A sermon preached September 18, 2011 at Crissey Farm

By the Rev. Frances A. Hills, Rector

Exodus 16:2-15, Matthew 20:1-16

What astonishing scriptures these are! They seem to fly in the face of some of our most cherished economic assumptions, like saving. We value saving, being able to have and “put away” more than enough/more than what we need for today. Even better is having MUCH more than enough. Enough to last us months or years or even a good, long retirement.

But then there’s this story about God providing quail and “bread from heaven”, manna. The Israelites had been wandering in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt. They’re hungry and cranky. They’re complaining and blaming Moses for taking them away from the slave-food they had in Egypt. They might have been slave-driven and oppressed, but at least they knew when they’d have their next meal.  So they’re free, but hungry and cranky. Then God tells them there will be meat at night and bread in the morning, Here’s the thing though, they can only take what they need for just one day…JUST ENOUGH.  God promises them God will supply what they need each day. God wants the people to learn to TRUST God in all things. To reinforce this, if they try to store up quail or manna—more than ENOUGH—then it always spoils overnight. So the people must learn to TRUST God one day at a time.

Jesus certainly echoes this when he teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”. ‘Such a familiar prayer, but do we think about what it really means?

We’re admitting we ultimately cannot supply what we need, and we’re asking God to give us what we need each day. In the asking, we’re acknowledging that God can supply our need. AND GOD WILL!

In the Gospel today, Jesus takes this much further, and again it flies in the face of some of our most cherished economic assumptions. Jesus gives us this parable about how the laborers who worked only one hour were paid the same as those who worked all day. Now what was paid to each was in fact, “a day’s wage”, which meant it was enough, just enough, to supply that day’s basic needs. Well, of course the ones who worked hard all day were furious…It wasn’t “fair”! Yet we must remember, in God’s economy, in God’s Kingdom, what’s “fair” is also what’s “just”. Perhaps for God the “minimum wage” (so to speak) is “a day’s pay”, like the quail and manna in the wilderness.

It’s important to remember here that Jesus always uses parables to give us images of what the Kingdom of God is like. In the Kingdom, God’s economy reigns. Giving all not only what’s fair, but also what’s just. And even more…God generously lavishing on us more than we can ask for or imagine, as the landowner choose to do for the laborer who worked only one hour. In God’s economy, in God’s Kingdom, there’s nothing for the all-day laborer to resent. He got what he needed and what he’d expected to be paid. Justice was done.

Now if the Kingdom of God is when God amazes us with God’s generosity, then, as children of this God, made in God’s likeness and image, I believe we are called to help bring in that generous Kingdom, “On earth as it is in heaven”. I believe we are called to amaze others with our generosity. I believe this congregation does from time to time amaze others with generosity. And I want to tell you a couple of stories about that…

As you may know, last weekend I was at the Bishop Search and Transition Committee’s Organizing Retreat with members of the Standing Committee and with our Consultant for the process. I sat at the lunch table Saturday with our Consultant, our Chaplain, and with Taylor Albright, member of the Search Committee and the rector of the church at Southwick. You may remember that the Southwick Church was planted just a few years ago. Until last year, when it became self-sustaining, it was the major recipient of the Diocesan Alleluia Fund. At lunch we talked about how the oldest and newest churches in the diocese were represented at our table. (With apologies to the newly formed “All Saints” in North Adams/Adams, which really is the newest church.)

Anyway, Taylor started telling the Consultant about how a couple of years ago

St. James, which was recently homeless and trying to discern what to do about our building and about our future, had actually sent a generous check to the Alleluia Fund to help the Southwick Church get firmly established. To us at the time, this just seemed like a good use of our Outreach money, but it turns out we actually amazed others with our generosity…Giving them a glimpse of God’s economy, God’s Kingdom.

You will hear more about this later, but on Thursday night, your Vestry agreed to do what we can to help our friend, neighbor, and partner in mission, Taft Farms. As you know they have been extravagantly generous to us with Gideon’s Garden, in helping to nurture youth and feed hungry people. But now the recent flooding has nearly pulled them under, and we have offered to help. Some at Taft Farms have told me personally that they are amazed by our generosity.

I know as your rector for nearly 4 years, you never cease to amaze me with your generosity! I think this is truly one of the Spiritual Gifts of this parish, and I hope we will continue to act out of this spirit of generosity even in these times when we might be tempted to try to store up more than enough for ourselves.  No doubt as we move forward into the future we will continue to be called upon to reflect God’s generous heart, to show the world God’s Kingdom, to use our gifts, and to amaze others with our generosity. I pray we are always up to this call. Amen.

Parts of this sermon were inspired by a sermon written by the Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek, co-rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Ellicott Mills, Elicott City, MD. 

All the Way to Heaven

A Sermon Preached by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher

September 11, 2011

St. James & St. George Episcopal Churches @ Crissey Farm, Great Barrington, MA

13 Pentecost, Proper 19A

Someone wrote this week: “We don’t have to forget, but we should be careful about how we remember.”[i]

September 11, 2001 is a day that is saturated with memory for us. So saturated with memory that the layers of meaning for us will be developed for years to come. For the past ten years, as a nation and as individuals, we have tracked the movements in our souls and hearts in response to our memories of that day.

I was especially grateful this week for the public television rebroadcast of Helen Whitney’s 2002 documentary Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. There was an interview I remembered but had not meant much to me at the time.[ii]

The photographer who captured many of the images of the stranded people who jumped from the Twin Towers was trying to imagine what was happening to them to enable them to fly down together from a high ledge. “Did they see a beautiful garden with rivers and lakes? Was heaven already there before they jumped? Something must have been going on because a lot of them jumped.”

Well, this was his remembrance, and maybe since then it has changed for him. But it was fresh to him then, and I was able to catch something about how his imaginings at the time were led by his compassionate identification with the jumpers. He sensed that for them a horizon extended out, out, out, and it included everything so that there was nothing to fear and it opened all the way into the freedom that “death need no longer be the end of possibility.”[iii] Whoosh!

What the photographer was describing, this horizon of heaven that he hoped they were jumping into, was what a Loving God of Creation has called us to since the foundation of the world.

When we hear the story of Jesus instructing Peter and the other disciples to forgive seventy times seven times, we are being invited to freely jump into this heaven, leaving behind a world that ends with us and our self-concern and arriving in a larger world that includes compassion for the other.

The hyperbole of the number stresses that it is more important to be kind than it is to exact payment in kind. I will repeat this. It is more important to be kind than it is to exact payment in kind.

Furthermore, Jesus follows with a parable which is a clear warning that if we remain unconcerned about the suffering of others however much we think they owe us, then we will end up tortured and stuck in the world of our own un-kindness, our own hard-heartedness, our own violence.

When Moses tried to call attention to the suffering of his people upon which Egyptian society depended, this caused such disturbances in Egypt that they are recalled and remembered as plagues. The pharaoh finally relents and lets them go, but upon further reflection about the benefits of slaves who can be whipped on a whim, goes off in greedy pursuit.

This time, self-induced fate of the hard-hearted Egyptians is represented by the sea waters, which in many ancient stories represent a crisis of violence that threatens to drown a society: the leakage and seeping of resentments, grudges and fears born greed and envy.

Rescue from the undertow of violence, as victim or perpetrator or both, is surely a miracle. Unimaginable faith in the ultimate power of love is needed to disengage and leave it all behind.

Whoosh! The waters of violence are parted and the Israelites walk through with dry feet, away from the world of hard-heartedness. The challenge for them will be to not only remember God’s loving gift of the miracle of their deliverance from the danger of their oppressors, but to remember—and understand—their deliverance from becoming hard-hearted themselves—which is exactly what will enable them to become a blessing to others.

But make no mistake: the kind of remembering without rancor that makes us a blessing to others is a long, slow, laborious journey for humans. The conversion to a precarious and vulnerable life of faith, hope and love—faith that we are loved more than we can love, hope for liberation from what keeps us enslaved to our own violence, and love that doesn’t end at home—this conversion does not happen by strict adherence to any known system of ethics or law. But, rather, it happens by the excess of love spilling into our lives in nearly inexpressible ways.

So I would like share a story about how love spilled into to one man’s life and transformed the horizons of it. I heard this story first-person in Jerusalem in 2007 on the last night of a diocesan sponsored trip to Israel.

Rami Elchanan, a graphic designer and 7^th generation Jewish Jerusalemite, and Aziz Abu Sarah a Palestinian journalist arrived together to speak to us from an organization called the Parents Circle-Family Forum. This is Rami’s story.

He told us that he had served as a soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and had come away from it embittered, cynical and furious after losing so many of his friends. But he went on to marry and have children and a career. In 1997, his only daughter, 14 year old Smadar, was killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers. For seven days he and his family sat Shiva and were consoled by thousands of people. After that he was consumed with how to react to the murder of his daughter.

One day he met Ytzchak Frankenthal who told him about how his son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas a few years before and that he established this organization of people who had lost children in the conflict but nevertheless wanted peace.[iv] Rami recognized him as one the people who had come into his home during Shiva and was initially outraged. But Ytzchak calmly proceeded and asked him to come to a meeting of this crazy group of people.

Rami agreed and at the meeting he saw many famous Israelis, all grieving parents. But then he saw “an amazing spectacle”—Arabs, bereaved Palestinian families getting off the buses, coming toward him, greeting him with peace, hugging him, crying with him.

He later wrote of this experience: “I am not religious—quite the opposite—and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on … I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! … We can and once and for all must stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge, and punishment.”[v]

Love spilled in and opened horizons that were previously inconceivable. Whoosh! And Rami’s way of remembering—stepping out of the damp, dank mire of rancor—becomes a blessing to those who meet him and hear his story.

Finally, let me tell you that 200 families who lost loved ones on September 11^th 2001 have become blessings to the world, too, by following their desire that no one else feel the same pain they have felt. As the September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows[vi] they are reaching out to families in Afghanistan who have lost family members. Love has spilled into their lives, too, so that the horizons of their compassion do not end here … or here … but stretch way, way out to there …

May such love spill into our lives, so that our concerns do not end so close to home and each morning we get up out of bed to become blessings to the world.[vii]

Amen.

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[i] The Rev. Bill Carroll, Episcopal Café Lead, in comments to “Using This Sunday’s Gospel on September 11, 2011” http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/peace/using_this_sundays_gospel_on_s_1.html

[ii] Photographer Luca Babini. Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero can be currently view at http://video.pbs.org/video/2120639608#

[iii] Davies, Oliver. A Theology of Compassion, p. 34 (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 2003; UK, SCM Press: 2001)

[iv] Parents Circle - Families Forum (PCFF) is a grassroots organization of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. http://www.theparentscircle.com/ The PCFF promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge. For Aziz’s story and blog see http://azizabusarah.wordpress.com/about/

[v] http://www.internationalnetworkforpeace.org/spip.php?article43

[vi] http://peacefultomorrows.org/index.php

For a televised interview with David Portorti about remembering 9/11: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/security/video-david-potorti-on-waging-peace-after-911/11420/

[vii] The preacher gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to Anthony Kelly’sThe Resurrection Effect (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008).

A sermon preached September 4, 2011

By the Rev. Frances A. Hills, Rector

As people go back to school, I hope many of you got your homework done and are ready to indicate (during the Offertory) the areas of mission in which you serve in your daily lives. As I look at the Five Marks of Mission:

·        To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom

·        To teach, baptize and nurture new believers

·        To respond to human need by loving service

·        To seek to transform unjust structures of society

·        To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth

I am struck that underlying each one is a deep sense of community and love …for God, for others, for our society, and for all the creation. It makes me aware of how we are called to be “people of peace” and a “community of love”. We’re not just an assortment of individuals, operating independently and in isolation, but we’re called to be a community of God’s people living in relationship with one another, loving one another and all that God has made. We are each unique, necessary parts of the same body, the community of love, and we’re called to use our different gifts to contribute to the common good.

In the Romans reading today, Paul tells us to “love one another” and to “love our neighbor as ourselves”. It’s like if we really are people of peace and a community of love, then we will not break God’s commandments, because (KJV) “love worketh no ill to his neighbor”. The thing is we know it’s really hard not to break God’s commandments. It’s really hard to be a person of peace and a community of love. Sometimes it seems especially hard to be that in the church. God knows that about us, and God knows how destructive it is to the congregation when people in the church are not repentant and reconciled.  

This is why in Matthew’s gospel Jesus gives us such an explicit pattern for reconciliation in the church: First, he says to go privately to the one who has committed the offense and confront them. If the two of you can’t work it out, then take a few others with you to help both parties speak the truth, hear clearly, and act fairly. If repentance and reconciliation still don’t happen, then take the matter to the church. Now here’s the zinger…If the offender still doesn’t repent, “treat him like a heathen and publican”. Some might take this to mean shun him—cast him out of the community. But if we think about what Jesus would do, we must  remember he befriended outcasts and sinners. Perhaps this means we should simply start over in the reconciling process and give the one who offends another chance to repent. Hopefully in the process, we can begin to see our own contributions to the problem, because as the saying goes, “it takes two to tango”.

In any case when, for Christ’s sake, we work at reconciliation and also whenever we’re engaged in mission, we can be assured we’re not alone, because Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in the midst of them.” With his strengthening presence, we can be people of peace and a community of love. Amen.