creation care

Ascending into Heaven

Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with a cry of joy.
Amen.

I can’t remember a spring in New England that I’ve savored with more delight than this one.  After a long, hard winter, how sweet it’s been to watch colors rise to the surface, to see forsythia and then magnolia, crabapple and now dogwood trees bursting into bloom, to look up at the hills of the Holyoke Range and see a haze of pink, followed by so many astonishing shades of green that I found myself wishing that I knew as many words for “green” as the Eskimos apparently have for snow. 

Energy seems to rise in the spring.  Not long ago I took a walk in a nearby town.  It was one of our first warm days, the sun was shining, and I saw a young man walking down the sidewalk on his hands.  He’d taken off his shirt and his feet were waving in the air like two flags.  I saw a child holding hands with a woman with multi-colored dreadlocks, or maybe it was ribbons that she’d woven into her hair, for the braids dangling over her ears were pink and orange and green.  And I saw a sentence painted on an old brick wall and the sentence said, “Change the future.”  Let me tell you, joy rose up in me.  I thought to myself, Christ has risen.  The world’s gone topsy-turvy.  People walk on their hands, they wear ribbons in their hair, and they know the truth: anything is possible.  With God’s help we can change the future. 

My spirits soared.

Here on the Sunday after Ascension Day, it feels right to muse a bit about images of rising, of being lifted up.  A few moments ago we listened to that familiar passage from the book of Acts, the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven [Acts 1:1-14].  It is the Bible’s only detailed account of how Jesus departed from his disciples and returned to God.  As we heard, for forty days after his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus appeared on different occasions to his disciples.  At last, on the fortieth day, Jesus gathered his disciples together, promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and was then “taken up” or “lifted up” in a cloud.  Jesus disappeared from their sight, and the disciples returned to Jerusalem to gather in prayer with the men and women who had known and loved him.  Little did they know that ten days later, on the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit would suddenly come upon them with great power.

Now the coming of the Holy Spirit was all well and good, but I have to confess that for a long time I didn’t know what to make of the ascension bit.  Every Sunday we repeat the line in the Nicene Creed, “he… ascended into heaven,” but secretly I suspected that one shouldn’t look at this part of the story too closely.  The thought of Jesus ascending into heaven evoked the irreverent and definitely unhelpful image of Mary Poppins slowly rising into the sky, umbrella in hand.  Surely, I thought to myself, surely the disciples’ last sight of Jesus was not of the soles of his feet. 

My difficulty came from assuming that I was supposed to take the image quite literally and to believe that heaven — and God — were literally “up,” a geographical place “above” the earth, and that after his death Jesus had to be re-united with God by going “up” — up and away.  On this point I was no better informed than the first Russian cosmonaut, Yurij Gagarin, who returned from the first manned orbit of the earth to announce triumphantly that he hadn’t seen God when he was up in space, proof positive (in his view) that God does not exist.  For years I avoided using the traditional imagery of heaven as “up” and the earth as “down,” precisely because taking those images literally invites such a simplistic response.

But this spring has reminded me that even if heaven and God are not literally “up,” and the earth and the rest of things not literally “down,” there is still something in our language, in our psyche, that links transcendence and joy with moving upward, with elevation.  “I was feeling down,” we say sometimes, “but now things are looking up.”  Happiness makes our spirits “rise”; we feel “uplifted.”  Joy, hope, inspiration — all these feelings of exaltation lift us up, they enlarge us, they carry us beyond ourselves, they may even move us to ecstasy, which literally means “ex-stasis,” out of a static place.

Is it possible that our moments of joy, our own experiences of feeling inspired or lifted up, are hints of Christ’s ascension, moments when we are aware that we are part of a great circulation of love that is always going on between heaven and earth?  For that is the great love story that we find in the Bible: God so overflows with love for God’s creation that — to use the familiar imagery — God in Christ descends among us, descends into our depths and finally into death itself, and then God in Christ gathers up all that he is and all that we are, and carries everything back to the Father, the Creator of all. 

That, to me, is one message of the ascension: we can trust our moments of joy, we can notice and value those moments of being uplifted by what is beautiful or noble or pure, or by the sheer exuberant creativity of life, because in those moments our hearts are rising with Christ to give thanks to the One who loved us into being.  And when we feel no joy at all, when we are in a time of sorrow or confusion or pain, we can trust that because of the ascension, all that is in us — our cares and concerns, our needs and our loves — have been taken up with Jesus to be drawn into the heart of God.  Through Christ’s incarnation, God came down among us and became one of us, and through Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ bore everything back up to God.

The ascension also means that we can have a living relationship with Jesus.  After the ascension, the life of Jesus Christ can never again be limited to one spot or identified with only one moment in history.  Because of the resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ is not far off, a man who lived — as fairy-tales say — long ago and far away.  Instead he is radically present to us, intimately close.  As St. Augustine once put it, “Jesus ascended into heaven so that we might return to our hearts and there find him.”

Thanks to the ascension, we can also speak not only of an inner Christ, the Christ that lives within us, but also of a cosmic Christ.  The ascension means that Christ is everywhere, beyond us, around us, within everything that exists.  As the letter to the Ephesians puts it, Jesus “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” [Eph 4:10].  Because of the ascension we encounter a Christ whose living presence infuses all of creation, permeating everything with his life.

It can be tempting to think that we’ll run into Christ only in predictable places – only in church, maybe, or only in passages of Scripture, or only in the sacraments.  Yes, we do meet Christ here, but not only here, not only in the places we expect.  As Luke makes clear in his Gospel and in the Book of Acts, the risen and ascended Christ can also meet us where we least expect it.  This week I did something I’ve never done before: I put Luke’s story of the resurrection side by side with his story of the ascension and compared the two accounts.  I was surprised by their similarities.  In Luke’s account of the resurrection, the women can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the tomb.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in dazzling clothes” who stand beside the women and ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” [Luke 24:5].  In Luke’s account of the ascension, the disciples can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the sky.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in white robes” who stand by the men and ask, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” [Acts 1:11].

It seems that men and women alike need a couple of heavenly messengers to prod them with a question that helps them see that from now on, they’re not going to find Christ in some limited, predictable place.  The living Christ simply can’t be confined, whether in a tomb below or in the heavens above.  The living Christ now fills all things.  We look around and find him in the secret places of our own hearts, in the faces of the poor, in the trees bursting into bloom and leaf, and the ferns unfolding their tiny green fists.  We look around and find him in laughter and multi-colored ribbons on a city street, in the embrace of friends, in every truthful and loving word, in every act of kindness.  We look around and find him in each other’s faces, in the bread and wine that we share at the altar, in the hope that inspires us to restore our building stone by stone and to create a space that praises God. 

You know as well as I do how much suffering there is in life, how much loneliness and sorrow.  You know how daunting the problems that we human beings face, from war to global warming, and how hard it can be just to live a single day wisely and well, much less to “change the future.”  Will we have faith and strength to face life’s challenges in a creative way?  Will we rise to the occasion?   If we do, it will be through the One whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  It will be through the One who lived, died, and rose for us.  When the celebrant calls out, “Lift up your hearts” we have the joy – and great privilege – of calling back in reply, “We lift them to the Lord.”

Conversion to Eco-Justice

“Be joyful in God, all you lands. Dear God, the earth bows down before you, sings to you, sings out your Name.” Amen.  

 Along with – literally – something like half a billion people around the world, this weekend we’re celebrating Earth Day.  Today is Creation Sunday – a day for giving thanks to God for the extraordinary mystery and miracle of God’s Creation.  And it’s a day for sober reflection and recommitment, as we consider the environmental perils that face us today. 

For several years I’ve been asking myself what inspires Christians to place care for the earth at the center of our moral and spiritual concern.  What needs to happen inside us – what deep change in perspective, what significant shift in values must we experience – before we become willing to offer ourselves to the great work of healing the earth?  One reason I’ve been asking this is that I’m trying to make sense of my own spiritual journey.  Some of you know that three years ago I was arrested in front of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., during an interfaith prayer vigil organized by a group called Religious Witness for the Earth to protest our national energy policy and the intention to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The decision to participate in non-violent civil disobedience came as a surprise to me.  I’m not “the type.”  I mean – hey, I’m an Episcopal priest.  I lead retreats.  I teach courses on prayer.  By temperament I’m a peacemaker, not a rabble-rouser.  When a photograph of me being led away in handcuffs showed up in the Boston Globe, more than one startled person told me, “You’re the last person I would have thought would get arrested!”

Of course, civil disobedience is not the only, or even the most important, sign of someone’s conversion to eco-justice, since God calls us out in many different ways.  But what inspires conversion to eco-justice in the first place?  Based on my own experience, here’s what I propose: for Christians it involves three steps or stages.  I call them “creation,” “crucifixion,” and “resurrection.”  I have no idea whether this model of conversion applies to every Christian who is committed to earth-care, for our journeys in faith take many different routes.  But I invite you to check this against your own experience as a Christian: to what extent does your conversion to earth-keeping include these three elements?

The first stage, “creation,” is when we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation.  We experience amazement, gratefulness, wonder, and awe.  In this first stage of the mystical journey, we discover how loved we are as creatures made in the image of God and connected by breath, blood, bone, and flesh to the whole of God’s creation.

I don’t take this first step for granted.  It’s a huge discovery to experience creation as sacred.  Some of us grew up in a city, and to some degree city-dwellers are cut off from the natural world.  For the first time in history, more than half the planet’s human population now lives in cities, which means that they don’t see stars at night, don’t hear spring peepers, don’t smell hay.  Even living here, in the beauty of the Pioneer Valley, we may experience a certain alienation from the natural world. We are embedded in a culture that tells us daily in a thousand different ways that we are the most important thing on earth and that our deepest identity as human beings is to be a consumer: to buy, discard, and buy again.  We are conditioned to think of nature as a “resource” for us to exploit and use up, and in the midst of our busy, distracted, and often car-centered lives, I sometimes find it easy to think of nature as nothing more than the weather that does or doesn’t get in my way as I drive from one appointment to the next.

To add to our alienation from the earth, many of us grow up in families riddled with addiction, or we develop an addiction of our own.  If you’ve ever been close to an addict, you know that addictions function to disconnect us from the needs and rhythms of the body.  In my own years of addiction, I paid no attention to my body’s signals.  Addicts don’t much notice – or care – if they are tired or sad, if they are anxious or lonely – whatever they’re feeling, they just do their compulsive thing – grab the food, swig the drink, hunker down with the Internet, find something to buy.  Addiction of any kind dulls our awareness and cuts us off from our bodies and the natural world.

I began my recovery in 1982, and in the years that followed I gradually learned to honor the first bit of nature with which I’d been entrusted: my own body.  As I learned to listen to my body and to live within its limits, I began to connect more deeply with nature.  I began to see that God loved not only my body – God also loved the whole “body” of creation.  God began showing up all around me – in the pond, the hills, the willow tree – and I began to understand the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  I began to understand the words of Genesis: “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  

“Creation” is the stage when we discover the great love affair that is going on between God and God’s creation.  We enter that stage when we experience God’s love for us, and not only for us, not only for our own kind.  Because God’s love is infinite, this stage is one that we can never “outgrow,” never finish exploring.

The second stage is “crucifixion.”  Nobody likes this part of the journey, but it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid.  The more fully we experience the ways in which the creation reveals the love of God, the more we recognize the relentless assault on the natural world.  Clear-cut forests.  Vanishing topsoil.  Disappearing wetlands.  Acid rain.  Worst of all, perhaps: global warming.  The ice in the Arctic is melting so rapidly that there is now no ice in the sea during the summer; by the year 2050 there may be no ice in the sea at any time of year.  One news outlet [Reuters] reports that “Inuit hunters are falling through ice, permafrost is thawing…[and] the habitat of creatures from polar bears to seals is literally melting away.”  In recent months we’ve learned that up to 30 percent of the world’s species face extinction in the next 50 years, that more than 40 percent of birds in Europe face an uncertain future, and that North American wildlife species ranging from butterflies to red fox are “scrambling to adapt to Earth’s rising temperatures and may not survive” [AP report, 11/8/04].

We try not to notice these things.  We try to shrug them off or look away.  But crucifixion is the place where God finally breaks through our denial.  When we reach this stage we finally dare to feel the pain, to mourn what we’ve lost and what our children will never see.  It’s important to feel our protest and grief because it’s an expression of our love.  We can’t sidestep this stage if we are to become truly human.  I wonder what the church would be like if it became a genuine sanctuary, a place where we felt free to mourn, free to express our anger and sorrow.

At the foot of the cross we express not only our grief, but also our guilt, because if we’re honest with ourselves, we must confess the ways that we ourselves benefit from the destruction of the earth.  We must admit our own patterns of consumption and waste.  When it comes to eco-justice none of us – at least, not most North Americans – can stand in a place of self-righteousness, because we, too, are implicated.  In penitence and sorrow we approach the cross of Christ, where God gives us grace to face and to confess our malice and ignorance, our grief and guilt.  We can take heart at the cross of Christ, because it is here that all evil and suffering are continually met by the love of God.  In a time of ecological crisis, we need to take hold of the power of the cross as never before. 

If in the first stage of conversion we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation, and in the second stage we share in Christ’s crucifixion, mourning creation’s wounds and acknowledging our own deep grief and guilt, then, as we enter the third stage, we find ourselves sharing in Christ’s resurrection.  Filled with the love that radiates through all creation and empowered by the cross that like a lightning rod “grounds” our suffering and sin in the love of God, we come at last to bear witness to the Christ “who bursts out of the tomb, who proclaims that life, not death, has the last word, and who gives us power to roll away the stone.”*  When we’re led to resurrection we move out into the world to participate in works of compassion and justice.  We enter the stage when the mystic also becomes a prophet, standing up to the powers-that-be.  As we heard in today’s reading from Acts, the early Christians were known for being people who were “turning the world upside down” [Acts 17:6].

What we feel ourselves sent out to do can take many forms.  God’s creation needs healing at every level, so wherever you feel led to begin is a good place to start.  Commitment to care the for earth will affect what we buy and what we refuse to buy, what we drive and what we refuse to drive, how we heat our homes, how much we re-use and re-cycle, whether we’re willing to do something as simple as switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and whether we’re willing to go even further and engage in public protest and civil disobedience. 

Living out the resurrection begins right here.  I invite you to take a look at the green insert in today’s service leaflet for some local environmental events. I invite you to throw some extra money in the offertory plate, for it will go to Clean Water Action to support their efforts not only to protect clean water but to fight global warming and to get rid of toxic chemicals like mercury that threaten the health of our children. I invite you to consider signing the petition about climate change that the Episcopal Peace Fellowship has put on a table in the parish hall, along with some handouts on ecology and faith. I invite you to take a walk through the town common and learn how you can participate in protecting the earth while you enjoy the music and the fun.

I’m inspired by the commitment of those leading our parish’s Restoration Project to make the renovations as energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable as possible.  You may know that the Church School’s Sixth and Seventh Graders spent some time thinking about today’s biblical readings, including the passage from First Peter that calls us “living stones . . . being built into a spiritual house.”  The students commented that our church building is made of stone, and one child reported having heard that we’re named Grace Church because the stones are gray.  (Don’t you love it?) Well, the stones may be gray, but I’m happy to say that Grace is going green. 

Some people want to ignore the environmental crisis, to deny its urgency, to deal with it some other time.   As comedian George Carlin once remarked, “I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.” 

Well, when we Americans do get past our denial and actually take a look at the challenges we face, what may come next is despair – the awful sense that it’s too late, it’s gone too far, we won’t be able to turn this around.  I know only two antidotes to despair: prayer and action.  Prayer roots us in the first stage of that 3-part journey: in the love of God that extends through all creation.  Prayer also gives us courage to enter the second stage, as we share Christ’s crucifixion, mourn the losses and feel the grief.  And through the Spirit of the risen Christ, we embark on the third stage: we are sent out to act, to do what we can to transform the world.  Conversion invites us to become people of prayer, people who take time to steep ourselves in the love of God.  And it invites us to become people of action, too, people who try in every aspect of our lives – from what we eat to what we drive and how we vote – to move toward ecological sustainability and to honor our first and most basic God-given call: to become care-takers of the earth.

  

*First written for “To Serve Christ in All Creation – A Pastoral Letter from the Episcopal Bishops of New England” (sent to the Episcopal Churches of Province One on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ, 2003)

 

Altar of resistance

The showdown has begun. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the holy city of Jerusalem.  The next day, as we heard in tonight’s reading, he entered its holy place – and caused a commotion.  He walks into the temple and drives out those who are buying and selling.  He overturns the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves.  Quoting Scripture, he cries, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.  But you have made it a den of robbers” [bbllink]Mark 11:17[/bbllink].

The temple is sacred space.  It is made for prayer.  It is no place for dishonesty, no place for greed, no place for the profit of a few.  Some scholars emphasize that the cleansing of the temple takes place in the Court of the Gentiles, the only area where non-Jewish people are admitted for worship.  If buying and selling is permitted in the Court of the Gentiles, then the Gentiles will have no place to join in worshipping with the people of God.  When Jesus cleanses the temple – when he drives out all commercial transactions, expels buyers and sellers, and declares the space so holy that no one can even carry a vessel through it – he is carrying out the first act of a Messianic king.  He is clearing out and protecting the sacred space so that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, may worship together.  He is proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Tonight we contemplate Jesus protecting sacred space that has been invaded by commercial interests.  I hold that scene side by side with another invasion by commercial interests of another sacred space.  Last week’s vote by the U.S. Senate to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling was not unexpected, but still it came to many of us as a shock.  It’s not just that so little oil is expected to flow from those pipelines, nor that the same amount of fossil fuel that is expected to come from the refuge could be saved by investing in clean, renewable energy and by improving the average fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks.  It’s not just that drilling for more oil in Alaska seems a particularly tragic and ironic project, given the fact that Alaska and the whole region of the Arctic is already bearing vivid witness to the perils of global warming, from thawing tundra to melting ice and changing patterns of migration.  Maybe you read in last week’s newspapers that it’s become so warm up there, Grizzly bears were spotted 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

But what especially appalls so many of us is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is sacred space.  It is the last great, untouched, wilderness area in this country.  As Jimmy Carter writes, “There are few places on earth as wild and free as the Arctic Refuge.  It is a symbol of our natural heritage, a remnant of frontier America that our first settlers once called wilderness” [quoted from his foreword to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land]. Do we really want to hand it over to multinational corporations and to the politicians who champion their cause?  Are there no limits that we are willing to set on our greed?  Do we bear no responsibility to other forms of life on this planet and no responsibility for the quality of life that our children and grandchildren will inherit after we are gone?

Some of you may know that four years ago I went to Washington, D.C. with an activist, interfaith group called Religious Witness for the Earth.  We marched to the Department of Energy and held a worship service to protest the Administration’s energy plan and its intention to drill for oil in the Arctic refuge.  We didn’t turn over any tables, but we did kneel in front of the doors to the building and pray that the sanctity of the Arctic refuge be protected.  I was among the 22 of us who were arrested.

You may know that the indigenous peoples who live in the refuge, the Gwich’in people, are sustained by herds of caribou.  They are called the Caribou people, and 90% of them are Episcopalian.  In Washington D.C., we met a Gwich’in elder who told us that the land is so sacred to his people, there are areas that they do not even enter. 

This is not just a Republican issue.  It’s not just a Democrat issue.  It’s not just a political and economic issue.  It’s a human issue, a moral and spiritual issue. 

Tonight, as at every Eucharist, we come to a table like this one.  Tonight Jesus reminds us that this table is not only the altar of repentance, the place where our sins are met by the forgiveness and mercy of God.  Nor it is only the Altar of Repose, where the Blessed Sacrament is taken after the service on Maundy Thursday, the place where Jesus rests and where we receive his peace.  It is also the altar of resistance, the place where we receive strength to stand up to the powers and principalities of this world.  It is the table that gives us power to turn the tables on the forces of greed, oppression, and injustice.  It is the table that gives us strength to resist the forces of death and to proclaim the power of life. 

In the silence that follows I invite you to let Jesus draw close.  Are there tables inside you that he wants to overturn, places where you are stuck or colluding with the powers that be?  Is he perhaps inviting you to join with other people and to play a part in turning over the tables of injustice so that together we can proclaim the kingdom of God?

Increase our Faith!

My first word to you must be thank you. Thank you for giving me the privilege of serving at your altar and preaching from your pulpit. Thank you for welcoming me so warmly as your new Priest Associate. I am delighted to be here and looking forward to discovering the many ways that God is at work in this very lively parish. Above all, thank you for sharing with me in the sometimes marvelous and sometimes daunting enterprise of living by faith.

You know as well as I do that faith is sometimes hard to come by. This country is going through a time of uncertainty and turmoil, a time when many of us are understandably weighed down by worry and stress. How do we keep our faith alive – much less help it deepen and increase – when we consider the conflicts in our lives and in the world around us? You can pick up any newspaper and make your own list of woes – the increasingly polarized rhetoric of the Presidential campaign; the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq; the brutality of beheadings, car bombs, and kidnappings; the torment of ethnic and tribal warfare in Sudan; the shock, closer to home, of five people in three weeks being stabbed near the Cathedral in Springfield.
It is not only human violence that makes us uneasy; it’s also the violence that human beings carry out against the natural world. Take, for example, what we’re doing to the weather. Remember that string of hurricanes that recently battered Florida, four monster storms in only six weeks? There have always been hurricanes and as far as I know, no one is claiming that Charley and the rest were caused directly by global warming, but tropical meteorologists do say that global warming is likely to produce more catastrophic hurricanes like these. Burning fossil fuels produce gases – principally carbon dioxide – that blanket the Earth and heat up the oceans, as well as everything else. Warming seas increase the energy of tropical storms, and, as one writer puts it, “Hurricanes are essentially heat engines” [Mark Lynas, “Warning in the Winds,” Washington Post, 9/19/04]. Global warming is real, a fact that even the Russian government acknowledged this week in its grudging decision to sign the Kyoto Protocol, though I wonder when political debate in this country will catch up.

Pile on the troubles and many of us cope by going numb. We space out. We push away the unread newspaper, turn off the radio, and go in search of a snack, a smoke, or a quick run to the mall. Or maybe we glue ourselves to the TV set, mesmerized by every last detail of every last bit of bad news, and feel increasingly helpless and upset. Look too long at injustice and violence and it may be tempting to grow bitter, shrugging, “What do you expect?” or else to rush around in a frenzy of ineffective activity that is mostly fueled by anger and fear. There’s got to be a way to face the pain and horrors of this world without becoming overwhelmed, without becoming hard-hearted or numb, a way to stay connected to the Source of love so that what we do, what we say, how we act in the world, springs from compassion and in some way contributes to healing.

Where do we begin? We can begin as the apostles began: by asking God for help. “Increase our faith!” they say to Jesus. His reply is startling. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says – and according to commentaries, what he means by the conditional clause “If you had faith” is that the apostles do have that much faith, they do have faith as big as (or bigger than) the tiny speck of a mustard seed. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” [Luke 17:6]. Who knows why someone would want to use his or her faith to uproot a mulberry tree, much less to plant it in the sea, but that’s not the point. What Jesus seems to be saying is, “Don’t worry about the faith that you don’t have. The faith that you do have is enough. It’s big enough to connect you with the power of God, big enough to work wonders, big enough to produce results that you may never have imagined and may never even know about. Trust the faith that is in you. You have everything you need.”

Today’s Gospel invites us to take hold of our faith, however small it may be, to affirm it and to bless it as Jesus affirms and blesses the faith that is in his apostles. And then to live it out, to act on it with all the clarity and singleness of heart that we can. I hear the same word of assurance in the reading from Second Timothy, which urges us to “rekindle the gift of God that is within [us]” for “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” [2 Tim. 1:6-7]. Let me say that again. “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” That’s the spirit that God has given us. That’s the faith that God has planted in us.

If you want to see someone make a breakthrough in faith, someone who’s been deeply troubled by the prevalence of violence and injustice in the world, take a look at today’s reading from Habbakuk. In fact, take a look at the whole book of Habbakuk, which is only about four pages long. No one seems to know much about this Hebrew prophet except that he probably lived in the 6th century B.C. at the height of Babylonian power. The text that he left us is short, but it lays out some of the elements that go into a vital and living faith.

Here’s one: faith in God is honest. It doesn’t pretend that things are any sweeter or more pleasant than they really are. Real faith in God throws away the rose-colored glasses. It names the pain; it expresses the anguish; it makes plenty of room to express our doubt. “O Lord,” says Habbakuk, “how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise” [Hab 1:1-3]. Real faith – not the fake stuff, not the piety that just glosses over our actual response to hardship – real faith is honest with God about what we feel and need and fear. Real faith dares to tell God the truth. That’s where intimacy with God is born: in our willingness to tell God the truth of who we are.

So honesty is one element of faith. Here’s another. Real faith is receptive. It is willing to listen, learn, and wait. You’ll notice that Habbakuk doesn’t do a kind of hit and run with God. He doesn’t just leave a quick message on God’s answering machine and then fly off into his busy day. Instead, he stays put. After he pours out his anger and sorrow, he decides to “stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what [God] will say to me, and what [God] will answer concerning my complaint” [Hab 2:1]. This is the stance of contemplative prayer, the kind of silent, steady prayer that makes a space for concentrated listening. Our minds are jumpy, so it may be useful to learn some simple techniques for helping it focus, so that, like Habbakuk, we know how to wait and watch and listen. Habbakuk is being receptive, making himself available for whatever God wants to say to him, be it a message of insight, rebuke, or consolation. He comes to God in prayer with open hands. “Speak to me,” he is saying to God. “Show me what you want me to see.”

And he is bold, as well. That’s probably another element of faith: boldness. With a kind of fierce urgency, as if he’s on fire with longing, Habbakuk turns his attention to God and he keeps it there. He stands at his watchpost, determined and persistent, waiting in silence and refusing anything less than God.
And what happens then? Like a flower that bursts open in sunlight, like a melody that brings tears to the eyes, Habbakuk suddenly becomes aware that is God is present, and he is filled with a vision of God’s mercy and power. “Write the vision,” he hears God say, “and make the message as clear as if you were painting big letters on a wall, so that even someone running by will be able to read it! For there is still a vision,” God tells him, “it will surely come, it will not delay.”

Maybe you’ve had moments like that in your life, moments when suddenly you can see through or see beyond the troubles that beset you. It’s as if you are filled or surrounded by a love that nothing can destroy, and you are free to look ahead with hope, committing yourself to God and putting your trust in God’s justice and care. Experiences like that can’t help but spill out into our lives. Faith leads to action, and one of the great tests of prayer is whether we’re growing in our capacity to engage in compassionate action and service in the world.

That, I think, is what happened to Habbakuk, and his experience suggests some of the elements that can help faith grow: honesty about our pain and the world’s pain, a willingness to wait and see what God wants to show us, and the courage to be bold both in our prayer and in our action as we look forward to the fulfillment of God’s purposes in the world.

That’s the kind of faith I pray for and that I pray we will encourage in each other. I must read you the last lines from the book of Habbakuk, because they ring in my ears like a song. “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet” – do you hear it, that ‘yet’? That ‘yet’ is the triumphant word of faith – “yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; [God] makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.”

We turn this morning to the One who loved us into being, and with humility and confidence we pray, “Increase our faith!”

We have seen strange things today

“We have seen strange things today” [bbllink]Luke 5:26[/bbllink].  No kidding.  The story we’ve just heard is strange from start to finish.  It begins with a paralyzed man – along with his bed, for heaven’s sake – being lowered to Jesus through a hole in the roof.  It ends with the man being able to stand up and walk, his sins forgiven.  We’re not told very much about the fellow, but for all we know, when the story begins, his physical, emotional and spiritual condition is completely hopeless, a desperate case.  And yet here he is at the story’s end, standing on his own two feet, restored to health in body, mind and spirit, heading home and praising God.  “Strange,” the people say to each other, seized with amazement.  “We have seen strange things today.”

Do you want to see something strange?  Just take a look at the group of us gathered here today.  You and I were paralyzed once – maybe not in body, but definitely in mind and spirit.  One way or another we were trapped by addiction, powerless, immobilized, and stuck, overwhelmed by our obsession.  There was no way to move, no way to get past the endless craving for the next drink, next bite, next hit, next toke.  What a small world we lived in, you and I – a world completely centered on ourselves, a world riddled with fear, doubt, and insecurity, a world haunted by shame.  Maybe we flailed around for a while – perhaps a very long while – looking for answers, searching for some way out.  We made vows, you and I, earnest New Year’s resolutions.  We promised we wouldn’t do it again – this was it, we told ourselves.  This time we meant it.  We weren’t going back.  We wouldn’t fall for temptation again. 

But we did.  We couldn’t help it.  We were in the grip of something we couldn’t shake, no matter how hard we tried.  Our own efforts availed us nothing – we might as well have been paralyzed, helpless in our own small bed, a basket case.

What happened next?  Someone carried us to Jesus.  Someone – and perhaps many someone’s – cared enough to carry us, or accompany us, or finally to push us into what today’s collect calls “this fellowship of love and prayer” in which we “know ourselves to be surrounded” by those who witness to the power and mercy of Almighty God [Collect of a Saint, BCP, p. 250].  Who knows how we got here, what conspiracy of grace was required to make us finally find our way into the 12-step program.  It may have taken a lot of effort on someone’s part – maybe a court order or an intervention, maybe someone’s ultimatum, someone’s tears, or someone’s prayers – but even if it meant climbing up on the roof and tearing away the tiles and lowering us bodily into the presence of Christ, something made sure that we got here – that’s how urgently God wanted us healed.

As the paralyzed man is lowered into Jesus’ presence, does he really believe that meeting Jesus will make a difference?  The story doesn’t say.  Maybe he wants to see Jesus and maybe he doesn’t.  Maybe he’s convinced that nothing and nobody can heal him, that his sins are too great, his past too bleak, his character too weak.  But here’s the thing: his friends believe in Jesus.  They know, as our text puts it, that “the power of the Lord was with [Jesus] to heal” [bbllink]Luke 5:17[/bbllink].  And isn’t that how it was for us, too?  When we first came into the 12-step program, we probably limped in with only the faintest of hope, if we had any hope at all.  We’d failed in every other effort to change our lives – why should this be any different?  But the people around us believed – if not in us then in the power of the program, in the power of a Higher Power, in the power of God.  They had faith when we did not and for a while – maybe a good long while – we had to trust in their trust.  We had to have faith in their faith. 

That’s where healing begins.  Sometimes it’s the faith of friends that saves us, the faith of our sponsor, the faith of the person sitting beside us in the meeting who simply refuses to believe that sin and death should have the last word in our lives.  When Jesus sees the faith of the people who’ve struggled so hard to carry the paralyzed man to him, he responds on the spot with words that heal.  Right then and there the man’s sins are forgiven.  Right then and there the man receives power to stand up and walk.  Our own healing may not take place in an instant, but when we come into his presence, Jesus speaks the same words to us that he said to the man who was paralyzed: “I say to you,” says Jesus, “stand up and take your bed and go to your home.”

Stand up and take responsibility for your life.  Stand up and face who you are and what you’ve done.  Stand up and tell the truth – about your pain, your guilt, and your need for a fresh start.  Stand up and claim your dignity in Christ, for however far you’ve fallen, however long you’ve been lost, the one who loved you into being has not given up on you and summons you now to fullness of life. “Stand up and take your bed and go to your home.”

What a poignant phrase: “Go to your home.”  Isn’t that what we addicts have always wanted, to find a home inside ourselves, to find a home inside our skin?  All that running around, all that restlessness and craving, all that greed to grab the next thing, all that anxiety that we wouldn’t find what we were looking for, that we’d be lonely and desperate forever, forever aching, forever wanting – doesn’t that express our soul’s longing to be at home, to find peace and fulfillment at last, to know on some deep level that we belong, that we’re wanted, that we’ve finally found our place?  As psychiatrist Gerald May once put it, we are all children of God but we keep running away from home [Addiction and Grace].

When – one day at a time – God puts our addiction behind us, we stand up and we head toward home.  Like the once-paralyzed man, we are released from the burden of guilt and the clutch of shame.  Like him, we make peace with ourselves and with our past.  Like him, we praise the God who set us free and whose home and dwelling-place, we are amazed to discover, turns out to be within us (c.f. John 14:23, Luke 17:21). 

And so our lives begin to bear witness to God, the one whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine [bbllink]Ephesians 3:20[/bbllink].  We find ways to serve, ways to reach out beyond ourselves and to offer other people what we’ve been given.  We become people who bring others to God – maybe not by lowering them through a roof, but by inviting them to worship with us in the sanctuary or to join us in the 12-step fellowship that we find even lower in the building, in those church basements where we share our experience, strength and hope.

Here in the Eucharist we meet the God who says to us, “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you.  Quit chasing your idols, whatever they may be – booze or food, sex or drugs, fame, power, or possessions.  None of these,” God says to us, “none of these can satisfy you the way that I can.  For I have made you for myself, and your heart will be restless until it rests in me.”

Here in God’s presence, here at God’s table, we put down our idols.  We lay them down right here.  And then we stand up, we come forward and we offer God our empty hands, an empty space that only God can fill.  We receive a little bread – it seems hardly enough to take our hunger away.  We receive a little juice or wine – it seems hardly enough to quench our thirst.  And yet it is the Body and Blood of Christ that we are taking in – it is God’s very Self.  The love for which we’ve always longed, the home that we’ve always sought and so often fled – here it is, being offered to us, just waiting for us to accept it. 

And so another paralyzed man gets up and walks.  Another addict puts down her drug and learns how to love.  Yes, we have seen strange things today.  Thanks be to God.