Holy Name Twelve Step Eucharist

Holy Name, January 1, 12 step Eucharist at 5:30

St. Mark’s, Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Arkansas, Wednesday January 3, Luke 2:15-21

Two days ago, on January 1st, we celebrated the Circumcision of Christ. Since we are more squeamish than our ancestors, modern calendars often list it as the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but the other emphasis is the older. Every Jewish boy was circumcised and formally named on the eighth day of his life, and so, one week after Christmas, we celebrate the occasion when Jesus was given the name which was given to Mary before he was conceived.  Our great gift that we celebrate on Holy Name is that we now have been given a name for God, Jesus.

Today as Christians we are given our names at baptism. This Sunday at the 10:30 service six people will be baptized and receive their names. / They will be named and made a member of this community, a member of body of Christ, a child of God, and a member of God’s kingdom forever.. Do not ever, ever forget this about your own baptism./

If you attend a 12-step meeting and speak, the first thing you say is your name. My name is “Joanna”, and then you identify yourself further with the addiction that brought you there. “My name is Joanna and I am an alcoholic.” I can well remember the first time I said that over 27 years ago. I did not want to say that. I knew I had this addiction, but I did not want everyone else to know it, as if many did not already know. However, naming ourselves and our addiction is the first step to recovery, letting others know who we really are, not pretending to be something that we are not, beginning to take off that mask that we are the perfect person. It is our first step to freedom.

Today, remember your name and who you are and remember Jesus who was named on this day, and remember that his whole life was lived to teach us how to be free people, free of addiction, free of all the masks we wear, free to be the person that God created us to be.

Do you remember something else that was said at your baptism? “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” No matter what our name is, at our baptism, God calls us by that name, and we are “marked as Christ’s own forever.”/

On this special feast day we celebrate the naming of a vulnerable eight-day-old infant who came to this earth so that we might know God’s name, so that we might know God more clearly, more dearly.

Do not ever, ever forget that we as well have been named and marked as Christ’s own, God’s own forever. May you especially remember that you have been marked as God’s own forever, every time someone calls you by your name.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Feast Day of St. Nicholas: 12 step Eucharist

Feast of St. Nicholas

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 12 step Eucharist, December 6, 2017

Very little is known of the life of Nicholas, bishop of Myra who lived in Asia Minor around 342. He is the patron of seafarers, sailors and more especially of children. As a bearer of gifts to children, his name was brought to America by the Dutch colonists in New York where he popularly became known as Santa Claus.

The feast day of St. Nicholas has been celebrated in our family as a major holiday. We have a big family meal together. My husband dresses up as Bishop Nicholas with a beard, a miter, and crozier and long red stole and comes to visit our grandchildren after dinner. He speaks Greek to the children and the adults. Speaking Greek is my husband’s favorite pastime, and of course you know that Nikolas was Greek. Nike the Greek! Then our grandchildren go into the bedrooms and leave their shoes outside the doors and Bishop Nicholas leaves chocolate coins and presents in their shoes. I won’t bore you with our pictures of this family event, but they are stunning.

Why am I sharing with you our family story? For the last several years on this feast day, I sit and watch this pageant and am filled with so much gratitude, for my sobriety date is close to the feast day of St. Nicholas. Each year I know that if someone had not led me to a recovery program, I would not be alive tonight.  I would not be witnessing this wonderful blessing of seeing my children and grandchildren giggle with glee as they try to respond to a beautiful old man with a fake beard speaking Greek to them and secretly giving them candy in their shoes. For me it is a yearly reminder to keep working these 12 steps so I can be around for another feast day of St. Nicholas.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Advent 1B: Wake Up Sunday, Second Coming

Advent 1B Wake Up Sunday

Mark 13:24-37, December 3, 2017 Collierville, Tennessee

This first Sunday in Advent is always “wake up Sunday,” but goodness knows we are already awake,  sleep deprived, planning the best Advent, the best Christmas for our church, our family, friends. We are already over scheduled,1 wondering how we can bake, chauffeur, buy, wrap, write cards, make visits to those who are homebound, teach, stay focused on our work, meet with friends, and go to more parties than we attend during the rest of the year.

Then of course when we listen to the news, it does sound just like Mark’s  apocolypse message: the world is coming to an end, and this could happen very soon.

For most Episcopalians, talk about the second coming and end times is  embarrassing and amusing. I recently read a parody on  how the media might report the end of the world. The Wall Street Journal Headline could be: “Dow Jones plummets as world ends.”  Amazon  online might  say: “Our final sale.” We might get a message from Google or Facebook saying : “System temporarily down, try reconnecting back in 15 minutes.”  

 As we go through the check-out line at  Kroger, we see at least one  magazine article about when this cosmic blockbuster is going to open. We chuckle and shake our heads. Yet, every week we celebrate at our Eucharist our expectation of Christ’s return: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” We pray for it in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come.”

We profess it in the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

Barbara Brown Taylor2 tells us that Christ has been coming back for so long that plenty of people have given up on him. Before he dies, Jesus  tells his followers, “I’ll be right back.” Believing him, they do not make long range plans.. Then a decade passes, then another. The people who actually knew Jesus begin to die off. The only reason we have gospels at all is that someone finally wakes up to say, “You know, there aren’t all that many eyewitnesses left. We really ought to put this stuff down on paper.”

 According to anyone’s guess, Mark’s gospel is  probably written at least 30  years after Jesus’ death.3 The stars are still in the sky, but that is about all. Jesus’ mother, Mary, is almost certainly dead along with the apostles Peter and Paul who are martyred in Rome. Jerusalem and the temple have been destroyed by Titus while putting down the Jewish rebellion. The emperor’s favorite pastime is thinking up inventive new ways for Christians to die, and there is fighting among the Christians themselves with whole families being torn apart. Things are going to pieces, and Mark has a lot to explain.

However, /Jesus’ wake up message today doesn’t leave Mark’s audience or us still in this chaos. Jesus tells us to be alert, wait for him, and then he gives us clues where and when we will see his coming, his presence, his light in the midst of what seems like darkness.

Edgar Allen Poe also has written a story about similar clues that might help us.

In the story of the “Purloined Letter,” the Paris chief of police asks a famous amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin to help him find a letter stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed women by an unscrupulous minister who is blackmailing his victim. The chief of police and his detectives have thoroughly searched the hotel where the minister is living, behind the wallpaper, under the carpets, examining tables and chairs with microscopes, probing cushions with needles, and have found no sign of the letter. Dupin gets a detailed description of the letter, visits the minister at his hotel, complaining of weak eyes, wearing green spectacles, so he can disguise his eyes as he searches for the letter. There it is in plain sight in a cheap card rack hanging from a dirty ribbon. He leaves a snuff box behind as an excuse to return the next day and switches out the letter for a duplicate.

 Like Inspector Dupin, we are to put on a new pair of glasses, not green or dark glasses  as we wore to see the recent eclipse of the sun, but perhaps 3-D glasses to see the depth of the world around us. We are carefully to observe, not just to be awake,  but to be alert.  

Jesus’ illustration of what is right in plain site is the parable about a sprouting fig tree.  “From the fig tree learn its lesson,” Jesus says. “Summer is near….he is near.” If you want to learn what God is up to, we must  pay attention to  the world immediately near, the world right around us. Look closely. Pay attention. Parables are happening on every street corner in the most ordinary events of our lives with clues to the presence of the kingdom in every square foot of earth, but most of us have forgotten to look for them. God is constantly speaking to us, but we so often are not present to the present, present to the present moment, the now.

 What is the barrier? One is  what is called the CNN Complex. This syndrome, first identified during the Gulf War,  continues to proliferate in our present political climate. People  become glued to their television and smart phone screens, watching the same battle scenes and battlefields in the political arena over and over again. The CNN Complex has become the postmodern addiction to breaking news and bulletins, and most generally an addiction to information. Whether we understand or comprehend the information is immaterial. We are pathologically addicted simply to the information itself, putting us into an addiction black out spell to the world immediately around us. We INGEST information, but rarely DIGEST it. We take in information constantly without comprehending or conceptualizing it and crave for more.

We take for granted and ignore the immediate world around us as we carry the syndrome over to seeing and hearing but not really seeing and hearing what is immediately around us. We are like people living near train tracks who become so used to hearing the train go by that we no longer hear it.1

My family lives  close to Interstate 430 but we no longer hear the loud rumbling of 18 wheelers as they cross the bridge over the Arkansas River. We have become so accustomed to the noise that is now background.  On my desk are icons to call me to God, but I look right past them as I obsess about my daily trials and the condition of the world.

 This is Jesus’ early morning Advent wake up call  to become aware of our everyday lives.

Pay special attention the world out side where the fig trees and the evergreens now surround us. Let their majestic beauty transform us, photosynthesize us to live in the moment. Sit outside, take a walk, engage in the outside world rather than neon signs, malls, televsion or iPhone screens./

Pay special attention to the interruptions from our multi-tasked agendas. They make the squirrels running around in the cage in our minds come to a screeching halt and open us up to the present moment, the now.

Pay attention to times of darkness in our lives. This is where Jesus promises to be very near beside us. I see this so vividly in grief recovery groups we work with.

Pay special attention to young children. They still live in the present. I remember one afternoon when I was deeply focused on some task in our house and our young daughter comes running in shouting. “Mom, Mom, come see the rainbows!” Only by God’s Grace do I stop/ and go outside with her. We had a sprinkler going in our yard and the sunlight was producing multiple rainbows in and out of the water streams. For me, this was a God moment, sharing joy and beauty with my young daughter in the present moment. This was a small taste of the second coming. The stars did not fall and I was surrounded by only a tiny angel, but I saw the love and joy of Christ in the joy and love of a small child.

 Jesus comes to us in the present moment, not the past or the future. The precious present is where God meets us./

Apocalypse means “revelation,” as when we look at something half our life and suddenly we see it for the first time, whether it is the sunlight changing water into rainbows, or the sorrow  we finally see in our neighbor’s eyes, or our own face looking back at us in the mirror. Revelation is the moment we see through, see into, see beyond what is going on, to what is really going on—not because we are some kind of genius but because God lets us, and we pay attention to what is near by us, and God comes in.4//

The physical birth of Jesus  has occurred. We have decided on a date to celebrate it. Jesus’s second coming is repeated again and again in each of our lives. even in the darkest darkness.  We have been promised in the resurrection to live in the realm of God where there is no sorrow, no pain, but until that time we also can experience a taste  of what that life is like today.5 Advent calls us to that life.

 Today Jesus asks us to wake up, be alert, to be fully alive,  so we will recognize  very near beside us, the one who was born, who has died, who is risen, and who comes again--- and again, and again, and again.

1Lillian Daniel, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 20-24

2Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way, “God’s Beloved Thief,” pp. 3-9.

3Barbara Brown Taylor, “With Power and Great Glory,” Gospel Medicine,  pp 133-137.

4Barbara Brown Taylor,  "Apocalyptic Figs,"Bread of Angels,   pp. 156-160.

5Martin Copenhaver, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 21-25.

 “The Great Intrusion,” Homiletics,  11/28/1993.

O.C. Edwards, “Advent 1, Year C,” Tuesday Morning,  pp. 20-21. 

“Return of the King,” Homiletics, November 2003, pp. 42-45.

 Joanna joannaseibert.com

Christ the King A: Wellness Check

Christ the King St. Mark’s November 26, 2017

Matthew Final Judgement, Great Surprise, Wellness Check

My husband summarizes our life as we become older into four categories. “We go to church. We go out to eat. We go to funerals, and we go to the doctors. Indeed, we do spend an inordinate amount of time in physician offices where miracle workers try to put our bodies back together for a few more years so we might see graduations and marriages of our grandchildren. We concentrate on wellness,/ disease prevention. We are vigilant about signs of cancer, for we know early diagnosis is crucial.  Heart disease is a worry.  My husband has had his bypass.  My primary care physician treats me as if at my age I already have heart disease. We know the best treatment for our heart. Diet and exercise. The proper diet is easier, but exercise is more difficult with my mobility issues. One daughter-in-law suggests yoga and another daughter-in-law and our granddaughter are “fixing” as they say in Arkansas to do yoga here at St. Mark’s. Mine will no doubt be chair yoga.  Also, you may see some of the staff wearing a Fitbit to measure steps. This is an attempt of Michael McCain to keep us alive a little longer./

This passage from Matthew is called the Last Judgement, but could have several other titles. One is the Great Surprise. Those who are caring for those in need as well as those who are not have no realization that they are also caring for Christ as well./ Another title is The Great Wellness Check/ for ourselves and for those in need.1 How interesting that the six ways Jesus gives for recognizing God in the world all deal with caring for the bodies, the humanity, the wellness of others. Jesus doesn't ask how many souls we have saved, what creeds we believe, but asks if we have cared for the basic human needs and wellness of others. Jesus makes it clear that what happens to others, happens to him. He takes it personally. He tells us that his body will be present in those in need and especially those who are suffering, the untreated hypertensive and the mentally ill who visit St. Mark’s food pantry and St. Francis House./ Remember this. Our King is not a remote God up in the sky on some throne. He is right here,/ right here, especially in our neighbor who needs us.

Jesus reminds us how important it is for our souls to practice unrestrained hospitality and love towards each other, especially those who are sick, needy, poor, the stranger, those in prison, especially for the “least of these, who are members of my family,” says the King. This is the diaconal call and invitation of the church to all of us. Jesus is giving us at the end of this liturgical year a snapshot of what our overall wellness should look like/ as well as the wellness of those in need.

 Matthew wants us to know that our ministry to those in the margins of our society is a diagnostic tool for us to measure and evaluate the condition of our own hearts. This ministry should not be a check off of a to do list, but a call to care because of the love which God has placed in our hearts. How easy it is to forget how to nurture this love and put it into action. Remember how quickly the disciples (Acts 24:10-14) forget in the immediate post-resurrection stories when the first women at the tomb are not believed and are dismissed by the disciples. Remember the discouragement of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.  Just one day after the resurrection, we see some of the most dangerous cancers Christians face, apathy, antagonism, disagreement, and a cooling of that love we once felt for Christ and each other. We forget we can only keep that love by giving it away as we look for the face of Christ daily in those climbing the corporate ladder as well as those in hospitals and nursing homes, those who are hungry, immigrants, and those who have lost their homes from fire, flood, or hurricane./

As in all of Jesus’s commands, it is a paradox. When we reach out to others in need, the love we share comes back to us and revitalizes, reenergizes us.  Henri Nouwen describes it more clearly.2 “Like every human organization, the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. The answer to prevent it is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity and gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness. When we reach out with all our energy to the margins of our society we will discover that petty disagreements, fruitless debates, and paralyzing rivalries will gradually vanish.”/

At the beginning of this month we celebrated the lives of saints and mentors who made a difference in our lives. They are a constant reminder of what wellness is like.

Last month we remembered someone who all in the recovery community in Little Rock knew well, Columbus. Every year, usually early in the morning on the birthday of your sobriety, you got a phone call from Columbus. You waited in anticipation for that call, celebrating one more year of new life with someone you only knew over the phone lines.

 Columbus’ wife of 46 years left  him three times before he went into his last rehabilitation after multiple DUI’s, missed work, and days when she did not know where he was.  Columbus died in the 38th year of his sobriety and was credited with leading thousands of men and women all over the world to sobriety. Columbus made 15,000 calls a year and almost half a million calls before his death. He also called people he knew were no longer in recovery and told them he cared about them. Many say they returned to recovery because of Columbus.

Columbus’ wife described his change as “truly unbelievable. He became a dedicated father and grandfather after he came so close to losing his family.”

When I hear people wonder what they can possibly do to make a difference in the world, I tell them Columbus’ story. One man/ with a generous heart,/ picking up the phone every day,/ and changing lives/ with a simple phone call.

I know each of us can remember times we did not get a good wellness report and passed by the body of Christ. As we met for our family’s last Thanksgiving meal last night, we looked at old family vacation slides. I remember the first time we took our oldest son to New York when he was in high school. We were so excited to show him all of our favorite haunts in the Big Apple. Of course, his favorite part of the trip was dining from room service in our hotel room. When we did venture out to the crowded streets, I do not remember his amazement at seeing the cacophony of people or the towering skyscrapers. I do remember that shortly after we left our hotel, we were met with people, men, women, young, old sitting in alleys and by storefronts with cardboard signs begging for food and money. Of course, my husband and I walked right by. / But our son,/ walked by with us, /then stopped,/ and turned around/ and went back to give money to each person begging.  Consciously or unconsciously, our son had seen the body of Christ in each of the street people he met that day. Isn't it amazing what your children can teach you./

 Barbara Brown Taylor3 reminds us that “sometimes when we do look into the eyes of those in need, all we see is our own helplessness, our own inability to know what is right./ Sometimes we will see our own reflection; we see ourselves in a stark new light./  Sometimes we see such gratitude that it reminds us how much we have to be thankful for, / and sometimes we see such a wily will to survive that we cannot help but admire it, even when we are the target of its ambitions.”

One more thing to remember. Notice that the sheep and the goats do not respond  individually,  but as a group. We are part of a community, the body of Christ, and the wellness of this body and our own depends on our serving together. My experience is that my body becomes exhausted and overwhelmed when I begin to believe that I alone am in charge of caring for the needs of the world. GOD DOES NOT WORK ALONE, so why would we think that God would ask us to serve without the help of the rest of the body of Christ?/

Wellness checks/ are not our favorite things. They ask us to look at our lives and recalibrate. They remind us that infection, cancer, and heart disease are what we need to be on the lookout for in our own spirit/ as well as our bodies.  Jesus reminds us today what a wellness check-up for Christians is like.// I have asked you to remember many things./ If you forget, remember one thing. Christianity’s default position should always be hospitality,4 especially to the stranger. This is Jesus’ favorite medical advice for our hearts,/ to reach out/ and love/ is to stay alive/ and be well.5

1Lindsay Armstrong, Feasting on the Word, year A Vol 4, pp. 333-337.

2Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey.

3Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, "Knowing Glances," pp. 133-139.

4Will Willimon, Pulpit Resource, vol. 45, no. 4 year A, November 2017, pp. 27-29.

5John Buchanan, Feasting on the Word, year A Vol 4, pp. 332-336.

Joanna   joannaseibert.com

All Saints 12 step Eucharist

 All Saints 12 step Eucharist

Ecclesiasticus 44:1-15

St. Mark’s November 1, 2017

"Let us now sing the praises of famous men,

our ancestors in their generations…

they were wise in their words of instruction..

But these also were godly men,

whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;

their wealth will remain with their descendants,

and their inheritance with their children’s children."

Today we celebrate the major feast day of  All Saints, remembering those who have gone before us, known and unknown who have made a difference in so many other lives. I would like to tell you about my experience with two saints who do not yet have a feast day.

Eight years ago, I kept getting these calls from a radiologist in Akron, Ohio, to come and speak at their Children’s Hospital about work I have done in Sickle Cell Disease. I am trying to cut back on the busyness of my life (if you can believe that) and keep refusing. Akron? You must be kidding. Ten years earlier I became aware that alcohol was interfering with my life. A therapist introduces me to her neighbor in a 12-step program, and she introduces me to a new life. I often go to a 12-step meeting at noon at the Central Office where there is a picture of the home in Akron of Dr. Bob Smith, one of the founders of this recovery program. I keep seeing that small brick-fronted house every day as I keep getting calls from the physician in Akron. Finally, I realize this just may be a message to go to Akron. I call back and say I will go on the condition that they will take me to Dr. Bob’s house. Of course, none of my hosts have heard of Dr. Bob. After the lectures, I am taken to Dr. Bob’s house, 855 Admore Avenue, modest, easily missed, tucked away in a quiet neighborhood. I go upstairs to the bedroom where Dr. Bob met with Bill Wilson, a stock speculator from New York, on the day after Mother’s Day in 1935.  In this small upper-room these two men eventually began a program, before I was born, to save my life and the lives of some of you present. These are two saints in my life and maybe yours.  This is the God of my understanding: someone who loves us so dearly that there is a plan to care for and save us all before we are born. Sitting in that house was one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I have known. I have an overwhelming sense of God’s love for me and each of us manifested through two men I have never known but now want to remember. But…. don’t be like me and wait so long to take that trip to Akron to remember the saints who have saved your life and be empowered to continue their work. Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson have not been named saints in our church calendar, but Dr. Bob’s house has been declared a National Historic Landmark. I have left some pictures for you.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com