RSS Feed

Do something.

Posted on December 1, 2014 by megancastellan

(I preached this on August 31.)

(Still works.)

 

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

August 30-31, 2014

Ordinary Time, Proper 17

Exodus 3

[how do you know what you read on social media is the truth?  Walter Cronkite is dead—there is no ONE OBJECTIVE ANSWER out there waiting for us.  Everyone has their own side of the story, whether we like this or not.]

[transition to…] 

Moses just wants to be a little Switzerland right this moment.  He’s having an identity crisis, of sorts, and of all people, he gets to have one.

Because, if you think back to what you recall either of a Charlton Heston movie or from watching the Prince of Egypt—Moses, when he was born, was saved from a genocidal pharaoh by his sister, Miriam, who stuck him in a basket and floated him down the river.  The Pharoah’s daughter found him, and adopted him as her own, saving him a second time.

So Moses had grown up with a foot in both worlds—the world of the Pharoah’s palace, all prestige and privilege, and the world of the Israelite slaves who made that world possible in the first place.  He’s had access to both worlds, to both places.  So he grew up with two identities—Moses the prince and Moses the Israelite slave. 

They were in conflict, to be sure, both sides of that particular story, but he was managing to balance them, apparently.

Everything was going fine it seemed, until one day when Moses was grown up and he ran into an Egyptian task master beating an Israelite slave. 

All of a sudden, these two identities are in conflict, these two sides of the story are standing opposed to each other.

Moses intervenes and kills the guard.

Well, whoops.

He panics, and flees out to the wilderness, because Moses does not want to pick a side.  Moses wanted to hang onto being a prince, but being a sort of cool prince who understood what was really going on, but still with all the power and the money, and the stuff. 

Moses wanted the best of both worlds, but killing someone was probably going to mess that plan up.

Now, Wilderness is where the people of God go in the scriptures when something weird is going on.  It’s the neutral space, it’s the space of retreat and where you head to rebuild, even though it’s not hospitable.  But it’s also where God usually came and found you.

Which is what happens.

As we hear in the reading today, Moses is tending some sheep when he sees the burning bush, and he hears God call his name.  And God sends him back to Egypt—not as a prince in a palace this time, but as something entirely different.  As the leader who will save the Israelites from oppression. 

In other words, God wants him to pick a side.  And God wants him to give up some things, like power and privilege and some things that go along with it.

Hiding out in the wilderness of neutrality doesn’t cut it—you have to figure out where you stand.  Where God is calling you to go in the stories of today.

because yes, there are always many sides to each story. And yes, God loves us all, everyone.  God loves everybody.  And that has always been true.  God loved the Egyptians and the Israelites. God loved Pharaoh and Moses and Miriam and Aaron and their mother.

And it is God’s love that calls on them.  It is that very love that makes God receptive when the beloved Egyptians start enslaving the beloved Israelites.  It’s that very love that causes God to say to Moses— “I have heard the cry of my people Israel, and I have come down here to set them free.”

God’s love means God comes down, means God picks sides.  God loves the Israelites, so God calls Moses to free them from slavery.  God loves the Egyptians, so God calls Moses to convince them that holding people in bondage is not the way to go.  God’s love for humanity means God gets involved in the story.  God doesn’t stay neutral—that’s not how love works.  Love wants the fullness of human life.  Love wants the fullness of justice and righteousness and peace for everyone involved—and that’s not a thing that’s neutral—and so that meant the Israelites couldn’t be slaves anymore.   Because God’s love forces God to come down on the side of the oppressed, the powerless and the helpless.

Desmond Tutu said once If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse is not going to appreciate your neutrality.

Our pretended neutrality doesn’t serve the love of God.  It doesn’t serve God’s call to us.  And God doesn’t let us stay there. 

God called Moses out of his desert of neutrality, out of having the best of both worlds.  Out of his Egyptian palace and into his role as a leader for an oppressed people. 

And God calls us the same way.  God calls us to take sides, to take sides thoughtfully, to take sides in love.  To side with the poor, the powerless and the oppressed when we see injustice in this world.

So what we have to ask ourselves is where is God calling us now?  Here in Kansas City, here in Missouri, where is God calling us to go?  What desert is God calling us to leave behind? 

For starters, I can tell you that although the tanks are gone from the streets in Ferguson, the basic situation hasn’t changed.  The officer who shot Michael Brown still hasn’t been charged, the original prosecutor remains in charge of the case, the police still have a whole mess of riot gear and tanks and tear gas at their disposal, and not a whole lot has changed. 

Except, in the three weeks since he died, two more young black men who were also unarmed have been killed by police officers around the country.

So what is it that God is calling you to do in this situation? 
Do you need to sign a petition, do you need to have a hard conversation with your friends, with your coworkers, do you need to go to a march, do you need to email the governor?  Do you need to do some research into the history and context of race relations in St. Louis and law enforcement? Do you need to listen to people with first hand experience of dealing with the police while being Black in America?

What are you being called to do here in this moment?

Because we are being called to something. Whenever we as people of faith find injustice, we are called to do something.  We are not called to complacency, we are not called to run to the wilderness, we are called to do something. 

We just have to listen for God’s voice, remember God’s love, and know that God is with us. 

1 Comment

Posted in Sermons and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

All the sermons, all the time.

Posted on December 1, 2014 by megancastellan

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.

 

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

IKEA and restructuring the church.

Posted on September 9, 2014 by megancastellan

Kansas City is getting its very own IKEA on Wednesday, and this is a very big deal for our little Stars-Hollow-goes-big town. To that end, TREC sounds like a particularly enraging shelving unit that you’d buy at IKEA—one that’s missing half its hardware, where the allen wrench breaks twice in the process of constructing it, but that looked so damn nice on the showroom floor that you even sprang for some cheap throw pillows in the hopes that this one shelving unit would solve all your organizational problems forever! You, too, could live a clutter-free life like in the catalogs!

But no. Dust, allen wrenches, and reality intervened.

That’s pretty much how it’s going with TREC. It started out so hopefully: the Taskforce to Reimagine the Episcopal Church was given an unanimous mandate by General Convention 2012 to go and figure out how we needed to restructure ourselves.

Nothing happens unanimously in this church—I once saw a resolution on whether or not we agreed to read the Bible voted down at diocesan convention. (There were extenuating circumstances, but still.)

TREC had the wind at its back, a song in its heart, brilliant people working together, and all of that I say in sincerity.

So what they’ve managed to put out so far has been… puzzling and disappointing.

Some of it has been good. Clearly, they realize that we need to change. Yes, the church wide structure is unwieldy, and no one knows quite who’s directing who, and we spend quite a lot of money that we no longer have on this whole system.

Clearly, this mess of books lying here on my floor calls for a shelving unit.

But it’s here, after having sniffed around the problem, that TREC seems to spazz out a bit, as in their latest open letter.

After having determined we need to change, they’ve proposed the following:

1. Changes that aren’t changes.
This suggestion that the Presiding Bishop should have all the 815 staff report to her/him, and be able to fire and hire at will?

Technically, that is exactly the situation now. There’s nothing written anywhere that prevents that—aside from the notion that it’s generally thought to be a poor leadership move to have the people you’re in ministry with afraid of you 100% of the time. But, YMMV.

If there’s a sense that the system, as it stands, lacks accountability, that might be a problem with personality, rather than logistics.

2. Changes that don’t make much sense.
General Convention is crazy enough as it is, with its countless legislative committees. Why, in the name of all of Baby Jesus’s tiny teething toys, would you want to cut the number of legislative committees? For starters, that makes the workload more, not less. Also, that disenfranchises deputies, because it will be harder than ever to get on a committee. 

If you’re worried about the strain on Convention (and yes, we should be.), fast track the resolutions that are important: that have many sponsors, and that come from Executive Council. And empower legislative committees to kill resolutions that are ridiculous and have no chance at passing, or (in the case of Constitution and Canons) are clearly uncanonical.

3. Changes that might be fantastic ideas, but they’re so cloaked in buzzwords, that I’m not sure what’s going on, or why we would implement them.

Look, I understand that shifting all your workers to “contract” employees is the hot new thing in the secular world. I know this because many of my friends had it happen to them, and as a result, they have no healthcare, no pensions, no 401(k)s, and are paying self-employment taxes, yet are doing the exact same job.

There’s no good explanation given about why shifting the program staff at 815 to ‘contractor’ status would help things. Again, there’s already accountability in the system, since they can all be fired—no one’s got tenure or anything. And the bulk of our staffing costs isn’t in program staff anyway—it’s in administration staff, which would be untouched in this shift.

So what it looks like is happening is that TREC is proposing doing a pretty shady thing that til now, has been very popular mainly with the major cubicle-dwelling corporations, chiefly to save a small amount of money. Come on, y’all. We can do better than that.

There are a few other things too (I remain unconvinced that TREC has read, learned, marked, and inwardly digested, the canons, because the only canonically required standing committee is Constitution and Canons. Which TREC just got rid of. Awkward.)

 

But here’s the bottom line:
TREC is not going to be the golden savior shelving unit that we thought it was going to be. It will not solve all our problems in one fell swoop.
We probably pinned too many of our hopes on them to begin with.  We got caught up in the moment, in the excitement of the swedish meatballs, the tiny pencils, and the artfully arranged decor.

But I’m relatively okay with that, because now we’ve started to have these conversations; we are learning what we like and what we don’t. What fits in here, and what doesn’t.

How to build our own set of shelves.

We will never clean up all the mess; we will never have a catalog-perfect house, but maybe one day, we will just make it liveable again.

2 Comments

Posted in Acts 8. Bookmark the permalink.

Magic book

Posted on September 8, 2014 by megancastellan

I got my first prayer book when I was 9.  It’s white, gold, and sparkly (or it was those things.)  I loved that thing. 

As a child, I thought of the prayer book as something approaching magic.  It had an answer for EVERYTHING.  It somehow knew what the priest would do in the service!  When we would all stand, when we would all sit!  And if I wanted, it put the whole service in the palm of my hand.

(So many weddings were performed on my Barbies.  So many.)

There are many reasons why I’m Episcopalian: we’re Catholic, yet still reforming ourselves.  We’re Protestant, yet not so zealous that we tossed out all the babies in the bathwater.  We are charismatic, orthodox, and progressive, and any manner of high-flying ideals—but on any given Sunday, what that means is this: the Altar Guild will care about getting the brass clean to preserve the beauty of holiness, and another 100 people are fed from a food pantry because Jesus said so, and the choir will twist itself into knots working out the Tallis anthem, but that’s actually what it comes down to.

That’s the main reason I’m Episcopalian: because this tradition truly adores people.  Not just some people, and not just the idea of Humanity, but honest-to-God people.  Anglicanism emphasizes the Incarnation to such an extent that all people become so important, since God blessed us with the divine presence.  So we talk about human reason as part of how we read Scripture.  We promise to seek and serve Christ in each person at baptism. We talk seriously about each person’s vocation and call to serve in the world. 

And most staggeringly, we put the book that binds the whole thing together in everyone’s hands. There’s no secret priest manual in this church.  There’s just a book of prayers that anyone can read, and follow along for themselves. If you can read, you can have all the prayers the priest does.  You can hold all that the smartest minds in the Anglican Communion have figured out over the centuries have figure out over the years in the palms of your hands.  All the poetry, theology, ritual, and quirky stuff that we’ve accrued is yours, because you’re a beloved child of God, first and foremost.  

And for all of our struggles, and our occasional in-fighting, Anglicanism lives and breathes that idea.

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Post-modern preferential option

Posted on September 6, 2014 by megancastellan

Last Tuesday, my friend, the Rev. Marcus Halley–the associate at St. Andrew’s (the Other Episcopal Church in KCMO), asked me to present a talk/speech/thing on God in the digital age.  And I hardly need much convincing to talk about social media.  So I talked about Twitter, and the theology around it–what sort of theology we could construct as we become more interconnected, but in a different way than we’re used to.

Inevitably, whenever I talk about social media, someone always asks, “But how do you know that what you’re reading is THE TRUTH?”

I love this question.   LOVE it.  I want to cross stitch it on a sampler and sew it to a throw pillow, it’s so adorable.

Because, seriously, how did you EVER know that what you were reading was THE TRUTH?  My parents had a set of World Book Encyclopedias from 1965 when I was growing up.  Big set of books that someone (not entirely sure who) paid a lot of money for.

There are a lot of things in those books that are not true at all.  And that’s ignoring the pile of stuff that they ignore entirely.  (I learned after 1 try that I could not do a project for Black History Month by looking in those things.)

But for a long time, they were THE AUTHORITY.  They were books, so they were up there with Walter Cronkite (who also was Wrong on occasion, and who also left out some notable things.)

Objective truth is out there, but there’s no monopoly on it.  So the question is less–how can I find the one truth, and more–have I listened to all the stories I need to?

That’s pretty much where this sermon came from.

August 30-31, 2014

Ordinary Time, Proper 17

Exodus 3

[how do you know what you read on social media is the truth?  Walter Cronkite is dead—there is no ONE OBJECTIVE ANSWER out there waiting for us.  Everyone has their own side of the story, whether we like this or not.]

[transition to…] 

Moses just wants to be a little Switzerland right this moment.  He’s having an identity crisis, of sorts, and of all people, he gets to have one.

Because, if you think back to what you recall either of a Charlton Heston movie or from watching the Prince of Egypt—Moses, when he was born, was saved from a genocidal pharaoh by his sister, Miriam, who stuck him in a basket and floated him down the river.  The Pharoah’s daughter found him, and adopted him as her own, saving him a second time.

So Moses had grown up with a foot in both worlds—the world of the Pharoah’s palace, all prestige and privilege, and the world of the Israelite slaves who made that world possible in the first place.  He’s had access to both worlds, to both places.  So he grew up with two identities—Moses the prince and Moses the Israelite slave. 

They were in conflict, to be sure, both sides of that particular story, but he was managing to balance them, apparently.

Everything was going fine it seemed, until one day when Moses was grown up and he ran into an Egyptian task master beating an Israelite slave. 

All of a sudden, these two identities are in conflict, these two sides of the story are standing opposed to each other.

Moses intervenes and kills the guard.

Well, whoops.

He panics, and flees out to the wilderness, because Moses does not want to pick a side.  Moses wanted to hang onto being a prince, but being a sort of cool prince who understood what was really going on, but still with all the power and money, and stuff.  Moses wanted the best of both worlds, but killing someone was probably going to mess that plan up.

Now, Wilderness is where the people of God go in the scriptures when something weird is going on.  It’s the neutral space, it’s the space of retreat and where you head to rebuild, even though it’s not hospitable.  But it’s also where God usually came and found you.

Which is what happens.

As we hear in the reading today, Moses is tending some sheep when he sees the burning bush, and he hears God call his name.  And God sends him back to Egypt—not as a prince in a palace this time, but as something entirely different.  As the leader who will save the Israelites from oppression. 

In other words, God wants him to pick a side.  And God wants him to give up some things, like power and privilege and some things that go along with it.

Hiding out in the wilderness of neutrality doesn’t cut it—you have to figure out where you stand.  Where God is calling you to go in the stories of today.

because yes, there are always many sides to each story. And yes, God loves us all, everyone.  God loves everybody.  And that has always been true.  God loved the Egyptians and the Israelites. God loved Pharaoh and Moses and Miriam and Aaron and their mother.

And it is God’s love that calls on them.  It is that very love that makes God receptive when the beloved Egyptians start enslaving the beloved Israelites.  It’s that very love that causes God to say to Moses— “I have heard the cry of my people Israel, and I have come down here to set them free.”

God’s love means God comes down, means God picks sides.  God loves the Israelites, so God calls Moses to free them from slavery.  God loves the Egyptians, so God calls Moses to convince them that holding people in bondage is not the way to go.  God’s love for humanity means God gets involved in the story.  God doesn’t stay neutral—that’s not how love works.  Love wants the fullness of human life.  Love wants the fullness of justice and righteousness and peace for everyone involved—and that’s not a thing that’s neutral—and so that meant the Israelites couldn’t be slaves anymore.   Because God’s love forces God to come down on the side of the oppressed, the powerless and the helpless.

Desmond Tutu said once If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse is not going to appreciate your neutrality.

Our pretended neutrality doesn’t serve the love of God.  It doesn’t serve God’s call to us.  And God doesn’t let us stay there. 

God called Moses out of his desert of neutrality, out of having the best of both worlds.  Out of his Egyptian palace and into his role as a leader for an oppressed people. 

And God calls us the same way.  God calls us to take sides, to take sides thoughtfully, to take sides in love.  To side with the poor, the powerless and the oppressed when we see injustice in this world.

So what we have to ask ourselves is where is God calling us now?  Here in Kansas City, here in Missouri, where is God calling us to go?  What desert is God calling us to leave behind? 

For starters, I can tell you that although the tanks are gone from the streets in Ferguson, the basic situation hasn’t changed.  The officer who shot Michael Brown still hasn’t been charged, the original prosecutor remains in charge of the case, the police still have a whole mess of riot gear and tanks and tear gas at their disposal, and not a whole lot has changed. 

Except, in the three weeks since he died, two more young black men who were also unarmed have been killed by police officers around the country.

So what is it that God is calling you to do in this situation? 
Do you need to sign a petition, do you need to have a hard conversation with your friends, with your coworkers, do you need to go to a march, do you need to email the governor?  Do you need to do some research into the history and context of race relations in St. Louis and law enforcement? Do you need to listen to people with first hand experience of dealing with the police while being Black in America?

What are you being called to do here in this moment?

Because we are being called to something. Whenever we as people of faith find injustice, we are called to do something.  We are not called to complacency, we are not called to run to the wilderness, we are called to do something. 

We just have to listen for God’s voice, remember God’s love, and know that God is with us. 

Leave a comment

Posted in Sermons and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
Newer Posts →