Author Archives: megancastellan

One of the things they warn you about in seminary is How to Do Liturgical Change. There are lots of dire stories about parishes who moved their altar back against the east wall in the dead of night, parishes that to this day refuse to use the 79 BCP, Altar Guilds that went rogue and used flowers that the clergy was deathly allergic to. (Ok, that last one isn’t real, but SOUNDS like a great murder mystery, right? Get on that, Midsomer Murders.)

At my parish, I have wanted to try to experiment with the approved trial use liturgies that were approved at GC2018, and see what people thought. So I wrote this sermon to sloooooowwwwly roll out that change, and explain why, and how, we were doing this.

Stay tuned for what the parish says at our Fall check-in.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

June 9, 2019

Pentecost, Year C

Acts 2

—I think I’ve told you this, but I promised my godmother when I was ordained, never to alter the 8am Rite 1 service, no matter where I was.  

—And so, wherever I have served, the 8am service (or the 7:30am service in one benighted place) has been Rite 1.  

—But there was one exception—in my Kansas City church, at the Rite 1 service, when I got there, we said the old form of the Nicene Creed, which includes the line “I believe in Jesus Christ, who died for us men, and for our salvation.”  

—Now, I know intellectually what “for us men” means.  It means for all humanity.  I know that.  And I also know that the reason we were still saying the old form of the Creed was because there was one particular individual who really found great meaning in it, and would have it no other way.  It was a pastoral concession to her.  

But I also know, that at 8 o clock in the morning, before I’ve had a chance to have my coffee, that my smart, intellectual brain has a hard time catching up with the rest of me.  And the rest of me does not realize that “Jesus Christ came for us men, and for our salvation” includes me too.  And it’s a really jarring feeling to feel yourself outside of salvation that early in the day.

And so, in that one spot, every week, I would skip the line.  Because I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  

Language is a funny thing, in that it allows us to communicate with each other. And yet, the vast constellations of connections and connotations we attach to words are entirely our own, and that can never fully be explicated—so, language is at once common, and entirely opaque. And the line between the two shifts, and changes over time.

Here’s an example: I was talking to some friends, a number of years ago—perhaps 7 years ago, and they asked me, quite seriously, why a person would be on the internet.  What could one do there?  I had a hard time answering.  Because again, intellectually, I know what I do on the internet: I watch movies, I procrastinate, I save my sermons in several places in case I lose a copy, I communicate with friends and family, I read things, I learn things, I…live my life?  The problem was, I wasn’t just trying to explain tasks to them—-I was trying to explain a whole new world.  A new way of being almost.  And I was having trouble finding language that worked for that.

This is one of the reasons that language shifts and changes over time.  Words that meant one thing at one time, come to mean something else, as a critical mass of people’s connections and connotations change to mean something else.  “Nice” used to mean correct.  Now, it means something like polite, kind, sweet.  And, “men” used to mean “all people” and then….it doesn’t quite.  Because we have other, better words for that purpose.

You may be wondering why I am devoting an entire sermon to language, and how it changes.  “Why is she dissecting the minute of words and what they mean?”  For one thing, I’m a writer; and I write sermons each week.  So choosing good words is a hobby of mine.  But for another—given how big the challenge is of communication, given how meanings change, and when we speak, we are evoking meanings that we might not even guess at, it’s really miraculous that we manage to communicate with one another at all.

And yet, on Pentecost, this is the miracle that the Spirit gives the disciples to announce her arrival:  a rush of wind, a burst of flame, and language.  Suddenly, all the pilgrims from all over the world could hear and understand the wondrous news of Jesus in their own language.  Suddenly, the disciples were communicating across culture, across class, across every divide that existed.  The Spirit, in a moment, gave them the words to blow past all of that.  

With the right words.

I imagine it was incredibly uncomfortable.  We know from the text, that not a few of the passers-by assumed that they were all drunk (and, you have to love Peter’s rebuttal:  No!  For it is only 9am!  BUT ALSO!!!  Peter never fails to be Peter.)

And yet, here we are.  When the Spirit shows up, the disciples are given words so that the Good News can be understood.  Even across all the incomprehensibility of the world.  

It is like the Spirit would like us to work hard at this task of communicating.  To really apply ourselves to examining our language, and to re-interpreting our words to make sure we are getting across what we want to.  From the Pentecost story, we learn just what a miracle it is when we communicate, and how much God would like us to do it, and to do it well.

In celebration of Pentecost, for the next season of church, that’s what we’re going to try to do here.  I wrote a bit about this in the Fledgling, but starting today, at the 10:30 service, we will be using a new version of the Eucharistic Prayer.  This version is official—General Convention passed it, the bishop approved it—I promise I haven’t broken any rules or invented any thing bonkers.

But it has become evident, for a while now, that our language may not be communicating the fullness of the Good news as we would wish.  The Eucharistic Prayers we use now were written almost 40 years ago.  Not to make you feel old, but that is before I was born.  

More to the point, that was before our language practice took into account the fullness of humanity.  

When the Prayer Book was written and approved, we were just starting to talk about what it meant that God was beyond, and unconfined by, gender.  Women’s ordination had not happened yet.  The civil rights movement was in process.  There was a lot we, as a church hadn’t yet lived through and processed.  

What we now know is that using masculine pronouns for God exclusively, like the BCP does, limits our vision of who God is and how God acts in the world.  It also can limit who we expect to represent God in the world.  It essentially puts God in a particular box, and while it’s not that any of the writers of the 1979 BCP had a limited understanding of God, or a faulty theology—it’s that our ways of hearing language and of talking about things has changed, in light of where we stand.  So our words about and to God need to change too.

We’re going to try this for a while, and see how it works.  This was approved for trial use at Convention, so it’s meant to be experimented with, tried out.  You may find that you hate the changes.  You may find you want more changes.  You may find you don’t recognize that they’re there at all.  

I encourage you to try it—take stock of how you feel right away saying the words, and hearing them.  What do you think of?  Does it make you think of something different?  As the weeks go on, do the prayers grow on you? Do you find yourself growing deeper into the words, praying deeper into them?  

Whatever you think and feel, the goal here is to talk about it.  Talk to me, talk to each other.  We will discuss how this feels in the fall, as we approach the end of our experiment.  

Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit being among us still, prompting us to find new words, to speak in new ways, to bridge the divides of time, culture and place, because the gospel of Christ cannot be limited even by our poor grasp of language.  With bravery, let us follow where the Spirit is leading us.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

May 11, 2019

Easter 4, Year C

Acts

In my first call, the rector decided that we needed a new photo director of all 2,000 members, and also that the new curate (me!) should take this on as my first task.  I studied our old one, and asked him if we could possibly make sure to publish all names in the new directory.  The one published two years before listed families only under the man’s name:  Mr and Mrs. John Smith, so it was hard to figure out women’s names.  

The rector was hesitant, and told me that this idea would no doubt sink the project.  It was a conservative church, he told me.  No one would like this.  Too much change!  People didn’t want to volunteer for this anyway, and with this sort of innovation?  Heavens, no.

With the hubris born of not knowing any better, I approached the two stately ladies who between them ran the ECW, the Annual Plant Sale, the Annual Peanut Sale, and the Altar Guild.  I explained the predicament to them, and my idea.  Would they like it to be easier to figure out names and faces of women in the church?  Within two days, those women had organized a rota, a schedule of volunteers to man the picture signups, and a group of women to call people to remind them of their appointments.  and lo, we had a new, all-names-listed directory inside of six months.

All of which is to say that there are a lot of different types of power, and the rector is only one type. When we only see that sort of explicit power, we miss a whole lot.

Tabitha, who makes her only appearance in Scripture in Acts today, is one such powerful person.  We don’t quite know who she is.  She sewed, clearly.  She made clothes.  But she wasn’t one of the apostles, Paul doesn’t list her as a church leader.  She doesn’t bankroll a ministry like Lydia will, she doesn’t go out and preach, she doesn’t write letters that become scriptures.  She….makes clothes?  That’s all we have.

And it’s not a lot, but the other intriguing clue we have is that she is described as a disciple in the Greek—the only time this word is applied to a woman in the NT.  (Note:  this is NOT the only time women acted like disciples, or went out to preach, or were demonstrably faithful.  We have the witness of Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha of Bethany, Lydia, Phoebe, Junia, and others.  But this is the one woman who is given the Title of Disciple—which is significant.)  There is something about her which indicates the community hearing Acts would have known her as a remarkable follower of Jesus.  And that suspicion is confirmed when Peter races down to Joppa to resurrect her.—surely not a usual occurrence.  

Whatever she did, whoever she was, even though we don’t see her work, clearly she was very important.  Clearly, though unseen, she had a great influence.  And the Christian community valued her.

Now, we shouldn’t get overly starry-eyed about the early Christian community; they were better than the highly sexist Roman world, they were making progress, but they had a ways to go.  (I had a professor once that said depending on the gospel writers for feminism is somewhat like depending on Margaret Thatcher for advancing women’s rights—it kinda works, but as a strategy, it has some limitations.) 

 They still lived in a class- stratified world.  And goodness knows, they just argued with each other from jump.  However—what we see here is perhaps a moment of grace.  Where one who went unrecognized in the wider world is held up as worthy by the Christian community.  Someone who did quiet, largely unrecognized, yet faithful work is just as important as the ones who spoke in public all day long.  

It’s hard not to read this story this week and think of Rachel Held Evans.  The unassuming words of a young woman that she didn’t expect to amount to much, first posted on her blog, but ten years later, when she died, thousands upon thousands of us held them up to each other to mourn what we’d lost.  Politicians and presiding bishops wrote eulogies.  Think pieces appeared in the news to analyze her impact.  So many of my fellow female clergy gave Rachel credit for sending us to seminary in the first place.  All from her words, humble as they were, about what she thought about God and life.  

God wants us to use our words, our voices, however small we assume they are, because God needs all of us, sees all of us.  The parts of ourselves we assume to be insignificant, or broken, or even damaging, God needs because it fills in the wider picture of creation–and may be someone else’s connection to God.

This sermon was given in the immediate proximity of the San Diego synagogue shooting. One of the aspects of that horror that didn’t get covered much was the religious affiliation of the perpetrator. He was a young, white Presbyterian. He was a devout attender of the Presbyterian Church of America–a breakaway group of the PC(USA), and in his writings, used what he had heard in that church to justify his murders.

So.

Here’s what I said (in notes form)

Intro?  Douglas Adams? So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I feel it appropriate today to call upon the little-known theologian, Douglas Adams.  Douglas Adams, you are probably familiar with from his great masterpiece, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein he ruminates on the chaotic nature of existence, the necessity of humor, and the importance of towels.  You may not, however, be aware of the theological nature of this work.  WELL.

You may recall that the story begins with the demolition of the earth, to make way for a bypass through the galaxy—and that immediately prior to this demolition, scientists notice that all dolphins on earth suddenly rise up, make some squeaky sounds, and fly off into the air.  Adams explains that the squeaks, properly translated, mean “So long, and thanks for all the fish”, as dolphins are the smartest creatures in existence, and long knew the bypass had been planned, so were making their escape.  

They take leave of their trainers and scientists with this friendly goodbye—so long!  And thanks for all the fish!

Now, I know, it may not seem like it has anything to do with the gospel, but here you would be wrong.  So long, and thanks for all the fish basically sums up what we are called to in the resurrection life of the Body of Christ.  

For one thing, nearly every time the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples, he eats with them.  At Emmaus, he breaks bread with them, and that’s when the disciples finally recognize him.  In the locked room, the disciples are hiding, and Jesus enters, and asks for something to eat.  And here, Jesus spies the disciples fishing, and cooks them breakfast.  A breakfast of fish.  on the beach.  And he feeds them.  There is a lot of feeding happening in these resurrection appearances.  Both to make the narrative point that the newly-alive Jesus is physically alive, and not a ghost, and because it’s a form of caretaking.  Jesus is caring for his disciples.  They’re eating together. Here, Jesus is doing a very strange thing, in that everywhere else in the gospel of John, Jesus is preaching, and teaching, or doing some specific sign.  Here, Jesus just feeds them.  Here guys!  You’re hungry!  Have some breakfast!

But the crux of this story is the conversation over breakfast.  Jesus, as everyone has helped themselves, turns to Peter, and asks him “Simon, do you love me?”  Peter is thrown but says “Yes!”  Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.”  Three times this gets repeated, til Peter gets downright offended and hurt, with Jesus emphasizing, if you love me, feed my sheep.  

There’s a take on this that it may be a way to ritually undo Peter’s denial of Jesus.  He denied him three times; now he affirms him three times.  But it also goes deeper than that; Jesus, in the last story we have in John’s gospel, is reminding Peter of the commandment he laid down back on Maundy Thursday:  love one another as I have loved you.  If you love me, you will go and do likewise.  You love me, Peter?  Then you will do as I have done.  Then you will love and care for other people.  

Peter is recognized as a leader in the church as early as Acts—and these are his marching orders.  Do you love Jesus?  Then love people.  Care for them.  IF you want to claim to love Jesus, then you have to love those he loved, and care for those he cared for. 

These are the marching orders Jesus gives his disciples:  so long—go and feed each other.  That’s your job now.  And these are the marching orders he gives us too.  

If you think back to the services of Holy Week, they were literally when we were passed the torch.  On Maundy Thursday, we heard Jesus tell the disciples, go and wash feet!  Go and love one another as I have loved you!  We washed each other’s feet….but if you noticed, the liturgy…didn’t really end.  There’s no dismissal at the end of Maundy Thursday—the liturgy is basically interrupted by the stripping of the altar and we leave in silence.  Then, on Good Friday, there’s no opening, no acclamation.  We immediately start with the collect of the day, with a bare altar, and tell the Passion story.  Because the liturgy never really stopped.

Then, right after we hear the story of the crucifixion—we pray.  We pray for everyone and everything—we pray for the world, and the church, and for people who are mad at the world and the church, and for suffering people, and for literally everything. In liturgical time, as we recall the death of Jesus, we also take up the task that Jesus left to us.  We begin to care for the world he died for, as we recall his death.

So this is our task, as followers of Christ.  A task so important that we rehearse its beginning every Holy Week, as we try to carry it out in the world.  God gives into our hands the job of caring for the world as God redeems it.  That’s how we show our love for Christ.  We care for those around us.

There is no way to extricate those two.  

Everything we do, say, are in the world.

It’s our lens in the world.  It’s our motto.  

theology that harms, that damages God’s creation cannot be of Christ, because Christ sends us out—so long, and thanks for all the fish!  Go forth, and feed the world!  Go out, and care for everyone!  You love me? Go care for those in this world I love. That’s your job. Go out, and care for all these. Peter, you love me, do you? Take care of these people. You all claim to love and follow me? Then love and care for those around you. Even the ones you dislike. Even the ones who worry you. Even the ones you’d rather not sit next to. Take care of them, if you love me.

There is no way to separate love of God from love of neighbor. You cannot love God while hurting your neighbor. If we love Jesus, we have to feed his sheep.

Well, friends, it is again the summer. And because it is the summer, that means I have gotten woefully behind on sermon-posting.

And so, it is time again for that summer custom, the Sermon Dump! Where I just post All the sermons, All at once, with minimal commentary, except where I absolutely cannot help myself.

Hooray.

I preached on Sunday, and we’ll get to that in another post.

But first, I want to talk about Rachel Held Evans.

I never met her, and never really talked with her. I read her books, and her blog. I followed her on Twitter, and she replied to me a few times (which triggered hours of shrieking.) In any logical sense, I didn’t know her.

But when I read her accounts of growing up in the church, questioning her faith, wanting to find a better way–I found myself convinced that she had been reading my mind, somehow. When she talked about her experiences as a young woman with opinions in the church, and how few people knew what to make of her, I put so many underlines and highlights in my copy that it bled through the pages. “Yes!” I thought, “I’m not the only one! She’s like me!”

Tragically, inexplicably, she’s gone now. She died over the weekend, leaving a bereft husband, two tiny children, and a legacy we’re only beginning to understand. She was only 37.

My little corner of the world is in deep mourning. So many clergywomen and progressive Christian friends are heartbroken right now. Not just because Rachel was great at elevating the voices of LGBTQ+ folks and POC that the church has been historically bad at hearing (she was), and not just because she was honestly as humble and generous as her writing made her seem–but I think because she was one voice that showed all of us that we weren’t alone.

This job gets lonely. Not in a “I am stranded on an island!” way, but in a “Wow, I am the only one dealing with all this” sort of way. Problems of leading a church crop up, many of them are confidential, and it’s not always easy to find people who understand how emotional you may get over how much electricity capacity your building currently has, coupled with the frustrating theology being cited by some random congressman on the TV.

When you add onto that the constant, nagging mosquito-bite-itch of being a young woman, of being told in a million ways explicit and implicit that your voice doesn’t matter, that your job is to look pretty and stand over there, please, that Jesus only took men seriously, that women who want to preach are what destroy church unity, you know, that maybe ordained women are ok, but goodness, you aren’t going to keep your hair long, are you?—that loneliness becomes acute. Not only are you lonely, you’re also quite probably a weirdo.

Part of what I valued so deeply about Rachel was how she unabashedly cheered us on. No matter what else was going on, or who else was talking, I could always think to myself, “Ok, but Rachel will say something brilliant and incisive, and she’ll represent us all so well.” She was out there being so awesome, doing such good work, and because she was, I, and so many of us, could feel less alone. Like less of a weirdo.

We get to do that for each other now. We get to show up for each other (especially for LGBTQ folks, and POC, and women). We get to pat each other on the back, remind one another to use the voices God gave us, and cheer each other on.

Because as Rachel taught us: we aren’t alone. We aren’t weirdos. God formed us because someone out there needs these stories. In Rachel’s memory, we need to share them.