“I Never Knew I Could Love My Children So Much!”

The Church of St. Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

March 31, 2019

Year C: The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Joshua 5:9-12

Psalm 32

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

“I Never Knew I Could Love My Children So Much!”

            Last week one of our parishioners was briefly admitted to Christ Hospital and when I went to visit her – when I entered the hospital lobby – as usual I felt the weight of history.

            I felt the weight of church history.

            As some of you know, for most of its history Christ Hospital was an Episcopal hospital and for more than a century many parishioners from both St. Paul’s and Incarnation devoted enormous amounts of energy and money to support the work of the hospital, especially through what was called the Abercrombie Guild.

            For most of my predecessors, serving on the hospital board simply came with the job of being rector of St. Paul’s.

            To this day, there is a long hallway on the first floor lined with plaques honoring many of these volunteers where you old-timers would recognize many familiar names.

            That’s why early on my rectorship we tried to offer a weekly service in the hospital chapel. Although I think we did some good, it was probably a romantic idea of recreating something that doesn’t exist anymore and so we weren’t able to continue.

            Walking into the hospital lobby, I also felt the weight of my own personal history.

            It was in Christ Hospital that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – died, a difficult loss for my family.

            And it was in Christ Hospital that for one summer while I was in seminary I trained as a hospital chaplain.

            It’s something most clergy-to-be do and I have to say that much more than any class I ever took, it was that intense summer working in the hospital that really prepared me for being a priest.

            Even now, almost every day I draw on lessons I learned during that time.

            One of the things that surprised me about that summer is that there is a unique kinds of community that form in a hospital.

            There’s community among the nurses and aides and the people who serve the food and clean up – the people who work side by side each day and usually have well-developed senses of humor, much needed to face so much fear, pain, and sorrow, day after day.

            I sort of expected that, but there’s also a community that forms with some of the patients, the people who are in the hospital for a long time or the people who go in and out of the hospital a lot, the people known among the nurses as “frequent fliers.”

            I was surprised to find myself forming bonds with some of these longtime patients – these regular customers – in some cases getting to know them and their families and in other cases just spending a lot of time with them, even if they were unable or unwilling to talk.

            There was one elderly woman I visited nearly every day.

            She was very sick and had a feeding tube up her nose, obviously so uncomfortable.

            I don’t think I ever met her family and I didn’t really know anything about her because although she spoke most of it was impossible to make out or maybe just gibberish.

            But there was one day when I was just sitting with her and listening to her babble on when suddenly her eyes clicked into focus and she turned and looked at me and with total clarity, she said:

            “I never knew I could love my children so much!”

            She immediately turned and slipped back into her fog but I was stunned by the power and beauty of what she said.

            Obviously I’ve never forgotten it and I’ve often wondered what made her say that – what was her backstory?

            I’ve wondered if maybe she hadn’t wanted to have children, thinking that she wasn’t loving or generous or patient enough for that enormous job.

            Or, I’ve wondered if maybe her kids had let her down – that their lives had not turned out as well as she had hoped when they were little babies filled with all the promise and possibility of life.

            Or, maybe her family was like most, maybe all, families – a little messy, with good intentions but hurtful mistakes – things done and said that can’t be undone and unsaid – all the baggage that we carry on our own and all the baggage that we share with those we know and love the best.

            I don’t know.

            All I know is that near the end of her life, out of the fog of disease and medicine, a woman felt the clarity and urgency to turn to me and say:

            “I never knew I could love my children so much!”

            I’ll never learn anything more about that woman’s family, but in today’s parable Jesus paints a vivid picture of one particular family – a family that has more than its share of problems, right?

            This passage is usually called “The Prodigal Son” – with prodigal meaning wasting money, usually on oneself – it’s not a compliment - and that’s fair enough name for the parable, but it might also be called “The Resentful Son” – and isn’t it kind of ironic that the older son who is taken for granted and pretty much forgotten about in the story has generally been downplayed in two thousand years of retelling this tale?

            And, the parable could also just as accurately be called “The Loving Father.”

            Whatever we call it, this family is a mess.

            They’re well off, with land and animals and servants, but like many wealthy families past and present they don’t seem particularly happy.

            The younger son, perhaps out of boredom or selfishness, wants out, so he takes his inheritance early – his father is loving but perhaps not so wise to give all of this to him at once – and, sure enough, with his full purse the younger son blows it all and ends up degraded, working among the pigs and begging for food.

            He remembers his father’s wealth, overcomes any embarrassment he might have had, and returns home, counting on his father welcoming him with open arms.

            There’s something heartwarming about that but overall I find the younger son to be an unlikable character – there’s definitely the sense of him manipulating his father – he kind of rehearses what he’s going to say when he sees him – which doesn’t sound like he’s exactly speaking from the heart.

            One commentator I read said that she wouldn’t want the prodigal son to date her daughter!

            Anyway, the younger son returns and his overjoyed father rushes out to greet him and calls for a big party to welcome home this son who was lost.

            Of course, there’s just one problem: the father neglects to tell his older son – the dutiful son – the son who did not squander his wealth – the son who doesn’t seem to receive much praise for his everyday decency – he neglects to tell this son that his ne’er do well brother has returned and there’s a big party.

            Oops.

            The father tries to fix this mistake – to heal the legitimate sense of grievance felt by his older decent son, but the story ends with kind of a cliffhanger.

            We don’t know if this relationship – if these relationships – can be healed.

            Families are messy, and yet, despite it all, the father in the story is able to find in himself perhaps more love than he had expected – love for the son who had wasted so much and was perhaps not such a good guy – and love for the son that he had taken for granted for so long.

            Families are messy, and, yet, despite it all, an old woman dying in a hospital bed was still surprised by the deep love she had for children.

            Families are messy, and yet so many people right here in our own church are able to overcome and forgive and sacrifice and, yes, love – love so much, despite it all.

            And, the really good news is that if we are capable of so much love, imagine how much love God has for us, despite our many mistakes, despite the messiness of our lives.

            So much love that – if I’m not pushing things too far – maybe sometimes even God – the God who loves us enough to die for us – maybe sometimes even God says,

            “I never knew I could love my children so much!”

            Amen.

           

            

Spiritual Urgency

The Church of St. Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

March 24, 2019

Year C: The Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 3:1-15

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

Spiritual Urgency

            On Thursday evening over 200 concerned Jersey City residents packed the First Wesleyan Church for a Jersey City Together action about the crisis – or, rather, the crises – facing our public schools.

            For me, as usual, the highlight of the action was when people told their stories.

Parents and students told stories of lead pipes and a limited supply of bottled water even during extreme heat and even for kids and adults with serious illnesses like diabetes – stories of broken bathrooms and flooded locker rooms and infestation of vermin – stories of a little girl with special needs who so wants to learn but whose desire seems not to be valued by the Special Education Department – stories of schools in some of our poorer and browner neighborhoods which have been neglected and maybe even nearly forgotten for decades – stories of a lack of municipal support and a quickly growing budget shortfall.

            There really weren’t any happy stories at this action.

            As is always the case with Jersey City Together, most of the action was carefully planned and scripted, including the demands made to the schools superintendent and the president of the Board of Education.

            Together they said yes (more or less) to all the demands made of them.

But, of course, that’s the easy part.

            The hard part is keeping after them – reminding them of their promises – holding them accountable – pressuring them to do the right thing for our kids and their parents.

            As I was watching and listening to this action play out, I was struck by the fact that for so long in our city there has been a total lack of urgency – a total lack of urgency about something that all of us at least say is important: the education – the future – of our children.

            After all, everything discussed the other night has been going on for years, for decades – the lead in the water didn’t just get discovered – the buildings didn’t just start crumbling – parents of Special Ed kids didn’t just start getting the runaround – and the city didn’t just start underfunding our schools.

            This has all been going on for years and years but there just hasn’t been any urgency.

            Of course we see this lack of urgency in other areas of life, too, like, for example, the environment and the scourge of gun violence.

            Just in the last week or two we’ve seen large areas of the Midwest drowned by floods and much of southern Africa was hit by a devastating cyclone that created giant lakes in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, forcing people to try to sve their lives by clinging to treetops and roofs.

            On the other hand, there was a story in the paper about how England – a land famous for its wet climate – is beginning to prepare for water shortages as summers become ever hotter and drier.

            And, yet, for most of our leaders – even those who acknowledge the reality of climate change – there is a real lack of urgency – and they and we seem to spend much more time addressing much less important matters.

            As for gun violence, mass attacks have become regular occurrences in our country – I’m tempted to say they’ve become routine - yet most of our leaders seem unable or unwilling to even examine why this keeps happening – why we seem to have so many armed-to-the-teeth men willing to slaughter as many people as possible - and our leaders certainly lack the dramatic urgency we’ve seen among the leaders of New Zealand in recent days.

            A lack of urgency.

            But we don’t have to look at the news to find a lack of urgency.

            We’re likely to find that same lack of urgency in our hearts – a lack of what we might call “spiritual urgency” - the issue that Jesus addresses in today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke.

            Today’s passage is at least in part about the always-challenging topic of bad things happening to good people – or bad things happening to people no better or worse than most other people.

            First there’s what we might call a manmade disaster: the ruthless Roman governor Pontius Pilate killed some of Jesus’ fellow Galileans – and then, as if that weren’t bad enough, Pilate used their blood in sacrifices to pagan gods.

            And then there’s what we might call a natural disaster: the eighteen people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.

            Then as now when bad things happen to people – when bad things happen to us – we tend to wonder what they or we did to deserve such misfortune.

            But Jesus – an innocent Galilean who will also be killed by Pontius Pilate – forever proves that this is not the way the world works – not the way God works – bad things happen to people who are better than average and bad things happen to people who are worse than average – bad things even happen to the blameless Son of God.

            So, Jesus says that the point is not that some people get the misfortune they do or don’t deserve.

            The point is that we don’t know how much time we have.

 We don’t know how long we have until we are going to have to answer to God for how we have lived our lives.

So we need to repent and turn back to God.

So we need to love God and love one another not “maybe tomorrow” – not “maybe next month”  - not “when some time opens up in my schedule” - but right here and right now.

We need to have a sense of spiritual urgency.

One of the things I love about Jersey City Together is that it is really good at getting the attention of our public officials.

On Tuesday evening, bringing out over 200 people definitely created a sense of urgency.

Forcing the leaders of our school district to sit in front of the crowd and hear the terrible stories from parents and kids created a sense or urgency.

Making those same leaders publicly make promises – and even forcing them to pose for photos next to a poster listing those promises – that created a sense of urgency.

The whole thing is artificial but quite effective.

And, you know, Lent is kind of like that, too.

Lent is artificial – for forty days we change some things around here in church – we offer Stations of the Cross and our book study and daily reflections – we’re encouraged to give up what we don’t really need and take on what we really do need – we’re encouraged to take stock of our lives.

Lent is all quite artificial but if we’re open it can create for us a sense of “spiritual urgency.”

(And, to give us all a little extra urgency, this is a friendly reminder that we’re already entering the third week of Lent – Easter is less than a month away!)

We might like to think that it’s only the “bad people” who face misfortune, but we all know better than that.

So, we must not waste too much time.

We must ask God to help us to change our ways – to help us love God and to love one another.

May God give us urgency to fix our schools and to save our planet and to bring peace to our land, and, most of all, may God give us spiritual urgency.

Amen.

            

The Citizens of Heaven Need to Speak Up

The Church of St. Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

March 17, 2019

Year C: The Second Sunday in Lent

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Psalm 27

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 13:31-35

The Citizens of Heaven Need to Speak Up

            The story of God and us really begins with Abram – soon to be Abraham - a faithful man who was asked by God to leave his home and travel to an unknown new land – a man who thought he and his wife would never have children of their own, yet God says that his descendants will be as numerous than the stars in the night sky.

            The story of God and us begins with God making a promise – a covenant – a contract – with Abraham and his many descendants – a promise made in the strange story we heard in today’s first lesson from Genesis.

            It seems that in the ancient world contracts were made by doing what we heard today: killing animals and cutting them in half.

            Then the two parties making the agreement would “cut the deal” by walking between these pieces, indicating the bloody consequences if either side broke the contract.

            Kind of gruesome, but it does get the point across, right?

            But, what we heard today isn’t just any regular contract between two people about land or money.

            This is a covenant between God and God’s people.

            So, notice what happens when God makes this covenant with Abraham – only God “walks” between the animal parts, not Abraham, because God knows very well that Abraham and his descendants – that we - will not be able to completely keep our end of the agreement.

We will break God’s Law – we will turn to other gods – we will reject the prophets sent to us – we will, from time to time, lose faith in the God who called Abraham to a new land, to a new way.

            But, since God made a one-sided contract with God’s people, God doesn’t ever give up on us.

No matter what, God always keeps God’s side of the bargain.

No matter what, as Jesus says so beautifully in today’s gospel lesson, God wants to gather us together, hold us close, as a hen gathers her chicks.

God will not give up on us  - will not let us go, no matter what.

And, that’s very good news, but…it doesn’t let us off the hook.

In today’s second lesson, St. Paul writes to the church in Philippi that their “citizenship is in heaven.”

That’s a surprising word to use, right? Citizenship. It would have caught the attention of people living in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago where citizenship or the lack of it made a big difference in people’s lives – just as citizenship or the lack of it makes a big difference for us living in the United States today.

And, just like American citizenship, our heavenly citizenship comes with many benefits and also many responsibilities, not in heaven but right here and right now.

As “heavenly citizens” living on earth we are expected – with God’s help – to try our best to keep our end of the deal with God – to love God and to love our neighbor – our Jewish neighbor, our Christian neighbor, our Muslim neighbor, our Hindu neighbor, our atheist neighbor, our neighbor who we really don’t like or trust – we are to strive to love them all.

Unfortunately, if you turn on the news for just a minute or two or even just walk down Bergen Avenue, it’s clear that we’re not really doing such a great job of keeping our contract with God, not doing such a great job of meeting the responsibilities of our heavenly citizenship.

It’s easy to get discouraged.

But, God doesn’t give up on us, so we must not give up on ourselves.

As I’ve thought about how we can respond to the difficult times we’re living in, I keep returning to Baptism.

We Christians gain our heavenly citizenship through Baptism – that’s our own little citizenship ceremony – and at each Baptism we make and renew important promises, including the promise to proclaim the Good News of Christ in what we say and what we do.

I bet that most of us would say that deeds are more difficult and more important than words. Just think of the expressions we use:

 “Words are cheap.”

  “Actions speak louder than words.”

We criticize people who are “all talk and no action.”

There’s truth to all of that – and if you’ve been here more than ten minutes you know very well that I’m very much about doing – I’m always trying to get us to do more - to serve more people – and that’s not going to change – but I think, especially these days, words are at least as important – and at least as difficult – as deeds.

I began writing today’s sermon on Friday morning after the news broke of the terrorist massacre in New Zealand where, as you know, yet another angry and armed man opened fire on worshipers – in this case attacking two mosques – killing 50 people and injuring some 20 more.

This time it was New Zealand and mosques, while not long ago it was a synagogue in Pittsburgh and an African-American church in Charleston.

One of the things that these horrific incidents have in common is that before the unspeakable violence there were words – ugly words and hateful words and fearful words - words that in a civilized society should have been unthinkable and definitely unspeakable – but in the cesspools of the Internet and among hateful extremists here and abroad – and, yes, among politicians who know better but cynically stir up hate to win applause and votes – the unthinkable and the unspeakable are thought and spoken more and more.

It can be a really short trip from word to deed, so, no surprise, there are some twisted men who put these ugly words into terrible action.

I know most of would rather not – I know most of us would rather look away - but I don’t think anything is going to change – and, actually, things are likely to get much worse - unless we heavenly citizens start to speak up.

If we’re scared, we have one another and we know we have a God who always keeps promises.

But, it’s time – it’s long past time - for us to use our words – beautiful words and loving words and courageous words.

After all, as the theologian I live with reminded me, in the beginning was the Word.

So, we’re called to speak up about what we experience right here in our beautiful church.

We’re not perfect by any means and we’re not always as welcoming to people who are a little different – who rub us the wrong way – who don’t fit into our little church cliques – but, for the most part, this diverse group of heavenly citizens gets along pretty well, proving that it really is possible for us to love one another, despite our many differences.

We’re called to speak up – and now I’m talking especially to my white brothers and sisters – we are called to speak up when we hear people spewing racist and hateful garbage – this could be among our own families and friends or at work or school or on social media – but we are called to speak up and say this is wrong and this is disgusting and this is most definitely not the way of God and I want no part of it.

We’re called to speak up in our communities – to speak up with other people of goodwill.

After the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was asked to speak at the rally held down at City Hall, representing the Christian community.

I really felt the weight of this huge responsibility.

I speak in public often enough so I don’t usually get too nervous – but I was very anxious that day – worried that I wasn’t eloquent enough or wise enough - worried that my words wouldn’t be right for this somber occasion – worried that I would say the wrong thing and accidentally do more harm than good.

I agonized over every word in my speech. In the end, I think it went OK but the truth is all I really had to say was this:

 Hating certain groups of people and slaughtering innocents is never the way of God.

It’s really as simple as that. But it’s not enough just to think it or to believe it. We have to say it, too.

The story of God and us – the story of the divine hen and her human chicks - begins long ago with God making a covenant – a one-sided contract promising to never give up on us, to never let go of us, no matter what.

We are so blessed – but we are not let off the hook.

And today in our broken and angry and heavily armed world, as heavenly citizens it is our responsibility to use both our words and our deeds to love God and to love our neighbor, all of our neighbors.

May it be so.