​In the name of the One who guides us along right pathways.  Amen.
 
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.  Both the psalm and the gospel remind us of that.  But how many of us have even seen a shepherd--let alone a sheepfold? 
 
So I've taken the liberty to transpose the psalm--and parts of the gospel too--into a metaphor that works for me and I hope for you as well.  As I sat with the words of the psalm and the gospel throughout this week, I kept returning to that shepherd and that sheepfold.  But in my mind's eye I saw--and see now--not a shepherd but a teacher--a gifted one at that; and not a sheepfold however they might look I really do not know--but a warm, inviting classroom--a place where folks feel safe, a place where folks can thrive.  The kind of teacher--the kind of classroom--we all have likely experienced at least once in our lives.  Or so I hope.
 
Hear the psalm and the gospel that flows from it:
 
            You are my teacher;
            I shall not be in want.
 
            You welcome me into your classroom--
               one that inspires me and feeds my curiosity
               a place where I find books and ideas and computers and crayons too
               my senses are awash with possibility.
           
            You quench my thirst for learning.
            You believe in me and cheer me on.
 
            You open worlds to me
            and through your questions guide me deeper into them.
 
            Though I stand at the gate of possibility and change
               a place that can be somewhat overwhelming and downright scarry too
 
            I am not afraid
                        for you are with me
                        my teacher, my guide, my companion on the way.
 
            Your smile, your word, your comforting gaze
            Your hand upon my shoulder
            Make me feel safe
                        safe enough to take a risk
                        safe enough to cross the thresholds of new worlds
 
            Worlds you open to me even when I'm surrounded by skeptics and bullies
                        who roll their eyes and snicker at my comments and my questions.
 
            You have listened carefully to me--
                        always encouraging me,
                        always pushing me to go deeper,
                        always delighting in my delight,
                        always gentling me on.
 
            I cannot ask for more.
 
            Your kindness and respect.
                        Your zest for life,
                        Your love of learning
            Shall be with me all the days of my life
 
            And I will follow your lead forever
 
For You are the good teacher who sets aside Your needs to meet mine:
            You stay up late preparing for the day ahead;
            You rise early to finish reading the papers that need to be graded;
            You spend your summers and your vacations too
              taking classes, attending seminars, planning for the year to come.
 
You never "work to rule".  How can you?
You have a sacred bond to those within Your charge.
           
You know Your students
            what lures us in
            what puts us off
            what plagues us
            and what intrigues us;
You know us and we know You.
 
We know You love Your work, Your world.
And we know to our very bones just how much You love us.
 
We--the people of St. Michael's and those with whom we share the planet--are living in a moment that cries out for trusted guides and wise companions to lead the way, to usher us form the darkness and isolation, from the weariness and wariness that have been so much a part of the last year into sunlight and community, into the future.  It has been a very rough year for all of us.  We need a model, we need a guide.
 
Or maybe not.  We have that guide.  We have that model--the Good Shepherd, the Good Teacher.  The One who leads us, the One who loves us,  into life.  And we can be guides to one another--gentling one another,  supporting and encouraging each other, reaching out, showing patience, pushing just a little when a push might help, never judging, always loving.  We know how to do this.  We have been well taught. 
 
But we're rusty.  And maybe just a little bit unsure. 
 
So let me close with a suggestion. 
 
Bring to mind those Good teachers in your life.  Remember their names.  Recall their faces.  Put yourself back into their classroom.  Hear their words.  Feel their gaze upon your face.  Remember how they loved you into taking a risk.  How they loved you into learning what they themselves so loved.  Try your hand at loving others into this new life we now find ourselves.  And when you mess up as you surely will for we are all so very human, remember how it felt when you couldn't fold your paper right or balance that equation and your teacher just looked at you and said, "Next time...next time you'll get it right.  Don't you worry.  Just keep on trying."  Just keep on gentling one another into this new life we now are living.
 
Then  pause--pause to give a little of prayer of thanksgiving for the teachers who have loved you on. Say their names.  See their faces.  Say thanks be. 
 
And when you have, enter their name in the chat or say their name right here.  Our worship will be filled with tmemories the wise teachers--the good shepherds of our lives.  Thanks be to God.  Thanks be to them.
 
 
 

​18 April 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Easter
 
“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24)
 
            In the pilgrimage that we made here at St. Michael’s on Easter Day, we took the various episodes recorded in scripture that happened on the first Easter Day, and put them together into one narrative. Turns out, a lot happened for just one day! Not only was there the discovery of the empty tomb, but also Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdalene, and then to the other women who came looking for him; then there was Jesus on the road to Emmaus, stopping to have supper with two disciples; and then Jesus appeared in the upper room, breathing the Holy Spirit onto the disciples … Jesus was popping up all over the place! It must have been a truly head-spinning day!
And today we read about yet another Easter Day episode, which is Luke’s own account of Jesus’ appearance in the upper room, when he not only gives the gift of peace, but opens their minds to the meaning of the scriptures about him. And if we were to read a bit farther to the end of Luke’s gospel, we would discover that in Luke’s telling, Jesus was not only with the disciples that day, but also led them out of the city to Bethany, where he was lifted up and disappeared from them. All in one day!
The strange thing is, though, that if you flip ahead to the Book of Acts, which is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke and presumably by the same author, you find a rather different story. There, Jesus continues to appear to the disciples over a period of forty days, and is taken up from them only at the end of that symbolically important time. Same author, two very different accounts.
These conflicting stories might remind us of the discrepancy that shows up right at the beginning of the Bible, in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, which have two radically different accounts of creation. In that case, the rationalization is made that the two accounts are by different authors (the famous Jahwist and Priestly, or J and P, sources), each with a particular theological point of view that leads to a different telling of the story.
But in the case of Luke/Acts, which have the same author, how does one account for the two completely different versions of Jesus’ resurrection appearances and final departure—one on Easter Day, the other forty days later? One could, I suppose, simply dismiss it all as so much gobbledygook: a confused mind telling predictably confused tales. That’s what our modern, rationalist perspective would have us to do.
But scripture doesn’t work that way. When it offers conflicting accounts of the same thing, it’s trying to get us to pay attention to the fact that the meaning of what is being related is larger than any one telling can provide. And so, in the case of the resurrection, the risen Jesus is not any one thing, and he is not known to us in any one way. He will make himself known to us where and how it is needful for us to encounter him. That’s why the stories are all different: they were experienced, and remembered, in distinctly individual ways. They are not linear and consistent, but multiple and divergent.
But there is another dimension to all of this that I want to draw out, and it is the primary message for today. Like the stories of Jesus, the stories of our own lives are also inconsistent and divergent. We human beings are a patchwork of thoughts and emotions and actions that are often at odds with one another, and that leads us to behaviors that are not entirely dependable—far from it. Add to this the fact that over time we change—thank God, more than we expect—so that what was true of us at one time, may be virtually unrelated to who we are now. No one is ever fully consistent or morally coherent. As Father Easter, a beloved retired priest in this congregation now deceased, used to say, “We’re all of us a mixed bag.”
And this, I think, is where the Christian emphasis upon reconciliation and forgiveness is radically at odds with the strident partisanship in our own day with which we are all too familiar. Whether we are on the left or the right, we look for a kind of moral and intellectual purity in one another that human beings simply aren’t capable of. Most of our lives, we’re too immature to know better, and the rest of our lives we’re too old to be able to do much about it. “We’re all of us a mixed bag.” And so out of simple compassion we have to make room for the reality of the mixture of good and bad that we all are.
When the risen Jesus appears to his disciples and greets them with the words, “Peace be with you” (and that’s one thing that remains pretty consistent across various accounts), I hear in that statement two things.  First, there is an implicit acknowledgement that the disciples are all guilty of having betrayed him, and therefore have reason to be fearful of his anger.
But second, there is also Jesus’ unexpected forgiving embrace that is ready and willing to move beyond that guilt. If anyone ever had reason to feel a righteous anger, it was Jesus toward his disciples. But the first words out of his mouth are not of anger, but of peace—he seems intent to say, “Let’s move on.”
So he quickly begins to turn the disciples’ attention not toward the past, but toward the future, telling them that they will be his witnesses among all nations to the pattern of forgiveness and reconciliation that is at the heart of what he came to teach and to inspire. That is the mission with which he leaves them, and it is the mission to which we ourselves are heir in our own day: to speak over and over again the gospel words, “Peace be with you.” Amen.   

​4 April 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Easter
 
“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. … He is not here.” (Mark)
 
            At the heart of the idea of God, lies a great paradox. If God is infinite, then there is no room for anything else to exist. But if God is finite, then there is something bigger than God, and God is only limited and partial, and not God at all. What to do?
            There is an idea known as tsimtzum in the Jewish mystical tradition that tries to address exactly this conundrum. It holds that in order for creation to exist, the infinite God had first intentionally to draw back to make room for created being (the Hebrew word “tsimtzum” means to contract). God pulls inward, to make room for the existence of what is not God—the other.
            Now think of the implications of that idea: in order for us (or anything else) to be, God first has to create an empty void. Emptiness is the prerequisite for existence.
            In his poem “Emptiness,” the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu wrote these words:
 
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
 
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
 
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
 
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
 
            How interesting, then, that the first indication of the resurrection is not anyone’s personal encounter with Jesus, but simply the discovery of an empty tomb. As the angel says to the women who come looking for Jesus, perhaps almost sarcastically, “He isn’t here.”
            And even when the disciples do later encounter Jesus, more often than not the emphasis in the resurrection stories is on how elusive Jesus is, disappearing just as he is recognized—think of the supper at Emmaus, when just as the disciples realize it is Jesus with whom they are breaking bread, he vanishes from their sight.
            And of course this pattern of retreat and withdrawal culminates in the story of Jesus’ ascension, when he withdraws from the disciples altogether.
            We spend a lot of mental effort trying to make sense of the resurrection, but I wonder if it might not help to ask if what it is really about, is God drawing back from the ordinary human world, where we know only violence and death, with the purpose of making room for a new way of life to come rushing in to fill the void (much like the primordial moment of creation)? What if the resurrection is a kind of, well, a kind of new creation? (After all, that’s what St. Paul says our life in Christ is, a new creation [2 Cor. 5:17, Gal 6:15]).
            It’s interesting, isn’t it, that no one actually saw the resurrection—in fact, we know almost nothing about it, except that it was accompanied by a great earthquake. All that we really know, are its effects. And those effects are the deep-seated conviction of Jesus’ followers that in him they have been given a way of peace to pursue, and a Spirit of hope to trust, as they—and we—remake the human community.
            So what if the message of Easter is that through an empty tomb, God has opened up the space in which we, by following him, can cross over from an old life circumscribed by violence and death, into a new and larger space where life opens out before us, like the experience walking from inside a dark enclosed house into the fresh radiant brilliance of the morning sun? No wonder the resurrection happened just at sunrise.
            Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet, once observed that even Jesus refused to say much of anything about the resurrection itself. What Jesus did focus on, every time he appeared to the disciples, was the new way of life by which they were to move forward in the path he had cleared for them. And so, for Cardenal, the point of the resurrection is that the tombs of all those who in their life loved as Jesus taught them to love, are existentially empty. Sure the bones are there, but not the spirit. Their spirit is “hid with Christ in God,” as St. Paul puts it (Col. 3:3).
            Parents know well this pattern of pulling back to enable growth: indeed, one of the principal tasks of being a mother or father to children, is first to equip them with a sense of confidence and direction, but then gradually to draw back to make room for the child to find his or her own way of being in the world.
            Or a teacher knows the same truth: at the heart of being an educator lies the importance of forming students with an instinctive curiosity and the tools for discovery, but then of turning them free to explore and create on their own.
            In fact, much of life is about having an adequate self-awareness and self-assurance, to be able to draw oneself back in order to make room for the freedom of others. And that is a lesson our nation is still struggling to learn.
            The great Christological hymn in the second chapter of Philippians is built around this very theme: Christ, says the writer, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. It’s yet another instance of God pulling back, to let something new take its place.
            And isn’t something like this, also the spiritual truth that we draw from the desert that surrounds us here in New Mexico—that it is in the emptiness of a landscape seemingly denuded of life, that we become most vividly aware of the preciousness of life itself? Emptiness inspires clarity. Absence precedes presence. (And that’s also what the Eucharist is all about, isn’t it?—revealing the absent Jesus to be present in our midst.)
            In a poem called “Seen” (which we read at this morning’s Easter pilgrimage), the poet Jan Richardson describes the dynamic emptiness of the tomb this way:
 
You had not imagined
that something so empty
could fill you
to overflowing,
 
and now you carry
the knowledge
like an awful treasure
or like a child
that roots itself
beneath your heart:
 
how the emptiness
will bear forth
a new world
that you cannot fathom
but on whose edge
you stand.
 
There is no other word
you need.
There is simply
to go
and tell.
There is simply
to begin.
 
Ó Jan Richardson, janrichardson.com
 
Amen.