Lent 4 The Lord Is My Shepherd, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, March 22, 2020

Lent 4 The Lord Is My Shepherd, St. Mark’s March 22, 2020

If you are wondering where God is in all this coronavirus mess, stay with us for a few more minutes. As we live socially distant, trying to avoid the coronavirus, the psalm appointed many, many years ago, just for today, is the 23rd Psalm where we are told that God is our shepherd, who leads us and cares for us. I hope we will pray this psalm every day until we can again become physically connected. In fact, let’s say it again. (PAGE 612 BCP )

1 The Lord is my shepherd; *

I shall not be in want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures *

and leads me beside still waters.

3 He revives my soul *

and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

4 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil; *

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

5 You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;

you have anointed my head with oil,

and my cup is running over.

6 Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, *

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

This is the most read psalm at funerals and with the sick, so let us follow the lead of so many others before us whom we loved./ Those in our ancestry and the sick are crying out to us now to know what they know. The God of love is not only above us and inside of us, but our God is beside us, our companion through the most difficult storms, crises, and disasters. God never ever leaves us alone or abandons us. /

Often we think this image of a shepherd was only relevant for ancient times. Certainly, the word picture of the Good Shepherd was very meaningful in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament where the post exile Hebrews sing this 23rd Psalm while tending sheep. But in the 21th century with our urbanized society of agribusiness and electronic fences, this scripture image may be a dusty antique of the past. We simply do not encounter sheep and shepherds except at a petting zoo, or perhaps at a drive through of the live nativity pageant that was at the Church of the Nazarene, our sister church next to us on Mississippi. We also are not excited about comparing ourselves to sheep. They are low on the animal IQ list. We do not expect an animal episode of the game show “Jeopardy” featuring a competition between sheep any time soon.

But to the Hebrews, the Good Shepherd is a meaningful image of a God who is loving, listening, caring, protecting, and leading his flock to nourishment and safety./ Is there a metaphor that we might use today to understand our God who is loving, nurturing, healing, caring? Hold that thought. We will get back to it. But for right now, let’s listen closely to discern how we may best hear the Good Shepherd’s voice beside us during this crisis. Is the message of the psalm only for the dying and those who are sick?

Our present culture is full of many voices. A symptom of the mental illness schizophrenia is hearing voices—loud, demanding seductive voices, pulling apart the sanity of a centered soul. Watch the award-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, the story of the Nobel prize winning mathematician, John Nash, and you will understand. In many ways we live in a schizophrenic culture. We are bombarded with voices demanding, analyzing, projecting, pleading, persuading, seeking to control our hearts and our minds./ Especially now we hear a multitude of different voices telling us about the coronavirus./

If we look at the 23rd psalm, an old family friend, with a new pair of glasses, we might see where we may find help./ There are four places where the voice of our caregiver, our protector, seems to be the strongest in this timeless psalm.

The first place is beside still waters, where we are made to lie down in green pastures where our fearful soul is revived. Remember the story about a desert father who goes to teach his novice about HEARING the voice of God. The old monk sends the novice out to fetch a bowl of water from a desert pool. The young monk returns and they both sit for hours,/ never speaking,/ watching quietly as the murky liquid becomes clear,/ as the sediment slowly settles to the bottom./ The Good Shepherd, the good listener calls us to quiet places and speaks to us there, often outdoors in the green and blue, in the silence of the wind. If you want to hear the voice of the Good Nurturer, the psalmist is telling us to find a still place in our lives, often outdoors, even for a few moments. Perhaps this is one gift from our confinement from the coronavirus. Many of us may have more time for silence, for prayer, listening for the voice of the Good Shepherd./ Those with small children now at home will especially be needing this quiet time. Again, the place of less noise may best be outdoors or early or late in the day or night. /

The voice of the Shepherd also leads us to right paths, actively seeking paths of righteousness. This is the second place we more clearly hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, the Good Leader: where we are searching for the path of our calling and our truth. This again may be another gift of the coronavirus. Some may now have more time to connect on our phones, emails, social media to friends, family, and our neighbors who are more vulnerable. We may also have more time to study and read scripture especially using the ancient Benedictine practice of lectio divina. We read scripture slowly,/ listening for the word or phrase that speaks to us from our life./ We meditate on that word and think about how it moves us./ We then offer to God how our heart is moved by the word./ Lastly we rest in silence in the Good Shepherd’s arms./

The third place we might hear the voice of the Good Shepherd is “where God spreads a table before us in the presence of those who trouble us, our enemy.” Today our enemy is this messy virus that shares itself across all borders, except two. Its spread is stopped by some basic hygiene steps, especially handwashing that we should have been doing all along, as well as unfortunately our social distanc/ing. The psalmist reminds us that the Good Shepherd is here with us/ and perhaps especially in the presence of this viral enemy./

The psalm promises the shepherd’s voice at one more place we all are experiencing. This is the place we need to hear that voice the most. This is the valley of the shadow, the valley where hurt and despair and death threaten to overcome us. We have learned most about this place in our Mourner’s Path groups where we hear stories from those who have experienced the death of a loved one. Over time, they remember someone inside or outside or beside them, guiding and caring for them./

The psalmist tells us that fear, fear of an evil illness also lives with us in this valley of isolation and darkness. Knowing God is beside us as our constant companion/ invites Courage also to be our constant guide. How does the Good Shepherd keep giving us courage? Courage is Fear that has said its prayers. // But sometimes it is too difficult to find courage. But remember that all of us, at this your St. Mark’s family, are praying for each other. This is where courage and prayer speak to each other. Courage and prayers meet and knit together in this community./ When we are in so much pain that we ourselves can no longer say our prayers,/ others are saying them for us./

And so, my WOOLLY friends,/ it seems this ancient, dusty metaphor of the Good Shepherd is very much a part of us, gifted to us from our heritage. Perhaps it IS such a timeless metaphor because it does not have the baggage of all our other present-day images. /The coronavirus, our enemy,/ has given us the gift of time. While we separate ourselves from each other, may we with all our might, use this time to put ourselves into position to hear more clearly the voice of that Good Shepherd. This voice may not be in complete sentences./ It may be silence that moves the heart. It may be a song, a messy diaper, a teenager that we haven’t been able to talk with for some time,/ a family member who keeps calling, a flute, a bird call, a hungry family at the food pantry, a phone call, a text, an email, food to our neighbor. The Good Shepherd, the Good Guide, the Good Listener, the Good Nurturer, now invites us to allow the Good Shepherd to be by our side, to care for us, to love us,/ today/ and for all our days./ The Good Shepherd is reminding us and our children that we all have been anointed with holy oil at our baptism, that the cup of love from the Good Shepherd is running over with goodness and mercy and love,/ and that we will live in the House of God forever.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “the Shepherd’s Flute” in Bread of Angels , pp.80-84.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Voice of the Shepherd” in The Preaching Life, pp. 140- 146.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Funeral Joan Matthews March 6, 2020 St. Mark's Little Rock

Funeral Joan Matthews, March 6, 2020 St. Mark’s

Today we join with family and friends to celebrate the life of Joan Matthews, the 85-year-old Canadian born matriarch of her family of four children, Boyd, Brett, Marci/a, Bobby, their spouses, as well as nine grandchildren. Joan raised this amazingly talented family after the death of her husband, Dr. Robert Matthews in 1992. Our present bishop, Larry Benfield was at St. Mark’s at that time. Dr. Matthews’ funeral was his first to preside over in Arkansas. The family will always remember the pastoral care they received from our present bishop at that time and for many years to come. Joan was a public health nurse, visiting the sick in their homes where she wiped away the tears of many of those she visited. This is part of her family heritage. As a child, she often accompanied her grandmother, Granny Stewart, who took food to the needy in a picnic basket with probably a Bible between the loaves of bread. Joan also served faithfully at this church as a eucharistic minister at this altar and a eucharistic visitor to the homebound. When she became homebound, many eucharistic visitors from this church took communion to her. We need to let them know that they were carrying Christ to someone who had done the same for so many others before them. Joan also was very proud that she was an EFM, Education for Ministry graduate from Sewanee School of Theology. But there was more to know about Joan than what she accomplished. Perhaps you will learn a little more about her/ from what her family shared with us about the day she died at home in her 85th year.

“On the day Joan died, the family had been telling her since the day before, "Marci/a (her daughter) is coming.. she'll be here tomorrow.. she'll be here in 8 hours.. she'll be here in two hours.." After Marci/a arrived all the children would drift in and out of her room, talking, singing, rubbing her feet, brushing her hair, reading from the prayer book. Finally, with every one present, all four of her children, Marci/a, Bobby, Boyd, Brett, three granddaughters, and Virginia, Bobby’s wife, they gathered around Joan’s bed reading psalms and reminiscing. Joan breathed her last breaths with all gathered around/ as Bobby felt a cold wind breeze past him.”/

This is an amazing story of a whole family midwifing the passage of the beloved matriarch of their family back to God in her own home. It is like being present and assisting at her birth into a new world, into a life in the resurrection. There is no more sacred and loving thing than being at that passage,/ the death of someone you love.

Let’s talk a little more about love. Joan’s body has died to this world but her love is still here with each of you. Love is the only thing we leave behind when we die. Remember this verse from 1 Corinthians, “Love never dies.” (1 Corinthians 13:8) Repeat

We don’t understand it. It is a mystery./ I look at pictures of my own loved ones who have died, my brother, my grandparents, I can feel their love as I send my love back to them. Frederick Buechner and Henri Nouwen tell us that our bodies die, but our mutual love somehow returns to God and is kept for all eternity.

Listen again to what St. Paul, Buechner and Nouwen are saying. Love is kept for all eternity. That means love is all we leave on this earth and love is what we take with us into eternal life with the God of love. Joan left her love to you, and also her love is now part of/ and is enlarging the love of our God of love/ in this greater life. If you are a mystic, you have no difficulty understanding this. If you are a person who comprehends mainly by rational thinking, this may be a difficult concept.

Let’s see if this conception of love is not only biblical and in the voice of our theologians/ but also in our literature. This is a closing sentence from Thornton Wilder’s fictional book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey( Sand louise ray), where five people die on a bridge in South American. The passage was read by British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the memorial service in New York for British victims of the attack on the World Trade Center.// “There is a land of the living/ and a land of the dead/ and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” (Repeat) —Thornton Wilder in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (HarperCollins, 1927), p. 107.

I know in my heart that the love that Joan had for each of you will always endure. Your love for Joan who has died/ is ongoing, as is her love for you. You will never be lonely. Her Love is always there inside of you. St. Paul, Nouwen, Buechner, and now Thornton Wilder tell us that in some mysterious way this love we have for each other never dies./ Joan’s love stays with each of you as you carry it forward to transform yourselves, transform others you meet, //and transform the universe./ Joan’s love is also now in the resurrected life in some way we do not understand as part of the God of love. The verse from Corinthians and Wilder in his novel are both telling us that the best of this love we have for each other never ever dies. This is a mystery, but I know in my heart it is true and I think you know it as well because this is what Joan taught us and you./ Unfortunately, the Bible does not answer most of our questions about resurrection. It refuses to approach resurrection as something rational for us in our lifetime.1

In this mysterious universe what we do know, however, is that those who mean most to us// mean EVEN MORE to God. In God's way, God will keep them, and because God keeps them, we will never be separated from them, or they from us./

This morning as we carry the ashes of our dear friend, Joan, in and out of this sacred space, we are sac/ra/men/tally carrying her back to God. 2We know she already is with God, but this funeral lit/ur/gy allows us in effect to shout out a prayerful petition to God, “God, get ready! Here comes Joan! A sinner of your own redeeming, and a lamb of your own flock. You have given her to us, and now with gratitude for the gift of her life, we are returning her to you.” Our prayers are like the prayers at the offertory, “We give thee but thine own,”/ except in this case the offering is not money but the life of one we love.

It is an early Christian tradition2 to tell stories about the one who has died as the body is on its pilgrimage to its final burial place. You are a family of story tellers, so keep telling all of us/ and all you meet, stories about Joan/ as I know you will do at the reception. This is how you will continue to share her love. We tell stories because Christians believe that death changes but does not destroy. Death3 is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma/ where we die but go on to a new relationship with God AND with those we love. Our experience is that our God of love does not give us a loving relationship and then let it stop abruptly as with Joan’s death. This loving relationship is still there but in some different form of love. We tell stories of Joan especially at her death to continue our relationship with her, to know Joan’s never-ending love for you, to remember Joan’s love for the God of love, as seen through the prism of her life, both in glad and sorrowful memories, which will continually be refractions of the grace and love of God.////

“O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our sister, Joan. We thank you for giving her to us,..to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage…and now 4O God of Love

who loves us/ with a greater love than we can neither know nor understand: We give you most high praise and hearty thanks for the good example of your servant, Joan, who now is in the larger life of your heavenly Presence;/ who here on this earth was a tower of strength for all of us, who stood by us and helped us;/ who cheered us by her sympathy and encouraged us by her example;/ who looked not disdainfully on the outward appearance, but lovingly into the hearts of men and women and children; who rejoiced to serve all people, especially the sick;/ whose loyalty was steadfast, and her friendship unselfish and secure; whose joy it was to know more about You and be of service. Grant that Joan may continue to find abiding peace and wisdom in your heavenly kingdom, and that we may carry forward her unfinished work for you on this earth;/ through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

1Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo (Seabury Books, 2007).

2Thomas Long, “O Sing to Me of Heaven: Preaching at Funerals” in Journal for Preachers, vol. 29, No. 3, Easter 2006, pp.21-26.

3Edward Gleason, Dying we Live (Cowley 1990).

4 J. B. Bernardin Burial Services (Morehouse Publishing 1980) p. 117.

Joanna. Seibert

Love Your Enemies

Lent 1 March 4, Love your enemies 2020 Wednesday 5:30,

Matthew 5:43-48

Today Jesus tells us to love our neighbors,/ ourselves,/ and goodness knows,/ even our enemies. Could this commandment be related to Jesus’ recent journey Sunday into the wilderness where he meets our greatest enemy called Satan? Rachel Held Evans in her last book, Inspired, leaves with us her experience of wilderness, enemies, and how this relates to Jesus and the God of love. She reminds us that unfortunately we will be driven into the wilderness on our journey when we encounter enemies, just like our Jewish relatives before us. We try to stay connected to the God of love but sometimes we seem surrounded by situations that are harmful to us. Our best reaction often is to flee to the wilderness to escape our enemies, just as Hagar and her son are turned out by Abraham and Sarah, or Jacob flees his brother Esau, or Elijah flees Jezebel. Evans believes that even the God of love, when clothed in human form, has to make a visit to the wilderness to prepare for his meeting/ head on with the devil.

The wilderness is usually thought of as a scary or barren place where God seems even more absent,/ but I have learned from my daughter who is a wilderness forester that the wilderness is the most sacred place where we, like Elijah, best hear the silent voice of God. The wilderness is out of sync with our usual routine. It disorients us and leads us to a different way of thinking where we can learn that the only way to face our enemies within and without/ is with love.

We all have had experiences where we have been harmed: death of a loved one, loss of a job, struggling with an addiction, physical, verbal abuse, a serious illness, depression, other mental disorders, difficulty with our children, parents or siblings,/ struggling with our present political scene. Rachel reminds us that as we are driven into the wilderness from these experiences, we will always learn a great deal about ourselves and especially about the God of love that has been there before us. That is the experience of the children of Israel, Hagar, Jacob, and even Jesus,/ our constant companion. When we decide to live in this more barren place, we meet what we perceive as the enemy within or without of us, but instead meet and are saved by the God of love, and are attended by angels. I think the wilderness is where Jesus especially learns about love of one’s enemy, as he confronts the devil, the personification of evil, the one who lives without love, that part of us where love for others does not live. Jesus’ confrontation with the devil, the evil one, is where he teaches us about loving/ our enemy. First Jesus listens. This is the most loving thing we can do, to listen. Then he speaks to the evil one being obedient to the love of God, whom evil does not understand. Evil can never overcome this love./ Jesus may be reminding us how to journey through the wilderness of this political scene and see if we can also / love those whom we consider our enemy. Loving our enemy is listening/ and looking for/ the Christ within what we perceive as our enemy, and offering the Christ, the love of God within us./ The enemy may or may not be transformed, but we always will become more connected to the Christ within,/ whenever and where ever we offer Love./

Lastly, Rachel reminds us to name these wilderness experiences. Hagar names the well in the wilderness which saves her life and her son, Ishmael, “I have seen the God who sees me.” Just as Jacob is about to meet Esau in the wilderness, he wrestles with God and names the place, Peniel, which means “ Face of God.”

Tonight, we will name this, our liturgical wilderness, Lent.// Here,/

the love we find and offer this Lent will never ever be destroyed, especially when we offer it to those whom we may perceive as our enemies.

Rachel Held Evans in Inspired ( Nelson Books 2018) pp. 48-50.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

The Call Epiphany 3A Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23, Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores, Alabama, January 26, 2020

The Call Epiphany 3A

Holy Spirit, Gulf Shores, January 26, 2020

Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23

The Call. /Your cell phone rings late one night around three am. You jump out of your skin. You sit up in bed terrified in a cold sweat. You try to pretend it is not ringing, but you know you must answer your phone because it could be a friend in trouble, one of your children, a grandchild, a sick parent. You pick up the phone, giving a sleepy, “hello.” A voice at the other end says, “Listen,/ something has happened, I need your help. Can you come! Please hurry.”//

Or.. there is another call./ It is a gray windy day at dusk on the gulf coast. The constant rhythm of the waves slows your frantically racing heart and life. You look out from your deck at the deserted beach. The brown pelicans sweep over the sea in their distinctive parade patterns in pairs and groups. They fly so closely to the water that their wing tips certainly must get wet. They flap their large wings for several strokes/ and then glide./ You are on beach time; a time to glide/ after days of flapping. You watch the laughing gulls stick by the pelicans, as if they were best friends. They follow the brown pelicans in their spectacular plunging headfirst high dive for their last supper. Then the gulls shamelessly and expertly try to snatch the fish directly out of the pelican’s enormous bill before he can swallow it. So reminiscent of the life you have left behind. Are you a laughing gull or a brown pelican? Some days a gull, some days a pelican./ Without warning, a flock of pelicans silently fly right by your head on their way home for the night. Their silent majestic flight leaves you speechless as well. The adults do not have a voice. Only their young nestlings speak with loud grunts and screams. / There is something so wild and brave and beautiful about the silence of nature you have just witnessed. You want to write it into a poem or paint it into a picture or sing it into a song,/ but there are no proper words or colors or notes to express it, and you have to live out the rest of that night in a way that is somehow true to the little piece of wonder that you have been a part of, the call to a different life that silently reaches out to you.//

And then, comes a third call. You are aware that you have become overwhelmed by the difficulties of your own life: your addictive life style, problems at work, conflicts at home. A friend asks you to go with her to visit a treatment center for women where the mothers keep their children with them. Suddenly you see young women just like you, with the same addictions, same problems, same family and work difficulties, same children,/ but they never had any of the advantages you are given. You watch their lives change, lights go on in eyes dulled by abuse and drugs… and it is like the phone ringing in the night again/ or the silent pelicans soaring by your head so close that your hair rustles. It is a summons for you to answer a call to something greater than yourself and your own small world. Answers to your own problems are right there in front of you.//

Today’s gospel is about that call to ministry: the call by Jesus to Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew. Buechner says that the word, “vocation,” has a dull ring to it, but in terms of what it means, it is not dull at all. Vocare, vocation means our calling, the work we are called to do in this world, what we are summoned to spend our lives doing./ We can speak of our choosing our own vocations, but more than likely our vocations choose us. A call is given; our lives hear it/ or do not hear it.

How do we listen and hear the call? Our lives are full of a great multitude of voices calling us in all directions. Some are voices from inside, some are outside voices. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives. What kind of voice do we listen for?/

There is a sad and dangerous game we play when we get to a certain age. It is a form of solitaire. We get out our yearbook, look at the pictures of the classmates we knew best. We remember all the exciting wonderfully characteristic things we were interested in and our dreams about what we were going to do after we graduated. We think about what these classmates and ourselves are actually doing with our lives now. If we have kept in touch we know that many are spending their lives at work where few of their gifts are used, at work with neither much pleasure nor any sense of accomplishment/… and what about ourselves?/

When we were young like Peter and Andrew and Jesus, perhaps our hearing is better. When we are young, before we accumulate responsibilities, we are freer to choose among all the voices, and to answer the voice that is our deep gladness, as Buechner1 describes the call,/ when “our deep gladness intersects with the world’s deep need.” The danger is that there are so many voices, so many needs, every voice, every need, in its’s own way promising “gladness.” The danger is when we do not listen to the voice that speaks to us through the silent pelican, or the voice we hear in the synagogue of our inner soul, or the voice of the prophet that speaks from outside specifically to us out of the specific events in our life. Instead we listen to the great blaring boring banal voice of our mass culture which threatens to deafen us by blasting forth that the only thing that really matters about our work is how much it will bring us in salary and status,/ and if it is gladness we are after, we can save that for the weekends./ One of the grimmer notions we inherited from our Puritan forebears is that work is not even supposed to be glad, but, rather is a kind of penance, repenting for the sins we do during the hours we are not working.

There is also one more spoiler alert. Sometimes our call is not the message we were hoping for. Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, or sometimes even Jesus question their calls. And yet,/ with each call is a promise/ that God’s strength/ will be present in our weakness.2 /

All this means that we must be vigilant about what we hear as our call. We have only one life, and the choice of how we are going to live it must be our own choice, not the choice we let another or the world call us to. We must never mistake success for victory/ or failure for defeat. We must learn that all people are one, and that there can only be joy for one person when there is joy for all./

All of us, no matter how old we are, are still at the place in our lives where we continue to think about our call. Maybe we think it is too late in life to hear our call. I learned that this is not true from another young boy, in his early teens./ Events in my life told me that I had become blind and deaf by the cacophony of the world, and I was using substances to ease the pain. I wanted to find a new life, answer another call. My teenaged son, looked across the luncheon table at our favorite restaurant and responded,/ “Mom, it is never too late to change.”//(repeat) That has been my experience and I offer his wisdom to you./

So,/ what is your call? Buechner says it is where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need./ Deep gladness. What we do that leaves us with an overwhelming sense of peace, something we do which energizes us and other people./

The world’s great need./ In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness, fear, and pain, if we keep our eyes and ears and heart open, we do not have to go far to find that place of need./ The phone will ring/ and we will jump /not so much out of your skin/ as into our skin. /If we keep our eyes, ears, and heart open, the right place of need will call us… and in that day/ “all people, including ourselves, who have sat in darkness will now begin to see a great light.”

1Frederick, Buechner, “ The Calling of Voices,” Secrets in the Dark, pp. 35-41.

2-Br. David Vryhof, Society of Saint John the Evangelist ssje.org.

Joanna . joannaseibert.com

Baptism of our Lord, Second Sunday after Epiphany, Matthew 3:13-17. 12 Step Eucharist January 8, 2020, New Year, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Arkansas

12 Step Eucharist January 8, 2020, New Year, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Arkansas

Baptism of our Lord, Second Sunday after Epiphany, Matthew 3:13-17.

Our new church year started over a month ago on the first day of December as we began the season of Advent. As you know, we have moved through Christmas and celebrated the Epiphany with the visit to Jesus of the wise men two days ago. This coming Sunday Jesus will be baptized as well as many others at our church, and we all will recite the covenant we made at our own baptism to follow “The Beloved.”

On the other hand, our secular world is just getting started as it only began a new year eight days ago. This gives you a little hint of how we are called to be out of sync with the secular world. We are to listen to the beat of a different drummer. This is always the paradox of our lives:/ how to live connected to the spiritual world we make promises to at our baptism,/ while we also live in this secular world where the only covenant may be how to get ahead.

However, we are not called to reject the secular world, for we know from the Christmas story that God has been born and is now among us in this world. We are called to be part of God’s own promise to make “all things new”1 in this world. But we are so often at a loss as to how we possibly can live into this promise to bring love to this world which seems so broken.

Bishop Steven Charleston in a recent Facebook message2 gives us a few clues when he first reminds us that this new year may be even an especially difficult roller coaster ride as we prepare for national elections, and most especially the election of a president. He reminds us that this is not a new norm, for presidential elections are always like this. I so appreciate his native American heritage as a role model for how to live in this secular world holding on to our connection to God. His challenge for us is to stay calm, a non-anxious presence in this new year. But, I know from my own experience that I have never been able to be a non-anxious presence. There is always some little question of anxiety nagging and gnawing at my soul. I do know that I may have a chance of being the least anxious presence at times this year. When I am in a group swarming with controversy, if I can only stay one step below the anxiety level, I am hoping to make a difference.

I also know that practicing the 11th step is going to be my best answer for accomplishing this. “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”3

Now this does not necessarily mean that we are to pray and meditate continuously for the next 365 days, even though that might be nice. We are still living in the world. We are called to follow a rule of life where we do meditate and pray at certain times during the day to try to keep our connection to God that is within us and around us and above us. From those prayers and meditations, we are called to action when we see wrong in ourselves and others. We are called to support those who also seem to voice concern for the needs of those in our world and especially those living around us. But we are called to stay as calm as possible and stay one degree less anxious than those around us. This is where we can make a real difference. As the least anxious person we are staying connected to the God of our understanding who really is in charge, and we are keeping God’s presence in the conversation. This is living out the covenant we make at our own baptism. It is the story of the incarnation. This is living with one foot in the secular world and one in the spiritual world,/ in essence helping to reconcile both worlds to become one.4

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

1 Revelation 21:5

2 December 27, 2019

3 Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 59

4 Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 1997, 2016), 37, 178.