12-Step Eucharist Being Saved by the Good Shepherd, Easter 4A, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, May 3, 2023 5 pm

Being Saved by the Good Shepherd

12-step Eucharist Wednesday, May 3, 2023, Easter 4A

John 10:1-10

“Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

In Richard Rohr’s blog,/ James Finley talks about being saved as the paradoxical power that comes from admitting we are powerless. /When we take the First Step: “We admit we are powerless and our lives have become unmanageable.” The First Step is admitting…. If we admit,/ we’re admitted. If we don’t admit,/ we’re not admitted. If we admit, we live; and if we don’t admit,/ we may die. (Repeat)

Why is admitting so extremely painful when the very thing that’s so painful is the very thing that saves our lives?

Hitting bottom is what most often precedes admitting/ and makes admitting possible. It’s excruciating to admit that our lives have become unmanageable because we all need a sense of control. We all need to believe, “Look, I have handled so many other things. I can handle this.”  It is the admitting that is such a painful experience. The admitting brings us to a place where we recognize that it is not looking good/ if this is all up to us. If this is up to us, we see despair. Finley says the fact that we’ve risked despair opens up a whole new possibility because maybe it’s not up to us. Maybe/ there’s another way.  

The Second Step of the Twelve Steps is: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  To lead us to life,  an abundant life./

John of the Cross says, “When we can still see a little bit of light, we will resist guidance;/ but when we cannot see at all, we will stretch forth our hands and be led to unknown places where we don’t know how to go.” This is indeed what admitting can do for us. Admitting is poverty of spirit; it is experiential humility. The act of admitting, then, opens up this paradoxical faith.  

Finley believes all of us on this healing journey in relationship to our Higher Power will finally come to say to God: “You know, /I don’t know who you are, /but I do know who you are: you’re the one who saved my life./ And I don’t know who I am, either,/ but I do know: I’m the one you saved.”  

 James Finley in Mystical Sobriety, an online course with the Center for Action and Contemplation. https://cac.org/online-education/mystical-sobriety/

Joanna Seibert

Easter 4A John 10:1-10 Wendell Berry's Good Shepherd St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock 5 pm

Easter 4A John 10:1-10, Good Shepherd Wendell Berry

 St. Mark’s 5 o’clock

Good Shepherd from “The Desirable Woman” by Wendell Berry

Laura Milby is a minister’s wife in Wendell Berry’s short story, “ A Desirable Woman.” She is loved from afar by a young man, Tom Coulter, who is in her husband’s congregation called The Little Flock. Tom works on the farm of Naomi and Ernest Russet, also members of The Little Flock Church. Laura and her husband’s favorite place to dine on Sundays after church is at the Russet’s farm. You see, in Port William, Kentucky, the congregation members rotate feeding their minister and his wife every Sunday in their homes. Berry describes these Sunday dinners as “food heaped on the table as they/ (the minister and his wife) were urged to eat/ as if they were being fattened for slaughter/ or as if it were the known practice of ministers and their wives/ to eat only on Sundays.”1

Laura’s practice is to follow these dinners with a walk alone over the land owned by her hosts. This Sunday at the Russets, she happens onto two pastures and a row of pens in the lambing barn. In one pasture are the new lambs safely born and strong,/ and in another pasture are the ewes waiting to give birth to their lambs. She walks into the barn and sees Tom Coulter, who has just midwifed the birth of twin lambs. One baby lamb is lying in the straw, perfectly formed but dead, and the other is bonded and feeding on its mother, who is nuzzling and muttering to her live lamb.

Tom is the “hired hand,” but not the thief or the bandit, but a good shepherd who deeply cares for his sheep. As Laura sees Tom’s tenderness with the dead and live lamb, she suddenly is filled with love for the eternal “unthanked care of the good shepherd.2 The sheep merely suffer, live, die, and are oblivious to the care given them by the shepherd. They do not seem to appreciate the care they receive from the good shepherd, but still the shepherd passionately gives the care. Laura responds to this by saying to Tom, “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

Tom gives a boyish grin and says, “I thought you knew it, (but) I didn’t look for you to say so.”

Laura’s response is, “I would like to thank you.” 

They say no more, and Tom goes off to war to “lay down his life” and never returns, unlike the Good Shepherd.

Wendell Berry gives us an abiding image of the Good Shepherd, who deeply loves and cares for us. We, in turn, don’t ask for the care but receive it/ and, most often, are unaware of the care from this Shepherd who passionately and desperately loves us.

 The Good Shepherd tells us, “I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

 All the Shepherd hopes for is that we, like Laura, acknowledge the Shepherd’s loves, saying to him, “You’re in love,/ aren’t you.” 

But even then, the Shepherd sheepishly grins, responding, “I thought you knew it/, but I didn’t look for you to say so.”///

Laura’s response to the Good Shepherd should continually be ours, “I would like to thank you.” Gratitude. That is why we are here today, giving gratitude for how the Good Shepherd cares for us. That is at the heart of our service today. A life of gratitude can make all the difference in our relationship with the Good Shepherd, ourselves, and those around us. May these words daily be on our lips,

“I would like to thank you.” 

1Wendell Berry, “A Desirable Woman,” A Place in Time, Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership, p. 57.

2Ibid, p. 67-68.

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.