Author Archives: Andy Jones

Unknown's avatar

About Andy Jones

A retired Episcopal Priest living in Madison, Wisconsin.

I Will Bless You, and You Will Be a Blessing: A Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter

Posted on by
Reply

The Very Rev. Andrew B. Jones

May 13th, 2012

Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church – Madison, Wisconsin

This sermon is based on the readings for the 6th Sunday of Easter in year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.  You can find those readings here.

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning is only a few short lines.  So as we read through it we may be tempted to rush ahead to our Gospel text of the day.  Baptizing Gentiles doesn’t seem like such a big deal to us in this day and age so let’s just jump straight to what Jesus has to say about love!  But if we take another look at the reading from Acts and read it in its context, read it thinking about the themes of the book of Acts, we begin to recognize that this is a passage fraught with conflict: fraught with potential and hope.  It is a passage that demands our attention today.

It says in this passage that the Holy Spirit descended upon a group of people and Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47)  Apparently, someone has been saying that the Gentiles should not be baptized.  We get another clues as to what has been happening when we go back a few more lines and read that “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles…” (Acts 10:45) people who they thought were on the “outside.”  The leaders of “The Way, this new faith, this new idea about how to be in relationship with God were in conflict with one another.  Should converts to the faith be required to be circumcised according to the Jewish tradition and Mosaic Law in order to participate in this community?

There was a lot at stake here for Peter and the leaders of the early church.  They are members of a new and growing movement trying to understand how to live out their new faith and their new understanding and to integrate that with their Jewish identity.  At the same time this new movement is under the scrutiny and suspicion of Rome who is very concerned about this movement’s ability to claim people’s allegiance and to subvert their fealty to the Emperor.  This new way of being is also being regarded with great suspicion and hostility by the temple authorities, the Scribes and the Pharisees who, even as we approach the day of the destruction of the Temple and the end of Temple Judaism, are concerned and angered by claims that Jesus is the Messiah.  They are anxious about the competing claims of this new group in their midst.  They are also angry about the ministry and preaching of that radical, liberal malcontent who is claiming that God’s love and grace is open to everyone… even to the Gentiles.  You know… that radical, liberal malcontent Paul!

Paul, whose ministry and teaching is in conflict with the Temple authorities, is also in conflict with Peter and the leaders of the early church.  Paul is saying that people who are converted to the faith from outside of Judaism should not be required to undergo circumcision in order to become members, and Peter and the leaders of the church have been fighting him.  But here, in this moment, Peter meets a group of Gentiles and he learns that he must in fact offer them the sacrament that forms us as the church, and that he must offer that sacrament without asking them to become circumcised.

What evidence do Peter and his group of “circumcised believers” find that causes them to change their minds?  After all, in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis God makes a covenant with Abraham and in that covenant makes a lot of promises to Abraham and to the people of Israel through him:

“I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. 8And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:6-8).

These promises are so deeply imbedded within the people of Israel that even as they come to this new faith they are clinging to them, to the reality and to the understanding that this is not something new, this is not something drastically different.  This is a fulfillment of the faith and the promises that were established in their forefathers, the faith that they have understood and held all of their lives.

In that seventeenth chapter of Genesis God goes on and tells Abraham that his part in this covenant is to circumcise every male among his people.

“You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Genesis 17:11).

And a few short lines later God says:

“Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (17:14).

So as Peter and the leaders of the church, in this new and evolving culture and context, with hostility from the synagogue and from Rome confronting them on every side, trying to understand how to be faithful and to live out the teachings of Jesus, are confronted by people who have not been circumcised and yet want to be baptized… they are deeply troubled.

What could make them change their minds?  All along they have been saying “no” to requests like this one.  Something must have shifted their position!   What, short of the very teachings of Jesus himself, could have led them to affect this radical shift in their understanding?

But if you go back and read through the Gospels, through Jesus’ teachings, Jesus doesn’t say anything about circumcision!  We know that he himself was circumcised.  We have that story in our sacred texts.  And we know that Jesus says through his words and actions, over and over again, that the Kingdom of God is for all people.  But Jesus himself does not address the specific issue of circumcision.  He doesn’t ever say whether or not circumcision is a requirement for being a member of his Body, the Church.  So by what evidence do Peter and his colleagues abandon this requirement that is as old as the book of Genesis?

Go back to our passage from the book of Acts and we will see that it was the presence of the Holy Spirit in those who sought the sacrament of Baptism that convinced Peter that he must in fact offer them this blessing.  The people there began to speak in tongues and to extoll God.  Peter and his friends saw this as evidence of the Holy Spirit in these people.  God was already there.  God was already present in these people.  How could they possibly refuse to baptize them?

Now that may seem like a radical thing to do: to overturn all those years of tradition and that sense of scripture based on what seems to be their subjective observation of an event in their lives there in that moment.  But there is scriptural warrant for this kind of interpretation and this kind of change.

In the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus says:

 ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:25-31).

Two chapters later in the Gospel of John Jesus says:

 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16.12-13).

Jesus himself says that revelation will be on going, that the holy Spirit will come and will guide us into change, that the Holy Spirit will move us forward, and that God is not done speaking yet.

So when Peter and his colleagues encounter these Gentiles who begin to speak in tongues and to extoll God, and they perceive this to be a manifestation of the fruits of the spirit, they baptize them.

We are reading this morning from the 10th chapter of Acts and really, this is the beginning of the end of this conflict.  The conflict between Paul, with his radical liberal views, and Peter and the circumcised believers has been building for the first ten chapters of the book of Acts, in chapter 15 it comes to a head.  In chapter 15 Paul and Barnabas are talking to other church leaders in Antioch and we read:

“And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders. So they were sent on their way by the church…” (Acts 15:2-3).

No small dissension and debate!  They were sent on their way to meet with Peter and the elders of the church.  Seems to me they were going to General Convention.  In the end Paul and Barnabas prevailed.  After a long and serious conversation Peter stood up and said to the rest of the church:

“My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15:7-9).

So just to make sure we understand what we are talking about here… We have the early church struggling to find its way forward, struggling to define its mission and vocation to the rest of the world.  It is doing that in a context that is shifting dramatically and there is opposition from the culture around them, and from those in authority over the nation of Israel.  There is dissension within the church itself.  And then they are confronted with something that seems to go against the scriptures that they hold sacred and which challenges the very core of their beliefs.  These uncircumcised Gentiles have come seeking the sacrament of baptism, the sacrament that binds us one to another and makes us the church.  And in the face of that challenge, the church changes and offers that sacrament because of its faith and trust in the manifestation of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Just to make sure that we understand what we are talking about… we are talking about the sacrament of baptism.  But all week long, as I wrestled with these passages, I was confronted by the reality that we could just as well be talking about the sacrament of marriage.

On Tuesday night this week we gathered with a group of people here in Madison at Saint Luke’s, to talk about the materials that have been presented to General Convention by the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.  We looked at the thirty-eight year history of legislation in General Convention around the blessing of same gender unions.  We read through the theological points being offered for consideration by the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.  We looked at the materials they have developed to prepare people in same gender unions to have their union blessed.  We looked at the extensive study guide that they have prepared to help congregations and dioceses discern whether or not they are called to participate in the three-year trial use of the liturgy that they have developed.  And we sat together in that space and we read through the liturgy.

Before we began that reading there were people in the room who were uncomfortable with what we were doing.  They were uncomfortable with the idea that we were considering this at all.  There were other people who felt that this is not enough.  “It’s a blessing not a marriage and why can’t we have the same sacrament that everyone else has?”  By the time we finished reading that liturgy everyone in the room was in a very different place…

A very powerful experience, a liturgy that recognizes the covenantal nature of relationships and makes room for the church to offer it’s blessing on two people who have made life long monogamous commitments to one another in the kind of love and joy that is manifested by God’s relationship to us and by God’s relationship to the church.

It was particularly difficult to come home from that meeting on Tuesday night and to learn that the state of North Carolina had passed an amendment to its constitution banning same gender unions, and civil unions, and partnerships: stripping away hospital visitation rights and all sorts of things that married people take for granted.  It was a difficult and strange juxtaposition.

It was even stranger then the next night when I came home from an all day retreat with the Diocesan Executive Council and the Diocesan Strategic Planning Task Force, and heard my son exclaim from his room down the hall that he had just read on Face Book that President Obama had affirmed same sex marriages in a televised interview with a reporter from ABC.  It has been a difficult and tumultuous week.

This issue is not going away.  Our nation is grappling with it.  Our government is grappling with it.  And my brothers and sisters, denominations all across this country are wrestling with this issue right now.

We, and I say that because I believe this is true for most if not all of us,…  I can say without doubt that I know and love many people who love people of the same gender.  And I have perceived holiness of life and the movement of the Holy Spirit in many of those people.  I know many people who are in monogamous, lifelong committed partnerships with people of the same gender and I have seen the fruits of the Spirit and the ends and purposes of marriage served and made manifest in those relationships.  And I believe that we are confronted and convicted by that truth and that the manifestation of the Holy Spirit leading us and teaching us to a new thing.

This summer I am serving as a deputy to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Indianapolis.  Last April I went to a workshop in Atlanta sponsored by the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music as it developed the materials and resources that are now available to all of us in “The Blue Book” so that we can prepare for this conversation at General Convention. I am proud to have been a part of that work.  And I will be voting to allow the three year trial use of this liturgy when we gather at General Convention this summer.

In the time between now and then, and while we are there, I will also be praying.  I will be praying that we in this church and that we in this diocese will be allowed to recognize, and to honor, and to bless the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that we experience in the same gender couples who are members of this parish, who are members of this community, who are members of the Body of Christ, and who are beloved children of God.  I will be praying because I believe, that faced with the evidence of the Spirit’s work among us, we must, must, bless what God is doing in our midst.

Amen.

Sermon for Easter

Posted on by
Reply

Sermon for Easter Day, year B

The Very Rev. Andy Jones

April 8, 2012

The sermon draws on the alternate Gospel reading for Easter Day, year B in the Revised Common Lectionary Cycle.

You can find that reading here.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

All over the world, in places much like this one, people are gathering to hear those words proclaimed!

That Jesus of Nazareth, who preached and taught that the Kingdom of God has come near, that we can experience that kingdom here and now…

Who preached and taught that the Kingdom of God is for all people, for the people on the fringes of society, for the people who have been overlooked by those in power,  for the people who had been thought to be less than acceptable, disposable…

Who preached and taught that the Kingdom of God is for sinners, even sinners like us!

That Jesus of Nazareth, who taught that those who believe in him might experience eternal life in the presence of God.

All over the world, in places much like this one, people are gathering to hear that Jesus of Nazareth who was dead, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, who suffered death and was buried, who descended to the dead… Is Alive!  That he has been raised from the dead!  That he is still among us!  He has not abandoned us!

All over the world in places much like this one, people are gathering to hear and proclaim:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

And with these words the things that Jesus taught us, the things that he said and showed us, take on a new import and meaning.  Words that might have been lost to history, or if not lost, consigned to the pages of dusty tomes in the stacks of obscure libraries have become central to the way that we seek to live our lives.  They have become the center of a faith that has changed the world.  We have placed our trust in them and they have become our Truth, our Faith, our Life.

With those words we have been set free.  With our hope set in Christ’s resurrection we know that we will not die forever.  We will not be annihilated.  There is life beyond what we can see and touch, what we can smell and taste, what we can feel and experience here and now and that life has been promised to us by the one whose resurrected life we celebrate today.

We are set free to live our lives boldly in His name.  We are set free to teach and to proclaim the vision of the Kingdom that He has shown us.  We are set free to challenge injustice wherever we encounter it, to lift up the poor and lowly, to defend the widow and orphan, and to work to bring the kingdom that He described to fruition here and now.

With those words we are set free to risk ourselves for one another with the assurance that we will always be fully embraced and loved by the God in whom we long to live and move and have our being!

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

All over the world today become are gathering to hear and to proclaim those words.  I wonder…  are we here today to hear?  or to proclaim?

The women who went to Jesus’ tomb that morning were certainly there to hear.  It must have been awfully dark that morning.  I know that Mark tells us that they went in the morning when the sun had risen but I am sure that for them, the world was very dark.  They had lost their teacher, their Rabbi.  The person around whom they had built their lives had been taken from them, beaten, humiliated, and hung on a cross to die.  Try to put yourself in their sandals.  It is hard to imagine a darker place.  As they walked to the tomb they had nothing to proclaim but their grief and loss.  I am sure that they would have told you that the world, life, even God had treated them very badly.  Can you imagine anyone who needed to hear our Easter Proclamation more than they did?

Sometimes we arrive at the tomb filled with assurance; a clear and abiding sense of God’s love and presence, “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38,39).  And so we stand outside the entrance of the tomb and cry to anyone who passes by that Christ is risen.  Sometimes we even dare to enter the tomb, of our own volition, where we proclaim with joy that he is risen indeed!

Other times we arrive at the tomb like, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, compelled, against our will, forced into the darkness by events outside of our own control.  Sometimes we arrive at the tomb unable to say the words ourselves, needing more than anything to hear someone else say them in a way that will invite us into the light where we just might be able to breathe once again…

“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him” (Mark 16:6).

The tomb is still empty and he is still out there waiting for us, just beyond the horizon.  Just beyond the limit of our ability to see right now.  Don’t be afraid.

 “…he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16: 7).

All over the world today people are gathering to hear and proclaim these words.  And it should be clear at this moment that it isn’t just the words that are important.  The gathering is important too.  Being called out of the darkness can be a terrifying thing.  It can fill us with amazement and awe that might, in the absence of companions to help us make sense of it all, leave us mute and afraid.  It can also be a scary thing to stand in a world that sees no justification or rationale for the bold claims we make about the kingdom of God.  About its call for justice, dignity, and respect for even the least among us.  And for our need to proclaim the good news of God in Christ.  It can be terrifying to contemplate risking our selves and what we have to speak up for those who do not have the voice to speak for themselves.

We need one another here in this place, in the tomb where the darkness is overcome by the light.  We all need to be here together, those who need to hear and those who need to proclaim, the broken and the healed, the fallen and the lifted up, because it is all of our voices, joined as one, that represent the Body of Christ, left to die upon the cross, and yet alive, living amongst us, as one of us, now and forever as we proclaim;

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Sermon for Good Friday

Posted on by
Reply

Sermon for Good Friday

April 6th, 2012

This sermon stands in the shadow of the Cross on Good Friday.  The Gospel reading for Good Friday is John 18:1 – 19:42.

You can find it here.

 

How has this happened?  How did we get here?  Jesus, the one whom we have been following, who has been teaching us about the Kingdom of Heaven, who has shown us a new way to see God, ourselves and one another…  Jesus whose entry into Jerusalem we celebrated with a parade as we waved palm branches and cried Hosanna… dead… dead on a cross… dead… at our own hands.  How could this have happened, Why did it happen?

We sit here today, our hearts broken, bereft, haunted by these questions as we recount once again the story of the passion.

It is a powerful story, one that has been told for generations, and so as each generation recalls this story as it’s own, it is a story that begins over and over again.  It is a story with many beginnings.

We began our telling of the story today in a garden across the Kidron valley, the place that Jesus took his disciples after he had shared a meal with them and washed their feet.  But if we are in search of answers to the questions that haunt us: how and why, we need to look back to another beginning, to a dream, to a dream that echoes the words of a prophet:

“…an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from his sins.’  All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us’” (Matthew 1:20-23).

God is with us, among us, as one of us.  This claim, this proclamation, this truth which lies at the very core of our faith has proven problematic to many: as Paul says in first Corinthians “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23).  It was problematic to the early church as well.  There were schools of thought within the Christian Community that held that Jesus was not really, not fully human, and there were schools of thought that held that he was not fully God.  And while those movements were judged by the early church to be heresies it would be silly to say that we don’t continue to struggle with Jesus’ “dual citizenship” even today.

It seems after all to be a contradiction in terms, a matter of definition, of ontology.  How could God, from before time and forever, the holy immortal one, creator and ruler of all that is, be at the same time, flesh, bound in time and space to a body, profane, a creature like us?  How could these two incompatible ways of being exist at the same time, in one being without somehow annihilating one another?  Could God be among us as one of us and still be God?  Wouldn’t one somehow cancel the other out?

And yet, even as we sit here today, with Jesus dead on the cross, dead at our own hands, we have the audacity to say:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ

the only Son of God

eternally begotten of the Father

God from God, Light from Light

true God from true God

begotten not made

of one being with the father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

By the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

 

“Came down, became incarnate, and was made man…” Unpack these words, these verbs we use to describe Jesus’ life among us and the metaphysical mystery of Emmanuel, God with us, deepens.  It quickly becomes apparent that if these claims are true something has to move, to change.

If God has come down, become incarnate, been made man… if God has truly shared our nature then either:

God is no longer God: immortal, beyond space and time, holy, pure, and creator,

or

the creation, flesh, time and space, are no longer profane, apart from God, or “dirty,” as our definitions seem to demand.

No wonder “Emmanuel” has proven a stumbling block or foolishness to so many.

So what has changed, God or the World?  “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”  We hear those words in a lot of ways.  Their meaning transcends the bounds of a single explication, of even a Good Friday sermon…  but the trajectory of this line of thinking helps us to narrow our focus a little.

Ours is an incarnational faith.  We believe that God inhabits God’s creation.  God’s presence among us, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, in the person of the Holy Spirit, in the imprint of God’s very image on all that is, makes this world real, important, Holy.  The world that we experience is not, as some would say, an illusion or a veil that we need to move beyond.  The world that we experience is not a prison that we need to escape in order to experience God.  In Jesus, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, we see that God is here, in all that is, in the world that has been given into our care, and that God is present in us, our flesh, the very stuff of which we are made.

What has changed?  Neither God or the World!  It is our understanding of who and what we are, our understanding of the world around us that has changed.  “For us and for our salvation,” God has come into this world in a new and unique way, in a person, flesh and blood, just like you and I, so that we can finally see and understand who and what we are: beloved of God, God’s children, made in the image of God, sacred and Holy.  This has always been true, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”

So now we begin to get to the “how and the why” that haunt us on this day.  Emmanuel, God among us, incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth has died.  That is the way of all flesh.  In the words of a famous theologian, “To be flesh is to be continually dying before God.”  The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ did not begin on Palm Sunday.  It didn’t begin at the Last Supper when he sent Judas to do quickly what he had to do.  It didn’t being in the Garden of Gethsemane where he was betrayed and arrested.  The Passion began at the incarnation, when God committed to doing a new thing and became one of us and walked among us, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood.  Even as an infant lying in a manger Jesus was already dying before God.

But why this death?  Why not just grow old together?  Why doesn’t the story end with Jesus, having spent his entire life teaching us, showing us the way to heaven, and modeling the kind of life that God created us for, dying peacefully in the arms of the beloved disciple, surrounded by his grieving but transformed friends and followers?  Why doesn’t the story end with Jesus being carried off in a whirlwind by a chariot and horses of fire like Elijah (2 Kings 2:11), or with him, having brought his people to the promised land, going off and dying alone in the presence of God to be buried in an unknown place like Moses (Deuteronomy 34:5,6)?  Why does Jesus die here, on a cross, in the prime of his life, at our own hands?  Who would have conceived a story with an ending like this?  What sense does it make?  What kind of God would demand such a thing?

Not God!  Flesh! God became flesh and walked among us as one of us and in so doing committed God’s very self to death.  All flesh dies and that reality, that truth, is to flesh abhorrent. It fills us with fear and trembling, with loathing and dread.  How can it be that I will die?  How can it be that I will cease to be?  And so the way of flesh, and Paul is very articulate about this, is to take matters into its own hands.  Our response to our own mortality is to struggle and to strive, to meet our own needs, to gratify ourselves and to build ourselves up.  We work hard to justify ourselves and to stand in a place where we can say that we have earned the right to an exemption: “we are dust and to dust we shall return?  No!  Surely I, of all people, will not go down to the pit forever…”

Our desperation to avoid the fate of all flesh is so great that we will even use and manipulate the people around us.  We will exploit them to accumulate treasure, to raise our status and profile, and to provide us pleasure in this transitory life.  We justify our willingness to raise ourselves at the expense of others because of the sense of scarcity that our own mortality creates in us.  Everything, including my time here on earth, is limited.  There isn’t enough to go around.  I had better get mine while I can and I have a right to build myself up even if it means that others have less than they need.

God comes among us, Emmanuel, and shows us that we are beloved, that we are made in God’s image, that we are holy and sacred and that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  That is the Good News of the Gospel!  “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son that those who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16,17).  Surely this is the answer that our flesh so craves.  We will not be extinguished, annihilated!  God’s love for us is unlimited and unceasing we will not die but will live forever!

But flesh is not so easily appeased…  The Good news might be good enough if it were spoken “just to me.”  If God had spoken from heaven, if God had become incarnate and just spent a quiet evening “with me” over some nice seven grain bread and a good glass of sherry my flesh might have been satisfied.  But that isn’t what happened.  God came into the world and made the whole creation new.  It isn’t just me and my flesh that is holy and sacred.  It isn’t even just me and my family, my tribe, or my nation.  It isn’t even just people that bear God’s image and likeness, that are created and loved by God.  It is the whole of creation!  And the implications of that truth are staggering!

How does this happen? Why does it happen?  We sit here today, our hearts broken, bereft, haunted by these questions as we recount once again the story of the passion and we recognize that Jesus hangs on a cross before us because accepting who is, accepting the gift of grace that he offers, believing that the good news applies to us means that we must also believe that the gift of grace and good news that he brings also applies to everyone and everything in all of creation!  .  If we are to believe Jesus, and embrace the truth that he brings, we must learn to live with a sense of abundance, generosity and love.  We must proclaim the Good News of God in Christ to others, we must seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, and we must strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being!  Jesus hangs on the cross today because it is so hard for the flesh to let go of its insecurities and needs, of its own fears and anxieties.  Jesus hangs on a cross today because we would rather reject the gift that he is offering than learn to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.  How does this happen?  Why does this happen?  Jesus hangs on a cross today because we are so afraid to love our neighbors as ourselves.

 

A Sermon for Palm Sunday

Posted on by
Reply

This sermon is based on the Gospel Reading for Palm Sunday,Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find that reading here

 

Hanging on a cross is a terrible and agonizing way to die.  Nails driven, not through the palms of the hand, where they would just rip out from between your fingers, but driven through your wrists, and nails driven through your feet, crucified, hanging in the hot sun, your full body weight pulling against those nails.  Between the blood loss, the dehydration, the exhaustion and the pain your diaphragm stops working and the only way that you can breathe is to push down against the nails in your feet, raising yourself up to inflate your lungs and lowering yourself to exhale.  When that becomes too painful, or you are just too exhausted to continue your lungs begin to fill up with fluid and you literally drown, hanging there on a cross.

This is how Rome put its enemies to death.  You may think, now that I’ve sent a chill through the room describing that awful death, that the Roman Empire really hated the people that it crucified.  But all of that pain, all of that agony, all of that terror that was inflicted through crucifixion wasn’t actually aimed at the person who hung there on the cross.  The roads in and out of Jerusalem, in fact the roads throughout all of occupied Palestine were lined with crosses where people had been crucified and where their bodies had been left.  The real victims of crucifixion were the people who had been left behind, alive, to see this symbol of terror and death.  Crucifixion was a tool that Rome used to keep the subjugated people in line.  It was merely a way to keep order and to show people what would happen to those who dared to defy Rome’s rules, laws and requirements.

Another symbol of Rome’s power and the way that Rome maintained control was evident on the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.  On that very day when Jesus rides in on a colt, being hailed as the one who comes in the name of the Lord, as people were strewing his path with palm branches, Pontius Pilate, Roman Governor of Judea, is returning to Jerusalem from his summer palace at Caesarea Philippi where he has gone to be by the water at the hottest part of the year.  It is the festival of the Passover and people are streaming in to Jerusalem from all over the country.  Rome knows that nationalism and a sense of outrage will be grow stronger among the people of Israel as they attempt to celebrate their most holy of feasts under Roman occupation.  So Pilate has left his comfortable summer residence to keep the peace by bringing a company of soldiers to stand in the streets and remind the people of the power of Rome and what happens to those who dare to defy its power.

On this morning as Jesus rides into Jerusalem and we wave our palm branches and we lay them on the road we dare to hope.  We hope that at long last we might be freed from this terrible tyranny and that this awful display of murderous rage might finally end, that the world might be put right and that God might come to reign in the land of Israel again, that we would know that we are God’s beloved people, and that these scenes of death might vanish from the land.  We dare to hope and dream and we focus all of this on Jesus as he rides into town and we celebrate with a festive parade.  And then something almost unbelievable happens.  The one upon whom we place our hopes and dreams is handed over to the ones whom we seek to escape and we are the ones who hand him over!  We hand Jesus over to Pilate, the symbol of that world that oppresses and dominates, the world that destroys and crucifies, the world that finds its power in manipulation, oppression and death.  The one that we had hoped would save us from these horrors is left in the hands of that terrible power and is abandoned by all who knew him and loved him.

We don’t get much information in this short reading today to explain how it is that this change is effected.  We know that the scribes and the Chief Priests and the Pharisees have been plotting to have Jesus arrested and killed and they have been looking for a way to do that.  We know that it is Judas Iscariot that gives them the information they need to finally arrest Jesus in a place without a large crowd of Jesus’ supporters who might have tried to save him.  But that same crowd that the chief priests, scribes and elders feared, when Jesus is brought before Pilate, turns against him and we stand and shout, “Crucify Him!  Crucify Him!”  How did this happen?  How could we have turned so quickly?  It may well be that Judas, the zealot, was hoping to force Jesus’ hand, to force him to finally come out in all of his power and glory and take charge of the situation and do away with their Roman adversaries.  It may well be that the people there in the crowd looked at Jesus beaten and bloodied bound there in the temple and thought “This isn’t what we thought!  He obviously isn’t going to save us from Rome.  Look, he’s not even carrying a sword!”  So in that moment of disappointment and anger at hopes raised in vain we yell, “Crucify Him!  Crucify Him!”  And send him to his death.  But how could we do this?  How could we betray him like this?

As I read this passage and I ponder all of these possibilities I keep coming back to the same conclusions.  It’s not that we are disappointed; it’s not that we are impatient, it’s not that we have been influenced by people who have been planted in the crowd to create this frenzy and lead us to call for Jesus’ death.  I think that the reason that we turn so quickly against the one that has come to love us is that we are much more comfortable with power that is asserted with force, that we are much more comfortable with power that is taken and assumed.  We are much more comfortable with power that comes by imposing the will of the stronger upon the will of the weaker.  We know how that kind of power works.  We have seen it in action.  It has been used against us and we know it works.  And we know that if we are lucky enough to be in a position of influence or authority we can wield this kind of power and get results right away.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem and declares that power comes in a different way.  Not through forcing people to obey, not through imposing penalties and sanctions not through demanding that people toe the line or die for daring to disobey.  Jesus comes and says to us that power comes through vulnerability, and being willing to offer yourself to those with whom you disagree, to those with whom you struggle, even to those who seem to hate you.  Jesus comes to teach us a different form of power, the power that guides and exists in kingdom of heaven.  But that is a power that is scarier to us even than the rows and rows of bodies that hang from crosses along the roads going in and out of the towns where we live and move and have our being.  It is a scary thing to follow Jesus on the way to the cross and believe that this is the way that we should behave towards one another, even if that other hasn’t adopted our methodology yet.  We have seen the fire hoses turned on our brothers and sisters.  We have seen the dogs loosed and we have seen the damage that a Billy club can do.  We know that people are imprisoned, that in some parts of this world they just disappear.  We know what it looks like when people attempt to change things in a non violent way.  A lot of people end up hanging from crosses.  So it is a scary thing to say that in a time of threat I will put down my weapons, that I will set aside the sharp sword that my tongue can become, I will lay aside my rhetorical tricks and my wit, my ability to talk my way around and through anything that you might say.  It is a hard thing to listen, and to invite you into a conversation, and to maybe give up some of the points that I hold dear so that we can find common ground where we might live and stand together.

It is a scary thing to stand with Jesus before Pilate and not become the very thing that we abhor.  On this day we see the result of giving in to that fear.  And in the week to come as we complete this journey moving ever closer to the cross and Good Friday we are called to examine our own lives and to look for the places where we may have become or conformed to that scary power wielding, death giving, world which we abhor.  What kind of power are we exercising?  Is it God’s power or is it our own?  When you get right down to it, it isn’t hard to tell the difference.  One looks like this (a raised and clenched fist) and the other looks like this (an open hand stretched out in love and compassion.)

The Episcopal Church and the Blessing of Same Sex Unions

Posted on by
Reply

The Episcopal church is now wrestling with a resolution to allow a trial period for the blessing of same sex unions.  As I think and pray about my role as a deputy to this year’s General Convention,  where that resolution will come to a vote, and as I work to help the poeple of the Diocese of Milwaukee develop a sense of history and context for the trial rite that has been prepared by the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, I have been greatly moved by, and highly commend this teaching by The Rev. Cynthia K. R. Banks, Rector of St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Boone, North Carolina.

She spends 45 minutes teaching about the scriptural and theological  elements of this debate.  She talks about our tradition, about our Anglican/Episcopal ethos and heritage, she even engaged Richard Hooker as she offers a description of her own personal journey around the blessing of same sex unions.

The context of her teaching is the debate surrounding an amendment to the Constitution of the State of North Carolina that would define marriage to be exclusively between one man and one woman.

Her scholarship is excellent, her arguments powerful, an her conclusions, I believe, reflect a growing and deepening understanding of the kingdom of God and the role of the church in helping to bring that kingdom to fruition.  I cannot recommend this video highly enough!

Here is her concluding paragraph:

“So the Scripture that haunts me at night is from Matthew 23, verses 4 and 13, when Jesus addresses the crowds about the scribes and the Pharisees: ‘They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear and lay them on the shoulders of others but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.  But woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.  For you do not go in yourselves and when others are going in you stop them.  Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, and mercy, and faith.’

Because I am a religious leader, the current day Pharisee, Jesus’ words hit particularly close to the heart.  I fear for too long we have neglected the weightier matters of justice, and mercy, and faith.  I fear for too long the church has laid heavy burdens on our gay and lesbian brothers and sister and not been willing to move them.  I fear for too long we have locked people out of the kingdom of heaven and the foretaste of that kingdom that comes in covenanted relationship.  And I don’t want to add to that burden any more.”

You can view Rev. Banks’ teaching here

A Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany

Posted on by
3

Last night I went to bed early and set my alarm clock to allow me to sleep in a little.  I had a sermon ready to go and so I assumed I would sleep well.  After a very restless night I awoke convicted by the idea that I had prepared the wrong sermon.  The events of the last two weeks, things I had read, conversations that I had participated in, all came together to help me to see that I needed to say something different about today’s Gospel reading.  at the conclusion of the 8:00 service I knew that I had not quite gotten it right.  It was coming together but wasn’t done yet.  The sermon that follows is what I said at the 10:30, as best I could reconstruct it at 4:30 this afternoon when I finally got home.

This sermon draws on the Gospel reading for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany in year B of the Revised Common Lectionary, Mark 9:2-9.

You can find that reading here.

There is a link both within the text of the sermon and at the bottom of the page to the blog post that I quote.

You’ve got to love Peter.  Of all of the disciples he is the one that we know the most about.  Peter’s name gets mentioned more often than any of the other disciples.  It is almost always Peter who is front and center, face to face with Jesus, right in the middle of the action.  It was Peter, there in a boat so full of fish that it was beginning to sink, Peter whose mother in law was healed of a fever, Peter who names Jesus as the Son of God, Peter who said that he would follow Jesus anywhere, Peter who denies Jesus three times and Peter who, in the end, strips off his clothes, dives into the water and swims ashore to have breakfast with Jesus on the beach.  Peter’s character is so well developed, he seems so human, and that humanity helps us to find ourselves in the biblical narrative, how could you not love him?

So this morning, as Peter stands there on the side of the mountain with James and John, and suddenly Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus in a blinding light that was unlike anything that he had ever seen, we find ourselves sympathetic and connected to the fear that he feels.  After all, if Moses and Elijah, the two prophets who are central to the history and faith of the People of Israel have appeared then the world must be about to come to an end and the kingdom of God must be about to come to fruition at last.  No wonder he is afraid.  What will that look like?  What will it mean?  And so we are right there with him as he says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

In this morning’s Gospel reading the response to Peter’s frantic and terrified response comes from God.  God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  Now I have to tell you that knowing what we know about Peter, his impetuous nature, and his proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth, I hear these words from God inflected a little differently than we just heard them read.  Depending on the week I have had I either hear, “Oh come on Peter!  This is my Son.  Would you just stop talking for a minute and listen to what he is saying…?”  or, I hear “Peter Shut up!  This is my Son!  Listen to him!”   The funny thing is that Jesus hasn’t said anything yet!  The text says that Jesus went up the mountain with Peter, James, and John and that he was transfigured before them.  It doesn’t say that Jesus was in the middle of a sermon, that he was delivering a discourse, or that he was teaching.  The text doesn’t tell us that Jesus was saying anything at all.  In order to understand what God wanted Peter to listen to we have to back up in the story a little.

This morning’s Gospel reading begins with the second verse of the ninth chapter of Mark.  In the middle of the eighth chapter we hear Peter’s famous confession.  Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is and Peter says, “You are the Messiah.”  Peter is the star pupil.  He has finally gotten it right.  But Jesus sternly orders his disciples not to tell anyone who he is and then begins to tell them that he must be crucified, die and be raised from the dead after three days!  Peter interrupts him and says,  “Wait a minute!  That can’t happen to you!  Don’t talk like that.  You are the front-runner.  We are ahead in the polls.  If you keep talking likes this, going off message, you are going to ruin everything!”  Jesus turns to Peter and calls him Satan.  He reprimands Peter and tells him that he has his mind on earthly and not heavenly things.  Peter has gone from being the star to being in the doghouse in just two short paragraphs.  Then to make it even worse Jesus calls the crowds together with his disciples and says to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”   Then the Gospel says, “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”

Six whole days!  For six days the disciples have been wrestling with what Jesus said.  He has told them that following him is not about riding into Jerusalem to the cheers of the crowds.  It is not about healing people of their diseases and working great signs and wonders.  Jesus has told them that being his follower means living your life for others, working to be sure that the people around you have what they need to live whole and meaningful lives.  Jesus has just told them that we need to recognize other people’s needs, wants, agendas and opinions as equal to our own, that life and the world are not just for and about us, but for all of God’s children…  Six whole days they have had to struggle with this new ordering of reality and the world.   I am sure that they were upset.  I am sure that some of them were beginning to wonder if Jesus really was who Peter said he was.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were ready to jump ship, to get out of the boat.

With all of that in mind it seems like Peter’s response might have sprung from a fear greater than what was inspired by the vision that he had been given.  It must have seemed much more attractive to stay up there on the mountain with those three luminous figures of the Hebrew tradition.  Going back down the mountain with Jesus’ identity confirmed by what he had just seen would mean a life lived for others, a life of service to the people around him, a sacrificial life spent holding up all of God’s children in ways that offered them the very gifts that he himself had received.  The idea of building three booths, residences, shrines to this experience and staying there, in the rarefied air, so close to God that they might touch and be touched… that probably sounded much better than going back down the mountain and rejoining the fray.

But that is just the point.  To be a follower of Jesus we have to go back down the mountain and be engaged with the world around us.  We can’t just sit up here where the air is clear, the light is bright and our hopes and faith have been strengthened by the experiences, the revelations that we have been given.  Peter, James and John had to go back into the world and actively participate in bringing the kingdom of God to fruition.  To be a follower of Jesus they had to be “engaged.”

This week someone, a member of this congregation, sent me an email that included a blog post written by the pastor of a church here in Dane County.  In this post he talks about a recent study that states “that in Dane County, fifty percent of ALL young African American men are either in prison, on probation or parole, or on extended supervision.”  That is a number that should outrage each and every one of us! Right here in Madison where we are progressive, broad minded, and fair?   How can this be?  This pastor, The Rev. Dr. Alex Gee, Senior Pastor of Fountain of Life Church in Madison, goes on to describe being accosted in the parking lot of his own church, while dressed in a three piece suit, because he was there at night, in his car, in an otherwise empty parking lot!  Really?  Yes really!  Right here in Madison we have homeless shelters that are filled to overflowing.  We have people who do not have access to adequate health care.  We have people who have to choose between buying food and buying their medications.  All around us people are hurting, people are struggling, people are living without the things that they need to be whole, to be the people God calls us all to be, to experience the kingdom of God that is held out to us in a vision of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on a mountaintop.  And what is happening here is wrong!

Yes, I am talking politics here.  Actually I have been talking politics all morning, I have just been using another word, a synonym for a word that we aren’t supposed to use in church.  We are called to be “engaged” in the world around us.  We are called to come down from the mountain, to reach beyond the walls of this church into the community and the world, and to live lives that reflect and imitate the life of the one we follow.  Politics is just another word that means engagement with the people and the world around us.  This morning God says to us, “This is my Son.  I know it is hard but you must listen to Him!”

This morning, at the end of the Season of Epiphany I think that we are in great danger of succumbing to the temptation that afflicted Peter there on the mountain.  Ever since Christmas we have been hearing about, and celebrating, God made tangible, real, manifest in the world through the person of Jesus Christ.  For the last seven weeks we have been trying to attune our senses so that we can be aware of God moving and working in or own lives and in the lives of the people around us.  The season of Epiphany is filled with stories of mountaintop experiences, the wonder of God revealed.  Now we are being asked to leave that all behind, to come down from the mountain, and enter into the season of Lent, a season where we are called to look deep within ourselves to discover the places and ways that we keep the kingdom of God from coming to fruition, both in our own lives and in the lives of the communities we inhabit.  We are called to engage in politics and to fight the institutions and assumptions, the beliefs and ways of being that allow half of all young African American men to be enmeshed by the corrections system, that allow people to sleep on the streets at night, and that deny people access to the basic services that they need to thrive and participate in the Kingdom of God.

We are also called to be engaged in the politics that operate here within our own church when we see that the things we do, say, or believe are inhibiting the coming of the kingdom for all of God’s children.  There are members of the Episcopal Church who feel like lepers in their own community because they do not have access to the same sacraments that the rest of us do.  They are not allowed the sacrament of marriage or ordination because of the way that God made them.  This summer at our triennial General Convention we will be called to vote on a resolution that establishes a three year trial period for liturgies for the blessing of same sex unions.   There are poeple in our church, right here in our parish family, who are praying that we will pass that resolution.  I am too!  We need to tell them that there are no lepers in this church!  We are being called to engage the issues, the hurt, the pain, and the theology that swirl around this resolution.  If we do not then we will have built ourselves a church on the mountain that has become an idol, a place where we have insulated ourselves from the world around us.  If we do not engage then we will have chosen to ignore the moving of the Holy Spirit who is calling us to this work.  We must be engaged.

 

Some people would tell us that church and politics don’t mix, that talking about issues like these jeopardize the Body of Christ by causing conflict and disagreement and it would surely be much easier to stay up here, in the rarefied air, so close to God that we can touch and be touched.  It would be less risky to build three booths, residences, shrines, or even just a church and leave the mess of engagement, of politics, to the people who are still at the bottom of the hill.  But the strength and power of the Anglican Ethos, of the Episcopal Ethos lies in our belief that the things that bind us one to another: the love of Christ, the creeds, and our common worship here at this rail, are far more important and powerful than the things that divide us.  We are committed to finding our way forward together.  We can talk about these things, we can be engaged, we can wrestle with the issues and with the politics and we can still come together and hold out our hands at this altar.

Jesus has told us that being his follower means living our lives for others, working to be sure that the people around us have what they need to live whole and meaningful lives.  Jesus has just told us that we need to recognize other people’s needs, wants, agendas and opinions as equal to their own, that life and the world are not just for and about us, but for all of God’s children…  And God says, “This is my Son!  Listen to him.”

Amen.

 Voices We Need to Hear: Alex Gee, Senior Pastor of Fountain of Life Church

Gay Straight Episcopalians, Having the Conversation in Madison Wisconsin

Posted on by
Reply

The Episcopal Church will hold its triennial General Convention in Indianapolis this July.   One of the resolutions before convention will request a three year trial period for the use of blessings for same sex unions.  Issues of human sexuality and the church’s response to our LGBT members will be in the news this summer.  Gay Straight Episcopalians, a group made up of clergy and laity from all four Madison Episcopal churches, would like to offer you an opportunity to prepare for the conversations and questions that are bound to happen “around the water cooler” when your co workers and friends find out you are an Episcopalian.

Join us on Sunday February 12th at St Dunstan’s or on Wednesday February 15th at St Luke’s for a showing of the award winning documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So.”   Both showings are at 7:00.  No RSVP is necessary.

From Amazon’s Product Description:

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, Dan Karslake’s provocative, entertaining documentary brilliantly reconciles homosexuality and Biblical scripture, and in the process reveals that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible. As the film notes, most Christians live their lives today without feeling obliged to kill anyone who works on the Sabbath or eats shrimp.

Through the experience of five very normal, very Christian, very American families – including those of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson – we discover how insightful people of faith handle the realization of having a gay child. With commentary by such respected voices as Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard’s Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech, For The Bible Tells Me So offers healing, clarity and understanding to anyone caught in the crosshairs of scripture and sexual identity.

A Whole Season’s Worth of Epiphany in One Week!

Posted on by
Reply

It was an amazing week in the season of Epiphany as God was made manifest (from the Greek epiphainein to manifest) here in Madison through the witness, love and work of the Episcopal Church!

Pere Wisnel Dejardin, our friend and partner in ministry from Jeannette Haiti arrived on Saturday night, January 7th.   In the week that he was here in Wisconsin he Celebrated the Eucharist three times, preached on a Wednesday night, met with representatives, both clergy and lay, from all over the diocese, and spent time with Bishop Steven Miller and Canon David Pfaff, and the Steering Committee of the Diocese of Milwaukee Haiti Project.

In the short time that he was here, describing the hardships in Jeannette caused by the two month early onset of the dry season and the loss of a feeding program that was previously underwritten by another NGO, we raised almost $5,000.  That $5,000 will feed the students of Saint Marc’s School for 6 weeks!  Those six weeks will give us time to raise additional monies to continue the school lunch program and wire the finds to Haiti.

The Diocese of Milwaukee Haiti Project has emergency reserve funds and at a meeting with Pere Wisnel at Grace Episcopal Church on Friday evening we committed some of those funds to buy a tanker truck of water to be delivered to Jeannette.  That water will fill their cisterns and provide safe, clean drinking water in a place where the land is parched and dry!

Pere Wisnel left for Haiti in the early morning hours of January 14th with a sense of joy and hope for the people of Jeannette, uplifted by the support and love poured out on him and his parish by the people of the Diocese of Milwaukee.

As this week was wrapping up we read in the news about a fire at the Porchlight Transitional Housing Apartments.  On Friday night, a bitterly cold night when the fire trucks froze on the street, all 100 residents of the apartment building at the corner of Brooks and Johnson Streets had to be evacuated.  On Saturday afternoon the fire department cleared the building so that all but 16 of those residents could return to their apartments.

As I was reading the article describing the plight of those 16 women I received a call from LZ Ventures, our partners in developing the Saint Francis House Episcopal Student Ministry site.  LZ offered to delay the construction process at the Saint Francis House site so that the vacated building could be used as temporary Emergency Housing for our next door neighbors at Porchlight!  Within the hour the Saint Francis House Board, the Bishop of the Diocese of Milwaukee and the staff at Porchlight were in conversation, making plans to move the sixteen displaced residents of Porchlight into Saint Francis House.

Madison Property Management, managers of the Grand Central Student Apartments, also neighbors “on the block” brought furniture to Saint Francis House, had their staff re key the doors so that the women who would be using the space would feel secure in their temporary lodgings, installed smoke detectors and repaired lighted exit signs bringing the space back up to code.  All of this done so that 16 people would be safe and warm for a month!

In the days since the fire I have heard from parishioners whose work places are sponsoring bake sales to raise funds to help the residents of Porchlight replace the belongings that were lost in the fire.  I have heard from parishioners who are donating clothing, toiletries, furniture, and cash.  Mike Lisle, a member of our Vestry, contacted me and his company KleenMark has donated cleaning supplies so that the rooms at Porchlight, even the rooms that were deemed habitable after the fire, can be cleaned of the soot, ash and smell of smoke that permeated the entire building!

In the season of Epiphany we look for signs of God’s presence and activity in the world around us.  We look for moments where God’s love and grace are made manifest, tangible, real.  In this one week we have seen God at work in the world through the ministry and care of the Episcopal Church, through the work of the communities that we have gathered, and through the outpouring of support for people in need that so characterizes who we are.  We are the Church, the Body of Christ, God’s hands and feet in the world.  Thanks be to God!

Helping the Displaced Porchlight Residents

Posted on by
Reply

Here is the website for Porchlight which lists things that are needed by the poeple who lost their homes in Friday’s fire:

http://www.porchlightinc.org/

If you would like to make a financial contribution to help these 16 women get back on their feet you can do so by by clicking here.

The web donation form allows you to designate how you want the funds to be used.

The Church at its Best!

Posted on by
Reply

After a three year discernment process and a long and contentious approval process the Saint Francis House Episcopal Student Ministry property is scheduled for redevelopment, deconstruction of part of the existing building and construction of a new Student Apartment building that will provide an income stream to sustain and enliven the campus ministry.  On Friday night at fire broke out at the Porchlight Transitional Housing Apartments on Brooks Street.  This apartment building is adjacent to the Saint Francis House property.  The next day, Saturday, I was able to send this letter to the Madison Common Council:

My name is Andy Jones.  I am the Rector of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church and a member of the Saint Francis House Board.  I have a wonderful story to tell you.

This morning, while I was reading about the fire at Porchlight, I received a call from Steve Silverburg, a partner with LZ Ventures.  We have already turned the property at 1001 University Avenue over to LZ so that they can begin the development process.  Steve had seen the articles about the fire and spoken with his partners.  He was calling to say that they were willing to return the building to us and to delay the beginning of the construction process to allow the displaced residents of the Porchlight Facility temporary emergency shelter at Saint Francis House for up to one month.

the Saint Francis House Board, and the Bishop of the Diocese of Milwaukee immediately approved these arrangements and The Rev. Dr. Jonathan Grieser, Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, contacted the staff at Porchlight.

Porchlight has been able to relocate six of their displaced residents in other faciliites.  The remaining ten residents will stay with the Red Cross tonight and then take temporary shelter at Saint Francis House tomorrow.

Steve Silverburg called again this afternoon and Jim Stoppel, owner of Madison Property Management and manager of Grand Central Student Apartments, has offered to lend us furniture and supplies to make the Porchlight residents comfortable while they are being housed at Saint Francis House.

When we came before you asking for approval for our development project we said that we were committed to being good neighbors on the block.  This story demonstrates the depth and quality of that commitment.

I know that the approval process for the Saint Francis House development was a difficult decision.  I hope that this story helps to illustrate the fact that, in the end, we are all working together to develop and nurture a strong and vibrant community where people can come together and work for the common good.

Peace,
Andy+