Lent 3 Yr C St MArk's Orchard Park Our mistakes won’t define us as long as we learn from them and move on.

+ I bring you greetings from Bishop Bill and I thank Fr. Sean for inviting me to be here today.
Can you believe that we’re already halfway through Lent?!
So…how are those Lenten Disciplines going? How’s not eating chocolate? Not yelling at your kids? How’s that extra prayer discipline going? That commitment to doing daily acts of mercy? How’s that commitment to not using a certain finger gesture while driving?
    When I was a parish priest, it was just about this point of Lent when parishioners would sidle up to me confessing that they’d faltered in their Lenten discipline. They were discouraged, ashamed and feeling like a failure.
It’s easy to feel that way when we haven’t reached a goal we were so committed to.
     
Do you remember a few years ago when, as part of the One Diocese, One Book, One season program many of us read the book Flunking Sainthood?  That book speaks to this very issue of not quite being the saint we aspired to be. The premise of Flunking Sainthood is pretty simple: God’s grace, and our receiving of it, comes in many different forms and our job, as people who long for that grace, is to find the method of reception that best works for us. Not what works best for your neighbor, not what works best for your priest or your Bishop, or your spouse, or your parents…what works best for YOU.
Because while we’re all very similar, we’re also quite different. Since the beginning of time humans have been seeking, searching, longing to engage with, be touched by, The Divine. We search for meaning; we long for protection, we hope for the Grace of a supreme being to pour over us and all those whom we love.
But we’re also different, so vastly and wonderfully different in how we search, in how we long and in how we hope. Where we run into trouble is forgetting that God LOVES our differences and willingly—longingly---reaches out to us in these varied ways, relishing in the truth that what you find sacred I may find silly and what I find sacred you may find absurd.
I think it’s just human nature that really wants our way of prayer, of worship, of being receptive to God’s Spirit,  to be THE way and we spend a lot of energy trying to PROVE that another way, a different way is the wrong way. Because if your way is the wrong way then my way must be the right way.
PHEW. It’s all very competitive. And exhausting. And   frustrating.
 And for God,  it just must be exasperating!
     Speaking of exasperating—listen to the folks in today’s Gospel. “Jesus, did you hear what Pilate did? Jeeeeeeesus did you hear…Those Galilleans …how bad was their sin, how much did they mess up? C’mon Jesus, SPILL---how BAD WERE THEY?” They want Jesus to tell them that they’re better, that they’re right, that they’re not flunking sainthood, that, instead they’re excelling at sainthood.
      Of course, Jesus doesn’t do that at all. In fact Jesus puts them in their place…and in turn, of course, he puts us in our place too.
    Jesus tells us ---it isn’t the sinning that gets us into trouble, it’s what we do about the sinning that gets us into trouble. Sinning—making a mistake, moving us farther away from God—is unfortunate. None of us really want to do it but we all do…not because we’re bad, but because mistakes are simply a part of the human condition…. we all sin. Jesus is saying----“you who are without sin, cast the first stone”---he’s saying: “listen folks, YOU’RE ALL SINNERS. Get over yourselves. Instead of being so concerned with your neighbor’s mistakes, why don’t you spend some time with your own—come to terms with them, accept that they’ve been made and set out to learn from them! Repent, and move on.”
     Jesus is telling us to engage in reflection and amendment of life. To take stock of all that we’ve done and all we’ve left undone and make a decision to learn from our mistakes, get up and try again. To, like that fig tree we heard about at the end of the Gospel, loosen up our soil and try this fruit-bearing thing one more time.
      By reading today’s Gospel at face value only, one might presume that God is in the judging and punishing business. But I think, as we delve a little deeper, it becomes clear that God is, instead, in the witnessing and urging business.
       God is always present, God sees what we do, God knows our intent, God witnesses the result. When we miss the mark, when we move away from instead of toward God, God has one hope—that we realize our misstep and, in the words of the church, Repent.
       Repenting is realizing a mistake. Repenting is admitting that mistake. Repenting is learning from that mistake and moving on. Our mistakes define us only when we wallow in them, when we are paralyzed by them.

 Our mistakes won’t define us as long as we learn from them and move on.

     So back to this idea of Flunking Sainthood; in the book the author, in her effort to find the perfect spiritual practice to bring her closer to God, the perfect practice to make her an excellent Christian, makes a ton of mistakes. And for a good portion of the book she allows those mistakes to define her…but, in the end…she realizes that the mistakes aren’t the end of the journey, they are simply part of the journey.

The journey is what matters. All of us are on a journey that begins and ends in God.

Each of our readings this morning reflects this journey. This journey of longing, deep in our souls, for God. A yearning expressed by the psalmist as a “thirst for God.” A thirst for God that at times causes us to feel so parched we fear never having that thirst quenched. But, as Paul reminds us in his letter to the church in Corinth, God is faithful. God will never let us die of that thirst, for God is always with us on this journey, offering the refreshing, life-giving cup of eternal salvation. All we need to do is take it, in whatever way works for us, and drink.
Amen.

Wrestling with God as a Lenten Discipline Lent 1 Holy Communion, Lakeview February 14, 2016

       Today, as we settle into the first full week of Lent we have a great opportunity to spend some time considering that all time favorite Lenten topic: Sin.
I am prone to insomnia and nine times out of ten my insomnia isn’t because I drank too much coffee, it’s because I’m doing my best impersonation of Jacob by wrestling God. I toss and turn all night running some problem over and over in my head. When in the grips of insomnia I am in the grip of sin because I am holding onto a problem, a concern, a worry that, frankly I need to turn over to God. My insomnia doesn’t leave God any room. There’s only one explanation for me boxing out God, for holding onto a problem throughout a long sleepless night: I’m not trusting God to handle it. I convince myself that I have to come up with the solution myself, that it isn’t worth God’s time and concern….that God couldn’t be bothered.
In other words, I SHUT GOD OUT. And right there, in those three little words, is a perfect definition of sin: shutting God out. You see sin isn’t just some laundry list of misdeeds that we need to atone for before being in God’s favor. We are ALWAYS in God’s favor, we’re always God’s beloved. But when we close the door on our relationship with God, when we shut God out, we harm ourselves. And us being hurt? That’s what hurts God.  Closing the door on our relationship with God hurts us so in turn, God is hurt. That’s sin.
Therefore, the heart of our Lenten journey is to do whatever we can to LET GOD IN. It’s about entering into an active and trusting relationship with God.
     Faith is all about relationship…. our relationships with each other, our relationship to all those whom we encounter outside these doors, but above all else, faith is about the relationship we have with God and the relationship we allow God to have with us.
 Let me explain:
      Our life is on a continuum….every decision we make, every action moves us on this continuum. At one end is God at the other end is what some people might call Satan, others might call darkness, still others call evil and what I call “Not God.”  What we do—all day, every day--- either moves us closer to or farther away, from God.
     Are you moving toward God or away? Are your choices fueled by light and grace or by darkness and despair? Do you trust God? I mean really trust God?
        In today’s Gospel Jesus trusted God. And boy, did that tick off the forces of darkness, the evil one, the Not God in our world. Jesus and Satan have a wrestling match of their own in the wilderness. And guess who wins?
Remember, Jesus has just been baptized, anointed as “God’s beloved,”when he’s thrust into 40 days of blistering heat, endless hunger, heart wrenching loneliness and 40 nights of bitter cold, desperate sleeplessness, and terrifying visions. The Devil is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at our Lord but because Jesus refuses to shut God out, because Jesus trusts in God no matter what; the temptations of the darkness, the evil forces of this world, the pull of His humanity don’t win. In today’s Gospel, light defeats dark, hope overwhelms despair, Love beats hate and the march of God’s goodness continues on its way.
        Today’s Gospel gives us hope; hope that as we begin our Lenten journey, the steady drumbeat of the light of Christ given to us at Christmas and Epiphany will fuel us.
And that’s good news because to really do up Lent right, we need that light. For it’s the light of Christ that shines in all the dark corners of our lives. You know those parts of us that we hide from, those things we left undone, or those things we’ve done that we wish we could undo.
    The work of Lent is opening up space for God to come in and help us with the spring (or in the case of this year, deep winter)-cleaning of our souls. In Lent we change the rhythm of our lives… not just so we can say that we successfully avoided chocolate or red meat or swearing or smoking for these 40 days, no we change the rhythm of our lives so that God can slip in and show up in the most unexpected places.
     And this is where it can get a little tricky… changing the rhythm of our lives makes us vulnerable. Being vulnerable is a frightening prospect---look at how vulnerable Jesus was during those 40 days in the wilderness. He had two choices as the devil led him around: stay in fear and trepidation, holding on for dear life, or move into trust and faith, letting Go and letting God.
Guess what? We are faced with this same choice each and every day….we can give into darkness or we can trust the light. We can hold on to our fear or we can let Go and let God.
Lent is about turning our hungers, our fears, our doubts and our worry over to God because this is what Lent’s all about; it’s learning how to trust that God is always the one we can turn too, that God is always the one who can feed our hungers like no one or no thing else.
 
    So welcome to Lent, where we learn that the sin of our wrestling matches with God is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to embrace, because it’s only in experiencing some dark nights of Not God that we can gain the courage and the trust to move fully and wholly into the bright days of Only God. And for that, we say Thanks be to God. Amen+

Ash Wednesday 2016--St Andrew's Burt

+A couple of years ago, at the church I used to serve, Good Shepherd Buffalo, An 8 yr. old boy, at our Shrove Tuesday Pancake supper ask me a pretty profound question: “what’s with these ashes? I don’t understand.”
What a great question, right?
And you know what?
In over eight years of ordained ministry no one-- NO ONE-- has ever asked me what Ash Wednesday was all about. And I don’t think that’s because everyone knows what’s with these ashes… I think we just don’t think about it all that much.
                  So what IS with these ashes?
       Ash Wednesday is a day in our church year reserved for our humanity. Our utter and complete and thorough humanity.
Ash Wednesday is a day when that humanity is spread out in front of us. In all its dustiness.
Ash Wednesday is a day to remember that without God, all that we are---all the stuff that makes us uniquely us----is nothing but dust. Ash Wednesday is a day to remember that Without God we are empty, we are dull, we are without substance.
                  Without God we are just dust.
Ash Wednesday marks the first day of Lent and Lent is the forty-day journey when we strive to open ourselves to God, to re-engage in a relationship with God. Lent is a journey from us to God and back again. Lent is a season for getting to know God and inviting God to get to know us…the real, full and true, us. On Ash Wednesday we open our dustiness to the cleansing grace of God. It’s the first day of our Lenten trek to Easter, a journey to intentionally show God more than just the spit and polish shiny “us” of Sundays, a journey where we expose God to the fullness of who we are--from the glorious, prayerful and committed Christian parts of us to the darker, more doubting, more despairing, more self-loathing, yes even more sinful and wretched parts of us.
                      So what about these ashes?
Well as I told that young man, when these ashes are pressed into your skin, remember this: without God, we are nothing but dust.
But with God?
Well with God we are all that we can dream, all that we can imagine, all that we can long for.
                           And then some.
      My wish for all of us, is that we have a well-done Lent.   

A well-done Lent allows God plenty of room and plenty of time to get to know us, the good the bad and the ugly.
A well-done Lent allows us to get to know God—the forgiving, loving and delighted God who wants nothing more than to meet us with joy at the empty tomb.
A well-done Lent begins with the dust of our mortality and ends in the resurrection light of Love on Easter morning.
 A well-done Lent is forty days of making room for the God who creates amazing, astounding and wonderful things out of dust. The dust of you and the dust of me.
       So, as those dusty ashes are pressed into your skin tonight remember that while you are but dust, you can be, you will be and you are, so very much more, thanks be to God.
May these forty days be a dust clearing, hope starting, love expressing journey into a deeper more honest relationship with our Creator; a God, who working in us, can do so much more than we can ever ask or imagine.
Amen.

Last Epiphany Yr C God's Glory Cannot Be Contained

+Have you ever been transfigured-- been so affected by an experience that your actual appearance—how you look… how you carry yourself…. changes? It can be negative—when something horrible happens and the wind is taken out of your sails, or positive, you’re in love, you’ve gotten your life back on track after some rough spots. Something about how you appear, how you present yourself to the world changes…and it shows!
But sometimes the causes of these transformations, these transfigurations aren’t as easily explained. They’re more mysterious, less concrete.
These experiences of the Divine, these experiences of the sacred are described, in Celtic culture, as Thin Places.
Thin Places are those times, those moments, those experiences when one feels especially close to the Divine. When one feels incredibly small--miniscule in the whole of the universe--- and yet also larger than life, one with God, one with all of Creation.
Maybe it occurs when witnessing a gorgeous sunset, or maybe after the birth of a child. But it can also happen  in the midst of an ordinary day—driving the car, washing the dishes, checking Facebook. Thin Places are available to us all, at any time and in any place, because thin places occur when we let the guard of our humanity down long enough for the fullness of the divine to breakthrough.
I think that the Transfiguration—what happened to Jesus on that mountaintop in today’s gospel--- was a “Thin Place experience” for James, John and Peter. Now, I don’t know what exactly happened on that mountaintop ---who knows what the actual facts are, but I believe that what happened was “transfigurative” for Jesus, transformative for his friends and sacred for us all.
As we prepare for the beginning of Lent on Wednesday, we’ve fast forwarded a bit. Moving from the early part of Jesus’ ministry, to the latter part when, once and for all, he turns his followers toward Jerusalem where everything will come to a head.
This is going to be a tough journey and Jesus needs his friends with him. He needs them to get it. He needs them to prepare. He needs them ready for the increased scrutiny, for the arrest, for the torture, for the death, for Jesus being gone. Not only do they need to be ready for it all to happen, they have to be ready to feel all the emotions connected to it---They need to feel it, for only in feeling it---really feeling it---will they be open to the ultimate Thin Place: the glory, wonder and awe of the Resurrection.
And, as usual,  they aren’t getting it. Maybe they don’t want to, maybe they simply can’t. And so Jesus takes them up the mountain to pray. Jesus, throughout scripture, would take retreat times-- going off by himself to pray--- and in his wisdom he knew James, John and Peter needed to get away too. They needed needed to lessen the distractions of their everyday life to get quiet enough, open enough and hopefully willing enough to let God break through. By going up the mountain, they get away, they retreat, they quiet all the noise of the world.
It’s then and only then, when they shut off the noise, that this “thing” , this “transfiguration” happens. Jesus’ appearance, his countenance changes. As one commentator puts it: “The indwelling Deity darted out its rays through the veil of Jesus’ flesh; His face shone with Divine majesty, like the sun in its strength. ”
 At that transfiguring moment, God’s glory could no longer be contained within Jesus…it burst forth, all over that mountaintop, all over James, John and Peter, and all over us.
Sometimes, God’s glory just can’t be contained. Sometimes it overflows, overwhelming our senses.
That’s what happens in Thin places: we’re overwhelmed by God’s Glory. In Thin Places, God’s Glory can no longer be contained.
Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary was a Thin Place, as was Christmas morning, Jesus’ baptism, and the Presentation of Jesus in the temple. Each of these moments were times when, in the course of a routine action---Mary going about the household duties of a young Galilean woman, the birth of a baby to a poor traveling couple, the baptism of a follower of John, the fulfilling of Jewish purity laws by a devout Jewish couple, and the quick trip up a mountain for some retreat time with friends----in the course of these ordinary events, God’s radiance bursts through, our efforts to shut the Divine out of our lives, the noise of daily life which tries to outshine the radiance of God, fails, and we’re overwhelmed with what is pure and holy and sacred.
The truth is, our humanity can’t manage a steady diet of this radiance. We spend a lot of time and energy layering “life” upon the in-breaking of the Holy—the radiance of God. Therefore, moments of the Holy, Thin Place experiences--- are usually fleeting. Not because God retreats, but, because the power of God’s presence is so overwhelming, we reach back into the familiar—the noise of daily life--to ground ourselves in the routine, the ordinary and unchallenging ebb and flow of our days.
This is why we read the story of the Transfiguration right before Lent. On Wednesday we embark on a stripping down, a quieting, a simplifying of our daily life. In Lent we prepare ourselves for an encounter with the Divine and this story-- this account of a Thin Place experience-- plants something deep within us. Something transformative, that, as we settle into the barrenness of Lent, marinates, stirs, and grows so that, like James, John and Peter, when we walk that walk to Calvary, when we weep with Mary at the foot of the cross, when we linger in the seeming finality of death on Holy Saturday we are strengthened. Strengthened to feel that loss, to realize what life is like without the Divine Radiance of God through Christ. So that, just when the rigors of Lent, the nakedness of the desert, and the restriction of discipline becomes too much, when our senses long for stimulation, we stumble upon the empty tomb….overwhelmed –not by the sights and sounds of our daily world, but by the radiance of the Divine which, this time, will burst forth from our own skin, crying out Alleluia, God is alive, Alleluia, we are alive.
Amen.