I don’t know if the Ascension means much to you or how you interpret it...I confess that I actually hadn't thought about it at much length before this sermon. It wasn't a theological point that really grabbed my attention, but this week it really struck me.

It says in the Acts reading from Thursday that the disciples asked Christ if it was time for the restoration of God’s Kingdom. And Jesus responds by saying that the timing of God is not for them to know, but “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Then Christ is lifted up out of their sight by a cloud, and two wise figures in white say to the crowd of disciples gathered there, “why do you keep gazing up into heaven?”

By leaving the disciples alone on earth while Christ ascends to heaven, we, as contemporary disciples, receive a charge from Christ. To be witnesses on this earth. Not to pine after heaven or ask when all things will be made right by God. But to practice the power of the Holy Spirit right here in our charge as witnesses, from our own city to the ends of the earth.

But what does a witness do? What is a witness? A witness doesn't just act mindlessly. Nor does a witness just see. Witnesses are neither passive observers nor thoughtless actors. A witness is aware. A witness sees the reality of the world, and with thoughtfulness and compassion acts and testifies in accordance with her values. It is a sacred call that Christ gives us in the Ascension account in Acts--to be witnesses in the world--to choose awareness of reality & not to stay silent, but to speak and to act.

The truth that we know all too well is that we live in a world of brokenness and suffering, and so our sacred call to bear witness to that reality is a powerful and challenging one. It’s not easy to witness suffering, to witness violence. As witnesses, however, we are also called to witness the beauty of this world, the small flashes of compassion and peace that sometimes go unnoticed. We are called to testify to love. In this way, being a witness is a  rather maternal call, for all of us...as we are invited into the possibility of observing and acting with a tenderness, justice, and love that is grounded in reality and oneness.

Julian of Norwich, the English mystic who was commemorated this week, lived in a time of disease, violence, and societal upheaval. Millions and millions of people in Europe died during the mid to late 14th century while the plagues raged. Julian witnessed this reality, and undoubtedly suffered because of it, and yet her legacy is one of hope and love and oneness with God. She is famous for the vivid vision she received where Christ came to her and told her, “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things, will be well.” Julian also received visions that Christ was our Mother--a somewhat unusual theology at the time and even now. She saw the relationship between Christians and Christ as one of nurture, love, and sacrifice, and Christ literally as our mother, taking on our human nature in what Julian called “the motherhood of grace.” Julian was a witness to the oneness of humanity in Christ's motherly love, in Christ's motherhood of grace.

Taking a cue  from Julian of Norwich, let’s look at the readings for this week again: Christ, our Mother, ascends into heaven, and asks us to be her witnesses to the ends of the earth. She asks us to wait, not idly, but actively. While she is in heaven, and we are here on this imperfect earth. The disciples want to know when all will be made right, when Christ will return, and they keep gazing up at the heavens expectantly, probably impatiently, with frustration, sadness, maybe even despair. Their best friend, their brother, teacher, mother:  has died unjustly, been mysteriously and miraculously raised from the dead, walked alongside them once more, and now finally leaves again as suddenly as she arose from the grave.  

But if Christ is our Mother, and leaves us as her witnesses on this earth, we know that even in our separation from Christ, there is tenderness, nurture and love--there is oneness. It can be discouraging, tragic even, to be a human being. We often long for something better than the realities of this world. We yearn for union with God. There is a temptation to believe that all things will be made right sooner rather than later, or at least to hope. We hear this desire in the reaction of the disciples to the Ascension, and it is also reflected in the reading from Revelation today:

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come."

And let everyone who hears say, "Come."

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Come! Come! There is an impatience! Come, let us drink that water of life! Let us be nurtured by the maternal milk that Christ offers us from her breast--the water of abundant life! How can we make that feeling of safety, of love, of comfort & closeness--like a child at her mother’s breast-- a reality in this world of violence and disappointments and broken hearts and empty bellies?

Today’s Mother's Day Walk for Peace in Dorchester is one beautiful example. Not because the walk itself is going to end gun violence in our city. Not because any public protests or actions can make decisive, instant change in our society. But our gospel reading for today reveals to us what is powerful about this kind of action:  it creates oneness, in the way that the gospel of John describes. Coming together in common cause for good with people with whom we wouldn’t  necessarily come together otherwise is undeniably powerful. Jesus says in this passage, “God, I am in you, and you are in me,  and as such, the people are in me so that they can know you.” It is through our oneness in Christ's spirit that we have connection to God, that we have union with love, and that we have the possibility of changing the world through our powerful role as witnesses. An action like the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace is a beautiful example of what witness and oneness look like, calling mothers and others into unity in a message of peace: We see our children shot down on our own streets, we witness that truth, and we speak to it--we bear witness & testify together.

As human beings who have had the experience of holding another human being within their bodies, mothers seem particularly aware of the need to care for others, of the lack of separation between individual people--the fundamental unity of humanity. Mothers can relate to what Christ says in the gospel today: “I am in you and you are in me.” Mothers have literally held their children within them. But even for those of us who have never been mothers, or perhaps never will be--by choice, circumstance, biology--we can learn from the power of a mother's witness. The capacity for humans to hold other humans within us is not limited to the physicality of motherhood. By holding one another in love, we become part of a web of connection that binds us to the Holy, and that expands our sense of compassion and justice out beyond our own self-interest. By holding one another in love, we live into our maternal capacity for witness and oneness.

Julian tells us “all will be well, all will be well,” and perhaps her vision could become a reality in this world. Maybe not as quickly as we'd like, but if we all held the people of our communities and families and world a little closer to us, and if we all understood this oneness as a clarion call to courageous compassion--to witness to peace, maybe then all would be well. 

This call to witness to peace is not a passive call, but a call to activity. Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. Peace is not gazing up at the sky, focused on heaven. As witnesses and peacemakers we are called to active awareness of the world around us and courage to face it with that fierce maternal love within us all--that love that our Mother Christ gives to us. The power of the Holy Spirit has come upon us and does come upon and will come upon us so that we can be courageous in our witness and our love, from those most intimate to us, to the ends of the Earth! As Christ says today, “so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." So that the young people who are shot on our streets each and every day may be in us, so that the civilians who are wounded and killed by bombs every day in Afghanistan may be in us, so that the mothers whose milk--whose water of life--is dried within their breasts by hunger every day may be in us--so that Love may call us into witness and oneness. Amen.

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Lections: Acts 16:9-15; Ps. 67; Rev. 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29

Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. The earth has brought forth her increase; may God, our own God, give us his blessing. May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him.  AMEN.

Doesn’t it just feel as if the new life of Easter is just CASCADING out of the natural world, this week? Warmth and flowers and leaves and sunshine leaping exuberantly out of the depths of this long, hard, even devastating winter?  It draws us outside irresistibly, calling to us, begging us to hope, begging us to believe in goodness, begging us to look forward!

“Lord, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding,” says the Collect.  I don’t know about you, but daffodils are one of those good things that surpass my understanding.  And my new little dogwood tree, bought in its bare-stick stage out from among the thick evergreen Christmas trees at Mahoney’s Garden Center last December when nobody in their right mind would be buying a deciduous tree, is throwing out its first greeny-white blooms in the shady back corner of my garden, where the smoke tree died a year ago, a testimony of renewal that speaks to my senses and my heart first, with my mind playing catch-up!

We need these reminders of healing, of redemption.  Our souls cry out for them.  Just as I needed to be invited to the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque on Prospect St. last Thursday, invited along with a large crowd of people – who knows who we all were, and what our faith journeys were? Folk who were Jewish and Christian, we knew were there, the crosses and yarmulkes attesting, but undoubtedly also folk who were atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, and pagan, along with the Muslims who were offering us hospitality.  We all gathered in front of City Hall in the spitting rain to walk down Mass Ave at rush hour and around the corner to the mosque, to remove our shoes and enter barefoot the holy ground of that place of worship and prayer, all together manifesting to ourselves and each other and the CNN cameras our loving commitment to learn ever more deeply to see God in each other, to hear love in each other’s prayers, to feel the Spirit surging up in us to heal our divisions and make us whole. I needed that witness after all the anguish of the weeks since Patriot’s Day, and after all the anguish of the months since Jorge Fuentes’ needless, senseless death on his doorstep in Dorchester last fall, and all the anguish of so much more death all around the world.

I didn’t just need the reminder.  I needed the OPPORTUNITY to express my own hope, my own conviction that faithful Muslims can be as full of Spirit as I and my Christian friends seek to be, as my Jewish friends seek to be. I needed to BE COUNTED AMONG THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF LOVE to redeem hatred, to counter violence, to bring justice, to flower forth out of any cold, to shine out of any darkness.  In my life of community fellowship and scripture study and worship and prayer here at St. James’s, God pours into my heart such love towards God, that I find myself loving God in all things and above all things, as the Collect says. Not waiting to love until everything is sorted out and peace is restored, not waiting to love until I’m safe, but loving NOW, loving ALL, loving URGENTLY, loving in the TEETH of hatred gnashing at me, loving truly as if LOVE POSSESSED THE WORLD despite the way things look from here.

Somehow the providential abundance of spring makes this priority on love seem less counter-intuitive at a time when we are still reeling from the impact of the Marathon bombs, and still making the connections between that highly public, highly visible, broadly traumatizing event in a neighborhood and on an occasion rarely afflicted by violence and the many recurring traumas inflicted on our brothers and sisters in neighborhoods of our city where public life of almost any kind happens under persistent threat of sudden violence.

Let’s remember that Jesus was living in a time of persistent and recurring violence and Jesus’ neighbors, too, felt under siege by the punitively violent enforcement of empire.  And he’s speaking in John’s Gospel Chapter 14 into the gathering darkness of his impending arrest and execution on the cross.  Yet he gives his disciples – and us – this luminous promise: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. 

How can we NOT be afraid?  What sort of peace is possible when we live amid such violence, and when the broad response to that violence seems to be to try to classify people and attribute blame: it must be Chechens (or Dagestanis).  It must be immigrants.  It must be Muslims.  It must be alienated young men and their vulnerable younger brothers.  It must be that liberal Cambridge high school!  A lax FBI! It must be that mosque on Prospect St., breeding insurgents.  Or at least so it looks when you “google” the mosque: up come pages of headlines “Boston suspects’ mosque has ties to convicted terrorists,” etc.

But John the Evangelist would say, that’s the kind of rhetoric the world gives. And Jesus does not “give as the world gives.” If we see only through the eyes of the world, the “cosmos,” as that word is in John’s Greek, we will miss the God’s-eye view, the view from the perspective of love.  And we cannot get that perspective without beginning with at least the openness to love.  When we begin without a disposition to love, even a WILL to love, the fearful things loom large on our horizon and obstruct our view.  Our hearts are troubled.  We have no peace.

Jesus says in John’s Gospel that if we love him, we will keep his word: “word, (logos, not the more ordinary term rhema).” “Keep” here means not only “obey,” but “keep hold of,” “preserve,” “treasure up.”  And what is being [treasured] here is not simply commandments, but logos, Jesus’ own divine essence, of which the love commandment is [at the heart: “love one another as I have loved you.”] Anyone who [preserves and treasures up] this logos, Jesus’ Father will love, and the two of them will come and will [make their home] with every lover of the logos...” And out of that fullness of God at home in us, springs the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, INSIDE US, to teach us everything and remind us of what Jesus has said, in other words, to remind us of the logos, Jesus’ divine essence, which is that self-offering love. [L. William Countryman, Proclamation 6, Series C: Easter]

But the world, the cosmos, says Jesus in John’s Gospel, cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because,John’s Gospel says in the verses just before our lectionary passage for today, the world neither sees him nor knows him. “The human failure to love can, in some sense, limit God’s success with us.  [That is the freedom in which God created us.] Only [starting from at least a mustard seed – a daffodil bulb, a dogwood bud – of openness to seeing] love [at the heart of all that is] do we become open to the presence of God in and with us…” Of course, “the love of the disciples is not yet perfect or complete,” any more than OURS is.  “But John’s Gospel does not reject them for that.  The important thing is rather that love has begun to work its way in us.” [ibid.]

And once love has begun to work its way in us, the Spirit will compound that “growth in love in us by maintaining our connection with the beloved… the Spirit will not only teach [us] all things, but bring to mind all the things that Jesus [has told us].  For the message of Jesus [about love] is not something to be learned and remembered [by rote,] merely as a form of words…but rather in its ability to change the hearer, to reveal new dimensions of reality, a new [and deeper] understanding of truth, and therefore a new way of living life… a conversion… a new plane of understanding where familiar words gain new meaning and those that previously seemed irrelevant or unintelligible come to life again.” [ibid.]

This conversion, this growth in love that the Spirit, once we give it opening, can work in us, can put us increasingly at odds with “what the world gives.”  It can be hard to communicate across that gap, hence all the complexity of Jesus’ language here in John’s Gospel to the disciples. He knows that only when we are already “leaning in,” already disposed to open our hearts to his message of self-offering love, will we be able to hear clearly, be able to receive the Spirit more deeply, be able to open further to love.  Others will find the message of love merely off-putting, mindless, even offensive.

So it is that although the cosmos might miss the connection, it can seem like a no-brainer to us, if we have already welcomed the Spirit, the Teacher of God’s loving view of the world, into our hearts, that we would respond to the violence on Newbury St. on Patriots’ Day by marching in the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace in Dorchester this coming Sunday.  It can seem like a no-brainer to head directly to the mosque when we have the opportunity to PRACTICE our conviction that we can love God IN ALL THINGS and ABOVE ALL THINGS, as the Collect says.  In an alienated and antagonistic, blame-laying, suspicion-laden cosmos, such a concerted will to love can seem misplaced, even radical.  But it is there and only there that we discover “the peace that passes understanding.”

As we seek to navigate such a painful, uncertain and fear-inducing cosmos, let us open our hearts; let us draw confidence from the loving outpouring of beauty springing forth around us; and let us turn to our very own Book of Common Prayer, to the prayer of thanksgiving for the diversity of all races and cultures.  All we need to do is add “faiths” to that line-up of diversity.  Let us close with prayer:

O God, who created all peoples in your image, we thank you for the wonderful diversity of races, faiths, and cultures in this world. Enrich our lives by ever-widening circles of fellowship, and show us your presence in those who differ most from us, until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou are with me, with all of us, O God.  AMEN.

Never was anyone more aptly named than Anne Strong!  Whatever you might say about Anne, wherever you encountered her, whatever she was bent upon doing, “strong” was what she was.  I had some notion of that even early on in the years that Anne’s daughter Gwei began singing in our Greenleaf Choir at St. James’s.  (You will hear the Choir shortly, after Anne’s family and friends have had their say.) It was clear that she was physically and psychically tough.  But I didn’t know the HALF of it!  In fact, I really didn’t know the whole soccer/girls’ sports part of it – the very center of her life’s mission – until her obituaries came out. Latecomer to her life that I am, I wasn’t there for the awards.  I can only surmise the legions of girls out there whose enthusiasm for sports and sense of self were nurtured on teams Anne made happen.  (Though listening to her own kids and step-kids talk, it’s clear that they are the sailors and snowboarders, softball-players and outdoors-people they are in large part because Anne cajoled, hijacked, dragged, enticed, coached, and tortured them into it, no holds barred!)

I love the story her family tells of how Anne simply wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.  If Sacramento St. (on which she lived when Brian and Dylan were young) went the wrong way to suit her purposes, she re-purposed it in the right direction, with the boys hiding in the foot wells so they wouldn’t be seen with her!  When the holiday traffic on the Mass Turnpike was backed up around Sturbridge, she repurposed the median to make her way to Westchester with the family!  If her car encountered an obstacle on city streets and found itself dented and bent or even totalled, the car was just too big!

I did know that Anne was still playing soccer well into her chemo treatments for the cancer. And God knows I know how she fought her way through the illness and the treatments and what all because she was that committed not to leave her beloved Gwei and Charlie a moment earlier than she absolutely had to: the “strong” in Anne was surely tested and it surely rose to the challenge this last year! 

There simply hasn’t ever been anyone more determined.  Considering that Anne grew up in the kind of Westchester country club privilege that considered women to be the ornament of the genteel life, Anne’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of naturalness – like her passion for sports – was itself a hard-won thing, a thing she discovered in herself against the odds, then claimed and nurtured, forging her own way as athlete, lawyer, nature-lover, leader. 

But alongside all that toughness, Anne Strong had a heart the size of a house.  A heart big enough to sweep up and hug all the young girls who risked missing out on sports that way she had missed out, who yearned as she had yearned, as she had waited at the light at JFK & Memorial Drive, watching girls cross the street on their way to sports practice, and had simply wept for all she herself hadn’t had the chance to do.  A heart big enough to found whole soccer leagues for these girls and coach them and make them a success so that many inner-city girls had the chances she had longed for.

A heart big enough to see the potential in kids struggling with learning disabilities, and fighting to get them the support they needed to succeed.  A heart big enough to make cheese grits and whatever else they wanted, year after year, for her kids’ and step-kids’ birthdays.  A heart big enough to keep growing and changing, to take on a new marriage long after the old one went belly-up, and then, at an age when most of us look for grandkids, to express the love she felt for her new husband Charlie by seeking out and finding and adopting her Chinese daughter and devoting all the youthful vigor possible to helping Gwei to thrive.  A heart big enough to sweep two whole families into it, including Charlie’s former wife, and lay the holiday table so all could belly up to it. No WONDER we chose Isaiah 25 as Anne’s first reading!

And speaking of holiday tables, you all know – don’t you? – that for Anne, the feast over at Christ Church that follows this service is as important a sacrament as the service itself, that if we could have organized this service around a banquet table, that would have suited Anne just fine!   (That is, if we had adapted the recipes so applesauce and yogurt substituted for butter and sugar and other health-defying ingredients, a sleight-of-hand she regularly practiced on the volumes and file-cabinets and shopping bags and counters-full of recipes she had laid by!)  For Anne, cooking and sharing food with family & friends truly was a glimpse of heaven, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, as Isaiah evokes it in our first reading today, a time when tears are dried and pain assuaged and everyone is knit back together into one family.  So losing the capacity to eat was just plain torture… you might say, crucifixion.  The fact that Anne “took up her cross” and carried on for so many months, enduring treatment after treatment, is a profound testimony to her love, her determination to stay with her beloved family as long as she possibly could despite the anguish and deprivation.  Now WE are doubly obligated to make up for her lost time by thoroughly enjoying the feast in her honor, as we are to thoroughly enjoy the music in this service, which, from all the way back when she sang harmony with her own sisters, also expresses Anne’s immense gusto for life.  Buon appetito!

Odd that, for a woman of such a vigorous ethic of service and so intimate and committed a relationship with the beauty of the natural world as well as the possibilities of the human one, Anne wasn’t quite sure about her own faith, her own capacity for prayer. “I’m not sure HOW to pray!” she confided to me in the whisper left of her voice during one of those awful episodes at Brigham & Women’s, trying to get her digestion to work properly without drowning her.  (God KNOWS how many hours and how much ingenuity and how much deep tenderness Charlie invested in that effort to keep Anne nourished and breathing, y’all!) 

I think that Anne really just needed reassurance that her life – that ardent, romantic, argumentative, creative, fiercely dedicated, take-no-prisoners life of hers, that had to get the kayak in the water at Charlie’s family place, Timbertide, on Puget Sound before the vacation could begin – WAS prayer, that her insistence upon living -- her refusal to be dying! – right up to the very last two or three days before she did die WAS prayer, that her confidence in love despite all the evidence over the course of her life that love could be devastatingly lacking, WAS prayer.

So now you know why we chose the odd gospel we did for Anne’s memorial.  Because, whatever the challenges and obstacles in Anne’s way – and she overcame many – and however her strength of mind and body and will sometimes irritated and even infuriated us who love her – and however desolated we feel that she was taken from us and from her own life so much too soon, when she was still so full of passion and potential and commitment to those she loved – to ALL she loved! – nevertheless we can readily say that Anne’s life was a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, overflowing her lap; for the measure she gave was the measure she got back.  And she gave all she had, every last ounce of it. No leftovers in the fridge!

As poet Mary Oliver says, in White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field:

…so I thought:

maybe death

isn’t darkness, after all,

but so much light

wrapping itself around us ----

as soft as feathers ----

that we are instantly weary

of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river

that is without the least dapple or shadow ----

that is nothing but light ---- scalding, aortal light -----

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones.

One last question, asked out of poet Oliver’s – and Anne’s – love of the natural world and knowledge of it as the sacrament – the outward and visible sign – of God’s inward and spiritual grace, in her poem, The Summer Day:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean ----

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down ----

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

Which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

We know, Anne, what you did with yours.  (Never mind that your way of paying attention wasn’t idleness, but piloting the catamaran with the wind in your hair!) Now it is our turn to follow your lead and give everything – all that we are and all that we have – to partner with God to make this world of ours as beautiful as it can be.  AMEN.

Not present: Iselma Carrington, Warren Huber, Saskia Grunberger

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Lections: Revelation 7:9-17; Ps. 23; John 10:22-30

Let us pray:  Make these words more than words, O God, and give us the Spirit of Jesus!  Amen.

Good Shepherd Sunday.  How strange an irony that we should be celebrating Jesus the Good Shepherd in the teeth of so much fear and violence, so much mayhem in our very own community this week. 

How many of us, listening to or watching or reading in horror on Patriot’s Monday the news of the explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and their senseless carnage; how many of us, as our hearts wept in the succeeding hours and days as we learned about those whose lives or limbs were lost; how many of us as we listened to the strong words of our President and the grief and hope beyond words that issued from the cello of Yo-Yo Ma in Thursday’s interfaith service, and how many of us, waking up again with a shock on Friday morning to the news that we ourselves were at Ground Zero for the violent manhunt, then hunkered in our houses, listening to the hours of talk unspooling from our radios, as SWAT teams sought the young man – the wrestler and popular, sweet-natured scholar at our own Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School – who apparently set the explosives at the Marathon, how many of us throughout this terrible week have wondered, as I have wondered, about this shepherding image? As members of our congregation huddled under the helicopters in Watertown only blocks from where the suspect was apprehended, what did they think about The Good Shepherd?

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters.

He revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…

In this valley of the shadow of death, darkening our very own neighborhoods, East Cambridge and East Watertown and downtown Boston, thundering with helicopter blades and “controlled detonations,” with the images of atrocities filling our media and our own imaginations, evil has seemed very close at hand.  It has been very hard to see green pastures and still waters.  It has been very hard not to fear.

In one of many email and text exchanges on Friday, someone referred to “our surreal situation” under these lock-down conditions.  Surreal and strange it seemed indeed.  But I found myself thinking about the streets of Baghdad, of Kabul, these last ten-plus years, where SWAT teams became “the new normal.”  I found myself thinking about that crucible of discord, the Caucasus, from whence the families of the young men in question seem to have hailed, a region fraught with a history of terrorism and war and imperial oppression and tribal and religious disenfranchisement and even genocide. In such regions – and so many others in the world – it could be that our accustomed Cambridge peace and freedom – not violence and fear – would seem the surreal condition.

Suddenly, after this terrible surreal week in which the peace and freedom we perhaps took for granted – notwithstanding that it began on Patriots Day, that commemoration of the sacrifices made to secure our liberty in the first place – was suddenly and violently ripped from us, suddenly we are a bit more intimately acquainted with the experience of so many living in so many places where the rule of law is a shaky thing and where tribal or religious affiliations long pre-dated any Enlightenment ideal of religious and personal liberty. Suddenly we know more intimately the terror of being unable to trust that our physical, moral, and spiritual person will be respected by strangers. 

And what of neighborhoods closer by than Baghdad or Chechnya?  What of our OWN BOSTON neighborhoods where maybe SWAT teams do not roam, but violence nevertheless lurks around every corner, in the park, on the playground, after school: the violence of guns in the hands of embattled people, people who have grown up in conditions of multi-generational poverty and racism, with little sense of economic opportunity other than the illegal drug trade, people who have a commensurately limited sense of future and few dreams, but who have ready access to guns with which to prosecute their despair?  After this week, might we not find within ourselves a deeper affinity than before for those who must live in such conditions?  Might we not reach into ourselves for a brother-and-sisterhood with these neighbors that would compel us into more dedicated action to ameliorate the conditions that precipitate such a daily, hourly, terrifying, stultifying, dream-destroying culture of violence right here in our beloved Boston?

Our first response to suffering, especially the senseless suffering of the innocent, of course, is often to fiercely interrogate that Good Shepherd image. When confronted with the mutilation and death of a beautiful and talented young person like Chinese statistics graduate student at Boston University, Lu Lingzi, trotting enthusiastically the few blocks up Boylston to observe the conclusion of her first American foot race on her first American Patriot’s Day, or 8-year-old Martin Richard, awaiting his running parents, the first temptation is to abandon all hope of any kindly rod and staff, any overflowing cup, any table spread for us.  The first temptation in the face of such suffering, such injustice, such incomprehensibility is to conclude that the Good Shepherd – that golden figure benignly tending a fluffy (and neatly groomed) lamb in the sunlight of a church school poster – is a vapid fraud.  No real shepherd he, or his lamb would have sticks and mud matting her wool, and his clothes would be rough and worn, his skin burned from the sun, his hair wind-knotted and disheveled.  Tempting to say, the whole Good Shepherd thing is a fantasy, concocted to avoid the grim reality of life.

Too many of us simply stop trusting, right there.  And as the next instance of suffering and then the next bears down upon us, we are left completely at their mercy (or perhaps I should say, their mercilessness), naked and vulnerable to their meaninglessness, like wave upon wave of tsunamis overwhelming us.

But in letting our trust fall away in the face of disaster like the one that confronted us on Patriots Day and then again on the Friday of the manhunt, we are overlooking a fundamental aspect of Psalm 23. The Good Shepherd’s safeguards are not offered only in sunlight and green pastures and groomed lambs as the church school posters so often imply.  They are offered in that shadowed valley of mortality.  They are offered precisely when the going gets tough.  In those gorgeous Handelian images from the Book of Revelation, there ARE tears.  There IS hunger, and thirst.  There are ordeals, and great ones, ones that call us into the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb that was Slain, the offering-up of our lives as he offered his, the loving of one another as he loved us, right into death if need be. 

Thanks be to God, for us in the congregation of St. James’s, the most demanding sacrifice asked of us this week, the greatest ordeal this time around was to weep for others’ losses, and to stay indoors and battle our fear of what MIGHT be, what COULD be in the chaos out in our streets.  Not so MIT policeman Sean Collier.  He was called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, at the age of 26.

The Good Shepherd’s safeguards are not to keep us ever from suffering, not to protect us from having to battle incomprehension or that dread confusion that comes over us when suffering simply doesn’t make sense. Or, for that matter, when people’s choices, like the apparent choice of Dzhokar Tsarnaev and his brother to sow destruction among the innocent, don’t add up in our knowledge of them and we find ourselves disoriented in our own perceptions, suddenly, queasily not being sure we recognize good from evil, suddenly, uneasily not sure that we really can judge character.

No: the Good Shepherd ENTERS INTO OUR SUFFERING WITH US.  The Good Shepherd knows what it is to suffer.  The Good Shepherd knows what it is to hunger and thirst, for food, for righteousness. There’s an Israeli legend that tells us “to take heart every morning when we arise from our beds and see the dew on the grass, for the dew is the tears of God who has been weeping all night at the pain that we are going through.  These tears are not a sad thing, but a great source of consolation and even… a promise of resurrection. Thus, one of the most popular names in Israel today for both girls and boys is Tal, or “Dew” – the consoling tears of God, who feels our pain.” [Philip L. Culbertson,New Proclamation Year C 2010]

The Good Shepherd’s guardianship doesn’t stop at consolation, either.  The Good Shepherd instills those still waters at our core so that we CAN ENDURE the sufferings that come upon us.  “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” The word “comfort,” con-fort, “with strength,” with fortitude, means to STRENGTHEN.  The Good Shepherd’s rod and staff strengthen us to wash our own robes in the blood of the Lamb, to walk INTO the ordeal, to head straight FOR the places of pain and suffering. The Good Shepherd’s anointing, his nourishment proffered at the table spread for us – the Eucharistic table – is an anointing for MINISTRY, a strengthening to follow him INTO THE PAIN, seeking to bring healing and reconciliation precisely where healing and reconciliation seem utterly impossible in the chaos.

So today, as we celebrate our return to peace and freedom in Boston, as we celebrate all the effort – police effort, doctors-and-nurses’ effort, EMTs’ and marathon runners’ and bystanders’ rescuing effort, reporters’ effort, pastors’ effort, our own mutually supporting and consoling effort – ALL the effort expended for good in these last terrible days, I invite you to summon your trust in the ever-present Good Shepherd and join me, along with Bishop Tom Shaw, Bishop Gayle Harris, and many, many other members of the Diocese of Massachusetts on the morning of Sunday March 12^th in Dorchester to march with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute’s 17^th Annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace as part of our diocesan Anti-Violence effort called “B-Peace.” We’re registering in the name of Jorge Fuentes, the young Dorchester native and graduate of our B-Safe Program at St. Stephen’s in the Southend, who was shot to death randomly on his own doorstep last summer.

All proceeds from the walk will support the work of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, which assists and empowers families impacted by violence by providing support to survivors of homicide victims. Applying their peace curriculum in area schools, the Peace Institute works to instill the value of peace in young people. Through education, collaboration, and policy advocacy, the Peace Institute works to raise awareness of the cause and consequences of violence on the individual, the family, and the community. The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute is named after 15-year old peacemaker Louis D. Brown, who worried about the effect of violence on his community and dreamed of becoming the first Black President of the United States. Louis was the victim of Dorchester gang crossfire in 1993. The Peace Institute was founded to continue the peacemaking legacy of this young leader. [http://mothersdaywalk4peace.org/Event_Information_2.html]

Joining the walk this year is Scarlett Lewis, mother of six-year-old Jesse Lewis, killed in Newtown, Connecticut.  "I am walking to honor my son Jesse and Louis D. Brown and all those who have been lost to acts of violence. I am walking to honor all the mothers who have suffered indescribable pain yet move forward in love and faith. I am walking to spread the word that we can choose love and it is a decision that we make every day. I am walking to make a positive change in the world. I am walking for love," says Lewis. [ibid.]

I hope to bring at least 15 people from St. James’s with me for the Walk, which will conclude with a Eucharist celebrated in Town Field Park, where the Walk begins and ends.  Edwin will stay at St. James’s to preside at Eucharist here. 

In this terrible week, when violence has come home to us in ways far too intimate for comfort, let us indeed be comforted by the Good Shepherd, so that we will fear no evil, but instead move straight into the pain, followers of the Shepherd wherever brokenness needs mending and wounds need healing, bringing peace where there is no peace.  For surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we will dwell in the house of the LORD, for ever.  AMEN.

Laine Walters Young Living Epistle

St. James’s Episcopal Church, Cambridge

April 21, 2013

On Sacrifice, Burnout, and the Christian life

The rhythms of Holy Week a few weeks ago, going to church so many times in a week, reminded me of how I grew up in the church. My single mother and I were involved in so many things and went to so many services at church that we practically lived there. Even before my father left, the only time I felt like the three of us we were a family was when we were in church. When I was a child, we went no matter what else was going on, letting the liturgical year speak to us with whatever we brought, literally, to the table. Sitting in a pew, hearing the Borg-like drone of our communal prayers is a grounding to what is essential, to what is larger than us, to what will sustain.

However, for the past few years, living in far off Brighton and working at a church in Chestnut Hill has ironically made me accustomed to less worship than I actually need. To be honest, until this past year I was more than just busy and far away, I was burned out. Seriously burned out. Giving my heart and soul at a church 5 days a week and then coming here to lead something or another or have my husband Michael do so left me frazzled and spent and him too.

I have always believed in service and life lived in community to such an extent that as teenager I contemplated joining a religious order. (Michael is very glad I didn’t actually do that.) My call to live in close relationship to God and God’s people started when I was very young, perhaps when I was an infant, because I can’t remember ever not feeling it. But for awhile in recent years, instead of the Christian community being a source of abundant life, all I saw were needs, management issues, brokeness. I did not feel any respite and rejuvenation and I ended up withdrawing as much as I could. My sense of call was not put in doubt during this time of intense burnout, but I didn’t know how to keep on pursuing it in a way that was life-giving rather than life-endangering. Since I needed my job, I nearly left St. James’s in my misery, my misery and drain was so deep. It was a hard thing to consider, because as many of you know, this is where I met my husband Michael, on Easter Sunday 7 years ago, where he asked me out at choir practice the very next Wednesday, and where we were married 2.5 years later. St. James’s is the only community of faith Michael has ever known. You are the closest thing I have ever seen to Dr. King’s Beloved Community. I do not believe that Christian communities have better hearts than this.

Why am I telling you this, you dear, dear people, about how I nearly left you? I am telling you this because I believe that honesty is redeeming and prophetic. Edwin talked the Sunday after Easter about showing our wounds as part of our Christian testimony, and this is one of mine. Burnout is a common problem in all communities where we are asked to give our whole selves and sometimes do not know where to stop or how to refuel. It is often a problem we will encounter time and again no matter the community in which we involve ourselves until we learn for ourselves how to handle our own selves, but how ironic that Christian communities can cause some of the worst burnout when the One we follow, Jesus Christ, is supposed to offer us abundant life? How is it that we can sometimes fall so deeply out of balance in the Christian journey?

While there are many joys in the Christian call to a life of service, there is plenty of sacrifice and sometimes that can lead to burnout. We as Christians are asked not to pursue worldly Glory or security, to rely on God, and to put all our resources of time and energy toward feeding the poor, caring for the sick and defending the vulnerable. I bring this up today precisely because YOU, dear people of St. James’s, DO answer that call, of sacrificial living, of paying it forward. While I freely admit to being hugely Type A, I bet more than a few of you have experienced burn out yourselves, here or elsewhere and are wondering if answering the call is worth it, if it continues to be right and Godly when it can feel so unGodly. I bet you wonder how you can keep going on.

It IS worth it, but we owe it to ourselves to be more finely attuned to what feeds us. I know that I am fed by the music here at St. James’s, by worship and the Eucharist, by someone sincerely asking how I am at coffee hour, by challenging my brain in some way that deepens my spirituality, like being asked to lead a 20s and 30s discussion on my academic work, thank you Edwin. And, in terms of being drained, I now know that doing any organizing work here is too similar to my work in Chestnut Hill to do it on my Sabbath.

And I am so, so comforted and inspired by the fact that we are on the verge of hiring a fantastic associate priest to provide pastoral care and formation to our families going forward. We have needed that here. By hiring this person, we as a community have taken a stand against communal burn out and toward care. We have allowed Holly and all those involved in formation to breathe and enjoy. While this new associate is not a panacea, I cannot help but think we are doing our small part to provide a safety net of care and Christ for our youth who are often more troubled that we know. This has been a hard week. It has been terror, and it has been terror at the hands of troubled young people who, as their uncle said, had never learned to settle themselves and were upset that others had managed to do so. We must be a community of sending out, but also of immense settling and teaching it to our young.

What feeds you, St. Jamesians? And also, just as importantly, what makes you feel drained? These are important questions to ask in order to keep doing all the good, important work we are called to do. We do not ask ourselves these questions often or honestly enough.

Many of you know by now that Michael and I will be moving to Nashville this summer so that I can pursue a fully-funded doctorate in Religion, Psychology and Culture at Vanderbilt. What you don’t know is that the woman I will be studying with writes on sacrifice in Christian life, particularly in Christian family life. I look forward to working with her on developing concepts of healthy sacrifice, for my own benefit and others.

Yet even without further research and thought, my faith gives me an answer to my question of walking that balance and where to refuel. Believing in Christ Crucified and Risen means that we as Christians must always put our lives in the greater context of salvation history. What that means is that we have a savior who calls us into relationship with him, who calls us to participate in his redemption of the world, but also calls us to rest, and to rest in Him. I am glad I have come back to that, and I thank you, St. James’s, for being my spiritual home.