Walking in Circles

Isaiah 6:1-8 • Luke 5:1-11

One of the jobs of a priest is to proclaim the good news of the gospel each week.  I am well aware as one of the pastors of St. Augustine’s Chapel that my job is easier because I am preaching, not just to a sweet choir, but to a congregation of disciples who have already discerned much of their calling and believes in offering one another the freedom to act as our callings guide us.  About nine years ago in the fellowship hall of St. Augustine’s, we started making candles and body balms.  We began because of a desire to help the women residents of Magdalene have an income and job experience.  We began with volunteers from this congregation, three women of Magdalene, and the name Thistle Farms, decided upon after discussion around a dinner table. The prayer was to make bath and body care products that would be healing to the earth, the body, and the women who were making products.  The chances that such a venture would succeed were exceedingly slim.  Our business plan was created by students, our work force of three had a combined record of over 500 arrests, and the director got mad every time someone asked for a budget.  But, slowly and surely we grew and outgrew our space. When construction on the chapel started, we found a new refuge in a building offered to us by St. George’s Episcopal Church on Belle Meade Boulevard.  And over the years as we embraced the reality of being thistle farmers and went out into the world, not just to help a group of women who needed help, but to talk about the myths in our culture of why women walk the streets and the truth about what it takes to invite them back into the wider community, we even outgrew our space at St. George’s.  Two years ago we started praying and publicly asking for a space to manufacture these revolutionary bath and body care products that preach without words that Love Heals.  It has been our dream.

In this Gospel, the Good News, Jesus calls Simon Peter to discipleship.  Peter, who has already witnessed the miraculous healing of his mother- in-law and the great catch of fish, is being invited by the Lord to stand close as the Good News is proclaimed.  In this account, he falls to his knees and seems unsure if he can take on this offer.  He feels unworthy, and seems to be on the brink of walking away.  He has to abandon everything else to follow this call.

In the story of Isaiah’s call, he receives a magnificent vision and is given the voice of a prophet.   He is given a message and told to proclaim it to the wide world.  It seems incredible, as if it would be a place of privilege and honor that many religious leaders would crave.  God gives him the words and the ability to preach them and Isaiah says, “Woe is me.” He stands back, and finally, almost as a surrender, we hear the words, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”

It is not that Peter doesn’t hear the call as the Good News or that Isaiah doesn’t love his Lord and desire his words to be on his lips or in his steps.  It is that the weight of not just good news, but great news is coming our way in our lessons today, that makes it a little overwhelming. We realize it means our lives will change and the calling will lead us to places we have never been before.  That is what is unfolding in our lessons today: the great news that we are called.   We, like Isaiah and Simon Peter, are called to intimacy with God on the path of discipleship, to hear his voice and follow his lead, and that is not just good news, it is great news, and it is completely overwhelming.

After two years of search and prayers, a donor came to Thistle Farms this fall and asked what we needed.  I told him a manufacturing facility.  He had given two smaller gifts to us in the last two years to help purchase the raw materials needed to grow our sales revenue.  The way he described it to me was that he was ready to make a significant gift.  Shortly thereafter we found a building, and he wrote a check for the entire amount. Now we are waiting to close on a building that has four store fronts, a manufacturing facility, and offices on the corner of 51st and Charlotte by the old First American Bank building.  We have a million dollar building that needs paint, carpet, lights, and heating/cooling to expand and live out our dream of growing and becoming a force for change in the world.  It is huge and the largest gift we have ever received.  It allows us to grow fourfold, to meet the needs of women we haven’t met yet, and to dream of things we haven’t begun to imagine.  The beatific irony of being thistle farmers and having the deed to a $1,000,000 building is a testimony to the dreams of a community.  But when the news came, it was not jump-up-and-down joy.  All of us were like Peter and Isaiah, feeling unworthy at this new calling.  It is not going to be easy to allow the longing and the dream to come into our waking truth.  It will pull us all in deeper and that is not good news; it is great news, and great news changes our lives.  This building, on top of our Ecuador commitment, our pastoral concerns, our baptisms, our personal stuff, and our prison tour is a great new calling for all of us. 

The great news for all of us today is that we are called like Isaiah and Peter to follow closely.  This calling isn’t a sweet reflection that fits into our lives.  Callings move us to walk more deeply into the wilderness of our faith.  It is not good news—it is great news, and because of it, our lives will never be the same. Thank God.



December 20, 2009

"Ave Maria" muzak blew through speaker-wreaths at the mall in strange and perfect dissidence with the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” that was ringing from the Santa kiosk.  The booth had a long coiled rattlesnake-line of weary children on the verge of a venomous meltdown.  Two old stoics sat on a nearby bench in the decked halls under camo ball caps that silently revealed their sugar-plum dreams of sitting in a homemade stand of pine boughs waiting for their Christmas feast to amble by.  What normally would have been a tightrope walk hanging above a gulf of sarcasm masking my fear that my own materialism is drowning out the call to peace, instead, felt like just a sweet stroll with my children.  I believe the joy was welling up in me, because I had spent the morning sitting with a woman who believed this may be her last Christmas.  Seeing this Christmas scene through eyes filled with the memory of her tear-filled eyes was the antidote for hearts that while they may never say “bah humbug," still beat through stone-like flesh.  I walked through those decked halls, welling up with gratitude for love.

That stroll became my “O come, O come, Emmanuel” this year.  It came as a surprise, and it was freeing and joyful. It has made me reflect on how many seasons I have spent trying to get the Christmas spirit by getting back to the spirit of Bethlehem or at least the spirit of my youth and feeling like something was missing and ending up feeling lonely.  This year though, instead, the gift of the spirit for me was found in imagining that this might be my last Christmas.  I know that if this was my last Christmas, I would love every gift that I gave and every single gift I received.  I think that if this was perhaps my last Christmas Eve, every carol would make me cry and sipping coffee by the tree as the kids opened presents would feel like even this sadness was filled with blessing.  I think that if this were my last Christmas I could hear the words of "Ave Maria" and the Magnificat as balm to my soul.  I could feel that Mary was singing her song of praise to all of us-- from generation to generation-- that remember our very flesh makes us human and lowly and that is what God loves. It is in our humanity that we are lifted up and that our pride is scattered as we remember that we are returning to God one day.  If this were to be my last Christmas, that is the good news that would feed me and carry me through the many silent nights.

After my walk through the mall, I spent the next couple of days in a grateful cloud that always seems to hover after moments of clarity. I received an email from a woman who had contacted my brother, The Rev. Gladstone Stevens, III, to see if he was the same Rev. Stevens she had met in New England when he was a young priest.  My brother explained that he was his son, and that our father had been killed by a drunk driver in 1968 when we were little children, not too long after she had met him.  She wrote us back and said that almost 50 years ago before Christmas, on what would turn out to be one of my father’s last, my father and mother both were very warm and kind to her and her boyfriend, a young couple who found themselves in the middle of tremendous personal upheaval and change.  She explained that they were both students and very much in love.  She wrote, “When I learned I was pregnant, we decided to be married. We contacted St. Andrew's Church near Yale where your father was vicar.  Your parents, who couldn't have been that much older than we were, invited us into their home for premarital counseling. I recall such a happy scene there, with at least two small children climbing on your father's lap.  At a time when our world was full of censure, your parents were accepting and supportive.  Your mother helped dress me in a borrowed gown and veil and choreographed the ceremony.  I was in a daze.  I wish your father could know that he joined us with strong glue---four children, ten grandchildren. I'm long overdue in expressing my appreciation, but it is heartfelt.”

For me, this letter was not overdue, but right on time.  That my father, who I can’t remember, spent one of his last Christmases opening his home and church to a couple seeking shelter from the storms around them is the best Christmas gift I could have asked for this year.  She remembered to write and give thanks 50 years later to children and grandchildren who might have wanted to ask the young priest, “How did you spend some of your last Christmases?  And would you have done it any differently if you had known you would die so young?”  Her email memory is a sermon to me about how each of us might want to spend this Christmas, whether or not it is our last—seeking to love without judgment, welcoming the stranger, not feeling put upon, opening our homes and hearts, letting children just crawl on our laps, planning a celebration in the midst of hard circumstances, and seeing Christ’s love in it all.

Second Sunday of Advent
December 6, 2009

Luke sets this gospel firmly in a time and place.  He tells us that it’s the 15th year in the reign of the Emperor in Rome.  More specifically, he tells us the religious authority was Annas and Caiaphas.  Out of this specific time, place, and structure, the word of God came in the wilderness to John.  It didn’t come out of nowhere; it always comes out of somewhere and breaks through traditions, systems, and structures to speak something new. The task of preachers since John first cried out is to pick up his voice and express, as explicitly as possible, the hope pregnant in our world, in our time and space—where love is being born.  Wherever we hear the cry of John in the wilderness our task is to preach it and remind the world that on our journey toward the kingdom we move from the structure and authority that is visible and concrete to places where the hope of love bursts forth.  It is then that we can stand with Mary in this season and scatter the pride in our own hearts.  It is then that we can remember our hunger and how we have been fed.  It is then that we remember how God has remembered his lowly servants and blessed us beyond our imaginations.  Fredrick Buechner says, “If God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives…Into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks” (The Sacred Journey). We can be moved by the inexpressible eloquence that rises up out of the mystery of not just our own lives but of life itself.
 
So, in the 15th year in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, when Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod ruler of Galilee, and Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests, the word came to John in the wilderness, telling him, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

In the first year in the reign of Obama, when Bredesen was governor of Tennessee, and Dean was the mayor of Nashville, and John was the Episcopal Bishop, the word of God came to voices crying out in the wilderness. The word of God came in a letter from a woman in the wilderness of prison to this community as she remembered her spiritual roots:

"I will be locked up until November 2010, but, Tara and Gwen, gave me hope when they came here.  I am still wondering if I can make.  I was molested by my Dad’s father when I was 6 until I was 11.  I don’t remember a lot about those years, but there are a few memories.  Does the madness end?  Can we become someone that we accept and respect ourselves?  I have stole, lied, manipulated, conned, hustled, whatever it took, and so it took me.  And so here I sit wondering is there life out there for me?  I was once a very spiritual person."

Then the word of God came from my child as we were driving home, and he spoke a word of faith as he said, “Mom, if you die, I will still believe in God.”  Then the word came from a woman who was leading a vigil hours before the state’s fifth execution in Tennessee as she stood and said, “There are plenty of reasons to grieve in this world, but there are more to reasons to hope. We remain a people of hope. Our hope is not grounded in rose colored optimism that pretends violence and death are not powerful or real. But we gather and light a single candle at midnight and say to the darkness, “I beg to differ!”
 
 Then the word of God came from a naturalist who spoke about an 8-year-old American chestnut tree she found in the park, a descendant of the trees that once graced hills all across America until blight killed four billion of them in the early 20th century.  To get there we walked near an old abandoned graveyard, sunken holes in hallowed ground long since forgotten in this city.  The chestnut was meek, with branches broken and no signs of leaves in the bleak mid-winter evening.  “That’s it,” she said, explaining that this tree was probably the seventh generation to sprout from the roots that died almost 100 years ago. “And even though it is blighted, it is a sign of great hope,” she said as she kissed the bark.  That American chestnut with its history, humility, and destiny was the prophet crying out and carrying the voices of prisoners, children, and those railing against principalities. Someday it will be well. People will be free, those we love who die we will see again, and blighted roots will spring up.  Someday every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.

The word of God fills the wildernesses in and out of our lives with a word of hope, breaking through long dead stumps buried deep in the earth.  No one would have ever heard John crying out if they didn’t venture into the wilderness to listen to the voice.  Waiting in Advent is not a passive position.  It is the faithful action of paying attention to the stories all around us and extracting the hope that breaks through the barriers of this world. It is not just waiting; it is waiting in hope.  In those glimmers of hope we see the advent of love coming our way.  It is then that we share the love of the Philippians that overflows more and more with knowledge of what is best.  It is then that we join the cantor in singing, “The dawn of the most high shall break upon us and shine on those who dwell in darkness and guide our feet to the way of peace.”