A meditation on Luke 3:7-18 for the Third Sunday of Advent
for the community of St. David of Wales Episcopal Church, Shelton, WA

John the Baptist lives outside of societal conventions
 
Outside the protection of city walls.
Outside livelihood and belonging in community.
Outside a home filled with generations of family.
 
John lives in a wilderness
foraging for food, making his own clothes
free from the trappings of society
which can in themselves become a trap.

And having let go of so much
we often think of as necessary
John devotes himself to God
becoming a literal voice in the wilderness
calling out to prepare the way of the Lord.
 
And in today’s gospel crowds of people
gather around John
among them pharisees, and Sadducees,
soldiers and tax collectors.
 
People who possess all the things John has given up
leave their own security and comfort for a time
to seek out John to be baptized by him.
 
---
 
What brings them to this prophet in the wilderness?
 
How have they heard about him?
 
And what have they heard?
 
What are they hoping for?
 
Why do they want to be baptized?

Are they there for the novelty?

Is John just one more stop on their entertainment circuit?

Or is this more than curiosity?
 
Is something missing in their lives?
 
What change are they seeking?
 
Or as John not so bluntly asks the Pharisees,
what judgment are they trying to escape?

And I wonder:
 
Will John’s words change the people?
 
Will being submerged in the river
reorient their priorities?
 
Will this be a pivotal moment of choosing a new path?
 
Will they be on the lookout
for the one John says is yet to come?

Or will the day be relegated to some obscure vault of memory
a vague recollection of something they did once?
 
--
I don’t know the answers to any of the questions
and I’m sure the answers are different for each person
gathered in the wilderness.

As varied as our own answers to those questions might be.

Questions about what we’re seeking in the deepest most vulnerable parts of ourselves.

Questions about what words we’ve heard while wandering in the wilderness.

Questions about why we’re gathered here this morning
and not at home watching football
or out Christmas shopping.
--
Thankfully, amid all the questions John has answers.
 
He says tradition and inheritance don’t matter.
When it comes to following the way of God,
no one is “grandfathered” in –
 
The desire, and the choice, he says, must come
from each of us individually.

And the way, he says, is available to everyone who chooses it
even the tax collectors, and soldiers
working in service of the empire and oppressor.
 
When those gathered around John ask what they should do,
his answer is deceptively simple:
 
Let your life show that you’ve changed.
Give to those in need.
Don’t take more than your share.
Don’t abuse your power.
 
--
Two thousand years later it’s clear
that though John’s directives are simple
they’re easier said than done.
 
And we are still waiting
waiting for the coming of Christ once again
waiting for God’s promises of justice
and reconciliation to be fulfilled
waiting in the beautiful and terrifying not yet.


And as we wait, may we find hope
in the words and actions of God’s messengers
reaching back to ancient texts and psalms to guide us
and remind us that God is with us always.

As we wait may we take comfort in hymns old and new
that spur us to remember and rejoice
in God’s plan to bring peace.

As we wait may we see the path that has led us to where
we are now mirrored in the lives of the faithful who have shaped us.
 
And may the way forward be illuminated by those gathered
alongside us here and now and in the days and years to come.
 
And finally, in the words of Paul:
 
“May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” 


​

A meditation on John 12:20-33 for the community at St. David of Wales, March 17, 2024.
 
“We wish to see Jesus” say the Greeks in the opening sentences of today’s gospel reading. Their words remind me of an old Maranatha praise song we often sang at my home church in CA:
 
Open our eyes, Lord / We want to see Jesus
To reach out touch him / And say that we love him
Open our ears, Lord / And help us to listen
Open our eyes, Lord /We want to see Jesus
 
But seeing Jesus isn’t that easy: In the gospel reading Jesus tells those who ask to see him that they’re too late. The time to sit and learn from him as he teaches is over. The time to come before him with requests for healing is over. The time to hear him preach in the synagogue is over. The only thing that’s left for those who want to see Jesus is to see him give up his life. And who wants that? Certainly not those who love him.

Jesus, as he always does, tries to help his followers understand the bigger picture by talking about wheat and the circle of life which always brings new life from death. At least for plants. But for people? It doesn’t make sense for those gathered around.
Jesus is in the prime of his life, he’s vital and inspiring, people are leaving their home and families to follow him. And Jesus is not talking about laying low until the tensions between him and the religious authorities and the empire cool off. He’s not talking about cutting back on all this travel or going back to carpentry. He’s talking about sacrificing his life. He’s talking about dying. And not only that, but Jesus is also telling those gathered round to be willing to give up their lives and their identities, too. Haven’t some of them already done that? Isn’t what they’ve done enough?

Here’s how Eugene Peterson phrases those verses in The Message:
24-25 “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
26 “If any of you wants to serve me, then follow me. Then you’ll be where I am, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. The Father will honor and reward anyone who serves me.
--
Having just lived through a global pandemic, we have all been forced to surrender control of our lives in ways we had never before imagined. As a faith community we had to let go of our traditional modes of worship and fellowship and find new ways of being present to one another, and to act as a voice of hope despite the fear and uncertainty in our daily lives.
 
​Many of us had have our lives turned upside down in other ways. By cancer, by fire, by relocating, by retirement or job loss, by death of a loved one. We have had our identities stripped from us. We have had to ask who we without the roles that have ordered our days, and the actions that have given us meaning and purpose.
 
Being human is so very hard, and drastic change, especially when we don’t choose it, can trigger fear and resistance, denial, and the desperate clinging to life as it is, or what we want that Jesus warns against. But even Jesus struggled with what was to come. Again from The Message:
 
 “Right now I am shaken. And what am I going say? ‘Father, get me out of this’? No, this is why I came in the first place.”
 
Unlike Jesus, I’m not so clear on my purpose, but it when I struggle with change or the unknown, it helps to know that the journey wasn’t easy for him, that Jesus was acting on faith in a future yet to unfold, believing in something bigger than himself that he wouldn’t experience in his lifetime.
 
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been told those older and wiser, even those who’ve sat next to me in the pews, that my faith is naïve and unrealistic. And it’s tempting, when I can’t see what is to come in my own life, let alone in the wider world that so often seems on the brink of destruction, to think that those people are right and that I ought to set my hope on some human construct – some form of empire or power that claims to speak for God.
 
But that’s the very thing Jesus warns against, time and again. In The Message he says:
 
“At this moment the world is in crisis. Now Satan, the ruler of this world, will be thrown out. And I, as I am lifted up from the earth, will attract everyone to me and gather them around me.”
 
Two thousand years later, the world is still in crisis. And, yet, 2,000 years later Jesus is still gathering us to his side, still modeling for us how to live, still speaking to us through ancient texts about how to love and serve God by loving and serving one another.
 
Back in 2011, Pew research conducted a survey in 200 countries and found that there were 2.18 billion Christians in the world. It’s a number I can’t even begin to fathom. But it’s a number that does fill me with hope. Jesus didn’t topple empire but stood in the midst of political and socio-economic power and testified to another way of being, to a power that recognizes the inherent worth of all people simply as we are. 
 
As Christians our call is not a call to change the world per se, but a call to allow Christ to change us, to live “reckless in our love” and from there to follow the ripples of faith and love into the world. As Teresa of Avila famously said:
 
Christ has no body now but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

A meditation on Matthew 20:1-16
for the community of St. David of Wales, Shelton WA, September 24, 2023
 
“It’s not fair!” The words rang from my mouth as a child whenever the gifts or desserts or treatment my sister and I were given seemed unequal. And that concept of fairness, the compulsion to split everything equally, and the grumbling of “it’s not fair” continued with my own two daughters coming to a head in the infamous cookie incident. When my girls were school-aged, I’d make a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies every few weeks. I’d time the baking to finish just before picking them up at the bus stop, and consuming our cookie was a delicious, and fair treat on that first day: We each received two cookies on our little plates as an after-school snack, and two more for dessert.

The trouble would begin the next day when I was home alone doing chores, walking past the kitchen every hour or so and popping a cookie in my mouth with each pass. By the time my girls arrived home from school on day two, there would be one or two snack cookies, and another one after dinner, if they were lucky. It all came to a head when the oldest was in Junior High and my girls came home to a house devoid of cookies. In less than 24 hours I had consumed nearly the entire batch.

“It’s not fair,” they cried, and they were right.

Next time I baked cookies, I divided them equally into bags and labeled them by name. Of course, I devoured my bag before the rest of my family. And soon I was tempted by cookies that clearly belonged to my loved ones. I wasn’t going to steal them. But I wasn’t above begging. Would they like to give one to their mother, who had baked them? No, they would not.

Well, then, Would they sell me a cookie? For a quarter? For a dollar? No, they would not. They wanted what was theirs, what they had been promised. They wanted what was fair.

A Meditation on Matthew 10:24-39 for St. David of Wales Episcopal Church 
​
When I was in elementary school living in Southern California, I had to cross Pacific Coast highway to get to school. There was a bus stop at the signal where I waited for the crossing guard to usher me across when the light turned green, and on the bus stop bench was a billboard with a graphic of a four-person nuclear family: Dad, Mom, son, daughter, walking into a church and text that read, “The family that prays together stays together.”
 
My family didn't go to church, and we didn't pray together, and we didn't stay together. But when I felt God pour into my life in my mid-twenties, I didn’t think about the bus stop promise; instead, I was terrified that I was supposed to give up all my possessions and become a nun in response, because even someone who didn’t know anything about God knew what God required of God’s followers. But I was married. A month after my twenty-first birthday, while we were both still in college, my husband and I tied the knot. Having lived through my parent’s divorce from each other, and their divorces from their second spouses, I had vowed never to divorce, so I was going to have to figure out how to follow Jesus without jilting my husband.
 
Once I began going to church, I wanted the bus stop bench promise in my life. I wanted a life that was easy and perfect – which is what I thought happened when you became a believer. But I heard words like today’s gospel where Jesus says that he didn't come to bring peace, or to bring a happy little family that prayed together and stayed together. Jesus said he came to set family members against each other: parents against children and children against parents; stabbing at the heart of family relationships.

How do you say goodbye to those you love? How do you leave them empowered to carry on without you? How do you explain a future that has not yet happened? How do you share a vision you see so clearly with those who cannot fully grasp it?

These are the questions that run through my mind when I think about this scene in John's gospel. It's a continuation of Jesus speaking to his disciples at the Last Supper. These words come after Judas has fled the room. John 14 is the beginning of four chapters known as the farewell discourse. The discourse is the words that Jesus offers to comfort and reassure and prepare those he loves to continue this journey that they have been on together.

A Message for the congregation of St. David of Wales, April 23, 2023

​What do you think of when you hear the word Emmaus? I have to say that the first I ever heard of it was from a friend of mine went to a weekend long retreat for women called a Walk to an Emmaus. The way she described it was a time away from her work and family where every need of hers was met. In particular, she told me she hadn't brought any ChapStick and the moment she mentioned her need, a new tube of ChapStick awaited her. So, I've associated Emmaus with a magical appearing. And that's partly true.
Along the road to Emmaus in Luke's gospel this morning Jesus does magically appear. And I confess, that's all I really knew about this passage before preparing for today's message. I hadn’t remembered any detail except the fact that this is one of the resurrections appearances of Jesus. And I cannot recall a single sermon I've heard about this passage. That doesn't mean I've never heard one, just that I don't remember it. Perhaps it is due to lack of repetition. The four gospels often have similar stories from Jesus’ life, but the resurrection experiences are each unique, so they haven’t become as familiar.
It doesn't matter so much why I’m uninformed about this scripture. What matters in my life and in the life of those who follow Jesus, is how encountering the risen Christ in this passage changes those in the scripture and those who read the scripture.

A reflection on John 11:1-45 for St. David of Wales Episcopal Church, March 26, 2023
 
I have a clergy friend, Chris Hoke, whom I met in grad school when we were both earning our MFAs in Creative Writing. Chris is a pastor to gang members and his ministry began by corresponding with and visiting incarcerated gang members in Skagit County where he lives. As a result of the relationships he formed, he saw profound transformation when the men left jail and were given the opportunity to learn job skills at ministry supported Underground Coffee and leave behind gang life with continued relational support.

His non-profit, Underground Ministries, has grown in the past decade and now is focused on growing the One Parish One Prisoner program, centered around the story of Lazarus as a metaphor for our prison system that entombs by incarceration. A system that often imprisons without trial, that sees people as disposable, and sentences them to live in cages nearly as lifeless as a tomb. Mass incarceration impacts our entire society, especially those whose loved ones are locked up, who grieve and mourn physical absence and the difficulty of maintaining relationships in such circumstances.

When I moved to the Puget Sound region a decade ago, I had only seen the Aurora Borealis in photos, and considered it one of those once-in-a-lifetime awe-inspiring encounters that I would only experience vicariously. But, amazingly enough, the Northern Lights can be seen in Western Washington when certain conditions are met. When visible to the naked eye, they usually look like clouds at the horizon, most often white, but brighter than usual. Using long exposure on a camera with a tripod, photographers can capture the color of this magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere that our eyes can’t. And I've now "seen the light(s)"!

A meditation on Luke 24:36-44, for the St. David of Wales community; First Sunday of Advent.

“But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not have let his house be broken into.” ––Matthew 24:43
 
One night when I was seven, I woke up in my bunk bed to hear a burglar in my house. My father worked late shifts patrolling the streets of Los Angeles as a deputy sheriff, and my mother usually stayed up very late to wait for him. But that night when I woke up, all the lights were off and I knew my mom was asleep and I knew my dad wasn't home, and I knew we were in the realm of the witching hour––that time between midnight and dawn when bad things happened that I had been warned about. I laid in bed frozen, heart pounding wildly, afraid to make a sound as I heard the burglar open the refrigerator. The burglar was stealing our food! Then I heard rattling in the kitchen cabinets. The burglar was stealing our dishes! Later I heard a sink run and a toilet flush. The burglar was in our bathroom, just down the hall from our bedrooms! My eyes were firmly shut so that the burglar would think I was asleep when he came into my room to steal my books and toys. I strained to hear more noises, but none came, and eventually sleep overcame my vigil.

A meditation on Luke 18:1-8 for the community at St. David of Wales Episcopal Church, Shelton

What does it mean for us to pray like the widow? Because Jesus doesn't give any specific details in his parable, we're free to imagine whatever sort of widow we want. We can imagine, like one commentary I read, a weak little old lady leaning on her cane. A soft-spoken succinct woman who shows up every day with her plea down to one simple and sentence “I want my property restored to me,” and receives what she wants because of her faithfulness. In that scenario, we prayer is orderly, dignified, and quiet.

However, in the dozens of commentaries I read, a different view of the widow prevailed. Writing in his book The Cultural World of Jesus, biblical scholar John J Pilch helps set the context for this parable by saying that the word widow in Greek meant one who has no voice. A widow would usually have a male relative speak on her behalf because she had no rights for property or inheritance.

But this widow doesn't have a male figure to advocate on her behalf. She is speaking on her own behalf, demanding justice. Pilch notes that she was not speaking in private at judge’s chambers as we might imagine today. She was confronting the judge in a very public forum in front of other people, and that the judge’s failure to act would bring shame upon him.