Category Archives: Uncategorized

Remember I promised to talk about Missionpolooza?  Well, since the kids are starting back to school, here it is!

Missionpolooza is a 5 day long experience for high-schoolers in Missouri to come and experience outreach work in the heart of Kansas City.  Every year, approximately 50 teenagers camp out on my church floor, and head off each morning at 7am to different worksites around the city: our food pantry, Habitat for Humanity, Operation Breakthrough, etc.  Then, they come back at day’s end and process what they’ve been doing, in the context of the Christian life.

My job, this year, was to take care of the 5 kids that had been selected to offer the sermon on the last day.  I greatly enjoy this job–last year, my rector and I took the selected kids to lunch at Hamburger Mary’s, thinking that all sermons should start with some quality real work experience.  This year, my rector was on vacation, so I alone took the youth to lunch.  (at the Ale House.  Their parents probably consider Kansas City the den of all iniquity now.)

(The rector being gone also meant the plumbing backed up at least twice, and two parishioners died.  As is the way of things.)

Anyway.  Preaching is hard, as I believe I have mentioned here before.  Harder still if you haven’t heard many sermons, or if you’re a teenager and terrified of public speaking, or worried about what your peers will say, or if you’ve spent the last 13 years in a school system that teaches you only one way to write.

The youth were great–they asked me tons of questions, and I tried to answer as best I could.  We sat around all afternoon, and I worked on and off while they tried to write, and asked me even more questions.

I told them that a sermon is like an airplane:  you need to take off, have one destination, and land.  Up, across, down.

There may have been a time, twenty years ago when people could stand longer airplane rides, with layovers in different towns to see the sights.  This time is no longer.  Fly your plane, and get to where you’re going.

Don’t swoop to the side to see the Grand Canyon when you’ve talked about going to Europe, and don’t say you’re going to Los Angeles and end up in London.  This will only upset and confuse your passengers, which is bad, because you need them to trust you as the pilot.  If your passengers don’t trust you, they will never fly your airline again.  They will grab their parachutes and jump off.

Make sure, when you’re taking off, that you know where you’re going to land.  THEN LAND.  Don’t circle the airport for hours, waiting for the FAA to give you permission–just land the plane.

This airplane metaphor got a LOT of mileage.  (No pun intended.)  Jokes about crashing, landing the plane, being the Malaysian Airlines of preaching were thick on the ground.

But after much wringing of hands, each and every one of those students gave deep and insightful sermons on Sunday.  So apparently we have some fantastic pilots in training!

**Addendum:

I should add that the OTHER thing that happened, presumably because the rector was on vacation–was that I got a phone call at home on 8pm on Saturday night from the youth leader.  She started by asking how I was (never comforting.  This means that whatever is coming next is going to be upsetting, and they want to ensure you aren’t already upset.)

She then informed me that a group of “homeless, travelling Lutherans had stopped by the night, and could we put them up for the night?”

I decided to head back over there.

Upon my arrival, I discovered a van full of ELCA teenagers and their erstwhile leader looking disheveled in my parking lot.  Apparently, they had driven that day from Wisconsin, with the understanding that they could stay at a local ELCA church in Kansas City.  But when they got there, there was no one around.  They called the pastor–no answer.  They then decided just to drive around town, and see if they could find a place.  (Kids, don’t try this.)  When they saw our lights on, they stopped and asked for help.

I had a short conference with the other youth leaders–we had space to spare, and could easily segregate boys, girls, and adults all one from another….not to mention we had lots of extra food, and a Guardians of the Galaxy blu-ray that needed watching.  So I invited them to stay.  We fed them, we gave them a lovely floor for the night, and we watched alien movies with them.  As our Lord doth command.

Our scripture for the week had been Matthew 25, and over and over I had been telling the students to focus on the people they met as reflections of God.

Who apparently sometimes rolls up in your parking lot at 8pm from Wisconsin.

This week, I was invited to guest-preach at St. Paul’s School of Theology, a local United Methodist seminary.  Hanging out with folks from other traditions is always fun, partially because I never feel so uptight as I do in a crowd of ministers who aren’t Episcopalian (I wear a collar!  I have to do and say certain things to consecrate at the altar! I am weirdly attached to a book! #oldschool)  And partially because hanging out with other Christians feels like a giant relief–thank God Episcopalians are not solely responsible for representing Christ in the world.  Look at the terrific variety of ways that these creative other people are doing it!  Pardon me while I madly scribble notes to take back home. ***

When I said I would preach, the first question the worship coordinator (Teresa, who is fantastic) had was which text I wanted, then we would plan the whole service around it. Where did I have energy?  What did I want to say? Off the top of my head, I suggested the Mary and Martha story.  Immediately, I thought “Well, that’s silly.  I’m probably the only one who finds that story and its  interpretation troubling.”  Teresa wrote back “YOU HAVE TO USE THAT TEXT. I cannot stand that Mary vs. Martha thing.”

Turns out, in talking to several of the students at lunch afterwards, the distaste towards how this story is talked about runs deep and wide.  (Like that blasted fountain the kids at the Day School sing about.)  I’ve decided I’m starting a new campaign: No More Awful Sermon Tropes. Who’s with me?

But in the meantime, here’s what I said.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan
February 4, 2015
St. Paul’s School of Theology, Word and Worship
Mary and Martha story

Prior to moving to Kansas City, I lived for four years in Flagstaff, Arizona. Arizona, as you might imagine, is not the hotbed of diversity and progressivism we all might hope for, and so frequently, when I went to supply around the state, I discovered that I was the first ordained woman the congregation had ever seen or heard from.
About a year after my arrival, I was approached by the cardinal rector of the large church in Prescott (where John McCain used to attend, before marrying Cindy and realizing that continuing to be an Episcopalian was politically toxic). He invited me to please! Come preach at his church! But specifically, preach on the Sunday that this text was read. Because, he told me, he didn’t know how to preach it, and maybe I could take a stab.
This story lives in a quiet infamy. For I don’t even know how long, it’s been preached the same way: Martha was the Busy One. Mary was the Quiet One. Martha was Too Busy to have a relationship with Jesus, and Mary, through her meekness and listening, did the Right Thing, and SHOULDN’T YOU BE A MARY, TOO, WHY YES YOU SHOULD. #alltheguilt.
If you’ve been in church for any amount of time, you’re familiar with this phenomenon: There’s Team Mary and Team Martha. Like dueling soccer teams or dueling sides in a shipper war, everyone takes sides and you’re either one or the other, ESPECIALLY if you’re a woman.
If you’re a woman, well, then, your problem is that there are precious few times that preachers address what that experience looks like. In the basic RCL lectionary that the Episcopal church follows as well as the UMC, there aren’t a whole lot of women running around in the gospels. And most of those times, we focus on Jesus or focus on the male disciples’ reaction—because unless you’re Mary, the mother of Christ, if you’re a woman in the gospel narrative, you’re either an actual prostitute, or you’ve just been called that for 2,000 years.
So it’s team Martha or Mary for life. Those are your choices, ladies. Nobody else is showing up.
It goes without saying (though I’ll say it anyway) that this is a problem. Not only because it smushes 51% of the human race into a dualism that doesn’t reflect reality,—and we’re coming back to that— but also because it does violence to the biblical text that we, on most other occasions, treat with the utmost seriousness.
For starters, Martha isn’t just bustling around doing useless tasks because she has some pathological need to avoid silence. She’s doing her job, what’s culturally expected of her at the time—she’s cooking the evening meal and preparing the house—and without women like Martha you’ve got to figure, Jesus and the male disciples wouldn’t have eaten at all.
So part of what she’s concerned about in this moment is that there literally won’t be food on the table for these guys, which is an actual issue. That’s an actual problem. But also, it’s safe to say that she is concerned with what Mary’s up to at this precise moment, because Mary is definitely not doing what she’s supposed to.
While Martha is off doing her important “make the food” work, Mary has plopped down at the feet of Jesus, and is listening to him teach. This sounds fairly innocuous, but sitting at a teacher’s feet was a very specific posture at the time. It was how male students signaled that they wanted to learn from a particular rabbi—they sat at his feet and learned.
So not only is Martha concerned about what’s going to happen with the food situation, she’s more than a little concerned that her sister is doing something that is culturally inappropriate, and not a little bit dangerous. Women weren’t disciples. Women did other stuff. They didn’t learn from rabbis, at least not openly. Martha, at the very least, wants to check in with Jesus to see how he feels about this particular turn of events, which is why she protests—and he reassures her that Mary has chosen a good part, and ’this will not be taken away from her.’
Neither of them is wrong. Neither of them is doing something that is dishonorable or sinful or unChristian. In the text, when you incorporate the historical context and you give it the attention we tend to give other parts of the gospel—Mary and Martha aren’t pitted against each other. In fact, when Martha panics that her sister might be doing something wrong, Jesus reassures her that it’s fine that Mary is doing her own thing.
So why, then, why do we preachers continually insist on shrinking this story, and stories like it into this dichotomy? Why do we fall into the trap of the good Team Mary vs the evil Team Martha, and try to shrink the rest of the world into the same mold?

The simple answer, for so long, perhaps is that preachers, and the ones who write the commentaries and the tomes of theology, have been men, concerned about an audience of men, so how the nuances of how women are presented and spoken about hasn’t been a chief concern. But my friends, it’s 2015 and that’s actually a pretty wretched excuse.
We have such enormous power when we stand in the pulpit. I know, and I believe in the priesthood of all believers, and the full empowerment of the laity, and I endeavor to live that out in my ministry, but when you speak from the pulpit, with the full emotional force of the liturgy, the music, the sacramental moment all structured to drive home what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how approachable you might be the moment you step down—for those 10-15 moments, you are answerable to no one. You hold an enormous club in your hands, to wield as you please. And over time, your words, your presence help shape the worldview of those who listen to you.
So, as responsible preachers, we need to remember our audience, and what they hear from us. We need to make sure that they hear the gospel preached to them—all of them, all the people who come to us need to hear the good news of God’s saving action.
Our God is so big, God’s action in the Incarnation so enormous, that to shrink it down like this misrepresents just what God did. God acted to save everyone, to save all of creation in its diversity and complexity—not just the people we are familiar with, or the ones we can describe with ease, or the ones we can assign to a Team. God came to us in Christ for everyone—this is good news for everyone.
And the gospel ceases to be good news when it tells women the only acceptable way to live is to be meek, passive, and quietly sitting somewhere. It ceases to be good news when it ignores the real contributions of half of the community because of who made them. It ceases to be good news when it confines the concerns of so much of humanity to a few neat, pat stereotypes.
So when we preach, we need to preach it all. Preach it all. Preach the whole thing. Preach Martha and her dedicated hospitality and her impassioned questioning when her brother died. Preach Mary and her rebellious discipleship when the world thought she should be doing something else. Preach the Samaritan woman at the well who argued and questioned and figured out who Jesus was before anyone else did. Preach Mary Magdalene who proclaimed the resurrection to the disciples and preach Mary the mother of Christ who proclaimed the coming of a new world where the hungry would be fed, the poor satisfied and the rich sent away empty, and taught her son to believe the same.
Preach the whole damn** thing. Don’t forget anyone’s story. Don’t exclude anyone’s voice. Because the wider we draw the circle, the more stories we tell, the more people we include, the more we learn of the God who created us all, who came to save us, and who gave us to each other’s care.

Amen.

***This is similar to my sense of relief around people of other faiths. “Hooray! Abrahamic faiths are here! Can y’all talk about praxis because American Christianity is just the worst at that, right? Oh, thank God–we might not all die.” Seriously, anytime I imagine a world without diversity, I get very stressed, and have to go lay down.

**Not what I said from the pulpit.  I think I said something like “preach the whole blessed thing” or “preach the entire thing.”  I was on a roll when I was writing and kept it in for emphasis.

Hi there, friends.

I realize I’ve left this blog long-neglected.  It’s due to a number of factors, none of which are that I dislike any of you, or that I have any intention of ceasing to preach or to post on this here blog.

So I want to do a bit of a sermon dump over the next few days to catch up from September.  Some of these are good, some of these are adequate.  Some of these are proof that the Holy Spirit can, in fact, work through anything to get a point across.

Enjoy.

I haven’t published my sermons in a while (long while), mainly because I’ve been forgetting.
But I’m on vacation at the moment, so here’s the sermon from Sunday.

I should pause to note that summer is MUCH calmer than the school year, at St. Paul’s. I’ve been spending my time working to get things planned in advance for the coming year.

And watching the World Cup, which, if you follow me on Twitter, you already know. And for which I apologize. I’ve been tweeting about soccer A LOT.

(I’m probably going to add to it–I’m working on a post about the theological implications of soccer.)

Until then, however, here’s what I said on Sunday. I went old school, and preached against Gnosticism, using Paul’s letters. It’s possible I’ve been taken over by a pod person.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan
July 12-13, 2014
Ordinary Time, Proper 10
Romans 8:1-11

Sit back, everyone. It’s raining and it’s my birthday, so I’m going to explain some heresy.

So there was, around about the time the gospels were written, a theology that arose in the still-forming Christian community that went like this. In the beginning, there was God—perfect, all powerful, and all knowing. But then, God created lots of lower sorts of gods, which were not as perfect, because they were a step or two removed from God’s perfection. One of these lower gods created this whole material world—everything we hear, touch, taste and smell, and these mortal bodies we live in.

Us being confused humans, we couldn’t figure out the difference between the lower god who created our world, and the God of perfection. That’s where Jesus came in. Jesus came and gave us the secret knowledge—the gnosis!— that we were really descended from the one true God, and not the lower god like we thought, and who had imprisoned us in this world of material suffering. And through this revelation, we could escape this material world, and rejoin the true God. Hooray.

This is Gnosticism, in a really small and brief nutshell—though, granted, there were lots of variations on this theme. And once the Christian community got itself a bit organized, at the first ecumenical council, everyone took a vote, and decided that definitely, Gnosticism was heresy. Way back in the 4th century. So that was that.

But here is the funny thing about heresies—old heresies never die; they just reappear like zombies.

And, If you’ve been following the debates over women bishops in the Church of England, then you know that the donatist heresy—this idea that if you disagree with the person who administers the sacrament, then the sacrament itself is invalid– is alive and well, despite supposedly being settled in the 6th century.

These zombie ideas come back, in different guises, and so does this Gnostic one. Because parts of this sound familiar, right? Some of the language is still how we speak.

(And here’s the other bit with heresies—heresy, like orthodoxy, is a way of marking boundaries of a playing field. Basically, it’s an indication that you’ve taken a fine idea, and gone too far in one direction with it.)

But this is our language–There’s your soul, and there’s the rest of you. There’s your everlasting soul, that bit of God within you, and then there’s the icky stuff, which breaks down and decays and really can’t be trusted. (And I’m oversimplifying, but bear with me.)
Material world = bad. Spirit world= good.
It’s pretty black and white.

And here it is in Paul’s letter to the Romans:
The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, he says, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Through this whole passage, it sounds a whole lot like Paul would really like nothing more than to consign his mortal body to the depths.

But then, there’s that last line. That pesky last line. In our mortal bodies, will we be resurrected.
Oh, yes, Paul’s not Greek. Paul, for his many failings when it comes to understandable grammar, decipherable sentence structure, and coherent theology, doesn’t trade in dualisms.

Paul isn’t angry with matter. For Paul, talking about ‘flesh’ isn’t a condemnation, it’s just a description of the material world. He’s describing creation as it is, in its pre-resurrected state. God hasn’t abandoned it—God’s just not done with it yet.
The ‘flesh’ as Paul sees it, isn’t inherently evil; it is just wrapped up in human rebellion and our fallibility and our propensity to wreck creation and to use it selfishly.

And for this reason, God comes to us in our very flesh. In our very materiality.
God saves us/resurrects us in our very flesh. Because our mortalness, our sin, our brokenness still needs help, the flesh needs help.  And that’s what we get through Christ.  

The idea is that Christ has come in the flesh, to root out and destroy the sin that lives there (it’s taken on therefore redeemed) and so we face no more condemnation, even though we remain conscious that we fall short of where we should be.  

And so what Paul is actually describing here isn’t the gnostic dualism scheme at all. He’s not sorting the universe into matter=bad! spirit=good!.

Instead, he sees all of it as intensely valuable, all creation as inescapably precious. So precious that God comes into this material world–this broken fleshly material world–to save it, save every part of it. To make it whole.

See, the problem with Gnosticism, and zombie Gnosticism, when it shows up in our day, is not that some council voted it down in the 4th century, put a stamp on it that declared it heretical, and that was that.

The problem with Gnosticism is that it’s a tricky thing to start to carve up creation like that. It’s a tricky thing, because it can lead to some dangerous places.

If the material world is bad. And God just want to get us to be spiritually free so we can get into heaven when we die, maybe climate change isn’t Such a big deal after all.
And the 152 Palestinians*** who have died in the bombing of Gaza over the last two days, that’s sad–but irrelevant.
the Gnostic gospel has nothing to say about that. No challenge to make. That’s the material world. The gnostic gospel doesn’t concern itself.

But our gospel argues differently. Our gospel talks about this world. It talks about the hungry being fed, the homeless finding houses, refugees finding a welcome. Our gospel insists that Christ came into this world because the suffering and the joys of this world–everything that we face here and now were important–that it mattered to God. That God came into this world of flesh to redeem our struggles and hopes and to take them on personally–not to give us an escape hatch. It matters to God, so it matters to us.

Matter, as it turns out. Matters.

Amen.

***NB: This is what my manuscript said, and it was correct as of Saturday night. However, I checked Sunday morning, and the death toll in Gaza had increased prior to the 8am Service to 158, then 162 before 10:30.