Join us October 3 at 5pm for an outdoor Blessing of the Animals. Animals on leashes or in carriers are warmly welcome, as are stuffed animals and photos.
“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year, before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19 restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”
“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait? Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you?”
“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;
About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware?
My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe.
It’s kind of annoying:
What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour?
It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood
Or to my intestines to digest food.
Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”
You’re probably familiar with practices of meditation and contemplation that focus on breath and attention, and that integrate the body, mind, and world. But did you know these practices have deep roots in the Christian tradition? This Sunday’s Adult Forum engaged with the lives of three Christian mystics from across time and space—Julian of Norwich, Gregory Palamas, and Howard Thurman—and asked: Where do contemplation and meditation fit into the Christian tradition?
“‘He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.’ It just wouldn’t have the same ring to it if it was a pigeon flapping over to sit on his head. It was, of course, a pigeon. Pigeons and doves, are, after all, members of the same family. The species we call the ‘common pigeon’ is the same as the ‘rock dove.’ It’s just that, in our culture, we think of pigeons as being kind of grimy. Uncouth. ‘Flying rats.’ But doves! Oh, doves! So beautiful, so intelligent! …I say all this because I think we often look at our lives and see pigeons where we ought to see doves. We feel the Spirit of God whooshing towards us and we cower and run, covering our heads with our handbags and ducking under an awning.”
“One of the big differences between us and our ancestors is that they lived in an enchanted world, and we do not. That is to say, they believed in gods and fairies; that the river had its own divinity; that relics and the bones of martyrs were charged with divine energy. The divine and human realms were permeable, always flowing and interrupting the other. Our world isn’t like that. Our world is disenchanted, un-magicked.”
“When we finally turned out the lights and went to bed, I discovered that there were glow-in-the-dark stars stuck all over their ceiling. I’d never noticed them all afternoon, but they’d been slowly getting charged up by the light around them, and now they were shining. Of course, I guess they’d been glowing all along. You just couldn’t notice it because of the bright lights, so it was only in the darkness that I’d realized they were there. The message, this first Sunday after Christmas, is simple: we are, all of us, glow-in-the-dark stars.”
“My generation invented the word, or acronym, ‘FOMO’ – fear of missing out, of being left out, say, of that group text planning a party. There is also, so I’ve learned, ‘FOJI,’ fear of joining in: “I would totally join in karaoking but I’m busy tonight”…Christmas allows us to dream dreams and risk and dare. Because, this evening, the Christ-child enters the defenses of our world, defenseless, and thereby disarms us. He disarms us of our fear of judgment. And his presence frees us up for what theologian James Alison called the ‘joy of being wrong.’ The Joy of Being Wrong: JOBW.”
“Some of you know that in my previous life before I was ordained I coached girls basketball. I would often stay up late and watch my favorite college and NBA teams play, and I’d record their plays in a notebook, and I’d use it with my team. The problem was that all the players I was watching on TV were very tall, very good, and could dunk. My JV Lady Eagles were not so gifted. And many a time I’d draw something up, telling which player would be Lebron, or who would be Kobe, and when it came time to execute, I’d be mystified, and I’d have the thought – that is not what I drew up. John is in a slightly more serious situation, but I imagine a similar thought coming to him now – Jesus, did you not see the play?”
“The Bible is not just one self-contained episode after another. It’s a huge narrative arc, told in different genres and languages across a millennium, a library of a thousand little stories that together tell one big story. And in Jesus, Paul claims in today’s reading from the letter to the Romans, God is writing us into the story.”
“When we talk about what we love about church—this church—we talk about our music program, we talk about Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our children, or maybe about the simple elegance of the worship space and the way the light comes in. Each of these things might stick out to us, but of course it’s not these things we are drawn to, but what comes through them, what meets us in this space. We come here in search of peace, and we often find it. We come to church in search of Isaiah 2. We do not, it turns out, come to church in search of Matthew 24. That’s a weird gospel. ‘Keep awake, therefore; for you do not know what day your Lord is coming.’ I know it’s your favorite doctrine: the Second Coming of Christ.”
“The feast of Christ the King was established at a time when authoritarian regimes were on the rise and more and more people were accepting the idea that a strongman wielding violence and technology could bend morality and truth to his will. When we claim that Christ is King, we are claiming that even the most savvy dictator cannot define the truth; that the most powerful forces of this world, ‘whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,’ are not the highest power; that however turbulent our times may be, the domain of darkness will never triumph over the kingdom of God.“
“A few years ago I served at a church with a weekly free community dinner. These dinners really brought the community together: we had suburban churches and synagogues serving food, we had our parishioners helping set up and clean up, and some of the folks who came regularly to dinner on Tuesdays also started attending worship on Sundays. And hanging on a banner above the doors into the parish hall were the Biblical words from today’s reading that had inspired it all: ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’ …NOT.”
“Over the time that I was here watching out my office window, I saw the most amazing thing happen over those four years. A change took place. And it’s because of beavers.” We were delighted to welcome back the Rev. Noah Evans to preach at Garrett’s institution as our new Rector—check out his sermon here!
“When you were a young kid, did you ever stand on your head? My sisters and I would have competitions, and we’d laugh and giggle at how funny the world looked upside-down, as the trees grew down, not up. You’d have your feet raised toward the blue lawn of the sky. You’d get a little dizzy, but the world was so interesting from that vantage point. You saw things differently. In the Sermon on the Mount—or the Sermon on the Plain, as Luke has it—Jesus invites his hearers to stand on their heads, to see the world upside-down.”
“In the race of life, we are all running together as one team in pursuit of one crown of victory. When we think about the communion of saints, when we think about the exemplars of Christian life, we often focus on the top one or two finishers in the field. But the shape of the race, our success or failure as a team, is determined as much by the slower runners in the middle and the back of the pack as it is by Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King kicking down the home straight for the win.”
“If you really want to get to know someone, you can ask them about times they felt small, or guilty, or loved so much that they at once felt fully alive and fully unworthy. Or you could ask them about failure and success and how the meaning of those words have, like the color of the leaves, changed through the seasons of their lives. But maybe the question that would take you deepest would be a question that you hadn’t thought to ask: ‘Can you tell me about your unanswered prayers?’”
“If you were to spend much time with the world’s richest, savviest business minds, you would likely be talking about getting into space. What the Internet provided for so many in entrepreneurial exploration, they want to pass along to another generation through space travel. But ultimately, like Columbus, the motive casts a long shadow over the expedition. The only way out of our mess, so the rich and smartest tell us, is to get out of this world.”
“Our pets reveal what we hope and long to be true, for us and for the world around us. It’s not just the existential longing of poets and philosophers; it’s a longing made real and tangible through flesh and fur; slobbering tongue and contented cat’s purr. Through them, the walls in our lives, in our hearts, slowly begin falling horizontal and it is we who are tamed, made gentle, by love; it is we who find ourselves capable of deeper communion.”
“I don’t know whether the fact that the rich man knows Lazarus’s name should be the last nail in the coffin of his condemnation or the first sign of a possible transformation. I don’t know that the rich man, simply by knowing Lazarus’s name, would ever have grown to care for him in that way that he should. But I do know that if he never saw Lazarus’s wounds, never heard his growling stomach, never got proximate enough to know his name—he would never have grown to care for him at all.”
