Francis of Assisi

FRANCIS OF ASSISI (4 OCT 1226)

St. Mark’s 12 step Eucharist,   5:30 pm October 4, 2017.

 Today we celebrate the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis was born in 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant. His early years were frivolous. He joined the military and was captured early in the Assisi-Perugia war. A year’s harsh imprisonment and a lengthy illness, probably malaria, at age 19 lead him to reflect on the purpose of life. Like many people starting 12 step-recovery, he became “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and prayed that he could be guided and helped from returning to his old life.  One day, in the church of San Damiano while looking at the original of this cross, he seemed to hear Christ saying to him, "Francis, repair my falling house." He took the words literally sold a bale of silk from his father's warehouse to pay for repairs to the church of San Damiano. His father was outraged, and there was a public confrontation at which his father disinherited and disowned him, and Francis in turn renounced his father's wealth. A favorite account says that he not only handed his father his purse, but also took off his expensive clothes, laid them at his father's feet, and walked away naked.

Later after hearing a sermon about Jesus’ command to go out and proclaim the kingdom taking no money or walking stick or shoes, (Matthew 10:9) Francis realized that God was not calling him to rebuild the building of his church but the people of his church, especially the poor, and the rest of his life was spent doing that.

Like people in 12 step-recovery, Francis made a dramatic change in the direction of his life and turned his life over to his higher power. There are so many stories for us to study about Francis, his life of absolute poverty, his love of the Eucharist, love of animals and his love and connection to God in creation and Nature. We heard in Morning Prayer today that “Francis of all the saints, is the 1 popular and admired, but probably the least imitated!”

To honor St. Francis, Michael will be here Sunday at 4:00 to bless all and any of your animals.

Tonight, let us concentrate on the prayer that is attributed to him. It is in our Prayer Book on page 833, but there is a copy in your seat. This is a prayer asking God, our Higher Power to change us just as God did for Francis. It could be considered a third step prayer. Let us read it together.

PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS 

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.   BCP 833

1Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 2006, p. 404.

Joanna Seibertjoannaseibert.com

St. Michael and All Angels

St. Michael and All Angels September 29

This Friday September 29, the next to the last day of September is the Feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. I keep a carved stone with a painted picture of St. Michael with his sword hanging by my window above my desk at home in my office. St. Michael is almost the first thing I see when I life my eyes from my computer. You as well encounter St. Michael every time you come to this chapel. There is a powerful stained-glass depiction of St. Michael overpowering evil just as you leave this chapel on the left.

 I give thanks for St. Michaels in my life who have been by my side in difficult times, lending me courage to go on.

 I think of some of my favorite other angels of today.  I have left you a picture of two of them. The first of course is Angel 2nd class Clarence Odbody played by Henry Travers who saves George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart, from bankruptcy and suicide in the timeless Frank Capra 1946 Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Whenever I hear a bell ring, I do wonder if an angel has earned his wings!

The second is my all-time favorite movie angel, the suave angel named Dudley played to the essence by Cary Grant who comes to save the life and marriage of Bishop Henry Brougham, David Niven, whose wife Julia is played by Loretta Young in the 1947 Samuel Goldwyn Christmas classic, The Bishop’s Wife.

Whenever I visit our Bishop’s office, I always look around to see where Dudley is.

As I talk to people in spiritual direction I listen to hear if they mention angels in their lives, people whom they encounter for some time or briefly that stand by them or lead them through situations or obstacles which used to baffle them. All of us have encountered angels, sometimes unaware. They are the people whom we least expect who show up just at the right time, when someone you dearly love dies, when you learn you have cancer, when your children are in trouble, when you know the task before you is impossible, or just when you are having a bad day. Angels are life changing and life giving. They are messengers, truth tellers, who see God in us and, like the angel Gabriel to Mary proclaim that God is in us when we never have a clue.

Who were/ are the angels in your life? They may be sitting next to you.

Give thanks for them.

How do you repay them?  You pay it forward by living the life God created you to be. You become Dudley or Clarence or St. Michael or all angels to those you meet one day at a time.

Joanna       joannaseibert.com

Forgiveness

19A Forgiveness

Holy Spirit, Gulf Shores, September 17, 2017

We have spent the last several weeks glued to the weather channel watching the path and destruction of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Jose wondering what we can do to help, wondering if Gulf Shores will be hit next. There is nothing like the weather to teach us about surrender and powerlessness. I think of the 6 million people in Florida who indeed lost power, two thirds of the state.  On our travels from Arkansas we stopped in Hattiesburg where the parking lot was filled with cars with Florida license plates and our hotel was filled with families with their dogs./ As the water rises we evacuate to shelter with what is most precious. After the storm, our only transportation may sometimes be by boat.

Balbir Matbur writes, “The boat I travel in is called Surrender. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude—complete gratitude for the gift of life. I am thankful for the experience of this life, for the opportunity to dance. I get angry, I get mad,/ but as soon as I remind myself to put my oars in the water, I forgive.”

Forgiveness

October 2, 2006. Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania1

A heavily armed dairy truck driver enters the one room schoolhouse of the Amish community, takes the eleven young schoolgirls hostage lining them up facing the blackboard, systematically attempts to execute them, killing five, and wounding five before he kills himself. The Amish community enshrouds their grief within their circle of prayer and daily communion. Within hours after the shooting they go to the home of the man who killed their children, offer forgiveness to his widow, attend the funeral of the shooter, and set up a charitable fund for his family./

Today Jesus calls us to forgive seventy-seven times or some translations say 70 times 7 or 490 times. He says nothing about forgiving according to the degree of the sin. He is talking about all. He is telling us that forgiveness is a top down event. It starts with the king in today’s parable, our God who forgives our huge debts and expects us to do likewise. Oh dear. This seems impossible.//

Will Willimon2 suggests we think about the worst thing anyone has done to us, the lie that was told about us, the time we were falsely punished, the deal where we were cheated, the person who insulted us. Now picture yourself extending a hand of forgiveness to that person for the terrible wrong they have done to you./ It seems impossible, doesn’t it?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter have written a classic book called The Book of Forgiving,3 emphasizing that we begin by telling our story so that we can move on to a new and more grateful story. Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves so that we do not allow those persons to continue to harm us as we emotionally and mentally carry anger and resentments towards them like a sack of heavy rocks over our shoulders. When we cannot forgive, that heavy burden causes a part of us to be immobilized, to stop growing.// Tutu’s book is highly recommended to be studied in a group and slowly, slowly digested.

Walter Brueggmann4 also writes about forgiveness especially from what we learn in the Old Testament.  He writes that forgiveness is made impossible in a system of deeds-consequences when deeds have an unbreakable tight predictable connection to consequences with no way out. This is the law, and if you break it, this is what will happen to you. Amen. This is the basis of much right-wing religious preaching of “hell, fire, and damnation,” trying to frighten people into a moral life. Brueggmann believes that forgiveness is only possible when we realize the astonishing readiness of God to reach beyond deeds-consequences, to offer continually to us unlimited restoration and extravagant forgiveness.  There is nothing, nothing that we can do for which God does not forgive us, and we are called to do the same. When we begin to lead a life of pardoning and newness, we start to see the world not through our grievances but through gratitude. It is a new life, a different life. We saw it in Nelson Mandela who forgives his guards of his 27 years of imprisonment as he walks out of prison. He tells others who are harboring resentments and grievances, “if I do not forgive them, I am still in prison.” Buddhists call it the Great Compassion.

Forgiveness brings freedom, a release. God commands us to do so. Otherwise our life is a living hell as it was for the slave in Jesus’ parable who would not forgive a 100 thousand times smaller debt, equivalent to a 3 months minimum wage, after he had been magnanimously forgiven an astronomical debt of more than10 million dollars. The king miraculously wipes out this unbelievable debt, but the first slave does not learn to go and do likewise! Robert Capon writes that the difference between heaven and hell is that heaven is full of forgiving sinners, while when forgiveness is rejected, blocked, when we conform to the old system of a bookkeeping and pointless torture, we dwell in a living hell. Capon believes this parable may be telling us that perhaps the only unpardonable sin is to withhold forgiveness from others.5

 For myself, if someone has harmed me, I begin to think about them all the time and what I would like to do to them, expose them. They live rent free in my head and in essence become my higher power, my God. I do not want this person to be my God, my higher power. That is what brings me back to start the work of forgiveness. Yes, for me it is extremely hard work.// Forgiveness is not forgetting. There are things we should never forget, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, slavery, abuse, 9/ 11, Hurricanes Camille, Frederic, Ivan, Katrina, and now Harvey and Irma.

Rabbi Kushner tells this story:

“A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. ‘Since my husband walked out on us, /every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he is living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?’ Kushner answers her, ‘I’m not asking you to forgive him for his mean and selfish behavior. I’m asking you to forgive because he does not deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman. I would like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically,/ but you keep holding on to him. You are not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you are hurting yourself.’6

Richard Rohr founded a group of lay Catholic families in Cincinnati living in community. Painted over the main doorway is “70 x7.” New mail carriers think it is the address. Rohr says, “yes, this should be our address, 70 x 7!” We must live in community freely giving forgiveness. The is the kind of forgiveness where the offender is not left feeling small and judged, but liberated and loved.7 When we forgive, we choose a person’s goodness over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing in us in surprising ways and realize this is the way for us to stay connected to God’s forgiveness as well.8 Forgiveness is our only way to free ourselves from being entrapped in the past. God calls us to define ourselves by the present moment, not to define ourselves by what happened in the past.9

Do you remember the person or event we mentioned earlier whom you cannot forgive?   This is a suggestion if you would like to be free from letting that person continue to harm you. Put them at the top of your prayer list for 30 days. Pray for them every day. If you are still not free in 30 days, go another, and another 30 days. I can promise you that one morning you will wake up and you will be free at last, free to become the person God created you to be.  

1Kenneth Briggs, The Power of Forgiveness.

2 Will Willimmon, “Extravagant Forgiveness,” Pulpit Resource, September, 2017, p. 37.

3 Desmond Tutu, Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving, the fourfold path for healing ourselves and our world.

4 Walter Brueggemann, “The Impossible Possibility of Forgiveness,” Journal of Preachers, Pentecost 2015, pp. 8-17.

5 Robert Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgement, 196-200. 

6 Harold S Kushner, “Letting Go of the Role of Victim, Spirituality and Health, Winter, 1999, 34.

7 Richard Rohr, “Forgiveness” Richard Rohr Daily Meditation from Center for Action and Contemplation, Monday August 28, 2017.

8 Ibid, Wednesday August 30.

9.Ibid, Thursday, August 31.

Constance and her Companions 12 step Eucharist

Constance and her Companions 12 step Eucharist St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

September 6, 2017 5:30

Do any here have Memphis roots or connections? This weekend, specifically on Saturday, churches in Memphis and especially the Cathedral, St. Mary’s, will celebrate the martyrdom of Constance and her Companions./

 It is the summer of 1878, 139 years ago. Memphis is struck with its third epidemic in a decade of yellow fever, the mosquito-borne hemorrhagic viral infection. 30,000 citizens flee in terror. Everyone who can afford to do so packs up their bags and leaves the city and flees away from the river.  200 people are dying each day. 90% of the city contracts yellow fever, 5000 eventually die, and Memphis loses its city charter. A group of Anglican nuns from New England at the cathedral who have only been in the city five years choose to stay and nurse the sick. 4 nuns and 2 priests die. Today, if you go to the altar at St. Mary’s Cathedral you will see their names written on the steps in gold./

As I think of these martyrs, I think of so many who made sacrifices to bring about our new life, our recovery from addiction, people, especially family members, we have harmed that we can only make living amends to, whether they be alive or dead. I think of people who spent hours, hours talking and telling us their stories about recovery and their experience, strength, and hope. I think of people in our past who founded recovery programs before we were born so that we might live. I think of people who daily die without recovery who remind all of us how cunning and baffling this disease, this addiction is. I think of the God of my understanding who so loves all of us that this God becomes human and even dies so that we might really know the depth of God’s love for us and realize in some small way the experience of resurrection…. and that is who we all are. We are all resurrection people. Some of us lived a life with a disease that was becoming a living hell, but somehow, by some mystery, some miracle, we were led by people, many of whom were martyrs, into recovery. We are Easter people. We have been resurrected from the dead. Never forget this. This should be at the top of our gratitude list every day.

Listen carefully/ and as we say our daily prayers of gratitude, we might sometimes hear Constance and her companions and all the martyrs in our lives whispering nearby. “It was all worth it. You are all worth it.”

Joanna                      joannaseibert.com

Take Up your Cross and Follow me

17A Take up your cross Matthew 16:21-28

St. Mark’s September 3, 2017

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

 Our neighbors in Texas engulfed in these unprecedentedflooding disasters from Hurricane Harvey are cross bearing. We send money, we pray. We look back to times of crisis we have experienced in Little Rock trying to remember what that kind of life was like and what we learned.

 18 years ago, Wednesday, June 2, 1999.

All of Little Rock mourns the crash last night of American Flight 1420 from Dallas at the Little Rock airport. During a severe thunderstorm, Tuesday, shortly before midnight, the aircraft skids off the end of runway 4R, crashes into a bank of landing lights and a metal tower/ and lands in a flood plain of the Arkansas River 15 feet below the runway. The steel poles act like a can opener, peeling back the plane's thin shell on its left side, from the captain's controls through the first-class section. Fire engulfs the plane as fuel spills.

The captain and eight passengers have died so far. Five of the dead are from Russellville, one from Havana, Arkansas,

and one from Paragould. Throughout the day Arkansans relive the times they were on that same last flight from Dallas to Little Rock.

One of the dead is Sue Gray, a retired Russellville schoolteacher. Gray, 78, was always doing something at All Saints Episcopal Church -- working the flower garden, teaching Sunday school, embroidering altar linens. She had been on a two-week tour of Britain.

Images of the disabled plane speak to the miracle of the 129 survivors, mostly Arkansans. They are the first to survive a U.S. commercial airplane crash since 1994.   Conversations in this capitol city center around eye witness accounts from survivors.  The stories are a spectrum of human behavior.  One of the first and most haunting reports is by Little Rock native Carla Koen at Children’s Hospital Burn Unit.   As she tries to escape from the burning plane through the hole in its side, she is caught on the jagged edges and becomes trapped hanging by one leg upside down. Other passengers spill out over and on top of her,/ scrambling to get out.  “They poured over me while I was hanging there, but no one stopped to help me,” she cries. “One angry, panicked man even screamed at me as I dangled upside down, ‘Move and get out of my way so I could get out of this wreckage.’ I’ll see his face for the rest of my life,” responds this survivor.

       I as well have been haunted for years by this man. Would I have stopped to help Carla Koen or would I have trampled over her in my panic for safety from the burning plane? I know how I hope I would have acted, but I can’t be certain./  When Carla Koen finally frees her leg and jumps to safety, she soon is caring for two young girls alone and terrified in the adjacent hay field in the driving rain and hail. Erin and Cara Ashcraft, 13 and 10, are on the flight to visit their grandparents in Arkansas. Koen stays with the girls and tries to divert their attention from the disaster, asking where they are from (Flower Mound, Texas), and if the have any pets (yes, a poodle) and if they play any musical instruments (Erin plays the clarinet). Koen comforts Erin who is distraught because her hair, singed by the fire, is falling out in chucks. “I tried to talk to them about life and how we were alive and that was the most important thing,” Koen says,/ adding that the girls helped her as well. “They gave me something else to focus on.”  Koen doesn’t allow the lack of consideration to help her become a “stumbling block”, an obsession to keep her from reaching out to others./

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

More stories surface about 25 members of the Ouachita Baptist University choir returning from a two-week European tour where they had entertained Kosovo refugees in Austria. In the chaos that follows the crash, the singers work again as a team. Barrett Barber, a 19-year-old minister's son, lifts passengers through a hole in the plane above an emergency exit that would not open. Choir member Luke Hollingsworth escapes from the tail section only to go back to help wounded passengers escape. On his own shoulders, the young man carries a woman with a broken pelvis across chest-deep water to safety. Choir director Charles Fuller gets his wife out then goes back into the burning plane to help rescue an 80-year-old man with a broken hip. He is later seen guiding other passengers out of the fuselage onto the wing of the plane.

The acts of heroism don't end even after the young people have gotten survivors off the plane. Rain and huge balls of hail are pelting down on injured passengers lying on the ground. Choir members huddle over them, using their own bodies as human shields against the hail and rain. Young men take off their shirts to form makeshift blankets for the injured. When a physician arrives at the crash site, he tells reporters he is "amazed at the calmness and stoicism that I witnessed." /

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

The heroism does not come without a price. Choir member James Harrison repeatedly runs back into the burning plane to pull passengers to safety. He is overcome by smoke, collapses, and dies. One of the young girls saved by James Harrison also later dies at Children’s Hospital. Rachel Fuller, Harrison’s choir leader’s daughter, is fourteen, a 4.0 honor student and oboe player from Arkadelphia.///

 If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”/ /

Flash forward to June 2004./  5 years after the crash at the dedication of a memorial to honor heroes of flight 1420.

Comments from survivors:

“Having a life and not wasting a day is what this is all about, “says survivor Kelly Williams. Sharon Agnleman, 43, no longer wears a watch.  69-year-old Little Rock native, Nancy Wood says, “We live each day to the fullest.” Vocalist Kristen Maddox was an operatic singer before the crash, but smoke inhalation severely damaged her voice. Her hands were also critically burned. She finds a new life, graduating from nursing school the month before the memorial. She believes that she was led to this new vocation by the compassionate care she received during her many arduous hospital stays by nurses in the burn unit like St. Mark’s own Helen McLennon./

 “Take up your cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”//

Move forward to July 2009. /Ten years after the crash.// The Ouachita singers meet to remember the two of their singers who died, Rachel Fuller and James Harrison, and sing the songs that made them a community. Their choir director Charles Fuller talks about how music has the power to touch and heal hearts./

“Take up your cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”//

Is Jesus calling us today to give up our life as James Harrison and Rachael Fuller did?  The chances of our ever being in a plane crash are unbelievably slim: 1 in 11 million. We do sometimes meet situations that seem like an airline disaster. A friend or family member dies or is gravely ill or develops cancer or dementia. Our children get into trouble. We lose our job. We cannot meet the house payments. Our spouse leaves us. Our children move away. Today friends and family members lose everything as Houston is flooded./ There is no question that we have been given a cross to bear and it is very heavy and we see no Simon of Cyrene around to carry it for us. We feel like Carla Koen, hanging by one leg up side down dangling out of a burning airplane.//

       But there is more to this gospel than about cross bearing and dying. The disciples missed the message and we often do as well. “And on the third day you will be raised.” We know this is true in the life to come, but does the blessing the resurrection occur today, right now for the cross bearing we are doing today? Resurrection and blessing are written all over flight 1420. Kristin Maddox loses her voice, her career, but sees through her pain and suffering another opportunity to serve as a nurse. Nancy Wood, Kelly Williams, and Sharon Agnleman learn what is really important in life, living one day at a time./

Today 18 years later if you attend a performance of the Arkansas Symphony at Robinson Auditorium, you will see that the oboe principal chair is a memorial to Rachel Fuller. If you go to the burn unit at Children’s Hospital you will learn that the doctor there is being supported by an endowed chair in burn treatment given by Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Charles Fuller. /

 My prayers are that if called to do so, I might become a James Harrison and give up my life for others. But my ability to do this is still in doubt. More realistically I pray that I can be a Carla Koen.  When I feel as if I am hanging by one leg upside down in a burning disaster, my experience tells me, that I will survive. And when I get back on my feet, instead of harboring resentment for the situation and for the people who were not helpful, I pray I can reach out to serve others in similar circumstances. My experience tells me this is the only way healing occurs. Another name for this is /gratitude/. Another name for it is resurrection.

Linda S. Caillouet, “Fleeing survivors trod on entangled woman”, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Thursday, June 3, 1999.

Joanna Seibert, “Flight 1420, A community of Survivors and Servants,” The Living Church, July 11, 1999.

Andrea Harter, “Surviving 1420,” A Four part series, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January 23-26, 2000.

Andrea Harter, “Flight 1420 survivors to gather, crash memorial dedication today”, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Tuesday June 1, 2004.

Joanna Seibert              joannaseibert.com