ThisWeeksSermon November 25th, Feast of Christ the King

AUDIOVERSION: http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/20071125ThisWeeksSermon.mov

(Unfortunately, there are a few "skips" in the recording. Don't know why, yet.)

“A reading from the Book of Chinook.”
Feast of Christ the King, November 25, 2007
As most of you already know…
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest…
in Seattle.
I spent many summers with my grandmother.
She lived on what is called “Hood Canal”…
a long…
narrow…
fjordlike inlet of Puget Sound.
It’s a little community that looks across the salty water toward the Olympic Mountain range…
snow-capped…
even in summer.
Salmon-fishing was a big deal there.
Still is.
Not commercial fishing…
but fishing for sport…
and for huge banquets.
There are about as many different kinds of salmon in those waters as there are varieties of fir trees in the State of Washington.
Cherry salmon…
Chump salmon…
Pink salmon…
Sockeyes, Steelheads, Humpbacks, and Silvers…
King salmon…
Coho salmon…
Chinook salmon.
They’re spectacularly beautiful…
streamlined…
determined animals.
Salmon are ana’-dro-mous…
a word that means they’re born in fresh water…
yet they live out their lives in the salty oceans.
Finally…
they return to their fresh-water origins…
to give birth…
and then…
almost always…
to die.
A few years ago…
during a visit to Seattle…
I remember seeing salmon working their way up a fish ladder…
working their way up from their salty world into a fresh-water world.
I stood right next to them…
with just a sheet of glass between me and them…
watching them as they obediently worked their way up…
step by step…
toward their eventual demise.
Holy salmon!
David James Duncan…
in a little book called God Laughs and Plays
writes about salmon.
He thinks that salmon should be considered “holy.”
He calls wild salmon…
“divine gifts created in an unending Beginning, a product less of evolution than of divine love.”
He compares the “holiness” of salmon with the kind of urgency and zeal associated with Old Testament prophets.
He writes about asking a friend…
a friend who’s Roman Catholic…
he writes about asking a friend if the friend might be well enough connected in Rome to get these innovative views on salmon’s holiness published in some obscure corner of the Bible.
The books of the Bible could read like this…
he suggested:
Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, Coho.
Or maybe Nahum, Habakkuk, Humpback, Zephaniah.
Or Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Song of Salmon!
His friend suggested that they’d already missed the deadline for submitting new writings for the biblical canon.
If Rome can saint new saints…
David James Duncan suggested…
they ought to be able to add a book to the Bible.
David offered to write it for nothing.
He promised to be inspired.
He offered to wear a crimson beanie while writing it.
“Think of it…
he said…
a Book of Chinook in the Holy Bible!
Salmon as a metaphor for the sacrifice of Christ
David James Duncan is a huge fan of the gospels.
He suggests that when young salmon feed their bodies to kingfishers and otters and eagles…
and their larger oceangoing bodies to seals…
sea lions…
and orca whales…
and when they feed their other magnificent…
sexually driven…
returned-to-the-fresh-water bodies to bears and Indian tribes and sport fishers and fly fishers…
and when they feed even their spawned-out bodies to sword ferns…
and salmon berries and cedar trees…
and mosses and wild flowers…
they have served us…
from one end of their lives to the other…
as a kind of living gospel themselves.
When a salmon’s nitrogen-rich body feeds trees and flowers…
it is…
literally…
“considering the lilies of the field.”
When its flesh feeds even the most intractable salmon haters among us…
they are literally “loving their enemies and doing good to those who hate them.”
All species of salmon have forever climbed our rivers like the heroes of a wondrous Sunday sermon…
nailing their shining bodies to lonely beds of gravel…
not for anything they stand to gain…
just for that tiny silver offspring…
and so 300 salmon-eating species of flora and fauna might live and thrive.
It’s the story of Jesus
In some ways…
it’s the story of Jesus…
arriving from the “fresh-water” amniotic world of his mother’s womb.
It’s the story of Jesus…
living out his life in a salty ocean of friendships and confrontations…
threats and betrayal…
spiritual awakening and self-sacrifice.
It’s the story of Jesus…
loving his enemies and doing good to those who hated him…
working his way from our salty world…
fish ladder step by step…
toward the fresh water from which he came…
until he was eventually nailed to a cross…
patiently…
without complaining.
It’s the story of Jesus…
serving us from one end of his life to the other…
until his eventual demise…
accepting his fate…
a living gospel.
They mocked him.
They labeled him “the king of the Jews.”
And then he returned from the salty brine of this world to the Warmth and Oneness and Truth and Meaning from which he came.
He did it all not for anything he stood to gain.
It’s how we’re called to live out our lives as well.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God…
the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside….
keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real…
a faith that helps us to live happier lives…
a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life.
Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe…
and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer.
Amen.
Jerry Brooks
Feast of Christ the King, November 25, 2007

Rehearsing for the children's mass...

Boys and girls at The Episcopal Church are rehearsing for next Sunday's children's mass and in preparation for the Christmas Eve family mass!

For some reason, the audio got stripped away when I converted the movie. One of my settings must be off. I'll work on fixing it when I get a chance. Meanwhile, here's a link to am m4v version of the clip:

http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/RehearsalForWeb-desktop.m4v. Looks as though you'll have to copy it and paste it into your browser.

November 11 sermon from The Episcopal Church in Marlboro

DOWNLOAD AUDIO VERSION: http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/20071111ThisWeeksSermon.mov

Young adults are smart, and aware, and interested in spirituality.

Any visit to Barnes and Noble will show that there are probably more books on matters of spirituality than there are books on sex.

Young adults these days are extraordinarily interested in spirituality.

ALL people have that longing.

“A great spiritual hunger.”
The 24th Sunday After Pentecost, November 11, 2007
May I speak only the Truth, and may only the Truth be heard by you. In the name of God, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.
A fourth dimension?
The woman who cleans my house has vivid dreams.
Always has, she says.
When she was a child, she told me, she’d worry about going to sleep at night because her dreams were so vivid, so real.
It was as though she was leading two lives, one while she was awake, and another while she was asleep.
On occasion, she told me, she’s actually recognized and met people during the day that she already knew from a dream.
A tale from The Twilight Zone?
In and out of a fourth dimension?
I really don’t know.
A hallucination?
The other day I asked Fr. Charlie Dupree, the Episcopal priest in Woodstock, I asked Charlie how he liked the confirmation workshop we’d attended together down at St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford.
He looked at me blankly.
I had seen him walk up the path from the parking lot and into the parish hall where we were meeting.
I was as sure as I could be.
He said he wasn’t there.
A tale from The Twlight Zone?
Was I hallucinating?
I really don’t know.
A different realm?
Years ago, I would visit my father every day in the Saratoga Hospital nursing facility.
I’d hang out in the common room where folks needed a lot of assistance, mostly Alzheimer’s patients, I expect.
Some were bitter and disturbed.
Others were peaceful and apparently happy.
One woman I remember was on the move all the time, strapped into a wheelchair, wearing a pair of rubber-soled sneakers, she was able to “walk” herself around at quite a pace, pulling herself along with her toes, and did she ever like me!
(Actually, she liked any man, I think.)
Wanted to hold my hand all the time.
It was almost romantic.
Conversations with those folks were sometimes unintelligible, sometimes not, but mostly inappropriate, at least by my standards.
In the beginning, I would feel sorry for them.
But I changed my mind about that.
I now think it’s just that they experience life in some other dimension, a different reality.
Maybe it’s actually a halfway point in a person’s journey from this reality back to the reality from which we all came.
The readings
Some Sunday mornings I feel as though I have to apologize for the readings.
I feel a need to explain away the no-longer-relevant theology that comes to us from an ancient world.
But not today.
Too much good stuff, stuff from “The Twilight Zone.”
The prophet Haggai
First it was the prophet Haggai…
“channeling” the voice of God.
In the movie, “The Exorcist”, it was that little girl, you remember, Regan McNeill, possessed by Pazzuzu, channeling the voice of an ancient demon.
This morning, though, it’s Haggai, channeling the voice of God, with some words of encouragement from the heavens:
“Work, for I am with you.”
God speaks using Haggai’s voice.
“My spirit abides among you.”
A voice from a from dimension?
Channeling of a hallucination?
I don’t know.
The psalm
Then the psalm.
We chanted words that described the marvelous things that our Jewish ancestors considered God to have done, God, showing righteousness, mercy, and faithfulness.
Let the rivers clap their hands, let the hills ring out with joy before the lord.
Some pretty mystical stuff.
Rivers clapping and hills ringing!
Paul’s letter
Then there was St. Paul’s letter back to the church he had started in Thessolonica.
Paul clearly got it wrong, at least in part.
He sincerely believed in the imminent return of a risen Christ.
That, of course, hasn’t happened.
It’s not going to, at least not in any kind of literal way.
But maybe it has happened, in an unexpected way, in the abstract.
Somehow the risen Christ has returned, is with us, a “real presence” in a dimension that is as-yet invisible to us.
The gospel
Of all of this morning’s readings, it’s the one from the gospel that really resonates for me, the story of a group of Jewish lawyers trying to trap Luke’s Jesus into violating religious law, with a trick question.
Jesus said, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, this God is a God of the living, for to this God of ours, all are alive.
God is not the God of the dead!
Jesus suggests another dimension, a mysterious dimension in which no one has died.
All are alive.
Yearning for mystery
A former dean of Virginia Seminary, Martha Horne, said this about mystery.
A mystery is, by definition, something beyond our comprehension, something we cannot fathom and certainly cannot control.
The truth is, we know that the mysteries of God will never be known by sticking with those things that are familiar.
One of the consistent things about God is that God always calls us out of our places of comfort and into the unknown.
Even as our hearts yearn for mystery, it takes some time and effort, and we make little room for it in our lives.
Canon Dietsche on “Why Church?”
A few weeks ago, The Rev. Canon Andy Dietsche was the keynote speaker at the meeting of the Mid-Hudson region over in Hyde Park.
“Why Church?” was the topic.
He talked about a great spiritual hunger and need on the part of young adults today.
Young adults are smart…
and aware, and interested in spirituality, he said.
Any visit to Barnes and Noble, he pointed out, will show that there are probably more books on matters of spirituality than there are books on sex.
Young adults these days are extraordinarly interested in spirituality.
All people have that longing.
But very very many, unfortunately, do not see the church as a spiritual resource.
They don’t see the church as a place to exercise, and experience, and explore their spirituality.
They are biased against the idea that they can get their very real, and sometimes urgent, spiritual needs met by the church they have known in the past.
Andy suggests that our job is to create a place here in our churches, a place where people may encounter God!
We must nurture a vital spiritual life among and for members of the church, he said.
It seems that the essence, the point, the main thing, of the Christian purpose is to make happen a genuine transformation of people by bringing them into an encounter with the living God.
A mystical realm more real that real
Mystics insist that they experience a realm of being that is more real than the “real” world, the world we trust without question.
They will claim a dimension with no sensation of space, No passage of time, No clear boundaries between the self and the universe, Ample room for the possibility of God.
Common sense compels us to reject this mystical reality as nonsense.
But I don’t know about that.
Those vivid, realistic dreams, and lifelike hallucinations, the voice of God “channeled” through an ancient prophet, rivers clapping and mountains ringing for joy, and a fourth dimension, a Twilight Zone, a mysterious dimension where no one has died.
All are alive.
It all sounds pretty good to me.
Maybe more real than the “real” world.
Ample room in that place, for the possibility of God.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside….
keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real…
a faith that helps us to live happier lives…
a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life.
Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe, and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer.
Amen.
Jerry Brooks
The 24th Sunday After Pentecost, 2007