What do you do when there’s nothing you really can do?  I often ask myself that question when I am with people at vulnerable times in their lives.  What do you do when a close friend reveals that she has terminal cancer?  What do you do when the young couple you’ve gotten to know at church loses the baby that they have been joyfully anticipating for months?  What do you do when your next door neighbor loses his job and has to sell his house because he can’t make payments anymore?  What do you do when there’s nothing you really can do?

I wonder whether Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus asked this same question when they heard about, or actually witnessed, the death of Jesus.  These men were not regular disciples of Jesus.  In the gospel of John, we hear that Joseph was a “secret” disciple of Jesus and Nicodemus is identified as the one “who had at first come to Jesus by night.”  But even as somewhat reluctant disciples, these men felt that they had to do something.  And so they did.

“Nicodemus…also came [along with Joseph of Arimathea], bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.  They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. …because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.”

Joseph and Nicodemus were utterly convinced that Jesus was dead.  They knew they could do nothing to bring him back to life.  They knew that what had transpired was completely unjust.  Even if they had not come to a complete understanding of who Jesus was, they knew that he was from God, and that he was innocent.  But they couldn’t do anything about any of that.  Not now.  So, faced with the question of “what do you do when there really is nothing you can do,” they decide to give him an honorable burial.  Spices are purchased and linen cloths procured.  They wrap the body properly and place Jesus’ body in the tomb.

When faced with nothing else to do, Joseph and Nicodemus fall back on ritual.  They knew what it meant to prepare a body properly for burial.  They knew how to prepare the grave.  They did what they could to honor this man who had changed their lives.  And then they gave it to God.  Through their bold ritual actions, they witnessed to their new-found faith in Jesus. 

I believe that the actions of Joseph and Nicodemus tell us as much about these reluctant disciples as it does about Jesus.  They didn’t have all the answers.  They didn’t even know what questions to ask!  They sure didn’t have any solutions.  But they had become followers of the Way of Love.  And they did what they could do.  They prepared Jesus’ body for burial and then buried him.  It was a ritual act of profound love.

The same is true for us as well, isn’t it?  If you’re like me, you don’t have many answers or solutions.  There’s not much we can do about the death of Jesus or about the myriad injustices and acts of violence that still plague humanity.  It can all seem so totally overwhelming.  So, as followers of Jesus, we do what we can do to be agents of love in the world.  And then, when there’s nothing more we really can do, we give it to God.  

We’ve been ritually doing that all week long in our services of Holy Week.  We have been ritually laying our lives and the life of the world upon the altar of Christ saying, “here it is, God, there’s nothing more we can do.”  And we’ll do it again today as we commemorate Jesus’ death on Good Friday.  And we’ll do it on Saturday night and, then again, on Sunday morning too as we ritually witness to our faith that through the power of Christ, even death itself dies.  So, what do you do when there’s nothing you really can do?  You give it to God and trust in the power of God’s love.

~Father Art  

The first day of Spring arrived this past Monday, March 20th, at 5:24pm.  Spring should be the time when one would expect more light, more green, more degrees of temperature.  Instead, winter continues to hold us in her grip.  This week we have had gray days, continued white, cold temps.  And yet, the promise of Spring is still alive.  We trust that it will eventually come because, well, it always does.

For those of us who follow in the Way of Jesus, we are used to proclaiming Spring-like words of hope.  Here are a few of the things that we say in the course of a Sunday’s service of worship:

“Blessed be God’s kingdom, now and for ever.”

“He will come again in glory.”

“His Kingdom will have no end.”

“We look for the resurrection of the dead.”

“Christ will come again.”

“At the last day, bring us with all your saints…”

These are hopeful, powerful, future-tense expressions of our faith.  These words pack a punch. They denote confidence of spirit.  The words reveal our trust in God’s capacity to change the course of the cosmos.  The Kingdom of God, we Christians maintain, is coming,  and all the evil forces in the universe can do nothing to stop it.

And yet,

not yet.

The Christian faith is an already but not yet sort of thing.  Already, God has created the universe, brimming forth with beauty and promise.  Already, Jesus has come into the world, incarnating love and showing us a way to do the same.  Already, human beings, filled with the Spirit of Christ, are living lives of generosity and grace.  Already, there are signs of God’s Kingdom all over the place.  

Clearly, however, God’s Kingdom, while already present, is not yet fully here.  There is still so much in the world and in our lives that stains and separates.  There is still such violence and abuse.  There is still such a dearth of love in the hearts of so many humans, such need for us to confess all the ways that we have sinned against God “by what we have done and by what we have left undone.”

That is the tension that we people of faith live… We celebrate and embrace the hope of Spring even when it still feels like Winter.  We celebrate and embrace the Kingdom of God even when so much is still broken.  We live in already but not yet times.  May we live them fully, abundantly, joyfully, and hopefully.

~Father Art 

I was speaking to a friend recently about the season of Lent and, in particular, Ash Wednesday.  My friend was saying that she always felt that Ash Wednesday was rather depressing, especially the imposition of the ashes when the words “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” are spoken.  The words, she explained, did serve to remind her to take each day as a gift to be lived fully, but the stark reminder of human mortality was much less appreciated.

Indeed, the Lenten journey is partially intended for us to consider our human frailty and faults so as to spur us on to repentance and more abundant living.  Further, there is a somewhat urgent nature to Lent, as if to remind us that our days are numbered so we had better get with the program.  But at the end of the day, Lent is much more about life than death.  If it is about challenging us to let our old selfish ways die, it is also about encouraging us to see and receive the new life that God intends for us.

I am a big fan of the poet David Whyte.  He wrote a poem, aptly entitled The Journey, that expresses much more eloquently what I am trying to say.

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

Painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

inscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

first, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.

Even as the light fades quickly now,

you are arriving.

Yes, all of us experience little deaths in our lives: failures, disappointments, unrealized dreams, broken relationships. And all of this ultimately leads to the death of our physical bodies.  Part of the Lenten Journey is an acknowledgement of this hard truth.  But there is a Truth beyond this truth.  There is Good News beyond the bad news.  There is a Life beyond death and a tenacious love that fiercely and persistently works to free us and rebirth us.  Yes, there are ashes in our lives, but the God of all Love and Life, the God made manifest in Christ Jesus, is eternally writing new stories into those ashes and bringing about the miracle of resurrection.  And this is the other part of the Lenten Journey, a realization that “You are not leaving.  Even as the light fades quickly now, you are arriving.”

~Father Art

While walking to lunch in the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, an Italian American physicist best known for inventing the first nuclear reactor, asked the following question of his colleagues: “If the universe is as old and as vast as it appears to be, why hasn’t the earth been visited by alien life forms?” Intelligent life forms should have evolved on countless planets across our galaxy long before we evolved here on earth.  Many could and should have developed space travel.  Fermi allegedly blurted out: “But where is everybody?!”  The renowned physicist’s question is now known as the Fermi Paradox.  

One answer to this question is known as the Great Filter.  In short, if intelligent life has, indeed, evolved on many other planets, perhaps it always self-destructs before it gains the capability for interstellar travel.  Perhaps, the Great Filter hypothesis contends, what we see happening to us on earth, namely that our technological evolution has outpaced our spiritual and moral evolution, has happened to all other species on all other life-producing planets in the universe as well.

We humans are a smart lot, but sometimes our brains get us into trouble.  We have developed weapons that can utterly destroy all of life as we know it, but we haven’t figured out how to wage peace.  We have invented all sorts of creative ways to extract resources from the earth, but somehow we lack the wisdom or will to preserve and protect those very same resources on which our lives depend. If there is any merit to the Great Filter theory, then we humans should take note and not allow our own technological advances to cause our own destruction.

And that’s where our faith comes in. We have journeyed so far down the technology road that I simply don’t believe that we are going to be able to engineer ourselves out of the problems we have created.  Further, our economic and political structures hold little promise in rescuing us. If the theory of the Great Filter is correct, then I believe the only way out is through a spiritual and moral conversion. We humans must learn new ways of living.

It is to this, at least in part, that Jesus was referring when he talked about the Kingdom of God. He taught a new moral way, grounding all relationships and all human behavior in love. With his own life he demonstrated that real love is rarely convenient and often entails substantial sacrifice. And he promised peace, abundant  life and eternal salvation to those who followed in this new way. 

The Way of Jesus is the work of the Church. If we do this work well through our own lives and if we do our part to teach others to do the same, we may very well be part of the salvation solution of our species and of this earth.  And maybe, just maybe, when future humans have traveled to some far-flung planet in some distant galaxy to visit other life forms, those life forms won’t be left wondering “But where is everybody.”

~Father Art

There is a famous story in the Old Testament about Jacob, one of the great Jewish patriarchs.  He has been on a journey, mostly to escape the wrath of his brother Esau, from whom Jacob has stolen his birthright. At a spot Genesis calls “a certain place,” Jacob stops for the night and has a powerful dream.  It’s important to note that this happens not in a temple or church or other special holy site; it happens along the side of the road in an everyday, ordinary place. He could have had this experience standing in the produce aisle of the grocery store or parking in the hardware store lot or sitting in a living room chair or standing at the kitchen sink or walking along a well-worn path in the woods.

The dream is of a stairway to heaven upon which angels are ascending and descending and God standing above the ladder blessing him.  Jacob learns that night that the distance between heaven and earth is much closer than he had ever thought. He exclaims, “How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God!”  And then he admits, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, but I was unaware of it.”

I was unaware.  Those words are frightening, because truth be told, many of us, perhaps most of us, spend much of our days remaining unaware.  As a result, human relationships suffer and environmental degradation of the world ensues. Friends take each other for granted; parents tend to the physical needs of their child but somehow remain oblivious to the child themself; soil and trees and birds and insects and water are forever spoiled by otherwise good hearted people who just don’t seem to consider the ramifications of their actions. 

Like Jacob, many of us spend most of our lives, unaware. We’re so busy.  We’re so easily distracted by our cell phones or televisions or computers. Our brains are becoming retrained, and those of us who engage in such inattentive behavior are losing our capacity to use our senses. Citing the prophet Isaiah, Jesus says, “You people will listen and listen, but you will not understand. You will look and look, but you will not really see. Yes, the minds of these people are now closed. They have ears, but they don’t listen. They have eyes, but they refuse to see.” (Matthew 13:14f.)

Jacob’s story, like so many others in the Bible, is a cautionary tale, bidding us to pay attention.  It reminds us that if we just slow down and open our eyes, we might very well see the presence of God in the world about us. And mostly, the writers of the Bible tells us, God becomes recognizable in the absolutely ordinary. Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest and writer puts it this way, “[the] earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”  In becoming aware, we discover God at the kitchen table and at the coffee shop, under tall birch trees and beside mossy riverbanks, on the top of mountains and in downtown White Bear Lake.

So, today, I don’t know about you, but I want to slow my life down.  I want to really hear the voices of my friends and family.  I want to see the power of God’s work in the intricate design of a snowflake.  I want to experience the presence and love of God in the ordinary stuff of my funny little life.  And at the end of the day, I want to be able to say, I was aware.

~Father Art

My father died this week.  I received the news from my brother on Monday morning.  He had tried to text me in the middle of the night, closer to the time of my father’s death, but for some reason the text didn’t get through. And so my week began with the news that a man whom I respected, emulated, loved… had died.

I can’t say that it came as a shock.  My dad had been ailing for a long time, victim to Alzheimer’s. I put on a brave face, stiffened my jaw, and got about the business of helping my siblings make all the decisions and plans necessary when the cornerstone of one’s family is removed and the family must somehow remain standing. 

As the priest in the family, it was left to me to work with the clergy and staff of my parent’s church and plan out the funeral liturgy.  For most of Monday, emails poured into my inbox, texts made my phone ding every few minutes, phone calls were incessant.  I can’t actually remember if I said my prayers on Monday, but I don’t think I did. In the zombie busyness of my day, on the very day that my father died, this priest forgot to say his prayers.  Wow.

I’m a pretty active guy, but I spent most of Monday alone, in my office, in my chair, in my grief. I took a break to feed my cats and to walk the dog; that was about the extent of moving my body. It wasn’t until 8pm that I realized I hadn’t really eaten anything all day. Surprisingly, I wasn’t hungry. And although I had moved my body so little all day long, I was exhausted; too exhausted to cook.  I ordered a Domino’s pizza: the deal of the day, a large pizza with one topping for $7.99.  I chose pepperoni.

I’m not sure what grief is supposed to look like. As I’ve walked alongside others in their grief, it has taken on all shapes and forms and hues and tones. 

I’m not sure what grief is supposed to look like, but for me, it looks like a priest

exhausted, 

forgetful of his prayers, 

consuming three-fourths of $7.99 pizza.

As I write this, it’s Wednesday night, and I’m doing a bit better.  I’ve been able to get some things done in the last couple of days.  I’ve been eating better too.  But I’m still really sad, and I’m not sure that sadness will go away anytime soon.  I’m not sure I want it to.  

Life is a mixed deal, isn’t it? Light and dark, abundance and scarcity, joy and grief, life and death… all blended together.  And somehow, the love of God, too, is in the mix.  And somehow, too, despite the pain and loss and emptiness, it all seems as a gift.  Even in the deep darkness of my grief, somehow I feel upheld, somehow I feel even loved.  Somehow, even in the midst of my grief, life seems worthwhile.

Tomorrow is a new day; the fourth one of my life without my dad. No doubt, my grief will still be close, but there’s a peace as well. I believe that peace is a God-given thing. And instead of leftover pizza for breakfast, I think I’ll have a grapefruit.

~Father Art

Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve, and I have been spending much of my time this week reflecting upon what to say about an event that occurred over two thousand years ago. It’s a crazy story with audacious claims about a God that loves so deeply, so broadly, so recklessly as to enter the world as a frail human baby.  It’s a story of God’s use of human scandal (a pregnant fiancée and a fleeing immigrant family) to facilitate a plan of salvation for the entire world.  It’s a story about an angel announcing the good news of the baby’s birth to the least powerful and most vulnerable of human society, the shepherds, and commissioning those same shepherds to be the first evangelists. 

I have preached on the same story every year (except two… one when I had the flu and the other when our services were canceled due to a covid scare) for over thirty years.  One would think that I would have a pretty good idea of what to say.  The story, however, is so paradoxically simple yet profound that preaching about it is not as easy as one might think.

As I was recounting my struggle to a friend, he said, “Just tell them about Jesus.”  And he followed up that statement with, “because you know, Art, it really is just all about Jesus.”

And so, that’s what I will do on Christmas Eve: tell folks about Jesus.  And that’s what I will do on Christmas Day: tell folks about Jesus.  The day after Christmas, I’ll be doing the same thing: telling folks about Jesus.  And the day after that, and the day after that.  And I hope that’s what you will be doing with your days too because, as simple and as profound as the story may be, it really is all about Jesus.

O holy Child of Bethlehem,

Descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin and enter in,

Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell;

O come to us, abide with us

Our Lord Emmanuel!

(words by Phillips Brooks, 1835-1893)

~Father Art

Mid-December and we are quickly approaching the longest night of the year.  Despite the attempt of the creators of daylight savings time to adjust the hours of the day to increase the amount of workable light, we all know that the actual hours of light have become fewer. The truth of the matter is that we are spending more of our lives in darkness in these mid-December days than at any other time of the year.

This increased time spent in the darkness leads many of us to reflect upon the dark times in our lives. All of us experience darkness: times of loss, grief, suffering, depression, despair, doubt. The natural darkness of these winter days serves only to accentuate and bring to mind and heart the many darknesses we have experienced in our lives.  Darkness can be disconcerting and uncomfortable, and many of us have the impulse to search for and flee into any light that we are able to find.

Of course, our experience of darkness is not unique to us.  It is part of the human condition, and women and men of all ages have experienced the same.  Throughout the Bible we read of the many darknesses and periods of despair in people’s lives.  Moses in the desert.  Joseph in jail.  Jonah in the belly of the big fish.  Daniel in the lion’s den.  Jesus in the tomb.  Paul in prison.  If you are experiencing despair, depression, or doubt in these cold winter days, well, you are in good company. All of the great ones in the Bible are right there with you in the darkness.

The biblical witness, however, is that God is Lord of both the light and the darkness.  There is not a dark place in which we may find ourselves that God is not also there.  Furthermore, God is not just present, but rather, gives us the strength and courage to make our way in the darkness.  Make no mistake, the darkness will still be there, but, as the writer of the Gospel of John says, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overwhelm it.”  Christ, the Light of the living God, shines in our darkness, and no matter how dark the darkness of our lives, the Light continues to shine forth and show us the path forward.  Darkness and light: they are both of God, and may lead us to a more abiding and life-giving trust in the Source and Creator of all.

Wendell Berry writes of this in his poem To Know the Dark.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Our God is the God of both darkness and light.  And so, with courage and bold confidence, we proclaim, Come Darkness!  Come Light!  May God bless you and keep you in these dark days of December.

~Father Art

The Celebrant addresses the congregation, saying

Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support Sonny in his life in Christ?

People

We will.

These words are part of the liturgy of Baptism in the Book of Common Prayer.  And I have begun this week’s reflection with these words because this coming Sunday, Sonny Russel Howe, the beautiful son of Maggie DeSmet and Nick Howe, will be baptized at St. John in the Wilderness Church.

Most of us are familiar with the story of Jesus coming to John in a wilderness area to be baptized.  By being baptized, Jesus was: claiming the great truth that he was loved and accepted as part of God’s family, connecting himself to all of God’s people and God’s creation, and committing himself to a particular kind of life dedicated to extending God’s dream to the four corners of the earth.  Claiming, Connecting, Committing…  What was true for Jesus remains true for all of us as well.  

Claiming

We claim that we are God’s children, loved and accepted just as we are.  We are bold in our proclamation that despite the fact that we regularly fall short of God’s dream for our lives, God continues to love us.  There is not a place we can go where God will not seek us out.  There is not a thing that we can do that extinguishes God’s inclusion of us.  We are God’s children, forever, period. Paul Tillich, a great 20th century American theologian, described faith simply as “accepting the fact that you are accepted.”  In baptism we claim our identity.

Connecting

As God’s children, we recognize that it is not just us who are claimed, but God has claimed all human beings. All are God’s children, and as such, all are our brothers and sisters. Baptism is this recognition that we are connected to each other and to all of creation.  We are family.  We are responsible to and responsible for each other.  As such, the Church is simply a community of folks who have come to understand that we are intimately and eternally connected to God and to each other.  In baptism we publicly live into our connection with God and each other.

Committing

And finally, as God’s children intimately and eternally connected to one another, we commit our lives to extending God’s kingdom into the world so that anybody who does not know or who has forgotten about God’s great love, may experience it. Baptism is an opportunity for us to commit or to recommit to God’s plan for love in the world.

Claiming, Connecting, Committing… That’s what Jesus did at his baptism.  That’s what all of us who are baptized did at our baptisms. That’s what the parents and godparents of Sonny will be doing at Sonny’s baptism this Sunday.  And when asked whether we’ll support Sonny in this bold and grace-filled new life of claiming, connecting and committing, may we all respond with ardent and robust voices…  

We will! 

~Father Art 

I grew up at a time when all the best toys and games that have ever been created were brand spankin’ new.  Okay, I may be somewhat biased here, but who can deny that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Etch-a-Sketch, Operation, and MouseTrap were among the most exceptional! But the toy with which my brother and I played the longest was our set of Hot Wheels. We spent hours laying out the orange track in our basement, creating huge jumps and loop da loops, and finding ways to propel our cars faster and faster without these same cars careening off the track.

After we had had our set for a couple of years, we discovered an accessory that totally revolutionized our Hot Wheels experience.  That accessory was the Turbo Booster! I’m not exactly sure whether Mattel, the toy manufacturer, actually referred to it as the Turbo Booster, but we did because it was the coolest thing ever!  The Turbo Booster was placed at some point in the track where the cars would naturally be slowing down.  As the cars entered the battery-driven Turbo Booster, two little rubberized wheels would grab the car, accelerate the car, and send it shooting down the next span of track. Our Hot Wheels race track creations were revolutionized by the Turbo Booster.

Each Sunday, we Christians are encouraged to come to church for worship. For me, worship is akin to the Turbo Booster in its ability to grab us, motivate us, and propel us back into the world and into our lives.  I don’t know about you, but by the time Sunday rolls around each week, I am plum worn out.  Our lives can often be difficult, the world can be exhausting, and if we lack something to keep us going, we may become worn-out and bitter, unable to receive and extend the abundant life that God has in store for us.

But, ah, worship!  When done well, it connects us to both God and each other.  It reminds us of who God is, who we are, and how very much God loves each and every one of us.  Our worship is an expression of gratitude for all that God has afforded us, and when we give everything we are into our worship, God is glorified.  And beyond all that is the ability of worship to propel us back into the world.  Our deacon speaks for all of us when she says, “Our worship is over; now our service begins.  Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit!”

For two more Sundays, we will be offering an Instructed Eucharist at our 10am service. It is our hope that as we learn more about its theology and practice, our worship will become more robust and pleasing to God.  And having given our all in worship, our hope is that we may all be turbo boosted agents of God’s love in this beautiful but broken world.

~Father Art