January 29, 2012
Inner Authority
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

<em>The people in the synagogue were astounded at Jesus’ teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.</em> And in a dramatic demonstration of this authority, an unclean spirit recognized Jesus as the Holy One of God, and upon Jesus’ command, came out of the man he had been tormenting.

What a scene. Can you imagine? No wonder the people were amazed, asking one another who this Galilean might be. They were accustomed to a different kind of authority, like that of the scribes. That kind of authority is more about position and power, but Jesus’ authority came from within; it was given by God. He had an unmistakable and irresistible strength of spirit.

Have you ever known someone with this kind of inner authority? Someone who didn’t have to demand your trust, because they commanded it? Perhaps it was a parent, or a grandparent. One of those people in my life was Nettie, who was the imposing nanny, cook, and housekeeper in my mother’s home when she was growing up. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, Nettie still lived with my grandmother. I would visit in her bedroom so that we could listen to the San Francisco Giants on the radio, hoping that Willie Mays would hit another home run.

Nettie was a person not to be trifled with. I don’t remember her ever raising her voice. She didn’t have to. She had wise, kindly eyes that didn’t miss a thing. When she spoke, which wasn’t often, you listened. As a child I wouldn’t have known why I listened - it wasn’t fear - but looking back on it, I know it was because she had depth and wisdom, and because she loved.

Sometimes I encounter a stranger, just in passing, who carries this kind of authority. It can be a child or a waiter in a restaurant. It’s in the eyes, the posture. In my office, I have a photograph of Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher. The picture was taken 40 years ago, but he looks alive, radiating clarity, strength, humility, wisdom, and compassion. Now there’s a person I would listen to. That’s what Jesus must have been like. That’s what astounded people when he taught. That’s why the unclean spirit recognized him as the Holy One of God.

In people that I have known who exhibit this kind of inner authority, in the gospel story we just heard, there are two qualities that are always present. First, a paradox: even though this authority is confident, it is humble, because it is born out of self-emptying. Second, it is always used in the service of others.

What do I mean by self-emptying? Most of the time when we consider growing in one way or another, we think of adding something to ourselves. We work out at the gym to build muscle. We invest money to increase our net worth, or at least we used to. Similarly, some people approach their spiritual life this way.

They think that by reading books, learning prayer techniques, attending classes or retreats, they will add spiritual stuff as an enhancement to their existing life. But the life of faith is really more about subtraction than addition. The whole point is to remove, by God’s grace, whatever is standing between us and God - our insistence that life be the way we want it to be, our fear of the future, our resentments, and our unwillingness to trust. Spirituality is a process of dying to the false self, so that the true self, or God’s life within us, can rise up, unencumbered.

So the more we offer to God our obstacles to faith and love, and the more we focus on God’s presence instead of our problems and desires, the more we become an empty vehicle for the Spirit. Spirituality is about subtraction, not addition.

When we experience this self-emptying, we can have confidence, but it is not the self-confidence of pride, which is always insecure, puffed-up. Instead, we have confidence in God. We are secure in the knowledge that as we continue to self-empty, God will continue to rise up, ever with us, supporting us, supporting everything, bringing good out of every situation. That, I think, is the paradoxically humble power of spiritual authority that Jesus carried, that people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu carry. It is irresistible, because it not about them.

And unlike mere power, which is used in the service of self, spiritual authority is always used in the service of others, in the service of the greater good. If we’re involved in the spiritual process of dying to the false self, there is simply less baggage to get in the way of whatever might be needed in order to serve others. And so we can be open, available, ready to respond to whomever or whatever God places in our path.

These days, the word “spirituality” has been overused by those who merely hope to have a nice experience for themselves. In our aggressively consumerist culture, it is no surprise that spirituality has become objectified, a personal product to attain and enjoy for oneself: peace of mind, happiness and joy. And it ends there. This is simply narcissism in a spiritual guise.

Jesus wasn’t connected with God so he could feel holy. He was connected with God in order to serve. One day, God placed in his path a man who had been tormented by a demon. And because Jesus was centered in God rather than in his own ego-centric needs, he turned to him, had compassion, and healed. It was a natural, spontaneous act.

And so genuine spiritual authority is paradoxical: it is humble and self-emptying, yet confident in God’s presence and power. And it always manifests itself in service to others; that is its nature when we are out of the way.

Today we will have our Annual Parish Meeting. We will read and hear reports from a wide variety of leaders and ministries that we do. You will be amazed at the scope of dedication and good works - on behalf of children and youth, in the beautification of this house of worship, behind the scenes making sure the whole place is clean and orderly and sufficiently financed, feeding the hungry and visiting the sick, caring for the divorced or the grieving, offering high-quality classes, retreats, concerts, and art shows, and much more that never gets reported - like those who serve at the funerals of people they didn’t even know.  

If you step back and look at this from a distance, it is quite impressive. St. Michael’s is known around our city, our diocese, even nationally among Episcopalians, as a place of real depth of spirit. We carry some spiritual authority. Because of this, people notice, listen to, and trust us.

But just like individuals who have spiritual authority, it isn’t about us. Whatever confidence we might feel is not self-confidence - “aren’t we wonderful.”  It is confidence in the Spirit, who moves through us. Together, we continually learn how to empty ourselves towards God, to die to our false selves, to our agendas and fears. We make it about God, not ourselves. And in doing so, God’s life rises up through this community. And that life manifests, naturally, in service towards others.

I am grateful to be a part of such a place. I pray that we will continue to walk this paradoxical path of self-emptying and spiritual power, and I expect that this path will lead us into acts of even greater service in the year ahead.

January 22, 2012
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
Discerning and responding to God’s call

The last few weeks we’ve hearing quite a bit about God calling people. Jesus baptized and called into his mission; Jonah; Jesus’ new disciples; Samuel, called in the night. And another call in the night, for Martin Luther King to persevere when things were the darkest. Call is clearly a major theme of this season of Epiphany.

But what is this business of “call,” anyway? Because it is not like most of us hear God’s voice come completely out of the blue: Brian, you are now to become an astronaut! Mary, go to Cairo tomorrow, and open a shoe repair shop!

More likely, God’s call is a lengthy process, which asks of us patience and discernment. It often begins with dissatisfaction, an itch. A job just doesn’t feel right, or we know that we’re not living in a way that is healthy or centered in God. We have to experience this dissatisfaction for awhile, getting to the root of it: what is the problem here? What needs to change?

Then begins a time of praying, listening, waiting for the Spirit to call us forward. What is it we need? A new approach to prayer, a change of vocation, a shift in our relationship with our spouse? What feels compelling, attractive, perhaps scary, but right? We have to rely on our intuition, and dare to imagine.

In time, we may have a gut feeling, an intuition about how the Spirit may be leading us. Then, if we are brave, we respond to the call; we get up and go where we are led. God gives us a vision of possibilities, but then it is up to us to get up and walk into the unknown. This takes faith, trust, that God will give us the means to do what God calls us to do.

Through all of this, we cannot go it alone. We need friends, family, fellow pilgrims on the journey. Some form of community is essential, if we are ever to get to clarity. We need people to discern with us, to whom we can express our dissatisfaction, our dreams, our fear of change. Others give us a reality check; they tell us things we hadn’t thought of; they mirror back to us what they hear and see in us.

This is essentially what many of you did last year in the ReImagine process, through the Season of Listening and the group meetings. You shared your passions and dreams, and what your “Yes” to the Spirit might be. You did that in community. Out of that, some of you offered new ministries to this community.

I don’t know if you’re aware of our parish Discernment Guild. They have served as this discerning community for some dozen of our members over the last few years. As needed, they form a small group around a person who is seeking God’s direction in their life. Over a period of months they listen deeply, and pray together. Discernment for some has to do with the possibility of ordination. For others, it has to do with other big transitions and new directions. In February, our Discernment Guild will lead the Sunday adult education hour, helping us all deepen our skills in personal discernment.

Everything I have described so far has been about discerning God’s call as individuals. We ask “How is God moving in my life, and how can I contribute more authentically to this faith community, to the world around me? What is my ‘Yes’ to the Spirit?” There’s nothing wrong with discerning about one’s individual life - in fact, we need to do more of it.

But there is another way in which community plays into discerning God’s call. It is when we listen together for a corporate sense of the Spirit’s leading for all of us. What would God have us do as a nation, as the Episcopal Church, as a parish, or as a family? This kind of corporate discernment involves listening, wondering, sometimes arguing, and waiting patiently together.

We’re not so good at this. Perhaps this is because it is more difficult to do it with others than alone. You bring other people, and their sense of the Spirit, their agendas they may be bringing into the mix - not that you or I have any agendas, mind you, only those others - and, well, we’ve got some sorting out to do. But that’s no reason not to do it.

We’ve got a golden opportunity to practice this, coming up this year. Next week at Annual Meeting, you’ll be hearing about how we’re taking a new team approach to ministry. We have a clergy team that is planning and coordinating ministry together. They, in turn, are forming teams of lay leaders in the broad areas of ministry they look after. These teams will listen to the Spirit, in order to discern the directions in ministry we, as a parish, are called to take together.

Another opportunity to do corporate discernment may be about to sprout, at least I hope it will. Last Sunday, one of our Vestry members planted a seed. We were in the midst of strategizing how to get through our budget shortfall, as we have been for two months now. He found himself a little itchy, a little dissatisfied.

So he gently but firmly pointed out the danger of becoming, in our worry, too inwardly-focused, too self-absorbed. He brought to mind how so many of God’s people in that big world out there have a lot of urgent needs. Despite whatever restrictions we feel, we have enormous resources, and we are able to do far more than we are currently doing to serve the most vulnerable of God’s children. We will continue this conversation with the new Vestry, especially on our retreat in March, and I hope that his itch will spread like a virus to others.

What our Vestry member brought up has an old-fashioned word that is being reclaimed by a new generation of young Christians today: mission. Mission is not just some evangelical outpost in a jungle somewhere, or a week of house-building in Mexico. Mission is when we, as a church, commit ourselves to join in God’s work of healing this broken world. Mission is not only charity; it is working to re-shape society so that it is more aligned with God’s intention for it. Mission is when we intentionally live out the commitment we make every time we say “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Young adults in the Emerging Church movement are, in fact, are talking about being a mission-driven Church. Think about that for a minute. What would it look like if all our decisions - about staff, budgets, buildings, education, ordination, worship, everything - were driven by and subject to the highest priority of mission, of healing this world and building God’s kingdom here on earth? What would the church have to be doing to be publicly known primarily for this?

So this year, we are entering a season of listening together how the Spirit might be leadings us into new ministries that benefit one another, and mission that benefits the world around us.

None of this is easy. To listen for God’s call, whether for our individual life or for our parish, we must be very patient and discerning, and open to the support and questions of others. Then to respond to God’s call, we must act courageously, without having any guarantee about the outcome, or even knowing how it will be worked out along the way.

We’re never done with this process, for we are a verb, not a noun. If we are alive, we are always in a process of becoming more. Even today, God is trying to get our attention, to invite us to be bigger, freer, more loving and of greater service to God’s world.

Sermon I Samuel 3:1-20
St. Michael and All Angels
January 15, 2012

What is it about nighttime? Things we manage to avoid in daylight come to life and demand our attention. We hear noises. We see shadows. We encounter our fears face to face. We find ourselves on edge. We go through periods of time where we lie awake night after night at the same hour. We don’t see this as a gift; instead we are annoyed by the inconvenience. We drink tea or milk, we visualize peaceful things, and if we get desperate enough we count sheep hoping we will go back to sleep. But what if it is the only time God can get through to us? Years ago I heard a sermon suggest that God wakes us up night after night to spend time with us, but we just get up and go to the bathroom and go back to bed.

We fill our days with appointments, lists, and electronics. At the end of the day, we come home to more electronics – television, computers, phones. Is there any space for God to connect with us? When I stand in line at the bank or grocery store, I look around at folks buried in their phones, not wanting to miss the latest facebook post. Our culture is fixated with connecting electronically every waking hour to the point that we are worn out and we don’t have the energy to receive God.

We are three weeks away from the miraculous story of God coming in the form of a child to bring hope and healing to our world. All the remnants of Christmas have been put away for another year when we are confronted again with God coming to us through a child. Hannah longs for a child. She prays for a child and bargains with God. She promises to give the child back to God if she is fortunate enough to get pregnant. Hannah becomes pregnant and as soon as her son Samuel is weaned, she returns him to God. She takes him to Eli the priest along with a bull, some flour and wine. She leaves Samuel and gifts at the temple and she prays…

My heart exults in the Lord;
    My strength is exalted in my God…
There is no Holy One like the Lord,
    No one besides you;
    There is no Rock like our God…
Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    But those who were hungry are fat with spoil…
The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
    He brings low, he also exalts.
He raises up the poor from the dust;
    He lifts the needy from the ash heap,
To make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor… (from I Samuel 2:1-10)

Does this song sound familiar?? Mary discovered that God was sending a child in what seemed like impossible circumstances and she too sang a song of God turning the world upside down to bring justice and hope.

This raises all kinds of questions for me. Where is God found today? Are we listening to our children? We tend to wait for the wisdom of grown ups when we are dealing with the important issues. But God keeps choosing the young ones to lead in difficult situations. We need to pay attention to God’s way of doing things. One of the best parts of my day is sitting down at the dinner table with my family. I learn to see the world differently as I listen to Max and Maya offer their viewpoint.

Samuel’s story continues. He grows up serving in the temple with Eli as his mentor. One evening Samuel is awakened from a deep sleep to the sound of his name. Thinking Eli is calling him, Samuel runs to see what Eli wants. This happens three times. Eli can no longer see, but he has spent his life listening for God. It is Eli who realizes what is happening and instructs Samuel to wait for God to call him again. We are told that God’s word was rare in those days and visions were not widespread. Samuel has grown up in the temple, but he needs Eli’s help to discern God’s call. Barbara Brown Taylor says “there’s more to knowing God than being in church.” (Mixed Blessings, p. 15) It takes both Samuel’s youthful attentiveness and Eli’s wisdom to bring God’s call into being.

We tell ourselves that this faith thing is a solo enterprise when in fact we are created for relationship. We discover God together. It may look like we did it alone, but if we look back we may recognize how many people paved the way for us, how many surrounded us as we encountered God, and how many are waiting to take the next steps of our journey with us. God comes to us in community.

It is a sad commentary that no one expected to find God in the temple. It may be that no one wanted to find God in the temple. God tends to shake things up. Humans like to think of church as the place where things are predictable. Those of us in more liturgical traditions can assume that we will say the creed and after the peace comes communion. We may forget that God comes to us in our familiar liturgy. Several years ago, I read a sermon called “The Dangers of Going to Church”. The author told about waiting in the airport while a four year old demolished a good portion of the area by turning over trash cans, stepping on an ice cream cone and tracking it all over the seats. His helpless, terrified parents sat by and watched the devastation. Just in the nick of time, their flight was called. The boy’s father leaned over to the mother and said, “Dear, perhaps we ought to consider taking Thomas to Sunday School; maybe that would help.”

Ah. So church is where we come to be tamed, civilized, subdued? I’m not buying that. There was nothing easy about God’s message for Samuel. Here is a twelve-year-old boy given the message of destruction as a result of Eli’s sons’ corrupt leadership. Encounters with God take us beyond places of ease and often make us uncomfortable.

I’ve been thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. One day in seminary, I turned in class to discover that I was sitting next to Bernice, his youngest daughter. I wondered what it was like for Bernice to grow up with a father whose call cost him his life. Martin didn’t want to be a civil rights leader. He wanted to have a quiet life as a professor. Through a strange turn of events, he found himself in the forefront of the Montgomery bus boycott. He came home late one night, tired, frightened. The phone rang. An angry voice on the other end said, “We’re gonna get you!” He stood in his kitchen frozen with fear. Then he heard a voice, “Martin, you do what’s right. You stand up for justice. You be my drum major for righteousness. I’ll be with you.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. listened to God and the world is forever changed because of that. God comes to us in the night and calls us to the difficult work of transformation.  God promises to be with us. All of this is scary, but I look around at each of you and realize that I am not in this alone. We are in it together.

God is in our midst. The Psalm reminds us that God knows each of us intimately. We cannot escape God’s love and care no matter where we are or what situation we find ourselves.

When you are lying awake in the middle of the night, remember that God is with you. The reading from Samuel says that the “lamp of God had not yet gone out”. It may seem that God is far away some days, but God is carefully weaving our lives together and preparing us to be disciples. This isn’t about who we are or what we know. It’s about how open we are to God who shapes us into a people of love and hope. It is happening as we sit here this morning. It is happening when we doze off in front of the tv. It is happening when we are awake in the middle of the night believing that we should be asleep.

God is not finished with you or me. God is not finished with St. Michael’s. We are embarking on an adventure together and God calls each of us by name to be part of the new thing God is doing.

January 8, 2012
The Baptism of Our Lord
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Today we begin the season of Epiphany. This season starts with the baptism of Jesus, and ends with his transfiguration on the mountaintop. It is obviously one story, because the beginning and the end are in direct parallel.

When he is baptized, a voice from heaven speaks to Jesus - You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Later, at the transfiguration, when Jesus is gloriously changed into a being of light, the same voice says the same thing, this time to the disciples - This is my Son, the Beloved.

So the Epiphany season tells a story about Jesus’ self-understanding, and later, the disciples’ understanding, of who he is: God’s beloved, God’s own offspring. This is the foundation of all his teaching, healing, and working of miracles: he does what he does because knows who he is.

During this season, in between the beginning of this story and its fulfillment, we shall see Jesus calling disciples into that same self-understanding. They go out to heal, feed, teach, and love, because they now know who they are. And through the disciples’ ministry, the people then begin to understand that they, too, are beloved children of God.

So God extends the divine life into Jesus, Jesus extends it into his disciples, and the disciples extend it into the people. It is all one ever-expanding circle.

The Western Christian tradition, however, has largely ignored this message over the centuries. It has drawn back the circle of divine life, and limited it to Jesus alone. We have been told that he alone is the Son, and that we are sinners through and through, cut off from God. But if we attach ourselves to Jesus, he will take us by the hand, and grant us admission to the divine life.

In this version of the Christian story, we’re like unfashionable slobs standing in line at the most exclusive nightclub in town, with no hope of getting past the bouncer, until some supermodel comes along and sweeps us in the door along with her.

The Eastern Church, on the other hand, has always understood that the divine life is an ever-expanding circle. They speak of theosis, of being “deified,” and rely upon a number of New Testament texts which point to this.

In John, Jesus prays for his disciples: As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us...The glory that you have given me I have given them. Paul speaks of being baptized into Christ, and that It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Paul has been deified. He goes on to say that We have the mind of Christ, that we will grow into the full stature of Christ, in whom the fulness of divinity dwells. He tells us that corporately, We are the body of Christ. And Peter, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, wrote that We are participants in the divine nature.

This is what we celebrate in baptism. In the waters of baptism, we accept our identity as participants in the divine nature, and we commit to a holy life, so that through us, others may also know themselves as part of God’s ever-expanding circle.

Now I suspect that you may not always feel glorious. You may not always feel deified. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It only means that you don’t always feel what is true. So how can we claim this identity? How can it become a living reality for us, and not just a nice idea?

We learn through experience. And the experience that is relevant here is what sometimes happens in prayer, among people you love, in worship and friendship with one another here, through spiritual reading, in nature, in any situation in which you have known God’s presence. Those are the times when we know that all of life is an expression of God’s holiness, including us.

However we seek this experience, whenever we intentionally put ourselves in the kinds of situations where we might remember this, we are doing what is known as spiritual practice. I don’t care whether what you do is formal prayer or not. What matters is that we are intentional about it. For those who knock, the door will be opened.

As you experience this from time to time, I want to encourage you to believe in it. Have confidence in who you really are - you are already connected with God. You are beloved, just as you are, a manifestation of God’s life. It is your true nature. You don’t have to strive to get there; you’re already fully there.

And every time you do some form of spiritual grounding, you reinforce your awareness of who you are. You touch base with reality, and over time, like Jesus, like the disciples, this deepest reality becomes the foundation of your daily life. Because you know who you are, as you go about your business, as you interact with others, you are more likely to love, to heal, to be patient, grateful, and self-giving.

We are certainly not perfect. We sin, we become unhappy and self-centered, and we cause harm. But this is only the small self, the part of us that can be put in perspective, the part that can, over time, become weaker, losing its grip over us. Place your trust instead in your true nature. You were assured of this nature at baptism, when a voice from heaven said to you,You are my beloved; with you I am well-pleased.

I also want to encourage you to have the very same confidence in the community of faith. We are not just an ecclesiastical institution. We are the Body of Christ, an embodiment of the divine life. You can experience this if you just look around with the eyes of faith.

We are not a perfect community. But together, every day, we express God’s own love and holiness to one another, to perfect strangers who come across our doorstep. God is manifested when we celebrate the sacraments, when we share our struggles with one another and encourage one another in faith, when we serve and pray for others. Together we invoke the saints and angels and the glory of God in this holy place of worship. We truly are, as Jesus said, the light of the world.

When we have confidence in who we are, when we reinforce this experience through spiritual practice, alone or together, it changes us. We live as if we are an extension of the divine life. We act as if this is true. As St. Paul said in a letter to the Colossians:

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is...Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God...As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience...Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.

We are God’s beloved, whose divine life extends through us, through our community, in an ever-widening circle, touching others who need it as much as we do. And then they, by the grace of God, also know themselves to be a part of this vast theosis, this redemption of the world, where all things are being brought to their fulfillment.

Today, you will be invited to take a small stone from the baptismal font, and carry it with you in the weeks ahead. Use it as a touchstone, to remember who you are, who we are, and the life to which we are called. Have confidence. For we are the light of the world.