Rev. Jennifer L. Adams – July 24, 2016 – Proper 11, Year C: Luke 11:1-13

So last week, (in case you missed it or have since lived through seven full days and filled your brain with other things,) we heard the gospel story of Mary and Martha which is found just before the passage we heard today from the gospel of Luke.

I want to make some connections so here’s a quick recap:

Jesus came to Martha’s house for a visit and her sister, Mary spent time sitting at the feet of Jesus while Martha remained busy bustling about, preparing supper, setting the table and so on. Martha then got upset that she’d been left with all the work (I was not without sympathy, you’ll remember, and some of you were with me on that.) And so, Martha, appealed to Jesus. And Jesus responded to Martha with this, “Martha, Martha you are distracted by your many tasks.” And added that Mary who had chosen to sit and to listen “had chosen the better part.” I shared a quote by theologian Paul Tillich who wrote, “the first of duty of love is to listen.” And so last week, we let Jesus and Mary teach us something about what it means to love. To love one another is first to listen to one another. Which invites us to approach this world a little differently than we otherwise might.

Well this week, we hear that God is listening too. And while that really shouldn’t come as a surprise, it is a profound statement of how God approaches us and we need to let it sink in. This God of love, of power, of wisdom, of grace, this God of almighty-ness is (to borrow an image from last week’s gospel,) sitting at the feet of the world and taking us in. All the time. God is loving. God is listening.

Which is theologically astounding. To genuinely listen is to allow one’s actions to be shaped by what it is the other has to say, by the story that person shares, their hurts, their dreams, their hopes. To listen is to become slightly vulnerable to that other – it is to laugh the laughs and likely share some of the tears of the one whose story it is. It is also to give the other an opportunity to hear them selves further into being, an experience that has power too.

And so this is a remarkable image of God. An all-powerful, yet lovingly vulnerable God who loves, who listens, and then get this, a God who responds.

Which means that part of our work is to prioritize our prayers, not that God isn’t willing to do that piece for us on a pretty regular basis, nor does it mean that there aren’t times when letting every prayer that it in us flow and flow and flow. But integrating a basic discipline of prioritizing within our prayers helps us not only to focus those prayers but to focus in life too.

‘Teach us to pray,’ the disciples said to Jesus in the opening of today’s gospel passage. And his response was something like, “Keep it basic, people.” Perhaps even “reign it in…focus…settle.” Jesus told them to “Ask God to help you through today.” And then he gave them some specifics: First acknowledge that God is holy, in other words, let God be God and you be you. Good reminder. “Ask for today’s bread,” he told them. Pray for the kingdom to come …now. (Which means we might look for it, even help it come into being now.) Ask for the ability to forgive and to receive the forgiveness you need today in order to have a new tomorrow. And the only truly forward-looking piece in all of this teaching was to “save us from the time of trial” which I think staying present probably does. (A topic for another sermon.)

One of the questions I’ve been asked several times over the past few weeks and months as horrendous acts of violence make the headlines is, “How do we talk to our kids about all of this?” Now I have some good resources to share and am happy to, but I think these stories give us a critical dimension of our response to that question.

We can talk to our kids, give them a framework for moving forward by teaching them how to pray. We can better talk to God, ourselves, and one another by making time for prayer. Prayer is in some ways an antidote to the anxiety of our times – not in a sappy or pop-religion sort of way – not as an excuse to not act nor as a way to assert our own power or superiority. We don’t pray in order to be let off the hook or to convince others of our closeness to God. We pray because through prayer we remember that which is most basic, most genuinely needed, most holy: Daily bread. Neighbors. Forgiveness. Kingdom like realities of mercy, compassion, and peace.

Fundamental to our belief as Episcopalians, as Anglicans is that our prayer, teaches us, shapes us, and makes us one. “Lord, teach us to pray,” could be the opening line of our liturgy every week, because that’s why we’re here. Maybe it could be the phrase we all utter in ourselves as we walk through these doors. “Lord, teach us to pray,” as we make space for ourselves, one another and God. We come here first and foremost to allow our prayer to teach us, shape us, and make us one. And our prayer has that kind of power, because God is listening, but also because through prayer, we learn to listen too.

“Listening is the first duty of love,” Tillich said. Each week, here in this space, we take and re-take that first step. Through prayer we remember that which is most basic, most needed, most lovingly vulnerable and holy too. Bread. Neighbors. Forgiveness. Mercy. Compassion. Peace.

And through this prayer that we call “common,” we learn how to listen and how to speak not only God but to this world that is God’s. Listen deeply to and through the words of our liturgy today and every week. We say things like: “Have compassion on those who suffer from any grief or trouble,” “forgive us those things done and left undone,” “we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves,” “Almighty God. . .strengthen you in all goodness,” “the peace of the Lord be always with you,” “the gifts of God for the people of God” and more! Through this prayer that is common we learn how to speak to God but also to this world that is God’s and our actions become grounded in this holy conversation that allows us to glimpse both a kingdom that is coming and a world that desperately longs for it to be so.

Through prayer we acknowledge that God is God and we are us and in such love we are given room to share ourselves, to listen to the needs of others, and to trust that God is doing the same.

The Lord be with you, Grace Church.

And also with you.

Let us pray…

The Rev. Jennifer L. Adams – Sunday, June 19, 2016

Proper 7, Year C: I Kings 19:1-15a, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 8:26-39

So this is one of the gospel stories that at first glance is sort of hard to know what to do with.  How’s that for a relatively understated opener?

It’s a strange little story isn’t it? Almost comical in some ways, at least if you let the images of the story hit your somewhat sophisticated, twenty-first century self.  Demons and voices and swine?

Jesus and his disciples had just arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which (in case you were wondering) was just opposite Galilee.  And as they arrived, there was an unclothed man, who met Jesus as Jesus was stepping out on to their land. Now this somewhat unusual and undoubtedly surprising, “Welcome to our country,” experience also included a demon who spoke right up as the man shouted out to Jesus.  When asked his name, the answer was “Legion,” meaning the demons were “many”. And so this was a complicated demon at that.

Then Legion, after having revealed themselves and having talked a bit with Jesus, left the man and entered into a herd of swine who (unfortunately for them one could say) happened to be walking by on a near-by hillside.  And then the swine, having become the new landing place for Legion, ran themselves into the lake and drowned.

And the people were afraid, which makes some sense. And the man was healed; I like that part.  And that’s sort of how this little story played out. There was a greeting by a complicated demon.  There was Jesus talking to them and giving them permission to leave a man.  There were some swine who hit on some hard luck.  There was a healed man and a confused people.

And so then if I go a little deeper I have to say that right beneath the humor of this, there is something like a very sad sort of hurting.  This man had been tormented by Legion for a very long time.  He didn’t live in a house, he lived in the tombs, the story said.  He had spent much of his life “under guard and bound with chains and shackles,” but even those chains couldn’t hold the demon and so the man was often driven by them into the wilderness.  And in the wilderness it was extremely hot and in the wilderness it was extremely cold.  The wilderness was a lonely place and there were wild animals there and so this man was probably on some very deep level, afraid too.

So after this is a strange story, but before it’s a healing story, it’s a hard story.

And since we’re together this morning and being present to hard stories is easier when you’re not alone, I want us to sit in the hard place for a few minutes.  Besides, the truth is, we’re already there.

We are being greeted by demons on an all too regular basis.  And that’s not typical language for me; in some ways it’s really not very Episcopal language nor is it what one might call a “sophisticated” analysis, but I’m coming to believe the language fits.  Last week we had barely stepped on to the land of Sunday morning when news of the shootings in Orlando greeted us in our news feeds, if we were lucky to have that kind of distance.  Others, not so lucky, were greeted by demons when they danced.

And one year ago this weekend a congregation in Charleston was greeted by demons, presumably because they had spent their lives fighting that kind of evil out in the open of this world.  That shooting took place in a church whose gospel proclaimed truth and justice and peace.  As these shootings seem to do, they tend to find people in places that should be safe, that should literally be sanctuary for them. Maybe that’s how demons work.  There were the children in Newtown, the children, teens and young adults in their neighborhood streets and playgrounds of Chicago, the students at a university in Virginia, the people dancing in a gay bar in Orlando, the movie goers in Colorado and so many, many more.

Now I want to be very clear that I don’t believe that the shooters themselves are the demons. One of the most important messages of this gospel story is that hidden beneath the demon, even a legion of demons, there was and there is a human being.  Someone who for whatever reason or circumstance became the place in which the demons landed, or were planted, or were placed.  I can’t say that I understand how evil works and I think we’re fooling ourselves if we do, but I absolutely believe that the man in this gospel story was suffering. And I can only believe that our modern version of this man – out of control, unstable, not yet having found the help he needs to be in this world, driven to the wilderness… I have to believe that the modern version of this man is suffering too.  And so were and are the people around him.

So these stories are disorienting at first, strange and almost unreal.  And some of us, like the disciples in this gospel did, still have the luxury of being surprised when the morning’s news brings a demon’s greeting. But then like this gospel, the stories become real and obvious even from a distance, because so many layers of hurt are exposed and revealed to us all.

And so if we’re going to follow this story through to the end (which is what we are called to do,) if we are going to follow this story through to where the healing happens, we have work to do.

We need to name the demons and in this story they actually named themselves.  They are legion. They are many. And they are complicated.  Which makes this the hardest kind of work we’ll ever be called to do. And not only because demons are complicated but because at some point, if we’re honest while we do this work, and full present when we do this work, we’ll start to see the demons in ourselves too.

Now there are several dimensions to this process of healing and some are relational, deeply and intentionally so.  It’s not a coincidence that many of the victims in these stories are minorities or those who have been labled as some sort of “other.”  We really aren’t really all that good at reaching across divisions with understanding, let alone with gifts of compassion and love (the second understatement of this sermon.)  But remember the people of Galatia from our second reading today. They were coming together as one and they were reaching over very strict and ancient divisions to do so.  And Paul helped them to hack through their divisions without hacking through each other.  It’s possible. At some point there is neither Jew or Greek, Christian or Muslim, slave or free, gay or straight, white or black, male or female.  There are just children of God each and every one of us and each and every one of “them” whoever the them happens to be. The people of Galatia managed.  So can we.

There are also pieces of this healing process that are legislative. As a country, as a society we have work to do.  In some ways we are the hurting man in this gospel story. We are naked, exposed to some very hard truths not the least of which is our all too common tendency to seek violent answers to human questions.  This is an uncomfortable place of self-reflection but it’s also an honest place to be.  If nothing else, we can see from here that we can do, that we need to do better than this.

Finally, there are dimensions of this healing process that are very simply and profoundly made of hope, a stubborn, passionate hope that is grounded  in prayer. And the prayer is individual and communal prayer.  And its Chrstian and Inter-faith.  Our gatherings matter.  Our vision of peace and unity matters.  Our stories in which healing happens matter.

Now there is a “bigness” to all of this work that can be intimidating or at times even stifling, but remember that in the gospel, and in our lives and in our world, grace is legion too.  That’s the good news: grace is legion too! Don’t ever forget that.

Did you catch that the demons in this story asked for mercy?  I think that’s one of the most important lines in this whole story.  It’s almost like they didn’t really want to win, or maybe more accurately, they knew that in the grand scheme, they didn’t stand a chance.  Even the demons begged for mercy.  And so this morning and every morning we sit in a place that is hard, because we are human and we are here in this world.  From here we hear the whole story – the whole strange, hurting, healing story.  And we grieve. And we listen. And we hope and we love and we pray.  And then we put both feet on the ground and we do the work we have been called to do, the work of releasing the demons.

We set to the work of releasing the demons, so that the people living with them, and that would be all of us, can be free.

Amen.

The Rev. Jennifer Adams – Sunday, June 5, 2016 – Proper 5, Year C: I Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17

“Young man, I say to you, rise!”  And he did.  The young man sat up, began to speak, got off the bier that his friends were carrying (a bier is sort of a frame that carries a casket, in this case would have been carrying his casket), he got off the bier that his friend were carrying and then he went home with his mother. The end …and the beginning of the story.

OK so what does that mean for you? For us? I mean those as serious questions.  We know how this gospel story played out, so you don’t really need me to unpack it very much. This passage is about as straightforward as they come.  Man died.  Community gathered and mourned. And then Jesus said to the man who was as dead as he could be,” Rise” and he did.  The young man sat up, began to speak, got off the bier that his friends were carrying and went on with life. End (and new beginning) of that story.

As preacher , I really can’t add much to that.  Jesus brought the guy back to life!  Period.  Exclamation point! Or more appropriately, “Amen!”  Luke’s pretty clear about it all.

And so what I want to know is about us.

Young man, old man, young woman, old woman, teenager, fourth grader, kid, middle schooler, college student, young adult, highschooler, recent grad, pilgrim, hurting person, happy person, every person, Jesus says to you, “Rise.”  And I want to know what happens next.

Granted nobody here was carried in to these pews not breathing this morning.  But everyone walked in with something, some part, something that needs resurrection, some part of ourselves or our lives that hopes or longs for resurrection even if we are sometimes a little scared to name, let alone share it.  The community hasn’t gathered to mourn any of us today, but maybe it’s more like each of us has carried a piece of ourselves in on a bier today. A piece that longs for new life.  And Jesus just spoke to us, invited us to rise.  And so it’s our job to prayerfully respond and to come to know what happens next.

And sometimes what happens next is that resurrection is as dramatic and obvious as it was in this gospel story.  But often it’s not. And that’s the kicker isn’t it?  If only new life were always as clear as the dead breathing again. End and beginning of story.  But resurrection is usually a little more a little more complicated perhaps, more multi-faceted, more mysterious?

And yet, “Rise,” Jesus tells us in the here and in the now, rise.

Now something I’ve come to notice from watching new life take hold is that what we might call “life circumstances” don’t always matter as much as we might think when it comes to experiencing resurrection. I have experienced people who “sit up and talk” who are themselves actually dying, people for whom an illness is terminal but whose spirit is not and new life actually flows through their very being.  I have witnessed people who face unbelievable suffering, hardship, injustice who in the midst of it all are “sitting up and talking”, not only managing to breathe themselves but miraculouslly breathing new life into those around them. I’ve also experienced people who are phystically perfectly healthy and whose lives are as absolutely as “together” as they could possibly be, but in some ways they they aren’t alive at all.  And so life circumstances can’t determine or control resurrection.  Resurrection is a little more complicated, perhaps more multi-faceted, more mysterious?

Young man, old man, young woman, old woman and everyone inbetween Jesus says to to us, “Rise.”

And so what I’ve come to believe is that resurrection has more than one ingredient to it and because God is God the particular amounts in the actual recipe don’t seem to matter much. Nor does the coooking time – that seems to vary too.  I actually think an ingredient or two can occasionally be missed and God will still make something happen because in the end new life is a miracle no matter how or when it comes.

But I also believe that most of the ingredients are here among us always, and that’s part of the grace of it all.  As people of faith (or even as people struggling to believe) our work is to make sure we’ve done everything we can to share the ingredients that make for our rising and the rising of others.

And so we gather, ingredient one.  Community, friends, family, matter.  It’s hard to “sit up and talk” alone and so we come together.  And we risk giving voice to our own healing and we ask for a little help when we need propping up and we just keep doing all of that for each other.

And  we pray, ingredient two (and for the record, these are not in any particular order.)  We have been invited into something larger than ourselves, a God who creates, and loves and re-creates, and forgives and redeems and so we pray even when the prayers are silence, even when the prayers are tears, we pray. Even when the prayers are hopes that don’t have words, or are so many words they don’t make any sense – we pray.

And we tell stories- an important ingredient in this process of helping to make for resurrection. We tell stories from Scripture (how about that story of the prophet who raised the widow’s son in the reading from I Kings today?)  We tell stories from the gospels and stories from our lives and stories from our world. We tell stories in which healing happens! Stories about young men rising, young girls rising.  Stories about the deaf hearing, the blind being given sight and captives being set free!  We tell stories about swords being beaten into plowshares.  Because if we don’t hear the stories, it’s hard to believe that anything like resurrection is possible at all.  The stories shape us and they open us to new.

And so we listen, we open ourselves to possibility and we pour what we have into helping create the reality of new life right here and right now (although like I said, the timing can vary and isn’t exactly under our control.) We actively pour some of the things of God into the mix – we practice things like forgiveness, compassion, and love. We look for redemption and invest in reconciliation. And pretty soon what we’re doing LOOKS something like resurrection. And it feels something like resurrection: Those who are dying becomng bearers of new life.  Those with what the world would call “very little” become those who are blessed beyond measure.  Those who seem to have it all, realize there is more, so much more when it comes to the mysteries and promises of God.

Young man, old man, young woman, old woman, teenager, fourth grader, kid, middle schooler, college student, young adult, highschooler, recent grad, pilgrim, hurting person, happy person, every person, Jesus says to you, “Rise.”  This is the end and the beginning of our stories too.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The Rev. Jennifer Adams – February 10, 2016

So we are about to do one of the most challenging and probably one of the bravest things we do all year. And so I want to talk about it a little bit before we do it.

Now we tend to be a group that stretches ourselves somewhat regularly, setting goals of various kinds and reaching toward them, feeding hundreds whether there be rain, snow, sleet, or high winds. We are on to Feed America tomorrow night! We wrestle with issues social and theological. Many here have taken up the challenge of learning a new tradition, since for most folks at Grace the Episcopal Church was not where they were born. We’re a relatively hearty group for the most part; we don’t tend to shy away from a challenge and yet today is one of the days that calls us to muster all of the courage we have, or to let go of some of the strength that we show (depending on how you approach this.)

Because today is the day on which we receive ashes on our heads. And we set out together on a journey that will lead us to the cross and beyond it. Bluntly put (and you’ll here it in the words of the liturgy in just a few minutes) today we’re asked to acknowledge our own mortality and to face death in a way that even the most hearty among us aren’t naturally inclined to do.

And it’s even harder because our society, our culture does everything it can to keep death at a distance. And we who are privileged in this world have that option of distance until it hits us close with ourselves, a family or friend. And that is unlike many in this world who live face to face with the reality of their own mortality and that of their entire family and community on a daily basis.

So here we Episcopalians are beginning a new season with ashes on our foreheads. It’s stark and it can be quite challenging to we for whom this strips away any illusions we’ve been privileged enough to adopt. And so there is something brave about coming forward today. “Remember that you are dust,” we are told as the ashes are put on our foreheads, “and to dust you shall return.” And honestly of all the things we do as clergy, I find this to be one of the hardest.

But this is where we start the season of Lent. With our own humanness and our own limitations laid bare. And then when the ashes are barely gone from our faces we follow the one whom we call Savior to the cross. His own mortal nature out there in the open for all the world to see.

So why would any of do this? So why come to church today? And while we’re at it, why not stay home this season? It’s only forty days and forty nights for heavens sakes. Why would we inflict this season on people whom we love. Of all the messages we offer one another and proclaim to this world why this one: “Remember that you are dust?”

Well don’t worry, there are a couple of reasons I can think of. So let’s go there.

First, one of the gifts we can give one another in the church is authenticity, just very basic honesty. We can be real here, in fact we are called to be real here and it doesn’t get much more real than this. And especially for those who are aware that their own death is near or who deal with their own limitations on a daily basis, having a community that isn’t denying those realities comes as a comfort. It comes as grace. And that’s part of what this season offers us – a touch of our own real.

But there is more than that because there is more than this. We aren’t in this place this season only to acknowledge our dustiness. That’s a starting place and theme that runs throughout the entire season, but we’re also here because there is more than that, there is more than dust to all of this. And that’s why this season is so important.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who has done brilliant work around medicine, meaning, and living life in community. He has spent his professional life dealing on many levels with human mortality and he wrote a book recently called Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

In that book he says this, “In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments. . .For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”

Then Gawande continues, “Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment- your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. . . .And in stories, endings matter. . .When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that . . .the peaks are important, and so is the ending.”  (Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)

I think we’re here today at least in part to find meaning. And “life is meaningful,” Gawande says so well, “because it is a story.” In this place we believe that life has been breathed into the dust that we are. We have a beginning. And we believe that that life that is you that is me matters to us, to God, to this world. We have an arc. We believe that the significant moments of pain and joy become the story we share, the story we tell, the story we are. And each of those is part of a bigger story, one that gives us “a purpose larger than ourselves” and gives us an ending that offers hope, and joy, and that peace that passes all understanding.

Sure we begin in dust and return to dust but that isn’t how this story ends. Sure the gospel began with an annunciation and takes us to Jesus’ final breath on the cross, but even that isn’t how this story ends.

He rises you know, and so do we.

We are dust and it is so very important that we remember that. And we are so very much more than dust, and we need to remember that too. The story we tell is an honest one where people follow and betray, where they hide and come back out, where they gather and scatter, they break and heal, they die and they’re given new life. And in all of that the real of ourselves and the larger than ourselves meet. Allowing that meeting to happen is the work of this season.

“The Body that is broken shall rejoice!” the psalmist says. “When you care for the weak, the hungry, the lost,” (those who where their humanity and sometimes their mortality on their sleeves,) “your light will break froth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly,” Isaiah told us. “Then you shall be called the repairer of the breach.”

We are dust. And we are so very much more than dust. May we find the courage and faith this season to let it be so.