“Look at my hands and my feet . . .”

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
The Third Sunday of Easter, April 14, 2024

Jesus, Savior, may the suffering love revealed by your wounds
surround the pain and hurt of this world, including our own. Amen.

I’m guessing that at least a few among us here this morning had an amazing experience on Monday afternoon during the solar eclipse. Indeed there were some Palmers who left from our church services last weekend to start driving either west or northwest of Houston in order to situate themselves within the path of totality. That’s the viewing area in which the moon completely covers the face of the sun as it slowly passes between the sun and the earth. As one Australian woman who works for NASA as an astrophysicist described it this past week:

Guys, it is proper bananas that the size of the Moon and the distance between the Sun are so perfectly matched. It’s one of the absolutely coolest things about the sky, and I say this as a person who discovers whole new planets.1

Many people who watch a solar eclipse under clear skies in the path of totality not only see something but also feel something as darkness covers the landscape and the birds stop singing their songs. It’s as if the whole creation pauses for a moment of reverence, accompanied by spontaneous gasps, “cries of wonder,” and literal tears.2

Holly Randall, who lives in New Hampshire, said, with tears running down her face, “I didn’t expect to cry when I saw it.”3 For a man named Doug Hansell, who had traveled from Minnesota to Ohio, the eclipse reminded him of humanity’s place in the universe. “We’re just a tiny piece of what’s out there,” he said, while noting he felt a sense of “overwhelming joy.”4

Those intense feelings were, for a lot of folks, both personal and communal, not unlike what Christians have experienced within these walls. In Syracuse, New York, a woman named Ora Jezer was hopeful about something that was bringing people together in an increasingly divided world. “I’m excited to watch everyone together, especially in such a chaotic time,” she said.5

But the ruins of such hope were expressed all too well by Sarah Burke Cahalan, a mother and librarian, in a short poem she wrote and shared on social media. This was her imaginative and also melancholy reflection:

The day after the eclipse I went back to the park

Pink Floyd t-shirt freshly washed I had

The glasses neatly folded in my pocket I made

Sugar cookies, black and yellow royal icing

Piped in phases descending and ascending

Little faces on the suns and moons

Went back looking for the absent crowd

*

I thought we did this now.6

The disciples of Jesus and their companions were gathered together in Jerusalem that first Easter Day. Surely they understood the ruins of such hope. They were the remnant of those who had followed Jesus throughout Galilee among the crowds there and also in Jerusalem not that many days ago. The crowds were gone, so very quickly gone, and so was Jesus.

“At early dawn,” some women found an empty tomb instead of a dead body. Two strange messengers, puzzled by their seeking the living among the dead, told them that Jesus had risen. But the disciples didn’t believe the women when they described what had happened. So Peter ran to the tomb, seeing the linen cloths there by themselves but finding no real answers.7

Later that same day, two followers of Jesus encountered him on the road to Emmaus. Like so many resurrection stories, however, they didn’t recognize him at first. The risen Jesus revealed himself to them in the breaking of the bread while they were eating together. Then he vanished from their sight, leaving us to wonder if it might have been a hallucination or a ghost.8

That brings us to the evening of the first Easter Day in the Gospel of Luke. These remnant followers of Jesus were gathered together. Somewhere along the way, Peter had seen the risen Jesus after leaving the empty tomb. And while those who had been on the road to Emmaus were describing what they had experienced, the risen Jesus stood among them all, saying, “Peace be with you.” Food is again connected with an encouragement to search the words of the scriptures to understand his sufferings and his resurrection.9

Needless to say, whatever is happening here is mysterious and difficult to put into words. They did think they were seeing a ghost. It’s not at all clear whether they recognized Jesus before he spoke to them or before he showed them his hands and his feet. The risen Jesus was neither a ghost nor exactly as he had been before his death. Yet his scars remained.

In case you’re wondering, I believe, from a historical point of view, that the tomb was empty. Now of course people can believe that without believing in the resurrection of Jesus. But I do believe in the resurrection of Jesus and also that his disciples and their companions had encounters with Jesus after his death. Those encounters and indeed his resurrected body are shrouded in mystery, especially in light of Jesus having to reveal himself in order to be recognized by those who knew and loved him.

Also shrouded in mystery are his scars, those unsettling reminders of his past sufferings. Is that something unique to the risen Jesus as the one through whom the reminders of our past sufferings will be erased after death when we awake in Easter’s light? Is it something that was, in a sense, temporary — granted specifically for the disciples and their companions to see and to remember before Jesus returned from whence he came?

I don’t know. But I trust, wholeheartedly, the living God who does know.

One thing I do know in this hour is this: You don’t have to wait until after you die to look at things around you in the light of Easter, in the light of the resurrection of Jesus. The risen Jesus invites you to look at his hands and his feet, to remember how he poured out his life to the point of death, loving the world all the way to the end, even the Roman soldiers who tortured him.

In the middle of the 18th century, the devotional life of Moravian Christians was intensely focused on the wounds of Jesus. They would pray at least parts of something called the Litany of the Wounds on most Friday evenings in their religious communities.10 And they would often draw from that imagery to describe and, I suppose, to understand the moment of death.

Tomorrow happens to be the anniversary of the death of my 6th great-grandfather Philip Meurer, who was a Moravian minister. The memoir read at his funeral in 1760 described that moment by saying that, while members of the congregation were surrounding him and singing to him, “he went into the Joy of his Lord to kiss the Wounds in Hands & in Feet.”11

It’s a way of describing how they — in a community, in a congregation — lived their lives as Christians, contemplating those wounds and being aware of the reality that love in this world is a suffering love, and always has been.

You can see this in the writings of Flannery O’Connor. The opening paragraph of her short story Greenleaf describes not Mrs. Greenleaf, the woman who gives the story its title, but Mrs. May, the woman who stands in contrast to Mrs. Greenleaf. Although they both consider themselves Christian, Mrs. May is moralistic and racist. Her bedroom window, like an altar in a church, is low and facing east. But the blinds are closed to keep out the light of the moon, and that’s a metaphor for her whole life — refusing to look at things in the light. That brightness from outside of herself, and beyond her control, seems unbearable to her at the end of the story.

Mrs. Greenleaf, on the other hand, is a kind of saint — peculiar and weird, from our perspective, in her zeal for the Lord. As one reader summarizes it:

[She] makes a daily practice of snipping stories from the newspapers. Not just any stories, though — the morbid ones, the heartbreaking ones, the “too much” ones[, as well as articles about the divorces of movie stars]. Mrs. Greenleaf then ritualistically buries them in the ground, lays on top of them, and prays, epitomizing Flannery’s belief that “you will have found Christ when you are more concerned with other people’s sufferings than your own.”12

So how do you get to that point — the point of knowing that Jesus, crucified and risen, cares not only about your pain but also the pain of the whole world and that we’re to care about the world’s pain, too, as those who know and love Jesus? Apparently going back to the park on the day after a solar eclipse isn’t the place to start. But if you find yourself standing in those ruins of hope, you can start rebuilding that hope within these walls.

There will always be people who gather together here, week after week, year after year, generation after generation — people willing to stand before the majesty and the mystery of God. The overwhelming reality of that as a love and mercy greater than the wideness of the sea opens our hearts to the pain and hurt of one another and of the whole world. We experience it together, but it’s also personal, like this prayer a young Flannery wrote in her journal:

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.13

AMEN

  1. Jessie Christiansen, who posted this on Bluesky Social @aussiastronomer.bsky.social, April 7, 2024. ↩︎
  2. Bob Berman, “A Total Solar Eclipse Feels Really, Really Weird,” Wired webpage, August 7, 2017. ↩︎
  3. Marica Dunn, “Total solar eclipse wows North America. Clouds part just in time for most,” Associated Press, April 9, 2024. ↩︎
  4. Nathan Hart, Dean Narciso, Danae King, and Shahid Meighan, “Ohio’s path of totality offers ‘transcendental’ solar eclipse experience for thousands,” Columbus Dispatch, April 9, 2024. ↩︎
  5. Rebecca Sohn, “’You could feel the energy and wonder’: Despite clouds, totality wows crowds during solar eclipse in Syracuse,” Live Science website, April 9, 2024. ↩︎
  6. Sarah Burke Cahalan, who posted this on Bluesky Social @sarahbc.bsky.social, April 9, 2024. ↩︎
  7. Luke 24:1-12. ↩︎
  8. Luke 24:13-32. ↩︎
  9. Luke 24:33-48. ↩︎
  10. Craig Atwood, “Adoring the Wounded Savior,” The Flaming Heretic? blog, April 23, 2011. ↩︎
  11. Memoir of Johann Philip Meurer, Moravian Lives website, image 8. ↩︎
  12. Evan Rosa in the introduction to “How the Read Flannery O’Connor / Jessica Wooten Wilson,” For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture podcast, April 10, 2024. ↩︎
  13. Flannery O’Conner, A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2013) 3. ↩︎

Bearing Witness to the Light of Light

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

THE RECTOR’S REPORT

DELIVERED AS THE SERMON ON JANUARY 21, 2024

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Earlier this week, while driving the kids to school, I listened to a podcast by a friend of mine from college. He drives around the American South and tells stories about the places he visits. Most recently he’s been on a trip through the Mississippi Delta, the area between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in the northwestern part of the State of Mississippi.

That morning my friend Pete Candler started talking about William Alexander Percy, a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi. Some of you will be more familiar with Will’s more famous first cousin, once removed — the novelist Walker Percy. After the death of Walker’s parents while Walker was a teenager, Will took him and his two younger brothers into his care.

That act seems to reveal something about his character.

Although privileged, Will had seen suffering, not only in the part of the world where he was raised but also in the Great War to End All Wars. During the latter, he was involved in relief efforts in Belgium. Then, when the United States entered the fighting, so did he.

Before the war, Will’s father LeRoy Percy had served as a United States Senator from Mississippi. LeRoy courageously and publicly denounced the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, calling it “an outlaw organization going about its work behind masks and in clown suits.”1 But like each of us, LeRoy was also a tangled knot of contradictions, and that spilled out in disappointing ways after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Will Percy, in his autobiography, described the flood as:

. . . a torrent ten feet deep the size of Rhode Island; it was thirty-six hours coming and four months going; it was deep enough to drown a man, swift enough to upset a boat and lasting enough to cancel a crop year. . . . Between the torrent and the river ran the levee, dry on the land side and on the top.2

In his community of Greenville, thousands and thousands of Black people were stranded on the levee. Will, appointed by the mayor to head the Flood Relief Committee, found supplies for them, but the supplies ran out. So he decided they should be evacuated downriver to Vicksburg rather than being left in a refugee camp, a kind of tent city, along the levee.

Ships from Vicksburg were at the banks of the levee, ready to do this. But LeRoy Percy warned his son that their peers, the other planters, would not be happy about it. These were the laborers in the fields, and if they were evacuated downriver, they would never come back.

LeRoy asked his son to convene a meeting of the relief committee, and his son was surprised when every member voted against his plan. So the ships returned to Vicksburg, empty. Only after his father’s death did Will Percy find out that his father had gone behind his back and persuaded each member to vote against the evacuation.3

It’s not surprising there’s a kind of melancholy in the poetry of Will Percy, like the hymn we sang this morning before the gospel reading. In fact, he wrote those words we sang about the “simple fisherfolk” who “cast their nets in Galilee just off the hills of brown. . . . before the Lord came down.”3

You can imagine Jesus walking along the levees of the Delta in the mind of Will at his desk. His descriptions of the disciples John and Peter are like the lives of so many through the centuries, including Will himself, who have borne witness to Jesus as the Light of the world without having seen the world embrace that witness. When he refers to “strife closed in the sod,” you can see the landscape of the Holy Land to this very day, this very hour, and the landscape of Mississippi, and the landscape of your own life — the hard times, the struggles, the tears.5 And yet we bear witness to the peace of God, just as Will did, because God will one day wipe away all tears.

When this church has been unlocked but most people haven’t arrived, some of you have seen me at times walk to the narthex, the entryway, to mash the dimmer that turns on the lights which shine brightly on the words you see above the doors as you leave. It’s one of those little things folks sometimes forget to do. I did that today, in fact, as soon as I walked into this space.

The first words above those doors quote the Gospel of John, when Jesus says to his disciples, including John and Peter, who is named Simon in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. . . . Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”6 I want people — I want you — to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them as you’re sent into a world that may or may not embrace your witness to Jesus as the Light of the world.

The peace of Jesus is at the center of the words you see before you cross the threshold of this church onto Main Street. It’s also at the heart of our vision for this place, the vision that came out of our strategic planning process and was embraced by the Vestry. That vision — Bringing the peace of Jesus to the whole world — is printed on the front of your bulletin. As explained in the strategic plan narrative emailed to you on Friday:

[It] describes the result of Palmer’s existence — our worship, witness, and loving service in the name of Jesus — not merely in the greater community but throughout the world at the end of our second century as a congregation more than 100 years from now. If we are following Jesus, who is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” as we say together on Sundays, what will be changed around us as our own hearts are changed from generation to generation?6

If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read that narrative. It also discusses our mission statement, values, and guiding principles. That whole description of who we are and who we want to be was then used to create our overarching goal for the next five years and the strategies and objectives we’ll use to get there.

Working groups have been identified to work on first-year tactics that will help us meet those objectives. Some invitations to be part of those working groups have already been sent. Others will be on the way soon.

A few of the recommendations about staffing were acted upon last summer when Roger Hutchison, Director of Christian Formation and Parish Life, became Director of Children’s and Youth Ministry and Jodie Williamson was called to be our part-time children’s ministry assistant. This was to strengthen our ministries with children and youth, which also include Courtney Daniell-Knapp leading our choirs for children and youth in a part-time capacity and Rivers Wallace as our part-time youth ministry assistant. Those are just examples of things already in motion.

With respect to increasing access to Christian teaching and spirituality for adults, I want to start with several things that remain strong but that we too often take for granted. Our weekly Bible studies let by the clergy and lay volunteers continue to thrive both in person and online. A variety of other small groups meeting weekly or monthly in person or online continue to thrive as well. Let’s remember to give thanks to God for these.

I also give thanks to God for the Palmers who served last year on an adult formation working group. I’m especially grateful for the parish forum that was held last fall for the purpose of listening to people share ideas about opportunities for Christian teaching and spirituality for adults. There was so much energy in the room, and people were having fun.

Last year we experimented with evening classes for adults on Thursday nights in the spring, with a simple meal provided by the church, and on Wednesday nights in the fall, with weekly potluck dinners. This year we’ll start with a variety of classes offered on Wednesday nights during the season of Lent that include a weekly meal of soup and salad. You’ll also be able to get an overview of these classes on Wednesday, February 7, which is the week before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Fear not, food will be served then too.

We’ll also have multiple, concurrent classes for adults, including newcomer/confirmation classes, on Sunday mornings in Lent. More details about that will be forthcoming.

To everyone who served on Palmer’s Vestry last year, especially Danna Kurtin in the role of Senior Warden and Abigail Follmar in the role of Junior Warden, to everyone who sits on our various church councils, committees, working groups, and task forces, and to everyone who works on the church staff or with us as a contractor, thank you for your devotion to God and to the people who gather here for worship, reflection, and service.

To the whole congregation, thank you for responding to the invitation to participate in our strategic planning. Hundreds of you filled out the initial survey, signed up for focus groups, served on the task force or committees, attended parish forums to ask questions, and prayed for God’s guidance in our discernment here at the corner of Cambridge and Main. 

Each of you showed up to be part of something larger than yourself, and that’s really the point of coming here for anything.

We walk through these doors weekly to stand before the mystery and the majesty of God; to bathe children, youth, and adults in divine mercy and forgiveness at this font; to be fed with divine grace at this table; to be reminded that boldly sharing the love of Jesus Christ makes a real and lasting difference in the world, even if we don’t always see that in the moment, because God will have the last word.

The love shared with an unsettled world by John and Peter, the disciples named in our gospel reading and in our hymn singing, wasn’t wasted. It wasn’t wasted even if facts on the ground testified otherwise. Your presence here is evidence of that, and we can be strengthened in the midst of an unsettled world the same way they were — by looking to the resurrection.

Will Percy felt this, too, even though he didn’t grip firmly the language of “the resurrection” in the creeds. When his not-always-saintly father was on his deathbed, he roused himself enough to say he had “nearly crossed over” and, in relation to that and to those in every age who peddle religious terror, to leave his son with these words: “There’s nothing to fear.”8

The stained glass window that reminds us of the resurrection within these walls, this one here by the pulpit, was given to the glory of God in memory of the grandmother of Palmer’s own Kirk Waldron. Kirk might as well have been born in this church because he’s been at Palmer nearly his whole life.

As many of you know by now, Kirk’s remaining days are few and his time on this earth is drawing to a close.9 He’s at peace with that because he knows that he’s part of something larger than himself. He’s surrounded by the love of Jesus, and always has been. He’s also been surrounded by many of you this past week. You have shown up. You’ve shown up with the love of Jesus.

I ask you to keep showing up in the year ahead of us. The people sitting around you need that. You need that. When you’re wondering whether to come to church for communion, come to church. When you’re wondering whether to go to the funeral, go to the funeral — always go to the funeral. When you’re wondering whether to share your struggles, share them — share them with people who love you the way that Jesus loves you.

Jesus, Lamb of God, have mercy on us.
Jesus, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us.
Jesus, redeemer of the world, grant us your peace.

AMEN

  1. LeRoy Percy, quoted by Pete Candler, The Detourist podcast, “Episode Four: Greenville,” January 17, 2024. ↩︎
  2. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941) 249. ↩︎
  3. Pete Candler, The Detourist podcast, “Episode Four: Greenville,” January 17, 2024. My summary of the conflict between LeRoy Percy and Will Percy comes from this podcast episode, which rightly notes that Will was also no saint. Most people today, including me, would be uncomfortable with Will’s paternalism with respect to racial issues. “Nevertheless,” as Pete Candler says, “figures like Will did pursue a kind of vision that was an outlier in Mississippi culture at the time, or at least the culture of the Delta. And maybe even across the South as a whole. The Percy story is a kind of a figure for a version of the South that became displaced by the rise of Jim Crow. . . . It’s not to say that what Jim Crow replaced was an entirely enlightened view of society. It wasn’t, but it was certainly more enlightened and more progressive, more humane than what followed it.” ↩︎
  4. William Alexander Percy, from “His Peace” in Enzio’s Kingdom: And Other Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924) 9. ↩︎
  5. William Alexander Percy, from “His Peace” in Enzio’s Kingdom: And Other Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924) 9. ↩︎
  6. John 14:27 (King James Version). ↩︎
  7. Our Strategic Plan: 2024-2028, Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas, January 19, 2024. ↩︎
  8. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941) 314. ↩︎
  9. Kirk Waldron died the next day, January 22, 2024. ↩︎

No Easter Phantom

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
The Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

I was a college student and spending a semester in London when I first saw a chandelier crash onto the stage during a performance of the musical Phantom of the Opera. Those of you who’ve seen it know that’s part of the show. (None of the globe pendants above these pews have been rigged for a surprise like that.) Even those who haven’t seen it might know that the final curtain was lowered on the Broadway production of Phantom last Sunday night. But there’s a hidden side to that I’ve been thinking about this week.

During performances of musicals, there are, of course, professionals who provide live music down in the pit — the sunken area right in front of the stage. In the case of Phantom, they went to some of the best music schools in the nation. And the atmosphere they created has delighted audiences on Broadway since 1988, for 13,981 performances. Some of the musicians stayed there from the beginning. They signed contracts which guaranteed them a job until the bitter end, thinking that might be two or three years.

But those musicians and others who would come alongside them later played the same music, each time, not just for a few years, but for decades. They ran into the same people, literally, in cramped spaces, whether in the locker room where they changed clothes and ate, or down in the pit, with chairs, music stands, and instruments of all kinds, cheek by jowl.

Their neighbors irritated them — the way they used their spit valve at the same moment every night, the jokes they told over and over and over again, the guy religiously using a stop watch to time exactly how long someone else held one particular note on one song. As a French horn player named Pete Reit said in an interview a few years ago with This American Life:

I would look at the music sometimes, and it would just literally look like shapes. I would just see circles and lines and dots. And I would have no idea. I wouldn’t even know what page I was on. . . . It’s sort of like hearing yourself speak, and you aren’t sure it’s English.1

Now there are a lot of people I know whose lives feel like that, like they are stuck down in the pit, whether through the monotony of a daily routine, a sense of disappointment about the way things are unfolding in the current chapter of their life, or an acute crisis in their relationships with family or friends, or in their health because of age or disease.

People living in Jerusalem in the first century, at least some of them, must have felt that way. Romans who found themselves stuck at the edge of an empire did their jobs, filled out all of the paperwork in Latin, and crucified thousands of nobodies to maintain law and order. Jews had seen messianic movements rise and fall, most of them small and quickly forgotten, with hopes of overthrowing their oppressors or other kinds of zealous religious aspirations dashed. From all outward appearances, the executed prisoner Jesus of Nazareth would soon be relegated to that anonymous past.

Two followers of Jesus, walking together on the road to Emmaus from Jerusalem, could see that this was about to happen, that their hopes had been crushed, and that Jesus, who had been mighty in word and in deed on behalf of God, would soon be forgotten.

These disciples knew about the reports of an empty tomb from women who were also followers of Jesus. But as I said from this pulpit on Easter Day, an empty tomb by itself only raises more questions, and simply adds to the indignities that surrounded the death of Jesus. If someone had stolen his body, he was being thoroughly, completely, utterly erased from this world.

When a stranger joins these disciples on the road, they speak to him both of Jesus and of hope, but only in the past tense, as if that fire had gone out. The remaining, dying embers were growing dimmer and colder with each step.

The Road to Emmaus by Daniel Bonnell

Now we know it was Jesus, crucified and risen, but they didn’t — at least not yet. Again, as we pondered together on Easter Day, there’s a mystery that’s not unique to this story in the risen Christ not being recognized until he makes himself known. I honestly don’t know what to make of that or the fact that these resurrection appearances in the New Testament are told in different ways, with different details. I think it’s because no one really knows what kind of language to use to describe events and encounters that happened within history, yet transcend history. But something happened.

And Jesus does make himself known to them after drawing near to them on the road, showing them how to read the words of scripture in light of new realities, and sitting at the table with them — their guest who becomes the host, taking, blessing, breaking, and giving bread. It’s what happens at this table in this church. Receiving the bread is when they recognized that it was Jesus, crucified and risen, in their midst. Then he vanished.

Jesus, however, was not a phantom — either as some thought the Phantom of the Opera to be or as the Phantom of the Opera really was — merely a broken human being. The body of Jesus was broken on the cross by the cruelty of humanity, by the sin of the world. But God raised him up. And the Jesus who lives — who lives — reaches out to broken human beings like us.

This Jesus is not a prisoner of history. This Jesus isn’t exclusively a fading memory that has been passed down to us. This Jesus is the Lord — in Greek, kyrios — the one who is in control of the past, the present, and most especially the future. And so we sometimes sing here at Palmer an ancient prayer in our liturgies, “Kyrie eleison,” which means, “Lord, have mercy.”

Ambulance sirens — like that one now — which are daily heard screaming past the doors of this church, and the sound of Life Flight helicopters taking off or landing across the street in the medical center, each of these to a Christian can be a Kyrie, a prayer for Christ to have mercy on those who are suffering, those who are struggling, those who are afraid, and ourselves.

Indeed, we can join with countless Christians throughout the centuries who have said the Jesus Prayer, which has several different forms, but can be as simple as praying the words, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” That is to say, “Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, who has been raised from the dead and reigns over the past, the present, and the future, have mercy on me, so that, having been forgiven, I may live, now and always, in your love.”

Then looking at the world through the words of that prayer, or through the words of the Nicene Creed, in which we speak — and will soon speak this morning — of Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” you can read the Bible as if those words are the lenses through which you see clearly, as if they are the glasses you need to focus the eyes of your Christian faith. Just acknowledge that that’s what you’re doing and that others will read the same words differently. Embracing your Christian identity, even when done boldly and courageously, doesn’t have to mean you refuse to see multiple interpretations of Old Testament passages.2

But if we’ve come to believe Jesus isn’t a prisoner of history, then we truly see Jesus in the evocative chapters of the Book of Isaiah about the Suffering Servant. We truly see the end of the Book of Malachi as a wonderful preface to the New Testament, which is why our Christian Bibles put those prophetic words at the end of the Old Testament while the Hebrew Bible doesn’t. We truly see Jesus on many pages of the Book of Psalms. We could even say that Jesus, in his flesh, embodies the message of the psalms — his life in the past and his risen life in the present is an eternal prayer on your behalf and on mine. In the light of the resurrection, we truly see Jesus.

I can’t really explain this story from the Gospel of Luke other than to say that we should occasionally, perhaps weekly on Sundays, climb out of the pit and walk together on the road, inviting the stranger to join us, looking for Jesus in the scriptures, expecting Jesus to be present in the breaking of the bread. And because Jesus lives, we can expect that today.

ALLELUIA. ALLELUIA. ALLELUIA.

Footnotes

1. Pete Reit in an interview on the podcast This American Life, “Act 2: The Music of the Night After Night After Night,” October 23, 2020.

2. One way to explore what I mean here is by listening to Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler in an interview on the podcast The Bible for Normal People, “How Jews & Christians Read the Bible Differently,” February 21, 2021.

Your Spiritual Family Tree

/ Neil Alan Willard / 2 Comments

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Sunday, October 2, 2022

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Two weeks ago I stood in this pulpit and talked about prayer. The reading from the First Letter to Timothy had urged us to pray for everyone, and we pondered what it means to do that when we love someone, when we struggle with someone or with something we’ve experienced, and also when we’re in conflict with someone, whether in the world nearby or far away.

I said that the most simple way to think about Christian prayer, in all of these circumstances, is to imagine ourselves and those for whom we pray, and the space between us, as being surrounded by the love of Jesus. Try to picture a never-ending love, a love that flows from the very heart of God, at times encouraging some, at times challenging others, at times reaching out to those who are suffering, at times providing a shelter for us in our own time of need. Most recently, in the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Ian, I’ve been praying for friends and relatives in Florida and for the congregations I first served as a priest along the coast of South Carolina.

Today our reading from the Second Letter to Timothy assures someone — let’s just say it’s you — that you are being prayed for, that even your tears are not forgotten, that you are constantly, day and night, being held in the love of Jesus.[1] And the faith that you have, however small it is, however insignificant it may seem, even if merely a whisper of curiosity about the universe, has been handed down to you by people in your life. It may have come from your grandmother and your mother, as Lois and Eunice were described so tenderly in our reading.[2] It may have come from your chosen family if your own family has rejected you for some reason. It may have come from a minister, a teacher, a friend, a neighbor, even a stranger — someone who paused to look at you through God’s eyes.

When a Christian does that, I believe she is praying for you and surrounding you with the love of Jesus. And whether you’re laughing with your whole body, filled with tears of joy, filled with tears of sorrow, regretful about the past, hopeful about the present, or afraid of the future, you might be able to see yourself, in that moment, as a child of God.

I had a surprise like that over the summer, when I could almost touch the tears of someone, a child of God who had been held in the love of Jesus by the prayers of many. I had arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at the doors of the Moravian Archives. The staff member who would be helping me learn about one of my ancestors immediately wanted to show me a register for a rural church in Lancaster County.[3]

He opened the book to part of the section recording funerals. All of the entries had been written by my 6th great-grandfather Johann Philip Meurer. He was the officiant for most of them, but not for one in the spring of 1757 — the funeral for his wife who died at the age of 39.


The staff member, since he could read German script, told me the death of Philip’s wife Christina was somehow related to the birth of their youngest daughter, which had taken place many months earlier. She knew her condition wasn’t improving and eventually said or sang these words: “O Savior, come take me soon to you.” Death came, tears flowed, and surely the love of Jesus was present in the midst of it all through the prayers of many people in many different Moravian churches.

As my fingers touched the words on those pages, I thought about how that love overflowed into the lives of those who came after them, how they also put their trust in a savior through whom death has been overcome. There were some detours along the way (there always are), but mercifully God writes straight with crooked lines, not only from generation to generation but also through the different chapters of our own lives.

How would you draw your spiritual family tree? I’m not talking about your family tree, which might be chaotic. I’m talking about your spiritual family tree, which I realize might also be chaotic — but it’s a different tree. And if someone were to take that drawing and look at it, how might they describe it back to you in a letter? How might they remind you that you’re always surrounded by the love of Jesus, day and night, and that the love of Jesus will continue to surround you beyond death?


It doesn’t matter if your drawing looks like a fragile Charlie Brown Christmas tree or a flowering tree with branches hidden by an explosion of blossoms or a sturdy and majestic oak. You see, they’re all majestic if Jesus stands at the center, the trunk, as it were, deeply rooted in the history of God’s people written in the scriptures and also in the history of the world recorded in poetry and prose, in the hearts of every generation that has ever lived, and throughout the universe in the book of nature. And then imagine all the branches reaching out through the history of the church, through people known and unknown to you, people related to you and to me, most importantly, though the Blood of Christ, shared in places like Palmer.[4]

Most people here, by a little more than a week from today, will have received in the mail a letter from Palmer with a pledge card. That card is for you to provide the church with an estimate of your giving to Palmer next year, in 2023. It’s true that it’s a way for the church leadership to make plans for the coming year. But it’s more true that it’s your invitation to see your blessings in the context of God’s whole creation, to know that what you have has been given to you, for a short time on this earth, partly for yourself and those you love, and partly to be shared with others, known and unknown to you, so that you can be a blessing to them, pray for them, and surround them with the love of Jesus.

Each of us is called to do that in certain unique ways, by the leading of the Holy Spirit. That I really believe. But I also believe we, as Christians, should give to our own church, whether that’s here at Palmer or somewhere else if you’re just visiting us today, our first and largest charitable gift among the many gifts we make to help the communities and the neighbors around us.


As one member of our Vestry has said several times in our public meetings, “I want Palmer to be here years from now for my children.” That starts with Palmer being here in the coming year for those children, and for the people sitting beside you in your pew, and for those who may be hearing for the first time right now that the great “we” of the creed includes them when other churches have excluded them.

Your returning to God a portion of what you have is also represented on this Holy Table each week. The bread and the wine are the gifts of the people gathered for worship. And the offering plates contain both the literal cash and checks we’ve brought with us as our offerings and the symbolic presence of the monetary gifts we have given in other ways, usually electronically. Each of those gifts is represented on the Holy Table during the Great Thanksgiving, when we ask God to bless them and to bless us, offering ourselves as a living sacrifice to the glory of God for the sake of the world into which we will be sent at the end of this service.[5] And we’ll step onto Main Street, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

If there was a group of folks, a community of Palmers, who oriented their lives around the love of Jesus rather than themselves or rather than things that benefited only people just like themselves, and they wrote you a letter, literally or metaphorically, reaching out to you like the branches of a tree, reminding you that you’re being prayed for constantly and that even your tears are surrounded by the love of Jesus, how might that change you?

The hope in today’s reading is that it would “rekindle the gift of God that is within you,” which is “a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”[6] Even if you don’t feel very powerful, even if you don’t feel very self-disciplined, you can rest in the love of Jesus, receive that love, and share it.

That spirit of love can be rekindled within you this very hour the same way you’ll receive communion — by unclenching your fist. That’s how you offer your hand to someone else, how you place your gift in the offering plate, how you give the gift of yourself to God for the sake of the world.[7]

It is good that we are here. It’s good that you’re here, even if you are here for the first time this morning, because God is here, and God loves you.[8]

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST 2 Timothy 1:1-14.

2 BACK TO POST 2 Timothy 1:5.

3 BACK TO POST This was a church register for the Moravian congregation at Donegal/Mount Joy in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

4 BACK TO POST The header photo at the top of this post is a detail from a larger piece of art titled “The Tree of Life.” It was commissioned in 1775 by Friedrich Von Watteville (1700-1777) for Frederick William Marshall (1721-1802), who was the administrator of a tract of land, originally 99,985 acres in size, owned by the Moravian Church in North Carolina called Wachovia.

The fruit shows it’s a grapevine rather than a tree, with leaves representing all of the Moravian congregations around the world at that time. The blood from Christ’s wounds, at the center of this image, nourishes each of them.

5 BACK TO POST Romans 12:1.

6 BACK TO POST 2 Timothy 1:6-7.

7 BACK TO POST The specific image I had in mind when thinking about our posture before God as we give our selves, our whole lives, to God as a living sacrifice was the way many priests hold their hands open, outward, and upward as they stand at the altar during the prayer for Holy Communion.

8 BACK TO POST Written across the top of the stained glass window above the altar at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, are these words: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.” They are the words of Peter as he speaks to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration in the Gospel of Matthew.

It’s important to remember that Peter and the others with him didn’t stay there on the mountaintop but went down into the valley and set their faces toward Jerusalem. They have an indescribable experience in the presence of Jesus, a glimpse of divine glory, then walk with Jesus through the world.

In the Middle of the Night, Easter Arrives

/ Neil Alan Willard / 2 Comments

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Easter Day, April 17, 2022

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Have you ever stumbled onto something that was completely unexpected, and only later realized there was more going on than what you could see? Photographers do this when they spot something which makes them stop and ponder what’s right in front of them, perhaps moving a little or a lot to change their perspective, then capturing in one picture an extraordinary moment that didn’t seem to exist in the world a few seconds earlier.

Sometimes you walk into a crowded room and hear on the other side of that threshold one of many conversations already in progress. And then maybe you cringe internally — or externally — once you realize the person whose voice you hear going on and on about this or that isn’t aware of other nearby realities in the same room — a struggling spouse in recovery from alcohol addiction, a mother whose heart is overflowing with joy over her gay son’s upcoming wedding, a friend who’s just lost a job but only told a handful of people about it. If the person holding court knew of these or any number of other realities in that same room, the conversation might be different.

There are a lot of hidden realities this morning in this room. Some of you don’t want to be here, having been dragged along by a significant other or a grandparent. I see you, and also have sympathy for you. (Know that your grandmother loves you very much, and I love you too!) Others sitting in the pews today have hearts weighed down by grief over the death of a loved one, perhaps over the past year, or perhaps from long, long ago. Many are still trying to figure out how the pieces of the puzzle that is the small part of the world in which we live fit together on this side of the pandemic. You might be worried about that but afraid to say anything about it to anyone else.

Imagine yourself as Mary Magdalene, who came to the tomb of Jesus “while it was still dark,” or the unnamed “other disciple” running with Simon Peter to that same tomb on the first Easter morning.[1] As they encountered the room that is the empty tomb, a sense of joy, a sense of wonder, a sense of divine majesty, wasn’t part of the experience. Something was very wrong. That’s why Mary ran back to tell the others that the body of Jesus had been stolen. What she had seen just compounded the trauma that had followed the events of Good Friday and the silence on the sabbath day.

Only when Mary, while overwhelmed and weeping outside the tomb, heard herself being addressed by name did she recognize Jesus standing in front of her. She had mistaken him for the gardener. Yet it was Jesus, who had died, and who now was alive — alive but also somehow very different, and known but only because he had made himself known.

“I have seen the Lord,” she would later say.[2]

For Mary, being called by her name changed everything in an instant — the identity of the person in front of her, whom she had already seen with her own eyes, the meaning of the empty tomb, and the movie playing over and over in her head about what had happened in the middle of the night.

Something terrifying had indeed happened, but not in the way Mary had first imagined. It was instead terrifying in the sense that the voice of the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon, and in the darkness that same voice brought Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, over from death to life, setting free all those imprisoned by sin and death, and giving to us a glimpse of our own resurrection in the world to come — in the world beyond our fears and our failures — a new creation that transforms tears of sorrow into tears of joy and, yes, tears of laughter.[3] How could there not be laughter with God?

Is it possible — just possible — that even this very small part of the world in which we live is much larger than we have imagined it to be? Is it possible there’s a lot more going on around us and within us than we can see?

Right outside the front doors of Palmer, on the other side of Main Street, is the campus of Rice University. (The church building in which you’re sitting, by the way, was built in 1927 to be a chapel for the Rice Institute before becoming the home of an Episcopal congregation in 1929.) This whole area is one of the most beautiful parts of the City of Houston — the live oaks, the azaleas, and the wildlife — squirrels, of course, and rabbits, an occasional possum, and lots of birds — grackles, mockingbirds, bluejays, and owls, which seems appropriate for Rice. (I’m even wearing owl cufflinks today!)

But even if you take time for a walk around the Rice campus, even if you pause to notice, with a sense of awe and wonder, all the other forms of life that surround you, including, of course, the students too — even then you’re only seeing a small fraction of what’s really happening there.

Houston is on what’s called the Central Flyway, and the Rice campus is essentially like a Buc-ee’s for many birds on their way to and from the tropics. But mostly they’re flying overhead, while you’re either sleeping soundly in your own bed or wide-awake and worried, staring up at the ceiling. And we know a lot about them thanks to a man named Cin-Ty Lee. He’s a professor of geology at Rice University, but he’s passionate about birds and has been observing them on Rice’s campus for 20 years.

Artwork by Cin-Ty Lee, Created in Support of Nature Conservation

At the beginning of the pandemic, Cin-Ty and a few others thought that might be a good time to try to record the sound of birds at night.[4] Ambient noise, because of reduced traffic, had gone down significantly. So they set up a microphone, initially in a lemon tree but now on a 20-foot pole, and waited to find out what exactly was going on during the night.

Well, that turned out to be a big ol’ disappointment.

In the beginning, in March of 2020, they heard nothing. And they actually thought they were doing something wrong. It was like their own experience of Holy Saturday, waiting and wondering what had happened. But then everything exploded in late April, when there were suddenly thousands — thousands — of birds passing overhead each night.

They weren’t even hearing all of the birds because some fly too high to be heard and others don’t call out to each other while they’re flying. But they heard thousands of them nevertheless. And those recordings added about 30 new species to the list of birds already known to be present at different times of the year on the Rice campus. That total is now at least 262 species.

Have you seen them all? Do they exist even if you haven’t seen them?

To be clear, I don’t think the meaning of the empty tomb should be reduced to springtime observations in the Northern Hemisphere. But nature does give us hints that there is more to this world than meets the eye. There is so much that we don’t see at all, that we see only partly, or that we see dimly, whether off in the furthest reaches of the universe or — perhaps even more amazingly — right here, right across the street, in this small part of the world in which we live and work, in which we love and grieve those we’ve lost, in which we learn and become curious about the things God has made.

What I want to suggest to you is that you’re only experiencing a small fraction of what’s really happening in the world around you. There are mysteries here that are visible but unseen, and there are mysteries here that are invisible too. What happened last night, so to speak, what happened in the darkness before the first Easter morning, was a mystery.

But Mary Magdalene and the rest of those closest to Jesus believed they had seen him raised from the dead. Perhaps the most mysterious thing of all was that the risen Christ, the one who called Mary by name and revealed himself to her, showed them, and shows us too, that God is for us, not against us.

And just as the risen Christ saw Mary weeping and had compassion on her, “God shall [one day] wipe away all tears from [our] eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”[5] They are passed away because of what happened in the middle of the night. And one day, having fallen asleep in Jesus, we shall awake in the light of his resurrection.

My friends, there’s more going on in this world, more going on in this very room, more going on in your own life, right now, than what you can see.

ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA!

1 BACK TO POST John 20:1-10.

2 BACK TO POST John 20:18.

3 BACK TO POST Psalm 29:5.

4 BACK TO POST Cin-Ty Lee in an interview on the podcast City Cast Houston, “Recording the Night Skies of Houston,” April 11,2022.

5 BACK TO POST Revelation 21:4. I quoted this familiar verse from the Book of Revelation using the King James Version, which can be heard in composer Eleanor Daley’s powerful anthem “And God shall wipe away all tears.”

Christmas: The Fine House That Love Is

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Christmas Eve, December 24, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

For most of us, Christmas is the emotional center of Christianity. Easter may be “The Queen of Feasts,” but Christmas hits us right here [hitting chest with a fist], tugging at our hearts in so many different and powerful ways, some of them unexpected, catching us off guard. Whether we choose to call it holy, regardless of who we are or where we have been or where we find ourselves now, even if we’re sitting outside on the grass rather than in the pews, this night brings back, unbidden, lots of memories of home.

Perhaps those are happy memories from your childhood — a Christmas tree decorated with silver tinsel or those giant, colorful, old-fashioned lights; wrapped presents that you shook to guess what was inside; that one special toy you held in your hands, which just seemed too good to be true.

I can still remember holding, in the late 1970s, a more-than-one-foot-tall action figure of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. After putting in batteries, an eerie sweeping “eye” in the helmet could light up bright red. You might have your own version of a memory like that, even if you never share it.

Then there are memories of beautiful carols and candlelight in a church. Later, at home, did you get to place Jesus in the manger in a nativity set? Or were you the kid constantly rearranging the shepherds and their sheep?

Maybe some of you are thinking about how you took for granted the ways you gathered with family and friends a couple of years ago. I know some of us, including me and my family, canceled trips planned for next week, each of us praying for a light to shine on our path and show us the way. Sadly but understandably, relatives have canceled trips to come and see us too.

More than a few of us find our minds flooded with memories of the physical places that we or loved ones have called home — a house we still go back to visit now and then; a bungalow that was sold long ago; a neighborhood that has slowly aged with its residents, where adults rather than children now ride their bikes down the street; a grandparent’s farm; a divorced parent’s apartment; a large back yard where we played with cousins.

Or you might be thinking of experiences that happened in those places — the way your grandmother set the table in the dining room just so before you arrived for a feast, wanting everything to be special for you; that awkward time your Christmas gift for someone was, let’s be honest, a real flop; a parent who was filled with joy simply because you were happily lost in wonder; the warmth of the family you had to choose for yourself, perhaps from people in this church, perhaps people here tonight, when your own family seemed to shut the door on you in one way or another.

When we think of home on this night, we think of nearly as many things as there are people here right now. That word means something different to each of us. And what did it mean to Jesus, who was raised in the village of Nazareth, born on the road under less than ideal circumstances, hit the road as an adult after he was baptized in the River Jordan, named as his family — as his brother and sister and mother — those who do the will of God, and said he, unlike the birds with their nests, had no place to lay his head?

I believe the answer to that question has everything to do with this night, which I do call holy. Many of those around you right now believe that Love came down at Christmas in the birth of Jesus — Love with a capital “L” — for you, for me, for the whole world. And it’s not imprisoned in the past.

That Love was present not only in the events described in the pages of the Gospel of Luke but also in many of the memories of home you’ve brought with you this evening — the wonderful memories of when your life overflowed with abundance, hopeful things that somehow emerged out of the hard times, or maybe new traditions that don’t reflect your bad experiences of the past. Whether you think of home as one place, or many places, or no place at all, what makes it a home, what makes it your home, what makes this church our home is Love with a capital “L,” manifested not in wooden beams, not in bricks and mortar, not in stained glass windows, but in relationships through the years that go back to the manger.[1]

The Love that flows from one generation to another, however it finds a way to do that, even if it comes to you through the cracks and the brokenness of your life, has a divine source. And the babe in a manger, crying out in the darkness, is Emmanuel, God-with-us, even if you don’t believe that to be true. That’s what makes this night truly magical, in the sense of something that’s beautiful and filled with awe, something that continues to have the power to change the world, beginning with your own heart.

How would your life be different if it were true?

The poet Jack Gilbert has a short poem that acknowledges the passing away of things, and our weeping over them as they decline into the earth. But it celebrates whatever among those things is present with us in this moment, “what abounds,” as he puts is. Amazed by that daily, his last line refers to:

My fine house that love is.[2]

I don’t know what he means entirely by that beautiful phrase. But his use of the word love refers to God for me on this night, and on all the other nights of the year. Home is my fine house that Love has built, that God is building, for me and for everyone else created in God’s image. That includes you.

We long for home, we have a yearning for it, because we long to be accepted, embraced, and loved. That’s something each of us wants, even if we’ve never experienced it, or if we think we don’t deserve it. The story of Christmas is about the coming of God to those who least expect it, to those sitting in the shadows, to those who feel left out, to the shepherds you kept rearranging, with their sheep, in that old moss-covered nativity set.

In this place, among this people, on this night called holy, you are accepted and embraced and loved by the same Jesus whose birth we remember each Christmas, including this one. Jesus came to set us free from the things that keep us from accepting, embracing, and loving others. Jesus came to invite us to the feast at this Table, inside the fine house that Love is. There will always, always, always be room here, just for you. So welcome home.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

1 BACK TO POST This whole discussion of home and what it means was inspired by an interview with Christian Wiman on the podcast For the Life of the World, “95. Christian Wiman / Finding Home Through Exiles’ Eyes,” November 27, 2021.

2 BACK TO POST Jack Gilbert, “Singing in My Difficult Mountains” in Home: 100 Poems, edited by Christian Wiman (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2021) 9.

Stoplights and Christmas PJs

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Advent III, December 12, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

As some of you know, Advent is my favorite season of what we call the Church Year — how we mark time on the liturgical calendar in our worship and in our prayers, which is different than how we mark time on a secular calendar in much of our day-to-day lives. Although one of the shortest seasons, Advent is really how we live most of our lives as Christians — looking back to what God has done in the past, crying out for God to come among us in the present, and watching, actively watching and waiting, for God to act and right all wrongs, not only around us but also within us.

And we’ll greet that Day of the Lord with joy, not fear.

Now having said that, I really feel like I need to confess something. I feel like I need to tell you that Christmas, which is surely coming and for which Advent always prepares us, is already sneaking a little bit into Palmer’s Rectory, where the Willards live, dispelling some of the shadows, here and there. I’m not talking about the lighting of our Advent wreath, hand-made with Topo Chico bottle caps, on which candles are gradually lit to remind us of the coming of Christ into the world. I’m not even talking about our beautiful Christmas tree, brightly illuminated and visible through one of the front windows. What that tree represents — family history, faith in Christ, fun and laughter through the years, and hopefulness — is what we need, what we all need, throughout this new Church Year.

No, what I want to admit to you today is that there was an explosion of Christmas pjs at the Rectory. I’m not going to say how many of us were wearing them. I’m just going to say that several of us were and that it was a joyful preview of the fun part of Christmas — like the storm clouds of the world around us parting and allowing a few rays of sunshine to break through for a moment. It sure seems like most of us — all of us, really — need a moment like that to surprise us, to lift our spirits, and to fill us with hope. Folks are stressed out at home, at work, and apparently at every intersection in Houston as drivers increasingly speed through red lights.

We want something to break through all of that, not like running a red light, but like a divine intervention. We want God to act. At the very least, we want God to explain why we keep taking two steps forward and one step back, even when we’ve tried to do the right things for ourselves and our neighbors over the last couple of years. Maybe there are also parts of your life where you feel as if you keep taking one step forward and two steps back. You want God to show up and help out. For you, Advent’s very real this year.

In a strange way, today’s reading from the Book of Zephaniah is like an explosion of Christmas pjs, however you want to imagine that or some other unexpected metaphor. That reading comes amid the traditional themes of Advent, which usually point us to some pretty weighty matters related to last things or God’s coming judgement. Surrounded by that heaviness, here is this super-rejoice-y fireworks display of hope, with God himself in our midst, as our redeemer, as a mighty warrior on our behalf who will renew us in his love and even break forth into loud singing over us.

But that’s not how the Book of Zephaniah begins. It begins with a warning about a disaster on the horizon, a judgement from God himself. The second verse of the first chapter puts it bluntly:

I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the Lord.[1]

The prophet wants those listening to change their ways in the present, to stop speeding through all of the red lights on the crowded road to doom. All of that was meant to be heard before the catastrophe happened — change, change, change, before it’s too la . . . 

[Announcer’s voice:] This ruin is brought to you by idolatry and oppression.[2]

That’s the Cliff notes version of the Book of Zephaniah.

But maybe there’s still time to change the channel, to watch a show with different sponsors, like righteousness, like humility. The prophet urges them — and us — to seek those things in order to be hidden from the wrath that will wash over everyone like tidal wave.

Well, spoiler alert, not much, if anything, changes and the bad things do happen — not a natural disaster, like those devastating tornadoes, at least 30 of them, that bulldozed through six states on Friday night and Saturday morning. That was awful. What the Book of Zephaniah described was awful too, but it was brought about by the rulers, the judges, the priests, and the prophets — most of the other prophets, that is — false ones.[3]

The part of the Book of Zephaniah that was read this morning is the last part — the final and most surprising words. They were probably meant to be heard while the catastrophe is unfolding, or perhaps afterwards, while looking in the rear view mirror and seeing the destruction in its wake.

It’s a different kind of message for a different kind of landscape — a landscape that has been altered. But it turns out that not everything has been swept away from the face of the earth. Those who had been oppressed and those who had suffered, the lowly and the outcast — they’ve been saved and gathered together as the remnant of Israel, and the Lord will bring them home and dwell in their midst. So they are told they should rejoice.

It’s not unlike the words of Mary’s song, known as the Magnificat, from the Gospel of Luke:

My soul doth magnify the Lord . . .
He hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he hath sent empty away.[4]

It’s not unlike the words of today’s collect — that prayer which collects our thoughts for this particular Sunday:

Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us . . .[5]

That used to be the prayer for the last Sunday of the Church Year — a prayer for God to stir things up throughout the coming season of Advent. In the Episcopal Church, we now pray it during Advent. It’s always a timely prayer, no matter what day of the year we cry out, pleading with God to stir things up, to come among us, and to help us . . . now.

But are you really expecting something to happen? Are you expecting a highway in the desert, a bridge over a deep divide, the restoration of a friendship, the rebuilding of your faith, however slowly, or the renewal of the gift of joy and wonder we ask God to give to those newly baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah?

Here, whenever you share with others the peace of Christ, if there isn’t anything that’s being overcome in that moment, in that experience before we gather around this Table, then it’s not really the peace of Christ. You don’t need the grace and forgiveness of Christ to overcome something that isn’t a problem, isn’t difficult, isn’t too much for you to handle.

That isn’t to say everything will suddenly be ok on the other side of the passing of the peace. I mean, let’s face it, sometimes only Jesus himself is able to make that a true moment. And it is true because we’re not the sponsor of that moment, Christ is. But that’s the point of the Advent season. We need help, and we need it right now, and our redeemer has be God.

Advent also reminds us that we need not be afraid when the Day of the Lord is at hand and Christ comes again, with power and great glory. Standing with those in the shadows who are suffering and excluded and broken-hearted and world-weary, we know the One who is coming will bring mercy, healing, and forgiveness, causing the shadows to flee.

In the meantime, how are we to live now, especially if we’re not looking in the rear view mirror at the chaos behind us but intensely feeling chaos surrounding us in the present? I like something the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota wrote recently, something which I’ve continued to ponder as part of my own Advent reflections this year. He said:

As followers of Jesus, we don’t need to see the whole map of the rugged landscape before us, we simply have to take the next step, which is always loving the next person, saying the next prayer, turning outward toward God’s outrageous promises, because God is faithful.[6]

My friends, the promises of God are indeed outrageous, as outrageous as an explosion of Christmas pjs amid the seriousness and the heaviness of Advent, amid the seriousness and the heaviness of world in which we’re living. Holding firmly to those promises — or rather being held by them — and knowing that mercy awaits us, we can say, with hope,

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.[7]

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Zephaniah 1:2.

2 BACK TO POST Zephaniah 1:4-6; 3:3-4.

3 BACK TO POST Zephaniah 3:3-4.

4 BACK TO POST The Book of Common Prayer (1979) 65.

5 BACK TO POST The Book of Common Prayer (1979) 160.

6 BACK TO POST Craig Loya (@MinnesotaBishop), Twitter, November 28, 2021. https://twitter.com/MinnesotaBishop/status/1464957201936572416?s=20.

7 BACK TO POST This popular saying is based on Revelation 22:20.

My Last Will and Testament, Part III

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Today is the anniversary of the marriage between a woman named Susan Campbell and a man named William York on September 23, 1852, in Randolph County, North Carolina. They are my great-great-grandparents. Both were born into slaveholding households in that same county. At least three out of four of their grandparents’ households enslaved Africans in the North Carolina counties of Randolph, Chatham, and Orange. The household which Susan and William would create was a slaveholding household too.

William enslaved a Black woman, who was 65 years of age when that fact was recorded in the 1860 Federal Census Slave Schedules. Several years earlier, after his father had died in 1855, William was the administrator of the estate and “filed a petition to sell the slaves of Semore York.”

That group of enslaved Africans may have included the five human beings listed in the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedules beside the name of William’s father, whose first name was spelled variously as Semore, Seymore, or Seymour. The youngest was a one-year-old girl described in that official record not as “B” for “Black” but as “M” for “Mulatto,” which referred then to someone who shares both African and European ancestry.

At the time that youngest child was conceived, Semore would have been married and about 44 years of age. William would have been single and about 22 years old. Two of William’s younger brothers would have been single and teenagers. The presumed mother of the enslaved girl would have been about 33 years old then and, as an enslaved person, a victim of sexual violence. So it’s surely within the realm of possibility that my great-great-grandfather sold either his half-sister, his niece, or perhaps even his own daughter, as human property at some point after Semore’s death.

In 1862, a decade after William and Susan were married, Susan’s father David Campbell died. His will directed that part of his estate, including 13 human beings he enslaved, be equally divided between his eight children. The estate inventory includes their names, ages, and monetary value.

It then describes which of the eight children of David Campbell received which lot of human property, and also what amount of cash was added to that lot from a sibling whose own lot was more valuable. The Yorks received lot “no. 6,” with 14-year-old Tamar, valued at $650, and 55-year-old Malinda, valued at $200, and also $25 from one of Susan’s brothers to make the total value equal to everyone else’s share, which is to say, $875.

In addition to Tamar and Malinda, the other names on that list of enslaved human beings were: Nancy, 19 years of age, $750 in value; Alfred, 32 years of age, $800 in value; Marticia, 32 years of age, $575 in value; Hannah, 29 years of age, $675 in value; Jacob, 26 years of age, $1,100 in value; Betty, 12 years of age, $550 in value; Sarah, 6 years of age, $400 in value; Martha, 6 years of age, $400 in value; Libby, 4 years of age, $350 in value; Harriott, 4 years of age, $350 in value; and John, an infant, $200 in value.

What distinguishes Susan and William York within the more than three dozen direct ancestors of mine who were slaveholders is the fact that they are the closest in time to me. Their household was the only slaveholding household among my great-great-grandparents. But the striking part of that statement, of course, is the harsh truth that I have great-great-grandparents who inherited people and then, presumably, continued to enslave them. (Although it should be noted that Susan’s sister and brother-in-law Isabelle and Steven Kivett had no prior history of slaveholding and would, in fact, name one of their sons Ulysses Grant Kivett in 1868.)

Both of these great-great-grandparents lived to see not only the end of the Civil War but also the end of Reconstruction. Both of them also lived to see a resurgence of white supremacist ideology in the election campaign of 1898, which culminated in the Wilmington coup d’etat that same year, a prelude to the disenfranchisement of Black voters throughout the Old North State.

Susan died at 74 years of age in 1901, and William died at 87 years of age in 1914. They are buried side by side in Chatham County, North Carolina. That simple act of charity in a cemetery, however, is something that more often than not was denied to enslaved African families, which were split apart both in life and in death. Also distant from one another after death, and certainly not unique to this particular story, were members of the York family and a Black enslaved woman who was raped and her daughter, whose name is unknown and who would be enslaved from birth, regardless of the real identity of her white father. I wish it was possible to undo all of that.

What each of us can do is, first, to remember the past truthfully, as it really was, not as we wish it had been, and to work in our own day toward justice in this world. Then, certainly for those of us who call ourselves Christians, we can pray that God will right all wrongs, including not only hurtful things done to us but also those cruel things done by us, in the world to come.

Click here to read all of the reflections in this series.

King David (kind of): “I hope you dance.”

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 10, July 11, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know you love and make it known. Amen.

I don’t know exactly how it started. But I do know she had left her mother’s side for just a moment as beautiful music sung by many voices washed over me from behind and continued toward her as she stood in the center aisle.

I think this little girl was dressed up as a ballerina, although I realize that sounds more like a dream than something real. But this was definitely real, a scene from my previous congregation in Minnesota, and I’m pretty sure she was dressed as a ballerina. I know without a doubt that she started her dance while I was preparing the Table for Holy Communion.

Her mother, as I recall, was a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but she shouldn’t have been. People there were watching that graceful dance as the bread and wine were placed “just so,” awaiting the prayerful dance of words that would ask the Holy Spirit to descend, in that hour, making ordinary food holy and ordinary people holy, not through anything we had done but through what God has and continues to do for the world.

All I can say is that most of us saw a little girl at home in the House of the Lord, dancing in the presence of the glory of God, giving thanks in her own way for the gifts that were about to be shared with everyone who had walked through those doors and been washed and refreshed and forgiven in the waters of baptism. Perhaps we were jealous, too, of the freedom she seemed to embody naturally and the joy and wonder she expressed. Those things sometimes get slowly squeezed out of us as we grow into adulthood.

But I’d like to think that growing into our Christian identity, as children of God, gathering together in this place, roots us continually in that kind of freedom, in the joy and wonder that the words of the Book of Common Prayer ask God to give to the newly baptized — to most of us here, whether we were baptized a few months ago, several years ago, or perhaps now many decades ago.[1] And if you haven’t been baptized but want to be, talk to me today right after this service. We’ll make sure you get baptized.

In our Old Testament reading from the Second Book of Samuel, there’s dancing too.[2] (And, yes, I’m well aware of the fact that there’s also dancing in our reading from the Gospel of Mark, but that would be a very different kind of sermon.[3]) Here we see David, already anointed as king over Israel, dressed not as a ballerina but in a linen ephod. That was a kind of sleeveless garment which was worn by the priests. It would have looked something like the chasuble our own priests wear to preside at the Table.

We’re told not once but twice that David “danced before the Lord with all his might.”[4] It wasn’t filled with the delicate and graceful moves I was trying to describe to you earlier, the ones I had seen in Minnesota. This was a total emersion in the sense of belonging to God, unrestrained, even scandalous, according the standards of the old guard.

Hence the reference to Michal who “despised [David] in her heart” after looking out a window at him “leaping and dancing before the Lord.”[5] She knew a thing or two about royal dignity because she was the daughter of the former king, Saul. But what makes Michal’s reaction really sting is the fact that she was also the first wife of the present king. Yes, she was married to David, who wasn’t acting with a shred of dignity in his jubilation.

Here we can see the enactment of the words of Hannah, mother of the Prophet Samuel, in the First Book of Samuel. Hannah sang a song to proclaim that “[the Lord] brings low, he also exalts. [The Lord] raises up the poor from the dust . . . to make them sit with princes.”[6] And remember that David had been a shepherd, and the youngest son of Jesse, someone who was obviously never meant to be a king in the eyes of the world.

To be sure, David was no saint. As I’ve said before from this pulpit, David was unfaithful, unforgiving, and unmerciful. Yet he was also an unlikely vessel of God’s grace, which, of course, means each of us can also be an unlikely vessel of God’s grace. It has been said that God, transforming our countless mistakes, writes straight with crooked lines. And that’s certainly true in the pages of the Bible whenever we read about King David.

But there’s another character in today’s story. Well, it’s really an object — the ark of the covenant. This wooden box held the stone tablets on which were written the ten words, the ten commandments, the self-revelation of God to Moses at Mount Sinai. Atop the lid were two angels, cherubim, and the glory of the Lord was enthroned above their outstretched wings.

Attached to two wooden poles, the ark could be carried to accompany God’s people. But it had been separated from them, having been captured in battle by the Philistines.[7] After the Philistines encounter some bad luck with the ark, it gets parked somewhere for about 20 years. That’s when David finally shows up with his entourage of thousands and the equivalent of an old coat check ticket to take the ark to its new home in Jerusalem.

So this wild parade into Jerusalem, known as the City of David, represents a different and much longer journey than the actual number of steps from the metaphorical coat closet where it had been left behind. The real movement, invigorating the whole scene, including David’s “Saturday Night Fever,” is the movement from despair to joy, from what seemed like the absence of God to an overwhelming sense of the presence of God.

It’s a preview of the journey the Israelites will experience in being sent into exile and then being brought back home. It’s a preview of the journey the followers of Jesus will experience in the disappointment of Good Friday and the surprise of Easter. It’s a preview of the journey we’ve made over the past year as Palmers, together with the rest of humanity, from separation to reunion within the walls of this church and around this Holy Table.

The reality of homecoming and our belief in the resurrection ought to overwhelm us like a flood with a sense of “the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty” of the Lord.[8] It ought to wash over us like the waters of baptism, like the music that washed over me in Minnesota, inspiring a little girl to dance before the altar.

There’s dancing taking place right now too. The children who processed out of the church before the sermon are talking about this story and dancing to music. And there was dancing last night, too, across the street in Hermann Park. Palmer’s own Carol Streatfeild and her son Theo were both dancing at McGovern Centennial Gardens. They were with a group of dancers in that public space performing art to the sound of a cello and other instruments. It might not have been the “lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals” or “the sound of the trumpet,” the shofar, that accompanied the ark as it made its way toward Jerusalem.[9] But it captured the attention of those walking by, causing them to stop, if only for a moment.

They danced across the grass to the pool of water in front of the pavilion, pausing there before continuing their journey to a new location where people gathered to watch and listen and ponder. Now I don’t know what any of that meant to Carol and Theo and the other dancers and the musicians and those who experienced all of this. For me, the pool resembled baptismal waters and the rest was an announcement of peace to the City of Houston.

I believe peace and beauty and community are gifts that flow, like a dance, whether slow and graceful or fast and jubilant, from the presence of God. And I believe this is where we learn how to dance in the world, in response to the overwhelming mercy and forgiveness and acceptance we receive through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.

So today I hope you’ll notice other Palmers, other Christians, other people created in God’s image and filled with the Spirit, dancing the world and not despise them in your heart but rejoice with them. In the words sung by country music star Lee Ann Womack:

Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance,
I hope you dance.[10]

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST The Book of Common Prayer (1979) 308. This is the prayer which is said by a priest or bishop over those who have just been baptized:

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen

2 BACK TO POST II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19.

3 BACK TO POST Mark 6:14-29.

4 BACK TO POST II Samuel 6:5, 14.

5 BACK TO POST II Samuel 6:16.

6 BACK TO POST I Samuel 2:1-10.

7 BACK TO POST I Samuel 4:1-11.

8 BACK TO POST II Chronicles 29:11. This is the translation in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), and here is the complete offertory sentence which a priest said at today’s worship services before the people’s gifts of bread and wine were placed on the Table for Holy Communion:

Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty. For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all.

9 BACK TO POST II Samuel 6:5, 15.

10 BACK TO POST The words of this signature song of country music singer Lee Ann Womack were written by Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers. Womack also sang this song in Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University, which is my alma mater, during the funeral for Wake Forest’s Reynolds Professor of American Studies Maya Angelou.

AP News: “The truth is still out there.”

/ Neil Alan Willard / Leave a comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 8, June 27, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Among last week’s very important news, of course, was the release of an unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on UFOs, which the government seems to want to call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And according to the most recent Gallup poll about all of this kind of thing, which was taken two summers ago, one-third of Americans believe that some of those UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets and galaxies. Now putting that fascinating information side by side with the fact that only about one percent of the American population identifies as Episcopalian begs the question: What do the aliens know about getting their message out that the Episcopal Church doesn’t?

Reading news articles about that DNI report made me feel like a child again, as if I was watching reruns of the 1970s TV series Project U.F.O. based on the Air Force’s real-life Project Blue Book, which investigated these strange sightings in the 1950s and 1960s. The bottom line, according a recent article by the Associated Press, is this intriguing but unsatisfying conclusion:

The truth is still out there.

On the flip side, there’s still lots of wonder left in the universe, even wonder about angels and archangels and other Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

There’s still lots of wonder left on the good Earth too — lots of things that make us want to say to the people around us the words of the psalmist today, while inviting enthusiastically with our hands both them and even complete strangers to join us: “Sing to the Lord, you servants of his; give thanks for the remembrance of his holiness.” Or as the down to earth version in the Message puts it: “All you saints! Sing your hearts out to God! Thank [God] to his face!” In other words, let’s praise God together.

The rejoicing into which the psalmist waves us isn’t that time when she felt like she was having a mountaintop experience. I mean, [*whispers*] just between you and me, this psalmist was rather insufferable back then. As the seventh verse of Psalm 30 says, “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I shall never be disturbed. You, Lord, with your favor, make me as strong as the mountains.” Most of us were somewhere else, down in the valley, when she was shouting at us from on high. And what we heard were these words from the Message version: “When things were going great I crowed, ‘I’ve got it made. I’m God’s favorite. [God] made me [queen] of the mountain.” Or maybe those were the awkward words we were saying to others below us.

Not surprisingly, all that self-righteousness came to an end in a gloriously spectacular crash. Everything fell apart, and the crowing from the mountaintop suddenly ceased. The terrifying image for that both here and elsewhere in the Bible is of God’s face being hidden from us. It’s the opposite of the priestly blessing of Aaron, brother of Moses, from the Book of Numbers, when we say over a living congregation or at the grave, literally over one of our own who has died and been lowered into the ground:

The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you . . .

This is how the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes what’s happening at this deeply upsetting moment in Psalm 30. “It is the way of a small child,” he writes, “who is frantic but is suddenly okay when she see’s her mother’s face. But if mother turns away or is absent or is unavailable or is unresponsive, the world is immediately a place of threat. When God’s face of blessing was hidden, ‘I was in dismay.’”[1]

But from that gut-wrenching moment, the one speaking, whether you or me or someone else, did not cease crying out to God, making her case about her connection, her abiding relationship, with the Holy One of Israel:

“Can you sell me for a profit when I’m dead?
auction me off at at cemetery yard sale?

When I’m ‘dust to dust’ my songs
and stories of you won’t sell.

So listen! and be kind!
Help me out of this!”

[And] you did it: you changed wild lament
into whirling dance;

You ripped off my black mourning band
and decked me with wildflowers.

I’m about to burst with song;
I can’t keep quiet about you.

God, my God,
I can’t thank you enough.

At least that’s how the version of Psalm 30 in the Message tells the rest of the story. Usually we hear part of it this way: “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” But you have your own words and your own stories to tell about the presence of God in your life or in the lives of those around you, including many of us here today.

In some cases, your own stories will follow the pattern of this psalm, this prayer. That moment of rescue occasions its opening words of praise and thanks. When the voice of the psalmist proclaims to God, “You have lifted me up,” she’s not talking about being lifted up to her mountaintop experience. No, she’s referring to having been lifted up out of the grave, raised up out of the pit, pulled up into an open place where she can breathe.

So when she invites those around her to join her, to sing to the Lord, to come together as the Lord’s people, she’s talking to them face to face, not shouting down at them, not separated from them out of pride or a sense of superiority. She’s on their level, grateful to be alive rather than six feet under. There’s a genuine humility in her invitation to us.

At other times, however, when we want God to be near to us, when we want God to rescue us, our honest prayer ends with the same words as a very different psalm, which says “darkness is my only companion.” Those are the surprising final words of Psalm 88. Sometimes that’s all we can say.

So don’t be afraid to describe things as they really are in your own prayers. And don’t cease crying out to God. Be persistent, like the psalmist today, watching for God, even when — especially when — the divine countenance seems hidden by the most intense and frightening storms of life.

Many of you will recall hearing echoes of some of this in a parable Jesus told hundreds of years later. It’s the story of the importunate or persistent widow. This widow doesn’t cease to ask for justice until the judge finally does something about it. The judge’s countenance might be turned away, but hers most certainly is not. Her gaze is fixed on that judge’s seat.

“The point of the parable,” according to Brueggemann, “is to carry the nightmare to God and insist that God should deal with it and then to trust your life to the God of all nightmares.”[2] Otherwise you will just sit there in silence, removed from the congregation and seemingly removed from God, growing cynical about everything under the sun and everyone around you. But according to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus told his disciples that parable about a widow so that they would “pray always and . . . not lost heart.”

So what if you choose not to embrace those words?

Well, if you get settled into that metaphorical recliner of cynicism and stay seated there, using your remote to click through the channels of this life and judging them all, I declare this to you as a minister of the gospel: The truth is still out there. And even if you take that cynicism with you to the grave, someone like me will stand over you and speak the truth, remembering that joy comes in the morning, at the general resurrection, and say,

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you
and be gracious unto you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you
and give you peace.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Walter Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004) 182.

2 BACK TO POST Brueggemann 185.

Life on the 400 Block of the Church

/ Neil Alan Willard / 1 Comment

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 5, June 6, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Some of you will remember scenes from around the world last year when people in cities and towns either opened their windows or stepped out onto their balconies at the same time each evening. In Italy, they sang together to boost morale. In the City of Atlanta, they cheered loudly from high rises when healthcare workers were changing shifts to thank them for risking their own lives to save others. Here at Palmer, our church bells are still playing hymns in the morning and in the evening for those walking into and out of the largest medical complex in the world across the street from us.

But most of those communal gatherings that brought people outside of their homes and connected them with one another stopped long ago. Most, but not all. The folks who live in the 400 block of East 118th Street in New York City are still going at it more than 400 days after starting this ritual.[1]

Ivette Rodriguez never misses a night. She moved to that block with her mother back in 1965. Her husband sets an alarm to make sure they don’t forget. At 7:00 p.m., Ivette puts on a jacket and steps outside. Some of her neighbors are already out there, with pans or whatever else they can find that can be used to make noise. A few kids wave flashlights too.

One of Ivette’s neighbors is Frances Mastrota. She’s in her eighties and moved to the block in 1959 as a bride. Widowed since 1975, she’s still there. She’s actually Dr. Mastrota, a retired oncology researcher. A lot of the people on that block, in fact, were healthcare workers. So that’s one of the reasons they still cheer on their former colleagues. But it’s not really the main reason they keep stepping outside at the same time.

When asked about this by an interviewer, Dr. Mastrota says:

Because we are a very special block, and we watch out for each other. If they don’t see [me] come out at 7:00, they look for me. . . . If I don’t come out, this lady comes, that lady comes, the people over there come. . . . If I don’t come out at 7:00, if I don’t pick up my New York Times paper at 6:00, they look for me. They know I’m alone.[2]

The interviewer, Ira Glass of public radio’s This American Life, then asks her:

Some nights, do you just feel tired, and you don’t want to come out?[3]

And she replies with a laugh:

I have to. I have to. They will come here![4]

In other words, the 400 block of East 118th Street maintains the bonds of community by showing up for one another and by looking out for their neighbors. They did it in different ways before the pandemic. And they will continue to find new ways of doing it in the future, I am sure, because they have love for one another. To be clear, that can be a true statement even if they don’t always like each other. They have regard for the humanity of those who live beside them and those who live across the street. From our Christian perspective, we would say they recognize those neighbors, both new and old, as human beings who have been created in God’s image.

Palmer, like any other church, is meant to be like the 400 block of East 118th Street. We don’t come together every day, although we can certainly join together daily in prayer for one another. But we do gather as a community of Christians on Sunday mornings — to remember that the circle of grace keeps flooding over the banks of our experiences only and to hear again and again and again that there is more to this world than we can see at the end of our noses. It’s important to look directly at what’s there, right in front of us — the suffering within us and around us from which others turn away. But it’s also important to know that’s not the last word. And that’s why we come here, regardless of how we feel, “so we do not lose heart,” as St. Paul writes in today’s reading from his second letter to the Corinthians.[5]

We can not only look out for those who live on our block, who belong to our church, but also for those who would find a home here, a place where they can be sheltered not only during a pandemic but also in all the other storms of life — a safe harbor. The truth is that the block on which we live as followers of Jesus, crucified and risen, extends far beyond our own walls.

I don’t usually remember my dreams, but I did remember one a couple of weeks ago on a Friday morning. In that dream, while on a trip, perhaps a vacation, my family and I made a Sunday visit to a congregation very much like Palmer. Folks there were recalling with joy the time same-gender marriages had begun within that Christian community.

The sense of encouragement and interdependence and love for one another, rooted in God’s first love for us, was intense in my dream. It reminded me that people don’t have to be merely tolerated in the pews. They can belong to parishes where LGBTQ people serve on the church staff, as members of the clergy, and as congregational leaders. They can even donate flowers for the altar to the glory of God in thanksgiving for a wedding anniversary — a simple, ordinary act which reveals a lot about just how welcoming a church really is or isn’t. They don’t have to hide or believe God is completely hidden and far away, keeping them at arm’s length rather than embracing them.

This I have come to believe, wholeheartedly, as a Christian.

After I woke up, a bit disoriented from the vividness of my dream, one of the first things I read that morning were these words from an interview with the actor Billy Porter:

The first thing that is taken away from LGBTQ people . . . is our spirituality.[6]

What he said is too often true, but it doesn’t have to be that way for everyone. We can open wide the gates and doors of our houses of worship, as we do at Palmer, walking through them beside our LGBTQ friends and neighbors and family members. And we don’t have to pray for them in the third person, as if they are somewhere else, because they are here. As a Christian young adult named Mary Grahame Hunter puts it:

Queer people are part of Church’s first person plural, the great ‘we’ that begins the Nicene Creed.[7]

I love her use of that phrase — “the great ‘we’ that begins the Nicene Creed” — because it includes all of us here today. It carries us along, within something much larger than ourselves, when we’re strong, when we’re struggling, when we feel as if we can trust God with every fiber of our being, and even when, perhaps especially when, we’re not so sure about that.

Reflecting on all of his various conversations with the folks who live on the 400 block of East 118th Street in New York City, Ira Glass, said:

It’s the dailyness of the 7:00 get-together, the fact that it happens every single day. That’s what makes it mean so much to all of them. They made this part of the day a little life raft that they gathered on during this terrible, dangerous year that made it like a daily prayer.[8]

Glass then confessed:

I personally haven’t prayed every day since I was a little boy. But somebody who does it as an adult tells me that it’s the fact that the . . . rituals never change day to day that gives comfort. He has days when the prayers mean less to him and days when they mean a lot more. And feeling that difference from day to day also tells him something [about himself].[9]

In a moment, we’ll stand before the divine mystery in this life raft, this church, and together acknowledge God as the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is,” including not only things “seen” but also things “unseen.”[10] As we heard in our reading from Second Corinthians:

. . . we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.[11]

And surely among those things that are eternal is love. It’s not something we can put under a microscope or place our finger on directly. Like the wind, however, we can see its effects and point to those places where and those people in whom we have felt it when we most needed it.

I hope you’ll experience that today in the people around you right now, in ordinary bread made holy food and placed into your hands, in the small acts of love you will give and receive after being sent into world, and in the God who made you, redeemed you, sanctifies you, and thinks you’re fabulous, arrayed in the love of Jesus, our Savior. So do not lose heart, my friends on the 400 block of the Church. You are clothed in love, and always will be.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Ira Glass, “The Daily,” This American Life, originally aired May 14, 2021.

2 BACK TO POST Glass.

3 BACK TO POST Glass.

4 BACK TO POST Glass.

5 BACK TO POST II Corinthians 4:16.

6 BACK TO POST Billy Porter, Tamron Hall Show, May 19, 2021.

7 BACK TO POST Mary Grahame Hunter, “By the Grace of God, Queer,” Earth & Altar, May 24, 2021.

8 BACK TO POST Glass.

9 BACK TO POST Glass.

10 BACK TO POST The first sentence of the Nicene Creed in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), according to the use of the Episcopal Church:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all this is, seen and unseen.

11 BACK TO POST II Corinthians 4:18.