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By now, you’ve heard my pitch about why you should do Holy Week, so this year I’m not going to give it. The fact is, I don’t know why you should do Holy Week. I’m thinking about why these stories still have something to say to us so many years later. Maybe in some of these questions you’ll find your answer. Maybe in these questions you’ll discover that Holy Week has already come to you, and you want to go there with others in worship as well.

Tonight, at our Maundy Thursday service, we read the story of the Last Supper. Jesus alarms everyone by kneeling on the floor to wash the disciples’ feet, Peter says: “Lord, you will never wash my feet.” He fears the vulnerability, the intimacy this will create. Now, I wonder how often we still try to shut God and each other out of our lives; is it that we’ll never let anyone see us cry? Never admit how much something hurts? Never tell another how they’ve hurt us?

Late into the night, we sit in Vigil with Christ in the sacrament. Church-speak calls it an “Altar of Repose,” but there isn’t much that was restful about that last night for Jesus. When we sit and pray with him, we stay awake-one of us will be in witness there all night, trying to offer our prayers and presence. What is the long night that you’re experiencing now? Whose long night are you sitting with, in support of someone you love?

Friday, we reverence the cross, a sign of torture and suffering. Jesus goes to the cross in taking on the worst of human cruelty, taking it on for love, unwilling to respond to violence with violence. What is at the cross for you? What is the pain that you are trying to keep for yourself? Is it possible to share it with God there? Or does the cross hold something else? Is there something that God is longing to share with you, some work in the world that you are being asked to take up your cross to accomplish? Is there some witness to God’s peace, some relationship to nurture that God asks of you?

Saturday, we celebrate. We really, really celebrate. But first, we watch and listen. With the new fire at the front steps, we remember the light of Christ that could not be extinguished. We hear the stories of the Old Testament where God stayed with God’s people, again and again, offering life out of death and comfort in suffering. We renew our baptismal promises and ring in Easter with bells and rejoicing. What will be raised for you?

Sunday – we celebrate some more! We celebrate for weeks and weeks, into Easter’s Great Fifty Days.

This week, we’re going back in the archives to a piece written by parishioner Marcia Luce in Lent 2011. Marcia died in November but I think she would be OK with us spending some more time with this! With Palm Sunday this week, we’re finishing our Lenten journey, so it seemed like a good time to look back at the last 40 days and see where we’ve been. Thanks to Sue Burkart who reminded me of this great piece.

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When I was younger, I was often confused about Lent. Oh, I knew about the forty days and that you were supposed to give up something and that you had to go to church a lot during Holy Week. It didn’t seem very important but I knew that it was supposed to be important. Over the years, I have learned a few more things.

In her book, A Clearing Season, Sara Parsons writes, “Lent is not all about penitence or misdeeds or guilt. It is a time of introspection, true, but its ultimate purpose lies beyond penitence. In essence, Lent serves as our annual invitation to come closer to God. It provides a time to look at our lives and ourselves not so we can criticize ourselves harshly but so we can identify the obstructions that keep us from God. What keeps us from feeling the presence of the divine in our every day? How do we hide from God and why? Lent gives us a chance to look at such obstructions and to move them gently away so we can come closer to the Love that gives us life, the Love whose triumph we will celebrate on Easter morning.”

“Who can separate from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities or powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. (Romans 8). It is only we ourselves that keep us from God. We set up the barriers that keep us from hearing his voice.

Lent gives us time to look at ourselves, to see the things that keep us from the love of God and to start to do something about them-a time to look at where we have been and a time to think about where we want to go in our spiritual lives. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness wrestling with Satan and the demons. Our job during Lent is to wrestle with our own demons and sinfulness. Christ’s message is new life and forgiveness. That means me and it also means you. It is a time of regret, but can also be a time of joy, a time of helping others, of allowing others to help us, a time of forgiving ourselves and of allowing God to speak directly to us. If we think of the space between us and God as a forest, our job during Lent is to clear the obstructions, to clear an open space where we can live more freely and communicate more clearly with God. This is a time when we must set aside a few minutes every day to pray and to listen to God’s voice.

May we each have a meaningful and successful Lent and find ourselves in a closer relationship with God.

This week in our Tuesday 6:00 group, we had a conversation about Jesus. We were kind of all over the place. We were responding to this quote from our book, The Restoration Project:

If you were to imagine that Jesus is with you right now, where would he appear? Would he be beside you, a companion on the way? Is he ahead of you, leading to an unknown destination? Is he behind you, holding you up in ways known and unknown? Or is he in front of you, holding you in his gaze, teaching or commissioning you for some work only you can do? (p. 85).

Where is Jesus?
In a literal, spatial way? I didn’t quite have an answer.
The answer is…all over. Jesus is in the sacraments, feeding me. Jesus is kind of laughing at me when I spin out wild story lines of anxiety and self-criticism, gently inviting me to be quiet and be loved. Jesus might sit next to me when I meditate, when I’m fidgety and can’t focus. But is Jesus the person, the first century Nazarene Jew really there? I don’t know. Where is Jesus? I don’t know…maybe he stepped out to fill the bird feeder or turn over the compost?

It’s much easier to encounter God in the abstract; praying with the Spirit who “intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8: 26). It’s easier to imagine God as Creator, bringing life out of nothing in primordial banging planets, and then receding from consciousness. It’s easier to imagine Jesus walking dusty roads long ago, turning upside down the consciousness of those he met. I love the Emmaus Story when Jesus walks with the disciples and they only realize it was him as they are eating – and then he disappears.

But here’s something. This morning, with the Sisters of Saint Anne, we celebrated Eucharist in the chapel surrounded by huge paintings of Jesus from artist Janet McKenzie – her rendition of the Stations of the Cross. We read her book, Holiness and the Feminine Spirit a few years ago in our daytime book group. McKenzie’s Jesus doesn’t have much in common with the Good Shepherd in our window. Her images are dark skinned, dark haired, dark eyed. They’re honest, his face in pain but also love, a body in motion, but also deep exhaustion and a moment of rest. We don’t after all, know what he looked like, but chances really are not that good that he was blue eyed and blond. It’s not just the “more accurate” picture of the paintings that makes you pay attention – it’s texture, nuance, and light. Jesus is somehow there in those paintings. I have traditional icons in my prayer space both at home and in the office, but I don’t quite encounter Jesus like I did this morning.

So there’s that. I sometimes wish I had the kind of spirituality where I could just go for long walks and have Jesus by my side in glorious and mutual back and forth conversation. Usually it’s more subtle than that, and for the most part I’m OK with that (you may be relieved to know that the Donatist heresies settled the question as to whether the piety of the priest impacts whether the sacrament works-it doesn’t – so you are all OK even if I edge into theological danger zones!)

Either way, the life of Christ in the church is as real as my own kitchen table, the pattern of death and resurrection near to me as my heart. And for that I am grateful, even if I can’t put it on a seating chart, locating the transcendent love of God with the right preposition. Maybe someday. Where is Jesus for you?

What is Holy Week?
Holy week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. It begins with
Maundy Thursday, continues on Good Friday, and culminates in the Great
Vigil of Easter on Saturday Night. These are sometimes called by the Latin
Triduum (meaning “three days.”). They are, technically, one service-there’s
no final blessing or dismissal from Thursday’s opening until the end of the
Great Vigil on Saturday. Often times the observance during the week might
include the Stations of the Cross or a simple Eucharist on Holy Monday
and Holy Tuesday, and a service called Tenebrae is held on Wednesday.
At Christ Church, we have Stations (lead by a lay person) on Tuesday, are
home on Wednesday (St Paul’s in Brookline has a lovely Tenebrae service
a few of us attended several years ago), and then have church Thursday-
Sunday. In 2013 a children’s stations of the cross was added on Good
Friday at 6pm.

Why Holy week?
Holy Week is, spiritually and theologically, the high point and center
of the whole church year. Having gone through the journey of Maundy
Thursday, the depths of Good Friday, the watching and waiting of the Vigilthe
celebration of the Easter resurrection is that much more powerful-and
honest. Our liturgies aren’t museum pieces; they draw us into a deeper
truth of our faith. They are in some ways a mirror of our own experience.
Jesus Christ was fully human. Though he was in the form of God, he did not
regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.
(Philippians 2: 5) Jesus emptied himself and took on all of the uncertainty,
pain, and suffering of human living. Nothing human is alien to the heart of
God because of Jesus’ closeness to us. This week, Jesus enters the depths
of human love, and also human grief and suffering. This week is about us,
not just about God. “Wash each other,” Jesus tells us in Scripture, and as
we do, we wash Christ himself. This week, we observe and participate in
this sacrificial closeness God has to us.

Where do the services come from?
Our liturgies come from the pilgrimage diary of a fourth century Spanish
nun, Egeria. We owe our own Book of Common Prayer liturgies to the
discovery of her account of her travels. Egeria was a remarkable woman
who wrote and traveled at a time that many women couldn’t do either. We
know she was Roman, so she was a convert to the Christian faith. Our
celebration of Maundy Thursday goes back even further, to the account in
Scripture of Jesus’ last night as described in the Gospel of John, when he
washes his disciples’ feet as he models servanthood. It is also the time we
remember the institution of the Holy Eucharist; we say the same words from
the Gospel on Maundy Thursday and every time we celebrate communion:
This is my body, this is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.

The Stations of the Cross
At this service, we walk the pilgrim walk of the Way of the Cross. Many
churches, both Catholic and Protestant, use these 14 “stations” as a way
to pray the last day of his life from his condemnation to being laid in the
tomb: the path Jesus would have walked in Jerusalem. From “Jesus is
condemned to death” through “Jesus is placed in the tomb,” the carved
images of each moment on the way were widely installed in European
churches in the late middle ages. Our stations are photographs of Eric Gill’s
early twentieth century series (at Westminster Cathedral in England). The
prayers can be done as a private devotion or a service with or without music
and can be lead by a lay or ordained person.

Maundy Thursday
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved
you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)
The word “Maundy” comes from the Latin, mandatum, which means
commandment. In the liturgy, we wash each others’ feet-we are each others’
servants. Men and women, older and younger-we are all called to serve
each other. Is it awkward? Of course. Don’t come wearing pantyhose. It’s
a level of nearness we don’t frequently experience with our friends, much
less the person you sit behind in church. But is it holy? Absolutely. The
disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was doing at first, either. When
Jesus kneels at Peter’s feet, he says, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus
answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Peter is
confused-an act of submission by his Lord? No way. Jesus says, “You do
not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Does Peter
get it, later? Much later, he does-after the crucifixion, after the resurrection,
he understands just how different a Lord Jesus was. Not one who wants
domination and power, but a Lord who wants to be on the floor, kneeling
in front of us, comforting and consoling: a Lord whose only command is
love. The foot washing takes place between the sermon and the prayers
of the people. The liturgy continues with Communion. After Communion,
we strip the altar. All the hangings, all the chairs, all the cushions and
candles come out of the sanctuary. We do this to prepare for Good Friday,
to remind ourselves of the abandonment of Christ, and the utter absence
and desolation of that day. Everyone who is present in the church is invited
to help strip the altar-it’s not just a performance by the clergy or leaders of
the service; it’s shared by us all. After the service, we’re invited to sit in vigil
with the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, remembering his invitation
to his disciples to stay awake with him in Gethsemane on his last night.

Good Friday
Some one is said to have bitten off and stolen a portion of the sacred wood, it is
thus guarded by the deacons who stand around, lest any one approaching should
venture to do so again And as all the people pass by one by one, all bowing
themselves, they touch the Cross and the title, first with their foreheads and then
with their eyes; then they kiss the Cross and pass through, but none lays his hand
upon it to touch it. (The Pilgrimage of Egeria)

For Good Friday at Christ Church, we follow the liturgy in the Book of
Common Prayer. It differs in some significant ways from the regular
Eucharist we celebrate on Sundays. Instead of the Prayers of the People,
we hear a series of collects (aptly named “the Solemn Collects”) that offer
prayers for the church and the world, for those who suffer and those who
seek faith). After the collects comes the central moment, the entrance of
the cross. The cross we use is not an elaborate one-it’s not made of nice
wood, or stained a beautiful color. It’s two rough sticks, bound together,
found in the woods. After the cross enters, we are all invited to reverenceto
bow, to kiss, to kneel, or just to stand and wonder at the mystery of that
symbol, an object of shame and violence transformed into life and love.
On Good Friday we don’t celebrate the Eucharist. The preacher Barbara
Brown Taylor has said that Good Friday is the quietest day of the year-part
of that silence is not celebrating the sacrament. In recognition of our need
to be fed, however, we do share communion (the bread and wine having
been consecrated at the service on Maundy Thursday). On Good Friday
at 6pm, we’re also having a special service of Stations of the Cross for
Children, continuing the conversation begun at the children’s sermon on
Palm Sunday.

The Great Vigil of Easter
The Easter Vigil is just that – a Vigil – we enter a darkened church, after lighting
the Pascal candle from the “new fire” of Easter outside the church and
then we process in singing, “The light of Christ,” and hear the stories of our
salvation from the Hebrew Scriptures. Halfway through the service, Easter
begins! We ring in our celebration with bells and more light (so remember
to bring your own bell to ring). We reaffirm our baptismal covenant (if there
aren’t baptisms to celebrate) and are sprinkled with holy water. The service
continues with a festive Eucharist, with incense and wonderful Easter
hymns. The alleluias will be back! The first time we did it at Christ Church (I
think in 2009), someone commented, “That is the Easter-est it’s ever been!”
Indeed.

Please join us for the whole journey!
Tuesday, 7 pm: Stations of the Cross
Thursday, 7 pm: Maundy Thursday Liturgy
Thursday, 8 pm-7 am: Vigil at the Altar of Repose
Friday, 12 pm and 7 pm BCP Liturgy for Good Friday
Friday, 6 pm Stations for Children
Saturday, 7 pm The Great Vigil of Easter
Easter Sunday, Holy Eucharist at 8:30 and 10am

A week later, I’m still mentally reeling a little in the wake of the murder of Waltham High student Tyler Zanco last week. I didn’t know him or his family, but something about the murder of a teenager-a child, really-feels like it demands our attention. My son Isaiah turns seven on Saturday-where will he be when he’s 17?

In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the murder of Jorge Fuentes, a parishioner at St Stephen’s in the South End, who came up through the ranks of the B-Ready afterschool program and the B-Safe summer camp program we volunteer with. It was in response to his death that our diocese kicked off the “B Peace” program to work against violence in Boston. Last year we participated in the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace, which we’ll join again this year. The Mother’s Day Walk, too, was founded in memory of a child who died-Louis Brown, whose mother started the Peace Institute in his memory. Louis Brown Peace Institute has partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health in their Peace Zone Curriculum for middle and high school youth They hold the Walk as an annual fundraiser for their work in in peace education and support for survivors of violence. In our diocese, along with support of the walk, the other aspects of the B Peace program are summer jobs for youth and anti-gun work, which has particular resonance with the news coming out this week about one of the alleged perpetrators of last week’s murder.

In this whole bundle of complication and grief, it’s hard to know how to respond. Whatever the circumstances, wherever it happens, it’s still tragic. Spiritually, it feels like it comes back to that question the lawyer asks Jesus when he’s trying to test him-“Who is my neighbor?” We all know how that ends-we become neighbors when we are in community with each other, when we help, when we provide for each others’ needs. Neighborliness isn’t about being part of the same group-on an ordinary day, the traveler in the story and the Samaritan wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other at all-they both would have wanted it that way! We aren’t just neighbors because we are, literally, near ones. Tyler, Jorge, the families who come for diapers, or food, those who wait for the bus outside-these are all “near ones,” but how can we actually become neighbors?

That’s the invitation of the Gospel. I don’t immediately know the answer to how we live into the call to be neighbors-it’s always different. Events like the Mother’s Day walk appeal to me as a way to act-like “Ashes to Go,” for me they fall into the “make the right mistakes” column-it may not fix everything, but it is something. We still need to do more to support our teenagers and make our neighborhoods safe. We still need to do more to get outside of our four walls and share our faith. But we can do this.

This week, I’m still mulling over what it means to “do” Lent-what offering could we possibly make, what could possibly be meaningful to God? One idea from Scripture that has struck me particularly forcefully lately is a line we heard from Psalm 50 from our Tuesday Eucharist:

For every wild animal of the forest is mine… ‘If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High.

And again, the prophet Isaiah on Ash Wednesday-we don’t really quite know how to honor God. On that day, we hear that God chooses a fast of justice-making, not just a fast of abstinence. God wants service to the oppressed, not liturgies and ritual.

Psalm 69 says something like this, too:
I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify God with thanksgiving. This will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs.

We don’t offer sacrifices of animals anymore, but that doesn’t mean this comparison has nothing for us. As I wrote in this space last week, there is something “to” giving things up, not so much for stopping that particular behavior, but to make us more mindful of what we might experience without it. On another level, though, somehow it can feel more ‘worthy” to do things that are hard. Making a sacrifice of just “thanksgiving” somehow doesn’t seem like it would be enough. (note that I’m not even getting into all the theology about Jesus’ sacrifice-for sure it’s linked, but let’s leave it off the table for now)

But, but, but. What if we took seriously the idea that we can offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving? What if gratitude to God could shape us more and more in God’s image? What if offering thanks actually is hard because it’s so simple? Or if we were really thankful for the fact of our own lives, maybe we’d spend more of them doing the work of God? Thanksgiving for gift of life is something that everyone-of every circumstance-can offer. Gratitude to God for life isn’t about the stuff of our life-not about your house or your car or lack thereof. It’s about understanding that it’s not that you would have nothing if not for God, it’s that you would be nothing. Let me say that again: it’s not about having nothing if not for God, it’s about not being in the first place. And that’s quite a paradigm shift.

So give whatever you can-obviously. Give your money, give your time, give your abstinence from whatever it is you’re giving up. But remember, too, as winter turns to spring, the pleasure of oxygen drawn deeply into lungs, the strength of tiny crocuses coming up from underground. Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, for your life and for all there is.

One week in, I hope you’ve been able to enter into Lent in a peaceable way. I almost wrote offering hopes for a “good start” to Lent, which sounds like it’s a race or something we’re trying to accomplish, which it’s not, exactly. But we are going somewhere.

So what is it? This time of year, I often remember Dorothy Day’s desire in her work in creating the Catholic Worker Houses-she said she wanted to create a society in which it was easy to be good. I think Lent is a time when we try to take on practices that make it easier to be close to God; of course we’re not distant from God at other times of year, but in Lent we’re invited to a certain sense of quiet intimacy with our Creator that the dynamism of Easter or the long days of summer Pentecost don’t exactly share. A colleague’s wife, Joy Howard has written about the traditional Lenten practices of giving alms, praying, and fasting. She recasts them as “three C’s” – compassion, connection, and clarity.

Compassion: we give to others because we are moved by the Spirit of God and see Christ in them. Compassion is different from pity-compassion moves us to respond to the needs of others, whereas pity keeps them at arm’s length, separated from us. Pitying “the poor” makes “them” different, not “our kind.” Being compassionate, though, allows God to move through my heart in action, not just words.

Connection: we pray. We pray to be more deeply connected to God, and we pray to be conncted to each other. We had some wonderful conversations in our Lent groups this week (you can still join!) about how we are made in the image of God-and how it can be hard to remember that. In prayer, we remember who we are-beloved children of God. That opens our hearts to each other (see: compassion) and allows us to respond with grace. The 2014 www.prayworshipserve.org challenge invites us to give 20 minutes a day to prayer, one hour a week to going to church, and four hours a month to service. If you can’t pray for 20 minutes, what about ten?

Clarity: we fast. You don’t have to give something up for Lent, but if you were to, what could it be? Think beyond the usual stalwarts of chocolate and alcohol. What about excess noise? What about shopping for stuff you might not need? What about gossip or complaining? Is there anything that would help you simplify or look more clearly at your life? My Lenten discipline for the last three years has been fairly minor, in that I give up the radio in the car. I’m an NPR junkie with a 20-30 minute drive to work, so taking that extra sound out of my life has created 40-60 extra minutes of silence in my day. There’s nothing wrong with knowing what’s going on in the world-it’s really important!-but to spend some extra time witnessing the chaos and noise of my chattering brain is always kind of sobering, an effect that usually lasts for a while even after I happily return to Bob Oakes in the morning.

I’m a big fan of the phrase “Pray as you can, not as you can’t”-don’t spend too much time regretting what you think isn’t possible. But don’t take it as an excuse that your life doesn’t permit you to do one BIG thing to get you off the hook of doing the little things you can.

Here are a few other resources:
The Daily Office online: also a podcast.
Hear Scripture and the ancient prayers of the church. Pray together with others knowing that they hear and say the same words, whether or not you’re in the same room. (it’s in the Book of Common Prayer, too-you can even do it without a screen!) Also check out our local monastery, SSJE, and their Give us a Word series.

How’s your charitable giving? Is your pledge to church really where it could be? Could you add some extra giving to a community charity like the Community Day Center or the Waltham Family School?

As you know, next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, but there is some partying to be done before then. We’re doing both jazz Mardi Gras (Friday, 6pm, Steve Taddeo concert) and taking up the traditional English practice of eating pancakes before Lent, using up the indulgent eggs and butter before the Lenten fast. On Sunday, we also celebrate and offer our thanks to Bishop Shaw, who retires this year, along with our partner congregation, St Peter’s Ugandan Anglican, who will join us for worship.

Ash Wednesday morning, we begin with ashes at the train station. This year, we’re partnering with Chaplains on the Way, which I particularly appreciate since, as a mostly-homeless ministry, the street is their church. I wonder about how many people, who, for whatever reason, don’t feel comfortable coming into a church, and how powerful a witness it is to leave our comfort zone of having people come to us. Will someone have a more “deep” experience in coming to church? As a priest I’d probably hope so, but I also shouldn’t make assumptions about what happens between an individual and God, no matter where they’re standing. I heard a quote about meditation once that said that you could open the window, but you couldn’t make the breeze come in. That probably applies here-when fewer and fewer people having traditional church backgrounds, we need to throw open as many windows as we can.

It’s not an easy question, though-how far can you go from tradition before you’ve lost the center of what you’re committed to in the first place? What are we inviting people toward if we compromise too far? How much do we ask of people who come to have a child baptized? Do they have to come for a few weeks, months, a year? Do they have to officially join the parish by making a financial pledge? What about receiving communion? It’s the practice in our diocese in many places, including Christ Church, to offer communion to everyone, whether or not they’re baptized. The prayer book and church canons say baptism should come first. Here, again it trying to open the windows.

Adherence to tradition is one of those places where we strive for faithfulness, not necessarily the 100% always-and-everywhere-iron-clad rule. Faithfulness, it seems to me, is deciding which side you’re going to err on. Will we be devoted to orthodoxy or openness? What’s at stake on both sides? There are a lot of times when I defer to tradition-the Nicene Creed, for example-but here, I think there is actually something to say for asking what Jesus would do. His first goal, most often, was to get people to the table. Once you’re there, you can talk more, debate, pick sides. As the parable in Luke 14 tells it, when the nice, qualified guests wouldn’t come for the feast, the host told his servant quite unequivocally: “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” When he does that and there’s still space, he goes out to make everybody else come in. Would it have been a better party if the well-educated and polite people had come? It’s completely possible. Would they have appreciated the expensive wine more? Maybe. But that’s not what God’s table is about.

I do appreciate, though, that it’s a discussion to be had. It’s not an uncontroversial stance, it’s not an “of course!” moment. And once-if-this gets settled, there will be something else to struggle with. As we grow into the church we’re called to be, we are trying to follow a Jesus who’s always just a little ahead, taking us a little further than we thought we could go.

Last Sunday in my sermon, I was thinking with you about how in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was trying to bring his listeners somewhere. He wasn’t just teaching, he was preaching. Our selection was not the nice and warm parts we associate with the Sermon on the Mount-instead of blessing, we heard him use shocking language about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes that cause us to sin: more maniacal dictator than savior. In doing the work of interpretation, we can hear that Jesus is offering a sermon, not an instruction manual for sound living. These wild words speak to imagination, not obedience. Jesus is telling the people to imagine, really imagine, to know that it’s possible to be free from sin. It’s not as simple as plucking out an eye, it’s not even as simple as declaring that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. Instead, it’s possible by God’s grace, in resurrection and love. As Christians we learn that is a reality beyond sin and brokenness. Whatever shame or violence or hatred we are stuck in, there is a way out.

Jesus uses shocking language because his listeners, like us, need a little prod to pay attention. I recently came across a wonderful book review of Alexandra Horowicz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. Realizing how city living had dulled her senses, Horowicz took eleven different walks around her neighborhood, trying to share the perspective of her companions-various “experts” from her dog, to her toddler, to a geologist and a font specialist. Her walk with a blind acquaintance is one of the most evocative.

Some of our obliviousness is a survival strategy; if my mind judged the new burger special at Wendy’s to be as important as whether or not a car was turning into the street in front of me, I wouldn’t live very long. I want to listen to the person in front of me talking about her family, not the sound of traffic outside, and I would be a bad priest if I didn’t were putting my attention elsewhere. The problem comes when we get cagey in our selection; where our ignor-ance is willful or inflicts pain, where we don’t see because we just don’t want to deal.

Horowicz writes,
Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

This awareness of our unawareness has particular theological significance. I wonder about what would have happened between Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis if they could have seen each other more clearly, untethered by racism or anger; protesters and police in the Ukraine; or Pussy Riot and Vladimir Putin in Russia. On a personal and global scale, we need a wider lens.

This Sunday, we welcome Allison Reynolds- Berry, a community organizer from REACH to tell us about their “Say Hi” campaign (read more below). Small actions like knowing our neighbors and actually seeing each other make for a safer, and stronger, community. Violence at home is an isolating experience, but when people are connected to each other, it can be easier to leave an abusive situation. How can we see our neighbors, our near ones, more clearly? How can we see the work of God around us more profoundly? Where are we not looking, and what can we see?

This week, as I was talking with you in my sermon on Sunday, I’m still thinking about the interplay of church as organization and church as people. The buzzword in church circles is “missional”-the focus is on how we are living the mission of God, not on how we organize ourselves or how we provide a service (we are not like manicurists or exterminators, for example, though we do emphasize service to the world). It’s hard not to fall into a consumerist way of relating. Our contemporary culture just uses that language; it’s convenient. Who is our market? How can we promote our message to resonate with them? How are we meeting the needs of our funders? What balance of challenge and inspiration, happy music and solemn music, will please our patrons?

We do need to be accountable, and the opinions of those who gather do matter, but we are the church because God has a mission in the world, not because we want to strengthen our organization or please ourselves. The sacraments are food for our souls and we come because we are hungry, but we also believe that feeding that particular hunger makes us attuned to other kinds of hunger in the world. We are healed at the altar and reminded of our deep worthiness as children of God so we can go out in the world and join in God’s work of healing others. That’s mission-that’s church as body, not church as service provider. We want a strong organization to serve the mission, but the organization is not the mission.

Understanding ourselves as a gathered body instead of a corporation frees us in a really particular way. This is what Simon and Andrew learned when they started fishing for people-it’s God’s mission, not theirs, and they’re free to succeed or fail, as long as they’re listening. The question for us is how to listen. Listen to our city, to where we are called to be in ministry. Listen to each other, to how we can help each other hear the call of God in our lives. When you coach your kid’s sport’s team, that’s part of God’s call for you. When you stand on the Common for the peace vigil, that’s part of God’s call for you. When you watch your grandkids after school, it’s God’s call.We don’t just live out our call as Christians within these four walls.

I wrote two weeks ago about the small group model we are considering for Lent education, beginning on Tuesday, March 11. It’s beginning to be a bit more fleshed out, and we’ve settled on reading the book The Restoration Project by Christopher Martin, whom I met at a conference last year. Martin uses the restoration of Leonardo DaVinci’s painting, the Last Supper, as a metaphor for how we can be restored to the image of God, and how our parishes can be home bases for transformation of the self as well as the world. The theological model he uses is based on the steps of humility set out by St Benedict in his Rule of Life. Christopher is a priest and a father of two, so at the same time as the method is steeped in Christian tradition and monasticism, it’s also very practical and tied to the life of ordinary people living now. The hope in beginning these smaller groups is to be able to support one another in all the different ways we live out our callings as Christians, as well as to know each other on a deeper level.

As she has generously done for the last two years, Erin Jensen will coordinate children’s education with a mix of Godly Play and other projects. Everyone is welcome to come for dinner at 6pm, and then the first education portion for children and adults will be from 6:40 to 7:30, with our simple meditative Eucharist at 7:30. What’s different this year is that there will be a second group that will convene with the same content after the service, so if you can’t make it as early as 6 you can still participate, joining at the Eucharist at 7:30 or just the group beginning at 8. If there is interest, there would also be a daytime group, so please let us know if that works better for you. Contact Anna Jones with questions. If the groups are successful, they may continue beyond Lent, but we’ll start for five weeks to begin with.