To listen to a recording of this sermon, click here.

Lately we at St. Paul’s have tried to stop calling our unhoused neighbors “the homeless.” We have our reasons for this. First, they are whole human beings who should not be defined by their lack of a mailing address. Calling them “the homeless” pejoratively labels them: the label refers to something missing in their life, something abnormal, something bad or wrong.

A second reason to say no to the term “the homeless” is that our neighbors are no less our neighbors for lacking a house, and to call them “homeless” might imply otherwise: it might suggest that they are not – that they technically, literally cannot – be our neighbors. And finally, perhaps it’s just problematic in its essence, this term, “the homeless.” It diminishes our human neighbors into objects, into things, and into loathsome things at that. It’s small. It’s mean.

To listen to a recording of this sermon, click here.

The love of a parent for their child is so monumentally important that it can chart the course of a person’s entire life. When a child does not receive secure emotional attachment from a parent, they are haunted for the rest of their life. They are changed – and often gravely diminished – until their dying day.

The term “secure attachment” itself sounds tinny and clinical, not fit to do the profound duty to which it has been assigned: to describe the grand and grave responsibility a parent has to love their child with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their might – with their whole being.

And if you wonder where you’ve heard that before (“you shall love with all your heart, soul, and might”), it is from God’s most important commandment. God commands that we love God this way, while God in turn loves us beyond all human imagination. The love between parent and child is the essence of our faith, the center of all we know, feel, and do when we speak of God, and when we speak of everything that matters most to us, everything that tells us who we are.

What good are dreams, really?

You have dreams. So do I. We all have nightmares too. Do they matter?

(Do we matter?)

What good are dreams, really?

I have dreams so fantastic that I would need to live in a different timeline, on planet Earth in a beta universe, for those dreams to come true. (Incidentally, I mentioned something offhand about parallel universes the other day and our parish administrator Emily said — I think with real affection — “oh, you’re a sci-fi nerd, I see.” Yes, yes I am.) Anyway, we have fantastic dreams, wild and illogical fantasies, ecstatic leaps of the imagination. 

What good are these?

There is another gift waiting for us under the Advent tree.

Maybe you’ve already guessed this, but I love gifts at this time of year. I was the kid up at 4:30am tormenting my drowsy parents about the loot Santa left us down in the living room. And now as an adult and a faith leader, I love exploring the idea of gifts, of giftedness, God giving gifts, God as a gift. Sometimes we roll our eyes about arrogant people and say, “They just think they’re God’s gift.” But that’s actually how I think about you, people of St. Paul’s, except in a kind and good way. I think you really are God’s gift — God’s gift to me, of course, but more vitally — and even urgently — you are God’s gift to this neighborhood, this city, this world. And so I thank God for you.

This morning we have another present to open, waiting for us underneath our proverbial Advent tree. Last week we opened the first one, wrapped elegantly by our ancient Christian forebears of the first century. (In my imagination, they used fine blue and purple paper and a handsome silver ribbon.) Their First Sunday of Advent gift to us was the insight that even when the world is falling apart, the shared work of cultivating a faithful community, right here, just here, is one powerful way that God mends the world.

Cultivating community is one powerful way that God’s dominion dawns.

We now turn to our second Advent gift. This gift is wrapped roughly, in brown shipping paper and gnarled twine. It does not shine; it doesn’t seem to be cheerful. But it is a gift, nonetheless, so let’s open it.

Click here to watch a video of this sermon.

Wake up!

Open your eyes. Stretch. Yawn. Stretch again. Roll to your side, take a breath, and lift your shoulders up from the bed. Sit up straight. And then stand. Stand up and walk.

Drink water. Stretch again. Rub your eyes: yes, it is morning. You are not dreaming. You are awake. You are alive. The sun is rising. The day is beginning. The time is now.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

Water divides.

Water cuts.

Water carves giant canyons in the earth. Water marks the borders of states and nations, on this side Israel, on that side, Jordan. Water separates one people from another.

We often imagine our beloved dead across the water. We say “they have reached that other shore.” A friend of mine once said that when his family told his grandmother that she had to move into a nursing home, she said “No, I’m just gonna take my cross and cross on over.” Losing her independence felt like a death to her, and so she thought of rivers and canyons, the living all here, the dead over yonder, across the river. She wanted to go home, and she knew that home was now across the water.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

My position is wrong.

I’m wrong about almost everything. I think I know who God is, and what God is – and I think I know that those are two different questions, that God is in some sense an object, a Something, but God also is a subject, a Someone. But really – do I know what I am talking about?

I think I know how we should worship, what songs we should sing, which prayers are the best, why bad things happen to good people, and what happens after we die. I think I know whether Grace Church is healthy, and I think I know that Grace Church is healthy. I am pretty sure my congresswoman is a person of integrity, and I think I was a polite and attentive dinner companion last evening. I think I know a lot of things.

But my position is wrong.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

“Do you ever look at someone and wonder, ‘What is going on inside their head?’”

This is the opening line of the Pixar film, Inside Out, a colorful animated trip into the mind of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley. When we travel inside Riley’s head, we meet different characters, including Joy and Sadness, and watch as they interact during the upheaval of Riley’s outside life.

You may enjoy – or dismiss – this concept as a cute fantasy, but there is something to the idea that small people, or parts, live inside each of us. Maybe you have said something like, “Part of me wants to apply for that job, but another part thinks it’s a bad idea.” The language of “parts” isn’t just a way of saying something – it may point to how we really function psychologically. Saying “Part of me this, part of me that” also helps you cope with life better. If it’s just a part of me, say, who is erupting in anger, other parts can help soothe him. And my core self — the true Me at the center — can manage every part and build self-aware wisdom.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

Don’t lose heart.

Be of good courage.

Buck up, now.

Dig in and stick with it.

Focus on your feet. Take another step. Hold on. Hold onto yourself. (You have yourself to hold onto.) Stay. Stay steady. Breathe.

Now take another step.

If you look up, you could see how far away the mountains still are, out there at the very edge of this wilderness you’re crossing, and you could despair. But don’t worry: you’re not supposed to be all the way to the mountains today. You belong here today. It’s okay. Focus on your feet again. Take another step.

I’ve been having trouble staying asleep.

That’s both a literal fact and a metaphor.

First, the literal fact. These days, if I wake up and the clock says 5:00 a.m., I feel deeply blessed. I made it to 5:00 a.m!! I usually wake up around 2:15, 2:30, 3:40, or on more leisurely nights, 4:15. This has been going on since I don’t really know when … June? May? And what’s to blame? It could be blue screens, sugar, caffeine, being over-tired, for a while I thought it was over-training on my runs. Or it’s the job transition, and my instinctive resistance to the emotional punch that’s coming as I prepare to say goodbye to people I love. (That’s you.)

What is heaven?

This question is definitely as important as the question, “Is there such thing as a heaven?” In fact I think it’s more important. If we are going to spend time and energy wondering about an incredible thing we cannot see, I’d like us to determine what exactly that thing is. So —

What is heaven?

First, the negative definitions. Heaven is not a literal golden city above the clouds. We knew this centuries before airplanes and spacecraft, but they confirmed it, of course. Earth is a speck of sand orbiting an average G-type star on a minor arm of an ordinary galaxy. Heaven as a city above Earth’s clouds? Yes to the vivid metaphor; no to the naïve literalism.

Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?

In the film “Apollo 13,” one of the astronaut’s wives is taking a shower in her cheap hotel room near Cape Canaveral. Suddenly her wedding ring slips off her finger and drops down the shower drain, out of reach and out of sight. She panics. She was already coping with profound anxiety about her husband’s moon mission, fretting over the fact that he could easily be killed at any point, and so the loss of the ring is unbearably hard and worrisome and sad.

But that ancient Palestinian woman who found her tenth coin – she would not have accepted the loss of the ring. She would have dismantled the whole shower stall if she had to, so determined would she be to recover a symbol of such a vital and essential relationship.

Oftentimes, our spiritual practices, and our prayers, are about control. When I pray for friends as their planes take off — and for myself, when I’m on the plane — I want to control the safety of that aircraft. I pray this: “Help and bless them, holy God, and keep them in your care.” That’s my little airplane prayer. (I change “them” to “us” when it’s my own life on the line.) I am asking God to be in control so that a good thing happens, but really, if I’m honest, I want to be in control. Help and bless these people, holy God. Keep us in your care, holy God. Listen to me! Please do as I say!

But we often have doubts about our spiritual practices, and our prayers – and about God, and the basic idea of a loving creator. Those doubts often arise when we realize, inevitably, that we are not in control. Countless prayers were said by hundreds of people, but my mother still died of cancer. The plane could still go down. Innocent people are killed. Children are killed. Who is in control of all this? If it’s God, then we have many questions for God. But it is most certainly not you or me.

They were watching him closely.

I am sure they were.

He was attending a dinner – a Sabbath dinner, which means there were additional customs in place that everyone is expected to follow. He was a leader, a teacher, a person with a notable reputation. And he was controversial: we’re in chapter fourteen now, in Luke’s Gospel, ten chapters after his own townspeople were so enraged by what he was saying that they tried to throw him over a cliff. By now, Jesus is known up and down the countryside. And he’s making his way to Jerusalem, where he will face his ultimate confrontation, his rejection, and his execution.

So yes, they were watching him closely.

We Christians are about lifting people up. We are about lifting people up, pulling them into an embrace, and drawing them close in beloved community. That’s what we’re about. That’s who we are.

Maybe you’re a little embarrassed to call yourself a Christian in these troubled times. Our public square is populated by many Christians who pointedly do not lift people up, pull them into an embrace, and draw them close in beloved community. So many Christians in our dominant culture are about tearing down, pulling apart, and destroying community.

But that’s not what we’re about. That’s not who we are.

Who are you?

There are lots of tools available for you to figure out who you are.

Do you prefer introvert or extravert, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving? If you sort all those out with the MBTI instrument, you could discover that you are one of sixteen kinds of people.

Or maybe there are only nine kinds of people – reformers, helpers, and achievers; artists, explorers, and loyalists; enthusiasts, protectors, and peacemakers – and you can turn the nine-pointed star of the enneagram in your hands to discern who you are.

Or there are six kinds of friends, and you can use a sitcom from the 1990s to discover whether you’re Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, Chandler, or Monica. (In this instrument, I come out as Monica, always and forever, with no nuance or ambivalence.)

Around this time of year in 1994, my mother, Nancy Crippen, told me she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This was by no means the first sign of health troubles for her: as I mentioned in a sermon this past Ash Wednesday, my mother survived several major back surgeries in the 1970s. To treat her severe post-polio syndrome, the surgeons cut her open from neck to hip, more than once, and put her in full-body casts for months at a time. They installed metal rods in her lower back, and in subsequent years she occasionally would let us kids tap her down there to feel the surreal hard-as-a-rock sensation. The arrival of cancer two decades later, then, was not an out-of-the-blue calamity for an otherwise healthy person. But it was scary nonetheless, and I remember crying when she told me.

What is mine and what is yours?

What do we really believe about what we own, and what we do not own?

Let’s begin by looking at a belief I have, a belief that probably seems self-evident and utterly uncontroversial: I believe that the money in my bank account belongs to me. We live in a culture that supports this belief: everyone accepts that this money is mine, and no one else’s.

First, let’s clear something up: Martha wasn’t just doing dishes. Her complaint wasn’t about housework. And Mary wasn’t necessarily her biological sister. This was not a domestic dispute between two women, settled by a man.

Martha and Mary were probably ministry partners in leadership, co-managing a household of faith. Think of them as sisters in the way Jordan and I are brothers in Christ, or our wardens Heather and Luke are siblings in Christ. And notice too that the story begins with Martha – just Martha – welcoming Jesus into her home: perhaps she was alone at the top of the org chart, and Mary was her second in command. They were running the community of faith in that village. Think of their “home” more like Grace Church than your condo.