Real Sermon for David

(I don't think the Gurniak family would mind me sharing the sermon I gave for his funeral last Saturday with you. He was a wondrous man. My sermon doesn't nearly do him justice.)

A SERMON FOR DAVID

You may be seated.

David Gurniak was very inquisitive. He  once asked me, when he and Jan were members of St. John’s in Waterbury and I was the Rector there: “Jim, why do you say, “please be seated?” to begin your sermons. Why don’t you say something like, ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spririt?”

I thought about that for a moment and replied: “I don’t know.”

He nodded and that was the end of that.

David was the kind of guy who took what you said at face value. I admired that in him.

O thou who camest from above/the pure celestial fire to impart

Kindle a flame of sacred love/upon the mean altar of my heart.

That’s the first verse of a hymn by Charles Wesley that David asked to be worked into the sermon at this service. And since I know better than to deny a last request of David Gurniak, I will try, as best I can, to do that.

David also wanted the preacher to talk about this lovely hymn in the context of the call to priesthood.

Again, haltingly and as best I can, I will try to talk about priesthood today.

Kindle a flame of sacred love/upon the mean altar of my heart.

David was a ‘big man’. I don’t have to tell you that. And I don’t mean simply in the physical sense of ‘bigness’, though that was true as true can be.

But David was ‘big’ in all ways: big in his opinions, big in his faith, big in his love, big in his heart. I never really knew David before he lost his leg.  But he always stood tall for me. Tall and ‘big’.

David’s heart, beloved, was not a ‘mean altar’.

His heart was massive, expansive, huge.

There let it for thy glory burn/with inextinguishable blaze,

And trembling to its source return,/in humble prayer and fervent praise.

David requested the Old Testament reading for this memorial to be the story of the Dry Bones.

I must say, I’ve never preached at a funeral where that was a reading!

I think there may be a story there, but I don’t know it.

But I do know this: what a priest is called to do is call forth life, call forth God, call forth resurrection.

I was once at a cocktail party in New Haven and found myself talking to a physicist from India. He asked me, “what do you do?” which is what people in New England ask strangers. Where I come from, in the mountains of West Virginia, you ask a stranger, “where are you from?” (More about that later….)

I told the scientist I was an Episcopal priest and he asked again, “what do you do?” And I told him, honestly, I was a member of a community who watched the life of the community and from time to time stopped everything and said: “That was God! What happened just then was God!”

The Indian scientist nodded, “you are a ‘process observer’ then,” he told me.

Part of ‘being a priest’ is being a ‘process observer’, watching, listening, waiting until God breaks into the ordinary—which is the only place to find God…in ‘the ordinary’—and then declaring God’s presence to the community.

Dry bones can live again. God does it. A priest declares it. That was a part of David’s life and ministry.

Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire/to work and speak and think for thee;

Still let me guard the holy fire,/and still stir up thy gift in me.

I only knew David for a few years. Many fewer than most of you. But in those years, I honored him as a priest, a mentor and a friend.

If I needed an ‘opinion’ about something going on in the parish, I would go to David.

David—and I know all of you know this—was always willing to give an ‘opinion’!

Here’s what I think a priest does. It’s probably simpler than you thought. I think a priest ‘tends the fire, tells the story and passes the wine.” That’s the job description as far as I can tell.

Guarding ‘the holy fire” and working, speaking and thinking for Jesus. That was David’s ‘calling’ as a priest.

And to work/speak/think for Jesus, David had to proclaim, as Paul did in today’s lesson: “Nothing…nothing…nothing whatsoever, can separate us from the love of God.

David’s life—and love: his love for those he served, for those he worked with and most, most of all, his love for Jan and their family—that was his ministry. His calling. His life.

Ready for all thy perfect will/my act of faith and love repeat,

Till death thy endless mercies seal/ and make my sacrifice complete.

In the gospel today, Jesus told his friends, “I go to prepare a place for you…and you know the way to the place I am going.”

Then Thomas, who gets all the good lines in John’s gospel, says, annoyed I think, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

One other conversation I had with David comes to mind.

He asked me, after a funeral of someone we both loved, “what do you think happens after we die?”

I didn’t have to think this time, I merely answered: “I have no idea. That’s one of the things I leave up to God.”

David smiled that smile he had and chuckled. I don’t know if I passed the test or not.

But this I do know. St. Francis of Assisi once wrote: “Death is not a door that closes, but a door that opens and we walk in all new.”

Whatever happens when we die, I leave up to God.

And yet, deep in my heart, I long for the reality that David, my friend, my mentor, my priest, walked through an open door into the presence of the One who loves him best of all and was made ALL NEW.

All new. All new. God was where he ‘came from’ (I promised we’d get back there) and where he returned to.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow him and he will dwell in the House of the Lord forever. And his sacrifice is made complete.

We love you, David. God loves you more. You are made complete. All New. All New. All New. Go home. Back to where you ‘came from’.     Amen.

in Grand Central Station

I went to NYC on Monday for a meeting with a group of people who are all committed to the Making a Difference Workshop that I help lead. I've known them all for years--some for decades!--and love them dearly. Since the meeting wasn't until 3:30 at 81st and Broadway, I got to New York before noon and had lunch with very pregnant Mimi and soon to be daddy, Tim. It was great to see them. Mimi is doing so well and Ellie will be with us in 6 or 7 weeks now. "Love" doesn't even do justice to what I feel for Mimi and Tim.

It's real clear to me that New York--at least Manhattan--has moved beyond 'exciting' for me to something like 'scary' or 'crazy'. Too many people. Too much noise. Way too much stimulation. "I grow old, I grow old, should I wear my trousers rolled or eat a peach."

But in Grand Central, as I was going up an escalator, something happened I'd been waiting my whole life to happen: in that busy, crowded place: someone yelled, "Hey, Jim Bradley!"

Down at the bottom of the escalator was Brendon McCormick, a dear friend I haven't seen for too long. We're both 'kinda retired' Episcopal priests. He was in Wallingford about as long as I was in Waterbury. We were even in a group with a psychologist for several years that the diocese helped fund to keep us all reasonably sane--or, at least, controlably (sic, my spell check isn't working) crazy.

He is a bear of a man--6'5" or so and big. But not so big these days. I had heard he has had some health issues, mostly joints and stuff, and I hadn't gotten around to checking up on him (my bad!).

He has a cane and moves slowly, but his wondrous smile and deep-deep good humor is intact.

He was in the city to visit his grandson. I had little time and he didn't either, but the sheer joy of seeing him was only exceeded by the wonder of having my named called out in Grand Central Station. I love stuff like that.

Tomorrow (or Saturday morning in Rome) I hope someone in the airport recognizes me!!!

See you in a week back here on this spot.

Read old stuff in the meantime--1600 posts should keep you busy. Go back to 2013 or 2014 and see what I was pondering then.

OK, finally, I'm with her...

I voted for Hillary Clinton in the CT primary, which she won. But it was pragmatic rather than enthusiastic.

I agree with Bernie Sanders about almost everything he says, but it is unrealistic to me to imagine it happening.

But tonight, after hearing Trump's first speech from a tela-prompter (which was a speech delivered by a man who didn't want to do it) and hearing Hillary declare herself the first woman in history to be a nominee of a major party for President--I'm with her.

I'll get a bumper sticker and a tee shirt and give some money.

She was so gracious to Bernie and his supporters. She was so clear about how unfit Trump is to lead my nation. She was so inclusive and inviting to all folks. She was so appreciative of this historic moment.

I have dear friends who have what I call 'Hillary doubts'. I hope they heard or will hear that speech.

I feel as optimistic as I have in a year about the future.

And Obama is revving up to campaign for her. If only Bernie does as well.

This could be, not just historic, but a salvation for the future my 3 (soon to be 4) granddaughters will experience and live into.

After that speech and the one she gave last week, I'm on board.

I'm with her.....

Counting down to Italy

We're leaving Friday, along with my brother-in-law, Josh, Cathy and our three granddaughters for Italy.

I won't be writing here for over a week since (of course!) my only access to the internet and to this blog is from my desk top in my little office upstairs off the back stairs of our house.

I hope you won't give up on reading. I think there are over 1600 posts now from under the castor oil tree. Look back on them a few years.

I'll have lots to say when we're back and a handful of posts before we go. Just wanted to let you know I'll go dark on the 10th and be back on the 18th.

I'll miss writing here--but not enough to go internet mobile!!!

Because Ray asked me to....

(After church at Emmanuel, Ray asked me if I were going to email the sermon I gave. Truth was, I didn't have a bit of it written down. It wasn't 'off the top of my head'---I usually read the lessons early in the week and let them roll around in my head and heart. I have a beginning and an end--it's just most of the stuff in between is relatively spontaneous, within the bounds of what I've been digesting during the week. But because he asked, I'm going to see what I can reproduce here from this A.M.)

I teach every other semester or so at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (know as OLLI!) at the Waterbury branch of UConn. You have to be 50 to take OLLI courses: see, getting older has some advantages!

One of the classes I teach is called "Reading the Gospels Side By Side". If I asked all of you to write down the 'gospel story', I'm sure you  could. But what you wrote would be a conflation of all four gospels and the point is, they are very different. I sometimes say, "isn't it nice to have four friends named Jesus instead of just one?"

Luke's Jesus is 'compassion' all the way down! In contrast, John's Jesus heals and does miracles to 'make a point'. John's Jesus' 'signs' are all to demonstrate 'who He is'. John's Jesus is all about demonstrating his identity.

But Luke's Jesus simply responds to the needs about him. He is 'compassion in action'.

In today's gospel, after he's healed the Centurion's slave, he enters the town of Nain and encounters a funeral procession. A widow's only son has died and Jesus is so moved my the woman's plight that he raises her son from the dead.

We need to remember something about the culture of first century Judaism--women are not 'persons', they're 'possessions'. Women belong to their father and then their husband. A woman without a man to belong to is essentially a 'non-person'. So, this widow, like the widow in the lesson from 1st Kings today, 'belongs' to her son. It is her son who will care for her and keep her from dire poverty. We don't like to recognize such stark and awful injustice, but it was true.

So, Jesus' compassion was for the widow and he felt it so deeply he resurrects her son.

Luke's Jesus is all compassion all the time...

So, having done that, let me get to what I really want to talk about: today's collect.

I usually don't talk about collects. Collects are written by a committee and most of them sound like it!

But the collect for today is so simple and sweet, it's worth a second look. Listen:

O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them....

Think about that. God is where 'goodness' comes from and the prayer asks God to 'inspire' us, send the Spirit into us, that we 'may think those things that are right' and then, with God's guidance, 'may do' right things.

That's pretty simple and basic, isn't it?  I think, more often than not, we make this whole religion thing too complicated. We make it too much about what we 'believe' and not enough about what we 'do'.

If we 'think those things that are right' and 'do them', what else matters. If we can be always compassionate, always caring, always loving, always just--what else could possibly be required by God? What else? That seems enough to me.

Some of you know I have a real problem with the Nicene Creed (or any 'creed' for that matter) because it's about 'belief' rather than action. Give me 'right action' any day over 'right belief'.

I once led a class on the Nicene Creed at Christ Church, Capitol Hill when I was in seminary. I opened the class by saying something like, "I'll just start reading the Creed and just raise your hand if you have an issue." Then I said, "I believe in God..." and five hands went up! I knew then that was a tough group....

Here's an example of my problem with 'belief'. It's the 'filioque clause'. When I was at Virginia Seminary, there was really no prayer book. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer was in revision and there were a whole series of drafts for the new book: the Green book, the Zebra book, the Blue book, on and on.

At some point during those revisions, the 'filioque clause' was removed from the Nicene Creed. Here it is: "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father (and the son)...."

"And the Son" is the filioque clause. It was removed because the Orthodox Churches don't say it. The Orthodox Creed says..."the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and Son he is worshiped and glorified."

So, in chapel, when the Creed without the 'filioque clause' was said, lots of people would yell, loudly, AND THE SON, though it wasn't there in print. I was in a class where we discussed this change and I said, "the 'filioque clause' is one of the great non-issues of this or any other age."

Betty, who was sitting beside me, burst into tears at my heartlessness about those three words. I just didn't get it. There was so much theological outrage that the final draft put the clause back in the Prayer Book. I still don't get it.

That's the thing about making this whole 'religion' thing about 'belief'. People just believe differently. I don't much care what they believe, if the truth be known, but I'm real interested in how they live out their lives, in their actions.

What if the whole thing is simply as simple as today's collect? What if all that matters is that we acknowledge God as the source of 'goodness', ask God to inspire us to 'think those things that are right and ask God's guidance to 'do' what is right? What if it's that simple?

Be compassionate. Be fair. Be just. Be loving. Think right things and do those right things.

I don't know, but that might be more productive and ultimately more holy and more healing than anything we might or might not 'believe'.

Think right things and do them. What if that's all that's required?

Amen.

In just a week....

A week from right now (8:06 pm) we will be three hours into a flight to Rome on the way to Sienna. Bern, her brother Dan, Josh and Cathy and the girls and me--35,000 feet up over the Atlantic.

Dan has been planning this trip for a couple of years and it's going to happen. I never thought it would, but it's going to. Amazing! Italy wasn't on my 'bucket list'--in fact, I don't have a 'bucket list' unless it's living long enough to see the end of Game of Thrones and read some books I know will be written by people I love to read. And seeing my grand-daughters (including Ellie, who isn't born yet) reach some milestones in their lives.

I'm not much of a traveler. I'm a home-body personified. And when I do travel I want to go to places where I can sit down and read in a lovely surrounding. Pretty dull, huh? That's me to a tee.

My dog is snoring behind me--one of the reasons I don't like to travel. He is getting onto 12 and slowing down a bit except when the mail carrier comes and Bela is as fierce as he's ever been. We'll have to leave him twice in a few months--for Italy and for Oak Island in late September when Mimi and Tim and Ellie will come. They're not going to Italy since Ellie is due to be born in 5 or 6 weeks and Mimi being on an airplane wouldn't be the best thing to do.

But it's all come clear now--Italy is going to happen!

I ordered Euros from the bank today. I bought a passport wallet to wear around my neck--lots of pickpockets, I'm told, in Rome.

One good thing will be getting away from Donald Trump for 9 days or so.

He's wearing me out.

Maybe by the time we're back Hillary will be ahead in the polls by 70%/30% and both the House and Senate will be ready to be taken back by the Democrats.

That would be worth flying 1/5 the way around the world for.

Something from the past

When I was looking for something else, I came upon this post about the church being irrelevant.

I believe it now more than ever. Thought I'd share it again.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

irrelevancy isn't so bad....

My last post may have seemed like a bummer of sorts--the church is irrelevant: woe are we!

But it isn't' that bad. In fact, I think being irrelevant to the culture gives the church a wondrous opportunity to play a different role than the church has--in the last 1600 years--normally has played.

For well over a millennium, 'Christendom' meant something. It meant that the Christian Church was 'relevant' to the society and culture of what we somewhat inaccurately call 'the Western World'. All geography depends on where you are standing at the moment. I guarantee you that most people who live in Iraq and Israel places like that, don't think of themselves of living in 'the Middle East'. People who talk about 'the Middle East' are standing somewhere else and looking over there and naming it.

Leaving that strangeness behind, let me share with you a fact: "Christendom" is gone. The church is not 'relevant' to the culture and hasn't been for a good while now.

But that is not bad. I personally think it was a problem for the church to be propping up and legitimizing Western Culture. There was a complicity that I think was unhealthy for the church. So, being 'irrelevant' in what was essentially an compromising and unhealthy connection with the culture is not a bad thing.


Christianity, in and of itself, is not totally irrelevant in all places. But where it is--oh, take Nigeria where Anglican bishops have done nothing to oppose the criminalization of homosexuality with severe penalties even for those who 'associate' with gay folk--it is not a good idea to my mind. And the 'religious right' plays much the same role in the US. Pat Robertson has publicly stated that the earthquake in Haiti was God's judgment on the 'pact with the devil' that Haiti made 200 years ago by allowing voodoo and Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on homosexuals and other sinners. God knows who believes nonsense like that but I'm betting quite a few folks do.


But, for the most part, the so-called 'main-line churches' (and probably the Roman Catholic Church as well) are irrelevant to our American Culture. (How many RC families do you know who have never had a divorce or who all have 6 or 7 kids?--that's the base line of irrelevancy....)
None of which is a bad thing. I'm personally pleased that RC couples who are battering each other one way or another no longer feel constrained to stay together because of the the church and that birth control isn't something couples discuss with their priests. (You see, some of the trappings of 'being Relevant' aren't bad things to lose....And that fish on Friday thing was simply a centuries earlier attempt to support Italian fishermen...)

So, being irrelevant as we are...there are remarkable possibilities for the church. Like this--we can be the fool, the jester, the gadfly, the prophet, the shaman, the joker, the wondrous and so needed foil to the nonsense of the culture.

Just one example of how this irrelevant church keeps thinking it is relevant and matters to the culture--the culture, the state of Connecticut, has outrun the Episcopal church by legalizing same-sex marriages. We should have beat them to it as the joker and Trickster of the culture, yet, even though they got there first, our Bishop has yet to even 'catch up'. I still can't sign a marriage license for a gay couple. We should have been out in front, flaunting the culture that takes us as irrelevant and pointing the way for the larger society.

Come on, being on the edges, being loosed to dance and be fools for Christ and to flaunt the eccentricities of a society and culture we are no longer responsible to shore up with our support, that's a remarkable calling for the Church 'to be....'

I love and adore the opportunity to hang out on the limits of the society and the edges of the culture and proclaim, not support of the status quo but an outrageous and Godly alternative to the culture and the society and 'the way things have always been done..."

I'm sure I'll ponder this more in the days and weeks ahead, but know this: retiring from full-time parish ministry will give me the opportunity to be even more irrelevant and irreverent than I already am....Praise be to God....

Fear not 'irrelevancy' doesn't mean the church doesn't matter...it means we "matter" in a way that frees us to be 'of God' rather than a part of the Culture....

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