Mary, the Mother of God,

  

            For far too long, women have been excluded from all or part of public life.  It wasn’t until 1920 that they were allowed to vote.  Hillary Clinton was the first woman nominated to run for the Presidency and that wasn’t until 2016.  It has been a long time for these people to wait to have access to the power that runs this country.  Yes, we have some representatives and senators from the female gender and even a few governors; but largely, it is men who run the country, make the laws and determine our course in the international world.

            Even in the world of religion there have been some profound changes.  The woman deacon who read the gospel at my ordination to the priesthood told me that it was the last time that she would do that.  I believe that it probably was because she was ordained to the priesthood in 1976, the first year that women were allowed to be priests in the Episcopal church.

            I have a sense that much is changing.  The #metoo movement has sparked commentary and argument across the spectrum of politics and it is obvious that women are not going to simply retire into the background and be quiet.  It is necessary to have conversation about the things that are troubling this country and all that crosses the lines of gender.  Things are never going to be the same as they always have been.  That is a positive outcome of all of this turmoil. 

            Mary, the mother of Jesus was a remarkable woman.  She endured the pain and the ostracism that carrying Jesus to term entailed.  She had Joseph as a companion on this journey, but it was a difficult trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where her baby was born in a stable because as the story is told, there was no room for them in the inn. 

            When the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of the Lord, she didn’t argue with him.  Instead, she replied with the Magnificat, a glorious song that proclaimed the greatness of God and spoke of the favor that she knew had been given to her.  Her song offers the mission of Jesus even before his birth.  In this beautiful song, she says about God:  He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.  He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.

            Mary’s greatness is also told to us in the second stanza of the Rosary, when it is said: Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.  Mother of God indeed.  Certainly that is true because we know that Jesus was God incarnate on this earth.  It is because of Jesus that we know that God understands what it means to be human and to know all of the limitations and difficulty that human being entails. 

            Thank God for Mary.  Thank God for all of our mothers and the women who have helped to create a world where goodness happens every day.  I hope that out of all of this trouble and difficulty that is being experienced in the present time, that their strength will be allowed to serve this world in more leadership roles and to help us to be the people that God intended us to be from the moment of creation. May God bless you and may you have a very merry Christmas! 

            

Ministry in a Changing World

                         Time marches on.  I have noticed that all of the World War II veterans are now in their nineties.  That should not be surprising, but I remember that war.  I heard the notice of the attack on Pearl Harbor on our radio in our living room when I was eight years old.  I have grown up with those memories.  We have moved into another era as things have changed in this country.  That isn’t a bad thing, it is just different.  We need to constantly look at what our work must be in a changing time. 

            Jesus came into our world as a newborn in Bethlehem and lived for thirty some years.  His ministry from the time that he was baptized by John in the Jordan until his crucifixion lasted about three years.  In that time, he offered healing, comfort and care to the people whom he met throughout Israel and even into some of the surrounding territories.  After his death and subsequent resurrection and his ascension into heaven, his apostles created small house churches that met constantly to celebrate their common ministry that they inherited from their Lord and to create communities that acted in concert to keep these ministries working.  Those house churches became the model for later Christians as they worked to carry on the ministry that Jesus taught to all of us by his life.

            The prophet Isaiah spoke of God’s purpose for humankind in the 61^st chapter of his prophecy when he said: He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed; to bind up the broken-hearted; to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to comfort all who mourn. That is the ministry that Jesus took for his own during his life and has passed on to what has become the Christian church afterwards.  Christianity is composed of a number of denominations, each with their own view of what their worship and ministry means.  We ought not to confuse ministry with our prayer books.  We can cooperate in our ministry while we worship in our own singular ways. 

            What we share with those original disciples of Jesus is our common community that we call our churches.  They are the means by which ministry can be moved into our neighborhoods.  There are many homeless, people in poverty and those who have lost friends or members of their families to death, or are suffering in many other ways around us.  Our job is to make their worlds brighter by our presence and our caring.  When we do this, we are doing God’s will as expressed by Isaiah in his insightful prophecy. 

            We are living in a turbulent world with changing politics all around us.  In this unsettled time, our ministry is more and more important.  When we can lift up those who are hurting and give hope to those who are fearful, we are making a profound difference in this world.  That is why ministry is so important.  God will bless us richly as we do this work. 

           

           

Avoiding Retirement

           I’ve retired four times.  That may sound silly or ridiculous, but it is certainly true.  In 1972, I retired from the television station that I had been working for because they ran out of money and they couldn’t pay me anymore.  I then went to seminary, became an Episcopal priest and started another career entirely.  I was the rector of two churches in Pittsburgh and loved every minute of it.  When I reached the age of 65 in 1999, I retired from my parish and went to live at a little resort community in West Virginia with my beautiful wife.  After two years of playing golf and reading, I got bored, called the West Virginia bishop and asked him if he had any work.  He told me that there were some parishes that were in need of an interim rector, but they were all in the southern part of the state.  I was eager to get back to work, so I agreed to consider these places.  Over the next several years, I served three parishes near Charleston as their interim rector, having a good time at each one and paving the way for each of them to do something with their future. 

After recovering from a menengioma while I continued to work, in 2010, our kids called and said that it was a four-hour trip to Charleston and they wondered when we were going to think about coming home.  We heard that plea from them, I again retired from the parish that I was working at, we sold our Charleston house and moved back to Pittsburgh. 

I still wasn’t done.  The bishop of Pittsburgh told me that there was a parish in need of someone to be a permanent supply priest for them.  I agreed to do this and spent the next year and a half serving that parish each Sunday and getting to know a parish full of excellent people.  The time came when I finally decided that retirement from this work was the thing for me to do, so for the fourth time, I retired.  I am probably still not done.  There is a shortage of clergy in this diocese and I am sure that there will be times that I will be asked to take a Sunday or two somewhere.  I will be happy to do that, and I will continue to write my blog every week.

Retirement is something that many people look forward to; they sometimes go to Florida or someplace else with a warm climate and they relax, do some of the things that they never had time for while they were working.  Pensions and Social Security help them pay the bills.  I tried this when we went to the West Virginia resort community.  We enjoyed it, but it still left a hole in my life, a hole that I needed to fill with the work that I had been doing.  Retiring is also something that has emerged in this generation as a stage of life that we can aspire to.  I think that if that is so, we need to discover some things that we can do that benefit those around us in our time to ourselves. 

When I look at the biblical people who speak to us in the lessons that we hear each week in church, retirement doesn’t seem to be a condition that many of them take up.  I think of Isaiah, who offered his prophecy to the people of Israel as a statement of life. His intention was to warn and to comfort his people as they lived lives that sometimes included a lot of misery. I have always loved the words that begin the second part of the book of the prophet Isaiah, the words that also make up one of the most moving arias in the Messiah.  Isaiah is getting us ready for the coming of God into the world.  He speaks to the people of Israel to give them comfort and hope:

                                      Comfort, O comfort my people,
                                                              says your God.

                                                          Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
                                                              and cry to her

                                                          that she has served her term,
                                                              that her penalty is paid,

                                                          that she has received from                                                                                                                   the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

        What beautiful words the prophet has for all of the people who are listening to him.
  These words come from a deep faith and a commitment to the work that Isaiah has been given

 to do.  His work offered promise and the blessing of God to all of the people and are the 

foundation of our season of Advent where we wait for the coming of our Lord Jesus into the 

world.

       I’m glad that I am still working and managing to avoid complete retirement.  I know that 

theLord still has work for me to do in this world and I am eager to do it.  I thank God for all of 

the things that I have been able to do and thepeople whom I have worked with.  This has been

 a blessing to me beyond any expectation. 

       

            

Listening and Learning

             

            I’ve always wondered about the argument about Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays as a greeting at this time of the year.  I know that Christians want to celebrate the birth of Jesus in this season, but it seems to me that Happy Holidays is really an inclusive term to offer good wishes to people who don’t necessarily celebrate Christmas.  It certainly isn’t an attempt to create a “war on Christmas” as some political people try to say. 

            If there was a war on Christians it was certainly waged during the days of the Inquisition, when proper belief was demanded and those who deviated were severely punished.  It was also waged when the Puritans came to America to avoid persecution in England and then began persecuting everyone when they got to this continent.  I’m not surprised by some of these “wars”, they come from the idea that somebody’s ideas are the only correct ones and that those who deviate from them just have to be wrong.  This has been the basis for discrimination since the world was founded. 

            The cure for this, it seems to me, is that we need to listen more and talk less.  When we listen, we learn.  That is increasingly important in a time when certainty seems to be in vogue and those who don’t agree with the prevailing ideas are told that they are wrong.  Certainty is very common in our politically charged world.  It has been made more so since our political parties have drawn away from each other in an attempt to gather power.  The keeping of gathered power seems to account for more and more outrageous claims of whatever they project “truth” to be.  There is less and less listening going on in the halls of power these days and an excess of talking.  Finding solutions requires people listening to each other to find compromises that really help people in their lives.  The final stage of not listening is an autocracy that simply dictates what will happen and fails to take into account the negative effects that their proposed actions will create. 

        In the Old Testament, Isaiah is talking about a time of crisis, when the people have gone on their own way and have become lost in this world.

                      Isaiah says:

                                               We have all become like one who is unclean,
                                                  and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.

                                              We all fade like a leaf,
                                                  and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

                                              There is no one who calls on your name,
                                                  or attempts to take hold of you;

                                               For you have hidden your face from us,
                                                  and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity

             The prophet calls upon God to come down, to make the mountains quake and to make the world new again so that the people who have strayed can again be happy.  This is a great cry here at the beginning of the Advent season as we wait for the coming of Jesus again with our own hopes that our Lord will help us to make the world right again after all of our certainty has faded and our sins that have erupted because of it have overwhelmed us.  Isaiah’s cry to God can mirror our own yearning for justice and hope in this world where so much seems to have gone astray. 

            That, for me, is the power of this wonderful season leading up to Christmas.  Our desire is for God’s hope for humankind to be restored and for us all to live together in the harmony that our Lord wants for us all.  As we once again wait for the birth of our Lord Jesus at the great moment of Christmas, let us try to listen better to each other and to learn rather than dictate our certainty in this world.  God bless us as we work together on helping our God to renew our culture and our lives.

Finding Our True Religion

   

            We live in a time of great turmoil.  There are arguments going on all around us.  These are not only political arguments that separate us, even our religious organizations are having trouble staying together.  This is a time when churches are losing members, small churches are foundering and some of them are closing.  There is an obvious struggle in many churches to stay viable.  I’ve been almost astounded to watch the Roman Catholic church merging parishes and closing others.  This has created agony among many people of faith who have looked to their churches as places of community where they knew their neighbors and found their friends. 

            It is necessary that we get all of this sorted out.  To help people of faith gather together in places where they can feel secure and practice their faith with some certainty that the institution in which they worship and know their neighbors will continue to flourish and be able to support them in their work and the ministry that they are anxious to continue to work.

            After Jesus’ resurrection, the apostles founded small churches in their homes.  These congregations were composed of 40-50 people all of whom wanted to celebrate the new life that had been given to them by their Lord.  These were joyful communities who did a lot of good in the world around them.  Care for the poor and the outcast was primary in the life of these newly created Christians.  This was probably the primary command of Jesus during his ministry: to love one another as we have been loved by our God and to take care of the need that we find around us with all of our resources.  I can’t imagine a better cure for the turmoil that I see in our society than this: to keep our eyes open for those in need and to do what we can to make them comfortable.  This is the mission that our God has set before us. 

            Look at Jesus ministry.  He constantly went out of his way to cure, to lift up and to help those who were in terrible need.  He even learned to go outside the bounds of belief to do this.  I think of the woman that he met on the road to Tyre and Sidon who had a sick daughter who asked him for a cure.  He told her that it wasn’t right to give the food on the table to the dogs.  She answered him by saying that the dogs eat the crumbs that fall to the ground.  Jesus immediately knew what he had to do and told her that her belief was remarkable and that her daughter was immediately healed.  Jesus was here for all of us.  His love and concern for our welfare extended to the whole world.  We are the inheritors of this mission.  What is necessary for all of us is to look around us to find those who are in need and to care for them.  When we do that, we follow our Lord’s instructions and create the kind of world that God intended from the beginning.

            It isn’t easy to do this.  We have to keep our faith and our religious life intact and to continue to follow our Lord’s teaching, wherever it leads.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers that they enter into his Kingdom when they fed him when he was hungry, gave him water when he was thirsty, welcomed him when he was a stranger, gave him clothing when he was naked and visited him when he was in prison.  They asked him when they had done any of these things and he told them the wonderful truth: When you did this for the least of those who are members of my family, you did it for me.  As we know, the members of his family are all of the people on this earth.  When we care for each other, we care for our Lord.  I can’t imagine a more perfect religion.   

               

                     

Living With Compassion

             

            I’ve never been particularly fond of the parable of the servants who were each given a sum of money by their master.  Two of them invested the money and doubled it and received the praise of their master when he returned.  The third one was afraid and buried his money and then gave it back to the master when he came back.  The master rewarded the ones who doubled their money and punished the servant who only returned what he had been given. 

            The reason that I don’t like this story is because it seems to me to be devoid of compassion, which I think is the quality that Jesus brought to all of us by his life and ministry.  I would rather have had the master take the frightened servant aside and thank him for giving back his money and sharing with him some possible ways that he could have used the small amount that he had been given to make a difference in the world.  That would have been preferable to seeing the poor man get punished.  

            Compassion isn’t always easy.  Sometimes we are frightened by misery.  When we see large groups of people who don’t have enough to eat or places to live, we sometimes are tempted to retreat from it and wonder if somebody else can do something to help them.  Our role in taking care of each other is the essence of compassion.  Once when we were on our meals-on-wheels route, a woman came to us and asked if we could give her a dollar.  She wanted to buy a hot chocolate and didn’t have the money to do that.  I gave her five dollars and watched the tears well up in her eyes.  She said that her house had burned down and that she was trying to find a place to live.  She left us and went to get her hot chocolate.  I certainly didn’t do much to help her, but those tears of hers after getting a small amount of money stayed with me.  She certainly needed more help than I could give her at that moment, and she was only one of a number of people on the street who are left behind by the rest of us.

            Finding ways that we can reach out to those in need is the essence of our religion.  God created us, loves us and asks us to love one another.  That isn’t something that is just said, it is what our creator wants of us all.  There is more than enough wealth in this world to take care of all of us.  The fact that it accumulates with those who are wealthy isn’t new.  It has been going on since the world was created.  Jesus came to teach us how to care for each other and to spread the wealth around so that we can all be cared for.  One of the best pieces of art that I think that I have ever seen is a sketch of Jesus sitting at the base of a lamppost with his arms around two obviously homeless people who are leaning on him.  That sketch says it all.  Jesus caring for those in need and asking us to join him in that effort.  Compassion is a great gift that we have been given by our Lord.  Let us not forget to use it.

Helping Others

            We have heard Moses give us the Ten Commandments, Jesus offered the beatitudes and in Matthew’s gospel, he tells us about the bridesmaids who were waiting for the bridegroom.  They all had lamps, some of them had oil for the lamps and some didn’t.  When the bridegroom arrived suddenly, those with oil were able to light their lamps and accompany him.  The others were out of luck and couldn’t do much of anything at all.

            Jesus uses this parable to tell us that we need to be ready—not necessarily for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, or for Jesus’ second coming, but simply ready in our lives for what is going on around us.  I think of this when I am at the store, or walking around downtown, or simply driving on the roads around town. We never know what we are likely to encounter when we are living our lives.  Sometimes it is a beggar on the street; sometimes it is somebody in serious trouble who needs our help.  What this parable is telling us is to be ready to do whatever it is that is needed to help people in their lives. 

            Our local paper had a column every week called Random Acts of Kindness, where people tell stories about how strangers helped them out of some kind of trouble.  They always do this to show their appreciation for what random strangers have done to help them.  Often, they don’t know the names of the people who have helped, they just are pleased that somebody cared at a moment in time when they needed help.  I suspect that a lot of the help that is provided to people on a day to day basis goes largely unreported and just anonymously helps whoever needs it.  I think that is what God has in mind for all of us as we live our lives.

            Families are one place where help is often provided.  We are more familiar with each other’s needs in our families.  For people whom we don’t know at all, we need to be able to see the sometimes subtle signs that help is needed.  When we are able to do that, the Kingdom of Heaven comes a little nearer.  I think that is what Jesus is trying to teach us not only with his parables, but with his life.