Karen Montana's Funeral Homily March 31, 2023, St. Mark's

Karen Montana homily March 31, 2023, St. Mark’s

 Karen’s St. Mark’s family knew her only for the last four years of her life. But we are all stunned by her death. Her quiet, cheerful, loving, thoughtful presence impacted this whole church, as rarely experienced in such a brief time. The enormity of Karen’s loving presence was most evident when our chapel was packed with standing room only/ by people called spontaneously to pray for her and share their grief last Sunday after her death./ 

The story of Karen’s presence here is a God thing. Karen mourned deeply the death of her 26-year-old son, Jeremy, in 2002, and then the death of her husband, John, on Christmas Eve 2018. Her physician told her about St. Mark’s grief group, Walking the Mourner’s Path. Karen decided to take a chance with us. Each participant has a prayer partner who holds them in prayer for the program’s eight weeks. Participants meet their prayer partners at the closing Eucharist in the final session. Mary Hines, who grieved her husband, Marion’s death, participated in Mourner’s Path the year before and was randomly selected to be Karen’s partner. They met for the first time at that Eucharist,/ shared their common stories/ and began regular lunches together. Mary invited Karen to church at St. Mark’s,/ and something clicked. The two sat together for the next four years on the third row from the front, on the other side of this aisle. I loved watching one come in, leave room for the other, who arrived a little later, and was immediately met with a hug. It was a constant sign that love was visibly present in this congregation. This story of love occurred Sunday after Sunday. Karen soon became incorporated in more ministries than I can name. /

Karen’s story at St. Mark’s was a universal model of God’s love and redemption. Out of Karen’s grief, she listened to someone she trusted and reached out to this community. She was led to attend church here by someone praying for her, leading to new friends and a new way of life. Karen, in turn, shared her huge heart, her huge heart, with the rest of us.// 

Funeral sermons should be about resurrection. I don’t need to explain resurrection this morning because Karen’s life is a resurrection story. Her deep sorrow and grief were transformed into a love in this congregation that will never die,/ even when all of us are forgotten. Her love has become part of the DNA of this congregation, just as it is a part of her family’s DNA for generations to come. She so loved her daughter, Laurie, and her husband, Michael. She adored her grandchildren, AJ, Everett, Hayley, and Kate./  

Remember the reading from I Corinthians. Paul tells us love never dies. Love is the only thing we leave on this earth and the only thing we also take with us into life beyond death. Laurie told me several times how she finds joy in her immense sorrow, knowing her mother’s love is now directly connected to the love of Laurie’s father, John, and her brother, Jeremy.

We don’t understand it. It is a mystery./ I look at pictures of my 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 our bodies die, but our mutual love somehow stays with God and is kept for all eternity.

 So Karen gifted her love to each of us. It is also now part of the enlarging love of God/ in her eternal life. If you are a mystic, you have no difficulty understanding this. But this is a difficult concept to comprehend by rational thinking.

This same belief is in 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 America. British Prime Minister Tony Blair read the passage 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)1

I know in my heart that Karen’s love will always endure with each of us/ and in all eternity. Her Love is always there inside of us as we carry it forward to transform ourselves, transform others, //and transform the universe./ My heart tells me this mystery is true, and I think you know it as well, because this is what Karen’s life taught us./

Unfortunately, the Bible does not answer most of our questions about resurrection. It refuses to approach resurrection as something rational for us to understand in our lifetime.2

However, in this mysterious universe, what we do know is that those who mean most to us// mean EVEN MORE to God. In God’s way, God keeps them, and because God keeps them, we are never separated from them, or they from us.3///

It is an early Christian tradition4 to tell stories about the one who has died as the body is on its pilgrimage to its final burial place. Keep telling all you meet Karen stories./ This is one way we continue to share her love. We tell stories because Christians believe that death changes/but does not destroy. Death5 is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma/where we go on to a new relationship with God AND with those we love. Our God of love does not give us a loving relationship, and then stop it abruptly, as with Karen’s death. This loving relationship is still there, but in some different form of love. We tell stories of Karen to remember her, as seen through that prism of her life,/ as refractions of God’s love and grace/ in glad and sorrowful memories.////

This morning, as we carry our dear friend’s ashes, in and out of this sacred space, we sac/ra/men/tally take her back to God.4 We know she already is with God, but this funeral lit/ur/gy allows us to shout a prayerful petition, “God, get ready! Here comes Karen! A sinner of your own redeeming,/ a lamb of your own flock. You gave her to us, and now with gratitude for the gift of her life, we return her to you.”/

“God of grace and glory, we remember today our sister, Karen. We thank you for giving her to us, to know and love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage.

And now O God,6 who loves us/ with a greater love than we can know or understand:/ We give you the highest praise and hearty thanks for the excellent example of your servant, Karen, who now is in the larger life of your heavenly Presence;/ who here on this earth was a tower of strength, who stood by us,/ helped us,/ 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 each of us; who rejoiced to serve all people;/ whose loyalty was steadfast,/ and friendship unselfish and secure; whose joy it was to know You/ and be of service. Grant that Karen 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.

1Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (HarperCollins, 1927), p. 107.

2Heaven. edited by Roger Ferlo (Seabury Books, 2007).

3 Theodore Farris. Death and Transfiguration (Forward Movement 1998).

4Thomas Long, “O Sing to Me of Heaven: Preaching at Funerals” in Journal for Preachers, vol. 29, No. 3, Easter 2006, pp.21-26.

5Edward Gleason. Dying we Live (Cowley 1990).

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

Ash Wednesday February 22, 2023, The Fast that God Chooses, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR, Joanna Seibert

Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Isaiah 58: 1-12, Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21

Ash Wednesday is a “jump start” for our Lenten journey to Jerusalem. This outer geographic journey is often in the desert,/ calling us also to look at the inner desert part of our lives. It is best not to journey alone in the desert. That is why we huddled together at St. Mark’s on one of our church’s major fast days. Our typical Lenten journey entails fasting from food or drink or a favorite dessert, which may not be what we need nutritionally on a desert journey. Today in Matthew and Isaiah, God tells us precisely what fasting means to God.

The writer of Isaiah enters into an amazing conversation with God and the Restoration era Israel, a nation passionately seeking God, just as we at St. Mark’s today passionately seek God. The Israelites have returned from exile in Babylon and are working tirelessly to build a new Jerusalem. They insist they have been fasting and humbling themselves, but God has not seemed to pay attention to their efforts.

“God, we fast, but you do not seem to see us? We humble ourselves, but you do not seem to notice?” Whoa! Right from the start, we have a hint there is a problem here. “We are humble, but you do not seem to notice our humility.”

Our folly continues.

A typical conversation in spiritual direction begins with, “Where is God in your life?” A frequent answer is, “I don’t hear or feel God anymore.” So, we try to pray another way or try another spiritual practice, and often exhausted, we may give up altogether because God seems more stubborn or more distant./

God’s silence can be stunning. And during Lent, we try even harder to make God hear us by making more noise, more prayers, more fasting.

Barbara Brown Taylor says in God’s perceived silence, we learn about our illusions about God’s presence. This sacred presence is not something we demand, and  God’s agenda may be quite different from ours.”1 So today, God, maybe also exhausted, comes right out and says he has a different “fast” or practice in mind for us.

 God replies, “If you cannot hear me, you have strayed too far from my voice. I am not far from you, but you are not following me to where our prayer time together leads.”

God gives us specific directions on how to return to the road less traveled and walk with him to Jerusalem.

God continues: “This is the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke, to share our bread with the hungry, to recognize our connection to all humankind.”

Our disillusionment is that God’s presence is not always where we think. We all have moving experiences of God’s presence when we pray, attend services, fast, and study scripture. But the God of both Isaiah and Matthew tells us to then, get up off our knees, open your eyes, take off our sackcloth and ashes, and fast differently.

God visits us at our prayer desks, but God does not live there permanently. God spends more time at our food pantry, sitting with us with the homebound and the dying, teaching special education classes, listening and sending books to those in prison, hearing the stories and dreams of those with mental illness and addiction, holding our children in his arms, sitting in waiting rooms, feeding homeless veterans. God is not permanently enthroned in our churches, waiting for us to stop by for an audience. At every service, God sends us out into the world! God spends more time in our crowded emergency departments and hospitals, at the employment office, in the lobby of the police station, not only to comfort, but to remind others of their birthright, their nobility, that they are the long-lost sons and daughters of heavenly royalty, meant for more extraordinary lives.

 God continues on a roll in his homily to the sackcloth and ashes crowd, “This is the fast I choose. When you see the naked, cover them and  do not hide yourself from your own kin.”  We can not serve God without serving our neighbors.1 Our relationship with God is intimately connected to our relationship with others, especially the least of all. That hope to keep our faith as a private matter between God and us is an illusion.

God is interested in human relationships and, in particular, dissolving those illusions that keep us apart from one another. We forget we are kin, related to one another. We falsely believe that some people are simply destined to be winners and others to be losers, and that there is no way to change, so we build walls, install security systems, and relocate neighborhoods to keep one from spilling over into the other.

This Lent, God calls us to ANOTHER way, a pathway as old as Isaiah and as up-to-date as the evening news. God calls us to surrender our illusions of separateness, safety, and superiority. We can leave our sheltered sanctuaries and seek God where God lives: with the homebound, in prisons, hospitals, treatment centers, nursing homes—trying to figure out how to untie the fancy knots of injustice and how to take the yokes of oppression apart. We can pool our resources so that the hungry have bread, the homeless have houses, and the naked have something to cover them. Above all, we can learn to recognize all those in need as kin, part of our community, asking them their NAMES, telling them our own, and refusing to hide from them anymore.

Then lovingly, when we return from where we have strayed off a side road and gotten lost, God never mentions any punishment, only blessings. Then,” Isaiah tells us, “The Lord will guide us continually, our healing shall occur quickly, our depression will be no more, we will be cared for when we become spiritually dry. We shall cry for help, and he will say,/ Here I am.” /

  Anne Lamott reminds us that we are never punished for our sins but by our sins. God’s silence has been suffering enough. 2

This Lent at St. Mark’s, say your prayers, but when you hear the dismissal to “go in peace to love and serve the Lord at the end of our service,”  Go, and:

Participate generously in our Kiva Lenten Mite Boxes ministry, giving small business loans to people all over the world.

Call Celia Martin that you want to help with the dinner for homeless veterans at St. Francis House on March 16th.

Call Tricia Peacock to serve at the Food Pantry. They need help every weekday to prepare for Thursdays.

Go to the monthly workday at Camp Mitchell on the second Saturday of every month to prepare for summer camp for all children. Give scholarships for those in need.

Tell Michael you want to go to the next Eucharist for men in prison at Wrightsville in the Pathway to Freedom Program.

Tell Tandy Cobb Willis you want to help send books to women and men in prison.

Call Janet Woodell that you would like to be a part of a medical mission trip to Guatemala.

Tell Jan Hart and Patricia Matthews you would like to visit the homebound.

Tell Helen McLennon you would like to take them Eucharist.

This is just a start. We’ll talk more./

If God seems silent, it may be because we are not SPEAKING God’s language,/ but don’t give up. God teaches us how to break the silence and even gives us the words./ “HERE I AM.” These are the words WE long to hear, but they are also the words GOD longs for us to SPEAK—to stand before another sister or brother, and say to them, “Here I am.”

When we hear ourselves speaking these words to our brothers and sisters, we will hear an echo in the air--- not silence anymore./It is the very voice of God, saying, “Yes./ Here/ I am. Here/ I am.”1

1Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Silence of God,” Gospel Medicine (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995) 67- 71.

2Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014) 43.

Funeral Betty Dungan, January 23, 2023, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Ar.

Funeral Betty Dungan

January 23, 2023, St. Mark’s

“O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our sister, Betty. We thank you for giving her to us,..to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. Amen”1

This morning as we carry the ashes of Betty Dungan in and out of this sacred space, we are sacramentally carrying her back to God. We know she is already with God, but this funeral liturgy allows us, in effect, to shout out a prayerful petition to God, “God, get ready! Here comes Betty Dungan! A sinner of your redeeming, a lamb of your own flock. You gave her to us, and now with gratitude for the gift of her life, we return her to you.” Our prayers are like prayers with the offering, “We give thee, but thine own,” except in this case, the offering is the life of one we love.2

Betty died in the morning of the second week of the Epiphany season. She was known as “Miss Boo” to the young children she taught and learned from for almost ten years in Sunday and Vacation Bible School. They were all precious to her, especially our two torch bearers, Ella and Harrison, who so wanted to be here today. The story goes that Betty was teaching the kindergarteners about God’s love, and she asked them, “who loves you?” and one child answered, “Miss Boo!” And the name stuck. She taught them about God’s unconditional love by loving them herself without conditions. That’s the way it happens, you know.

Betty led an amazing life serving this community of St. Mark’s, caring for her daughters, Gail and Susan, and her four grandchildren, volunteering at Arkansas Children’s, our public schools, and caring for her husband, Dr. Tom Dungan. Betty and Dr. Dungan were world travelers, taking their families on cruises, traveling themselves around the world at least once, and experiencing every continent at least once. She was a true Razorback fan with a sweet sense of humor, which stayed with her even as her dementia developed./

It is indeed an early Christian tradition to tell stories about the one who died as her body is on its pilgrimage to its final burial place. We tell stories because Christians believe that death changes/ but does not destroy. Death is not the period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma where Betty, in death, enters a new relationship with God AND a new relationship with us. Our experience is that God does not give us a loving relationship like hers and then lets it stop abruptly with death. The relationship is still there/ but in some different form. We tell stories about Betty to continue that relationship as we see through the prism of her life, both in glad and sorrowful memories, refractions of the grace and love of God.

Betty died in her 92nd year. I invite you to go back in your imagination to 1930, when Betty was born. The stock market had crashed a year earlier, on October 29, 1929. The 19th Amendment, allowing women to vote, was ratified less than ten years before. She was 11 years old when World War II started on December 7, 1941. She was 22 when St. Mark’s Church was founded on the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1952, and she married Dr. Tom Dungan a year later in 1953. In fact, the Dungans were some of the founding members of St. Mark’s, joining when St. Mark’s moved into the Wilcox Building.

So many will miss our dear friend, who lived a long and fruitful life of service during some difficult and joyful days.

Do our Anglican tools of scripture, tradition, and reason help us process Betty’s long life/ and now her physical departure from us, often too soon, even for someone her age?

What does Scripture tell us about death? The New Testament describes how Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus. Our mentor is telling us that weeping is still appropriate. At his own death, Jesus asks God, “God, where are you?” He tells us that doubting, arguing, and feeling abandoned are as Christian as feeling held in God’s arms. We know in our minds that Betty is now experiencing resurrection, but a part of our hearts will still miss her physically, reminding us how much she loves us.

What does our Tradition tell us about death? There are many sermons by people in our tradition who have also experienced the death of someone they dearly loved. Karl Barth, Friedrich Schlei/er/ma/cher, William Sloane Coffin Jr, and John Claypool all preached about the death of close family members. All these towers of faith were shaken to their roots. As they searched for hope, they wrote profusely and vividly about what did not help them in their grieving. One of the universal dead-end theologies for these preachers was the often-quoted phrase that the death of a loved one was God’s will. This is not the God of my understanding, and it was not theirs. After the death of his son in a car accident when the car went off a bridge into the water, William Sloane Coffin preaches, “my own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that my son die; as the waves closed over his sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” I know this family felt God’s heart and presence with them as they lovingly surrounded Betty in her last days.

All these preachers do find comfort in scripture, but it is different scripture for each of them, and not the usual one-liners that we all try to say to comfort one another. Betty would tell us to read and look for it, but the words will differ for each of us.”3

And so, what does our reason tell us about death, including our own experience of grief and death? Our loved ones who have died are not only in a new relationship with God, but also with us. We may only recognize their presence at certain times. Death changes, but does not destroy our communion with the saints, those we love. We all have shared experiences of knowing the presence of loved ones after they died, doing things we knew we could never do before because of some presence very near us,/ guiding and still caring for us. The Hebrew Old Testament gives us an excellent description of this experience. As Elijah is about to die, he asks his beloved companion, Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha responds, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” Elijah says, “You have asked a hard thing.” But you know the story. As Elijah ascends in a whirlwind into heaven, he leaves for his friend, Elisha, his mantle or shawl/ as a sign of their spiritual connection./ This will also be our experience. Betty has left us a mantle or stole that we all will be wearing, carrying with us. Our stories about how Betty loved us and changed our lives/ that we share/ will tell us/ what that stole looks like. Betty, like Jesus, is resurrected and will be with us always throughout all eternity, especially with the mantle and legacy she left. Her presence no longer depends on time and space.

When our loneliness is so deep that we cannot see or feel anything else, our reason, our experience, our tradition, our scripture tells us that though our pain is true,/ it is not the ultimate truth./ Beyond all our pain is the beauty, truth, and love of God in Jesus Christ, which Betty taught us about. This love never dies./This love lives within us,/ surrounds us/ and all those in eternal life, like Betty./ This love will embrace us/ throughout all the years/ and ages/ to come.4

1Burial II, Book of Common Prayer, 493.

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

3Jeffrey J. Newlin, “Standing a the Grave,” This Incomplete One, pp. 121-130.

4Gary W. Charles, “The E Prayer,” Journal for Preachers, 47-50, vol. 29, no. 3, Easter 2006.

Epiphany 3A Matthew 4:12-23, The Call of the Fisherman, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, January 22, 2023, Joanna Seibert

Epiphany 3A Matthew 4:12-23, The call of the fishermen

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, January 22, 2023

God calls us, you and me, to St. Mark’s today to hear a fishing story.1 Four men leave their family fishing business to become disciples of a new traveling rabbi/with no credentials. It is 5:30 pm, and all national news stations have this as their human interest story: Today, four well-known fishermen in Capernaum on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee drop their nets and follow an unknown preacher. Lester Holt with NBC Nightly News introduces Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, sitting on the shore with a distraught Zebedee, the father of James and John. “Well, we are still adjusting to the shock. I was standing in one of our boats/ with my two sons/ and our hired hands mending our nets from last night’s fishing, and suddenly/ this man called Jesus walks by and says, ‘Follow me.’ My hired hands and I shrug our shoulders and roll our eyes,/ but my two sons look right into those big dark brown eyes and literally drop their nets and follow him. I was furious. I yelled as they took off after him. I said a few things I cannot repeat. You know, fishermen are known for our colorful language./ Later in the afternoon, James and John do send a message that they will return/ soon.”

On PBS evening news, Judy Woodruff, on special assignment,  is at the modest home of the wife of Simon Peter, another man who walked away from his fishing boat today.2 “Yes, I am Simon’s wife. I only have a few minutes to talk. My husband not only left all these fish in his boat,/ but this man called Jesus changed my husband’s name to Peter. And to add to my distress, my mother is sick with a high fever./ But later Simon, or Peter as he now calls himself, sends back word, /‘get the fish,/ don’t “salt” them down,/ clean and prepare them,/ call in the neighbors/ and we will have a big fish fry at our house tonight,/ and Jesus will cure your mother, and she can help serve.’” /////

This morning, as we hear the stories about these four fishermen, we must ponder what all this means for us.

So, first, let’s first think about how we got here this morning? I don’t mean did we come in a Chevy pickup or an SUV! What brought us here? Do you realize that Matthew’s gospel today is telling our story?/ Do you hear it?/ Jesus is walking along the Sea of Galilee and calls four disciples,/ but whether we realize it or not, Jesus also calls us here, at this place, this morning. Perhaps you think we are here because your roots or your family or friends are here,/ or you like the sermons,/ or you like the mystical feeling when you enter this beautiful building,/ or maybe you are transformed by the liturgy,/ the music,/ the candles,/ or you want your children to experience something you vaguely remember from your childhood that you cannot explain. That is how my husband and I were called back to church almost fifty years ago. We wanted our children exposed to what we experienced growing up in a Christian community, even though we doubted we still needed it/. Do not ever be embarrassed by your motives. God will use every possible means, even and probably especially our children, to call us back to him, for God loves us and them so dearly./

Jesus begins his ministry by calling extremely ordinary people. They are un/com/pre/hen/ding of Jesus and his mission, but for some reason, Jesus chooses not to do his ministry without them. Time and again, they will disappoint him. Yet he will stick with them like glue, give them all he has, and lead them into the kingdom.

William Willimon3 says, “if you are a God, why do you need a bunch of amateurs to work with you?”

But Jesus does not work alone, but joins hands with ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Jesus recruits people who have made awful life choices. Jesus invades the most hapless lives and fills them with light. He sneaks up on people who are thinking not about God but lunch,/ smacks them upside the head/ with love, and says, “I’m going to change the world,/ transform the future,/ radically rearrange the present,/ and guess who is going to help me?” It’s a strange way to run a railroad, but this is the way God gets the job done. “Follow me!”

God has plans for us. God has a ministry for us./ Realize this is good news,/ for the saddest of all sad things is an uncalled, unclaimed life./

Listen again to this morning’s story. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for PEOPLE.” We start to worry about having the “right stuff” even to consider being a disciple. Would Jesus ever choose us? And if by chance he does, will he make us leave home, our job, and go to Africa or South America?/ The answer is in the rest of Matthew. Read on. Note that the disciples stay near their homes for quite some time. They remain in Galilee for the next eighteen chapters of Matthew, and then they return there after the resurrection./

Do you have other concerns about this call?

Barbara Brown Taylor believes the most powerful part of Jesus’ call to his disciples is not that the disciples decide something on their own. Something happens to them, something almost beyond their control. To stress the decision-making of the disciples is putting the accent on the wrong syllable. In that God-drenched moment of their turning to follow,/ the miracle occurs: their lives flow in the same direction as God’s. There is an openness to a connection present since birth, /since conception. /

This story of the call is not a hero story, but a miracle story, as miraculous as the feeding of the five thousand or the raising of the dead.4 This is not a story about the power of human beings to change their lives. This is a story about the power of God to walk right up to a quartet of fishermen.. and to us… and work a miracle, creating disciples where there were none, just moments before./

Remember, this is our story of being open,/ and swept into the flow and passionate vision of God’s will as we turn ourselves over to God’s call.

It will be a different story for each of us at our particular stage of life. This call comes not just once, but constantly, as Jesus seeks us out to go farther and deeper,/ open to new possibilities.5 / Sometimes, following Jesus may mean staying home.4 At other times, it may mean letting the hired servants go and taking care of Zebedee when he gets too old to fish. Sometimes following may mean casting the same old nets in a new way, or for new reasons. Sometimes the call is doing something different with the fish we catch, or spending the money we bring at market in a different way. It may mean reorganizing the whole fishing business so that the jobless down at the pier have work to do, and everyone receives a decent wage./ It may mean doing less every day, not more,/ so there is time to watch the sunlight changing on the water, and how the fish leap out of the water at dusk, celebrating outsmarting us one more time.//

Are you old enough to remember a nature program, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, which aired on Sunday night television?6 One memorable program focuses on a mother elephant seal in Argentina and her newborn pup. The mother, now famished, leaves her pup on the shore to find food. She returns to a different part of the beach and calls for her baby. Other mothers return, also calling their pups, producing a wild cacophony. The camera stays with this single mother as she calls her pup and listens for the response. Following each other’s voices and scents, the mother and pup are reunited. The host, Marlin Perkins, explains that from birth, the sound and scent of the pup are imprinted in the mother’s memory, and the sound and the scent of the mother are imprinted in the pup’s memory. A friend watching with us turns around and says,/ “we are imprinted with the memory of God,/ and God is imprinted with a memory of us,/// and even if it takes a lifetime,/ when we hear God’s call/ smell God’s scent,/ we acknowledge and honor God’s imprint deep inside of us,///and God slowly walks toward us,/ makes direct eye contact/ and once again calls out,/ “Follow me.”

1Kenneth Gibble, “Discipleship, a Fishing Story, Matthew 4:12-23,” Preaching.com/sermons/11563998.

2Iona Community, “The Calling of Peter,” Present on Earth, p. 114-116.

3 William Willimon, “Revolution,” Pulpit Resource, vol. 34, #1, 2006, pp.9-12.

4Barbara Brown Taylor, “Miracle on the Beach,” Home By Another Way, pp. 37-41.  

5 Herbert O’Driscoll, The Word Today, year B, vol. 1, pp. 78-79.

6Rodger Nishioka, Feasting on the Word, year A, Vol 1, pp. 284-285.

 Joanna Seibert  https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Christ the King 29C St. Mark's November 20, 2022, Little Rock AR

Christ the King 29C

St. Mark’s November 20, 2022

Jesus on the cross with thieves Luke 23: 33-43

In the name of our God who forgives, remembers, and offers us paradise. Amen

“Jesus, remember me..”

When the thief being crucified, traditionally called Dismas, asks Jesus “to remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom,” Jesus responds, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” That is not necessarily later after they both died, but right now. Jesus’ kingdom and his reign of peace are not simply in the future. It is right here, right now, if we only look for it, if we are willing to remember./  Remembering is not just recovering data from our memory banks. Re-/membering has a richer meaning for Christians. It means re-connecting, re/turning to a relationship. When Jesus gathers around a table for the last time with his friends, he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” ”Reconnect to me.”  When we hear this in the middle of the Eucharist, we not only bring to mind Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection,/ but we also bring together, re-member, the various parts of Christ’s body, Christ’s church, Christ’s world, as Christ stands there waiting for us. We remember and reconnect our lives with Christ as well as reconnect to those from whom we have been estranged./

We are offered paradise, Christ’s peaceable kingdom, when we gather around this communion table, even and especially with people who challenge us, disappoint us, frustrate us, or have wronged us. This table is a sign that communion with God is possible for thieves and criminals, for people who are significant pains in the neck, and for each one of us. The table represents the concrete possibility of communion with God and those with whom connection seemed impossible./ /

In Jesus’ last words from the cross, Christ the King teaches us how we accomplish reconnection.

“Father, forgive them.”

Think about the table we will gather around this Thursday, the Thanksgiving table. Our table traditions say volumes about how we gather and re/-member. Close your eyes./ Remember who has been and still may be at your table this week. Aunt Fanny, the drama queen; Martha, the family matriarch who knows terrific and tragic stories about everyone, living and dead; Robin, the lost child; Tom, the eternal child; Suzie, the family gossip; Marcella, who has a plan for everyone’s life; Uncle Billy who drinks too much and no doubt will become obnoxious before the day is over; Carol, who sees the good in all people and all things; James, the eternal pessimist;/ the brothers and sisters who differ about every political issue;/ and especially those wonderfully wild, energetic children running underfoot. That’s not a bad image for the church.. and for the kingdom of God, the scratchy proximity of near enemies coming together because deep down, under all those facades, they do love each other and know their only way of survival is to follow Jesus’ example from the cross, to forgive each other their humanness, ask for forgiveness, and remember that everyone also has a cross to bear. /

As we gather around the Thanksgiving table, we also remember those who are not there: loved ones who have died, those who have joined the communion of saints, those absent because they are in the military or government around the globe. We remember those absent because their relationship with the rest of the body is torn or fractured. Sometimes we remember those who have no access to a table./ If we keep re-membering, re-connecting we will soon have a vision of God’s kingdom and an image of how to make it a real place.///

An iconic movie for this relationship is “Places in the Heart.” A young widow, Sally Fields, survives the depression, planting and selling cotton with the help of an itinerant black man and a bitter blind man. In the powerful closing scene in a country church during communion, as the grape juice and bread are passed,  the characters exchange the peace of God with each other, those dead and alive: the young black boy who killed Sally’s husband and then was brutally murdered, the banker who showed her no mercy, people alienated from each other, people who have harmed each other, her sister and her unfaithful husband, as well as those who love each other, Sally, her murdered husband, and her two children. It is an image of paradise, realizing connections, forgiving, and re/-membering./

“Forgive them, Father……, Mother, sister, brother.”//

Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa after apartheid. Surviving that holocaust meant staying connected, re/membering, hearing people’s stories, and hearing, “yes, I did that; forgive me, I see how we are connected, and I do not want to lose that relationship again.”/

 Hopefully, that is also what is happening in this city, in this church, as our disastrous pandemic moves toward becoming endemic.///

“Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

So, we begin to live in this paradise when we re-member, stay connected to God and our neighbor and learn how to forgive ourselves and our neighbor. The word paradise has often been used as another word for heaven. Paradise comes from the Middle Eastern word for a walled garden. It is a place of safety, an oasis in the desert, a church like this one, where relationships are protected and flourishing. It echoes the Garden of Eden, surrounded and walled in by four rivers of plenty. When the image becomes more extensive, it can mean “this fragile earth, our island home,” as Eucharistic prayer C describes us. There is a clear implication that paradise, this walled garden, includes all of us, even that other criminal hanging next to Jesus, whose response is not repentance but mockery. The difference between these two thieves, and those living in paradise and those who do not, is whether they are awakened to the possibility of forgiving and re/membering. It is not a matter of just putting on a different pair of rose-colored glasses. At times it can be cross-bearing hard work.

The re-membering that brings us into paradise is realizing our connection to each other, asking forgiveness for the harm we have done, forgiving others for the damage done to us, and holding on to a dream for the future for what is possible in God’s good creation./

We are all in the same walled garden, Americans, Ukrainians, Democrats, Republicans, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, Muslems, Chinese, and Anglicans. Whether or not it is paradise depends on what and whom we re-member, what and whom we forgive, and with whom we stay connected.//

Who will you remember, reconnect with, and forgive around this family table today/ and later this week at Thanksgiving?

This morning, this week, we have the opportunity to forgive,/ remember,/ reconnect, and be in paradise.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, “Collective Memory,” A Wing and a Prayer (Morehouse Publishing  2007), pp. 15-18.