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.

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.

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.

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 14, 2021

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

On the Friday before the Big Freeze here in Texas, I was standing outside, waiting to pick up my youngest son at the end of the school day. It was already pretty cold. So I turned up the heat after we got in the car, and that’s when my son immediately noticed a thin crack in the front windshield.

I had noticed it, too, earlier that day. And upon closer inspection, I could see where it started — a little round chip, like a small crater on the surface of the moon. I have no recollection of when that happened. I don’t remember a piece of gravel, or whatever it was, bouncing off my car with that distinctive sound that makes me wince for just a second or two. But that’s definitely where it started before stretching to the left and to the right across most of the breadth of the windshield. And then, as temperatures continued their descent into hell, the crack traveled in multiple zigzag directions.

That serpentine crack came to mind as I read this puzzling story about snakes from the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament.[1] Many Christians have never read this book or never made it to the end if they tried to read it. And rarely do we hear its words spoken aloud in public worship. There’s a beautiful blessing that the Lord, through Moses, gives to Aaron and his sons to use as priests to bless the Israelites. So we hear about that, we hear a strange story about prophecy, and we hear this weird memory of snakes in the wilderness. But that’s all we get if we’re just listening on Sundays.

Here the Israelites have been delivered from Egyptian slavery by the Lord’s hand. Food has also been provided for them so they’ll live. That food, called manna, is a daily miracle in the wilderness. This isn’t too hard for us to picture, right? We have been walking through a wilderness of restrictions.

Yet in the midst of that, the Lord has set a Table for us. Looking back, we can say that the Bread of Heaven hasn’t ceased to appear in this church, and it hasn’t ceased to be received by God’s people at our in-person services with Holy Communion over the last six months. That which gives life to the world is waiting to be given to you and other Christians as more and more of us feel we’re able to return safely with the measures we have in place. It’s as if a beautiful flower is about to start blooming through the rest of the year.

But the Bread of Heaven? It’s been here all along, and it’s available now.

That was true for the children of Israel, too, although the food provided for them was for physical sustenance rather than spiritual strength. But they complained about it. Yes, it was a miracle, but they complained nevertheless. At one point they yelled at Moses about not having meat, and the Lord gave them quail in abundance. Now they’re grumbling against Moses and God, basically saying, “These two? They don’t know what they’re doing. And this so-called food they keep giving us? Disgusting!”

What happens next is probably, for most of us, the unsettling part of this distant memory. It’s like that little chip in my windshield. I wasn’t exactly sure how it got there, but it just got worse and worse over time, to the point that someone with skills far beyond my own was needed to do something about it. There’s absolutely no way I could’ve fixed that problem myself.

Our translation of this text from the NRSV says “the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”[2] It implies that God was the direct source of a deadly judgement in response to their prickliness — a harsh sentence for a sour attitude.

At least one Jewish translation takes a step back, saying passively that “[the Lord] let fiery snakes go among the people.”[3] Maybe if they had respected venomous snakes a little more than they respected both God and Moses, they wouldn’t have been harmed. Maybe their carelessness wrought that.

Some folks take two steps back, saying these snakes are really a metaphor. Perhaps in the midst of a temper tantrum these wanderers in the desert began striking one another verbally with sharp tongues, infecting everyone with the all-too-deadly human poison of rumors and back-biting.

Whatever brought that about, whatever caused that chip in the glass, things got worse.  Those cracks began to spread, and people were suffering, people were dying. They needed something beyond their own abilities to help them, to heal them. Only when they were able to see that, and finally open their hearts, did they ask Moses to plead to the Lord on their behalf.

Now we would probably want this painful scene to be ended quickly through something like a healing wind from God that comes over the encampment. But in the pages of the Bible, the important part is also the weird part of this story. Moses is instructed to make a serpent of bronze and set it on a pole so that those who’ve been bitten by a snake can look at it and live.

How primitive! Can you seriously imagine walking into a doctor’s office in the 21st century and finding an image of a snake wrapped around a pole?

Wait a second . . . you can see snakes wrapped around poles throughout the Texas Medical Center. Whether it’s the Hebrew symbol of the bronze serpent of Moses or the Greek symbol of the rod of Asclepius, that image has represented healing and medicine for millennia and still does today.

Perhaps it’s related to taking something that can be dangerous and making it, counterintuitively, into something else that brings health. Think of snake venom being used to create a medicine, a scalpel being wielded to remove a tumor, a pathogen being transformed into a vaccine, or merely information about a virus being used to make an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

I don’t know what bronze-age people knew about snakes and healing. But I do believe God has been just as much at work in all these things, even in our own day, as God was when Moses lifted up that serpent in the wilderness.

And we have experiences of this healing in many other ways too. Nicholas Wolterstorff is a Christian philosopher who comes from a small town in Minnesota. He was one of my professors in divinity school. A couple of years ago, he said the most moving experience of teaching he’s ever had came not in a classroom at Yale University or inside a church building but at a prison.

Wolterstorff is mostly known for a small book called Lament for a Son, an unvarnished reflection on the death of one of his adult children. He says he had a curious sense while writing it that the words came to him, that he wasn’t searching for them, that they were plucked from the air, as it were, reminding me this week of Moses receiving something from God.[4]

Anyway, a group of prisoners was reading that book. And because he lived nearby, they invited Wolterstorff to come speak to them. So he did, talking for a few minutes and having them respond. This is how he described it:

Twenty guys in the room. Seventeen of them are in for life. . . . For ten minutes I’m utterly perplexed by what’s going on. They read a passage, and then make some comments. And I saw no connection between the passage that they read and their comments.

And then it occurred to me: Oh, they’re not reading this as Nick Wolterstorff’s lament for his son. They’re reading this as their lament. They were using my words for their lament. That’s what was going on. . . . And they were open. They didn’t conceal the fact that they had murdered their best friend, and that they ruined all their relationships. . . .

[They] could use my words to express [their] grief.[5]

The healing power of God was present inside that prison in the same way it was present in the wilderness when Moses lifted up the bronze serpent.

Now there are two footnotes to this snake story. The first comes centuries later in the Old Testament’s Second Book of Kings.[6] Apparently this bronze serpent, a symbol of healing, was preserved by the Israelites and later erected in Jerusalem, perhaps in the Temple itself. King Hezekiah had it destroyed finally because the people had been burning incense to it. So the material object through which the Holy One of Israel healed them had been turned into a kind of graven image forbidden in the Ten Commandments.

When I dropped off my car to get the windshield replaced, they very cleverly gave me a brand new car, same model, to drive around for a few days. It had an updated navigation system with a 3-D map. Here and there a random building was raised up on that map to use as a landmark. Memorial Hermann Medical Plaza, across the street, was the one of them. And just like in real life, day or night, I always know where Palmer is when I see it.

On a spiritual 3-D map, we might choose to raise up our church building instead. That would be a great landmark, a place where we are reoriented in a broken world and rediscover our relationship to God as beloved children.

The key is not to worship the building itself, forgetting that its beauty, like the beauty of the music that fills it and the rituals that animate it, creates a frame around the source of all of that beauty, which is nothing less than the presence of Christ — in the Word proclaimed, the Sacrament received, and the Body of Christ gathered, whether we are inside or outside its walls.

And that brings me to a second footnote from the New Testament’s Gospel of John.[7] We heard it in the words of Jesus this morning. He said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”[8] Jesus also said he had come not to condemn the world but to save it.

Jesus would be lifted up on the cross in another godforsaken place, so that all those suffering in a different kind of wilderness — all of us — can be healed. So look up to him, and know there’s mercy for each of us . . . today.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Numbers 21:4-9.

2 BACK TO POST Numbers 21:6.

3 BACK TO POST Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah with a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text (New York: HarperOne, 2003) 499.

4 BACK TO POST Nicholas Wolterstorff, interviewed by Scott Jones on “Episode 151: In this World of Wonders, with Nicholas Wolterstorff,” Give & Take Podcast, October 1, 2009.

5 BACK TO POST Wolterstorff.

6 BACK TO POST II Kings 18:1-4.

7 BACK TO POST John 3:14-21.

8 BACK TO POST John 3:14-15.

THE RECTOR’S REPORT

DELIVERED AS THE SERMON ON JANUARY 24, 2021

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

I often pray those words before a sermon because they reflect the mission statement of our church “to know and share the love of Jesus Christ.” And that is what we’ve done as a congregation over the past year, in spite of the unforeseen and unprecedented challenges that arose last March.

In the middle of that month, in the middle of the season of Lent, we made a lightning fast shift from what most of us think of as “normal” church to gathering only online. We had less than two days to prepare for that change, which most of us had no idea would last this long. From inside the church that next Sunday, with some of the lights turned off, painter’s tape holding a less than adequate camera steady on top of an aluminum step ladder, and no one to be seen in the pews from the pulpit, it felt like the distant shadow of a wartime broadcast from the heart of London during the Blitz.

Today’s sermon is actually my report as the Rector of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church on the day our Annual Parish Meeting. I first want to thank everyone who works on my staff at Palmer, everyone who serves in leadership here, and those who’ve volunteered in ways seen and unseen.

You all have kept our parish moving forward through this wilderness. We’ve worshiped together. We’ve prayed together. We’ve studied the scriptures together. We’ve discussed and debated issues facing us and the world together. We’ve laughed and cried, experiencing joy and sorrow together.

One example of that joy was our experience of Christmas. Our traditional Christmas Eve service was offered online. Our usual worship with holy communion on Christmas morning was held outdoors and attracted a lot more people than had registered ahead of time. That’s because many people saw it happening as they passed by the church and stopped to join us.

And our most non-traditional Christmas Eve service, of course, was our first drive-in service in a parking lot near Rice Stadium. Far more of you and your friends showed up for that than we expected. Rice officials were amazingly generous and helpful, you were patient and gracious, and the local news told our story in their reports that night and the next morning.

The last thing I did in that parking lot was to pray with a woman being treated for cancer in the medical center and with her family, including her grandchildren. Surprised to find our service on their walk, they watched it until the last carol had been sung and said it was a special gift to them.

In the days leading up to those celebrations, Palmer’s Alternative Gift Giving invitation raised nearly $19,000 for outreach agencies and programs, far surpassing our previous record high in recent years. The largest donation was given in support of PAR, which stands for Palmers Assisting Reentry. This is one of our own ministries and is dedicated to reducing recidivism among former inmates by supporting them in various ways and partnering with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program and, soon, the Texas Jail Project. More details about all of that will be forthcoming this year.

Those days leading up to Christmas also brought hope to us and the world in a different way. The first day vaccines began to be administered locally to physicians, nurses, and others across the street in the Texas Medical Center, there were photos posted online each passing hour to show that we had crossed a new threshold — a hopeful one.

I was surprised how emotional it made me to see those images, including the faces of people I know personally, including some of you. And now I see from time to time photos with the masked smiles of other Palmers who’ve just received their first shot. Those of us who are still waiting for ours rejoice with you and give thanks for your public witness.

It’s a witness not unrelated to your Christian faith. That’s because it’s not only about loving yourself but also about loving those for whom you care the most and loving everyone else in our congregation and throughout this great city. And here at Palmer, we believe that God is the ultimate source of the wisdom and intellect, creativity and curiosity, and scientific methods that have led us to this moment. Those dots are connected for us.

So we give thanks in our prayers as individuals and as a community for the graciousness of God and for the heroic diligence of scientists, public health experts, and medical professionals. And as an outward sign of those prayers, our church bells ring daily for those healthcare workers.

Along the same lines, at the meeting of Palmer’s Vestry last June, the physicians who are members of the Vestry affirmed that looking for specific medical milestones as we move into different chapters of regathering as a church is prudent for the health and safety of our congregation. And one of them proposed the following motion, which was passed:

The Palmer Vestry supports the phased reopening of Palmer Memorial Church based on achieving medical milestones that have been recommended by public health officials and following the stated recommendations of the Diocese of Texas.

That’s exactly what we have done, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.

As the COVID-19 test positivity rate started to get closer to 5%, we began offering outdoor worship services on the south lawn of the church last September in addition to our prerecorded online Sunday liturgies. Once that positivity rate stayed below 5% for at least 14 days, suggesting community control of the spread of the virus, we moved one of those services inside the church with the various limitations required by the COVID-19 protocols approved for use in our setting by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas.

As soon as we reach that milestone again, we’ll repeat that shift and include an indoor service. At the moment, however, we’ll remain outdoors for worship since the positivity rate posted on the TMC website is nearly 13% and the positivity rate for all of Houston and Harris County is nearly 20%.

The reason for being especially careful right now was explained not only by Dr. Anthony Fauci at the White House just a few days ago but also by our own medical professionals here at Palmer earlier this month. Simply put, the new strain of the virus is much more contagious, which means that shorter exposure times and being less than six feet apart could lead to a higher risk of infection. So physical distancing remains important.

I know it’s hard. I know it seems like it will never end. But it will end, and we’ll see one another face to face. And we’ll know, even without words, the joys and the sorrows that too often remain hidden behind a mask or that feel too distant behind a screen. We need to use the masks and the screens right now, out of love. But a new day is indeed coming.

Looking down the road, there are three important things I want to highlight as we think about putting our best foot forward on the other side of this pandemic and walk together with confidence through an altered landscape as the community of Jesus in this place — this particular place.

The first is the Membership Task Force that I appointed last fall. Its purpose is to think creatively about our own context here at Palmer, specifically as our staff and leadership look ahead to regathering differently later this year and inviting the whole congregation to make an intentional recommitment to growing our church in what one might aptly describe as a New World.

At the moment we’re doing a series of mini-interviews with a variety of churches here and elsewhere, both like us and not like us, to learn about their practices and strategies for inviting and incorporating new people into the life of their churches. And we’ll have a more extensive conversation with a few of those church leaders and our whole task force at some of our upcoming meetings this year. So please keep this work in your prayers.

Some of the recommendations of this task force will relate to our use of technology. By next fall, for example, we might be able to transition from prerecorded to livestreamed services inside the church. That’s something we’ll continue to do long after things feel a lot more normal to most of us.

It will help others to be able to glimpse the glory of God we encounter within these walls and keep us connected to one another when we’re traveling or sick at home or confined to our house because of physical limitations. And the church needs to have the right kind of equipment to make that a quality offering. In the same way, our Bible studies, which have thrived during the pandemic, will gather again at the church at some point. But the rooms they’ll use can be equipped in such a way that others will still be able to join the conversation online, which is helpful not only for Palmers who live far away from the church but also for new people who are curious about us.

More important than technology, however, we envision a regularly offered workshop for Palmers, new and not-so-new, young and not-so-young, to help them learn how to give their testimony, broadly defined, about God in their lives and the connection of that to Palmer. Inviting others to come and see what God is doing here in this particular place will always be the most effective thing we can do as individuals to grow our congregation in the present moment and post-pandemic. But each of us needs to be equipped to do it well. So this should be a high priority for us going forward.

Perhaps less interesting but still important is Palmer’s Code of Procedures, which outlines how we organize our common life as a parish community. During my tenure here, they’ve already been changed once, partially, because the way we were doing a few things on the ground didn’t match the way the Code of Procedures was actually written.

But now, I believe, is the time to take a comprehensive look at the Code of Procedures so that we’ll be organized in the best possible way going forward. For example, the councils that specifically derive their authority from our Vestry should have clear rules about membership, membership rotation, and leadership rotation. Not having that blurs lines of authority, makes it difficult for new people to participate, and simply isn’t healthy.

Two important things relating to the organization of the Vestry, the collective body with the most authority in any Episcopal parish, have to do with its size and the manner in which new members are elected.

Ours has 15 elected members. My previous parish in Minnesota had even more and went through a process that reduced the size of its Vestry from 18 elected members down to 12. That’s the most common size for reasons that are hopefully obvious since Jesus called 12 disciples, including Simon and Andrew, and James and John, as we heard in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark.[1] But it was also a practical recommendation from the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes because larger vestries don’t result in better decision-making processes but do inhibit discussions.

Regardless of the size of a vestry, there is more than one way to elect new members. I have served parishes that hold elections just like Palmer does, with a slate that has twice as many candidates as there are slots to fill. I have also served congregations that use a different nominating process to produce a slate with the same number of candidates as there are slots to fill.

Many of our peer congregations have shifted from the former to the latter for their elections. We have discussed this here before publicly, and I know doing things the way we do them currently is how the first women were able to be elected to the Vestry here at Palmer. That is a really important part of our history. But our present reality is that it’s very difficult to expand the diversity of our Vestry today because of that same election process.

On a practical level, with each passing year, it takes longer to produce a full slate of ten candidates for our Vestry election. We can find people to serve on various councils. We can find people to serve in leadership. But finding twice as many people to serve in leadership in any given year isn’t easy.

And on a pastoral level, there are many active Palmers who share the pews with us and would bring so many wonderful and unique gifts to the table who are hesitant to step forward as candidates because of a perceived winner/loser aspect to our elections. No amount of explaining how that’s not what this is about will change their minds. As a priest, I will also tell you that it bothers a lot of people who participate in the process more than they ever thought it would. And that breaks my heart as their pastor.

So today I am appointing a Code of Procedures Task Force to consider these things and lead us through a process to discuss them in the coming months and eventually to vote on its recommendations, probably next September.

The members of this new task force are: Kristie Van Arsdel, a lawyer and Palmer’s outgoing Junior Warden, who will chair the task force; John Wallace, an attorney and one of Palmer’s former senior wardens; Barbara Hass, a member of the Vestry who is rolling off this year and who, as many of you probably know, helped to write Palmer’s current Code of Procedures; and Michael Chambers, an attorney who serves as Palmer’s Chancellor. I’ll also serve on the Code of Procedures Task Force as an ex officio member.

Finally, as you will hopefully recall, our annual meeting last year included a description by Greg Hambrick, one of Palmer’s former senior wardens, of what was then a new Property Development Task Force and an interesting idea that was being explored by knowledgeable people who love very deeply this place and this people, which is to say all of us in this congregation.

They had been invited to think creatively about the use of our property, which, although limited, is uniquely situated. In other words, are there ways to envision its use that would enhance the life and ministries of our church while simultaneously giving us an opportunity not only to grow our congregation but, more importantly, expand our mission in a powerfully significant and truly lasting way here in the City of Houston?

Could something be built both physically and spiritually that you could lift up your eyes to see and be a part of and know that it would bring life to this church and this community long after my lifetime and your lifetime? And what would that look like in our specific location as the gateway to the Texas Medical Center, which is the largest medical complex in the world?

Imagine all sorts and conditions of folks being drawn to cross the threshold of the doors of our church because of our mission in this city and because, quite frankly, we made it easier for them to get here. What they would find in this particular place is beauty — beauty not only in this historic building but also in the music and the prayers and the preaching and the people.

They’d find beauty in God’s grace for them.

David Robinson serves on Palmer’s Vestry, faithfully attends our Tuesday morning Men’s Bible Study, and also has a seat, as most of you know, on Houston’s City Council. He’ll give us an update with details related to these wonderings and conversations later this afternoon at the annual meeting.

If such a path presents itself to us, and we make the decision to walk down that path, believing God is calling us to do so, one of the most important and exciting things we would get to do as a congregation is to dream together about what the expansion of our mission would be.

It might be something that addresses an issue related to the area of public education. It might be a way to invest in early childhood development, which is one of the stated goals of the Episcopal Health Foundation and, in fact, its most specific goal because of the impact it makes. It might be an idea that connects us directly to the healing that takes place in the Texas Medical Center or the caregivers of its patients or the people who work there and absorb all of the stress and the grief and the anxieties thrown at them.

I don’t know what that expanded mission would be, opening our arms wider to share the love of Jesus Christ. What I do know, however, is that it would reveal itself as we walk together, talk together, pray together, even wrestle together with God, like Jacob does in the Bible, to receive a blessing. For me it brings to mind a quote from one of our Great Wednesday Webinar guests last fall, Miroslav Volf. A theologian at Yale Divinity School, he once said:

Every act of grace is a stepping into an unknown land.

And that’s why, he also said, “you don’t know what’s going to happen.” But it’s like answering the call of Jesus to follow him. We heard about Simon, Andrew, James, and John answering that call this morning. And we prayed in the Collect of the Day that we, too, would “answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ” so that “we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.”[2] What is he calling us to do next? Whatever that might be, the good news is that we can trust the one calling us by name. 

This I believe.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Mark 1:14-20.

2 BACK TO POST The Book of Common Prayer (1979) 215.