Closing Eucharist Mourner's Path

Mourner’s Path Closing

June 8, 2017   St. Marks Episcopal Church, Little Rock

What a journey we have been on. Pat, Patricia, and Susan and I have had the privilege of spending eight weeks with a group of very brave people who have shared with us their loves, their losses, and their triumphs.

You have listened and told each others’ stories of loved ones who have died. You have shared their pictures. You have talked about how you learned to grieve as a child. We have talked about the physical side of grieving. We have talked a lot about tears. We have learned that tears are helpful and appropriate in our grief. Jesus, our mentor, wept at the death of his dear friend, Lazarus. You have shared what you miss the most and what you are doing to live on, how the relationship continues in a very different way, and about small victories in your life. You have talked about how difficult it is to live on and make decisions now especially when the one you loved was bigger than life and that their life sometimes ended so tragically.  You have talked about places on this journey where you seem stuck, but you also have talked about how you honor and remember your loved ones in standing stones. You have shared how you have stayed connected through God nods, dreams, books such as Tear Soup, pictures, emails, bracelets, notes from friends of yours and your loved one, meeting with clergy, being with children and grandchildren your loved one also loved, Facebook Mother’s day messages, serving and caring for others that knew or did not know the one you loved. You have talked about best times, memories to hold on to such as Christmases. You have talked more about those small victories: just getting out of bed, returning to church, just coming to Mourner’s Path, going outside and doing something your loved one liked to do, living in the moment, being more aware of the pain of others, making new friends for a venue of your old stories, walking, giving up being the cruise director, seeing cardinals, working in gardens. Tonight, just before this service you have let each person know about the change you have seen in yourself and in them during these eight weeks. Finally, you have written a letter to your loved one that you will offer at this altar.

We have questioned where was God is all this sadness and tragedy that you have experienced. Sometimes the God of your understanding seemed absent or at some great distance. We have told you to let us and the group hold that faith in God for you when it becomes too hard. Many have come through this experience with a different relationship with God and a new understanding of the person God created you to be.

Each of you has a different story and is at a different place on this journey. That is what has been especially beautiful about our group. I think each of you has respected the other and not insisted that your neighbor’s journey be like your journey. I, as well, can only share my experience. This is what I learned from another mother whose child was tragically killed.

Several weeks after her daughter’s funeral, I met Mary for coffee. Her daughter, Anne, had been killed in a tragic train accident in another country the summer before she was to enter college. We met on an usually cool summer morning. I felt Mary in the room before I even saw her. After a tearful hug we began talking about Anne’s funeral. We marveled at the number of friends Anne had and the people she had touched in her young life. We went over all the details of the glorious celebration of Anne’s life that was right here at St. Mark’s: the music, the choir, the liturgy, the reception and how no one wanted to leave. Mary then began slowly to talk about the new directions she already felt in her life.  She told me how she had spent much time trying not to wear masks in her life, but that this great loss had made her even more desiring of not being anything that was false to her.  She was living her life one day at a time.  She was not making a lot of plans and was trying to be open to what God had in store for her that day.  She also had a vision of what her life's mission should be: to become the person God had intended her to be with all her heart.  Mary was not certain what that was, but she was more open than she ever had known. She spoke of feeling God's presence and support throughout this entire tragedy.  She wondered how anyone could survive such a loss without love and faith in God. / Then she could barely speak as she softly whispered that she had some insight into the thoughts of our Lord's mother, another Mary, at the cross. 

Each of you has had a Mary experience of being at the foot of the cross. Some of you were far off on a hill, others were right at the foot of that cross. Our sessions were during the Easter season. I think that each of you has also experienced a taste of resurrection, a new life, which like new birth has often been very painful. Each of you is in a new relationship to the one you have loved who died as well as in a new relationship to God.

I hope you will also get to know a powerful community of people who have been surrounding all of us these past eight weeks with God’s embrace. These are the prayer partners who are sitting with us. I have learned from them the power of prayer, for they have been the glue/ praying for us and holding us together these past weeks. /

May you continue to feel the loving arms of this group you have met with for eight weeks, your prayer partners, and our God who has always been silently holding you in your loss.

Henri Nouwen writes that when we die, our love remains.  Love is eternal.  Love comes from God and returns to God. Love is the life of God within us.  It is the divine, indestructible core of our being.  This love not only remains but also bears fruit from generation to generation.

 The love of God that dwelt in the heart of each of those you loved who died will come to you and offer you consolation and comfort. Our experience is that you have also felt that love in the members of this group, and that as you continue your journey, you will continue to feel that love, share that love, and hold and heal others as you have helped heal and hold each of us.

Joanna

Easter 7A Ascension Searcy

Easter 7A Trinity Searcy       Ascension

May 28, 2017 Acts 1:6-14

This is the last Sunday in the Easter season, the Sunday after Ascension. The excitement and enthusiasm of Easter Day is receding in our rearview mirror. The lilies are faded, the music is toned down, the congregation is smaller. Ascension is a little like the day after the party, the day after all the visiting family packs up and drives away. It’s the day to wash the sheets and put away the special dishes. Barbara Brown Taylor describes Jesus’ ascension as the most forgotten event of the church year. Who wants to celebrate being left behind? Who wants to mark the day that Jesus goes out of this world? We are daily so hungry for the presence of God. The one thing we do not need is a day to remind us of God’s absence.

 Today’s question is how do we continue as resurrection people after ascension?/ In Acts today we hear about the simultaneous presence/ and then absence of Christ. Where does Jesus go?  Tradition has it that he goes to heaven, which may not be up, as much as it is beyond. Jesus goes there to finish what he liturgically starts with us six months ago. Jesus’ Christmas present to us was being born into the body of this world. His ascension gift is that through him/ the body of the world is borne back to God. Jesus presents his own ruined risen body to be at the right hand of God. Jesus imports flesh and blood into those holy precincts. He paves the way for us, so that when we arrivelater, everyone will not be so shocked by us. Jesus restores the goodness of all creation and ours in particular. By ascending bodily into heaven, he shows us that flesh and blood are good, not bad; that they are good enough for Jesus,/ good enough for heaven,/ good enough for God. By putting on flesh and blood and keeping them on, Jesus not only brings God to us; he also brings us to God.

Absence always does hurt the most when we remember what presence was like. Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night into the empty space where once was a beloved sleeper. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the overgrown lot where our old house once stood, the house where people laughed and believed happiness would last forever. Absence is the body parts which no longer work.

You can not miss what you have never known, which makes our sense of absence and especially our sense of God’s absence the very best proof that we knew God once, and that we will know God again. There is loss in absence, but there is hope.

It is our sense of God’s absence that brings us together to this place today in search of God’s presence.  Former Bishop Porter Taylor of Western North Carolina describes a liturgy conference where people discuss their most important part of the Eucharist liturgy. I know you are shocked to know it was not the sermon. For the majority, including the bishop, it is the moment in the Eucharist where each of us holds open our hands to receive the bread of life. It is the moment that we acknowledge our dependence on a reality that we have known, that we search for, beyond us that has the power to nourish and sustain us.//

  Like the band of forlorn disciples, you return to this sacred space in Searcy again and again. It is the last place you saw him, so of course it is the first place anybody thinks to look for him to come again. You have been coming here a long time now, but even in his absence this is a good place to remember him, to recall best moments, argue about the details, to swap the old stories until you begin to revive again, life flowing back into you, as you retell the stories of God’s presence here in this place in your lives.

“Men and women of Galilee, men and women of Searcy, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

That is what two well dressed men in white robes say to us and to the disciples on the mount called Olivet as they gaze openmouthed into the sky,/ and the disciples most probably would have stood there like that all afternoon had their attention not been directed back to earth. These angels may have been sent to remind us that if we want to see Jesus again, there is no use looking up. More likely we should look around /at each other,/ at the world,/ at the ordinary people in our ordinary lives, because that is where we are most likely to find Jesus, not the way we used to know him, but a new way, not in his own body but in our bodies, your bodies. The risen, the ascended Lord is no longer in a particular place on earth. He can now be everywhere on earth, especially in each of us./

If the disciples had it their way, they might have tied Jesus up with their fishing nets so that he could not get away again, so that they would know where to find him forever. Only that is not what happens. Jesus is taken away as the disciples stand looking up toward heaven. Then they stop looking up toward heaven, look at each other instead, and get on with the business of being the body of Christ on this earth.

And once they do this, surprising things happen. They say things that sound like him. They do things they have only seen him do before. When two or three gather together,/ it is as if there is someone else in the room whom they cannot see, the  abiding presence of Christ, as available as bread and wine, as familiar as each other’s faces. It is as if he has not ascended but exploded with all the holiness that once was concentrated in him alone, flying everywhere/ with the seeds of heaven now sown in all the fields of the earth.

We gather here this morning to worship in this historic church with the many memories of so many of you, to acknowledge God’s absence, and to seek God’s presence, to sing, to pray, to be silent, to be still, to hold out our empty hands to be filed with bread, to drink wine, with the abiding presence of the absent Christ until he comes again. Do you sometimes miss him? Do you long for assurance that you are not left behind? Why do you sit or stand looking up toward heaven? Look around you, look around you!  There he is! Here/ is the light of Christ.

Bradley, Schmeling, “Reflections of the lectionary,” Christian Century, p. 20, May, 28, 2014.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Looking Up to Heaven,” Gospel Medicine, pp. 72-78.

Barbara Crafton, “Almost Daily Email from Geranium farm,” Ascension, 2004.

Joseph Harvard, III, “Preaching the Easter Texts: Can I get a Witness?, Journal for Preacher, Easter, 2014, p, 10.

12 step eucharist and Jackson Kemper

Jackson Kemper

May 24, 2017 First 12 step Eucharist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

 Today at our first 12 step Eucharist at St. Mark’s we also remember Jackson Kemper, the first missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church. Kemper is especially known for his work with Native Americans as he founded parishes in what was considered the Northwest Territory (Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska). Bishop Kemper founded Nashotah House and Racine College in Wisconsin, and from 1859 until his death served as the first bishop of the Diocese of Wisconsin.

I think that Jackson Kemper, our church’s first missionary bishop. would like our first 12 step Eucharist to be on the day we honor him. I think he would also like the reading from Corinthians, “I laid a foundation, and someone else is building.”  That is a good definition of 12-step work. When we are in recovery, we tell our story, our foundation, but so often we are only planting a seed, and those still in their addiction, may not start to build their recovery until they also hear someone else. I can count on my hands the number of people I have told my story to who then went into recovery, but I know the others may hear the message later from someone else and together our stories may make an impact.

 This Eucharist with the 12 steps is showing us how the foundation of AA came from the church, actually from an Episcopal priest at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City, Sam Shoemaker.  One of the most spiritual experiences I have had was attending Shoemaker’s church and being part of a 12-step meeting in the space that once was his office. I imagined all those, but particularly Bill Wilson who worked on the 12 steps with him in that office.

  So many of us heard all these steps growing up in our religious traditions, but somehow, we missed important parts of them. We had to see this way of life with the new glasses in a community of others who had traveled the same road that we did. Then at some point, we had another moment of clarity as we realize the 12 steps are part of our tradition of our church all along. So, we are all now in the right place, exactly where we should be this evening as we celebrate and give thanks for the miracle of our recovery, we give thanks for all who gave and continue to give us the foundation for recovery, and we give thanks for St. Mark’s for supporting recovery ministries.

Joanna Seibert

Jackson Kemper

Samuel Shoemaker

Absence of God

Easter 5A John 14: 1-14 Absence of God

Holy Spirit, Gulf Shores May 14, 2017 Mother’s Day

“I go to prepare a place for you.. so that where I am there you may be also.”/ Jesus’ followers are confused. As we try to understand what it was like for the disciples, let’s imagine on this Mother’s Day that we are back in the house we grew up in maybe at age five or six.  We are playing on the floor with a brother or sister or best friend, only to look up and see our Mother and Father or older sibling putting on their coats. Children always have three questions. “Where are you going? Can we go? Then who will stay with us?’/ Jesus, in the role of a parent or older sibling, responses, “I am going to my Father and your Father. You cannot come now; you can come later./ But in the next verses he says, “I will not leave you orphans.” I will send another friend, another helper who will never leave, but who will stay with you forever.”//

The disciples knew Jesus was more than the son of Mary and Joseph, more than a carpenter. His character, his words, how he spoke, his work, the way he behaved, /made them believe that when they were in his presence they were closer to the presence of God.

He didn’t shine in the night, he didn’t dress in unusual clothes, he didn’t have a strange look on his face, he didn’t go around saying a lot of religious things all the time. It is just who he was and what he did and the way he related to people that caused them to say, “He is connecting us to God.”

I am sure each of you has known a person like that, a person who, when you are in his or her presence, you think better thoughts, live a better life, reflect on God, become more devotional, more spiritual. Perhaps your mother was like this. Multiply that by many million times and you have Jesus of Nazareth.

The painful side of seeing God in Jesus is that just as Jesus came into the world, he had to return to God. During his brief life here on earth, he bonds with many people, family, disciples, Mary, Martha,  Lazarus. Toward the end of his life, he tells them, “I don’t call you servants anymore, I call you ‘friends.’” The plain fact is that the deeper the bond, the more painful the absence will be.

All the years I taught medical students, residents, and fellows, I never liked graduations because of the hypocrisy of saying, “Congratulations on finishing.” Even after 40 years, I still miss many of them.  I teared up and felt the same loss at each Cathedral School, and now the Day School graduation in Little Rock./ The deeper the bond, the deeper the pain.

Two young girls are friends, next-door neighbors since they are three. They play together, sleep in each other’s bed, eat at each other’s table. Now they are ten. One of the girl’s parents is transferred to Dallas. Suddenly the ugliest thing in the world, a big moving van is out front hauling them away./ The deeper the bond, the more painful the absence./

I also know that people in a congregation like Holy Spirit can have such a deep bond that they miss each other when they are absent.  On Saturday night, as I say my prayers, I picture the congregation where I am serving in my mind and visualize where everyone sits. On Sunday morning when I look out, if this one or that one is absent, I assume they must be sick and try to call during the week to see how they were feeling. I sincerely believe that Christian people have a bond so deep that if one person is absent, others feel something missing. I also realize that church sometimes is something people just fit in among the many things in their lives, and somehow our sense of bond and community slips away.  Even so on Sunday morning as I look out and see that such and such a person is not here, that old feeling comes back. It’s like being a child;/ the deeper the bond, the greater the pain.

This pain of absence is intensified if the absence is death, as in the case of Jesus. Death makes absence seem final. Death does not care about age. You do not have to be elderly to face death. Death comes in the rain and wind of our violent Arkansas storms and tornadoes and causes trees to crash on young mothers and children and rivers to flood. Death whirls in the hurricanes that love to visit this Pleasure Island,/

Absence is also more painful when we consider the way someone dies. Students are killed in their classrooms in Jonesboro, Littleton, Sandy Hook, Blacksburg. Senseless. I think of Jesus, snatched away from his friends and family.  They strip him naked as vulgar-mouthed soldiers, unbelievers walk by and mock him.

Jesus knew the depth of pain created by absence, so in John 15 he becomes a counselor, mother, father, older sibling to his friends. He is trying to soften the blow, trying to get them ready./ He says, “I know I’m leaving. Listen. Trust in God and trust in me. I am going, it is true but am going to prepare a place for you, so that we will all be together forever. I will also send another counselor that will guide and help you and will never ever leave you.” Jesus is trying to get them and us ready for his absence, but they and we are still confused,/ still asking questions. “We don’t know where you are going or how you are going to get there. We don’t understand anything you are saying. Just show us God, and we will be satisfied.”/

It didn’t work; it never works at the time. Jesus tries to get them ready, but you can talk and talk and talk and there is still the pain. Jesus leaves his disciples and they feel his absence keenly and painfully. It just never seems to work until later./

My experience is that each of us has felt God’s absence, that feeling that God has withdrawn from us, that feeling that God is no longer close to us. The Psalms are full of prayers to God, “Lord, don’t turn your back on us. Don’t hide your face from us.” The people in the Hebrew Bible have felt it. Jesus knows it. “My God, my God why have your forsaken me?”// Is it possible that in times that God seems absent and we feel all on our own/ that we have an opportunity to use and develop strength God has already given us?

I know of a handicapped child with no arms. He tells the story of how his mother always dresses him. One day, she puts his clothes in the middle of the floor and says, “Dress yourself.” He says, “I can’t dress myself.” She says, “You have to dress yourself.” He kicks, screams, yells at his mother, “you don’t love me anymore.” After hours of struggle he gets the clothes on. As he opens his door, he sees his mother on the other side of the door/ sobbing./

I don’t believe that God grows distant from us. My experience is that God is always on the other side of the door./  I do believe that sometime we feel distance, but God is still there.//

 How do we manage this feeling and live with the perceived experience of distance from God? I think it is a matter of memory. Remember the spirit filled times, what you have been taught. Remember when you felt God’s presence, perhaps here in this church. Remember the liturgy, the worship, the Eucharist. Remember your baptism, the baptism of your child, or grandchild. Remember your Christian friends. Remember the old songs, familiar prayers that perhaps your mother or grandmother taught you./ I remember an old friend who lived with cancer for over twenty years telling me how he would recite the Te Deum, a song of praise from Morning Prayer to feel God’s presence and live through unfavorable medical reports. /

 It grieves me to think of people, especially our young, who do not know a hymn, a single scripture verse, who have never sat next to the strong shoulder of a believing man or woman. How will they ever make it? You see, what we do here on Sunday in case you are wondering, is making memories. What happens today will be the food we will have on those difficult days, food for us, and food to share with those who do not have these memories. But it will be enough. This is Jesus’ promise. It will always be more than enough.

Fred Craddock, “The Absence of Christ,” Cherry Log Sermons, pp. 54-59.

Fred Craddock, “More Than Anything in the World,” in The Preaching of Jesus, William Brosend, pp. 64-67.

The road to Emmaus, the road we all have travelled

Easter 3A Road to Emmaus, A road we all have travelled

Luke 24:13-35

April 30, 2017, Trinity Searcy

Jesus does not appear to everyone before he ascends into heaven, which leaves plenty of first century Christians as well as all of us/ to listen to stories of those who were there/ and decide what life is like in the resurrection. We base our decision about resurrection on these stories/ as well as our own encounter today with the risen Christ. The question always is,/ exactly where is Jesus’ address?

Today we find Jesus somewhere on a road between here and Emmaus. Luke is the only writer sharing with us what happened on that road,/ but all of us here have walked that road at one time or another. It is the road we walk when we are trying to get away from reality, trying to deal with something very difficult that is happening in our lives, something beyond our control.  It is the road we walk when our team loses,/ our candidate is defeated,/ we lose our job,/ our children leave home, our grandchildren move to another state, or our loved one dies. This is the long road back to that empty house, the piles of unopened mail, to life as usual, if life can ever be usual again. It is the road of deep disappointment,/ and walking it is the living definition of sad.///

In today’s story, we know one of the disciples on the road is Cleopas. Is the other disciple possibly a woman, Mary the wife of Cleopas whom John tells us was with her sister Mary at the cross? That would make them part of Jesus’ family, /and yet they do not recognize Jesus./ The Emmaus Walk takes us two hours to go those seven miles as we relive and process with the disciples the trial, crucifixion,/ and  this rumored resurrection.  Suddenly, a stranger appears. Actually, the Greek word is “resident alien,” someone very different coming up from behind asking, “what are you talking about.” We answer, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know what has happened?” Have we played this scene before?/ After a very close friend or family member dies, we meet someone who has not heard. We want to say, “Are you the only one who does not know that my husband has died?”// 

Back on the road, we hear we had hoped he would redeem Israel, but now there is no more hope. He died. Suddenly our new walking companion no longer remains an active listener. “How foolish, and how slow of heart!” he tells us. “If we had read our Bibles, none of this would come as a surprise to us. What happened to Jesus is right there in black and white. Soon it will be in red. The scriptures tell us that our Messiah, does not win the power struggle; he loses it.  Christ is not the undefeated champion. He is the suffering servant, the broken one, who comes into his glory with his wounds still visible. These hurt places are the proof that Jesus is who he says he is. We will recognize our God and his followers not by their muscles but by their scars. /

This mean that we interpret the painful parts of our lives in a new light. This mean we should no longer see our defeats as failures. This mean we should no longer fear our enemies, not even fear death itself// This may mean we are to follow our leader sometimes into the scariest, more dangerous places in the world armed with nothing but a small black bag or maybe a first-aid kit, because we are like him, not fighters, but physicians,/ and  all of us are wounded healers, whose credentials, our diplomas, are our own hurt places.//

Starting with Moses and working his way through the prophets, this stranger reveals a story told over and over in scripture of how God redeems us in our brokenness. We are wounded, but the stranger is telling us that maybe we are not losers. Maybe the rumors are true. Maybe our hope that was crucified will be transformed and resurrected.

All too soon as the scriptures have come alive we reach our destination, but we will not let the stranger go. “Stay, please, stay with us.” We invite him in to our home, our food, our table, but when the four of us sit down together, it is he, the guest, who acts as host, who reaches out, takes the bread, says the blessing, breaks the bread, and gives it to us. Maybe it is the oddness of the act that causes us to put on a new pair of glasses to see for the first time that this is the Christ, a member of our family. Maybe it is the familiarity of the act. We have seen him do this before on a green hillside with five loaves and two fish and in an upper room with unleavened bread and Passover wine.  We have a moment of clarity/…and then he vanishes. //

Our blindness and the blindness of the two disciples will never keep Christ from coming again and again to them and to us. Christ does not limit his post-resurrection appearances to those with full confidence in him. He comes especially to the disappointed, the doubtful, the dispondent. He comes to those of us who do not know our Bibles as well as we should. He comes to us who do not recognize him even when he walks right beside us, even when he is a member of our own family./ He comes to us when we have given up and are headed back home.

Jesus seems to prefer working with broken people, with broken dreams, in a broken world. If someone hands him a whole loaf of bread, he takes it, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it, and he does the same thing with his own body. That is the way of life Jesus has come to show us: to take what we have been given, to bless it, to say thank you for it, whether it is the sweet satisfying bread of success or the tear-soaked bread of sorrow, and then to share our story in community.

Beginning to end, Luke’s story of what happens on the road to Emmaus is a perfect address book for finding the risen, the living Christ. Two people in distress intimately share their story with each other, and then they openly share their story with an interested stranger. They are then open to hearing what the scripture says from someone with a different pair of glasses. They then insist on sharing what sustenance, what food they have with the stranger. Fellowship, hospitality, word, and sacrament. These are all the ways Christ has promised to be present with us, all of which happen to be the everyday activities of this church. Not the building, or institution, but the people of God—us—who attend to one another, to strangers, to God’s word, to the sacraments as a way of life.

I know that each of you here, like Cleopas and his wife Mary have experienced how the hearing of the word and the breaking of bread at the eucharist at the church can break you right open. Sometimes you are right in the middle of it when suddenly tears start. It is like the gates to your heart open and everything you ever loved comes tumbling out to be missed and praised and mourned and loved some more. It is like being in the presence of God. One moment you see Jesus and the next you do not. One moment your eyes are opened and you recognize the risen Christ, and the next he vanishes from your sight.

Take heart. This is no ghost. Do not fear. You cannot lose him. This is one of the places he has promised to be at the church, and this is the place he returns to meet us again and again.

 Risen Lord, be known to us at this moment,  in the hearing of your word and in the breaking of the bread…. and as we depart from this place, also be known to us in the stranger /whom we will meet/ on this road back home.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Blessed Brokenness,” Gospel Medicine, pp. 19-23.

Jake Owensby, “Lessons from a Condemned Man’s Last Meal,” Looking for God in Messy Places,  April 29, 2017