives and the lives that have come before them, like they call us to notice that continuum, like they invite us to, like them, take note, hear, participate in, share in the beat that doesn’t stop, the rhythm that goes on.
For isn’t it true that life, as we know it, begins with a drumbeat? That the very life force within us, the blood that courses our veins, moves and flows to a beat we only sometimes notice? That in any given collection of people, the force that drives their lives is, in fact, a crucial rhythm, a rhythm that, in concert with the beat that drives each other person’s life, creates countless symphonies of life-giving sound? Can you hear it? Can you hear it in this room? So much of this goes unnoticed, at least for the rest of us. But not to a drummer. Not to Brian.
Because there is something to that rhythm and its life-giving force, to which a drummer calls our attention. The beat is not optional – in fact, everything depends on it. The drummer’s role is to remind us that that beat is beautiful, it’s complicated, it’s varied, it’s emotional, it’s ours. They put this truth before us, they require us to take notice. Because when the drum speaks – we have no choice but to listen. And thank God for that. When he was here last year, I heard the great drummer Ralph Peterson say that the drum was the first cell phone – it calls. We listen.
For the rhythm goes on and the beat doesn’t stop.
And this truth, this shift of perception is especially critical in a place like this one, at a time like now. Because, to the uninitiated, we might make the easy mistake of doubting this truth. We might make the simple mistake of believing that Brian Grice’s rhythm has stopped. But to think so is to miss the very nature of rhythm, it’s to miss the continuum on which it rests. And for those of us who profess a Christian faith, to think that Brian’s rhythm has stopped is to lose faith in God, Jesus Christ, and the power of resurrection.
Why? Because if rhythm is life. It is both the symbol and the essence of our humanity. It connects us to the first beings who inhabited the earth and will connect us to the last. And, if rhythm is life, and, I believe, God is the source of all life, then the rhythm points to that very same God who gave us life and lifts us out of death into eternal life. The beat may change, but it still goes on – it never ends. And that, good folk, is the work of God.
And the rhythm goes on, the beat doesn’t stop. And as that phrase rings so true, points directly to the core of my faith, I think of a poem my father wrote – a requiem from a lover of rhythm (particularly in jazz), a believer of the centrality of the beat:

i will die in Havana in a hurricane
it will be morning, I’ll be facing southwest
away from the gulf, away from the storm
away from home, looking to the virid hills
of Matanzas where the orishas rise, lifted
by congueros in their masks of iron, bongoseros
in masks of water, timbaleros in masks of fire
by all the clave that binds the rhythms of this world…

when you come for me come singing
no dirge, but scat my eulogy in bebop
code…find one true poem that i made
& sing it to my shade as it fades
into the wind, sing it presto, in 4/4 time
in the universal ghetto key of b flat

i will die in havana in rhythm. tumbao
montuno, guaguanco, dense strata
of rhythm pulsing me away
& the mother of waters
will say to the saint of crossroads
well, damn, he danced his way out after all

And so we come, come remembering Brian, not singing a dirge – we come with the joy of thanksgiving, singing to an image in shadow that – by the power of a resurrecting God – fades but never dies. Because Brian’s rhythm hasn’t stopped, won’t stop, never stops – in fact, it gets stronger, more pronounced, because he is with his God. So yes, of course his beat goes on. If we could learn anything from his life’s work, from the testament of love made known in his music, let us know and remember and believe that. As for us? Our challenge is just to listen more closely.
Amen.

from A.B. Spellman: After Vallejo. Things I Must Have Known. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission of the author (my father).

The Humble Walk

2010-10-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

The grades were generally positive, though the comments could be rather brutal. “Miss Spellman is a strong student, despite herself.” “She somehow manages to master the material” (with an emphasis on the “somehow.”) “We’re not sure what place there is in for such a headstrong young lady,” they’d write. And “her penmanship requires dramatic improvement.”

Truth be told, my teachers couldn’t have made my parents more proud. Neither was especially interested in raising an especially compliant child. Self-assurance, confidence, the ability to have and to hold a position on things, maintaining a suspicion of authority (this one often backfired on them, as it were) – these were important qualities for a child born into the culture I would encounter. To be “headstrong” was good – how else could positions be determined effectively, debates be won decisively, the world be changed conclusively?

Much to many of our teachers’ dismays, many of us were raised with similar values, to know what we think and believe and to stick to that. In this way, the mechanics of victory are our native tongue. So it should come as no surprise that, despite my “stellar” and “elite” schooling, for some reason, I never actually learned the word “humility” until my third (and final) year of college.

I had been invited to apply for a secret society I shan’t name, and the application essay asked us to explain humility. Oh, I knew the word and its etymology – from the Latin humilitatem (lowness, insignificance, meekness). I could define it on a test. But to explain humility exceeded my grasp of understanding. And I struggled.

You see, for those of us schooled in the art of victory, for whom Sun Tzu’s The Art of War conjures just as warm memories as what’s her name’s Goodnight Moon does, for those of us taught to “stick to our guns” and “shoot from our hips”, for those of us whose “courage of conviction” always trumps out ability to compromise or seek middle ground, for those of us who were taught that the Via Media is the road for cowards – all values I kindof cherish, by the way – to “explain humility” is akin to explaining the dermatological makeup of little green Martians. (Well, almost.) Truth is, we just don’t know.

Well, being in a place where we just don’t know is a good place indeed for the likes of me. And it’s good for all of us when we look at a text like today’s Gospel. For how many times have we found ourselves standing alone, thanking God we’re not like…them? Like those who think that way, who talk that way, who vote that way, who pray that way, who know that little? How many times have we stood just so sure of ourselves that we turned our deepest contempt – even in prayer – to them?

Ooh, and it feels good, doesn’t it? It feels good to reflect on how far we’ve surpassed them in evolutionary order. It feels great to see ourselves as God’s favored ones, the ones who’ve figured out much more of God’s truths – wait – you think I’m saying this rhetorically, don’t you? But no! It DOES feel good. I do feel smarter, more in touch with who God is than one who steps in the pulpit to speak with a forked tongue – condemning some, then turning around and doing them same behind closed doors.

I believe that I’m a better Christian. Yep, I said it. I’m not kidding. In fact, let me be biblical and quote today’s Gospel: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” Not like them.

A woman approached me at one of my former congregations. I was talking to someone at coffee hour, and she interrupted: “I’m sick of confession. Why should I call myself a sinner? I’m a good person.” “Can’t confession be optional? Only for those who actually need it?” she asked.

Well, I answered her right out of my Calvinist training. Maybe I was a little mad. But I was grateful that I had “the answer” memorized: “we are all born under a cloud of sin. We share in human depravity. We also share in God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ.” I went on with a good, proper Reformed treatise on sin and penitence. At some point, her eyes glazed over, and eventually, she walked away, having heard nothing. I shook my head at her heresy and moved on to the next person, a “better” person who wouldn’t bring me that kind of nonsense.

I heard her question and gave her a rote answer. She was “one of them” those loose-lipped using, bad-theology-having members of the United Church of Christ who gave us a bad name. And I spoke to her question with the answer I’d memorized for such a situation. There was no conversation. Just a question and an answer.

Which is too bad. Because if I’d taken the time to listen, I might’ve learned how she came to that place. How she had been raised to think that she looked and talked and acted as she did because God was punishing her for her parents’ mistakes. That she suffered through poverty because she was “evil”. That she was abused because she was “marked with sin for life”. That she “deserved” to cry herself to sleep each and every night, that she was “depraved beyond redemption”, that her “sins were so evil that she was untouchable”. This was a woman in need of Good News. But to me, she was “one of them” = a heretic whose questions sullied my church’s name. I answered to win, not to help.

Oh, there’s so much worth condemning. The pure evil perpetrated in the name of Christ is more than embarrassing to the rest of us – it is deadly. The trouble is that with the very nature of being and interconnectedness and privilege and power and victory and citizenship and empire and might, we all – every single one of us – share in that evil. The prayers explain it perfectly by “what we have done, and what we have left undone.” Sin works collectively, but it works individually, too.

To get to the root of this (and most) parables, we have to be willing to see ourselves as the “we” we want to be, and the “they” we want to condemn. We must see a place for us to bow before the throne of God and beat the sin out of our breast, to proclaim ourselves sinners in need of the forgiveness God promises – even to the likes of us. And, we have to see ourselves in the place of the Pharisee, the Pharisee who is no worse for his pride than we in our proudest moments can be. The beauty of the parables is that they reflect the complexity of human nature while showing us that God is, was, and always shall be in the very midst of it, right with us, sinners and saints, broken and healed, dead and alive, redeemed, sanctified by God.

The Good News is for them just as much as it is for us. Even when we change places.
There’s something stunning and holy in responding to “the other” not with a sense of conquest, not feeling the need to conquer their bad habits and ways and thoughts – but from a sense of a shared nature, where Pharisee and tax collector recognize something of themselves in each other. Perhaps one day we can learn to listen with the same intensity as we learn to win.

So maybe that’s how to explain humility. Taking God at God’s word. Remembering that we are not God. Believing Jesus Christ enough to want to emulate him. Seeing them and recognizing components of ourselves in them. And – with God’s help – having the faith and the patience to listen and believe that one born in the image of God like the rest of us might just need to hear some Good News from us – even if it’s one of them.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Luke 18:9–14

TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

On the Edge

2010-10-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

They’re finding themselves on the edge. Not some exciting precipice, the kind where you take a delicious, deep breath, leap, and you’re on to something amazing and beautiful and wonderful. No. They’re finding themselves on a very different kind of edge. The frightful, terrifying edge where the deep unknown of darkness reduces them to something they should never have to be or to even see. They are there on this edge, horrified of the possibility of falling.

I see this edge, and, as I see it, quite frankly, I’m furious.

Because no one should have to find themselves here, here on this edge of fear and despair & loneliness and exhaustion, where the ones who would chase them out have pushed them away so far that they are at the gate – with the enemy quickly approaching.

How long? How long, O Lord? How long will people, will children find themselves on this edge? How long will the bullies chase and chastise and humiliate and destroy and harm and terrify and push and push and push so that there’s nowhere left to go but the edge? The edge that stands between life and death? The edge from which the slightest wind will push the most delicate and vulnerable to destruction?

How long, O Lord, must our children face torment passed on from generation to generation through inherited sin and destructive blind eyes and cruel laughter turned to insidious persecution?

How long, O Lord, the prophets from Moses to Samuel to Elijah to Jeremiah to Zechariah to the voice of our prophet today, Habbakuk have asked with the Psalmist with the others we read along with the people we know to the children we mourn – how long will this endure, O Lord? How long shall they cry for help, seeking protection, yearning for comfort, but still pushed to edges they cannot endure.

Any one young person buried is one too many, of course. This past month we buried five. Five young people driven right to the edge. Gay suicides are nothing new, especially amongst young people. We’ve mourned their losses for years. We’ve seen this very exodus to that very edge from which some of the most vulnerable people cannot survive for far too long. But this litany of news stories, the growing list of teenagers like Tyler Clementi and Asher Brown and Billy Lucas and Seth Walsh and Raymond Chase who just couldn’t make it – as the direct result of our collective inability to protect them – not only drives them to an edge, but there are others, too, others who are so close, who’ve stepped back just a pace but aren’t too far behind. The edge is too wide, and the procession towards it too long.

There are 8.1 miles between here and the George Washington Bridge – in other words, you can reach out your hand and touch it, it’s so close. Close to this community. Close in all of our hearts. Sitting atop our consciences. Unsettling our spirits. It’s so close because there is a way in which holy ground touches holy ground – there is no separation. All who stand amongst the holy stand with each other.

And as we find ourselves right there, right there with Tyler (as well we should) we share the ground with some others we should see, too. Some people you know and I don’t. Can’t you see them standing there? There are others, ones we’ve never heard of. And then, there are the prophets. Like Habakkuk. We stand at the edge and we stand with Tyler, and Habakkuk and Christ and the angels and the suffering and the afraid and the persecuted. And as we stand, we understand ourselves to be standing right there on the very holiest ground. With Habakkuk who keeps watch over them. Heralding their truth. Standing on the watchpost, watching the procession, the exodus, the ones running for their lives to the very edge.

We stand at the watchpost, just on the ramparts, we see and we listen. Listen for the Lord, who meets us there and shows us the promised vision – the vision that delivers the very justice that turns us around and pushes right back against the oppressor, lifts the lowly, protects the vulnerable, and stops death.

This time has not come yet. And so we watch, wait, and listen and ask:

How long, O Lord, must we stand here? And in the midst of the watching, waiting, and asking – with God’s help – the church must stand at the edge, too. Because we’ve got work to do.

Which starts with confession.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York
October 3, 2010

Habakkuk 1:1–4; 2:1–4

Time to Listen

2010-10-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

Let’s just admit it: we’re bothered by the noise. You can’t hear a sermon in this sanctuary without the interruption of a siren (or, perhaps, even a screaming child.) Noise interrupts the quiet we seek, distracts our focus.

It’s with that focus that I want to sit for a moment in this sermon.

What holds our focus?

I suppose the answer to that has to do with where we are in our lives. Many of us focus on our work. Connected to work is, of course, money. A lot of us focus on family. Many focus on food. And water – wondering where they can find it next. And there can be so much more, so many more foci that the idea of focus becomes rather blurred with the long list of all that occupies our minds. As each of us considers the many points of focus in our lives, it’s a wonder that we have any room for God at all. If we do.

Consider the story of a certain man, a man who you can be sure was brilliantly focused. He enjoyed tremendous success. He had the envious home. The big family. People admired him for his riches and power and influence. He even enjoyed a great position in his house of worship. He had it all.

It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar with the stories of his faith. He knew who the great patriarchs and matriarchs of his faith were, and he remembered their names well. No, for this man, his issue wasn’t knowledge. It was focus.

Because, you see, he was so focused on himself, on reaching his goals, on meeting his own personal expectations for greatness and recognition and success – he was so focused that he could not see the angels on his doorstep attending the man who suffered, a man we know as Lazarus.

He was so focused on everything else that he couldn’t even see God. He couldn’t even hear God knocking at his door, drawing his attention to something other than himself.

It was as if he was so focused on pushing aside the noise of his life that he lost the ability to listen.

Those of you who hear me preach have heard me say this before: when you hear a story in the Bible, hear yourself in the good and the bad of the story. Hear the story of the rich man who didn’t listen to or for God, and see elements of yourself in this rich man. Hear the story of the poor man called Lazarus, and see pieces of yourself in him. Because we are both, all of the time – über-focused on things that aren’t of God, while, at the same time, being attended by angels on the doorsteps of those who are more powerful than us.

The Good News is that God is always calling. Always knocking. Always giving us an opportunity to listen. Always ready to knock or to call or to speak, even after we missed God the last time. Because God is not a God who gives up.

And so we come to understand that now is the time to listen – not because we’ve been warned by the story of this rich man. But because listening unlocks the great joy of faithfulness & communion with God.

In this story, we witness the beautiful continuum of the faith from Abraham to Jesus. The message of Moses and the prophets – the Word of God proclaimed in ancient times – is yet and still a message for us, too. Love God first. Focus on God. Listen to God. Care for ALL God’s people. The messages of old are just as true for the characters of the stories as they are for us today.

It is in the midst of a people who heard these stories but did not listen, that Jesus spoke. It was amongst a people focused on the very wrong things, that Jesus proclaimed the gospel – a gospel that hit against a barrier of inattention and improper focus. And yet Jesus ministered, gave, gave so much that he even gave his life. Why? Why did he need to rise?

To break the barrier, the chasm between those who are dead and those who are alive. To interrupt the focus, to spread the news – Good News, of a God who never loses focus.

To get through to us and to all people so that the interruptions, the noise, if you will, might just help us to hear the siren or the baby’s wail as the voice of God calling us back. Again.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

September 26, 2010
Psalm 146, Luke 16:19–31

Reflections on Reflections – No More Excuses: Confronting Poverty

2010-09-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Yale Divinity School hosted an event launching the latest issue of Reflections Magazine. Dean Harry Attridge convened a panel at the UN church office building in honor of the conference on the Millennium Development Goals.

Listening to the panelists, I wrote some notes I thought worth sharing, which you’ll find below. But there was one thing that I noticed, and that no one seemed to talk about. Poverty seemed to be referenced as an external issue, something to which we respond on behalf of the poor. But I have a hard time thinking of it that way. I truly believe that

we are the poor.

I can’t see justice in a response to poverty until those of us with connections to power realize that we, too, are the poor. I explore this somewhat in last Sunday’s sermon but will need to continue to think it through further to know exactly what I mean by that. Sure, I sit squarely in the middle-class (perhaps even upper middle class) but I’m not very many steps away from homelessness. That’s my economic justification for this claim. But, more importantly, is the theological justification for it: I don’t believe that we’re supposed to see ourselves (whoever we are, and wherever we come from) as anyone but the ones described in the stories. The sinners and the saints. The rich and the poor. The disciples and the Pharisees. Because, as we all know, reality is nuanced and complex. Human personality and action and choice are no different.

I can state this more articulately, and I hope to, in time. For now, take a look at what other, more eloquent speakers offered us at the UN…

Poverty accomplishes nothing in God’s plan.

1/3 of people in the world die of poverty-related issues.

How many poor people are acceptable in your system of thought?

“If you’re not doing something substantial for the poor, you’re not living an ethical life.” Period. – Peter Singer

A lot is being done to keep the poor poor, so we need to make headway in the headwinds. – Thomas Pogge

God is calling us to change the politics of poverty. One thing to do is to work to get a candidate – one candidate – elected who gives a damn about poverty. – David Beckham

What Should We DO About Poverty?

1. Do less harm. Corruption and widespread protection of our markets from poor countries’ imports does enormous harm worldwide.
2. Bring poor to the table when negotiating their fate
3. Eradicate futility-thinking because it prevents action, instead, begin with what has worked. – Peter Singer
4. Equip people to question authority. – Debbie McLeod Sears

Remember the environmental dimensions of human dignity. The meek won’t be blessed if they inherit a desiccated earth. Consider the fact that we are in an unprecedented era of massive human power over the earth & yet trying to survive in a desiccated land. How do we expect the poor (who are ecologically vulnerable) to do this? There is an erosion of a sacred trust to know and respect the earth, which, in turn, erodes human dignity. – Willis Jenkins

How do economic realities refract back onto us? Expose the connections between what we do and how that affects the poor – our feedback cycles need attention...we take up disproportionate atmospheric space. – Christiana Peppard

Now I'm reading through the issue, and will write some thoughts on some of the articles over the next few days. HOWEVER, writing thoughts doesn't quite feel like enough. Hold me accountable and ask what I'm doing about what I'm reading, too. Please.

Stay tuned...

God Never Forgets

2010-09-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

I can’t remember where I’ve seen all the signs, but I can definitely remember how I felt when I saw them. “Never forget,” they said. They were everywhere a few years back, all year long. Now, they tend to resurface around this time, the time when the days start getting shorter, when the night air is cooler, when a crisp, cool morning where the only clouds that punctuate that beautiful blue sky might still give us chills. And they – perhaps you – say “never forget.”

Don’t worry – I can’t. I didn’t even notice it, but somehow my mind and body colluded to get me out of town last Saturday, an hour north of the city. I wasn’t even thinking about it. But isn’t that just the way that our bodies remember, after trauma, even if we aren’t conscious of it? Somehow, the body and that room in our minds that’s controlled not by us but by some deeply implanted body clock – they never forget.

That is the way with trauma – it sticks with us even when we, in many ways, would like to forget. Not to forget the people, the immeasurable loss, the friends, the family members, the names we never heard, the loss, the loss, the loss.
I imagine this is what most people mean when they put up their signs – never forget them. Never forget the innocents. One of the greatest fears of death is the idea that the memory will be lost. And so we work quite actively to remember, and this is right. It is a huge piece of what we do in church.

But another side wants to forget. Because when memories hurt, there is a deep need to move away from the hurt. The trouble is that this instinct, this desire extends beyond where it should go. There are things, topics, people, concerns that we seek to forget, too, even when we shouldn’t. Well, I won’t speak for you. But I will say that, culturally, this desire to forget certain things is part of how things work. I would argue that forgetting the difficult is as part of the dominant culture as apple pie.

Take the deep persistence and proximity of poverty and hunger. A lot of us are a few paychecks away from the corner. In many ways, our ability to forget our own personal proximity to poverty represents the degree to which we’ve risen into (or out of) the middle class.

For example: I have some sort of fascination with reading the stories of people who’ve won the mega jackpots. Immediately, so many are lifted many levels away from the corner, so to speak. But their families often have not. I’m not talking about the immediate families – people generally remember them generously. I’m talking about those cousins they’d forgot about or never knew, the ones who seek that same distance from the terrifying corner. And as the money stretches, the lift impact lessens, and the lottery winners realize that poverty is still literally at their doorsteps, and that they can never forget it. The extra wealth, then, is often viewed as a burden because the need just seems too great.

I would argue that part of the American Dream is in attempting this very form of forgetting – if only we could put our memories of the burden of the corner in our rearview and never look back. Then we’d have made it.

So the signs said “never forget” and I wondered what they meant by that? And over these past few weeks, thinking about today’s Scriptures and reading those signs, I couldn’t help but wonder what God’s answer would be to my question? Never forget what, precisely? Besides the tragedy of innocent loss, what else should we never forget?

The prophet Amos was one who remembered the poor in tragic, poetic detail. In chapter 8, as he reflects the voice of God, he litanizes the sufferings of the poor as he points a finger at the culture that caused their suffering in the first place.

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, he says,
and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, (and here I paraphrase)
How can we cheat them next? How can we force them into bondage and debt to us? How can we steal their due (“the sweepings of the wheat” were supposed to be reserved for the poor) and outsource, make money off of them? And, how can we get God out of the way of our ability to make profits? Otherwise put, how can we forget God?

Now this voice, this voice Amos reflects, comes from a place of knowing that the poor and the hungry had suffered long before, and that they would suffer long after the prophet’s time. I believe that the very awareness of the persistence of suffering is precisely why Amos gives us this critical word from God:
Surely I will never forget, God says.

God never forgets.

But this isn’t just a word of comfort for some distant time on some distant shore. This is a word of awareness, of activity, of noticing. This is the word that comes from the same God who, as the Psalmist says, “takes up the weak out of the dust and lifts up the poor from the ashes.” This is the voice of the One who lifts the poor and does the most unexpected thing: enthrones them, all the while, overturning dominant structures, honoring and blessing the downtrodden. This is the One who notices the suffering of all as if they were each rulers of the earth.

This is the One whose Son entered our world as one of the most vulnerable, I believe, to draw attention to our proximity to poverty. Not just in terms of how close we are to the corner. But because God wants us to remember that in order to see God, in order to see the face of Jesus, we need to see Jesus where he went. We need to turn around and look at the corner.

God knew how much we’d want to forget. God saw empire after empire that trampled right over the ones in the greatest need while turning their backs on the need, and in so doing, on God. But God who is within each of us, could never let us forget.
Maybe that’s the restlessness in which our souls share. Maybe that’s what holds us a few steps away from true satisfaction. Maybe our inherent restlessness is God reminding us that there’s so much more of God’s work to do, with our very own hands.
Maybe it’s as if God dwells in that corner of our minds holding open a door that we can never close, no matter how hard we try. Because poverty is our collective trauma. The beauty of it, is that, in Christ, God turned – and is still turning – us right to it. Right to the poor. Not as some fetishized group of more godly people. But as friends, neighbors, equals, God’s beloved – us.

Never forget, the signs say.

Never, ever, forget.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

September 19, 2010
Amos 8:4–7, Psalm 113, 1 Timothy 2:1–7, Saint Luke 16:1–13

Rules & Freedom

2010-09-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Watch here.

I think I’ve pretty much grown accustomed to their response when I tell folks that I’m a pastor. The blank stare. The confused gaze. Part of it, I know, is that I don’t look like what they expect to encounter when they meet one of us.

“I’m spiritual, not religious,” they tell me. (If they knew how common and ordinary this phrase was, I’m sure they wouldn’t say it anymore.) A brilliant preacher, Tom Long, says that “I’m spiritual but not religious” means “I might like Jesus, but I don’t like his friends.”

And there’s something to that.

People don’t think I’m a pastor, or a Christian, necessarily, because so many have this expectation that Christians are uptight, boring, mean, unwelcoming, judgmental. They look at me and assume that I just don’t follow their rules.

And in many cases, I guess I don’t. Just like the rest of us sinners.

Well, what are the rules to being a Christian? So many have asked this question. Someone even asked Jesus. “What’s the greatest commandment of all?”

Jesus replied that we must love the Lord our God with our whole heart, our whole mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves.

So there are the rules.

But, particularly in certain circles, we hear about so many more, right? They put rules in place that welcome themselves (at least from what they do in their public lives, forget about what happens behind closed doors) welcoming themselves and people who look and think like them, while figuring out how to keep folks like you and me away.

Rules enforced by people in power tend to be rules that disempower the rest of us.

You – stay away as long as you think impure thoughts.
You – keep away from me so long as you have sex before marriage.
You – get out as long as you’re in love with him.
You – you said the f’ word – get out.

We’ve all encountered the types. “Get out!” they tell us – as if they could ever keep us away from God.

Imagine if they’d taken today’s Gospel seriously.

The woman had a “spirit” upon her that prevented her from being able to walk upright. The text calls her “crippled.”

The text says nothing about her coming to Jesus. But he saw her. And he made her spirit right. “Woman, you are set free” he tells her.

She was set free! The spirit that held her captive, all that kept her from being able to experience true freedom, Jesus released from her, sending it all away without her even asking.

The good news of this text is good news of freedom. And, in case you missed it the first time, the Gospel underlines the point.

A religious leader in town saw just what Jesus had done. And apparently Jesus (God Incarnate) had broken this leader’s rules. Sure, the woman had been healed of her affliction. Sure, good had been done. But it didn’t matter to him, because Jesus had broken the rules.

(We’ve all seen someone like this man, haven’t we? Maybe on a certain television station named after a woodland creature?) But I digress.

Jesus, having just demonstrated the centrality of the freedom of God’s people in setting this woman – who didn’t even know to ask for it – free, was chastised by the religious leader.

Please don’t miss the contrast: God presents and delivers freedom. Those who oppose freedom and love granted to everyone, try to stop in its way. It’s a story as old as time.

But the story changed with Jesus. Because we’re always supposed to see ourselves in these stories. We can see ourselves as the self-righteous leader, at time, stepping in God’s way. And we should stop.

But we can also see ourselves in the woman set free to stand and walk – to stand and walk as the beloved child of God whom she was.

Today’s a healing service. You are welcome to come forward, and I will offer a special prayer, on your behalf, to God. And I will say something similar, quoting the immortal words our Savior said in this Gospel – praying that you, too, are set free from whatever holds you back from standing and walking as the beloved child of God whom you most certainly are – religious, spiritual, questioning, wondering, praying, hoping, wherever you are.

Because Christ offers you the freedom, even if you didn’t ask.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

AUGUST 22, 2010
Saint Luke 13:10-17

God & Faith

2010-09-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

I think I might scream if I hear another person say: “just have a little more faith”, though it wasn’t until I looked at today’s text again that I could exactly articulate why. It’s a big text the kind you need to memorize if you want to be a pastor, so it’s not as if it were unfamiliar. But one of the most sacred and wonderful things about reading the scriptures is that we can see things anew with each encounter of texts. It’s a major part of why I love my work. So I knew that I was uncomfortable with these platitudinous comments, but I wasn’t clear on why.

Nowhere are we more likely to encounter such platitudes than in our most difficult moments. Just visit someone at death’s door in the hospital, and it seems that there’s bound to be a Christian somewhere around telling the ones in the most pain to “have faith” and feel better. Have you seen this? (Have you done this?)

Oh sure, we tell each other to have more faith and we (likely) say that with the best of intentions. Have more faith → things will get better.

Never mind that it might imply that our faith is lacking. Or, even worse, that our lack of faith brings about the difficulties we face. To say something like “have a little more faith” places a lot of responsibility for our conditions on our very own shoulders.

But what the text in Hebrews is telling us is that the command or even the suggestion that we “have more faith” is far too presumptuous for anyone to say.

Hebrews says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” What a wonderfully opaque statement, right? It bears repeating, and remembering. Let’s try this, together.

Faith is the assurance/ of things hoped for, /the conviction/ of things not seen.

Notice that the writer of Hebrews doesn’t say that faith is:

feeling better when times are rough
pulling yourself together when you can’t

Everyone’s favorite theologian, Martin Luther, agrees. “Faith is not what some people think it is…it is God’s work in us…” Faith is God’s work in us. Faith is God at work in us. It is not summoning up belief. It is not creating something that is not there. It is not pushing us into impossibilities. It is the infinite at work in our finite forms. It is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, making use of us somewhere in the middle. Faith is not ours, it is God’s, given by God, nurtured by God, tended by God.

So what does that make us? If faith is God’s work, then what is our place in this?

Just go back to Hebrews. If faith is God’s work, then God’s work is the assurance and the conviction. God gives us the assurance of the deliverance we hope and pray for, the ultimate salvation, the clear resolution of the grief and the sorrow in the fullness of time. God’s work is the assurance, the conviction. And thank God that’s true, because assurance and conviction can be hard to muster on our own. Sure, there can be times in our lives when we are 100% (or close to 100%) sure of our place in God’s enfolding love, when we can stand with full conviction of God’s presence in our lives. The key is to recognize that surety as the grace that it is, not some unwavering strength on our parts.

And then, there will come times when we can’t find that strength. The key is to separate our belief from our faith. Belief is our realm. Faith is God’s. Belief wavers, changes with new information, new experiences, new revelation, even. But faith never ends. So when we can’t keep the faith, we must never forget that God always does. This is what we mean when we say that God is faithful, for God holds our faith even when we can’t.

But I still haven’t answered my own question. What is our role in faith, then?

If we listen to Hebrews, recognizing the assurance and the conviction as God’s work, then we fill in the rest.

Because what is faith? The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

So our work in faith comes in two parts:
1. We hope. What is it to hope but to take our very best intentions and to reach from what is into what is to come? We are capable of hope. We can see opportunities for things to be better, and we can even pray for the better to come. We can want, from the core of our beings, true and open and unending communion with God. The work of faith, God’s work, is to join our hope for this with the assurance that it will, indeed happen.

2. We recognize that there are many things that remain unseen. In some ways, this seems almost intuitive, easy, even. We do not see everything that happens, of course. Our knowledge is finite, as individuals, and as a people. Of course. But recognizing that we don’t know everything also involves something a bit more difficult, a humble surrender, even, to that which is beyond our understanding. With that, the work of faith, God’s work, is to meet that surrender with the care and omniscient (all-knowing) power.

And when we hear the text this way, we come to see that in this life of faith, which is (the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen) we see that God has invited us to, God asks nothing of us that we cannot do.

At the funeral of a little girl who died too young, my mentor, Martin Copenhaver, had very little he could say as he attempted to deliver a eulogy. But what he did ask was that we kept our platitudes to ourselves. “Don’t tell the family to feel better, that their faith will take away their pain.” And as I reflect today on Martin’s words, I realize that he was telling us not to ask the grieving family to pull off the impossible. Because, quite simply, we cannot do God’s work. We cannot make our faith do anything.

What we can do is to hope. We can recognize that there are things we don’t know, and don’t see. And God holds the rest.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

THE ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
August 8, 2010
Genesis 15:1–6, Psalm 33:12–22, Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16, Luke 12:32–40

(This sermon references a passage from Martin Luther’s Introduction to Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1522.)

In Our Right Minds

2010-09-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else join me in having a bit of a sense of jealousy at the part of the Gospel in which the man sat down and was “in his right mind”? After all that drama with demons and swine and insanity the man got dressed, sat down, and was IN HIS RIGHT MIND.

I hear that part of the Gospel, and I’m jealous. Because I will admit to you that I do not always – perhaps even not often – feel like I am in my right mind. And I don’t imagine that I’m alone in this feeling.

How could we feel like we’re in our right minds when the day is never done? With iPhones and Crackberries following us around from the bedside to meetings to the gym to the kneeler to just within reach of the shower – the day is never done. This sense that we can never do enough: symptom.

How could we feel like we’re in our right minds with the incessant drone of the 24-hour so-called “news” cycle replete with pundits and adversarial coverage and inane chatter we need to keep up with to talk to our friends and believe that we have a least some of a sense of what’s going on, while, in fact, we never do. And we might not even know what’s really news right in front of us – I don’t mean the local news, necessarily, but the news of the people who even matter to us, our spouses, our extended families, our close friends we can’t quite find enough time to reach in a meaningful way it turns out that so much news is no news and we feel disconnected. Symptom.

How is it that we could feel like we’re in our right minds, what with the constant chafe against what this wonderful (German!) theologian named Jurgen Moltmann calls American “official optimism” which expects so much, but offers not quite enough to pull off. Consistently evaluating whether or not we’re achieving the “American dream” we expect a whole lot of ourselves, our culture expects perhaps even more of us, and while some of us hold hope that we’ll get there, others never really thought that the dream ever applied to us, either. (I mean, I’m still not sure that I’m not supposed to be some hybrid of Donna Reed and Barack Obama. But how does that work?) Holding the expectations against the real and lived experience, we feel the rub, the chafe – regardless of whether or not we’re even conscious of it – while so many of us live with the hopeful guilt and disappointment of the dreams dreamt on our behalf. The constant sense that someone’s falling short they could never do in the first place: symptom.
And how could we possibly feel like we’re in our right minds when, at the times that we’re truly honest with ourselves, we realize that when we pray for peace, we’re not really sure what that even means, because, looking at the world stage, at least, none of us has ever seen it in our lifetimes. With peace as a concept, an idea, rather than an existential truth, we cannot help but feel lost. And it is that wandering, that lack of what we know we need more than anything else, I believe, that makes us constant wanderers, lost. Perhaps the saddest symptom of all.

Add to all this the depression and the anxiety so many of us live and struggle with every day, and it’s not hard to wonder if, in fact, we really are in our right minds. And when we sortof “diagnose” ourselves that way, we might approach the story of the Gerasene Demoniac a little differently.

For a long time I’ve struggled with this text. Let’s just say it: this is a bizarre story, and I’ll admit that I bracketed it somewhere in the stories that I’m not meant to relate to, at least not personally. (Like, say, the Annunciation – Mary and the Holy Spirit have a history you and I will never have...) So the story of the Gerasene demoniac seems like one of those stories – I just don’t expect Jesus to send my demons into a herd of suicidal swine. Instead, this feels like a story for us to hear and say a puzzled “oh” and then move on. Except that this time around, I saw something I hadn’t seen before.

After the dramatic events of the day, after the demons and the pigs and the cliff had met, after everything that makes this story so memorable – and so disturbing – after Jesus controlled, and saved, after all this – the man who had been known only by his demons was free and saved and he sat down, and he was in his right mind.

We hear in the Scriptures stories of Jesus’ healing touch, his ability to make life better for those who sought him and we can develop an image of Jesus as healer – it’s one of the images even the secular world embraces and can understand. Scripturally, what I think becomes harder to imagine is life after the dramatic changes.

To put it another way: yes, Jesus saves! But what comes next?

It’s a constant question in the gospels. After the healing, after the resurrection, after God’s gifts are made known to us so dramatically and so perfectly, then what’s next?

Good people of God, we must remember that after the high drama of death and resurrection, Jesus’ first words are of peace.
Truth is, each of us will continue to live with symptoms. We will not escape the forces that draw us from clarity and satisfaction in the Lord, not in this lifetime, anyway. But our God is a God of resurrection – of new life. There is a seed of resurrection in each and every healing story – of them, and of us, being brought to new life. A new life that will be lived in the old places, with many of the same influences that will lead us to need to know resurrection – accomplished once and for all in Christ Jesus – but made anew, again and again, through the work of the Holy Spirit.

And this is how we live in Christ: refreshed and renewed in the midst of and after all of the drama, so that, at the last, we might sit at Christ’s feet and finally, and forever, be in our right minds and know Christ’s peace.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
June 20, 2010
Isaiah 65:1–9, Psalm 22:19–28, Galatians 3:23–29, Luke 8:26–39

Breath

2010-09-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

It’s no wonder we’re all so exhausted. Even when we’re not taking inventory, you can be sure that our bodies are. Listing out the demands on us: demands for time, demands for money. Demands for commitments. Demands for attention. Demands for work. Demands for people. Demands for thoughts. In our increasingly segmented lives, we have many demands on us, and in more and more directions so nothing seems to come together.

And it’s no wonder that we’re exhausted.

It might come as a surprise that God has thoughts on this. Exhaustion carries with it so much subjective baggage. “I should be able to handle it.” “Everyone else has demands, too.” “If I could just x, or y, or z, then I could pull it all together.” Perhaps, given our cultural demands coupled with our cultural shame, we don’t understand that our segmented lives and our difficult-to-manage demands have a spiritual component, as well, and that God may have something to say about this.

And scripture does have something to say about it.

As Christians, we talk about resurrection. Resurrection is the core, it is the very core of our faith. That God would resurrect one so that all could be resurrected, too. It’s the message of Easter; it’s the celebration our faith affirms with every Alleluia.
But have you ever noticed how the broader culture talks very little about resurrection? Noticed how it hasn’t been as easy, even, for say Madison Avenue or Hallmark to co-opt the message of Easter into something commercial and exploitable, because it’s a bit more esoteric? It’s not THAT easy to understand, it seems so much more abstract and far off – after all, most of us aren’t that interested in thinking about our deaths and resurrections, at least not every day – and so, chances are, resurrection sits as a distant concept until we’re forced to face death – the death of a loved one, or our own mortality.

What’s so sad about this is that it turns the concept of resurrection into something macabre and not something that is beautiful and joyous and part of God’s work in our lives every single day.

And so we spend days and hours and minutes in moments of joy, but often with an overall feeling of exhaustion – that feeling we want to push away and would if only we were a bit stronger – not realizing the ways in which the very core of our faith speaks directly to our exhaustion and weariness.

Just listen to today’s texts. Both give us the most perfect examples of people of faith who raised people from the dead. Elijah saw the widow’s son, who “had no breath in him,” prayed for him, and brought him back to life.

Jesus saw the woman with her son who, too, had no breath, and said, “young man, I say to you, rise!” and brought him back to life.

These are stories of resurrection, stories in which God restored life when the breath had left them. And we could read them just as quaint events disconnected from our own lives. We could read them as historic, situated in the past, having nothing to do with us. But that would be a mistake.

Because how many times have you felt that “the breath had left” you? Breathless, exhausted, weary, broken, hurt, how many times have you felt like you’ve been socked in the gut, deep in need, gasping for aid?

We celebrate the Holy Spirit in Pentecost, God’s eternal gift to God’s people, the Spirit, the Wind, the Breath of life, always with us, always in us, breath by breath, the Holy Spirit becomes ours from our first day to our last, and then some. Pentecost is, by far, the longest season of the year, and for good reason, too – maybe it takes that many weeks to remind us, again and again, to the ways God offers us the Holy Spirit – the breath of life – again and again, moment by moment, in times of death and resurrection that happen throughout our lives.

Because that is what resurrection is: not just raising up the dead, but giving new life! Through the Holy Spirit, God raises the dead, and raises us, too. Raises us from our sorrows, breathes new life into us even past our last breath, holds us fast in every moment, brings newness to the same old story, gives us the next burst despite our exhaustion.

God’s in the exhaustion, folks. And God resurrects our dry bones, giving us new life. Resurrection is a lifetime event, my people. Resurrection happens as we, even as we have no breath in us, take the next breath.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
June 6, 2010
1 Kings 17:17-24; Saint Luke 7:11-17

Words Matter - Pentecost 2010

2010-09-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

Words matter.

I would imagine that each of us has come to understand just how much words matter in the course of our lives. Recognizing the power of words is one of the marks of adulthood – and whatever events taught us the power of words were probably rites of passage.

For years, I celebrated Pentecost as the time in which Jesus’ disciples were given the power of words, the power to speak & convert people. But as I came to know the Bible a little better, I began to understand Pentecost differently.
Remember that the Book of Acts – the Acts of the Apostles – is believed to be a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, composed by the same author. One of the clearest ways to see this is to take a look at the Greek – for me, reading in the Bible in Greek is pretty difficult. I can read even less of Luke/Acts because the Greek is much more sophisticated and elaborate. So if you look back into the Luke/Acts continuum, you will find stories of the disciples going out and talking about Jesus, healing people, casting out unclean spirits in the name of Christ. And so, even before Pentecost, the disciples were “apostolic” if you will, given a charge to go out and tell people about this Jesus the Christ.

Well, it’s clear that in Pentecost, the disciples were given more than just the power to speak – they were given the power to speak in many different languages, languages other than their own. So as I learned more about the Bible, I started to think of the gift of Pentecost as the gift of language – as if God had injected some sort of Ancient Near East Rosetta Stone program or Google Translator into the minds of the disciples. And there is some value to this understanding of the gift of Pentecost, because it honors “the other” so much that God gifted the disciples with the ability to speak to the other.

Because words do matter, and they matter to God. That much we can see at Pentecost.

But to think of the gifts of Pentecost as merely the gift of speech is to miss much of the point, I think. Because words never matter when they fall on ears that don’t listen. And if you pay close attention to the text, you see that the disciples were not just speaking, but they were also hearing in other languages, too. And this pairing of speaking and listening, talking and hearing in ways that they hadn’t done before, has led me to believe that the true gift of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the power to communicate well.

Just imagine how important it was to communicate effectively in this ever-growing community of the faithful? I hear the first line of the Pentecost reading and I chuckle. “They were all together in one place.” “They” were probably about 120 people, all together in one house to celebrate the day that was 50 days after the Passover, Pentecost, the Jewish “Festival of Weeks”. The community had already grown. And, as you look deeper into the history of the church, you can already see that factions began to emerge from the earliest days. Why else might we need 4 different gospels? But for this festival, they were all together in one place. And I try to imagine what that was like? If one guy was in the room, would another want to leave? How well did they communicate with each other? Were they a cohesive unit, or were they more divided? When one spoke, would another roll his eyes? Or, would everyone listen attentively?

The biblical narratives seem to hint towards a less entirely cohesive group. Read on, and we learn of disputes amongst generations of Jesus’ followers, some of which became quite ugly, deadly, even. It was not unusual for one group to believe that they had the best and the strongest understanding of Jesus’ teachings, while another group would vehemently believe the opposite. (Sound familiar?)

So I always smile when I hear the first line of the Pentecost reading: “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.” I smile because being “all together” so often means tension. Being “all together” means that one couldn’t avoid another. Being “all together’ means that they had to hear each other, even if they could not necessarily understand one another.
They were probably accustomed to hearing one another speak. But on this day, something was different. For this gathering, they would each speak, and be understood. And that, good people, is what I believe is different about Pentecost.
“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
Speaking was nothing new. The gift of the Holy Spirit made the experience different, though. Because now, they would speak, and they would listen, and they would understand. On their own, that wasn’t possible, but with the gift of the Holy Spirit, something impossible became real and theirs.

The point of Pentecost is that, in and through the Holy Spirit, their differences didn’t matter. In and through the Holy Spirit, they could speak and be heard, they could listen and understand. In and through the power of the Holy Spirit, they could be different but still be one.

Gifted with the Holy Spirit’s power to unify, Jesus’ followers could leave that house as a changed people – a people others would witness and hear – and understand. The Holy Spirit carried their words from say-er to hear-er so that each would understand in ways that they’d never been able to understand before.

In this way, the Holy Spirit becomes the master communicator and the master unifier.

And what a gift! How many times have you longed for the help of a master communicator? At home? Check with any couple or family, and what’s the hardest struggle? Communication. Peer into any system of people – at home, in the office, wherever, and you will find communication bottlenecks – places where the truth can’t break through, triangulation, where instead of communicating directly, it happens indirectly. Places where the words said are not the words heard, where language leads to hurt rather than healing.

And so we see that in the absence of a master communicator, true unity is not possible.

But with the Holy Spirit? In the presence of the Lord, the giver of life? Together with the master communicator?

Before his Ascension, Jesus said, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” We can conceive of the Holy Spirit in many ways. It is a life-giving force. But the story of Pentecost reveals a facet of the means by which the Holy Spirit gifts us with life – it gifts us with knowing.

With knowing the other. With hearing and understanding with clarity and love. With togetherness despite the barriers that would come between us. With the kind of unity that only God could pull off.

This is the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and it is a power available to all of God’s people.

Each of us knows this power. Just reach back a bit into your own experience, and I would imagine that you could recall a special moment of clarity, of togetherness with another. A time when someone spoke and you heard and saw real and true beauty in a way you never had before. A time when, before, all you’d known was confusion, confusion, but then, with some new piece of knowledge or information, the confusion disappeared. Good folk, I firmly believe that each one of these moments of true communication, the beautiful “aha” moments we cherish so much because our lives changed because of them, these are our very own Holy Spirit moments. Moments when the Holy Spirit played its role as master communicator and unifier. Moments when we shared in the experience of Pentecost, perhaps without even knowing it.

And so we do well to draw on, to call upon, to rest in the Holy Spirit. Especially in those moments when we just feel like no one understands. Particularly in those times when we feel utterly alone. It then that we must remember the Holy Spirit, already there, always with us, never leaving us.

Breathe in the Holy Spirit, and, with its power, send forth that which the Holy Spirit inspires – which you will always know by its delicious, life-giving fruit.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

DAY OF PENTECOST
May 23, 2010
Acts 2:1–21, Psalm 104:24–34, 35b, Romans 8:14–17, John 14:8–17 [25–27]

The Gates Are Never Shut

2010-09-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

The great holy city of Jerusalem had no need for a temple, for the Lord was its temple. It had no need for the light of sun or moon, for the Lord was its light and its lamp – in fact, the nations would walk by this light. And its gate shall never be closed.

This is the vision for the New Jerusalem.

Many of you know that, while I certainly affirm Luther’s teachings, I am, in fact, not a Lutheran. Rather, I come from the traditions started by the Congregationalists, the churches founded by the Pilgrims and Puritans centuries ago when they migrated to a foreign land, hoping to create their own “City on a Hill”, their own New Jerusalem. And so much of my training was in studying their writings, reading the sermons they would have heard, trying to understand their concepts of precisely what was to be created in this world so new to them.

And what is clear to me, and would be clear even to a cursory student of American history, is that the vision of the New Jerusalem has been a critical component of this nation’s history from its western inception.

But whose vision was it?

We know that the earliest settlers had access to the same texts we heard today. My guess is that the vast majority of them could even quote Revelation 21 verbatim – it was that important, it came up that often in recorded public discourse because the New Jerusalem was their hope.

But whose hope was it?

As things have developed in the church, it seems that certain traditions have taken hold of certain texts while others love to ignore them. There are a great number of churches in which Luke’s Beatitudes (“blessed are the poor”) just aren’t read. But you can bet that Revelation is. In those same churches, it is pretty rare to hear about the camels and needles and wealth. But you will hear a lot out of selected chapters of Leviticus. Even as we read the lectionary, only a percentage of the entire Bible is covered. For example, today’s Revelation reading skips verses 11-21 (the less poetic, more condemnatory ones). And somewhere along the way, as traditions continued selecting the words they would have read in public worship, as the more fundamentalist traditions started to use texts like Revelation as weapons, it is almost as if Revelation were given up, handed over as that crazy, peyote-induced trance text that only “they” use.

The moment we hand over the texts we might not want to read, we lose the truth of the New Jerusalem. The moment we hand over our apocalyptic texts, we lose sight of God’s vision for life, for the nations – for us. The moment we ignore Revelation, we forget that in the New Jerusalem the gates to the city never close.

Well, something’s happening. You can even see it on facebook: the most frequently posted “status update” over the past few weeks has had a bunch of unlikely people quoting from an unlikely source: Leviticus (19:33-34). “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

You can see it amongst our church leadership. A “Newcomer Taskforce” has carefully reflected, over the past several months, and presented recommendations for how we welcome those who have just come to join us at our church. A newcomer, an “alien” if you will, is someone to be honored, welcomed, shown hospitality, invited in to share in the bounty we enjoy as a church. We huddle together around a table from which we deny no one and we celebrate the truth that the gates are open around Christ’s table. Very well.

But why can’t we pull this off as a people? As a nation? Why must the vision of the New Jerusalem be a vision for some and not for all? Why must the City on a Hill be walled off from those who disagree, didn’t come with us, don’t look like us, can’t be one of us? Why must the alien be an enemy, or at least a suspect, a perceived threat to the “peace” that we so desperately seek, at least for ourselves?

Why must those of us who might not look “American enough” now wonder what will happen to us if we forget to carry the proper paperwork as we make a run for a carton of milk in Phoenix? Or, have you tried to go to the old Jerusalem lately, with its own wall of separation, with its gates narrowing further and further?

Why is it that we just can’t seem to remember that in God’s vision for us – and for all nations – there’s no more we/they or us v. them – “they” are “us”?

My people, what are we afraid of?

That God would be right? That God’s promises would come true? That our self-understanding would expand beyond the boundaries we can grasp? That everything we’ve known, everything we’ve held as our own, everything we’ve acquired and protected and fought for – that all that would be lost?

Is God’s vision for the nations too much for us? Are we afraid that we’d lose too much?

This is a personal question for those of us in this sanctuary today. Over the past few months, it’s become especially personal. A man who offered me a special blessing at my installation, whose children reminded me of my baptism, whose wife helped us at Wednesdays together, who, several years ago, was married here by Pastor Ribone, this family was deported a few weeks ago. They struggled to make it, they couldn’t, they were captured, and they were sent away.

In the New Jerusalem – the gates are never shut.

There are other members of this community – people you know – who wonder each week whether the same time has come for them. I talked to one couple just last week, a couple who checks in with the immigration office each week in the Bronx, wondering what will happen, if they’ll return home to their children that afternoon, if they’ll be able to keep working to support the rest of their family in South Asia. The government seems to be very effective at keeping tabs on them and their whereabouts, but is doing absolutely nothing about their so-called “employers”, people who are essentially holding them in what any of us would name as slavery. Ask around the room this morning and you’ll hear other stories, other examples of outsiders treated as enemies, as if the institutions that support our way of life believe that the healing fruits of the tree of life in this “New Jerusalem” could never be for “them”. As if we could only share in that fruit if “they” were just – gone.

But in the New Jerusalem, the gates are never shut.

Well, my Congregationalist forebears were wrong. This is not the New Jerusalem. We don’t have the City on the Hill – we never did. And we never will, so long as we believe the New Jerusalem is only for us, so long as we conceive of security as living behind a closed gate, so long as we’re the only ones who can reach the healing fruits, so long as we criminalize those who want to hand the fruits (or even a cool glass of water) to those crossing the desert to reach it, so long as we can only imagine our own peace – the peace that the world gives – rather than the peace that Christ gives, so long as we hold on to what we have rather than what God promises to give – to everyone.

But the day will come for the New Jerusalem – whose gates are never shut. My people, let us cling to that vision – the vision beyond our own – and trust in God’s promises and hope for God’s deliverance. Let us hear these words and never lose sight of the ways in which we falter. Let us fight for the New Jerusalem – pray for it, believe in it, proclaim it, and cling to hope. Clinging to what? Let me remind us all:

And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

THE SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
May 9, 2010
Acts 16:9–15, Psalm 67, Revelation 21:10, 22—22:5, John 14:23–29

El Día de Pascua, 2010 (en Español)

2010-09-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

¡Aleluya! Cristo resucitó!
¡Aleluya! Cristo resucitó!

Se podría decir que la totalidad de la Escritura es una historia de amor entre Dios y el pueblo de Dios.

Desde el momento de la Creación, cuando el amor de Dios desborda dando lugar al nacimiento de la vida,
a la promesa de los pactos, a los actos de ahorro y los milagros del Éxodo, a la entrega a la tierra prometida,
para el nacimiento de Nuestro Señor
a la milagros de sanidad en este momento ahora.

Había "Rocky" momentos…tiempos en que la relación entre el Creador y lo creado no vivían en armonía.

Tiempos en que el pueblo de Dios se volvió contra aquel que los amó tanto.

Tiempos en que los hijos de Dios pasan a través del fuego purificador que nos recuerdan quiénes somos
y de dónde habíamos venido.

Esta historia de amor no fue fácil, y se hizo cada vez más complicada por las transgresiones de los amados de Dios.

Estas son las historias de nuestros antepasados – es esta historia de amor que fue creada en el pasado
en el principio de los tiempos.

Y es esta historia de amor que nos lleva a este momento ahora.

¿Por qué anunciar a Cristo resucitado?

Cuando se piensa en ello, me parece un extremo.

¿Por qué Dios llega a tales extremos para nosotros?

¿Por qué Dios se da de sí mismo de manera tan dramática,
dando nacimiento a su propia ser – que extremo!

Andando como uno de nosotros en la gran pobreza y con falta de vivienda? Emigrar de país en país sin los papeles requeridos?

Sufriendo humillación, dolor horrible, la burla y la muerte de un criminal?

De alguna manera, no podemos saber. Nunca se pueden comprender los propósitos de Dios y – nuestros caminos no son los caminos de Dios, nuestro entendimiento no es el entendimiento de Dios.

Pero cuando nosotros predicamos a Cristo resucitado, lo que estamos haciendo es reconocer el mayor acto de amor, que hacemos como testigos de un Dios dispuesto a ir hasta los confines de la tierra – hasta el final de la vida – y de vuelta – para nosotros.

En Cristo, aprendemos que Dios nos amaba tanto que Dios estaba dispuesto a conocernos!

Para conocer nuestros peores temores y vivir a través de ellos. Sufrir nuestro estado más temido - la muerte – y de hacer absolutamente con la suya.

Para subvertir el poder de la tierra para que ya no lo tiene la última palabra en la vida del pueblo de Dios.

¿Quién hace algo tan feo como final y la muerte en un regreso al hogar hermoso.

Quién iba a llegar a tales extremos, una vez por todas – incluso para la gente como nosotros.

Proclamamos a Cristo resucitado para que podamos ofrecer nuestra alabanza al Dios que nos ama tanto a Dios para ir a cualquier parte. De hecho, Dios ya tiene.

Cuando decimos que Cristo ha resucitado, afirmamos que tambien vive la vida. Por siempre.

La resurrección de Cristo se inclina a nuestras vidas para la eternidad de manera que incluso en la muerte, sólo sino que atraviesa todas las puertas al otro lado de la vida que Dios ha preparado para cada uno de nosotros. Para que nuestras tumbas, también, estaran vacias, por lo que hay absolutamente nada que jamás nos podrá separar del amor de Cristo – ahora y para siempre.

Amén.

What's Crucified on the Cross? Good Friday, 2010

2010-09-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

It is all about power, just like it always is.

Power in strength and might and money and coercive influence and weaponry and fearmongering and jealousy and hatred and corruption and greed and punishment and the ability to act on all of these, well that is what it is all about. It is the same old story retold again when murder is in the air, mur-der in the hands of the rulers who would act out of their fear, murder in the hands of those who would stand by and watch – and even more.

Today’s story is the same old story in which the powerful win while the powerless join in. Even if we didn’t know a thing about the events of the Passion, we would still know them because this stuff plays out every day, where the powerful seize control and punish anything that could separate them from their beloved power and the thumb of op-pression pushes down even harder. It’s a story almost as old as time.

And then there was Jesus – one whose only crime was that everything about him chal-lenged this old story. His power was differ-ent, his strength came from a place unfamil-iar to them, and the powers that were did not know what to do but to stamp him out. Humiliate him first, yes, that’s what they’d do. Turn those palm-waving crowds against him. Then, erase him. In what they would perceive as the ultimate show of strength and might, they would blot out this move-ment and their power would be assured, bolstered, even. Because people knew about this Jesus, and they would come to know about his embarrassing end. Suppress and control: business as usual.

When we close our eyes and think, we see this story alive again and again even now. The strategies haven’t changed, though maybe the tactics have. After all, of course Jesus wasn’t the first to suffer an unjust and torturous death, and he certainly wasn’t the last. In the meantime, you and I are drawn right into the crowds that either let it hap-pen or stand by too afraid to stop it.

What is crucified on that cross? Good people, I believe that it’s the old story that’s crucified. It’s the show of strength and might, it’s the arm of the oppressor doing his best to win, it’s the thumb and the fist and the sword and the foot that can hold, slap, waterboard, electro-cute, belittle, lynch, deport, spit… gas… mock… scourge… nail to a tree. In fact, the oppressor can do this with all its force and might.
But that show ends. It does not win. Look at the cross and see the old story of oppression crucified. See that other concept of power in evil ways nailed down – be-cause Christ’s home is not the cross – Christ lives. What remains nailed down for eternity and then some is the evil that put him there in the first place as God’s power transforms it all. And so that old power loses because that power fizzes out, death itself dies, and what lives is God. And us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because right now, we’re in the midst of the Passion, the story of a power that has an end, an end that God sees and reveals to us in the events of the next three days.

We’re in the midst of the Passion, and I am reminded that four years ago, I had the great privilege of singing the other Bach Passion. We sang it in German, which meant that for a long time I didn’t know what I was singing. But, thanks to Bach’s musical genius, you don’t have to know the story to know the story. You and I can find ourselves in the crowds. We can feel the confusion and fear of the disciples. We can imagine the pain in his mother’s voice. We can hear Jesus, and we can weep with the women who heard him, too. We don’t have to know the story to find ourselves in the story, perhaps even reliving it. And so I invite you to let Bach lead you through this story. But if you (as I did last time) find yourself on the other side of it weeping – please, go on and weep. Rent your robes, cry your tears at evil’s ap-parent triumph.

But please, I beg you – remember that that power is only temporarily situated between the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the Power to end all other powers who is, and was, and shall be forever, without end.

In nomine Jesu!

The Rev. Kaji R. Spellman

GOOD FRIDAY
April 2, 2010
Saint John 18:1—19:42

To God Be the Glory

2010-09-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

I learned something new yesterday. While I knew that we put our “alleluias” away for Lent, I hadn’t known that we also put our “glorias” away for Holy Week. And while this tradition is entirely new to me, it makes perfect sense. Much in the way that our Lenten fast from the celebratory tone of the alleluias makes the proclamation that Christ is risen all the more sweet, this pause in the exultant spirit of the gloria makes its proclamation at the Vigil all the more holy.

Putting away the glorias has the added benefit of inviting us to reflect on precisely what we mean when we give glory to God in the first place.

Alas, the way in which God is glorified (made manifest, exalted) is subject to much poor interpretation. Today’s Gospel perfectly demonstrates our historical penchant for misunderstanding God’s glory. Because today’s Gospel is all about glory, and how it so often is misinterpreted. Imagine the people who encountered this Jesus of Nazareth. News had spread about him, news that inspired many to ask whether he might be the Messiah. But to ask this question about him would be to attempt to match his story with their own notions of who the Messiah would be and how they would recognize him. The journey from the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday to his rejection at the cross on Good Friday reflects a precise failure to reconcile their expectations with the Christ who walked before them. How could it be that God would be glorified in the midst of people’s gross miscalculations?

Jesus tried to explain this, knowing fully well how the old notions of glory would be insufficient in understanding God’s designs. He spoke in metaphor about wheat grain – it must die to bear fruit. But they did not understand him. Then, “a voice came from heaven.” But when the crowd heard it, they could not understand it – they thought that it was thunder. Again and again God’s voice came to the people and they could not hear it for what it was.

Expecting God’s glory to be limited to triumph over the things they wanted blinded Jesus’ followers to the fullness of God’s glory. They had hoped that the Messiah would overturn their rulers, set them up for their own glory and successes, restore, to the best of their recollection, the ways and the times of King David. Meanwhile, they would have continued to live their own lives and die their own deaths connected by the power of sin that reigned throughout. If their Messiah had ruled with their notion of glory, sin and death would not have been conquered and God’s glory would not be complete.

Thanks be to God that God’s glory extends far beyond what we could ever imagine of it. Thanks be to God for the balm that takes away the sting of death, the triumph that conquers the grave so that, in all God’s glory, the victory isn’t ours; it is God’s.

We put away our alleluias so that our highest form of praise goes not to the designs of our own imaginations, but to the Risen Christ. We put away our glorias so that when God speaks, we hear God’s Word, not the clap of thunder. We take the journey this week to make these truths real for us again and anew, so that we can emerge on the other side of the Via Dolorosa ready to encounter the Risen Christ in whatever place God chooses to make our own Emmaus. Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

HOLY TUESDAY
March 30, 2010
Isaiah 49:1–7, Psalm 71:1–14, 1 Corinthians 1:18–31, John 12:20–36

Let Go

2010-09-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

Oooh, it is hard to let go. There’s something exciting, comfortable, dare I say…seductive? about holding on. Of all that might crowd our minds throughout the course of our days, of our lives, there are some things that just shouldn’t. They distract us, they discourage us, they tempt us away from all that’s right and good. And yet we hold on to them.

Fear is the perfect example of this – because it’s our fear that we hold with our strongest grip. And for good reason, too. Why not be afraid? Fear is learned. Something bad happens. We survive. Then the fear kicks in – we don’t want to re-live things that hurt. Fear is not exactly irrational, is it?

And so we hold on to it, gripping it so hard. The problem is that as we hold on tighter and tighter, we might not notice that, somewhere along the line, the fear has begun to hold us, too.

So maybe we do want to listen to the apostle Paul. Maybe we’d just love to “forget what lies behind” us. In fact, it would be lovely to forget. I mean, in this way, maybe we even get Paul. Always looking forward, constantly pressing forward sounds exactly right. Paul wants us to understand that to do otherwise is both theologically and ethically counterproductive. Turning back, holding on, well, that often means turning away, firmly grasping something other than God. That’s the theological argument. Ethically, or behaviorally, looking back, holding on – especially to our fear – well, that gets us stuck, and the damage to ourselves, and to our community, are enormous.

Remember that Paul is always concerned with community. So imagine a community in which everyone feels stuck. Everyone’s looking back, remembering what’s gone wrong, perseverating on the bad, the problems of the past. These thoughts, these experiences can be so strong, the memories so pervasive, that the community finds itself obsessed with things that have happened so much that they can’t see what’s happening now. And then imagine the consequences of this “stuckness” in Christian community. How can we notice God’s work amongst us when we’re stuck looking elsewhere? Stuck in our fear? Stuck in our anger? Stuck in our frustration?

“This one thing I do:” Paul says, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

That bears repeating.

“This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Otherwise put, we have to “keep our eyes on the prize.” Consider Paul’s advice in the context of the civil rights movement (they did). They heard God’s call. They remembered that they were beloved children of God. They remembered that their God was just, but saw that their country was not. And they acted. Much of their past would’ve taught them fear. Fear violence, fear poverty, fear arrest, fear beatings, fear hoses, fear continued injustice, fear alienation, fear lynchings, fear death. But the old values just weren’t working anymore. And God called them to do differently, not to hold on to the burdens of their past, but to hold on to God. And they listened. They listened to God, and they listened to Paul and they prayed for the strength to keep their eyes on the prize and to hold on to the right things.

Because in the landscape of the mind, the things that we hold on to eventually will begin to hold on to us. Holding on to fear does not serve us. Holding on to God does, because, no matter what, God has, does, and will hold on to us. Period.

Oooh, but it’s hard to let go! Of course. God knows. After all, remember that when something shows up over and over in the bible, it’s something that continues to persist. How many times do the angels and the prophets and does our very God God’s self have to tell us “fear not”?

As many times as it takes.

For, can you imagine just how much would God love to see us emerge, “press forward” and escape from the goo that would hold us back from the full and constant experience of God’s everlasting embrace? Can you even begin to grasp how much God rejoices every time we pull forward, stepping towards the Cross, as we do, particularly in Lent, and then moving forward as a resurrected people? Well, we do this. It is part of the Christian journey. Again and again, we have experiences of stepping out on faith.

It’s not that the past is inherently wrong. After all, creation was in the past. Jesus walked the earth in the past. We were baptized in the past. But the fascinating thing about Godly things is that our measure of time cannot contain them. The historical acts of God that have to do with us have happened, yes, but they continue to happen, too. We learn about them in study, and we live them out in faith. God’s time continuum is not our own.

Now, one of the things I love to do for you is to make use of those annoying catch phrases that come out of certain “unmentionable” communities of Christians. What makes these phrases so annoying is, in part, that they’re so catchy, and we’re just above “catchy” here at Saint Peter’s. But even more annoying is that there’s some truth in so many of these catch phrases, too. So with that said, I will quote countless others who’ve said:

“Let go. Let God.”

Isn’t this a major piece of our Lenten fasts? Of letting go of something that we might cling to a bit too closely so that we might cling more closely to God?

Just let go! Let go of the fear. Let go of the hatred. Let go of the hurt. Let go of the anger. Let go of the perfectionism. Let go of the distrust. Let go of all the things that would dare come between you and the God who made, loves and saves you.

Sound like too much? Sound ridiculous? Sound absolutely impossible?

It is. So thanks be to God that our God is master of the impossible. Thanks be to God for each miraculous step out of the goo of sin. Thanks be to God for creation, salvation, resurrection, hope, joy and love love love.

So you can’t let go? Fine. Then just let God be God, and, as someone I’d much rather quote put it: “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

March 21, 2010 – Morning Masses
Isaiah 43:16–21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:4b–14, Saint John 12:1–8

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Christ's Ambassadors

2010-09-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

So much of jazz is about communication.
Not just communicating a message,
because that’s not always an explicit goal in the music,
but in communicating a feeling, an impression.

But what I’m most fascinated about is the communication between the musicians.

As Ralph Peterson put it in this afternoon’s panel,
the drum, the source –
the heartbeat in jazz,
is like “the first cell phone”
in the sense (particularly in its African roots)
that it calls out and sends a message.

So I called my dad, A.B. Spellman,
(who wanted to be specifically referenced in this sermon) to talk about this –
what about jazz uniquely teaches us something about communication?

The root, dad says, is in the idea of collective improvisation.
Jazz introduces all sorts of levels of freedom in musical expression,
in improvisation.
But in order for it to work,
each person’s freedom has to be
in concert with every other person’s freedom –
you’ve got to be in tune with each other,
pay attention to each other.

You’ve got to “lock” in order to find that rhythmic groove and energy
that will feed the entire group.

In many ways, every one of us wants,
needs the freedom to be able to improvise in our own lives.

So when we have the privilege to witness brilliant jazz musicians at work –
the masters of that craft –
we do well to take note, because there is much that we can learn from jazz.

And, in a way, it is as if the band leader is
like an ambassador from the culture of studied collective improvisation
to our culture that so deeply needs to learn that discipline.
Art Blakey was such an ambassador – one of the best.

Well what does that have to do with church?

Maybe you’ll recall that the apostle Paul said that “we are ambassadors for Christ.”

Well, what does that mean?

Think about the role of the ambassador.
Ambassadors represent their sovereign (or country)
to foreigners, to outsiders.
They have the authority to carry a message for whomever they represent.
They seek to build meaningful relationships,
even (or perhaps especially)
in circumstances in which those relationships cannot be taken for granted.

They develop friendships in the midst of suspicion.
Not only do they build bridges, but they are bridges.
They are the master communicators.

But why would God want us to be bridge-builders?
After all, isn’t that God’s job?
Even Paul acknowledges that:
“in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.”

God is the bridge and builds the bridge –
that is precisely what Christ has already done for all of us,
building an indestructible bridge between the
imperfections of humanity and the perfection of God.
But Paul continues, saying that
God is “entrusting [God’s] message of reconciliation to us.”

How could God entrust us with all this?
I mean, the message of God’s saving grace,
of God’s steadfast and abundant love,
of God’s eternal promises –
this message is at the root of human existence.

And what have we done with it?
How fully do we equip the people we encounter to be and to live and to act freely?

Granting freedom is not our work –
God has already done it.
Our job is not to block others’ freedom.

Sometimes it’s really fun to watch a jazz band to see this struggle at work.
One musician gets into his solo,
and another one decides he wants to step in, and starts showboating,
playing a little louder than he should,
stepping on the soloist who wasn’t done expressing himself.
I love watching this,
because it shows how hard we have to work to respect others’ freedom.
And it plays out in real life, too.

Sometimes you might see someone else doing a great job at something,
and jealousy steps in.
Stepping in on someone’s good solo,
putting down someone’s joy,
not celebrating someone’s successes –
this is a way that we limit others’ freedom.
(I find myself resisting this all of the time!)

But as ambassadors for Christ,
we have the opportunity to do the opposite.
We can encourage the people we encounter,
celebrating their freedom,
giving them to tools to explore good and new possibilities,
building up their experiences of trust
so that they can come closer to trusting God’s promises of never-ending love.

Because the greatest barrier to experiencing our freedom
and risking improvisation is fear, a lack of trust that in all things,
God will hold us up.

When we add to people’s experiences of trust
rather than detracting from them,
they are so much better equipped to step into a pattern of
trust in God and to step away from patterns of fear.

Building up people’s trust is one of the most profound gifts
ambassadors of Christ can give to the people in our lives
because it is a way that God entrusts us with
God’s work of reconciliation in a very tangible way.

So I invite you to take a look at your life.
When have you been an ambassador for Christ before?
When might you be tonight?
Tomorrow or the next day?
With what Gospel truth has God entrusted you?
What bridges are left to be or to build?

As a pastor, people so often ask me what it means to be a Christian.
The simple answer is that it’s
loving the God we have come to know most fully in the person of Jesus Christ,
whom, with the power of the Holy Spirit,
we seek to follow in every way we possibly can.

Loving Christ, how could we resist being his ambassadors?
With the power of the Holy Spirit,
and perhaps even through the example of jazz, this life of collective improvisation
is entirely within each of our reach.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York
March 14, 2010 - Jazz Vespers

Joshua 5:9–12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16–21; Luke 15:1–3, 11b–32

Jesus Isn't My Homeboy?

2010-02-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

“Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet…”

“And I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He held a little scroll open in his hand. Setting his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, he gave a great shout, like a lion roaring...”

And so you’ve heard the opening lines to passages of Scripture I once chose to categorically ignore. These are the judgment heralds of the Revelation to John. When studying the Bible, I refused to touch them because I was afraid of them. The ways I’d encountered Scripture and the Christian faith, in general, inscribed within me a sense of terror when it came to judgment.

I think it was when I made the mistake of wearing my “Jesus is my homeboy” t-shirt to a theology class that I started to learn differently.

“What makes you think that Jesus is your ‘homeboy’?” my professor asked.

Well, you know I was too smart for my own good, so of course I had an answer: “Jesus is my homeboy, Professor, because he told his disciples that he called them friends.” Smug.

“Do your homeboys sit in holy judgment over you?”
“Do your homeboys give everything for your sake?”
“Do your homeboys grant you eternal mercy and forgiveness?” my professor asked.

Perhaps you can imagine that I didn’t have such a clever answer to those.

Frustrated with the casual associations of Jesus as mere associate , as the “friend” who “walks with me and talks with me” who preached love and daisies and sunshine and rainbows, my professor wanted to remind me that Jesus also stood as judge.

And with that word, “judge” – I shut down.

Because when I heard the word “judge” I thought of the trumpets blaring in Revelation – the book not to be touched – and I thought of the people who loved to quote it. I thought of the people who took the power of the keys to lock up the church. I thought of the “morality” that set people aside – no – let me be more clear – cast people into the gutter, threw them away, made them feel like less than the beloved children of God who they were.

I thought of the influence of the very ones our “Visible Witness” ministry is seeking to undo. The ones who would inflict the “corrosive force” of shame on people just seeking to be who they are. The ones who would push a child to ask “why can’t I be normal?” the ones who would send away candidates called to the ministry by God, sent away because they were open about who they loved. The ones who would force the “silence that does not save” on the ones called to proclaim Gospel truth. The ones who would damn a child to hell. The ones who would lock people in closets marked with “emblems of shame.” The ones who would wield “curved blades” against others without even recognizing it. The ones who would point the finger of judgment forever outward without seeing themselves as just as needy of forgiveness as the next person.

It was because I made these associations when I thought of judgment that I committed the sin of not embracing God’s judgment.

But Imagine if I’d taken today’s Gospel seriously. Imagine if I’d heard Christ’s words of judgment against the City of David, the dwelling place of the name of the most high, the holy city of God’s people – the place that kills its prophets and would soon kill its King. Imagine if I’d heard the strong voice of Jesus’ judgment against that city and then watched what he did.

Because HE STAYED.

He stuck with the very people he judged, and he stayed to heal them. He denounced the sins of injustice, and then he stuck around to save every one of them. (And us.)

He saw what was wrong, and he remained right there – even with his tormentors breathing down his neck, even with his adversaries threatening his death – and he didn’t budge.

He didn’t budge because he loved them – and us – so much.

My good friends – what the Pharisees don’t want you to know is that when God renders a judgment, it is done so out of love! In judgment, God reveals all those things that might cause a breach in our relationship with God, and then God draws us back! Turns us around!

That is why this Gospel is so wonderful to read during Lent. Because Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem provides the perfect formula for conceiving of who Christ is and how Christ judges: in recognition and healing, in naming and repentance.

To consider God’s judgment as a lament is to begin to grasp a God whose understanding – and love – is wider than anything that we could possibly imagine. To hear the angel’s trumpets – even in Revelation – is to hear the clarion call towards repentance, towards turning back to God no matter how many times we’ve turned away. To believe in Christ is to receive God’s forgiveness – cloaking ourselves – covering our sin – so that the bond between us and God is never –
Ever.
Ever severed.

So when you hear false judgments – you turn to those sources and you say,

“Pharisee! Repent! Nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Nothing.

Not even you.”

And then, you turn your back on that Pharisee, turning back to God, and you pray for their forgiveness, too. The forgiveness already made theirs (and yours, and mine too) through Christ Jesus.

And then you say:

Amen.

Advent IV: The Prophet Mary

2009-12-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

Micah 5:2–5a, Luke 1:46b–55, Hebrews 10:5–10, Luke 1:39–55

How do we know a prophet when we see one? The Bible is full of texts deemed prophetic – they make up much of what we call the Old Testament. We can name prophets, in fact, one of tonight’s texts is from the prophet Micah. So how do we know they’re prophetic? One answer is that we can recognize a prophet because the prophecy comes true. But there’s more to it than that, because many charlatans offer a good predictions from time to time.

So how do we recognize a prophet?

One of the foremost scholars on the prophets was a rabbi named Abraham Joshua Heschel who was based here in New York City during the Civil Rights movement. His study of the prophets informed his understanding of the revolution taking place in American culture as the oppressed challenged the oppressors. Heschel read the prophets and couldn’t help but to align himself with the movement. (In fact, the famous picture of King and many other religious leaders linked arm-to-arm marching in Selma, Alabama includes him standing in the front row.) In his seminal book on the prophets, Heschel took up this very question of what constitutes a prophet.

He described prophets as people who “combine deep love with powerful dissent, painful rebuke with unwavering hope.” Heschel catalogued the qualities of a prophet. His list includes:

Sensitivity to evil
Luminousity
Concern with the highest good
Austerity and compassion
Loneliness & misery
A messenger, witness

Due to the deep contrast between the prophecies they proclaimed and the cultures that heard them, prophets lived pretty miserable lives. They were homeless wanderers, deeply sensitive to the injustices they witnessed. And yet, the prophets always had hope, always delivered a corrective to draw God’s people back in, to pull their cultures closer to the God who beckoned them – beckons us.

And so we encounter tonight’s Gospel.

In some ways, we can be distracted by the beauty of these words. And they are beautiful. Mary says “my soul magnifies the Lord.” She sings a song of praise and rejoicing, giving thanks to the God who has chosen her for such an important role. These words are indeed beautiful, in fact, I treasure their poetry more than any other part of the New Testament. I’m not alone – the church has played out its love story with this text – called the Magnificat – for ages. Through her words, Mary is exalted for her devotion, praise and remarkable faith.

Many of us picture Mary as the pious mother of Christ. We imagine her as the maternal figure holding her son as a babe, and later after his crucifixion. Through the generations, in many traditions, Mary has become the tragic quaint mother, gentle in her love, tearful in her devotion.

But to see Mary as purely quaint is to fail to hear her words.

“The mighty one has done great things for me, and holy is His name,” she says.

But then the song changes. It switches key. We can hear her words and imagine her voice getting louder in deep, dramatic crescendo, because it just makes more sense to shout than to say:
He has shown strength with his arm!
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts!
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones!
and lifted up the lowly!
he has filled the hungry with good things!
and sent the rich away empty!

These are not the words of a quaint little woman. See Mary as the figure in the Madonna and Child, or even the pietas, sure. But I like to imagine Mary with Rosie the Riveter’s fist, too. Because Mary’s words are the words of a prophet – strong and true.

She was not a popular woman. As a direct result of her faith, she was an outcast – sent away for her pregnancy to her cousin Elizabeth. With her husband, she wandered to Bethlehem. She bore her child in homelessness, then fled into exile to live the life of an illegal immigrant.

Heschel said that prophets are sensitive to evil (“he has brought down the powerful”), luminous (“My soul magnifies the Lord”), concerned with the highest good (“he has helped his servant, Israel, in accordance with his promises”) austere (“he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant”), lonely (mother of the crucified one), messengers.

Good friends, we need the message of Mary, the prophet. We need to trust her prophecy to be true. We need to hear her words, learn from her strength – a strength so profoundly great that she could give birth to the Emmanuel – God with us, the Christ-child, the Word made flesh, God incarnate born to a homeless family who lived in exile. We need these things because we are broken, our world is broken, people hurt, suffering endures. We need these things because we need God. When God chose to take human form, not as a wealthy king, but as a man who was homeless and poor, God made Mary’s prophecy true. The lowly and poor are lifted up in the person of Christ Jesus. Our own hunger is filled by the bread of life, given for you, me and everyone else.

And so, people of God, when we sing Mary’s song, let us sing her words as our own. Let us trust her prophecy. Let us await its perfect fulfillment, through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

(note that the quotes from Heschel are taken from: Speaking of Faith: “The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel”. Tippet, Christa, December 3, 2009. American Public Media. The catalogue of prophetic qualities comes from Heschel's book The Prophets, Hendrickson's, Peabody, MA, 2007 edition.)

Advent II: Prepare the Way of the Lord!

2009-12-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

Malachi 3:1-4; Saint Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; Saint Luke 3:1-6

“Prepare the way of the Lord! Make his paths straight!” John the Baptist proclaimed a “baptism of repentance” helping us to understand that this time of preparation – Advent, is a time for us to make some changes. Last week, I preached about how we could all stand to “clean house”, get things ready, clear up those things that clutter our spiritual homes. This week, it’s good to be with John the Baptist, who tried to do what he could to prepare the world for the coming of its Lord.

As we ask ourselves what preparations might need to be taken, notice that John (who quotes Isaiah) is directive. It’s like he’s pointing fingers – you! me! – we need to do some things, we have work to do. We need to prepare the way of the Lord, perhaps because when the Lord comes it would be helpful to know it, to recognize him, to not let Christ’s return pass us by. Don’t get me (or John) wrong – God’s return is God’s work, and it doesn’t depend on our individual action by any stretch of the imagination. But what I hear in this prophetic text is that it calls us to take a look at our spiritual landscapes – the mountains, the valleys, the obstructions, if you will, that would act to keep us – and others – away from God. (In the church, we call those obstructions sin.)

And so I’ll share but three ways that we might follow John’s lead.

1. Make the paths straight, John says.

If the walk of faith takes place on a path, if the walk that brings us into closer relationship with God is on a path, then we have an opportunity to recommit to that path. Perhaps you’re like me, and you struggle with the many, many demands on your time that might veer you off the path. In many ways, I have it easy because I’m a pastor, and so my work is always supposed to be centered around God. That’s a luxury, but don’t think that it means that I don’t veer. Because I do come across people from time to time (ok, probably every day) who test my godliness! Sometimes I catch myself thinking something, or, more likely, talking to someone in a way I know is just as far from godly as I could possibly be (especially when I’m mad) and bam! I’m off the path. Again and again, you and I have to recommit ourselves to letting God put us back on the path that draws us closer to God.

2. Make the paths straight, John says, because sometimes it is our responsibility to
do that for others, too.

Have you ever asked yourself what you might be doing, as a person, or even culturally, to prevent someone from experiencing God? Put another, more actionable way, what might you do – better yet, what might we do – to shed light on God’s goodness and mercy in real and tangible ways? Like taking away a moment of someone’s suffering? Like sharing gracefully? Like working to eliminate the injustices that lead to poverty? This is how the church works, moment by moment, day after day, to prepare the way of the Lord, but like our first point, it takes constant refinement and recommitment.

3. Make the paths straight, John says.

Never forget that John was a baptizer. The baptism in which many of us share and to which every one of us is invited is at the center of this process. I don’t take for granted that everyone here has been baptized, but whether you have or you haven’t, understand this: we are baptized because it sets the path. It affirms a desire to wash away sin. And it seals us with the promise that, in God’s time, the path will be straight, the sin will disappear, and we will – each one of us will – arise redeemed and purified by God’s love. Could anything be more beautiful? If you haven’t been baptized, come talk to us, talk to your pastor, take that step onto the path of your faith, remembering that baptism puts us on the path and God will make it straight, God will fill every valley, level every mountain, remove any impediment that might turn us away or block us from the God made, loves, and cares for us, because that is what God does.

You may have been receiving our Advent devotionals (if not, please sign up with the receptionist so that we can get them to you). You’ll see that this week’s reflections written by Pastor Stahler are, in large part, based on God’s action in leveling our personal and collective spiritual landscapes, restoring God’s creation to its original, unsevered, perfect relationship with our Creator. We bend towards that perfection in our brokenness. God mends that brokenness in God’s perfection.

Christians, we prepare the way of a Lord who’s coming, anyway. So as we shout our alleluias and sing our antiphons, let us face forward on the path God sets us on and say:

Yes, Lord.

Come.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

REPOST: Matrilineage of Jesus Christ

2009-12-19T10:01:00.001-08:00

An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, descendant of Abraham, and son of Mary the daughter of Anna.

Sarah was the mother of Isaac,

and Rebekah was the mother of Jacob,

Leah was the mother of Judah

Tamar was the mother of Perez

The names of the mothers of Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon and Salmon have been lost.

Rahab was the mother of Boaz,

And Ruth was the mother of Obed.

Obed's wife, whose name is unknown, bore Jesse.

The wife of Jesse was the mother of David.

Bathsheba was the mother of Solomon,

Naamah, the Ammonite, was the mother of Rehoboam.

Maacha was the mother of Abijam and the grandmother of Asa.

Azubah was the mother of Jehoshaphat.

The name of Jehoram's mother is unknown.

Athaliah was the mother of Ahaziah,

Zibiah of Beersheba, the mother of Joash.

Jocoliah of Jerusalem bore Uzziah,

Jerusha bore Jotham, Ahaz's mother is unknown.

Abi was the mother of Hezekiah,

Hephzibah was the mother of Manasseh,

Meshullemeth was the mother of Amon,

Jedidah was the mother of Josiah.

Zebidah was the mother of Jehoiachin,

Hamutal was the mother of Zedekiah.

Then the deportation to Babylon took place.

After the deportation to Babylon
The names of the mothers go unrecorded.

These are their sons:

Jechoniah, Shealtiel, Zuerubbabel,
Abiud, Elliakim, Azor and Zadok,
Achim, Eliud, Eleazar,
Matthan, Jacob and Joseph, the husband of Mary

Of her was born Jesus who is called Christ.

Written by Ann Patrick Ware. Published in Frank Henderson's Remembering the Women (Liturgy Training Publications, 1999).
shared by Siobhan Garrigan

Advent: Getting the house in order

2009-12-03T13:50:00.000-08:00

Here's what I wrote:

Consider this: Revisit your image of your home with a place prepared for Christ. In prayer, begin to make a list — a list of preparation. What needs to be put away? What needs to be brought out? What, from this list, are you ready to change today? What, from this list, will take some time and a lot of prayer before it’s changed?

Every weekday, my church offers a daily mass at 12:15. Well, amidst the gorgeous sunshine and near-70 degree temperatures this amazing December day, it turned out that today was the first time I've presided for an empty mass. This meant that I didn't celebrate a mass for myself, but I did walk through the readings. And as I prayed, I thought about my advent preparations and asked for God's help in this (after all, none of this happens without God's help...)

As I prayed, I thought about the things I'd like to set out before God: my love, devotion, trust, my heart, obedience. And I thought about the sinful things I'd want to put away: my spirit of competitiveness, my ridiculous drive for attention and approval, my ambitions that distract me from all those things I listed as good, worthy of showing God. And I prayed for help and guidance in this work. "Help me to make today be a day in which I show you my devotion, God." It's not a bad prayer to start off the day with, I think...

Blogging on Advent I: Getting Ready for Christ

2009-12-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

Based on this passage from Luke:

stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption
is drawing near

Here's what I wrote:

There’s a wonderful excitement in the air — Christmas is coming! The season of Advent seizes on this excitement, encouraging us to look forward, to look ahead to the celebration that is to come. With that excitement in mind, Advent asks more of us, too. We’re asked to look up — to look around us, to notice what’s around us. Advent is, of course, a season of preparation. Preparation implies change — we will change something so that we’re ready for what’s next. This week, we’ll consider ways in which God’s encouraging us to look up, look around, and get ready, making whatever changes are necessary to prepare for what God has in store. Christ is coming, our “redemption draws near” and there’s much work to do!

Key Question: What do I need to do to be ready for Christ?

I asked this question because someone else asked it of me once, and I felt as if I had no answer at all. That was a problem, because this concept of preparation, of waiting, anticipating Christ's return is not supposed to be purely conceptual. It should be ethical, too - it should play out in our interactions with people and in our inner spiritual lives as a matter of devotion. So my reflections follow over the course of the week as I walk through the devotions with you. Please leave your comments here or on the Saint Peter's Church wiki.

Blogging on Advent: Iconic Images and Sounds

2009-12-01T05:32:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, December 1:

Here's what I wrote:

This week's Gospel invites us to look up and around us, to take notice of things. What do you notice around you right now that reminds you of Christ's enduring presence? What do you notice around you that reminds you that Christ's return, Christ's eternal reign, is needed? Take note of these things in your prayers today.

And so I took my own suggestion, looking around me to notice Christ's presence. Everywhere around me I find these iconic images and sounds - things that point beyond themselves - and so I made a list that I thought was worth sharing.

1. I have a vase of flowers on the desk in my office that I've kept for weeks, reminding me of many beautiful things. While the flowers are dying, yes, I have to admit that even in their wrinkled, wilting repose they point to something much more wonderful - love. My sister in law, Nichelle, sent them to me the day after my Installation on October 30 to let me know how proud and joyful she and my brother felt at the occassion. The flowers point to their love, their disappointment in not being there, and the deep familial connection that holds us together in spite of the distance that would separate us (they live in Los Angeles.) This vase of flowers points to love, and love emenates from God.

2. It's almost 10 pm on a Monday, and I hear music, very good music as an orchestral ensemble practices in our Sanctuary. I love that our Sanctuary is just that - a place for musicians to come and to make incredible music in a space dedicated to the worship of God. Maybe no one came with the intentions of seeing God at all here, but God has a way of breaking through any intention, anyway. There's my hope.

3. I look out of my window and see the people who take rest in the ledges outside of the church, and I, of course, see the body of Christ gathered in this place of shelter. But I also see an answer to the second part of my question - a reminder that Christ's reign is needed. Just a few days ago, someone elaborately tied cardboard boxes to the cross that sits outside our church on the corner of 54th & Lex, fashioning a makeshift home there. The image of the cardboard boxes sullying the artwork of the cross is arresting. Those cardboard boxes ARE the cross. Christ was crucified so that we wouldn't have to be. And yet people have to live outside as winter draws ever closer. We rest in and rely on the assurances that Christ will return and in Christ's reign, suffering, dying, pain and homelessness will be no more, but we wonder when that day will come? The cardboard homes outside of my window are deeply iconic - they point to the need for God, the need for the fulfillment of Christ's reign, and the need for the church in the between-space in which we all live.

I'd be curious about others' lists, too...

Blogging on Advent: "Crookbacked" Christians in Advent - Stand up!

2009-12-01T05:27:00.000-08:00

Monday, November 30

Last year, Greg Jones published an article in The Christian Century called "Monkey Business" that immediately reminded me of our 1 Advent Gospel, from Luke:

Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Here's what I wrote: In the 7th century, Gregory the Great talked about the “crookbacked” phenomenon, in which a person was so stuck looking down at his feet, “weighed down by the burden of earthly cares…of evil habit…so that he never looks up to the things that are above.” What habits of yours are weighing you down? In what ways do you find yourself “crookbacked” — so stuck in the routine that you have a hard time looking up? Pay attention to these habits and prayerfully discern which ones you might be able to turn away from.

It's hard to raise my head when my back is "crooked...by the burden of [my] earthly cares." So I thought I'd open up a discussion on what spiritually makes us, quoting Gregory the Great, "crookbacked"?

Blogging on Advent Devotionals

2009-12-01T05:22:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2009

Beginning with the first Sunday of Advent, the three pastors developed a daily Advent devotional resource for the people and friends of Saint Peter's Church. Based on John the Baptist's mandate echoing the prophets of old (notably Isaiah and Malachi): "Prepare the way of the Lord", we designed each piece to give all of us a chance to take a moment every day to reflect on our own personal practices of preparation.

Well, "all of us" includes the pastors, too. So I started blogging on a conversation, essentially responding to the questions I had posed in that day's devotional. And we want to hear from you, too! So join the conversation.

Advent I: Getting our Houses in Order

2009-11-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah 33:14–16, Psalm 25:1–10, 1 Thessalonians 3:9–13, Luke 21:25–36

Well, it’s not Christmas yet, though to look around New York City these days you wouldn’t know it. The office buildings have hung their white lights, the color scheme for stores has changed to red & green, the air is appropriately chilly and all the markers we’ve grown accustomed to signaling Christmas’ arrival are around us.

But the church wants to remind us that it’s not Christmas yet.

This has always been a struggle in the churches I’ve served – the air smells of Christmas, and the people are excited, ready to sing their Christmas carols, but the church says, “not yet.” Wait.

Because we have another important season that precedes the Christmas season – we call it “Advent” which means “arrival”. And we, the church, say, “wait” because the season of Advent is predicated on the assumption that there are things that must happen before we’re ready to celebrate Christmas.

Advent is the time of preparation. We prepare the space physically – we hang an Advent wreath with the growing light, week after week, as candles are lit. We prepare as a community, planning the Christ Mass to celebrate the Incarnation, birth of our Lord. And we prepare as a people, reminding ourselves and one other of why it would be that we would need a Lord in the first place. We prepare as Christians so that Christmas has meaning for us, so that it is relevant to our world, so that the impact of this story worth telling and retelling for a couple of thousand years can continue to transform us.

In Advent, we prepare for the coming of our Lord, which happened once and will happen again. The season of Advent is the perfect time to rehearse this practice of preparation, because Christ will return – we don’t know when, but we know it’s happening. So it makes sense to be ready – in that way, the folks on the soapboxes on street corners are exactly right.

I heard a preacher put it this way: it’s as if the church were the host, and Jesus were our guest. You wouldn’t want to have a guest over without getting your house in order, would you? How much more would you want to prepare for your Lord’s arrival?

So. How do we put our houses in order?

The Gospel tells us to stand up! To raise our heads! To pay attention! To take note that our redemption is drawing near! To do something about it!

I would suggest that we raise our heads to pull us out of our routines, to notice God at work around us, to remind us that we, ourselves, have work to do.

Maybe you’re like me, and find yourself guilty of the ancient “crookbacked” phenomenon. Back in the 6th century, Gregory the Great (who was pope from 590 to 604 AD) talked about crookbacked Christians as folks who were so busy looking down, stuck in their own ruts, that they developed these crooked-backs, unable to see God’s glory around them. And this resonates with me, because when I’m stuck in an unfaithful routine, it becomes difficult to stand up, raise my head, and prepare for my redemption. This probably resonates with Jesus, too, who undoubtedly witnessed many a crookbacked follower. (Why else would he give such clear instruction?)

So we need to stand up, raise our heads, and get ready. Let’s get our houses in order.

As I try to prepare my “house”, I think of all the things I’d want to clear out, clean up and put away: habits that need breaking, choices I continue to make that I know aren’t right, things I need to do but put off out of fear, relationships that need mending that I continue to ignore…the list goes on.

I also think of the things I’d want to bring out, to set before my Lord: my pure devotion and obedience, praise and graceful living – essentially, all the gifts God has already given me – I would want my Lord to see these things first; not because I can earn my salvation – I can’t, no one can. But because I would want to do my part to prepare the way of our Lord.

So Christmas is coming – but not yet. And maybe that’s good news. Maybe this gives us a chance to work on getting our houses in order as a matter of devotion.

Why not do this together? You might be glad to know that the pastors have prepared a devotional resource for you this Advent season. (Contact the church www.saintpeters.org to receive this daily email). This is what we do as a church – we share in the discipline, we do the work together, we support one-another as we try to shape our lives around this faith we share.

The Good News is that even if we fail – even if the houses of our spiritual lives are a complete mess – God meets us there. Because no matter what our kitchen looks like, never forget that it’s God who sets the table, makes the meal and sets it before us at the heavenly banquet.

But maybe we could at least do the dishes.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji Rosa Spellman
Saint Peter's Church
In the City of New York

Here in the Sanctuary

2009-11-30T19:14:00.000-08:00

1 Sam 2:1-10

I can’t help but celebrate in a place like this, on a night like this, with music like we hear tonight. That’s what we do in the Sanctuary – we encounter the goodness of a God whose mercy is so great and incredible that most of us can’t help but celebrate.

But there’s more that happens here. We come to the Sanctuary for just that – sanctuary, respite, rest, refuge in the loving arms of the Holy One. And when we need sanctuary, we’re not always in the mood to celebrate.

Hannah certainly wasn’t. She’d spent time being tortured in her household, tormented by her peer, mourning the loss of her most important dream. She was desperate for help, even as she was surrounded by people who just didn’t help at all.

In Hannah’s time and place, women played a very specific role in their households – they brought their homes increase, both as careful stewards of their household goods, and by bearing children – healthy, male children who could then grow up and increase the family’s resources even further. Responsibility for this always fell on the women – never mind that there were men who might be sterile – the women bore the responsibility. In Hannah’s case, her husband, Elkanah, had other wives who bore his children. And so, with every new child born to another wife, Hannah’s situation grew more pronounced – each new child reflected failure she perceived with increasing alarm. Despite her husband’s assurances, Hannah felt unsafe. Hers was no undue anxiety – her situation was precarious, at best, made worse by the taunting, the severe provocation of another wife, her rival. Hannah felt the weight of the hostility she encountered at home with increasing intensity, such intensity that she was driven to desperation. She could not even eat.

And so Hannah came to Shiloh, where she presented herself to God in the sanctuary. She was desperate, and, perhaps as a place of last resort, she prayed. Through her bitter tears she prayed for God’s help.

God heard her prayers. And God answered them.

In the Biblical narrative, there are many stories of barren women. Think of it this way: women who could not bear children represent the marginalized. As the result of prayer, God visits the marginalized, and something new emerges –new hope arises, God’s deliverance is known and proclaimed – in the narrative, as a child is born.

For those of us who read the story, deliverance is and must be broader, because it necessarily includes us, too. Children or not, new hope can always be ours.

Because God hears our prayers. And God answers them, making everything new.

This is why we come – this is why this place and every other sanctuary exists – to allow the Hannahs and the desperate and the needy and the sad and the weary a place where they can be sure to present themselves before the Lord.

Of course, Hannah could’ve been “spiritual but not religious,” she could’ve offered her prayers from home. I’m sure that she did. But there was something about presenting herself before the Lord in the sanctuary that did something different for her. There was something about taking the journey, stepping out of her routine and entering a space that promises to be holy that changed things, altered Hannah’s relationship with the Lord. There, in the sanctuary, Hannah accomplished something different.

Here, in the sanctuary, tonight, in this space, we’re invited to do the same. Perhaps someone’s like Hannah. Maybe someone’s been driven to the brink and has nowhere else to go. Perhaps someone’s been ignoring God, angry about something that happened and unsure how or even why to approach God now. Or, perhaps someone has had a pretty incredible day and is uplifted by this music and just wants to celebrate.

The sanctuary can handle any of this, because all of it is holy.

Regardless of whether or not we know or admit it, we encounter God here. Just as we are, worn or torn, God meets us here. At the table, no matter what, God feeds us here. And when we walk out that door, God joins us – awaiting the time when we’ll present ourselves again.

Here in the sanctuary, let us allow God to make us whole, so that when it comes time to sing a song of praise, we can sing it with all that we have, and all that we are, as the only song we could possibly sing.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

Needs Assessment

2009-11-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

1 Kings 17:8–16, Psalm 146, Hebrews 9:24–28, Mark 12:38–44

I used to work for a big company in their Marketing department. Big companies’ marketing departments are notoriously good at what’s called a “needs assessment” in which they explore the marketplace to see where there were gaps to fill, ways to draw clients closer.

Each of us does our own needs assessment, too. Ideally, we would take stock of what we have and we make decisions of what we need accordingly. And yet, very often out of our needs assessments we wind up with a wish-list, confusing true needs with desires. This is what I’d like to explore tonight.

How often do we do a needs assessment from the perspective of our faith? Consider the widow: she had next to nothing, and gave what she had over as a matter of devotion. Have you ever wondered what inspired her to do that? What encouraged her to hand over everything she had? Didn’t her needs assessment tell her that if she gave up her money, she wouldn’t be able to eat? Didn’t her needs assessment suggest that she might save up instead of donating funds? Didn’t she know better?

Well, I’ve heard it said that when we have next to nothing, when our “back is against the wall,” so to speak, that’s when we’re closest to God. Something inspired this widow, something encouraged her to do something the rest of us saw as irresponsibly risky. Something came out of her relationship with God that gave her the confidence and strength to give up all the money she had. For her, the use of her funds was, at least this day, strictly a matter of faith. As this widow took stock of her needs, she concluded that God would take care of her. That somehow, her needs would be met.

I see this happen at Saint Peter’s very often. I see people on the street taking care of each other, sharing what they have even when they have so little. How is this possible? Perhaps because when we have very little, our needs assessments are more accurate.

After all, what do we really need? Note that I’m not asking the question of what we really want. But what do we really need?

A psychiatrist named Maslow famously documented human needs as a hierarchy, a pyramid, which is a helpful starting point for us (of course realizing that my exploration of this does not come from a medical perspective at all.)

1. At the bottom of the hierarchy are our basic bodily needs. These needs have to do with our ability to survive. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need a place to sleep, a place to go to the bathroom (a big issue in New York City, by the way). This need speaks to our ability to perform the basic functions of living and surviving.

2. Next is our need for safety. It’s important to us to feel secure in one way or another, in a way to anticipate that our basic needs will be met. Due to life circumstances, there are some people who don’t get to experience satisfaction of this very basic need.

3. What follows is our need for love and belonging. We seek companionship, we need to know that we’re not alone. We need support, people who will draw us out of ourselves and into something bigger. We need community.

4. Next is our need for esteem – confidence, self-esteem, the need to be recognized and known. We need to know when we’re on the right path, we need confirmation that our hunches are good, that we’re making good choices.

5. The final need is for self-actualization, our need to realize our potential. I think that this speaks to our need to make meaning in our lives, our need to leave a mark on the world.

On this needs hierarchy, each need feeds of the others so that it becomes very difficult to meet the final need (to realize potential) when we’re hungry, or it becomes difficult to experience love if we don’t feel secure. To reach our primary motivation - which is that meaning-making need, we need love, companionship, safety, food and shelter. All of this makes sense. It especially makes sense from a perspective of faith, because, as it turns out, God promises us these things. God promises that our needs will be met. Maybe not all of our desires, maybe not even matters of convenience, but God promises that our needs will be met.

Think about these 5 needs and how God meets them in your life.

1-2. For the first two needs, I always remember Dorothy Day, who dedicated her life to serving the poor and hungry. As we all know, there are entirely too many people who live with hunger and poverty. But that isn’t because there isn’t enough food – as Dorothy put it, “there was always bread.” The truth is that the food is there, and it’s available. But it is up to us, all of us, to ensure that the food reaches the people who need it – not just on a one-off basis where folks won’t know where their next meal will come from, but in a healthy, sustainable way. It’s up to us as people of faith to ensure that every person’s bodily needs – however inconvenient, however expensive, are met. God counts on us to be God’s hands and feet – God’s given us the tools, and it’s up to us to use them.

At the same time, it’s helpful, in our own needs assessment, to take note of how God is providing for this in our own lives. How our most basic need to survive is a gift from God. How each meal, even each shower, is worth giving thanks for. Trust me, this helps, and as often as I forget to do it, I know that this is an essential part of my, and our, devotion.

3-4. God meets our third and fourth needs in Christian community. We are drawn together to be a family, to give each other the support we need, to build trust, to have people who will love us and who will hold us accountable, who will remind us of who God is and who we are. We are here, we partner with each other so that we can meet each other’s needs. But even if we don’t, even when we have trouble finding a place to call our spiritual home, God travels with us & reminds us that we’re never alone.

Many of us don’t have trouble with issues of food and shelter, but we certainly have trouble with this one – finding and knowing love, building and keeping trust, believing in our own worth, fashioning ourselves for purposeful living. Which draws us to our deepest motivation…

5. As the Psalmist says, we were all “knit together in our mother’s wombs” by a God who knew us even before our existence began. A crucial tenet of our faith is that God fashioned us to thrive, to serve, to love the world into which we were born, to make a small mark, to improve upon something, to contribute. This is God’s dream for every human soul. As a church, it is our role to proclaim this truth but also to make it possible, through God, meeting the basic needs, and drawing us into this deep need.

When we consider our own needs-assessments, we do well to take note, and to give thanks to God every day, for the ways in which God meets those needs. Try this tonight – let’s each go home tonight and see how God is meeting our needs right now.

And in places where we don’t see needs being met, let’s address that in our prayers. Address it back here in Christian community, too. As a church, by the way, we’re required, by God, to respond.

If our devotions center around our needs, it becomes easier to see God at work in our lives, and it becomes easier to invite God into the areas of our lives that especially need God’s help. This keeps us from making ridiculous requests of God (like from that enormous apartment we really want, or those stacked heels with the red soles all of our friends are wearing) and instead asking God for things that God can, and will, provide.

When we do this, we see our own interests and God’s so beautifully aligned. When we do this, we develop the crucial discipline of separating our wants from our needs, and perhaps even making better decisions with God in mind. When we do this well, perhaps some day our own needs assessments might lead us to such acts of devotion as the ones we hear about from the faithful widows of the scriptures. They are not that different from us.

Let’s not let the major corporations hold the market on needs-assessment. Let’s make it a spiritual discipline, a matter of faith, a topic of devotion.

It is into this kind of relationship that God invites us.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

November 8, 2009

When Jesus Wept

2009-11-09T16:26:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 25:6–9, Psalm 24, Revelation 21:1–6a, Saint John 11:32–44

I refused to go to my grandmother’s funeral. I was eight at the time, and I knew little about death, except that someone had once told me that Christians rejoiced when their loved ones died. Well, I wanted to be a Christian, but I wasn’t rejoicing, and so the matter of death made no sense to me. And so, when my family made its pilgrimage to my father’s home town in North Carolina, I stayed with friends. In the black and white world of a little girl, the rejoicing I understood to be a requirement of my faith didn’t match the tears I wanted permission to cry. “Everything happens for a reason,” I believed. “God took my grandmother,” I thought.

But imagine if I’d heard of Lazarus back then. Imagine if I’d known a story in which Jesus learned that someone he loved had died. Imagine if I’d learned that Jesus wept when Lazarus’ sister came to share this hard news with Jesus.

For many years, I lived with the assumption that everything in life and in death happened at the hand of God. If everything happened for a reason, if God “took” our loved ones away, if our duty was to rejoice in the face of death, then what could we say about the story of Jesus and Lazarus?

I remember when my thinking started to change. I was reading a book of sermons, one of which was called “Alex’s Death” which is the now-famous sermon that William Sloane Coffin delivered to his congregation at the Riverside Church ten days after his 24-year old son died in a car accident in 1983. He said:

The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is "It is the will of God." Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break.

I heard those words and, perhaps like some of you, I was furious. How dare he claim to know how God felt about his son’s death? How dare he suggest that it wasn’t God’s will that his son died? Bill Coffin’s words challenged the very core of my faith. It took me a few years to forgive him. It took me a few more to actually thank him.

Sure, I’d heard of Lazarus. But I had always focused on the product – on how Jesus brought him back from the dead – and skipped over the process in which Jesus shared in mourning with Lazarus’ family and friends.

When Jesus saw Martha weeping, he was deeply moved, the Gospel says. He was so moved that he wept. Jesus wept. He didn’t offer platitudes, nor did he offer explanations. This is the son of God we’re talking about, and he did not tell Martha to stop weeping and rejoice that God “took her up” he did no such thing! Instead, he shared in her grief – his heart broke, too. In the death of Lazarus, God Incarnate, the God whose power is so mighty that he raises the dead – this God wept.

It wasn’t until I heard these words again, it wasn’t until God opened up this particular passage for me, highlighting Jesus’ compassion, that I could approach Bill Coffin’s sermon and hear God speaking through it.

Once I could imagine a God capable of weeping in the face of loss, my faith completely changed. I stopped thinking of God as capable of killing, and instead started to think of God as capable of knowing the depth of human pain, capable of joining us in our mourning and loss. It was with this new revelation that I was ready to face the many deaths I’ve encountered since my first grandmother died. It was in knowing that God could accompany me through my grief, participate in my mourning, that I could – and can – encounter death again and again.

Why did Jesus weep? I believe that this is a critical question to ask because it helps us to fashion our own Christ-like responses to death. Why would Jesus weep? After all, he would raise Lazarus from the dead.

I don’t think that Jesus wept because he was worried about what would happen to Lazarus.
I believe that Jesus wept because Martha wept. Jesus saw their pain and felt such deep compassion for them that he responded in kind, with his own tears, with his love, and with his healing touch.

On this day, All Saints’ Day, we read the names of those who have gone before us. And at these names, perhaps we will weep. As well we should. Not because we are worried about their salvation, for that, we must trust in God’s grace.

No, we weep because there are some faces we can no longer see and kiss. We weep because some voices that helped us to know reason and truth – voices that shaped us into the people we have become – some of these voices no longer speak to us. We weep because hands that used to hold us and keep us safe can’t hold us anymore. We weep because there were words we meant to say, things we meant to do, that we never had the chance to finish. We weep because partners on the journey don’t walk beside us now. We weep because after a loss, we’re not the same people we were before we knew that loss.

We weep and God weeps, too.

But God does more than that. God weeps with us, but God acts beyond our power, too. God weeps, and God heals, and God resurrects.

As Christians, we should feel free to mourn. But in our mourning, let us pray that the day will soon come that God gives us the strength to give thanks, give thanks for the saints that have gone before us, give thanks for God’s promise of resurrection, and give thanks for the day in which every tear will be wiped from our eyes, “when Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” when all that hurts, all that separates us from our loved ones, will have passed away, when God will make all things new.

Never forget God’s promises to us. And never forget about Lazarus and the God – our God – who wept for his friends.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

November 1, 2009 - ALL SAINTS’ SUNDAY

Freedom in Truth

2009-11-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah 31:31–34; Psalm 46; Romans 3:19–28; Saint John 8:31–36

Well, they were just indignant, weren’t they? “Don’t you call me a slave,” Jesus’ believers were saying. Freedom was a common theme in their faith culture, after all. At the Passover Seder, the reminder that they were once slaves in Egypt helped the Jewish people to remember the God who delivered them. They were once slaves, of course, but God had freed them, and let no one confuse these believers with the slaves of their day.

I read this text in the land of the free and the home of the brave and feel a certain connection to our texts’ believers. Here, we celebrate our freedom-seekers, the folks who paved the road to the freedoms we enjoy today. So when I hear Jesus say that “the truth will set [me] free,” I’m with the believers! I am free, I celebrate my freedom, this gift Jesus is offering seems like it’s important for someone else, not me. I’m with the believers who claim that “we’ve never been slaves to anyone.”

I’ve never been slave to anyone, except, of course, to that lie.

Being enslaved to the lie that would make us believe that, by virtue of where and how we’re born that we’re truly free, is deeply problematic.

After all, it would make us believe that God’s deliverance was but an historic event, proclaimed only in the inspiration of Emancipation in the 19th century, declared at Independence in the 18th century, something God did for our ancestors and only transferred, as if by proxy, unto us. God’s deliverance is not only a matter to be told in the history books. God’s deliverance is a dynamic, constant force available to us at any hour.

But Jesus tells us that we’re all enslaved in one way or another. And in slavery, there is always a master.

So – who is your master? Who holds undue power over you? Who or what can dictate your behavior? Who or what can get in the way of your ability to thrive? Who or what can keep you from living the life God created you to live – a life of freedom?

As it turns out, I have many. I find myself, of course, a slave to fashion, a slave to trends, a slave to consumerism, trying to keep up with the Joneses at ridiculous costs that, at times, put me at odds with my faith.

You may find yourself a slave to unrealistic expectations of yourself or of others. Many of us are slaves to our own ambitions, pursuing goals at whatever cost. Or maybe it’s something less avoidable. Many of us find our creditors taking the role of our masters, dictating our choices in life and career, threatening our ability to survive. Others of us find ourselves enslaved to our fears, holding us captive to our nightmares in place of living out the dreams God would have us dream for ourselves and others.

There are many masters around. The trouble is that we sometimes forget they’re there.

Do you know the phenomenon of repressing thoughts? What the brain is capable of doing, especially in the face of trauma? On the one hand, it can be a helpful, hiding away something, blocking something so hideous that our consciousness just can’t handle it. On the other hand, the process we go through to block those thoughts requires so much energy that it gives them undue power over us, power that can keep us from surviving and thriving – without our even realizing it.

Friends, in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is warning us to pay attention to those insidious forces we find taking the role of master in our lives. He’s warning us to recognize the amount of energy they can suck from our lives without our even knowing it. He’s telling us to face up to them, to know who they are, and, ultimately, to set ourselves free from them.

Hiding from the truth – the truth that there are, indeed, things that get in the way of our relationship with God – separates us from the even greater truth – that nothing can separate us from God’s love. That even though things get in our way, nothing gets in God’s way.

That through Christ, we are forgiven. That’s Gospel Truth, and no one, no master, no overlord, no sin, no pain, can take that away from you.

That’s the truth that sets you free.

In nomine Jesu!

Kaji R. Spellman
Saint Peter’s Church
In the City of New York

October 25, 2009