1-12-21 - Pride and Prejudice

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Nathanael had a snarky reaction when Philip told him the big news about meeting Jesus: Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

Nazareth was evidently considered a low-rent town in a backwater county – think, say, Secaucus, New Jersey. Deserved or not, that was its reputation. Later, some religious leaders will question whether Jesus could possibly be a holy man, using similar reasoning, “Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.” (John 7:52) Nathanael was so sure he could discern who a man was by where he came from, he dismissed his friend’s claim out of hand.

I don’t think it’s possible to be human and be free of prejudice. We navigate life by sorting and categorizing the input we receive. And if we’ve been taught that a certain kind of person is one way, or if most of our experiences of “that kind of person” have gone that way, or if most of what we see in the media depicts “that kind of person” that way – our default position will be to assume that that’s how “those people” are.

Sometimes we sort by race and ethnicity and nationality; sometimes by class and education; sometimes by temperament. I have a prejudice against people whom I perceive to be angry. I shut down, and I judge. I have prejudices about weight, loud chewing, hunting, extremists… if I ever thought about it, I’d be astonished at how many biases I hold, many of them unconscious.

Prejudice may be part of the human condition, but acting on it does not have to be. With awareness, we can surface our gut reactions and examine whether they are based on something intrinsic to that actual person, or to a category they represent. If we’re conscious, we can take steps to remedy our bias.

For instance, take my negative reaction to people who often appear angry or combative. What I want to do is walk away from people like that, not engage. And what does that do? Further isolates them. What I might choose to do instead (oh Lord, this is work!) is:

• Remember that person is created and beloved by God;
• Pray for them to be blessed, and ask God to show me how God sees them;
• Remember there’s a reason they got to be the way they are, and let my compassion kick in;
• Actually engage them in conversation, with kindness and respect, even if I don’t feel it.
• Open my heart and spirit to seeing something new in them. All reconciliation begins with actually seeing another human being. 

We are in the midst of both a more divided and divisive time than many remember in this country, and a renewed engagement with race and racism. Now is a very good time to look within and learn to look out, beyond our assumptions, to the real people in front of us.

What Philip said to Nathanael was simply, “Come and see.” If we all did that with every person of whom we are suspicious or think negatively, I imagine world peace would be in our grasp within seconds. Imagine.

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1-11-21 - Going Viral

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Third Sunday in January – never fails, whatever the reading, Jesus is telling somebody, “Follow me!” That’s how you start a movement – invite people to follow you, start a social network. And there was indeed something “viral” about the way Jesus’ network of followers accumulated. It wasn’t just linear, Jesus asking one after another. It was also radial, people telling their friends and family, who then came to check out what they’d heard, and stuck around, becoming followers themselves.

Three paragraphs in a row in the first chapter of John start with “The next day…” So this would be the third day since John the Baptist first saw Jesus approaching and identified him as the Son of God. On the second day, Andrew follows Jesus, spends the day with him and by nightfall has gone to fetch his brother Simon Peter, saying “We’ve found the Messiah!” By this third day, Andrew and Peter have introduced their friend and neighbor Philip to Jesus, for Jesus invites Philip to follow him to Galilee.

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.

Philip, in turn, goes and finds his friend Nathanael, telling him “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote!” And, though Nathanael is sarcastic at first, Jesus finds a way to get through to him.

It’s not up to us to make people fall in love with Jesus, only to make the introduction. And in our day we have the ability to do “radial” faster and more effectively than ever before. If you’ve ever had a social media post garner attention from people well beyond your own network, you know how quickly that can happen. Even your own circles include not only people close to you, but friends of friends, and people who hear about you. Lately many new subscribers to Water Daily are people I don’t know, which is exciting. How did they hear? Someone forwarded one, or they saw it online. It’s a wide open world out there – with a lot of people hungry for connection to the holy.

Of course, the call to introduce others to Jesus presupposes that we are ourselves connected, that we’ve experienced undeserved love and transformation through coming to know Jesus better. The language of “falling in love” can be a bit much for Episcopalians, but truly, that is our invitation. I do my share of resisting intimacy with God, yet I know it’s where my life’s deepest meaning and purpose will be found. When I allow myself to get close to that fire, I’m much more apt to tell somebody about it.

Who has been an “Andrew” or a “Philip” for you? Who has drawn you closer to a relationship with God in Jesus Christ by the way they speak or live their lives, or the stories they’ve told you? What was it about the way their faith sparkled or their love ran deep that got your attention?

Who are the “Nathanaels” around you, whom you might invite to join your faith journey? These days we can spread the word by posting something about church or asking for prayer - that'll let people know that your spiritual life is important and vital, and maybe they'll ask you about it. (Need I add, you can always forward Water Daily or invite friends to subscribe!)

“The next day” is today – and the ones in the story are you and me. Who will we introduce Jesus to?

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1-8-21 - Voice of Love

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Two days ago, on the Feast of the Epiphany, when we celebrate the light of Christ dawning in the darkness of this world, as Congress was enacting a ritual core to the peaceful transition of power that has always marked our democracy, a marauding mob stormed the US Capitol building, destroying, desecrating, brandishing weapons and symbols of hatred. We will live with the consequences of that action, and the words and actions that incited it, for years to come. 

This is our mission field, my friends, this place of discord and division, where the fire of lies has been given oxygen and the power of love seems not to make a dent. But we know that is not truth – the power of God’s love, mediated through us, can transform hearts and lives. For this was also Jesus’ mission field. And his mission began with this: And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

We’ve been looking this week at Jesus’ baptism, and how each element has become incorporated into our own baptismal rituals. We use the water, we invoke the Holy Spirit’s anointing with the application of oil to the baptized person’s forehead. Where, though, does this piece of divine affirmation come in?

We could say, “It goes without saying.” The whole act of baptism is a response to the Love of God. We see it as incorporation into the family of God. Do we need to hear God’s “I love you?” when we’re bathed in it? Well… yes. We’re human beings, and we need to hear it. Jesus heard it, and it’s not like HE needed to be reminded of his Father’s love. Or did he? Was the mission he was just beginning going to be so hard and lonely and dangerous, that he very much needed to be reminded of his belovedness?

The same is true of our lives in God’s mission. If we’re truly going to bear Christ’s light to dark places and people, we need to hear it too. Maybe God is always reminding us how beloved we are, but we aren’t tuned to that frequency. This world and its messages throws out a lot of static. (Casting Crowns has a good song about that, Voice of Truth.) Our inner sense of inadequacy or insecurity, however we came by that, too often overrides that message of love. How might we hear it for ourselves?

One way is to try to tune in every day – whether it’s a quiet time of prayer in the morning or a step off the treadmill sometime mid-day, or in reflection in the evening. If we can cultivate the daily reminder of our baptismal life and the promises God has made to us, we might find ourselves more often living in, and out of, our belovedness.

We also need to remind each other. No one is called into Christian life in a vacuum. The “noise” around us will always overwhelm us if we don’t encourage and support each other. Who has been good at reminding you that you are beloved of God, delightful and pleasing to God? Who in your life might need a reminder this week? Who in that mob needed a reminder?

During the Episcopal baptismal service, at one point the congregation is asked, “Will you support this person in her life in Christ?” And the answer is a resounding “We will!” That’s one of the times we hear the voice of the beloved, God speaking through us.

God has not stopped speaking through us. Let’s be that voice of love for one another, and for the world, now more than ever.

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1-7-21 - Oil of the Spirit

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

We use two sacramental materials when we baptize someone, at least, in the so-called “sacramental” traditions, Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican. The most obvious is water, which we explored on Tuesday. No less important is oil. We don’t use oil in the same quantities as we do water – that would get messy – but in some early church communities, a baptizand’s whole body might be anointed with oil, or hands, feet, face and head be anointed as part of the baptismal rite. In other places oil was poured into the font along with water.

It seems likely that this was a part of baptism as St. Paul knew it in the earliest days of the Church. In his letter to the churches around Ephesus he writes, “When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit…”
That’s just what we say when we make the sign of the cross in oil on the forehead of someone being baptized: “You are sealed with the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Paul likened that anointing with the Holy Spirit to a down-payment of sorts: “…the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession.”

It is the oil, chrism, that gives us the word “christening.” That’s how fundamental the chrismation part of the baptismal ritual is. For the oil is the Sign or symbol for the Holy Spirit. As I said Monday, it was the anointing with the Spirit that revealed Jesus as the Anointed One, or the “Christ” (same root word as chrism).

We could even deem the oil more important than the water. The water symbolizes the cleansing, forgiving, dying and rebirth realities of baptism. But it is the gift of the Holy Spirit uniting us with Christ that makes us Christians. That’s where our new identity comes from, the birth of a new person, you + Jesus, or you + the Spirit of Christ. Without the Holy Spirit we are just strivers; with the Spirit of Christ in us we are empowered and engaged in the Mission of God – and that cannot fail.

One of the readings appointed for next Sunday is from the book of Acts, about a time when Paul came upon a group of elders from Ephesus who had been baptized by disciples of John the Baptist. He said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." Paul baptizes them into the name of Jesus and lays hands upon them in prayer – and they are filled with the Spirit.

Do you feel you’ve received the Holy Spirit? If you’ve been baptized in the Episcopal Church, you have. But our churches can be awfully quiet about the Spirit, so that we become almost like those Ephesians, barely aware of this Life Force by which we are renewed to be most fully who we are and empowered to do more than we can “ask or imagine.” If you don’t feel acquainted with the Holy Spirit, there’s some spiritual work for us. We can begin with the simplest of prayers: “Come, Spirit of Christ, fill me. Come, Spirit of the Father, renew me. Come, Holy Spirit, empower me.” And then see what happens.

We have been sealed. The deposit has been made. It’s time to start collecting our inheritance.

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1-6-21 - Sacramental Epiphanies

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany! Christmas ended last evening with Twelfth Night, and today, like clockwork, the light dawns, insight floods us and we see it all clearly, right?

There are a number of bible passages associated with Epiphany: Jesus’ birth, his first miracle at Cana, the wise men and their star – and the story we are examining this week, Jesus’ baptism, which gave rise to the premiere rite of initiation into the Christian church. Holy Baptism is one of two main sacraments accepted by most Christian traditions (two points to the person who can name the other…). The Feast of the Epiphany seems like a good day to talk about sacraments – for they are Signs which reveal the hidden realm of God and make it discernible in our day-to-day world. They are epiphanies which inspire epiphanies.

Our catechism defines a sacrament as “an outward and invisible sign of an inward, invisible grace.” Something is enacted on the outside, what liturgical scholars call a “Sign Event,” and we believe by faith that the Holy Spirit accomplishes transforming work within us as we move through that rite. The material “signs” in baptism are water and oil, as well as the baptismal candidate and the gathered Body of Christ. The “signs” in Holy Communion are bread and wine and the gathered Body. The Holy Spirit is the one doing the work. We just show up with our faith.

The major sacraments of the Church are those rites which we believe Jesus himself instituted – the Eucharistic meal at the Last Supper (“Do this in remembrance of me…”),and Baptism in the Great Commission recorded in Matthew 28 (“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”) I’m pretty sure he also commanded his followers to regularly wash each others feet as a mark of servanthood and union with himself (John 13), but, sadly, only the Moravians do that more than once a year.

The ancients referred to sacraments as “the Holy Mysteries,” because in them the unseen reality of God is made known in human flesh, as it was more fully in Jesus’ incarnate life. Sacraments are ways for us to touch and taste and feel God, to draw as near as possible to the presence of the divine. We believe they are effective for us whether or not we’re conscious – but how much more powerful for us when we open ourselves to experiencing God in them!

How do you experience sacraments? In addition to the two major ones, some churches include confirmation, marriage, ordination, reconciliation (confession), and anointing the sick. Can you recall a time when you had a transcendent experience during baptism or communion or another rite? What were the circumstances?

If your experience is not earth-shaking (mine rarely is), what is the dominant feeling you associate with these holy rituals? We might pray before we participate, “Jesus – make yourself known to me.” Or “Holy Spirit, fill me.” Or “God of heaven and earth, draw near to me.” And trust that God showed up, whether or not we felt it.

Martin Luther had a slightly different definition of a sacrament: “Rites which have the command of God and to which the promise of grace has been added.” Grace is God's unconditional promise to us. Sacraments are an invitation into an encounter with the grace of God. Our epiphanies dawn as we become aware of just how powerfully that grace has made us whole.

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1-5-21 - Water

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Sometimes I think we belong in the water – we begin life and end it in a sealed, watery place. We spend our first nine months floating in a sack of amniotic fluid, with embryonic arms like flippers. And then we’re born – which looks like freedom, but also makes us fish out of water. Some people spend their whole life trying to get back to that warm enclosed place – to live in the water.

Do you like a nice, hot bath after a hard day? Easing yourself into slowly because it’s just a little too hot, letting the water close over your tired feet, your aching muscles, letting your back settle in, enclosed in warm water.... Or are you a shower person, standing for minutes on end in the flow, letting it wash over your face, your shoulders and neck….

Or let’s go bigger: walking into a cool lake on a hot day, the smooth, gentle water enveloping you… When I swim in the ocean I feel the most freedom of all. It’s bracing, it’s huge, you can dive down and float on the waves, it’s vast and refreshing. Sometimes I think we belong in the water.

Today we continue our exploration of the sacrament of baptism. There’s a fancy name for teaching about sacraments: mystagogy, the study of the sacred mysteries. Mystagogy flourished in the fourth century, when Constantine’s declaring Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire caused a flood of would-be converts seeking baptism. A few bishops – Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia (say that three times fast!) offered instruction about the sacraments to catechumens before they were baptized.

They attempted to explain what the rites were all about. As we study baptism, let’s begin with water, the most fundamental of fluids for life, and for baptism. The Bible is full of water, from Creation to the Ark to the Red Sea to the Jordan River. And there, symbolically, is where we all begin our life in Christ, going with him down into the water, letting the merely human person in us die and be reborn as the new creation that emerges with Christ from the depths. That’s why water, lots of it, is so important in the sacrament of baptism – it is symbolically enough water to drown in, and enough to birth us into new life.

The baptismal water is where our eternal life truly begins. Once with water and the three-fold name of God, it’s accomplished. It’s done. And whether you were sprinkled, toe-dipped, dunked or half-drowned, you got the whole thing. You went down and were laid in the watery tomb with Christ. You got up and were raised to life eternal with Christ. You were baptized in the waters of life for ever and ever! Amen!

If we want to feel more alive as Christ followers, we can practice remembering our baptism every day. We are surrounded with reminders – the water we drink, bathe in, wash dishes with. What if we trained ourselves to remember our baptism every time we feel water on our skin? Remind ourselves that we were washed and cleansed and reclaimed and reborn in water? Remember how beloved we are, which might make us more loving.

We begin Life in the water. And according to the book of Revelation, there’s water of life waiting for us at the end of days too, in that heavenly city, the new Jerusalem. A river runs through it, with trees on each side with leaves for healing.

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1-4-21 - Back To the River

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

We’ve been here before, this river. I don’t just mean every year at this time when we revisit Jesus’ baptism. We came here a few short weeks ago, with John the baptizer doing his thing,  “…and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” We heard his prediction about the one coming after him, “more powerful than I.” “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Soon enough, some thirty years after the birth we just celebrated, Jesus showed up at that river. As Matthew tells it, John protests that he is unworthy to baptize Jesus, but Jesus indicates that he must “fulfill all righteousness.” Mark doesn’t mention this, but all four evangelists agree on what happened next: And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The water, the Spirit’s descent, the heavenly voice of acclamation. This pattern of Jesus’ baptism becomes the pattern for Christian baptism to our own day. This week will explore the rite and rituals of baptism. Today let’s try to immerse ourselves in this story of Jesus’ baptism. Let’s put ourselves at that river, among the crowds, imagine the stir when John reacts to Jesus’ presence, the hush that may have fallen as they enacted this ritual of repentance for one who had no need of it.

Close your eyes and see Jesus lower himself into the water until it closes over his head, and then, as he emerges, a dramatic play of clouds and light, and what looks like a dove coming upon him. It is the Spirit's action that makes Jesus from this time on “The Anointed One,” the Greek for which is “The Christ.” Until this moment, Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. From here on, he is Jesus the Christ.

How would you feel if you were an eyewitness to Jesus’ baptism? I’m sure some thought they were seeing things, hearing things. Others knew they’d witnessed a divine intervention into the human sphere, and they told the story and told the story and told the story, until it became one of the foundations of the Christian movement.

How has baptism changed your life? I hope you have an answer, or develop one, for baptism is one of God’s great gifts to us. This week we will explore this rite of initiation which seems so simple yet carries so much power. Perhaps we will get in touch with the Spirit’s anointing of us even if the sacrament that enacted this happened decades ago, or when we were barely conscious.

Faith and even ministry may not always begin with baptism, but each Christian traces her or his membership in the Body of Christ back to that river Jordan, back to that water of life. Let’s go down to the river again this week.

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