The Call, Epihany 3B, Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, January 21, 2024

 The Call, Epiphany 3b, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, January 21, 2024

Some may remember the 1982 academy-award-winning movie “Chariots of Fire,” the story of Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, and the 1924 Olympics. Liddell, a minister’s son and theology student at the University of Edinburgh, trains to be a missionary.

 A scene in the film is branded on our hearts. To keep up with the Olympic training, Liddell must discontinue theological studies. He and his sister walk the rugged hills around Edinburgh as she argues he should stop running and stay with God’s call to missions. Liddell lovingly responds, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. When I run, I feel God’s pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt;/ to win is to honor him.”//

Liddell runs and, later, makes a hard decision to follow his church’s teachings against running on the Sabbath. Eventually, he finds a race,/ setting a world record in the 400-yard dash,/ lasting over a decade. (He becomes a missionary to China, ultimately dying in 1945 in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp/ four months before liberation.), as all of Scotland mourned.

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” // Sam Lloyd, former dean of the National Cathedral,1 writes that these words are the most important questions we ever face: What is our life’s purpose? What is our calling? These questions are frustrating, because answers aren’t always clear.

A young college graduate says, “My friends are in law or medical school. That doesn’t seem right for me.”

“I don’t like my job,” another says, “but it puts food on the table. My boss is a jerk. The pressure is terrible. But do I have a choice—especially in today’s economy?”

“I’m burned out,” a woman says. “Between caring for my children and keeping up at work, I’m exhausted. But I don’t see a way out.”

“I’m sixty-eight and ready to retire. What will I do?”///

Over 2,000 years ago, an itinerate rabbi walks by four rugged, hardworking fishermen—Simon, Andrew, James, and John—and simply says, “Follow me.” According to today’s story, they follow. “Immediately,” it says./

Most call stories in the Bible, like this one, are somewhat intimidating. A voice comes from a burning bush, from heaven, or echoing from the smoke and incense of the Temple. God speaks, and heroic prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah proclaim with authority./ We feel challenged if those stories are our models for God calling us.

Thank God for Jonah, whose story we partly hear today. There is nothing impressive about this back-pedaling, stubborn complainer. A Prophet is the last thing Jonah wants to be. He wants to be left alone. But God won’t do that.

God calls Jonah to Nineveh, demanding they repent and turn to God. Instead, Jonah sails as far away as possible. Nineveh was the hated capital of the Assyrian Empire, now known as Iraq, and was as hostile to Israel then as now. Jonah wasn’t about to help his enemies escape doom.

 A storm at sea threatens to kill everyone on board. The crew decides God is punishing them for Jonah’s presence, and they toss him over. He lands inside the belly of a big fish for three days. Jonah composes a beautiful prayer there and is finally spewed out on dry land.

In today’s story, God tells Jonah again to go to Nineveh. This time, he goes. To everyone’s shock, especially Jonah, the people of Nineveh, from the king on down, repent, and God forgives them. The story concludes with Jonah whining and unhappy because those terrible Assyrians escaped God’s wrath.

How is that for hearing God’s call? Not too inspirational. We identify with Jonah. He’s not confident he wants to hear God’s call, immediately doesn’t like God’s answer, and flees from God’s voice. /Jonah’s story cuts to the depth of our souls: we often don’t want God to call us because we fear what God might ask us to do.

We long to feel connected to God, but what if God asks us to deal with people we don’t like/ or forgive those we don’t want to forgive? What if God asks us to help families struggling in Arkansas with food and housing insecurity, or those facing death and poverty in Guatemala or Gaza? What if God asks us to make time to grow our faith in our already oh-so-important, overloaded lives? ///

Recognizing a call can be elusive. We may not actually hear a voice; there may not be a specific event or earthshaking experience. Hearing a call means listening to our lives, sorting through our gifts and passions, talking to advisors and friends, trying to imagine this or that possibility,/ asking God to guide and inspire our seeking. Listening for God’s call means refusing to ask what we want for our lives/ and focusing on what God wants from the lives we have been given.

We look at our skills, our abilities, our passions. We watch for moments when we are ENERGIZED. It often takes looking backward at our lives to begin tracing a call within us. We start to see connections, hints, surprising turns that led us to where we are.//

People ask about my call to medicine and ministry. The calls were often Epiphanies, a sudden, profound understanding of something that had been bubbling up all my life.

As a girl growing up in small town 1950s Virginia, medicine was never considered an option for women. I loved science and heard a call to the healing profession as a medical technologist. When I worked as one a summer, I realized a desire to care more directly for patients. I had the identical training, so I modified that call my senior year in college to go to medical school. I soon knew I wanted to be a pediatrician, but a crippling car accident led me to become a pediatric radiologist, which brought us to Arkansas Children’s and Saint Mark’s.

Much later, we discerned a call with two friends, Hap and Barbara Hoffman, to leave Saint Mark’s in 1990 to be founding missionary members to start St. Margaret’s Church. By then, I was also a functioning alcoholic and had only been in recovery a few months. I met with Chris Keller, who spearheaded the mission. I remember uncomfortably telling him that I was only recently in recovery and did not know if I was the person he wanted to start a church. His words still ring in my ears. “You are exactly the kind of person I am looking for.”//

The call to become a deacon happened suddenly, even though something was brewing for years. I felt a desire to offer more than physical healing for children and their parents. I overheard Cindy Fribourgh tell someone at Saint Margaret’s about the new deacon program Bishop Maze was starting in our diocese. Immediately, I knew that was a call, and I have never regretted it these 23 years.

The issue isn’t whether we hear a clear call. It isn’t whether we are confident that we are doing precisely the right thing every day. It’s whether we sense that ours is a called life, a life accountable to God, a life that has a mission and purpose, even if it takes years to articulate it.

But our calling is not our job. Writer Studs Terkel says, “Jobs are not big enough for people.” We are more than our occupations. We are friends, spouses, parents, members of our neighborhoods, local organizations, and this community. All of this is part of our vocation.

Many take unrewarding jobs to support their families. This is also a noble calling. Remember, not one person in the entire New Testament does God call into a money-making job. While following Christ and being disciples, they always do other things to pay the bills, like tent-making, making purple cloth, or catching fish.////

So,/ what is your calling? What irreplaceable gifts do you have to offer the world today, whether you are 18 or 80?

Remember God never gives up calling Jonah, and God never gives up on those Assyrians, either. That’s the kind of God we’re dealing with—one who won’t stop calling us,/ ever.//

Even if you didn’t realize it/ when you came here this morning, God is calling you. God wants all of us—because there are things to do today and tomorrow, right in the midst of our lives and our world, that only we can do. Maybe a paycheck will be attached. Often, the pay will be the work itself.///

 Today, /God calls us to help each other say “Yes, we will follow, /even when we don’t know the way. Help us to listen, learn, and trust you, God, to show the way.”////

Do you hear a call bubbling up inside of you? Today?/ Right Now?

1The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, “What Is Your Calling?” January 25, 2009, 11:15 AM • Epiphany III, Washington National Cathedral. © 2009

Washington National Cathedral

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

The Last Leaf, January 3, 2024, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 12-step Eucharist, 5:30 pm. John 1:1-18.

 The Last Leaf, January 3, 2024, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 12-step Eucharist, 5:30 pm. John 1:1-18.

“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

 A single autumn leaf has been clinging to the wood frame of my office window for weeks. It is the first and last thing I look for as my day begins and ends. It reminds me of one of my favorite O. Henry short stories, “The Last Leaf.” A young artist in New York’s Greenwich Village at the turn of the last century loses her will to live and succumbs to pneumonia. She watches from her window as the cold winter wind blows leaves from a tree branch growing along the side of a nearby adjacent building. She decides when the last leaf falls, she will die. Miraculously, the last leaf remains on the tree until she regains her will to live. Later, she discovers that an older artist in her building, whose own realistic paintings rarely sold, heard her story. He spends a night out in the cold while she sleeps, painting a leaf on the wall of the building. Shortly after he paints “his insignificant masterpiece” to save her life, he dies from the pneumonia epidemic.

Of course, the story is one of sacrifice of love for another human, reminiscent of the story of the good Samaritan. It is also a story of hope. How do we offer people that they will not remain in despair? There is a promise of Easter after every Good Friday experience. But that promise of light in the darkness can be challenging to see without the help of others. The darkness forgets what light is like. We see and read about this hope from others. The story of old Simeon and Anna at the temple in Jerusalem at Jesus’ presentation reminds us of the promise that the Christ Child will always come to us.  

This story is also about using our gifts and talents. We may think our abilities are minor compared to others, maybe even worthless. But there will be a time when what we have to offer is more significant than any other can offer. We will be called to use our talent at the right time when no one else will be there to help.

Steven Charleston writes, “We have been chosen to be who we are. Not as an accident. Not as an existence without purpose. But as a self-aware soul brought to life by a Spirit who knows our name. We have a mission to carry out, a message to send, a blessing to bestow. We are the only ones who can live this life. We are entrusted with a corner of the universe. We are a stakeholder in creation, selected for a task only we can complete.”

Give thanks today for someone who brought you out of darkness into light in 12-step recovery. Give thanks for those who showed you hope. Give thanks for those who brought you the message of recovery that now lives in you.

Consider that this new year is a time to share the gift of recovery you have received. Watch, wait, and pray that we will be open to offering the gift to others./ The gifts we may consider as our “insignificant masterwork” may soon make a difference in the life of another.       Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Christmas 1, John's Christmas Pageant, John 1:1-18, Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock

Christmas 1 December 31, 2023, John’s Christmas Pageant, John 1:1-18, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock

 Growing up in Tidewater Virginia, the custom was decorating homes at Christmas with a single, lighted, electric candle in each window. The Virginia tradition goes back to colonial times when candles were necessary to light pathways to homes on dark winter nights./ From an early age, I also loved Christmas pageants. I think it is in our family’s DNA, for when our grandchildren were young, the oldest would write a Christmas pageant where all participated, delightfully costumed. I have pictures if any are interested.//

Christmas pageants are icons of God’s love. No matter how the children act, whether they remember their lines, pick up cues, or drop props,/ we are delighted, grateful, and full of compassion and encouragement to see the wonder and light in their eyes.1 I still feel the electricity in the air in this place from Christmas Eve one week ago at the packed children’s pageant. Stop for a second./ Can you feel something different around you? //

Today, we hear John’s Christmas story. It, too, is all about love, but is markedly different from Luke or Matthew. No angels, sheep, shepherds, wise men. Not even Mary or Joseph. A Christmas pageant based on John’s story has a single child holding a lone candle in front of a dark curtain, saying one line, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and the darkness did not overcome it.” That child then leads the congregation out to the hymn, I want to walk as a child as a light. The dismissal secretly concludes with, “Go in the name of Christ… to an early Christmas Eve dinner.”//

More often, we hear John’s Christmas story when children go off script in traditional pageants. My favorite is when Mary and Joseph approach the innkeeper, asking for a room. The sensitive teenager playing the innkeeper’s wife opens the door and spies the pregnant Mary, obviously in early labor pains. She throws down her script/ and shouts, “Of course,/ come on in. We have lots of room for everyone,/ especially for pregnant mothers.”/ The astonished director is forced abruptly to end the pageant and invites a surprised Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and the compassionate innkeeper to lead haloed angels with magic wands, sheep, stuffed animals, bath-robed shepherds, drummers, and jeweled gifts along with the congregation out into the winter night singing Love Came Down at Christmas. Again,/ to an early Christmas Eve dinner.

Frederick Buechner describes another pageant at an Episcopal church.2 The manger is in front of the chancel steps. Mary wears a blue mantle, and Joseph has a cotton beard. The wise men are there with a handful of shepherds; the Christ child lies deep in the straw in the manger. The rector reads the nativity story as carols are sung at the appropriate places. All goes like clockwork until the arrival of the angels of the heavenly host, children of the congregation robed in white,/ scattered throughout the nave with their parents.

They all gather around the manger and say, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill among men.” But, there are so many angels crowding and jockeying for position/ that one of the smallest nine-year-old angels ends so far on the fringes that/ not even by craning her neck and standing on tiptoe can she see the Christ child. She has been waiting all Advent to see baby Jesus. “Glory to God in the highest,” the angels sing on cue. Then/ in the momentary pause that follows,/ the small girl electrifies the entire church by crying out in a voice shrill with irritation, frustration, and enormous sadness at having her view blocked, “Show me Jesus! Where is Jesus? I can’t see Jesus. Show him to me!”

Much pageant is still to come, but Buechner’s friend says one of the best things she ever did was ending everything precisely there. “Show me Jesus!” the child cries out again, and while the congregation sits in stunned silence, the rector intuitively pronounces the benediction. The crowd processes out of the church, singing, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing with those unforgettable words ringing in their ears. “Show me Jesus!”//

We also gather today because we, like that tiny angel, have heard John’s Christmas story of how lives have changed for over twenty centuries by the light in the darkness that now “lives among us.” We are like the Greeks later in John, who approach Phillip, saying, “We would like to see Jesus.” We long to come closer to see that light from the “word that became flesh,” but the mess in our lives and the world seems to block us from that view./

In another town, a third pageant begins.3 The second and third graders are animals making unusually realistic creature sounds. The new pageant director fails to realize the preparation time to dress/ and fix the hair/ of the heavenly host, who are thirty-two angels between ages two and four. It is a rough night in Bethlehem. Mary is sick, and the bucket near the manger is for her. Joseph may be a “righteous man, unwilling to expose Mary to public disgrace,” but he is thirteen/ and decides not to enjoy this pageant. When the mooing, barking, meowing, and baaing animals arrive behind the shepherds, all hope of heavenly peace vanishes. The animals take over the whole chancel and elevate “lowing”2 to a new cacophonous art form. The angels miss their cue and arrive long after the wise men, after the congregation sings Angels We Have Heard on High,/ and after the teenaged narrator says four times, “and suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host.” /But when the angels finally arrive, they look good: their halos and hair are perfect./

Right before everyone sings, Joy to the world! the narrator fights to center stage for his last line. He walks over an abundance of sheep, cows, dogs, cats, and one mouse. The angels’ parents ignore the narrator, making up for lost picture-taking time, entirely disregarding the no-flash photography request.

Mary reaches for the bucket, and Joseph has rolled his eyes so many times that they are about to fall out of his head. Our star narrator has to shout over the barnyard noise,/ and never gets the parents’ attention. /Exasperated, he throws down his folder,/ stretches out his arms,/ and yells, “Christ was born for this??”4 The exhausted pageant director cries out, “It is an exclamation point, not a question mark!”/ //

BUT, INDEED, Christ was born for this, IN ALL OUR MESS… “The word did become flesh, and lives among us.”/

Some days, the birth of Christ does feel like a question mark. Underneath the surface of our lives that look so good on the outside live hidden, secret, hemorrhaging, fractured relationships. We long to see Jesus’ love, peace, and light in our darkness. That scared inner child in each of us cries out,/ “Show me Jesus!”.//////

The child holding a single candle in John’s Christmas pageant says, “Here is the light we have been waiting for,/ the very presence of God living among us,/ inside us,/ beside us,/ and at this table.” That light of Christ miraculously enters our wounds and our messy world. The light heals us daily through neighbors,/ friends/ and this community gathered today/ if only we open our eyes and hearts to see this light already in each other, ourselves, and at this table.

God sees all of us as participants in this messy Christmas pageant we live in daily, and God dearly loves each of us, just as we love the children in last week’s pageant. God loves us no matter how well we remember our lines, sing our solos, or keep from knocking down the scenery. 

In our rich and messy pageant of life, we are called to remember and keep looking for that light from that single candle/ held by a child in John’s Christmas pageant/ proclaiming that the light can always overcome our darkness. Keep looking for that light, open to all of us,/ here at this table, in ourselves, our neighbor, our children, and the stranger. Hold John’s Christmas story in your heart, where we learn that “the word became flesh”/ and now dwells among our messiness.… “Christ was born for this!”

1 Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of Saint John the Evangelist

2 Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark A Life in Sermons, (Harper Sanfrancisco 2006) p. 268.

3David Davis, “A Kingdom we can Taste,” Sermons for the Church Year. pp. 25-30.

4“Good Christian Friends,” The Hymnal 1982.107.

Joanna Seibert   joannaseibert.com

Feast Day of Saint Nicholas

Feast of St. Nicholas

St. Mark’s 12-step Eucharist, December 6, 2023

If you have been at this 12-step Eucharist in December, you have heard a homily about St. Nikolas. I apologize, because you are going to hear about him again. I am powerless over St. Nikolas. He has become a significant figure in my life. It is possible that in December, I replace my addiction to alcohol with an addiction to St. Nikolas. 

Little is known about Nicholas, bishop of Myra, who lived in Asia Minor around 342. He was probably at the Council of Nicaea in 325. He is the patron of seafarers, sailors, and especially children. As a bearer of gifts to children, his name was brought to America by the Dutch colonists in New York, where he soon became known as Santa Claus.

The feast day of St. Nicholas, today, December 6th, was celebrated in our family as a major holiday. We began with a big family meal together. My husband dressed up as Bishop Nicholas with a beard, a miter, a crozier, and a long red stole, and came to visit our grandchildren after dinner. He spoke Greek to the children and the adults. Speaking Greek is my husband’s favorite pastime, and of course, you know that Nikolas is Greek. Our grandchildren then went into the bedrooms and left their shoes outside the doors, and Bishop Nicholas placed chocolate coins and presents in their shoes. If you want to see our pictures of this family event, they are stunning.//

Why am I sharing with you our family story? Yearly, I remember how I sat and watched this pageant and was filled with so much gratitude, for my sobriety date is close to the feast day of St. Nicholas. Each year, I remember that if someone had not led me to recovery, I would not be alive tonight. I would not have witnessed this wonderful blessing of seeing my children and grandchildren giggle with glee as they tried to respond to a beautiful older man with a fake beard speaking Greek to them/ and secretly giving them candy in their shoes. For me, it is a yearly reminder to keep working the 12 steps, so I can be around to remember and treasure the next feast day of St. Nicholas./

This is a suggestion. Look at the calendar of saints. Find one close to your sobriety date or an important event in your life. Learn about that saint. Observe that saint’s day in your home, in your life. You might consider that saint as your patron saint.

This is simply one more way to remember how our sobriety has transformed our lives. Spend that saint’s day giving thanks for those before us,/ who loved us before we were born,/ developing a program before we were born to save our lives. This love only comes from the love of the God of our understanding. My hope is that we will all pay this love forward, giving back God’s love to a world so desperately needing it.

A secret./ St. Nikolas may make an appearance Sunday night at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, at the Christingle Service at 5 pm on December 17.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Wicked Tenants 22A Mathew 21:33-46 Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, October 8, 2023, 5 p. m.

Wicked Tenants 22A Mathew 21:33-46  Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, October 8,  2023 5 o’clock

Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenant farmers is more like an allegory, with its meaning barely hidden. It is a good story from the viewpoint of the landowner. But let’s listen to another version. A wealthy farmer from Texas buys an abandoned apple orchard in Searcy, Arkansas. He prunes the trees, fertilizes them, and fixes the sales stand with a new hand-painted sign on Highway 67. He leases the place to a local family for less than market value, with the understanding they will return ten percent of the apples. With no business experience and high hopes of owning their place someday, the tenants agree and seal the deal with a handshake. The wealthy landowner gets into his black Hummer and drives back to Texas.

The tenants love the place like it is their own. They tend the trees from dawn to long after dark. They use organic pesticides. They haul water by hand during the summer drought, and when the first frost is predicted before the apples are ripe, they build small fires throughout the orchard and stoke them all night.

Come October, the air smells of applesauce. The trees are so heavy with fruit that they look like Victorian ladies wearing too much jewelry. A Little Rock cousin designs a web page advertising their homegrown Arkansas beauties. The harvest must be done quickly, so they work in shifts, some half-sleeping while others pick. Seventy-two hours later, mountains of apples rise from the wooden bins in the sales shed: Golden Delicious, Winesap, Arkansas Black, and most especially, Fuji.

Exhausted, the tenants admire the fruits of their labor when they hear gravel crunching under tires behind them, and turn to see an eighteen-wheeler with Texas plates backing into the shed. Two big men with bulging biceps start loading apples into the truck. When one of the tenants attempts to negotiate the ten percent business, the big guys pick him up and set him out of the way.

So, one of the tenants cranks up the Bobcat, while the others get out pitchforks and pruning hooks, and soon, they have persuaded the landowner’s men to return to Texas empty-handed.///

You know the tenants are wrong. It is not THEIR orchard. They have made a deal. The vineyard owner deserves his share of the produce, but the story does not sit right. Maybe because no one likes absentee landlords. Perhaps we have relatives who were sharecroppers, and we know how hard that life is: making someone else’s profit.

This is not the American way. From the beginning, this country has fueled the dreams of disenfranchised people from all over the world who have come looking for their own small piece of paradise.

This is the American way: owning our own home on our own land. Most of us believe in ownership, autonomy, and self-reliance. We do not like following someone else’s agenda.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells us if we believe Jesus’ parable,/ the American values are not the kingdom’s values. Ownership of the vineyard is NOT the issue. It is NOT for sale and NEVER will be. The owner is not looking for BUYERS; he is looking for tenants, RENTERS, who will give him his share of the produce at harvest time, which means the real issue is stewardship, a word that puts us on the defensive because it challenges our sense of ownership.

We worked hard for what we have. We have deeds, titles, and fence lines to prove it. We have registered land plots, mortgage payment books, and tax bills with our names on them. Getting these things was difficult, and keeping them requires financial courage. But according to this evening’s parable, we are simply deluding ourselves.

Our ancestors became divine tenants so long ago that we forgot the circumstances. Somewhere, someone misplaces the tenant’s agreement and writes up a deed instead.

The landowner is surprisingly easy to handle. When he sends messengers to remind the tenants of their agreement, it only takes a little burst of violence, and those still alive run away empty-handed. The owner could send the police or recruit his own army. He could return violence for violence, but he does not. He keeps sending messengers, pleading with the tenants to come to their senses and honor their agreement.

Finally, when there are rows of unmarked graves of messengers outside the vineyard walls, the owner sends his son, unaccompanied, unarmed, to teach the tenants things they have forgotten. He reminds us that ownership is a game we are playing, that we are guests on the earth, not rulers.

 This is good news! Being guests relieves us of responsibilities we are not equipped to handle,/ like numbering the hairs of our head/ or speaking out of a whirlwind to command the eagles to mount up and make their nests on high/ or to bring rain on land where no one lives,/ or knowing when the mountain goats give birth.

 As guests, we have free access to far more than we could ever earn. Instead of a vineyard full of one-acre tracts divided by barbed wire, we have acres and acres at our disposal, not to own but to use and enjoy through the owner’s generosity. All he asks is that we care for it, “this fragile earth, our island home,” and that we give back to God a portion of what we produce,/ not because God needs it,/ for he always turns around and gives it away,// not because God needs it,/ but because we need it. We need to give so we remember who we are: grateful guests. We are to take our lives like wrapped and ribboned gifts to return the favor by giving ourselves away to others.

The tenants kill the son, but he does not stay dead,/ and to this day, he walks the vineyard, reminding us that we are God’s guests, welcome on this earth as long as we remember whose it is/ and how it is to be used. We can love it as our own. We can even will pieces of it to our children, naming them our successors in the stewardship of the vineyard. //

We are God’s sharecroppers. We tend to the earth and its riches on someone else’s behalf. We are expected to represent God’s interests, being as generous with each other as God is with us. We are not owners. /This is not the American way, but it is the kingdom way, A NEW THING,// and I will tell you something:// the harvest will take your breath away.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “God’s Sharecroppers,” Gospel Medicine, pp. 96-100.

Mary W. Anderson, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” Christian Century, September 23, 2008.