Month

Dear People of Christ Church,
St Francis Day Sunday is this week!
St Francis Day Sunday is one of the (perhaps too few) days in the church year we do just for the simple hilarity and joy of it, of blessing our pets. Whether furry or feathered (or in a photograph), we say prayers for gratitude and praise to God for the ways our animals and God’s creation bless our lives. I wrote this space last year about the woodchucks that live in our garden, and now have my own furry dog friend, North (aka Sir Snuggles aka Streudel ), and offer thanks even more.

It seems to me that there is something profoundly countercultural about the way we nurture our relationships with creation and with the animals in our lives. Not just “real” animals, either; there is a yellow stuffed teddy in our household who I am sure I would leap through a flames to rescue. Both our “lemon bear” and our actual dog represent love, only love. It is unlikely that your guinea pig will ever earn its keep. It won’t pull itself up by its bootstraps and get organized. It do anything useful or inspirational or brave. It will just be there to look at you and love you, and then love you some more. Maybe then chew the carpet, but afterwards return to love. It won’t ever buy anything or sell anything or need anything other than food, water, and your company.

An animal in itself is an invitation to patience and acceptance, too. This is something we are working on a lot on in our house. Like people, animals can experience trauma—our dog wandered in the woods possibly for weeks before coming to us as a stray into our campsite in a national forest this summer. We have no idea what kind of situation he might have been in before he ended up there; his list of intolerances is long. He can’t deal with loud noises. He can’t deal with the postal service. He is afraid of the waffle maker. Until we started feeding him on a tray, he wouldn’t even eat food out of a bowl (claustrophobia?). That’s just what he’s like. We’ll do what we can to address whatever is underneath it and hope he calms down a bit, but he just might not. We have to accept him for who he is. I mean, God sent this dog to us, right? He’s not trying to change us so we can imagine offering the same grace to him.

So that’s what we do for St Francis Day. St Francis, who preached to the birds and would rather strip naked in the town square than follow wealth the way his family expected him to. Francis who gave everything he had to follow Jesus and “Lady Poverty,” and found joy and peace beyond measure beyond measure beyond measure.

I’ll close with part of Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun,” which we sing on Sunday.

Dear mother earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
O praise God! Alleluia!
The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them God’s glory also show.
O praise God! O praise God! Alleluia!! Alleluia!!

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week my friends’ and my plot to get ourselves out of our offices—”two priests and a rabbi drinking coffee” resulted in another great conversation. Angel and David and I sat with one person who grew up Catholic and later converted to Judaism, one Christian new to Waltham in search of a church home, and one repeat customer who might call himself “spiritual but not religious.” Our word for the day: Hell.
Not usually one of my go-to spiritual concepts, but it was on my mind since it comes up in our Gospel for Sunday in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. In the story, Lazarus (not to be confused with the guy who was raised from the dead) rests on Abraham’s breast, finally at peace after a lifetime sitting outside the gate of a rich man’s home begging. That rich man has also died, but he has been sent to the lake of fire in Hades. A great chasm is fixed between the two; Lazarus couldn’t help even if he wanted to.
The chasm is not, however, new: it ruptured while the two were alive, when the rich man chose not to see Lazarus. God didn’t create it as punishment: it simply was. “Hades” in the story is a nod to Greek mythology, not Jesus talking about God’s plans for us in the afterlife. But it comes with a hard question: the rich man didn’t see Lazarus. What are we not seeing? Then, as now, what does it mean to be part of a world where it’s so easy not to see?
This parable follows the parable of the dishonest manager, which we heard last week. In that one, we sit across the table from the manager who asks us: how much do you owe?
How much do I owe? Good grief, how much. A lot. Nobody is comparing me to a poisonous candy. Nobody is going to shoot me if my car breaks down (no matter where my hands are, and especially not if they are up in the air).
Why think of this as a debt? Many others do not have this thing that I have. And I certainly did not earn my citizenship or my pale skin or my access to education. My debt is to God, through those who suffer in this world. My debt is to them, through God. Easy to forget those lines in the Lord’s Prayer that really in the original language are more correctly translated as “debts.” Forgive us our debts, God, as we forgive our debtors. We say “trespasses,” which makes it a lot harder to say that as a confession.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
Forgive us, God, all the things we don’t see, and give the grace and courage to open our eyes and hearts to your call.
Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m excited to share the news that our first “Two Priests and a Rabbi Drinking Coffee” open office hours at Café on the Common last week was a success. It sounds like a bad joke. That’s the point. The rabbi David Finkelstein of Temple Beth Israel (the temple behind Hannaford). The other priest is the Rev. Angel Marrero, the pastor of a new Spanish speaking Lutheran Congregation, Santuario, which meets at First Lutheran on Eddy Street. Angel and David and I have worked together on several different projects over the last few years since they’ve each ministered in Waltham. The idea is that we just have an open space to sit and talk together with whoever walks by about whatever comes up. Yes, it’s that technical. We’re going to start by having a word of the day as a conversation starter, but I expect that the topics will range widely.
David and Angel and I all lead radically different spiritual communities—we’re not out to convert anyone to “our” brand of religious experience. But we also have a lot in common. We’re all under 40—in Angel’s case, way under 40, unlike David and me!). Angel’s husband is in seminary and both David and I are married to other clergy. We’re all politically progressive, but our religious expression rooted in ancient tradition. Last week our conversation veered toward worship: what is it? Why does that word elicit such strong responses, both positively and negatively? We all have something we worship, whether or not we put that label on it. You can worship at the altar of looking good or being successful and it occupies just as big a place in your mind as, perhaps, one might wish God would.
Why are we doing this again?
In a world where many people have deep questions and profound wonderings about God and faith but fewer and fewer people are part of religious communities, I want to be part of creating a space where people can begin to have those conversations in a different kind of context. The best of religious community–exists not just for the aid or inspiration of its members, but for the surrounding community. Sure, we have a mission is to make Christians. But that’s not done by banging people over the head. Most broadly, our mission is to make a certain kind of world where God can be known and God’s people can be whole. I love the Episcopal church, but we don’t have an exclusive lock on the presence of the holy. Neither does David’s congregation. Or Angel’s. There will be some people who don’t find God in ANY of our communities. And we want to hold space for them, too. And I need to get out of my office! Faith doesn’t just happen between our four walls. We are called further afield.
So far on our list we have the following for our words of the day:
Television
Food
Bad neighbors
Community
Fear
Belonging
Anger
The City
We meet next on Wednesday, September 21, at 2:00 at Café on the Common and hope to continue weekly. Come, and check out our facebook page!
Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
In the children’s sermon this past Sunday, we played with clay—our text was the passage from Jeremiah where the prophet talks about God as a potter, forming us. The scripture text gets a little dark—God tells Jeremiah the pot can be crushed, if the potter desires. It seems to come with a threat: God will “shape evil” against the people if God desires.
God might, but God doesn’t.
The Bible is a record of God’s doings in history, but it’s also a record of the people of God trying to understand their experience and God’s action in the world. Again and again, we might think that God will give up on us, or send calamity or trial or tempest. We feel like unsteady pieces of clay sometimes, going around and around the potter’s wheel. Will we be strong and perfect? Will we be weak and wobbly? Will we go astray and get flung off the wheel and into the corner? Will the potter just give up and get something better?
Here’s where the similarity to the potter ends.
I took a class once in pottery, learning the painstaking way a potter has to have just the right balance of gentle pressure. Too little support for the thin walls of a pot on a potter’s wheel, and the clay tears and falls down. Building the wall of the pot too thick doesn’t work, either—then you end up with a door stopper instead. Too little water on the pot as it spins will make it impossible to shape. Too much water will do the same. It’s a marvel any potter can make anything at all without throwing it all in the corner.
Again and again, though, God doesn’t throw the whole thing in the corner. As a not-even-second-rate potter, I gave up all the time and threw the clay back in the bin or, worse, in the trash. But God never does. This week we’ll hear the parable of the lost coin and the lost sheep. Leaving 99, the shepherd goes after the one who’s gone astray. Losing one coin, the woman turns her house upside down until she finds it—and then she throws a party! These are not the actions of a potter who’s going to give up on the clay.
This is the time of year of new beginnings. Even though it’s now been 13 years since I started a new academic year as a student, I still feel a sense of promise as the air begins to cool in the fall. This is the year, I tell myself, I’m really going to get organized. Whether I do or not, though, by now I’m beginning to learn: it doesn’t matter. I’ll do my best, imperfectly tending the garden of my life. Either way, fall will give into winter. Either way, winter will give into spring. Either way, God’s love will encircle us.
Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,

It’s the first Thursday of the month, so I was blessed to spend the early morning with the Sisters of Saint Anne and their daily Eucharist, soft boiled egg and toast breakfast following. The sisters regularly include a “Requiem” mass in their rotation, with the readings and prayers centering on offering thanks for those who have died.
The readings for this morning were the lovely passage from the prophet Isaiah about the “feast prepared on the mountain of the Lord,” that God will “swallow up death forever.” In the Gospel of John Jesus says he has not lost anything God has given him, that all will be raised on the last day.
Death and resurrection are the pattern of life, period. All life. Life day in and day out, is death and resurrection. Death: things come to an end, feelings are hurt, conflict ensues, the loved one dies. Resurrection: all is held in the palm of a God who creates, redeems, and restores, simply because it is in the nature of God to do so. We don’t earn it, we don’t keep it, we don’t work for it. Life comes out of death: it always does. Not always the way we’d hoped and not always on the schedule we planned on, but it happens.
What does resurrection look like, day to day? It’s God’s world, but we live in it. And “practicing resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry puts it, involves making some choices in how we relate to the world. I’ll leave you with my paraphrase of the French thinker Jean Luc Marion, which I shared in my sermon on Sunday (the original is found in his Prolegomena to Charity, p. 84),
We need to put more confidence in God’s love than in our own broken and faulty wishes.
We need to have more faith in God than mistrust in ourselves.
We need to decide for the infinite, which we’ll never own or master, instead of the success of the world, as Jeremiah would call it, a cracked cistern that can hold no water.
We need to risk losing ourselves to the astonishing generosity of God, instead of being frozen in the idiotic myth of scarcity.
How are you losing yourself to God’s astonishing, generous resurrection life?

Blessings,
Sara+