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Posted at 02:37 PM in Photos | Permalink | Comments (0)
This sermon was preached at St. Lydia's on Sunday, February 7, 2010. The text is Matthew 9:35-10:15. You can read the text here.
Last week we read the story of the
Gadarene Demoniacs that Jesus heals, sending the demons into a heard of swine
that are grazing nearby. Then
there are some more healings: a paralytic, two blind men. We’re told that Jesus travels through
the surrounding town, healing as he goes, and all this time, the disciples are
watching.
Jesus called them, they followed, and
from that day on they’ve watched, perhaps confused, or perplexed, but watching.
And then Jesus simply says, “your
turn.” All this stuff you’ve
been watching me do, curing the sick, raising the dead, casting out demons,
cleansing the lepers? Your
turn. Go do it.
You can almost hear the disciples
stuttering in surprise: But…but…rabbi…
They’ve chosen the right word. Jesus is a teacher. All this time, he’s been teaching them,
preparing them for this moment, knowing that, when it came, they’d feel
completely unprepared.
I have a friend who’s in the last
year of his residency as a doctor.
And he told me that it’s the first year of your residency that’s the
hardest. When I asked him why, he
said, “because all three years you were in med school, the only thing you’ve
been allowed to do is to watch, and then run and find the doctor. And then your first year as a resident,
people start calling for the doctor, and you realize that it’s you.”
Jesus doesn’t come to show us that
he can heal
people. He comes to show us that we can heal people. All of a sudden, they’re asking for the
doctor, and it’s you.
Each one of us in this room has an
aching within us to heal the world. An aching to say, in our own voice, “the realm of God has
come near.” We are aching to do
it, and we are terrified to do it.
That’s why the church is here.
To teach us to do those things that our heart aches for, but that
terrify us. The church is here to
say, “Your turn.”
What are your stories of “your
turn?”
Posted at 02:34 PM in Sermons | Permalink | Comments (2)
Right off the bat, I want to out myself as someone who is
generally terrible at contemplative prayer. Only when forced to submit to group peer pressure (yoga
practice comes to mind) do I begin to really sink into this practice. I’m getting better though, really.
Practice is the key word. Like anything else, prayer takes practice. Time to build up technique, endurance,
flexibility.
Contemplative prayer.
It’s been a part of Christian traditions a long time, traced all the way
back to early Christian monasticism.
Here’s how to start:
Find a good position.
Some people sit in a chair.
I like to kneel with my knees together and my feet apart sitting on a
yoga block. Cross legged is
good, or child’s pose, or laying on your back on the floor. You want to find a position where your
body is aligned and at rest. It
helps to have your palms open and facing upward.
You also need to be warm. Dress warmly or put a blanket over you.
Bring you attention to your breath. Allow the your jaw to relax, your
eyes. Let tension fall out of you
with each exhale. Then organize
your breathing around a sacred word: any word that will invite God in.
Let the word be present as you breathe. Wherever your mind goes, gently return
to your sacred word. Use it as an
anchor as you sit in God’s presence.
Posted at 05:52 PM in Learning to Pray | Permalink | Comments (0)
I flew for the first time at six months old; family legend has it that I scattered fruit cocktail across the heads of those seated several rows in front of us. My family is a family of flying. My sister was bicoastal from the age of 14. I remember long, slow goodbyes and happy reunions in the days when you could still accompany someone right up to the gate. We traveled often. Our family was spread across the country. My father gets that itch and wants to wander. As a kid I traveled to Italy, France, the Soviet Union.
I have a memory of waking up as an eight year old on an overnight flight and opening the window to discover the Alps spread out below me in the morning light. German stewardesses moved down the aisles with trays of hot, strong coffee. I was used to strange food, strange toilets, deciphering street signs with the help of my parents and long days in museums.
As an adult the wanderlust snuck into my romantic relationships as I ferried across the Atlantic to be with my Dutch partner. The international terminal was at once a place of reunion and painful separation.
Between the terminals, I find an exhilarating and exhausting emotional expansion from seat 4A just in front of the wing. The plane struggles into flight and in moments we're flying through the night, pinhole stars in a dark sky. The light on the tip of the wing blinks predictably. All of this makes me more susceptible to a sense of reminiscing that seems to extend into the future, an heightened sense of awareness that comes from being suspended for a moment between places, not quite anything just yet.
Posted at 11:09 AM in Musings | Permalink | Comments (0)
This sermon was preached at St. Lydia’s on Sunday, January 31. The text is Matthew 8:23-34. Read it here.
I’ve been using the word boundaries a lot lately. I’ve been using the word boundaries with my choir students at First Presbyterian where I teach singing each week. We’ve been having some…trouble with discipline, and that word, boundaries keeps coming up. The teachers and I are discussing how the good boundaries can help our children get more out of their time in Church School.
When you work in a church, you talk about boundaries a lot. Good boundaries are important to help congregants and pastors understand their roles and relationships to one another. At Divinity School, we spend class time discussing how to create healthy boundaries. And all of this talk about boundaries is important. Because boundaries keep us from going too far. They help keep us safe.
Jesus spends a lot of time time pushing boundaries. He spends a lot of time pushing the limits.
Throughout the gospels, people keep saying to him, by who’s authority are you doing these things? What gives you the right? In these two related stories tonight, he’s literally and symbolically pushing his luck. Pushing the boundaries.
We talked a little bit about chaos, and the sea as symbol of chaos. Jesus heads right out into the sea. Then there’s the story of the two demoniacs. The text tells us that they’re so fierce that they live in a graveyard, which to Jews was ritually unclean territory. Jesus didn’t just happen by, he went to the graveyard on purpose, playing with that boundary between clean and unclean. And when he gets there and encounters these two demoniacs, he plays a trick, and it’s a little bit of a nasty trick too. He sends out the demons, but into these pigs that then go over a cliff which means that somebody, the Gentile who owns the herd (because Jews don’t eat pigs, remember) looses a whole bunch of money. And he makes an entire town mad at him.
In fact, Jesus does stuff like this all the time. He loves to walk right up to the edge of chaos, of destruction, of sickness, of death, and just get right in there. Healing people, stilling storms, eating with women, casting out demons, these things are not nice things to do. They’re dangerous. They’re liminal. They transgress all the boundaries. To use the phrase of Aidan Kavanaugh, they flirt with chaos, flirt with doom.
I want you to think for a moment about boundaries. Maybe you have a story to share about liminal, in-between places, pushing boundaries in a way that felt dangerous.
I’ll tell you one.
Before I went to Divinity School, I was a musician. I played the trombone. And all my life I had felt this strange discomfort with being a female trombonist. I chose the instrument in the fourth grade, and I have a clear memory of telling my friend Caroline, who played the flute, that I had chosen trombone. Really? she queried. Don’t you think you should have chosen something more…feminine?
This response stuck with me, and was reinforced by many of the folks I met as I grew older. It became clear that I had a certain amount of talent as a musician, and in highschool I began taking lessons from a female player named Cathy. She recommended that, when competing, I wear a suit rather than a dress. So as not to distract the judges from my playing.
In college I took lessons with a professional player in the city. Like many brass players before him, he had been trained to be a rigorous, aggressive teacher. We did drills. I practiced. A lot. He yelled. He berated. I was encouraged to not to play with interpretation, but to mimic the performances of great orchestral players. And I hated it. Everything I loved about music seemed silenced in my teacher’s studio.
Until finally I pushed a boundary. My sophomore year in college I won a concerto concert. My teacher asked me a few weeks before the big concert what I was planning on wearing. I told him I was wearing a dress. His brow furrowed. In fact, the dress had been hanging in my closet for over a month. It was strapless. It had a train. It was made of this gorgeous raw silk material. And it was bright, fire-y orange.
When I walked on stage wearing that dress, I could almost feel the shock and…yes…something like rage palpitating from my teacher. More than anything else, I felt exposed. I felt girly and sexy and yes, empowered, but it was tinged with something more ambiguous. It wasn’t triumphant, but it was dangerous. I certainly felt like I had crossed a line.
I stopped taking lessons with my teacher at the end of the year, and, for the most part, gave up on a career in classical music. The dress hadn't shown me who I was, but it had pushed me away from who I wasn't.
We share our sermons at St. Lydia’s. What stories do you have this evening, inspired by our texts and the words I’ve shared, about pushing boundaries?
Posted at 11:54 AM in Sermons | Permalink | Comments (2)