tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-255609652024-03-23T11:07:45.239-07:00Caught by the Light<center><strong><em><br><br>Jesus said, “I have come as light into the world,<br> so that everyone who believes in me <br>should not remain in the darkness.”</em></strong><br><br>
John 13:19</center>Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.comBlogger311125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-84554503326853791392017-08-16T10:11:00.001-07:002017-08-16T10:11:51.248-07:00The Moral Test<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<b>Written in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the President’s response...</b></div>
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I’ll leave it to the historians and recognized scholars to decide whether or not America is a nation, a people. But I will reflect here that a famous conservative politician of the late twentieth century once confidently declared that “society is nothing more than a collection of individuals.”</div>
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Are we greater than that? Do we aspire to be?</div>
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When a man who swears only by the jungle stumbles into the Presidency, we cannot expect him to see society. And nationhood to him is only a collection of individuals who might serve his interests or suit his tastes.</div>
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I believe it when a chaotic personality expresses displeasure at disordered chaos in the violent clash of protesters. A chaotic personality instinctively seeks order in externalities: gilded, clean halls as a balm for his internal strife. People doing what they are told, obeying simple, straightforward rules. I also believe it when he can only see disobedience to laws intended to preserve order, and not the deeper moral complexities of human motivation; let alone the philosophical differences between, say, sociopathic nihilism and the socializing instinct to protect a peaceful, dignified, diverse community.</div>
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I believe that he cannot understand that, while violence of all kinds must be eschewed, the moral universes of white supremacy and an anti-fascist countermovement could not be more starkly different.</div>
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The moral failure of our so-called President over the past five days puts our union — dream or fact — into a level of doubt that many of us have not experienced in our lifetimes. And it reflects a hollow center in our republic that should shock us, at least if there is any hope for this strange experiment in diverse democracy left.</div>
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His predecessor, no doubt, would have repudiated this resurgent collective sin of racism without hesitation. As a matter of fact, he already did, scoring the highest number of likes ever recorded for a Twitter post. (That must make the Tweeter-in-Chief most uneasy.) But Obama is no longer President, and so many of us still feel bereft of moral leadership.</div>
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But we do well not to neglect the grace-filled question of the moment.</div>
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Were Obama still President this night, with his strong rhetoric and erudition, we would be risking at this point letting him speak for us, acting practically as our moral proxy. We would be posting his words, maybe taking up a phrase or two, admiring his clarity, extolling his appeal to our virtue.</div>
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And we would risk believing that we had arrived.</div>
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He was hated for this very reason. And he rhetorically left little doubt, thus leaving many who were still wandering their dangerous mazes of prejudice and bigotry out in the cold. Now they want back in, and they are angrier than ever.</div>
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This is not a criticism of Obama. No, this is a criticism of our king-making, celebrity culture. We want our President to be our ethical and moral proxy, our healer, our great reconciler. We want to be told how to think, how to behave, how to believe. How to get along.</div>
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Our most primitive parts want him (or her) to look, think, and act like our most noble imagined selves; or to diabolically justify and focus our darkest, most ignoble impulses.</div>
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We want to remain moral children.</div>
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This country’s founders worried about centralizing power in the Presidency, and its echoes of crown princes, queens, and emperors and their overweening temperaments and the infantilizing effect they had on their subjects. Like the prophet Samuel, when the ancient Israelites desperately wanted to be like other nations and have a king, the architects of our democracy knew that to ladle so much power, trust, and authority on a frail human being was ultimately a recipe for misery.</div>
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Now we have a man who — above most, if not all other men who preceded him in this office — has failed a key moral test.</div>
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That is no longer a question, and, yes, it makes him, sitting at the helm of the powers of the State and at the center of a fragile democracy, remarkably dangerous. That we should seek his swift removal from this position of power is also a question beyond doubt.</div>
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But the grace-filled question, the critical moral test before us now, is whether we will fall with him into the moral vacuum of the jungle...</div>
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Or if we, despite him, will grow up and decide for ourselves whether we are a nation, a society.</div>
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And if so, just what kind of society we will be.</div>
Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-26514116631024273562017-04-22T13:53:00.001-07:002017-04-22T18:21:42.477-07:00Easter Saturday / Earth Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” - Genesis 1:31<br />
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Someone once challenged me to justify Christian ecological concern using scripture. We need look no further than the first chapter of Genesis. Who are we to damage and destroy what God has deemed good?<br />
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God has woven an Easter hope into the very fabric of life itself. The biosphere, like our bodies, has an astonishing capacity to heal. And like us, an astonishing capacity to rise again to new life.<br />
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Our destruction of the natural world is a reflection of our sinful insistence on living in a Good Friday universe, where we crucify Life itself in the name of our own fear, our craven desire for power, and our boundless capacity for self-destruction.<br />
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But Christ rises from death and appears in the garden. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener, but perhaps this isn’t a mistake at all, but a reminder that the Maker of the Garden rises again in the context of creation, in the midst of the vibrant springing forth of all life season by season, year by year, epoch by epoch.<br />
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Too many Christians have mistaken scientists as the enemies of faith, but what we have failed to comprehend is that so many are the observers of the goodness of Creation, the recorders of the wonder that -- as we Christians might put it -- God began and Christ continues to redeem.<br />
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Science as a discipline has its roots in the Christian academy: the university. Part of being an Easter people is about healing the false rift between science and religion, and remembering that what God has made -- and what God is prepared to raise to new life if we will only allow -- is indeed very good.Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-40575792704511472312017-04-20T12:28:00.000-07:002017-04-22T12:26:36.158-07:00Easter Thursday vs. Emotional NarcissismDo you believe?<br />
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This unnerving question haunts the Easter community of Christ. But too often, we hear it as a demand to offer intellectual assent to the implausible or, perhaps even worse, an expectation that we must feel a certain way before we can judge ourselves faithful. Both are paltry versions of belief that don’t get us very far.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What happens as the Easter glow fades and the Great Fifty Days are still before us? When the zeal of the newly converted wears thin? When the honeymoon is over?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thomas continues to ask questions. Mary Magdalene’s witness falls on incredulous ears. The first apostles wonder what to do next and sometimes gather in fear. Even when directly confronted by the Risen Christ, Peter is bewildered and unsure.</span></span><br />
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But belief is not overruled by doubt, fear, or confusion.</span></span><br />
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As for the first apostles, so it is for us:</span></span><br />
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Believing is about choosing to remain in relationship.<br />
It is about the hard path of learning to trust.<br />
It is about the discipline of showing up.</span></span><br />
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Who knows how we will feel today or tomorrow?</span></span><br />
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But for God in Christ, all that is secondary.
What matters is that we choose to be an Easter people. Mary Magdalene persists in delivering her message. The apostles continue to gather, in fear or not. Peter answers the call and puts one foot in front of the other.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That is what believing is about.</span></span>Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-50696892086258390852017-04-19T12:02:00.000-07:002017-04-20T12:03:24.780-07:00Easter Wednesday vs. the Limits of Historicity<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I catch myself trying to read the story of the Road to Emmaus as mere history, caught up like a good Gentile in Luke’s apparent effort to turn the Gospel into an historical account. Our conceit to literalize Easter founders when we relegate the Risen Christ’s self-revelation to only a mid-first-century encounter.</div>
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When did we decide that story was *less* than history? And myth was less than truth? The road to Emmaus is the story o<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">f Jesus walking with us, often unrecognized, reinterpreting our most closely held stories and histories as the eternal divine story of life and love conquering death and despair.</span></div>
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What if the Risen Christ is on the road of life with each and all of us together, not as an artifact of history, but right now? The love in our hearts as we ask those burning questions of one another? The tender compassion that greets us in a smile, in a supportive hand, in confronting us with the hard but wondrous truth that we are loved beyond all imagination?</div>
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Easter Wednesday is the day we are reminded to pray, "Be known to us, Jesus, in the breaking of the bread." That is not a historical moment, but an ever-present and eternally holy now; as we engage in relationship and share the nourishing bread of life with one another...</div>
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And find God closer than our breath, with us in the very fabric of our relationships with one another, the earth, and the whole cosmos.</div>
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-66712686251132728512017-04-18T12:02:00.000-07:002017-04-20T12:02:25.802-07:00Easter Tuesday vs. the Arrogance of Caesar<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Even after defeating death itself, Christ does not rule like an earthly emperor or king. He greets his followers in hidden rooms and seeks them out in fearful places. He walks with them along the road. He dines with them on simple fish by the lakeshore. He is not troubled by our lack of recognition or ill-tempered at our ignorance and timid faith. He only asks, “Do you love me?” and, if we do, he commands us only to feed and care for<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;"> one another.</span></div>
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The rulers of this world posture, bluster, don cloaks of violence, and send forth great armies, concealing their incompetence with a veneer of arrogance. Compassion is always secondary to the laws of fearful statecraft, and humanity and the natural world are commodified and expendible in the economy of the anti-Christ.</div>
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Despite all this, the Ruler of the Universe who died for us rises to new life and lives among us and in and through us with a disarming humility.</div>
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For all the shameful ways the world marginalizes, we are not alone.</div>
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And we never will be again.</div>
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-8197115605327333902017-04-17T12:00:00.000-07:002017-04-20T12:01:28.517-07:00Easter Monday vs. Dreams of the Dead<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
What a fascinating, terrifying age we live in, where little boys who never grew up sit astride apocalyptic powers, trying to live into the death-dealing dreams of their grandfathers, and millions of lives hang in the balance.</div>
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This is the culture of death writ large in a world crafted by the long-deceased. The dead teach and lead the dead.</div>
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But we resist the Culture of Death. God’s radical hope is not waiting around for us to grow up. The New Life has already arisen and walks and lives among us, calling us forth from the tombs, as the old song goes.</div>
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This is the paradox of Easter:</div>
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Life renewed in the face of the Culture of Death.</div>
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Courage, my sisters and brothers.</div>
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-31494000634345122262016-12-13T08:28:00.001-08:002016-12-13T09:22:26.209-08:00God of ShadowsA Reflection for the Quiet Days of Advent<br />
The Bishop’s Ranch<br />
Healdsburg, California<br />
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This is a very strange Advent. And that, I suppose, is saying something for a season that is meant to be strange. Talk of angels appearing to virgin peasants, wild men shouting at crowds in the desert, and the strange intersection of prophecy, worldly power, and divine favor have always made Advent an odd season, filled with paradoxes and contradictions.<br />
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But this one seems especially odd with a body politic turned on its head and things I grew up assuming and trusting no longer reliable. This Advent feels like someone turned out the light of enlightenment and odd shadows are thrown this way and that as one person’s rising star becomes another’s heart of darkness.<br />
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Serving a largely politically liberal community has met me with unexpected questions that I could have scarcely imagined even a year ago. What does it mean, for instance, to pray for our our new government-elect? What do we ask for? What do we pray for when it comes to the world’s fiefdoms and principalities and powers changing hands in ways we did not expect, and in ways that many of us didn’t want? What does it mean when we pray (as we do in my parish) for our new administration-elect to be granted wisdom and compassion? What do we legitimize or de-legitimize with such a prayer?<br />
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Which takes us to an even more ancient question of faith: Do we only pray for what we want or desire? Do we only praise God when we deem something that happens is good? And do we pray for things to change only when something is unfolding that we deem harmful or bad? Do we face the darkness only praying for the light? Do we ask for darkness to fall on those whom we deem benighted, and light and gracious power on those we deem enlightened?<br />
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Our fundamental bias is that we often believe that ours is the God only of daybreak, of light, of illumination. Something or someone else commands the darkness and shadow. And so we, like the ancient Greeks and some of our early Christian ancestors, imagine or at least pray as though the world is divided up spiritually and even materially into light and dark, daybreak and shadow, good and evil.<br />
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The womb is also a place of shadows, and we all began our lives in the dark. Our habit is often to romanticize the womb as a place of loving warmth, and for all of us blessed with loving mothers, it can certainly be that. But the womb also contains the seas and storms of billions of years of evolution, of cells organizing over and against chaos, of marking the boundaries between the energy of life and the dissolution of death, between child and mother, between this life, that life, and not life. It is about the infinitely complex dance of genes, chance, and circumstance mysteriously created by and infused with a Spirit who knew us even before we were conceived. It is about the death of billions before us that taught our bodies and minds how to survive, develop, and grow for a brief time in this world. And even then, it is simple biology but hard for us emotionally that over two thirds of attempted starts on this journey fail. So our very being knew death, chance, and vulnerability from the very moment of conception. To the very essence of every cell, we learned death before life, we knew the shadows before we saw the light.<br />
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That God risked everything to emerge into our world through this dangerous, unpredictable, and astonishingly miraculous process is in itself a testimony that ours is the God of shadows, a God who knows death and the role it plays in our development and the unfolding of our universe. And ours is a God who knows daybreak in the darkness, and the shadows that come with the light.<br />
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It is only our very deep Greek and Eastern cultural and philosophical influences that often bifurcate a reality of life and death, light and shadow, death and life. But to God, all of this – including the light and the shadow – just like energy and matter, space and time — are made of the same unnamed, mysterious stuff, part of the same process, part of the inextricably intertwined pattern of Creation. It is not enough to blithely say – as we sometimes do – that without darkness there can be no light, and without daybreak there can be no shadow. It is more accurate to say that God is the God of both, and there is a deeper reality in which both are one.<br />
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And that deeper reality is one that only God knows and understands.<br />
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So God is God, too, of our odd political moment. Which I suppose is not very odd in the grand scheme of things. Jesus was conceived and born in a world of odd political moments in his own time, and the quest for power and intrigue was already as old then as the tradition of prophets and kings, of powers and principalities, of despots, of empires.<br />
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God is God, too, of our shadows. Of our failings and of our blindnesses. Of those benighted parts of our souls scurrying for cover to nurse their neuroses or those parts of us yearning for the light. God is there, too, ever at work — an understanding both comforting and unsettling, paradoxical, and yet very much made to order for Advent.<br />
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The message of the incarnation that we lift up — as the shadows are long, the days are short, and daybreak comes late — is that God is the God of all of us, divided souls and communities, of diverse and conflicted peoples, God of a world teetering ever on uncertainty. Ours is a God who meets us in death as well as in life, a God who understands both the birth of stars and the vast darkness between them, a God who sees the death of every part of us making way for the new, who knows the fullness of not only our life, but our death as organisms, the deaths even of our very thoughts, the loss of memory, the dissolution of reason itself… and all their redemption and more.<br />
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As the mystic Psalmist has written:<br />
<i>Darkness is not dark to you;</i><br />
<i>the night is as bright as the day; </i><br />
<i>darkness and light to you are both alike.</i> (139:11)<br />
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An Advent practice then is to learn how to pray in the darkness, in the shadow, in the land of uncertainty and fear, in the creeping doubts and inchoate worries. For God dwells there, too, and God — always — has the last word.<br />
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-11492446640800167782015-12-17T17:08:00.000-08:002015-12-17T17:08:22.986-08:00Stirring in the Darkness<div>
“Who then shall stir in this darkness, prepare for joy in the winter night?”</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Carol Christopher Drake</div>
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It is difficult not to feel this year that wider society has entered a collective winter night of the soul. We have gone rigid with fear in the wake of terrorism and in the midst of a campaign season that can find no bottom to lows in public discourse. Ghosts of nightmares stir in the swirling chill, old memories of history recent past but seemingly long forgotten: the cold of bigotry, willful ignorance, open deceit. No one seems to listen anymore. It is just assertions shouted over the voices of everyone else. Those who shout the loudest win. We are sorted, but not into goats and sheep with the care of simple husbandry. Instead we are sifted ham-fistedly into winners and losers with winner-take-all.</div>
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Who then shall stir in this darkness? Who would want to? And where can we find joy when the shadows grow so long and the chill seems unusually cold this year?</div>
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Anxiety has always been a part of our condition. It must have been, too, in the air and water and the chill of the winter night all those years ago in Judea and Galilee, when Herod danced with his puppet masters and Roman soldiers watched with suspicion as the people eked out a barebones living. What chills must Mary have felt when all that stood between her and certain ruin were the words of an angel and the dream of her betrothed. And even then the darkness was certain: This new life stirring in her womb was sure to be trouble. Herod would brook no rival, and Rome would tolerate no challenge to the status quo.</div>
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To imagine God stirring in the darkness of her womb must have been as terrifying as it was thrilling and dangerous. To be a peasant from a small town few knew bearing a promise that was too hopeful for so many, too hopeful to be more than whispered about in close company… Well, who could possibly imagine any of it? And yet it inspired Mary to speak of a world where winners are losers and losers winners. Maybe she was turned so upside down with this stirring in the darkness, she could not help but see it invite the utter overturn of the world about her.</div>
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Who do we imagine might stir in our darkness of today, and dare we imagine anyone or anything stir in the dark in this age of cynical doubt, of narrow materialism, of perpetual war and angst? Is the Virgin’s womb barren in our time, so much so that we must shut our borders and cast suspicion within? So much so that we ignore the plight of teeming refugees, of a world run mad with suffering? So barren that we must be convinced that the gracious years are gone and now we are to grasp in the dark, scrambling over each other for only scraps in the waning days of empire?</div>
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We want strongmen to arise and lead us out of the dark. But we who pause and reflect long enough remember in our bones that strongmen are only part of the darkness themselves. They brood, posture, and bellow like Tolkien’s dragons. They threaten and menace with power and its seductive promises. They cast about for enemies and blame, point fingers, and count might and perhaps count the heads of those who oppose them for a coming purge. This is not the stirring of a baby as it quickens in the womb, with innocence and hope. This is only the stirring of the old games of war, politics, states, wealth, and domination.</div>
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Who then shall stir in this darkness and prepare, prepare for a joy that is too wonderful to imagine and too subversive to be disclosed? Where would Herod and Rome be if suddenly their military might and posturing was shown to be only a cruel illusion, a self-perpetuating myth? What if the hope were so great that fear no longer roiled our body politic and people turned away from desiring the power to cast death and instead turned to offering only life and love? Terror would then have no claim on us, no haven in our hearts anymore.</div>
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But this is precisely the promise of Advent: someone stirring in the darkness, preparing for a joy even in the depths of a world’s winter. John the Baptist was not out to overthrow empire or even the king who wanted the prophet dead. No, someone was stirring in the darkness, he said, someone who would change everything. And change it forever. He had met that someone only once, and even then, it had been while in the darkness of his own mother’s womb. That Someone had come close enough to be felt yet unseen, perceived in ways that were beyond sight or sound or explanation. And in that moment, John had leapt for joy and made his mother cry out with wonder. And so now, too, a grown man stands in the Jordan, peering into the darkness of his people, looking for that Someone stirring yet again.</div>
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The prophet peers into each of us, looking for that Someone stirring in the wombs of our hearts, stirring in our relationships, even stirring in that poisonous place we call the body politic: stirring in the darkness of this winter night and every night; quickening, and waiting to be born, to birth joy into our midst, with light, with hope, with love.</div>
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Richard Edward Helmer, BSG</div>
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A reflection for the Silent Days of Advent</div>
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The Bishop’s Ranch, Healdsburg, California</div>
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December 17, 2015</div>
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-71758871439219436272015-05-12T21:56:00.002-07:002015-05-12T22:10:19.299-07:00Lessons of a Not-So-Clever PriestAfter nearly thirteen years serving as a priest in The Episcopal Church, I’ve learned a few things the old-fashioned way:<br />
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1. Nobody really cares about your professional credentials or seminary education, and everybody has an opinion about how you should be doing your “job.” Live with it.<br />
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2. You can crack jokes in sermons, meetings, and cocktail parties, and be the cleverest priest they ever met. You can be the best preacher and teacher in the world and the most erudite theologian and liturgist on the corner. But what they really want to know is, “Do you love us?”<br />
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3. Don’t expect anything to really happen until: a) someone is offering decent liturgy and preaching on a regular basis; b) people’s basic pastoral care needs are being met; and c) the parish’s administrative affairs are in order and are competently managed. If you can’t accomplish this yourself, find the help to make it happen, and don’t work on anything else until you do.<br />
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4. Politics, housing, and church life are truly all local. Don’t get caught up too much in the news about the wider church or its demise. When most of the people we serve hear “church” they think first and foremost of the congregation where they are a member.<br />
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5. Never put full credence in either your harshest critics or your greatest fans. Both change their minds on a dime, and both will lead you down blind paths if you let them.<br />
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6. There’s a lot of talk about “leadership” in the Church these days. Much of it is egotistical baloney. It’s always a good idea to shut up and listen. It’s also a good idea to authentically tend to your own faith journey and prayer life. Most real leadership flows from there.<br />
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7. Be curious about the people you serve. This is not about you.<br />
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8. Knowing your limits is just as important as knowing your power and responsibilities -- perhaps even more so.<br />
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9. Never go it alone, and always check your own counsel with people you trust.<br />
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10. Be courageous enough to make mistakes and humble enough to apologize for them.<br />
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11. Bullies need the same thing you do: honesty and accountability. Cultivate both.<br />
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12. The Church generally moves slower than molasses in Vermont in January before climate change. Learn to be patient.<br />
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13. The Church is not primarily a social service agency. Nor is it a mere sacramental grocery store. Never forget that Christ is at work here, somewhere, despite the best and worst you bring to bear. For this priest, that recognition is often Gospel.Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-80150417615441459792015-03-01T14:53:00.000-08:002015-03-02T22:26:39.709-08:00That Not-So-Sweet Jesus<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, Year B<br />Delivered at <a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Lent/BLent2_RCL.html" target="_blank">Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley</a>, California on March 1st, 2015</i></div>
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<i><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Lent/BLent2_RCL.html" target="_blank">Readings</a></i></div>
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<i><a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/podcasts/p.php?file=2015-03-01_sermon.mp3" target="_blank">Audio</a></i></div>
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Where did we decide that Jesus was sweet, kind, and gentle,
and why? Maybe it has something to do with attempting to make the gospel
stories (and the Bible generally) palatable for protected, young ears and tender
imaginations. Maybe it has something to do with our habitual domestication and
institutionalization of religion. That makes some sense – we institutionalize
people deemed unruly, so why not scripture and Jesus, too?<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is easy to imagine and depict Jesus, blue-eyed and
blond-haired no less, surrounded by laughing children, smiling platonically and
knowingly that all will be well. Except that is our conceit, not scripture’s.
Nor is it Jesus’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jesus was a frustrated man. And he was Semitic, not Teutonic
or Anglo-Saxon, which meant he grew up in a culture where passions were at the
surface of everyday life and relationships. And he was Mediterranean, which
meant there was yelling in public and it mattered how you play verbal hardball,
most of all with your opponents.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps most importantly for our gospel today, Jesus’
understanding of hatred was indifference, not wanton cruelty. And that meant
his understanding of love meant engagement, reproof, and disclosure of the
heart. And the heart for him was not a demurring, individualistic secretive
seat of emotion, but an openly relational, communal dynamic of passion,
thought, and conviction wrapped and delivered in action. For Jesus, there was
no love at a distance. There was only love up close, personal, and, indeed,
political.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So Peter gets an earful today, not for being evil, but for
being errant and dense. And you can’t blame Peter. He’s feeling bold. He just
got it right for a change, identifying Jesus first as the Messiah. And he knows
what “Messiah” means. It means a political savior who will throw out the Romans
and restore the kingdom of Israel to its former glory under David’s son. Maybe
Peter is imagining a few divine things, too, but his Messiah is grounded in
reality and is supposed to bring about some practical political change and
honor to all of Judea, Galilee, and the people of God everywhere. And Peter has
just witnessed Jesus feeding the multitudes, putting the religious authorities
in their place and healing the blind. So what is Jesus talking about? All this
nonsense about going to Jerusalem and being arrested and killed. Peter likely
can’t hear much past that. Who needs a dead King? Or a dead Messiah for that
matter? So, of course, he will rebuke his Rabbi, Master, and friend. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And Jesus’ counter-rebuke will be all the more stinging, but
not because he calls Peter a “Satan,” which simply means “tempter.” But because
Peter has just stumbled into yet another, even more disturbing truth:<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Messiah he thought he signed up for is not the Messiah he
is getting.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We all know this feeling. The perfect house turned out to be
mold-ridden or needs a major foundation repair. The perfect church just turned
out to have everything all communities have: bad history, gossips, and
skeletons lurking in dark places. The perfect job is tarnished by a grumpy
boss, an incompetent co-worker, or the unexpected drudgery of paperwork. The
perfect friend just stabbed us in the back. The spouse we thought we married
has edges we didn’t know about and didn’t learn about until the wedding was over,
the honeymoon was behind us, the bills were all piled up, and all of life with
its bumps and windy roads lay ahead.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Love, we all learn again today along with Peter, is a choice.
It isn’t the romantic confluence of perfect circumstances and emotions. Faith,
we learn with him, is also a choice. It isn’t just a nice daisy chain of
inspired moments.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And pain, we all try to learn along with Peter, is an
inevitable part of love and faith. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And life, particularly Life with a capital “L” — that Life
with God, the author of creation and all true love — happens only one way: cheek-by-jowl
with death.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Kingdom Jesus has been talking about has, at least at
first glance, surprisingly little to do with the stories about King David’s
slaying Goliath with a sling and stone, or the glorious expansion of his mature
kingdom. The Kingdom Jesus has been talking about is so fragile that it must
die before it can live. And it is not made of stone walls and fortresses, but
dry-rotted wood shaped into crosses. And it is not found at the heart of
Jerusalem in the beauty of the Solomonic Temple, but outside the city on a bare
hill where the criminals go to die.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jesus tells his disciples and us — if we will but set aside
our kindly, gentle, but largely harmless depiction of our Savior — that we must
face our darkness in order to find light. We must see our imperfections if we
are to be perfected by God’s love for us. We must confront death’s designs if we
are to embrace life. And the Kingdom of God, that frustrated kingdom that still
yearns to be born even now in the real lives of the suffering and the lonely,
the fearful and the marginalized, is born on the sweaty, hard work of carrying
crosses, both ours and those of others.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Richard Rohr talks about “necessary suffering,” the
inevitable hard knocks of life that every human being experiences simply by
breathing and being in relationship. There is suffering delivered by
oppression, by evil, by negligence, and we can police that to a degree. But
necessary suffering is as inevitable as old age. Peter, like us, would avoid
that if he could.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But the command of Jesus to Peter and to us is to get behind
him. The command is to get real. The command is to join the struggle and
dispense with the selfish delusions of immortal youth, political glory, and the
superficial salves of creature comforts. These are the temptations Jesus
confronted in the wilderness. No wonder Peter’s oblique appeal to them equates
him in Jesus’ mind with Satan.<o:p></o:p></div>
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No, God’s Kingdom is more radical than Peter imagines, more
fragile than he wants to know, and yet — like that sacred covenant God made
with Abraham — more consequential for the ages and peoples near and far than he
can begin to realize. Yet it is remarkable that Peter, stung as he is, doesn’t
leave Jesus at this juncture. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Maybe he recognizes a glimmer of hope in Jesus’ words, or at
least a glimpse of deeper truth than he has yet to understand. The difficult,
frustrating, winding road ahead is one of love, truth, compassion, and true
justice: those divine gifts the world cannot commodify or control, and so it
often ignores or marginalizes them. And sometimes it kills them. As it killed
the prophets of old and as it kills the prophets of today. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Lent is about walking with Peter and following that road
anyway. . . and trusting in a God who has whispered or perhaps just hinted in
Peter’s heart and ours, too, that the path ahead could conquer even death
itself.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-64429705773466663412014-12-18T08:35:00.001-08:002014-12-18T08:35:44.841-08:00Vexed by the JourneyLittle vexed me more as an aspiring, struggling pianist many years ago than a trusted friend — also a musician — telling me to learn to “enjoy the journey.” It’s taken me nearly twenty years to even begin to grasp what he meant, noting my temptation towards quick fixes, thinking more often about arrivals, and craving a predictable stability in daily life that is worse than unachievable. It is entirely unrealistic. Worst of all, it is just another pet idol of mine.<br />
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Which brings me, of course, to the institutional church, from which we all benefit as we sit here this morning in the beautiful confines of St. George’s Chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, bathed in a most blessed rain slowly eroding a long drought. How on earth — building on millennia of tradition with roots in Benedictine and desert spirituality along with Roman bean-counting governance and parochial proclivities — did we get the idea that Christianity should be institutional? At the very best, I suppose, we might say we need a vessel — and we might imagine that in the naval sense of the word — to help us sustain our essential needs while we attend to the inevitable spiritual journey of the inner and relational life. But I, as a parish priest and veritable church governance junkie, encounter too often the severe limitations of institutional Christianity, and I cannot quite convince myself.<br />
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This time of year, we remember a young woman, probably barely into her teens, literally bearing Christ not in the comfort of her own home in Nazareth with supportive, familiar faces and hands tending to her, but somewhere on the road outside of Bethlehem, in the midst of strangers. According to Luke’s account, at least, as a Galilean Jew, she had entered the somewhat foreign and hostile domain of her ancestral Judea with her betrothed, knowing full well she would bear her child, begotten under most dubious circumstances, while en route. I can only imagine what my wife might have said to me, in those interminable weeks leading up to the birth of one of our children, had I told her we were going on a long journey, and we would not be home before labor. There are probably more than a few suitable Japanese expressions for husbands spouting clueless ideas!<br />
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Yet Mary, the Godbearer, almost never has any significant interaction with Jesus in the gospels unless they are somewhere other than home. There is that precious glimpse of Jesus’ teenage years while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he incurs Mary’s fury for worrying her when he lingers behind in the Temple. There is that argument in a kitchen in Capernaum over a wedding party running out of wine. And there is, of course, that image of Mary with her suffering son about as far from home as they might imagine ever being: on a hill called Golgotha.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/images/madonna_bamboo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://oursaviourmv.org/images/madonna_bamboo.jpg" height="320" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“Madonna of the Bamboo Grove” from <em>Four Japanese Madonnas</em>, an online collection curated by The University of Dayton</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Mary has been called the first Christian, and I suppose it is not just for her willingness to physically bear the Son of God. It is for her willingness to journey with him into the strange, unexpected, and even terrifying; carrying him at times even into the loneliness of a stable with only the company of a somewhat mystified but stalwart Joseph and a handful of stinky animals and shepherds; or receiving her son’s body in that most poignant station of death on Good Friday.<br />
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Our predilection to reify Mary may at times obscure her witness to what it means to be truly Christian. It is not simply a matter of sitting in comfort, as we can this time of year, and sing Veni Emmanuel, unless we mean it like an expectant mother in the midst of labor. Nor is it simply a matter of hanging out for the Second Coming in the beauty of our institutional churches, unless we expect that coming to mean not one beloved stone being left upon another. The only stability we are meant to cultivate is that radical trust in the promises of God. Institutions, comforts, and even homes come and go. They can be as fleeting as a long-practiced piece of music, the fading tones of a performance, or the echoes of applause.<br />
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The Christian life is like Mary’s, after all, uncomfortable and dusty on the road, with no room at the Inn and unexpected meetings with total strangers, and the comforts and faces of home only a wistful memory. Our idolatry of stability, of sitting comfortably on the laurels of our accomplishments and conquests, explains a great many things wrong with our civilization today and across the ages. Journeys are powerfully vulnerable moments in our lives, but also the most profoundly real as we are exposed to the elements and uncertainties of a capricious universe. And so it is there that Christ comes – sometimes to us, but more often because we carry him and give birth to him there. It is there we also vent our fury at his mystifying talk about God and something he calls a kingdom. We, too, are vexed by his wandering ways and upside-down teachings. . . and we sometimes find ourselves receiving his body after the world has had its way with him and our journey — along with his — seems to have reached an abrupt end.<br />
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I suppose my greatest struggle with music and journeys all those years ago was with the “dirty laundry” of missed notes and frustratingly difficult passages and the lonely hours trying to master an instrument, a phrase, a chord, and, above all, myself. The truth of my friend’s counsel was that there was no short-circuiting, no circumventing that process. And then my even harder learning was to value that long journey when at last I would push a piece out in front of an audience, knowing even then that it might fail or I might fall to pieces in a pile of nerves. But that, too, is the journey of the true Gospel, the true Church, and all of us when we are sometimes approaching what we might call true Christianity. No amount of institutional comfort can save us from the journey we must undertake in this pregnant time. No amount of bean counting and careful preparation can forestall or circumvent the dangerous, uncertain, and sometimes seemingly endless labor of pushing Christ out into the world.<br />
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But as vexing as that is at times, it is our calling. And we, like Mary, undertake the journey risking a radical faith in the whispers of angels and the ephemera of dreams. I still take no comfort in clichés like “the journey is the destination.” But then, who said I am to be comfortable? This late in Advent is an ironic call to discomfort (“Comfort, comfort ye my people”), because nothing new comes without upsetting the old and the known, and until we learn to leave our idols at home and carry the living God with us on the road of life, we will not know our salvation.Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-24509382413962680432014-12-07T22:47:00.003-08:002014-12-07T22:47:35.179-08:00Ferguson, Staten Island, and AdventOne lesson of the last few weeks I have tried to take very much to heart:<br />
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We must learn in this country how to better acknowledge our privilege.<br />
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This is not about “white guilt,” which is simply a mode of hiding our power behind a selfish facade of shame — a most insidious liberal piety!<br />
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Nor is this about mere “personal responsibility” — that hideous idol of the right that is blind to all the ways oppression is sustained systemically in our common culture.<br />
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No, this is about stepping back far enough to see how the simple accident of birth clothes us in undeserved power and rights over others.<br />
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And how by seeing, then, we might be offered a choice in the shared future we are willing to pursue alongside all of our sisters and brothers.Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-63315315864457176412014-06-13T17:30:00.000-07:002014-06-13T19:08:23.937-07:00Prelude<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Rachmaninoff_1900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Rachmaninoff_1900.jpg" height="320" width="207" /></a></div>
Among my first attempts at studying Rachmaninov, recorded this afternoon while practicing at church. . .<br />
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Lots of voicing, many choices, and an almost endless sea of detail:<br />
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<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140613_Rach_23_4_REH.m4a" target="_blank">Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No. 4</a>Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-48533679244759116132014-05-15T22:03:00.003-07:002020-09-20T22:50:46.200-07:00Love, Ludwig<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Beethoven_Hornemann.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Beethoven_Hornemann.jpg" width="280" /></a></div>
<b>Ludwig van Beethoven:</b><br />
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<b><a href="https://oursaviourmillvalley.org/audio/20140513_der_kuss.m4a" target="_blank">Der Kuß (The Kiss), Op. 128</a> (c. 1798) </b><br />
Poetry by Christian Felix Weisse (1726–1804) <br />
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<b><a href="https://oursaviourmillvalley.org/audio/20140513_adelaide.m4a" target="_blank">Adelaide, Op. 46</a> (c. 1796) </b><br />
Poetry by Friedrich von Matthisson (1761-1831)
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<i>Steve Beecroft, Tenor</i><br />
<i>Richard Edward Helmer, Piano</i><br />
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<i>Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium<br />Mill Valley, California<br />May 13, 2014</i>Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-61836146052107236302014-05-14T23:38:00.002-07:002014-05-14T23:38:23.186-07:00Songs of Travel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4p3fn1SMpjnm6PjgPAnKYgRKSdHw9zN6kmecM4zOIcFDCZ3UAKH6dANEHG3cWq7Zeq2TGut0I054yzfuc9XRDmLTCicgrcHCzYopF3PTXO7p2Dh7oPi1ERF4yezNOz2OxgUd/s1600/Helmer-Beecroft_TLPeck001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4p3fn1SMpjnm6PjgPAnKYgRKSdHw9zN6kmecM4zOIcFDCZ3UAKH6dANEHG3cWq7Zeq2TGut0I054yzfuc9XRDmLTCicgrcHCzYopF3PTXO7p2Dh7oPi1ERF4yezNOz2OxgUd/s320/Helmer-Beecroft_TLPeck001.jpg" height="256" width="320" /></a></div>
<i>Songs of Travel </i>by Ralph Vaughan Williams<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson</span><br />
Steve Beecroft, Tenor<br />
Richard Edward Helmer, Piano<br />
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<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel1.m4a" target="_blank">The Vagabond</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel2.m4a" target="_blank">Let Beauty Awake</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel3.m4a" target="_blank">The Roadside Fire</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel4.m4a" target="_blank">Youth and Love</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel5.m4a" target="_blank">In Dreams</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel6.m4a" target="_blank">The Infinite Shining Heavens</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel7.m4a" target="_blank">Whither must I Wander</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel8.m4a" target="_blank">Bright is the Ring of Words</a><br />
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Songsoftravel9.m4a" target="_blank">I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope</a><br />
<br />
<i>Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium<br />Mill Valley, California<br />May 13, 2014</i>Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-47481931198655010152014-05-13T22:55:00.001-07:002014-05-13T22:55:33.633-07:00To Clara from Johannes<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/20140513_Brahms_Variations_D_Minor_transc.m4a" target="_blank">Here is my rendition of Brahms' Theme and Variations in D Minor</a>, his own transcription for piano of the second movement of the String Sextet in B-flat, Op. 18. In 1860, he offered this as a birthday gift to Clara Schumann, concert pianist and life-long friend. The work was not published until 1927.</div>
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A sextet has six voices (more if the strings are playing chords).<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"><br />I was given only two hands.<br />Definitely a study in transcriptions!</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 6px;">
<i>Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium, Mill Valley, California<br />May 13th, 2014</i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-34109289190860454502014-04-21T13:28:00.004-07:002014-04-21T13:30:28.004-07:00Easter Incongruity<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Sermon notes for Easter, 2014.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nearly fifteen years ago this autumn, my wife and I both
arrived in the Bay Area within weeks of each other from two very different
parts of the world. But it didn’t matter if you came from western Japan or the
American heartland: the Bay Area was just as expensive and roiling with
newcomers scrambling all over each other to get it while the getting was good.
Some of you will remember the dot com bubble, and perhaps some of you, like me,
find our current milieu eerily similar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It seems we live again in a familiarly cynical,
self-absorbed time. Business-as-usual involves 101 turning into a parking lot twice
a day, sky-rocketing housing prices, old neighborhoods being rapidly gentrified
by bidding wars, and an almost palpable feeling that you’d better get yours
while the getting’s good.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It always strikes me during Holy Week and into Easter how
incongruous, how out-of-step our observance of these high holiest days of the
Christian year appear against the backdrop of Southern Marin and the wider Bay
Area. And this year felt conspicuously incongruous, as stopping for time only
to think about where we are headed and why might just lose us the race. Even
more would stopping from business-as-usual long enough to think about a God who
dared to risk everything for us – even death on a cross.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To paraphrase another passage of Christian scripture, the
cross is foolishness to the world. Resurrection more so. A society of winners
and losers depends on the certainty of death and a kind of inevitability for
the victors. That is how the world is built and maintained. Even if we don’t
always see it, we feel it in our exhaustion and uneasiness with the present
time and how it distracts us from the warmth and beauty of a spring day, or the
scents of the flowers, or dulls and anesthetizes us from the pain and wonder of
those priceless gifts the world has not yet invented a way to commoditize: love,
generosity, and compassion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet we are here. Like Jesus’ first disciples at the
tomb.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Those first followers gathered at Jesus’ tomb must have also
felt – to the core of their being – the sudden incongruity of their lives with business-as-usual.
Business-as-usual meant the Sabbath in Jerusalem was over, and much of the
population was back at work for a new week. The religious authorities were
poring over their latest dust-up with a charismatic pretender who had
threatened both their tightly held traditions and their fragile economic/political
agreement with the Roman occupation. But fragile as it was, they had come to
rely on it for their prestige and power. And with the death of Jesus and the
dispersion of his followers, that fragile alliance would hold. Pilate, governor
of the occupation, and the garrisons under him had just executed another criminal
and rabble-rouser: probably one of many during his tenure. Crucifixion was
always a handy way to frighten and shame the locals into line and get rid of
threats to the <i>Pax Romana</i> at the same
time. So the tribute to Rome from this dusty, irascible, little country in the
backwaters of empire would keep flowing for the foreseeable future. The Roman
occupation could start a new week resting on its laurels that the drama of the
weekend was satisfactorily resolved. They had done their jobs, and business
could go on as usual.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But not so for the disciples at the tomb. They had planted
their lives in a different garden, in an economic and sociological dead-end, a
graveyard far outside the halls of power – about as far away as you could get. Jesus
had taught them not to base their lives, their essence and hearts, on the rat
race as they had known it. And much good that did them. Now they were far
beyond the reach of the comfort of business-as-usual, stuck with a dead
teacher, prophet, rabbi, and friend. And who needs a dead Messiah? They didn’t.
And even if they had the imagination and savvy to turn him into a political martyr,
his closest supporters and friends were scattered in fear, with no political
alliances to leverage with any effect. In the tomb with Jesus was the dead barest
beginnings of a revolution called “the kingdom of God.” The kingdoms of the
world had defeated the Jesus revolution, cutting it down even before it had a
chance to fully take root, crushing it under the heel of human empire, the well-practiced
art of manipulating the mob, and the weighty, inevitable structures of economic
and military hegemony.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so imagine their surprise when they find the tomb empty,
the stone rolled away!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When Mary Magdalene encounters the Risen Christ, how can she
but mistake him as the gardener? That would be business-as-usual: the only
expected stranger we might encounter in the company of the tombs and the dead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It will take her, and Jesus’ other followers, a moment—or more
than a few – for them to perceive the Risen Christ. And it will take a whole
community to help us realize what the resurrection means…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
God in the Risen Christ tells us it will no longer be business-as-usual.
Something fundamental has changed, and God has broken into the world, rolling
away the stones of tombs and ushering new life for the dead. The race the world
offers is unmasked and emptied of its power over us. We are offered a different
kind of life: one not rooted in fear, death, and competition of a cynical and
self-absorbed age. Instead we are offered a life that conquers fear and death
with abiding compassion, love for others, and unimaginable grace. So the
question for us this Easter, then, is this: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Will we decide to continue business-as-usual? Or will we
look where the women of the Gospel looked: into the margins, the graveyards,
the dead ends of our lives and souls and those of others? Perhaps the incongruity
of the broken bread and the common cup will awaken us this Easter to discover
Christ rising to new life, the Jesus revolution arising again among us. Perhaps
we will uncover our calling again as Christians to “turn the whole world upside
down” in ways the world cannot understand, recognize, nor ably oppose.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The weapons of the Jesus revolution, after all, are not fear,
guns and steel; nor are they venture capital, hedge funds, and technological
innovation. They are instead compassion,
generosity, forbearance, forgiveness, and that wild peace in the face of death
that resurrection engenders: a peace that signals our freedom from the final
tool the world employs against us, death itself. And these priceless Easter
virtues are here for the taking. Will you take them up again?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
We remember today this promise: we are first and foremost an
Easter people. This world will pass away, just as did the Roman Empire and many
kingdoms since. Jesus lives forever. And so, then, might our truest selves born
anew in him: our Easter selves, fresh as the spring, fragrant as the flowers,
powerful as the seasons, and given as new life for everyone.<o:p></o:p></div>
Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-43271171291093557222014-04-18T15:23:00.003-07:002014-04-21T13:30:09.675-07:00The Good Friday Project<div class="Body">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Sermon Notes </span></b><b><span lang="JA" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica;">–</span></b><b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">
Good Friday, 2014<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Good Fridays were always busy for my family. As a high
schooler, I remember hearing the passion according to John’s gospel in our
little mission church, and then driving up the road from McPherson, Kansas, to
Lindsborg, where my parents and I would play in the annual performance of
Bach’s <i>St. Matthew Passion</i>. It was,
at one level, my first acquaintance with the distinctions between two biblical renditions
of the passion narrative. It was, at another level, finding a way to really
begin to grapple with the texts at the very heart of our religious tradition.
As a youth, Bach’s musical treatment of the passion always moved me, as he
would capture the emotion of each verse and repeat it in glorious counterpoint passing
between orchestral sections and the double choir. . . until its meaning sank
into the very depths of the soul. It was, you might say, a striking example of
eighteenth-century <i>lectio divina</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I remember my first Good Friday without playing in Bach’s <i>St. Matthew Passion</i> as a capstone, and
how empty I felt without it. Recovering a sense of deep engagement with the
passion narrative then became part of my struggle to grow up spiritually, to
grow up in faith.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Richard Rohr argues, “All healthy religion shows you what to
do with your pain. . . Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the
tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Good Friday is precisely about all these things, and no
amount of theology seems to get us beyond the absurd, tragic, the nonsensical,
and the unjust nature of the passion. And yet, it is tempting as we have often
done in the Western Church: to simply project all of that onto Jesus, call it
redemptive, and then go home. But that, we all learn sooner or later, is not
enough.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the great steps in my own journey was to reflect in
recent years with my spiritual director on my own pain and suffering. At a
critical point in that conversation, I finally said out loud – with more than a
little trepidation after years of ordained ministry – that I had learned my
pain and suffering were nothing compared with others’.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Yes,” he replied, “but it is still <i>your</i> suffering and pain.” No one else’s. Just as much in need of
redemption as anyone else’s. And no amount of undertaking the odious task of
comparing my suffering with others’, or denying it, or looking for the right pill
– spiritual or otherwise – to take it all away would accomplish that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Until we are ready and willing to see the cross as God’s
identification with our own suffering, individual and shared, we will not get
past treating Jesus as only a mere scapegoat, only a cosmic carrier of our sins.
Jesus’ suffering, much as we often misapprehend our own prayers and theology,
is not a simple substitute for ours. Good Friday always ran the risk of turning
into an abstraction for me: the next step in completing a theological formula
that would perhaps end all my heartache and pain. But reality ultimately
confronts and challenges our abstract notions about salvation. Most of us learn
through the trials of experience that no matter how much we focus on Jesus’
suffering or think about it, it doesn’t take away our own. I often wonder if
this isn’t an unspoken reason that many people leave the church or abandon
Christianity all together. At our worst moments, the Church has sometimes
behaved no better than snake oil salesmen, promising relief if you buy the
mythical magic formula.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But we must learn that Jesus’ suffering is not some great
cosmic talisman to ward off our pain. And the Church is not a simple pharmacy
where we pick up our medicine and then go home and follow the prescription. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, Christ’s suffering faces and transforms ours. In the old
language, his <i>redeems</i> ours. His takes
on the absurdity, tragedy, nonsense, and the injustice of our lives and makes
it – sometimes with great endurance and sweat – all something holy. Through the
cross, he takes the awful pain and messiness of this life and infuses it with
meaning, purpose, and transformational power. And if we let the cross do this
work in our lives, it not only transforms us, but turns us into true Christians,
ready to help transform the pain and suffering of others. That is what we might
call the project of Good Friday – a project that begins with Jesus, and into
which each of us is called. We have been, of course, very much like the
disciples, running away in fear and denial. And yet the cross remains: our
invitation to become part of the mighty salvific act that God is offering all
of humanity in Christ.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a healthy religion, our tradition of the cross encourages
us to offer our pain to God. Sometimes it will be relieved. Sometimes it will
remain. But either way, the promise is that it will be transformed into grace
for us. As a great religion, our tradition of the cross offers us a pathway to
transform the suffering of others as well. Sometimes we will be able to relieve
that suffering. Sometimes we will not. But either way, the cross calls us into
the transformative acts of compassion that end the loneliness that suffering
engenders. We then carry it together, lightening the load for one another. And God
in Christ carries all of us together.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In that way, we see that our suffering is shared, and
ultimately made holy. In that, we partake in God’s sharing with us in Christ,
broken in the bread, poured out in the common cup. All that has blighted our
life, then, is re-purposed for redemption. Our suffering is like Jesus’, and
his like ours: offered out of love rather than resisted or denied in fear. And
our life, like Jesus’, becomes an offering poured out for all the needs of
others.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recovering a deep engagement with the passion narratives for
me began with recovering a fuller sense of my own pain and suffering, my need
to see that redeemed, and my choosing to actively participate in that
redemption. And that is where we all begin again together on Good Friday: at
the cross, with the suffering of Christ identifying with our own, remembering
our place on the cross with him, and seeing in his eyes our own reflected back.
. . and through them, a God who loves us so earnestly that no part of us is
beyond the renewing, life-giving touch of the divine.<o:p></o:p></div>
Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-89837661797151578952014-04-05T21:13:00.002-07:002014-04-21T13:29:42.001-07:00Stubborn SalvationSermon Notes for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A<br />
<br />
<a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent5_RCL.html" target="_blank">Readings</a><br />
<br />
Most of us gingerly dip our toes in the waters of faith through hope. I hope there is more than this life. I hope the virtues like love and fidelity are worth it. I hope death is not the end. Hope is given as a Christian virtue, of course, but I find it somewhat remarkable that I can’t come up with a single verse in any of the gospels that Jesus commands us to hope. It’s only a word that appears in his absence or expected presence.<br />
<br />
And so we come to another of the great “I am” statements in John this day – John’s rewriting of the familiar and ancient Torah, beginning with the creation narrative, disclosing as he did to us last week that by working in Jesus, God has not yet arrived at the seventh day sabbath rest… and this day recounting another play on the “I am” of the burning bush, the divine disclosure of being both primordial and eternal, both transcendent and imminent, both wholly other and fully present.<br />
<br />
The focus is on the stinking tomb of Lazarus, that festering wasteland of death that haunts so many of our worst fears and wrecked dreams. John does not hesitate to ladle every possible oppositional force into the story, reminding us that Christ, the Word of God’s great “I am…” is up against every conceivable human obstacle.<br />
<br />
On discussing making the journey to Judea, the disciples are rightly worried their teacher is walking into the inevitable, deadly trap of the religious and Roman authorities in the Jerusalem orbit. Thomas, ever the realist bordering on cynicism, offers resigning snark worthy of twenty-first century:<br />
<br />
“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”<br />
<br />
John must want us to feel the inevitability in this story we all feel about the finalities of this life, the surrender to forces beyond our control, the undeniable reality of our suffering and the press of death.<br />
<br />
Mary is too grief-stricken to greet her friend and savior. Martha, the more pragmatic of the two sisters meets Jesus with a thinly veiled accusation:<br />
<br />
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died…”<br />
<br />
followed by a thin sliver of hope:<br />
<br />
“But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”<br />
<br />
But when Jesus offers unwavering assurance that her brother will rise again, Martha retreats to an abstraction about the resurrection of the dead on the last day, somewhere off in a murky future where hope for a struggling life might find some projected justification. The present suffering of loss –a brother, breadwinner, and kin companion in life’s brief journey gone – is just too much for hope to bear.<br />
<br />
And so it is for Jesus when he arrives at the tomb and weeps with his companions. John compels us to consider a God who does not will our suffering or plan it to test us or use it to punish us, but rather who enters into it with us. This is a dangerous God who is not manipulated by clever prayers or incantations or pleased by the bribes of priests or even by our most righteous piety. This is a God who suffers with us, sheds tears, breaks with our hearts, and feels the gnawing reality of our finitude. This is a God who knows our limited vision, the real humility of our impotence, and the uncertainties that grind away at even the most vibrant faith.<br />
<br />
This is a God who risks all danger to be with us at the very end, in the dark and bitter deaths we all inevitable experience.<br />
<br />
And, a bit like Ezekiel, Jesus, when confronted with the undeniably dead and dry bones of every broken dream, promise, and ended life, does not respond to the question, “Can these bones live?” with a tepid “I hope so.”<br />
<br />
Hope is not enough, at least not as we understand it these days as a shrug in the face of all human limitation. Instead, Christ, like Ezekiel, surrenders to the sublime power of the Creator: “Oh, Lord God, you know.”<br />
<br />
“I am the resurrection and the life,” God in Christ says to a hopeful Martha and to us in the sacraments, at our deathbed, in our suffering, and in our darkest hour of despair. So stubborn is our promised salvation, it will not yield to our tepid hope or our deepest hopelessness. So stubborn is God’s love for us, it will not be confined to platitudes or vague projections about an afterlife. So stubborn is the resurrection that Jesus embodies, we can only respond with the silence of Lazarus as we are raised from our own stinking tombs, and ordered set free by the great I AM.<br />
<br />Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-144123844171641942014-02-23T19:26:00.002-08:002014-02-23T19:47:01.277-08:00Choral Evensong<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://stbarts.episcopalatlanta.org/images/customer-files/St_Bartholomew_s_Episcopal_Church/Merbecke_Evensong01.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://stbarts.episcopalatlanta.org/images/customer-files/St_Bartholomew_s_Episcopal_Church/Merbecke_Evensong01.gif" width="203" /></a></div>
<a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/" target="_blank">Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley</a>, and <a href="http://ststephenschurch.org/" target="_blank">St. Stephen's, Tiburon-Belvedere</a>, joined choir forces Sunday evening for Evensong, one of the great musical contributions of Anglicanism to the Christian tradition.<br />
<br />
<b><a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/audio/evensong_2014-02-23.m4a" target="_blank">Listen now to the full service.</a></b><br />
<br />
<b>Albert Campbell</b>, director<br />
<b>John Karl Hirten</b>, organist<br />
<b>Richard Edward Helmer, BSG</b>, officiant<br />
<b>The Rev. Rob Gieselmann</b>, homilist<br />
Musical settings by William Smith (<i>Preces</i>) and Thomas Morley<br />
<i>Expectans Expectavi</i> by Charles WoodBr Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-84196150452299466742014-01-26T14:42:00.000-08:002014-01-26T14:42:25.567-08:00The Wild Ride of Repentance<i>Sermon notes for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.</i><br />
<i><a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/podcasts/media/2014-01-26_sermon.mp3" target="_blank">Audio of the sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
Someone remarked to me this week that I had chosen – in this particular vocation of serving the Church – what he called the “wild ride.” I hesitated for just a moment, tempted as clergy are all too often to see our calling as elevated or separate from most other Christians. On the one hand, it’s true: being subject to the uncertain future of a relatively modest not-for-profit budget that relies almost wholly on others’ generosity; social forces well beyond my control that might make churchy business popular, unpopular, or indifferent tomorrow; being on call when people are facing life-altering events that few witness with any regularity. . .well, it is a “wild ride” at times, indeed!<br />
<br />
But then I recognized that few, if any of us, can say with any validity that we are not subject to the uncertainties of the present state of the world, or that we are secure enough to weather social forces no matter which way they trend, or that our particular line of work will sustain us in two or five years, let alone ten. Truth is, all of us are confronted with a “wild ride” of one sort or another. And so I say again, paraphrasing Wesley in <i>The Princess Bride</i>: Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something!<br />
<br />
On Facebook this week, I came across the perennial article remarking on how the institutional church is faltering: How it has failed and hurt many over the centuries, and whether or not it deserves to survive. The curious thing was that I read one article like this and then another popped up on my Facebook news feed, and then another, and then another! I wondered for a moment if everybody was starting to write again about the demise of institutional Christianity (a familiar and depressing thought for a guy like me). Maybe we really were going to at last go under. But then I realized Facebook was only doing what it was supposed to do – posting articles on my news feed similar to ones I’d already read. It’s the same kind of consumer-driven content selection that all our media and social outlets now employ at every turn, every mouse click.<br />
<br />
What struck me about that is the rapidly distorting effect this has on our perception of reality. We can quickly find ourselves in an echo chamber hearing only voices that think about the same things we do, and think that therefore the whole world is discussing what we are; or worse, that a majority of the world thinks the same way we do! What makes this doubly troubling is the modern myth that with all our access to information these days, we are getting a more “unbiased” view of reality than did our ancestors.<br />
<br />
The first piece of good news, then, in today’s gospel, is that we are in this way, at least, similar to Peter, Andrew, James, and John living on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. They didn’t have mass media or access to mobile devices to distort their view of reality with consumer-driven content. But it was still probably hard for them to imagine much reality beyond that which they already knew and talked about all day. Fishing was and remains another all-consuming “wild ride” subject to forces well beyond human control: weather and the almost complete mystery of the biology beneath the waves. Whether their catch would be big or small must have been a combination of seasonal guess-work, intuition, and fate into which a faithful fisherman might have injected a good dose of prayer. But no matter the size of the catch, there would always be the endless work of disentangling and mending the nets, countless hours of dropping them here or there in the waters and hauling nothing, and the gnawing uncertainty of whether even a good catch would sustain their livelihoods for another cycle of moons.<br />
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These first disciples, doubtless, talked, breathed, and dreamed fishing. It was what they knew best to their very bones. And so, when this itinerant teacher, filled with the Spirit of God from his venture in the wilderness, shows up and commands them to follow, I can only imagine their perplexity when he told them they would now “fish for people.” They will spend the next few years on this “wild ride” with Jesus, learning better what he means by that from the greatest teacher of them all: experience. They might even come to learn that this is no ordinary mystic, prophet, or teacher they are following. This might just be Someone who reveals God’s presence with us in the flesh.<br />
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For Jesus, his time has come, and none of the signs are good. John has been imprisoned, and no sensible person would believe anything other than Jesus was next on the hit list. It will take time for Peter, Andrew, James, and John – even a lifetime – to learn what Jesus has just learned in the wilderness through his confrontation with temptation: by rejecting the offer of the powers this world recognizes – the power to satisfy ourselves and lord it over others – Jesus has planted the flag of a new kind of community that will involve radical self-offering, radical non-violence, and, therefore, radical vulnerability.<br />
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This will not be a wild-ride in a chariot or alongside a marching legion or the grit of a violent insurgency. It will be a wild ride of profound vulnerability to people’s love or painful rejection; it will be a wild ride in the midst of a confrontation between the ways of a God who lovingly made all that is with a world that is too often hell-bent on distortion, dissension, division, domination, and destruction.<br />
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No doubt, Jesus saw this likely ending with a cross. Had Peter and Andrew really understood the reality they were stepping into, would they have dropped their familiar nets and followed? Would you? Would I?<br />
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Repentance for them was not simply getting it right with God so things could go back to the old and familiar. Paul must confront this very human temptation bearing bad fruit in the little clutch of Corinthian Christians today, and while his message is at times amusing (just how many people did you baptize there, Paul?) it is steel-edged with worry that the faith he gave them is being quickly sandblasted by the dry winds of familiar factionalism and quests for domination and control. They haven’t gotten repentance yet, and so they are at the same risk every formalized Christian community and every half-converted heart has been since: just going the way of thousands of other spiritualities and religious institutions across the millennia. And that is nowhere at all really, except back into the familiar teeth of a power-hungry and hell-bent world.<br />
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So when Christ calls us to repent, he is not merely telling us to be good Christians working on our own righteousness, finding the right cause and standing up for it, and then hoping to end our short lives having done good things. If that were the case, we could see Sundays as only a time to gather, utter faithful words, mend our nets, collect our rations at the altar, organize a bit, and then go out and simply do “it” better.<br />
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No, repentance is more like Jesus coming to the shore of our familiar lives and calling us out of our familiar but distorted, insular view of reality, and us daring to follow him into a wild ride that is truly unfathomable — a ride with God that, inevitably, will overturn everything we thought we knew about ourselves, the world, and even our most cherished values and beliefs.<br />
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Didn’t you learn that somewhere along the way? Maybe in Sunday School? No? Then the institutional Church, you see, is still trying to get its job right, and two thousand years later is still falling far short. Paul is addressing us as much as he is that quarreling little sect in Corinth all those centuries ago!<br />
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But not to worry. Our little community is rooted in grace, not institutional righteousness. And the school of repentance for Jesus was not confined to the synagogue. It was ever engaging its students at the side of the sea, at the booth of a tax collector, in the kitchen, seated at table with friends and enemies, under a tree, or even up a tree! For us, the school of repentance is found, too, out there in the world at least six other days of the week, when we each must grapple with our own “wild ride” and perhaps find ourselves called yet again out of the familiar, the predictable, and the ever budding arrogance of our own narrow judgments about reality. Here we gather in the hopes of being reminded of this humility and re-fueled for our journey by the life-blood and strength of our Savior, exhorted by word and sacrament not merely to do better, but be affirmed again that we are on this wild ride together with one another and our God.<br />
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And so we can truly repent by pursuing that journey that Jesus’ first disciples were on: where the flag of a new kind of community, a new kind of people, a new kind of world is carried...<br />
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A world built not on the foundations of power, but of radical self-offering and self-emptying...<br />
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So that we each may be filled with the love that God made us to have, a love that even promises to bring life beyond all death. Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-78037165162390089922014-01-18T11:53:00.001-08:002014-01-18T11:58:59.839-08:00Brother Rock, of his own Violation<i>Sermon for the Confession of St. Peter</i><br />
<i>January 18th, 2014</i><br />
<i>delivered at the Winter Convocation of The Brotherhood of Saint Gregory</i><br />
<i>The Chapel of the Stigmata</i><br />
<i>Mt. Alvernia Retreat Center, Wappingers Falls, New York</i><br />
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Among the great blessings of my childhood and youth were trips to rural Gloucestershire to visit my English grandparents. Even now, simply reflecting on it brings back the scent of freshly cut sweet pea blossoms on the kitchen table, the yeasty smell of the pantry where my grandfather fermented homemade wine, and his aftershave scenting the little office beyond, cluttered as it was with papers, books, and the typewriter where he tried his hand at writing for many years.<br />
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Above his desk was a little wooden plaque that read:<br />
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“Engage brain before opening mouth.”<br />
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You might think for a moment I will be relating St. Peter today to my grandfather — a self-made and largely self-educated man, a man of simple trade, and yet amongst the wisest people I knew growing up.<br />
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But, no, I would better relate my grandmother to Peter. For our beloved Rona, to say it was to think it. She was the positive antithesis of that delightful little sign in my grandfather’s office, which is probably why it remained in his office and nowhere else in the house, and you can only imagine the fascinating relationship they cultivated for over fifty years of marriage!<br />
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My grandmother had married well below her station. To employ a bit of British understatement, her family that included a captain in the Royal Navy was not at all amused when their daughter found herself backed by love to marry into trade — namely, the floristry trade. But that she did, and so without the roadmap of family sanction, she and Stanley built a life and started a family together around his floristry business in London. They in turn found themselves backed by geopolitical forces far beyond their control into lessons of survival and perseverance through the war years.<br />
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They narrowly escaped death on at least one occasion when a German shell leveled their little shop. Gathering stubborn resolve for survival from that experience, Rona learned how to deal effectively with annoyed customers, difficult characters, and guide anxious brides and grieving families to the right floral design. All the while, she and her husband worked grueling hours, rising in the dark to gather fresh flowers for the day from the market, working late into the night to prepare for weddings, funerals, holidays, and every need for a bit of beauty that came in the door, and raising two children. Years later, as Stanley watched his professional colleagues drop dead of exhaustion in their early fifties, he and Rona decided to sell their business and purchase an old hunting lodge in the West Midlands. There, Stanley was determined to slow their pace of life, pick up gardening, and become a published writer.<br />
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But Rona, with no roadmap yet again, found herself backed onto a new, unexpected path, and so she began to teach. And she started writing about flower arranging, too, and was quickly published. By the time her first American grandson was born, she had become the primary breadwinner of the household, having built her little floristry school into an internationally recognized training ground for aspiring and experienced florists alike, all based in the studio she had designed and built.<br />
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In the seasons I would visit, we would sit together for tea and fine cheese, and Rona would still always speak her mind. Didn’t matter if it was politics, the beautiful garden she and Stanley cultivated, religion, church gossip, music, neighbors, or the weather. She articulated a strongly held thought about almost everything. And so Stanley would sometimes say in exasperation, if for no other reason than to end the volley of unsolicited opinion:<br />
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“Yes, dear, you could be right.”<br />
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Following his death, she told me on at least one occasion with a laugh that she learned early on not to be bashful about having the last word. And hers was a one-liner worthy of the Dowager Countess of Grantham:<br />
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“Not only could I be right,” she would sometimes respond to her husband, “I bloody well am!”<br />
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Rona lasted into her nineties, impetuous and opinionated as ever, and in many respects more successful business-wise than her more careful and studied husband had been. She was never the charmer that the self-made gentleman Stanley was, but at least you always knew where you stood with her. Her mottos included an honest wage for an honest day’s work and making a commitment to “keep the tide coming in.” A cousin even noticed that one of Rona’s books made a cameo appearance in the opening credits of the BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances. Her floristry school was taken over by a colleague and continued to flourish after she moved to the States to live with my parents.<br />
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Rona’s other favorite expression, which to this day I find myself using on occasion, was always about so-and-so undertaking something “of his own violation.”<br />
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Now that’s Peter in a nutshell, isn’t it? Always impetuous, always undertaking actions “of his own violation.”<br />
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Peter finds himself backed into dropping his nets at the seashore, abandons the familiar life of fishing for an uncertain future following this strange yet alluring, itinerant teacher. Peter jumps out of the boat to walk on the water. Peter is ready to enshrine Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on the mountaintop and is answered by more than awkward silence. And Peter, today we remember, boldly calls Jesus Messiah and Son of the living God, and suddenly in a truly inspired moment for once, finds himself in the right. Then, before the sound of his confession fades in his own ears, he is handed the keys to the kingdom and is named in an instant of affectionate word play, “Brother Rock” if you will, a first stone for the foundation of the Church.<br />
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Yet we have good reason to doubt Peter knew precisely what he had really said or what any of this really meant. A scant few verses later, he will attempt to block Jesus from turning towards Jerusalem, and his Lord and Master will be vexed enough to call his first disciple Satan. Clearly, divine inspiration or no, “Brother Rock” had yet again opened his mouth without engaging his brain.<br />
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And it will go on. After promising not to, he will betray Jesus three times during the Passion. He will be skeptical when reports of the Resurrection are brought to him. Even after witnessing the Resurrection himself, he will clothe himself with embarrassment and jump impetuously into the water yet again, and yet still be befuddled when the arisen Christ commands him to feed his sheep. On the way to fulfilling this charge, he will argue vociferously with Paul, struggle with intractable disputes of his little community, and learn through mis-steps and unexpected visions that God still has yet even more to reveal. Nevertheless, he will still successfully lead the first Christian community in spreading the Gospel in word and deed: healing the sick, sharing the Spirit, organizing and exhorting, testifying boldly before powers and principalities, and even bursting the shackles of prison.<br />
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This week, in our own way, we Gregorians have recounted the uncertain footsteps and impetuosity of Peter as he discovered his walk with Christ. We have spent time with minds and hearts buried together in our Rule and governing documents, recounting how our Founder began this community “of his own violation” as Rona would say, and how he and subsequent companions on the way jumped impetuously and dangerously into the water, went off on tangents, said and started things they didn’t quite understand at the time. . . or simply didn’t understand at all, and yet found God inspiring, leading, and revealing things they had never imagined.<br />
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But then, that’s true of all of us, isn’t it? It’s one reason why we gathered here again to talk about humility, being broken open again and again for Jesus to plant seeds in us, and about the virtues of traveling light and allowing Christ to open our eyes. It’s why we spent time this week endeavoring to understand ourselves better, both as a community and as individual brothers.<br />
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Yet we are like many ancient tribes and like Peter himself, in that we are really walking backwards – not forwards – into the future. The ancients understood that hindsight is truly the only way we see, and so it is the future, not the past, that is behind us. Now, we might be tempted to see our evolving governing documents in particular as some kind of roadmap, some pathway forward, but they are really only lessons from experiences of the past, helping us —at best — to keep our footing while we walk backwards – or, perhaps a bit more accurately – to gather a bit of confidence and hope that we will more than survive when we, like Rona and like Peter, find ourselves backed by love and life into a future that we can only best describe as unexpected and unplanned.<br />
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The philosopher and prophet of our modern media age, Marshall McLuhan, coined the familiar phrase “the medium is the message” and the term “global village.” He also said, gathering up this ancient wisdom, “We look at the present through a rear view mirror; we walk backwards into the future.”<br />
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And, yes, it is always dangerous to walk backwards: no constitution or customary or amount of self-awareness will make religious life safe. My brothers, we are called to remain unsafe and impetuous at times, just as Peter was; to proclaim Jesus Messiah and Son of God, and not know what the hell we are talking about some of the time or even much of the time; to undertake ministries and tasks “of our own violation”; and, indeed, to open our mouth sometimes or often without engaging our brains; to risk offering the gift of the Spirit working in us despite ourselves.<br />
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And it is this risk that continues to allow the kingdom to unfold among us and through us for the sake of those we serve, so that perhaps in the final analysis, we can with Peter learn finally to become the media and the message for Christ in this global village of ours. We might in the process show in word and deed that not only could Peter be right, he (bloody well!) is right that Jesus is indeed Messiah, the Son of of the living God:<br />
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Christ at work for the redemption of a whole fragile, tender, beloved world.<br />
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-36205790252403354102014-01-04T22:18:00.000-08:002014-01-04T22:19:17.101-08:00Wisdom of the Magi<b><i>A reflection for the Second Sunday after Christmas</i></b><br />
<b><i><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/Christmas2.html" target="_blank">Readings include Matthew 2:1-12</a></i></b><br />
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The visitation of the Magi has always been one of the more fascinating – and memorable – stories of the Christmas season. From my wondering as a child at the seemingly exotic nature of these travelers from the East, to the fabulous annual productions of Amahl and the Night Visitors I had the privilege of seeing while studying music as an undergraduate, there is something about them that captures our imagination. Part of their mystery is their origins: were they Persian priests of Zoroaster, Babylonians, Arabians, or Jewish leaders of the diaspora from contemporary Yemen, or some combination of all of these? Were there three or more? A plethora of traditions arose around and about them. In the Eastern Church, they number at least a dozen in some depictions. Tales of their later martyrdom for Christ spawned relics into the Middle Ages. But Matthew, the only canonical gospel who records their visitation, gives us precious little to go on. The author himself may have had his Jewish audience in mind as the story in some ways parallels the tale of the King Balak and the prophet Balaam in the Torah, complete with a messianic star (cf. Numbers 22-24). That Matthew also intends to show the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles may also, of course, be on the agenda.<br />
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But our fascination amounts to much more than that:<br />
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Who are these mystical figures really? And why does their story speak to us?<br />
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Part of our fascination with them is their deft handling of Herod, the crafty Judean politician, son of an appointee of Julius Caesar. Herod clawed his way to kingship by aligning himself with the Roman occupation, re-conquering his own homeland with Roman aid, and then lending legitimacy to his rule by marrying into the legendary Hasmonean dynasty, whose fame was rooted in the celebrated Jewish Maccabean revolts of centuries past. Herod the Great’s success (his building projects in Judea were more than impressive) was matched only by his ruthlessness (it is during Christmastide that we also remember accounts of his slaughter of innocent children in Bethlehem in an effort to protect his throne from the prophesied Messiah.)<br />
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But Herod’s carefully crafted and paid-for rule is trembling with fear when word of a new king’s birth is whispered in his ear and these strangers from the East come looking for him. Yet the wise men catch the scent of Herod’s fearful scheming through their wise observation and dreams – they are whole, it seems, in their engagement with the universe and the sacred; holy mystics – rulers perhaps – of a different order than the unholy, violent, divisive and soul-rending political machinations that make up Herod and his ilk. The Magi are sacred watchers of signs in nature and the solitude of sleep; faithful stewards of ancient wisdom buried in the very foundations of history and the human experience – wisdom that speaks of our need for a savior, of God to come among us to restore our wholeness.<br />
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Recently, I had the privilege of one of those all-too-rare pastoral conversations with a stranger: a seeker from the wider community. For years she has struggled mightily with memories of a profoundly traumatic childhood: trauma that led almost inevitably to struggles with addiction and the law. She had done so many things right more recently: residential programs, therapy, psychiatric care, engaging recovery groups to address her compensating addiction, grappling with various diagnoses...some wrong, some right...struggling with how medication made things better...and made things worse...She had taken every step you can imagine to find and fight for her healing. But still not a day would go by that she didn’t re-engage with the awful memories of her youth, sometimes triggered unexpectedly by things that would seem to most of us innocuous.<br />
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She visited me and wondered aloud through tears simply why she couldn’t get over the traumas of the past. Her prayer life is vibrant, she continually offers thanks to God for every daily blessing, she knows scripture well, she places high expectations on herself to let go of anger and forgive those who harmed her, she struggles faithfully to keep her family together. Why doesn’t God just fix things inside her and punish the guilty as a reward for her fidelity? Why can’t she just be healed so she can be a better help to her family and friends?<br />
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It was these questions that were worthy, I realized, of the Christ-child, and the long, uncertain journey of the Magi. That the Magi and Jesus would experience a world that was as brutal in some ways as hers is a given. The Magi had to face Herod. So did the Holy Family. Neither of them fixed the situation politically or saw Herod brought to justice. The Magi simply evade Herod on the way home. The innocents of Bethlehem will be killed. John the Baptist will be beheaded and Jesus will die on the cross in part because of the machinations of one of Herod the Great’s sons and heir. Imagine the very different and somehow more familiar story we would have had the Magi remained with Jesus and conspired with him against Herod. The political messiah everyone, even Herod himself, expected, would be just another dynasty battling for power – perhaps with an Eastern alliance opposed to Herod’s Roman one – the Nazorean political family possibly rising and falling in history, like the Hasmoneans, the Herodians, or the Caesars.<br />
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One of our alternate gospels today talk of Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt to protect the infant Jesus from Herod’s murderous designs for a time. Exile is an inevitable and un-fixable part of the human condition: one that Jeremiah speaks to again on the Second Sunday after Christmas. And that exile has many forms: political, social, relational, familial, and even that awful internal divorce between our heads and hearts, between our inner private and outer public lives. And then there’s the cross that holds it all up for redemption, which is hinted at to Mary even while her first-born destined to be baptized the Son of God still grows in her womb.<br />
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“What if,” I asked this stranger who became no-longer-a-stranger in my office, “your struggle is a struggle we all share? One that Christ shares with you?” Sure, her memories and journey seemed harsher than most, but our our most holy journey in common is the struggle with our woundedness.<br />
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“What if Jesus isn’t on the outside waiting to fix things, but in the very midst of your struggle with those traumatic memories, standing with you in those awful moments, sharing those wounds with you?”<br />
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I found myself offering advice I was once given by a wise counselor in a broken moment: to remember and suffer is as human as it gets. To struggle with woundedness is not so much a “fixable” reality or one to be gotten over, but one to be lived into faithfully as a journey every bit as important as following the star in the East – our wounds are a reality into which we invite Jesus for redemption, not one we try to fix before we meet him. To struggle with forgiveness itself is a process: not simply a switch we throw in our heads. To weep over difficult memories is simply to weep, a most human and Christian vocation. And then to give thanks is to offer this precious gift of Christ in our midst the very best we have to offer.<br />
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And then when we remembered her children, some of whom are now successfully engaging adulthood, she brightened considerably. Despite her own struggles, she had already been a help to them and a loving support in ways she might not even be able to imagine. And then there were those to whom she witnessed every day walking alongside her in recovery. Her ministry in grace had already begun, and had been unfolding for a long time. She didn’t need to wait until she was completely healed or perfect, or even just until tomorrow. The life of Christ had already been unfolding in her. Like the exiles’ return in Jeremiah, her journey home was palpable, ongoing, and will be ultimately joyous even if, like the returning lame and blind, she – like all of us, and even like our beloved Christ – still bears the wounds of this life.<br />
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It is this wisdom, perhaps, that the Magi knew as they journeyed great distances, asking questions, following uncertain paths, knowing their own brokenness and limitations and learning and re-learning the brokenness of the world, and yet at long last kneeling and worshiping the Christ-child and offering their greatest gifts in homage. . .<br />
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This divinity born vulnerable and human as a child among us, who is birthed into all our wounded places, shares our scars and sorrows and even our death, and yet knits a broken cosmos back together; who is driven into exile himself, and yet invites us on the long journey home from all of our wounding exiles from self, community, and God; who is worshiped by strangers sometimes more faithfully, it seems, than the recognized faithful among us; and who is revealed as the Savior of All as the darkness turns to light and the star ascends in our hearts.Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-60429596272742271532013-12-26T10:46:00.002-08:002014-04-21T13:34:28.596-07:00Christmas SilenceListen to <i><a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/podcasts/media/2013-12-24_sermon.mp3" target="_blank">A Holy Silence</a></i>, a Christmas sermon delivered this year at <a href="http://oursaviourmv.org/" target="_blank">Church of Our Saviour</a>, Mill Valley, California.<br />
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<b>Silence Paradox</b></div>
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Silence speaks with silent slate,<br />
a place to project ourselves to hear<br />
heart’s murmurings until heart comes home;<br />
to poisoned mind on big screen large,<br />
’til antidote resolves.<br />
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Silence guards ’gainst word distorted,</div>
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feeble language fails meaning carry<br />
where trust away corroded and time-rusted relation.<br />
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Watchful silence better than angry exchange,</div>
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patience borne that withholds all words,<br />
for word of God withheld lest rend us might,<br />
before we are ready for Truth.<br />
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Silence: darkness before Truth’s dawn,</div>
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the time to anxiously prepare,<br />
for the Light that will reveal all,<br />
and even silent hearts exposed will show<br />
their true hue and life’s delight.<br />
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Silence: most loving when all other love extinguished,</div>
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and all other avenues pounded to rubble,<br />
and even fear itself grows waiting weary.</div>
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Silence: the stuff of unclosed conversations,<br />
and business left undone,<br />
of lives cut short and forsaken loves.<br />
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Silence: wisdom when no response will do,</div>
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when it is time to make way beyond all judgment, all control,<br />
allow the errant heart to find its own path through the maze of life.<br />
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Silence: language of death that awaits new life,</div>
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of darkness under stars of hope ’fore God’s new Light,<br />
of waiting upon nameless expectation,<br />
that wraps us up against the cold...<br />
in the warmth of silence, that faithful paradox,<br />
where whole universes await new birth.<br />
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– Advent/Christmas 2013</div>
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Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25560965.post-37042783852636634042013-12-19T08:52:00.002-08:002013-12-19T08:53:57.158-08:00Out of Silence<em>A reflection offered at the 2013 Advent Silent Days at the Bishop’s Ranch, Healdsburg, California.</em>
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Just about everyone who studies music in formal settings long enough hears the apocryphal story of a student who observes her famous teacher one day sitting at the keyboard gazing intently at a music score in silence. The intensity of concentration is so striking that the student strains to see the score herself but dares not say a word. As the minutes go by in silence, the student slowly screws up her courage to finally ask out loud,<br />
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“What are you studying so intently?”<br />
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Her master teacher breaks his gaze from the pages and looks up at the student with equal intensity and simply says, “Music.”<br />
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Nervously, the student replies, “Yes, there are a lot of notes. . .”<br />
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“No, my dear,” says the master teacher, “Music is what happens between the notes. That is what must be studied.”<br />
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John Cage, one of the more colorful 20th-century composers, famously presented his koan-esque 4"33, in which a performer came out on stage and simply sat down at the instrument or music stand in silence for the time allotted, then got up, took a bow, and exited.<br />
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At a more superficial level, it was an exercise at teaching an audience to learn to listen to itself – a bit of a poke-in-the-eye from performers to their patrons who would invariably cough, wriggle, talk, or otherwise distract their way through a carefully planned and rehearsed musical masterwork. At a deeper level, it was part of Cage’s exploration that any sound – even the sound of an audience – could be considered music. But more deeply still, it was a riddle very much along the lines of the Zen koans Cage himself must have known, such as:<br />
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「隻手声あり、その声を聞け」 (Sekishu-goe ari, sono goe o kike)<br />
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Literally: “There is the sound of one hand; listen to this sound.”<br />
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Or as is often better translated into English:<br />
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“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”<br />
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More so than the Western question about the noise of unobserved falling trees, the head-splitting notion of a hand clapping without its partner, like 4'33, leads us into the universe-old mystery of silence: a place where, if we but allow ourselves, we might be drawn into the primordial divine mystery.<br />
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It might be easy for us, here on retreat, to fall into pride at our taking silence seriously. This is the time of year we have a penchant for criticizing our commercial, noise-filled culture, one that seems ever more resistant to silence: crowding us and the world as it does with words, noise, and every sensory input imaginable.<br />
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But are we Christians, however traditional we regard ourselves, all that better?<br />
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We have been taught to value words so much, we even talk about the Word, incarnate in our midst this time of year. Our reverence for scripture and the sacred tasks and words of our structures and institutions have been the subject of bloodshed and reformation; we wrangle over them to this day. We preach, write, discuss, sing, and pray out loud or utter the words in our own heads and hearts in the name of discernment, seeking, and intercession. We drown out the silence with accumulated tradition and book-learning and spoken wisdom passed down across the ages.<br />
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How easily we can forget the space between the words and the notes, or the silence that fills the stories of our most beloved characters of scripture:<br />
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What is the silence about between the Annunciation, Mary’s visit with Elizabeth, and the story of Jesus’ birth? The silence about the certain silence of sleepless nights as Mary pondered mystery? Or Joseph slowly stretched himself beyond all convention to grasp the strange promise they were called to wait for, protect, and then bring to birth?<br />
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What is the silence built into the very structure of the cosmos, from the huge empty, voids between the galaxies, stars, and planets to the equally huge empty spaces between the nuclei of atoms and their orbiting electrons? What is the silence about between friends, between longtime spouses and lovers, between members of community who have shared all words until no more will come, or no more are necessary? Or the silence between a question and an answer? Or the silence in the face of suffering, awe, or perplexity?<br />
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We focus so much attention on words and sound, we tend to forget that they are always a tiny fraction of reality, and only a mere flimsy representation of what is. Like matter, they occupy the tiniest, ever-shrinking fraction of space in the universe. And they are fickle, diffuse, and fungible. It is the silence that is eternal and unnervingly real and – ironically – painfully tangible and ever-present. Scientists tell us now it is just as likely this reality will end in silence as anything else, when the boundaries of time and space are stretched out into the silent void so much that matter itself will cool, fall apart, and disintegrate.<br />
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And yet, we Christians sing “Alleluia” into the silence of the grave, and perceive resurrection in the open, silent, empty tomb.<br />
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Our reality, our spirituality – like music, like relationship, like speech – is bounded and defined by silence.<br />
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I am not at all sure which is more terrifying to us: recognizing God’s awful silence that fills the space between illumination in our lives – much like that darkness that occupies space between the stars; or that humbling realization that without other words of authority in our lives, our own egos will attempt to project our own self-serving words onto the divine silence.<br />
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The mystics have always occupied that endless spiritual dilemma, and little wonder they walk the razor’s edge between madness and enlightenment: so closely that “sensible” people often wisely avoid them. Silence carries an enormous risk, and really, the more I contemplate it, a divine risk.<br />
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God risks losing us by being silent. We might think when confronted by silence that God isn’t there, or we might end up filling the void with our own words and agendas and making them into yet more gods that fail us.<br />
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But those who dare the silent path anyway, that razor’s edge between madness and enlightenment, dare to grow up by confronting the divine silence of this life. If God doesn’t have an immediate answer or grace for every prayer or riddle life brings, then we have a chance to learn the greater spiritual virtues of patience, humility. . .maybe even wisdom. We have a chance to watch ourselves grow up beyond selfishness, ambition, and our own controlling egos; to be opened to the divine mystery at work between the words, between the notes on the page, before the cosmic dance begins, before even the first word is uttered or the first note sounds. . .<br />
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Meister Eckhart, in a sermon on the incarnation (“Where God Enters”) offers up the teaching of a sage:<br />
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“When all things lay in the midst of silence, then leapt there down into me from on high, from the royal throne, a secret word.”<br />
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He posits that at the very center of our being, the very kernel of our souls, is a place of unreachable silence, beyond all thought, all word, all sound, all music, even beyond all our awareness.<br />
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And that is where the incarnation begins.<br />
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We are made of star-stuff, after all, and the same space in all matter is in us. So are we also made up of voids of understanding, the yawning silences of unknowing, great rifts and inconsistencies that no end of reason, research, or worldly wisdom will resolve. We are not all solid or all sound. Nor will we ever be. To believe otherwise denies an essential key of our spiritual reality, and reduces us to less – far less even – than we truly are.<br />
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Silence sets this distorting denial aside and opens us to a new grace.<br />
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It is the silence outside that risks reflecting to us the silence within. Can we keep watch there long enough to glimpse our true emptiness? And dare we hope that it is that emptiness, that silence, that huge space before all time, that silence between the words, thoughts, and notes that will be the cradle in us for God’s true song be born?Br Richard Edward Helmer BSGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04603206783767329399noreply@blogger.com0