Matthew 23:1-12
St. Michael and All Angels
October 30, 2011

It’s a good thing that we are committed to following the lectionary because it is tempting too many Sundays to skip over it to something more palatable. The gospel lesson this Sunday is one that I would love to skip. After all, a sermon on humility for adults is like a lecture for kids on the importance of eating your vegetables or the old “clean your plate, there are starving children in China”. Perhaps I’d like to skip it because I don’t really want to think about humility. I’d rather think about something more lofty.

I’m struck by how often what we want to think about or how we want to spend our time, may not be what is most needed. I just returned from a week in Nashville with young clergy from around the country who were gathering to complete a program that had one assignment…form a support group in your home town. They had two years to complete the task. They chose to be part of this program so they weren’t coerced in any way. My job that week was to talk with the participants and hear about their experiences. On the last day, I reported to the whole group what I had heard. Here is what I heard over and over from them… “it’s hard to form a group”, “everyone is busy”, “some people moved so we couldn’t get a group going”. All of those things are true. I hear them every day in the work that I do. Forming community is HARD WORK. People really are too busy to do it. Lives are always in transition so there isn’t the stability we need to be able to form the community we desire. What I found myself asking throughout the week was, “what’s underneath comments about being hard, busy, and people moving?” It was then that I began to hear some of the blocks to forming a group. It’s scary and we don’t ultimately know if we can trust one another. If we are really honest, we are ambivalent about intimacy with other clergy. We aren’t good at being hospitable with all the parts of ourselves. How can we show hospitality to others and invite them to form a group?

I love talking with my friend Rusty from St. Martin’s who always responds, “That’s real.” Somehow when he says that, I know he’s hearing me.

So here is my response to the people I met in Nashville. “That’s real. I honor that in you. And I think that God is calling us more deeply into the real so we can truly be followers.” Can we spend some time with what is most real in us so that we can more fully be those who have been made in God’s image and called into this precious world to offer our lives?

I wonder if Jesus was pointing out what is true in Matthew: the Pharisees were teaching people how to follow God and Jesus seemed to respect their teaching. He knew this was true…the Pharisees cared about the Law. They were worried about the cynicism in Israel and hoped to restore people to God. Their heart was in the right place, but somehow along the way, they began to act as though they were entitled to certain privileges. They seemed to believe they had an exclusive connection to God.

What if he’s inviting them and us into a deeper understanding of what is real? Don’t we often start with the right intentions? How many leaders, how many politicians, how many of us begin with a deep commitment to do the right thing and somewhere along the way things get a bit muddy?

I learned something interesting from a friend who is a Greek scholar (as in he reads stuff in Greek just for fun). He was reading a gardening book in Greek and found that the word hubris refers to when a plant is overgrown and it gets woody and needs to be cut off. What if pride for humans is about our being overgrown and reaching beyond what we’re supposed to be? Humility in this sense, means being close to the earth – maybe even clear to our roots. It means being exactly who you are supposed to be in order to produce fruit.

You know the verse in Micah that says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (6:8) We love to love this verse. What isn’t there to love about justice, kindness, and walking with God. But what about the walking humbly with God? Orienting our whole life toward God is another matter. Humility is an invitation to be rooted in God so that we can be fruitful. It is about shifting our gaze from the goals we have set to the call God has for us.

It seems to me that rooting our lives in God really means being radically open to God. That isn’t a one time thing, but something we practice daily as we actively seek God in all that we do. Radical openness isn’t about just hearing from God, but bringing all of who we are to God and that is where things start to get tricky. When we look at the fullness of who we are, we want to start editing and hiding parts of ourselves. Perhaps this is the place where broad phylacteries and long fringes come in handy! Who can blame Adam and Eve for the fig leaves? Don’t we want to cover ourselves?

What if Jesus is telling us to set aside the “stuff” we put on to make ourselves presentable to God and the rest of the world and take a “long, loving look at the real.” Those are the words that Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt used to describe contemplation. What happens in that real place? It seems to be that place where we tenderly connect with the deepest part of our being and hopefully begin to experience compassion for ourselves. Certainly in that place, God is filling us with love.

Thomas Merton describes humility as being precisely the person you actually are before God. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 99)

It is in that place of the real that we fall into step with God and find that we don’t need to cover up with fancy words or fancy stories. It is here that we see ourselves through God’s eyes and together shift our gaze toward a world that needs us.

One of the gifts from my trip to Nashville was hearing Trevor Hudson speak. Trevor is a pastor in South Africa and a man of deep humility. He was so open and we immediately knew we were in the presence of a man who is both rooted and real. One of the things that Trevor said that I cannot shake was how important it is to remain amateurs. To be an amateur is to do something because I love doing it. Trevor believes that God says to us, “I hope you always remain an amateur.” It isn’t easy to do in a culture that wants everything to be professionalized. We professionalize ministry and leadership and public service. But we should never professionalize being a Christian. We do this because we love God and we desire to grow in love with a God who first loved us. As Kathleen Norris says, “there are no prodigies in the monastic life.” It seems as if the Pharisees had declared themselves no longer amateurs. Had they lost sight of their love for God and become enamored with their own power?

I feel a bit hypocritical saying this as I prepare to join the staff here in a month. But I need you to know that I am not joining the staff to be a professional Christian. It is my desire to grow in love with God every day and to have that love translate into my relationships with you and the world. I am looking for ways for us to come together and be real with one another. I want us to gather around our love for God and our desire to grow more deeply into the people God created us to be. I want us to take risks together as we seek to be God’s people in the world. It is my prayer that as we walk humbly with God, we will bring justice and kindness to the whole world.

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October 16, 2011   
The Feast of St. Luke
Creativity
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Early Christian tradition claimed that St. Luke, the author of the gospel by that name, painted the first icons. Even though there is no way of knowing if this is true, he was clearly an artist in his craft of writing. Luke’s gospel is written in a beautiful, literary style, with many stories that are found only in his version, including the one we love to hear on Christmas Eve.

Given his creative talent, I wouldn’t be surprised if he painted. And so Luke is known as the patron saint of artists, which is why we’ve chosen this day to bless icons, and to bless all our members who make art.

But in the interests of the rest of us, today I’d like to use St. Luke’s art to consider God’s gift of creativity, so that we can include everyone. And yes, that includes you. Perhaps you’ve said to other people “I haven’t got a creative bone in my body. I couldn’t draw a stick figure, even if my life depended on it.”

I want you to consider the creative nature that comes with being human. God is the Creator, the One who brings all things into being - marvelous, complex, fearsome, ordinary things. Every day, the Creator generates life, and so is generative.

We are made in the image of this Creator, whose very Spirit dwells within each one of us, coursing through all of creation. As God’s children, we inherit some of God’s creative DNA. We are co-creators with God.

And so broadly speaking, when we are generative, we are creative. Whether we are engineers, parents, teachers, homemakers, athletes, business people – when any of us brings new things into being, we exercise God’s gift of creativity.

In fact, it is often said that as we age, when we pass beyond the things we have to do to make a living and raise a family, we are faced with a choice. That choice is either generativity or stagnation; life or a living death. To be alive is to be creative, or to put it another way, to bring things into being by engaging with other people, with materials, with ideas, with activities. When we do this, we are living in the Spirit of our Creator, in whose image we are made.

What are the things that help us to live more creatively? How do we stay alive as long as we are living?

Recently I was looking at a book called Art and Fear, which could have been titled Life and Fear. In it, the authors conclude with the statement that while the outside world consists of variables, the inside world remains remarkably constant. Throughout our life, we tend to be drawn to the same things over and over. All their lives, artists often have one color palette, preachers have maybe 3 sermons, and you will likely experience the same struggles and the same things that pull at your heart.

When I began my sabbatical nearly a year ago, I went into it with a sense of fear and trembling. That was because I decided not to make a project out of it, and I really didn’t know if there was enough in life to captivate me once I had removed my job from the picture.

It turns out that there was, and they were constants that have always interested me – prayer, music, writing, friends, travel, study, working with others in the wider church, even projects around the house. These are not just hobbies – they are the vehicles that have always carried me into life’s depths, into risk, beauty, challenge, and fresh perspectives.

The point is to embrace those constants, to accept them as our constants. They are both limitations and our ultimate freedom. To go deeply into one color palette, to go deeply into the few things we care about - to really give ourselves to gardening or mathematics or friendship or whatever are our constants – this is how we discover the depths of life. It is our palette, our material that we have been given to use on the canvas of our lives.

But to go deeply with our material, we must risk. Good things come into being only when we risk struggling with the hard questions that are presented to us when we parent or pray or pursue best business practices. In these struggles, we encounter our resistance to change, our fear of failure, our unwillingness to go blind into uncharted territory. This is always hard. But if we keep moving into that work, whatever it is, allowing it to change us, it will become a spiritual path that leads us into a creative, generative life, and good things will come into being.

As the authors of Art and Fear put it, In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice…between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot – and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

What they’re really talking about is faith. Faith is a risk. By throwing ourselves into the things we care about, we are risking that the Creator who has given us these constants will also give us the ability to develop them. The things we care about were given to us in order to enjoy them, to share them, to let our limitations be challenged by them, to learn from how other creative people have developed the same things. Shall we risk working with the unique material we have been given, or shall we go through life painting by the numbers?

Most of us who aspire to be good at anything know the ambivalence of seeing a virtuoso of what we enjoy doing. I had one of those moments a while back. I went to a jazz concert at the Outpost Performance Space. The young saxophonist and his band were amazing. The drummer, for one, is the artistic director of the jazz department at Julliard School of Music – they were all virtuosos. I couldn’t believe the complexity and beauty of what I was hearing. It was magical.

But as an amateur musician, I walked away from that concert with mixed emotions. I was excited and happy, but I also thought, darkly, No matter how hard I try, I will never play like that. What a joke my so-called musicianship is.

The next day I had a thought that changed everything. I heard a voice saying Brian, you are a virtuoso at being Brian. Nobody else can play the song of your personality, your work, your relationships, your humor, the way you can. Go ahead, play it right out loud.  

Every person in this room is a virtuoso. We may not all be playing our song right out loud yet, but we have the capacity to do so. In fact, we have a solemn obligation to do so, and we are accountable to God for this. Why? Because God needs us to pursue the things we are given to care about, so we will be co-creators with God, so creation will go on and on.

Your life is your art. The few things you have always cared about are the materials that God has given you, with which you can make something beautiful. If you give this your best shot, you will become once again like the child who once delighted in her own unique way of doing finger-painting, before she was told she didn’t have talent. And you will have truly lived.

SERMON OCTOBER 9, (Matt: 22:1-14)

The king who invites becomes the king who destroys.  This man, the king, is the worst kind of brutal dictator, who would dare to fill a banquet hall by using lethal force and terror; a king who, if you cross him, will kill, terrorizing the next person into not crossing him.  

Think of the HERODS of our day, the many dictators that have been in the news in recent years, who have behaved in similar ways to the king in our parable.

Matthew, however, tags on additional parable:  (NOT PRESENT IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE OR THOMAS) ---the parable of the guest without the proper wedding garment.  This guest is cast away for refusing to follow the customs of the rich and powerful.  He becomes the victim – the scapegoat.

The lone figure refuses to celebrate a banquet that is shrouded in violence of the dominant culture;  he is cast into the outer darkness, (like Jesus, at Golgotha) the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

This guest appears to intentionally, yet silently, confront this king’s brutality.  This is not the king who dishes out the violence, but rather the guest who at the end takes it upon himself ---- the Christ figure –

The man without the wedding garment was silent before the king.  He discovers a similar fate as did Christ.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ was silent before his judge.  In the face of the earthly authority based on violence, Jesus stood silent in the face of his accusers and allowed himself to be bound to a cross.

JESUS WAS TROUBLE:  ----  TROUBLE FOR THE RELIGIOUS ELITE-- TROUBLE FOR THE RELIGIOUS AUTHORITIES-- TROUBLE FOR THE WAR-MAKING ROMAN EMPIRE.

The gospel parable is asking us this question:  “For what do we really stand?  How much do we really care about the injustice we see around us?”

Our guest stands alone and by his silence says:  I cannot wed myself to   a culture of those who make this their creed:

Blessed are the rich; the reign of the world is theirs.

Blessed are those who cause others to mourn and to grieve.

Blessed are those who are violent, proud, arrogant.

Blessed are the powerful who dominate others and who oppress the poor.

Blessed are those who ignore injustice and benefit from the sufferings of the poor.

Blessed are those who play it safe, and secure, who do not get involved in the struggles for social change.

Blessed are those who remain silent, and turn a deaf ear to the struggles of their neighbors.

As a nine year old child, Alice Gahana accompanied her parents when they were summoned to the village square.  After surviving two concentration camps, Alice was asked what she remembered most from her horrific experience.”                

EMPTY WINDOWS, was her reply “ I walked that morning carrying my suitcase, down our cobble-stoned street, by the houses in which people lived that I had known all my life. But the windows were empty – that’s what I remembered – the empty windows.  My friends and neighbors knew what was happening.  They knew – but they were afraid.  They didn’t want to get involved.  Nobody came to the windows to see what was happening to me.”
                        
God sends us, you and me, right into our own community, to call for justice for the poor and to denounce injustice whenever and wherever we see it.

We hear again the words in our Isaiah passage this morning:
    
For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress” (AN EXAMPLE OF OUR OWN CASA SAN MIGUEL)

Sometimes it might mean standing alone – But ALWAYS it calls us to go to the windows and see what is happening to our neighbors!!!! Remember those in our day who had the courage to stand against injustice – Those who were willing to serve not counting the cost.  
    
Dorothy Day Founder of Catholic Worker Community who chose to tand with the poor.

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, who chose to walk among the disenfranchised;  denounced the death-squad government that eventually shot him while he celebrated Mass.

Martin Luther King, Jr. who demanded equality and civil rights for     all people, and economic justice for the poor.

Mahandas Gandhi who resisted racism in South Africa, rebelled against British imperialism in India, and sent out a call to practice non violence.

And of course, Anng San Suu Kyi recently released from house arrest in Myanmar, (formerly Burma) as well as the three women awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this week (one from Yemen, and two from Liberia – all who fought for human rights)

At a different kind of banquet, Jesus stands alone on the shore after the resurrection.  He calls out to his fishing buddies, and tells them where to throw their nets.

When they recognize him he says “COME, HAVE BREAKFAST.”
Jesus is serving breakfast to the very ones who had abandoned him only a few days earlier.  What a different picture than the king in our gospel story.

Who can resist Christ’s intimate love, his willingness to stand alone, his refusal to participate in a culture that ignores the call to peace and justice, and his willingness to serve everyone regardless of their station in life!

We can finish breakfast with the Risen Christ and set off on our journey of justice and peace, remembering to look out our windows – and to willingly get involved!

AMEN

October 2, 2011
The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor


Today, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels - or Michaelmas - is a kind of parish birthday. We are blessed to have with us Fr. Daniel Gutierrez, who was raised up as a priest out of this parish, and who has gone on to assist our bishop as Canon to the Ordinary. Welcome home, Daniel.

A birthday seems a good time to share with you some thoughts about where we have recently come from, and where I think we are going. So this will be less a sermon and more a State of the Parish talk.

Today, we are enjoying a number of significant programs that assisting clergy and many of you have built up over the last few years.

• The dedicated folk running our Food Pantry, together with Deacon Jan, brought it to a place of real consistency and strength. We’re now able to offer food to many more of our neighbors here in the Valley.
• Fr. Daniel and his crew created the 5:00 Sunday Eucharist, a wonderfully intimate, alternative form of worship and community. It is now being taken forward to its next stage by the Rev. Susan Allison Hatch and a freshly-energized group of lay leaders.
• Fr. Christopher and dozens of teachers deepened our ministries with children and youth. He and a group of Re-Imaginers brought us closer together through listening to one another’s stories and passions. A number of you also worked with him to create events, parties, and pilgrimages, which have strengthened our sense of community.
• A lay group doing pastoral work with Deacon Judith has significantly broadened our ability to reach out with home and hospital visits, spiritual direction, support groups, and intercessory prayer.
• Finally, as these ministries were growing over the last few years, we realized that we needed more room to house them. You committed $1.4m to build our beautiful Ministry Complex. It is now filled with delightful activity nearly every day, enabling us to be generous and creative in our use of space.

So as I look back over the last few years, I’m amazed at your faithfulness and dedication. We are, as Bishop Vono has said many times, a model of what a congregation can be when it is responsive to the Spirit.

And now as I look ahead, I think about where the Spirit might be taking us next. Since my return from sabbatical, I’ve seen four signs of the times we’re in. These are the areas where I have real enthusiasm and commitment, where I want to focus our energy over the next couple of years. They will help us evolve to our next stage of community life.

The first sign I see is that some of the ministries we’ve developed have been fairly clergy-dependent. Where this is true, we miss out on the kind of consistency, diversity, and breadth that can only come from group lay leadership.
And so over the next couple of years, I want to build leadership teams in every area of ministry that rises above a certain number of participants. They will deal with the big picture, by planning ahead, learning best practices, evaluating their work, recruiting new leaders, and nurturing volunteers. They will learn about publicity and communications, how the staff can support them, budgeting and fundraising, and connecting with the wider church’s activities in their field.

I am currently in the process of hiring part-time ministry staff who will help develop these leadership teams. I’m excited about the idea of working closely with this new staff, sharing ideas and overlapping and integrating our activities. And as lay leadership teams develops, the role of ministry staff will be less about the management of details, and more what we are called and trained to do – to offer theological, pastoral, and spiritual support for the ministry you are carrying out.

The second sign of our time is that we are beginning to spread out into the diocese and the wider church beyond. We have people elected and appointed to offices, and others who participate in diocesan and regional events. We’ve got our people at San Gabriel’s in Corrales, St. Martin’s with the homeless, St. Mark’s, and in the diocesan office. A number of our members are in discernment about ordained ministry, which may take them afield.
We’re also planning to train other congregations in what we’ve been doing for years – discernment groups, lay pastors, Hispanic ministry, and support for gay and lesbian Episcopalians and their families.

All of this is possible because the diocese is much more healthy and vibrant, and because it is beginning to value the significant experience that we have to offer. It is time for us to spread our wings.

The third sign: we will have financial challenges, but we also have the resources and commitment to meet them. Every year, we must raise $700,000 in pledges to cover operations. Over the next two years, unless we’re prepared to make hefty mortgage payments out of our operating fund, we will need to raise an additional $650,000 to pay off the remaining debt on our Ministry Complex.

This is a bit daunting, considering the economic climate we’re in. But what is amazing is that you have been consistent in keeping your financial commitments to this community you care about so much. And every year, more of our households understand the connection between enjoying being a part of this wonderful community, and making a financial pledge to support it. Over the next few years, I know that we will have to be frugal, but I also know that we will always have enough.

Finally and most importantly, I am reading another sign that goes back to what I talked about when I first returned from sabbatical in June. It is time to recommit to our essential grounding in the spiritual life. My new ministry staff and I will make this our highest priority in every area of ministry.

The purpose of this parish – the purpose of any religious community – is to provide a holy space where seekers can authentically encounter the divine; where we can mature in spirit; and where we can learn how to more faithfully serve God in this broken world. That’s why we exist.

The parish is, as St. Benedict said about the monastery, a school in the Lord’s service. In this school we learn how to pray, to forgive, to challenge one another in love, to celebrate diversity, to open ourselves to the Spirit, and above all, to trust in faith. This happens when we attend to the way we do what we do together. For how we are together is far more important than whatever we might accomplish.

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So these signs – <em>strengthening teams of lay leaders; broadening our presence in the wider church; meeting our financial challenges; and re-committing to our spiritual foundation </em>– these signs point to where I believe we are headed in the next few years. I’m energized about these things, and I intend to return to them again and again to focus our attention, our time, and our resources.  

Lastly on this parish birthday, I need to tell you how very grateful I am to be sharing this life with you. Almost every day, I really do enjoy coming to work. And I have complete confidence in you, and in the Spirit among us, that we will continue to evolve in creative ways, as we always have over the last 61 years. Happy Birthday, and thank you for helping St. Michael and All Angels be what we are.