12 step Eucharist Sam Shoemaker

 12 Step Eucharist St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Sam Shoemaker January 31

Do you ever wonder where the 12 steps we will be repeating tonight came from? Listen to this story.

 Let’s take a time travel trip back to Calvary Episcopal  Church New York, City 1934.

The Rev. Dr. Sam Shoemaker has been rector of Calvary, for 10 years. He has developed Calvary House, a hostel and center for ministry and small groups in the city. He also runs Calvary Rescue Mission, a place for the “down and out” to get a meal and rest. Bill Wilson, an alcoholic New York stockbroker, visits there during his last days of drinking. Bill is influenced by Ebby Thacher, a friend who has become sober through a spiritual program called the Oxford Group led by Sam Shoemaker while Ebby meets at Calvary House.

We time travel to one year later, 1935,  Bill Wilson becomes sober and spends more time with Sam Shoemaker in his book-lined office talking with Shoemaker and attending Oxford Group meetings as well as visiting  at Calvary Mission and Calvary House. Dr. Shoemaker sends Bill a letter when he is 60 days sober thanking him for his help getting a chemistry professor sober.

 Later Bill Wilson  says, “Every river has a wellspring at its source. AA is like that. In the beginning  there was a spring which poured out of a clergyman, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker. He channeled to the few of us who then saw and heard him.. the loving concern, the Grace.. to walk in the Consciousness of God- to live and to love again, as never before. 4 Dr. Sam Shoemaker was one of AA’s indispensables. Had it not been for his ministry to us in our early time, our Fellowship would not be in existence today. Sam Shoemaker passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated. He was a co-founder of AA.”  The first three Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous were inspired in part by Shoemaker. “The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in American, and no one else.” I am  quoting Bill Wilson directly.

So, Dr. Shoemaker provided a refuge for alcoholics in New York and directly influenced the Twelve Steps through his long and close friendship with Bill Wilson. 1.2,3

You have heard from Bill Wilson. Now here are the words Sam Shoemaker later said.

“I believe the church has a great deal to learn; not from any individual member of AA, but from the incredible collective experience of AA. I pray to God that what is happening pretty steadily and consistently throughout the fellowship could happen in every church. The AA fellowship is made up of people who are beginning to be changed, not saints, and not perfect. We in the church can all learn by this example and if we think we’re above it we are in real danger.”5/

Last Wednesday and every January 31, the Episcopal Church remembers the ministry of this Episcopal  priest in New York City who saved and changed the life of so many people at this service today.  One of my most spiritual moments was attending an AA meeting  seven years ago in Sam Shoemaker’s office at Calvary.

Perhaps you have seen an Episcopal presence in AA, but even more, perhaps you can see that Sam Shoemaker transmitted to AA a message, that it is all about love.. the same message we hope to transmit at this church and at this Eucharist.

1.Dick B, “Calvary House and the Oxford Group,”  The Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous, A Design for Living that Works, p. 114.

2“A Biography of Sam Shoemaker,” AlcoholicAnonymous.org.

3“AA Tributes ,Samuel Shoemaker, ‘Co-founder’ of AA,” Dickb.com

4Karen Plavan, “A Talk on Samuel Moor Shoemaker,” Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburg, January 31, 2010

5 Michael Fitzpatrick, “Rev Sam Shoemaker, His Role in Early AA Part 11,” Recoveryspeakers.com

Joanna Seibert

Epiphany 4B The Unclean Spirit

Epiphany 4B Mark 1:21-28 The unclean spirit, Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores, Alabama January 28, 2018

My friend John begins experimenting with drugs and alcohol in his twenties when he is a surgery resident. He begins very scientifically as a curiosity about how his patients feel with their pre-op medications. John immediately knows he feels good, very good, especially with the opiates. He is conscious that what he is doing is wrong, he feels guilty, but he becomes powerless over this “unclean spirit,” so similar to those beautiful but dangerous Sirens in Greek mythology whose enchanting musical voices cause sailors to be shipwrecked. Indeed, his life soon is a shipwreck. John loses his job, his marriage, and his medical license. He is depressed, feels unlovable. His mother rejects him. He spends a few days in the hospital but does not go to treatment.  He goes to a few AA meetings, only going through the motions.  He rejected a belief in God after his father died. Why would a loving God allow a good man like his father to die and keep alive a bad person like himself?

John applies for a psychiatry residency in New York and is accepted with the understanding that he goes regularly to an analyst. He finishes his residency and works again in medicine as a psychiatrist, using his great gift of charm, but soon he experiments again, this time with beer, pot, and codeine. With codeine, he knows euphoria as he has never known before. Codeine and alcohol cover up all his feelings of inadequacy. His addiction, his unclean spirit grows like Topsey. For the second time he loses his job, his license, and all his money. He learns about a treatment center in Little Rock. The founder is a black man, Joe McQuany, world renowned for recognizing and calling out “unclean spirits.”

The “unclean spirit” eventually does come out of John convulsing and crying in a loud voice. John describes that experience as becoming humble, so humble he can listen and follow someone else’s direction. He still cannot believe in God, but as CS Lewis and Joe teach him, he “acts as if.” He says his prayers, works the 12 steps. He acts as if there is something greater in his life, and slowly and surely this God of his understanding fills the hole in his heart previously occupied by the “unclean spirit.” He knows he can only become clean and sober with the help of God and a recovery community, for he has tried everything else to stop his addiction, and nothing he could do on his own worked. John goes to three AA meetings a day for a year. These meetings begin with a prayer presumably written by Reinhold Niebuhr that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The meeting ends with the Lord’s Prayer: “thy will be done, give us this day our daily bread, forgive us as we forgive, deliver us.”1

 John moves to a half-way house and earns money re-upholstering chairs. Friends in recovery help him find another job in medicine.  He is on probation for his medical license for twenty years. That means he has to have papers signed at several meetings a week and has drug screens for 20 years. He now works helping others with their “unclean spirit” of addiction, marries an amazing woman in recovery, and they are hopelessly in love after 20 years.

We often talk about why he is in recovery and the great majority (90%) are still living and dying with their unclean spirit, their addiction.  We both agree that Mark’s story is true, that the “unclean spirit” knows and recognizes God so readily. There also  is the part of us that tries in every way to believe in ourselves, that we can recover on our own. We do not need this God that we are so angry at because this God has abandoned us. We have to reach a place of desperation, a bottom, where we are ready to turn our will and our life over to this God, for as in John’s and Mark’s story, only God is the one who heals and commands these “unclean spirits” to come out of us.

Addictions are not the only “unclean spirits” that live among us, but they are the flashy, spectacular, florescent ones, for they are like tornados, destroying or wounding and crippling everything in their paths. There are more subtle unclean spirits that are just as harmful that harden our hearts:/ gossip, the need to control ourselves and others, functional atheism which is a belief that only we can do the job, the resentments we hang onto for harms done to us, the family member or co-worker we refuse to forgive, our hatred and self-righteous thoughts we hid behind well-mannered looks, our blindness to the suffering of those around us. We may not be a part of the heroin or cocaine epidemic occurring in our country presently, but without thinking about it we gossip or try to take control, or do things not healthy for our bodies, or take credit for something someone else has done, or say something unkind./ I have had an intimate experience with all of these as well./

Mark starts the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with this short story set in Capernaum, Jesus’ home base in Galilee.  Jesus calls his disciples by the sea shores, and they leave their fishing boats and follow him on the Sabbath to the local synagogue, where Jesus teaches “with authority” as he encounters a man with an unclean spirit. In Jesus’ time, an unclean spirit could be anything, any illness, any disease. Again, note that the demon recognizes Jesus, and has the most dialogue in this story, the most dramatic soliloquy, filled with fear, crying out with a loud voice, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

 Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, Holy One of God!’”

Our unnamed man with the unnamed unclean spirit is teaching us that whatever our illness or addiction or sin or character defect is, it is always coming out, leading us in a straight path to Jesus. People in recovery will tell you this is true. It is their addiction that leads them to God, just as it does for our friend John and the man in Mark’s story today. People with debilitating illnesses will tell you that their illness leads them to God. Does God cause theses illnesses in order for us to reach out to God? Don’t go there. Just know God redeems every part of us, constantly trying to heal us. There is some form of resurrection in every Good Friday experience. Remember this. /

Are you wondering what a man with an unclean spirit is doing in the synagogue? Not allowed! We, like our friend in this short story, take our unclean spirits with us to places where we think the unclean spirits will not be recognized.  We are so good at hiding our unclean thoughts and actions, but we are powerless and not as good at hiding our unclean spirits. At some inopportune time, like in church, or in front of our children, or with our spouse, or at work, it appears like a flame-mouthed dragon as it did for John and for the man in the synagogue.

But this is the season of Epiphany, the season of light and this sermon is becoming more appropriate for Lent. Let’s turn on the light. The light bulb goes on when we like the man in Mark’s story and our friend John recognize that God uses every part of us, the unclean and the clean. God uses the unclean part of us, our demons, to draw us to him just as he uses the clean part, the Sunday best of us, the part that says our prayers and visits the sick, and makes soup and sends cards to the homebound and grieving./

Today’s story is about how deeply God desires our healing; how God will interrupt whatever is going on, even a church service, to heal us. Mark is the premier gospel writer emphasizing Jesus’ healing power. Of the eighteen miracles in Mark, thirteen are about healing.2 Typically Mark only records a few of Jesus’ words as he heals in the synagogue. Mark’s Jesus teaches by doing, by action./

 Our unnamed man in Mark is healed in the daytime on the Sabbath in church. John in our story is also healed in a church but in the church basement perhaps on the Sabbath but at night as well as daytime, just as many are healed in rooms in this church in 12 step meetings almost every day, as well as at your Wednesday night healing service.

 Buechner1 describes what happens at these church basements and meeting rooms. (Note the similarity of spirit and spirits.) The people who come to these 12 step rooms “try to follow a kind of spiritual rule, not only uncovering their own deep secrets but making peace with the people they have hurt and been hurt by. Through prayer and meditation, through seeking help from each other, they try to draw near any way they can to God. They sometimes make serious slips. They sometimes make miraculous gains. They laugh a lot. Once in a while they cry. When the meeting is over, some of them embrace. Sometimes one of them will take special responsibility for another, agreeing to be available at any hour of day or night if the need should arise.

They also have slogans, which you can either dismiss as hopelessly simplistic, or cling on to like driftwood in a stormy sea. One of them is "Let go and let God.” Let go of the dark, which you wrap yourself in like a straightjacket, and let in the light. Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you, your children's lives, the lives of your husband, your wife, your friends, because that is just what you are powerless to do. Remember that the lives of other people are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become life-transforming.” Turning our life and our will over to God is turning on and looking to the light. And Jesus replies, “Be still,” and suddenly all that has been tormenting us comes out, as we stand before Jesus, quiet and healed.3

1Frederick Buechner, “Let Go,” Telling Secrets, pp. 91-92,

2P C Ennis, Feasting on the Word year B, Vol 1, p. 310.

3Walter Russell Bowie, “Epiphany 4,” Synthesis, January 2018.

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