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On Preaching, Part 2

Posted on October 16, 2013 by megancastellan

Recall, gentle reader, that I said this would be a three part series? (First part is here.)

Herein is part 2. If this interests you not at all, feel free to come back once this is over and done with in a few days.

3. Scars are good, hemorrhaging is not.
This sort of falls under the ‘don’t lie’ category, but needs expansion.

You–like everyone else sitting in the pews–have struggled in your life. Things have not always gone well for you, and you’ve made mistakes, and known pain, and struggle, and loss and uncertainty. It is from that place of vulnerability that your preaching should emerge. The minute you try to assert a certainty you don’t actually feel, it will become transparently obvious. One good way to think about preaching is as one traveller, a little further on the road than the others, turning back to give a scouting report. But you haven’t gotten there either. Be honest about what you don’t know, what is unclear.

That being said, there’s a difference between being vulnerable and bleeding all over people. Please don’t bleed on people. (What would the Altar Guild say?!)

Never bring up anything personal in a sermon that you haven’t worked through previously. Sermons aren’t about just you–they’re about the whole community. So when you bring up something that you’ve struggled with, make sure you’ve got some closure there. You don’t want to make the congregation feel like they need to therapize you in the middle of the service.
Ultimately, this is a fine line.
But this is also why God has given us friends, therapists and spiritual directors.

4. You are not a Baptist.

This is sad, but true.
Baptists are taught to preach ENTIRELY differently than Episcopalians. The service is different, the expectations from the congregation are different, everything is different.

So: though we may envy the ability of the Baptist preacher to preach for 30, 45 minutes, or even an hour, at a stretch, this is not your calling.
Your calling is to say one thing (ONE THING), to say it well, and then to sit yourself down. Not three points, not (God forbid) five points, and not a discursive exegesis on the Greek translation of that one word which is only found in 3 other places in the New Testament, yet once also in the Odyssey.
Sometimes it is very tempting. Sometimes there is a lot to say about the text. This should not surprise us–it is Holy Scripture. But in 99% of cases, you are going to see these people again. They are not going anywhere. You will get another shot at them.
And in 100% of cases, you need to trust in the working of the Holy Spirit to continue whatever work God has begun in them, and not attempt an entire Christian Formation course within your single sermon.
Pick. One. Thing.

Then, sit down.

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On preaching, Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2013 by megancastellan

A few weeks ago, a friend from Arizona wrote and asked me if I’d come up with some do’s and don’ts of preaching for a seminarian. “Something short, off the top of your head,” he urged.

My friend is a wonderful person, but I have never not had multiple opinions on anything. So coming up with a Buzzfeed-worthy listsicle on preaching wasn’t in the cards.

What I tried to do, instead, was to think about what made sermons compelling to me, and what I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been preaching.

Here’s what I came up with.

It is long, so this will be broken up into three posts, over three days.

On Preaching:
I have lots of thoughts about preaching, because I have lots of thoughts about pretty much everything. But I’ll do my hardest to contain myself, and put them into some sort of understandable format.

1. The pulpit is powerful.

This isn’t a do or don’t, so much as a rule that undergirds the rest.
When you step up to preach, you assume a lot of authority—whether ordained or not—by virtue of the fact that you are speaking within the liturgy, and as Episcopalians, it would take no less than the return of Jesus Himself for a congregant to stand up and contradict you openly. (And even then, I’m pretty sure the Altar Guild would consider it very bad form.) You have so many minutes to speak to your people about your common life and what God is up to and those people aren’t going anywhere. It’s the very definition of a captive audience (You are quite literally preaching to the choir) and what’s more, the vast majority of that audience will put, at least, some stock in what you’re saying.
It’s both a golden opportunity to say something important and life-affirming, and a huge risk to say something hurtful and alienating if you aren’t careful. So never underestimate the power of the pulpit, for good or for ill.

That being said…

2. Don’t lie from the pulpit.

Don’t EVER lie from the pulpit.
This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’m amazed at how often I hear people do it, and mostly unintentionally. Things like saying “When Matthew wrote this story…” (anyone who’s taken EFM knows that’s not how it went down), or glossing over textual contradictions. (I about walked out of church once in college when I heard a lay reader declare that this was “a lesson from Deuteronomy, which was written by Moses.” Gah.)
But there’s another layer to this, too—don’t feel the need to ‘prettify’ the Bible. Don’t smooth away the parts of the parables that make no sense, don’t try to pretend that the Johannine Jesus is more comprehensible than he is, don’t ignore the violence and the awful gender politics and the excuses for slavery that runs through the Bible.
Don’t lie by omission.
If you don’t directly address the ugly parts of the Bible, and the parts that don’t make sense, then people are left to either adopt whatever interpretation they hear, or just continue in a vague fog of Biblical misunderstanding left over from the 1930s. Neither one have served us well. You’re the preacher. It’s your job to expound and confront that text. Sometimes your job will be hard, but that doesn’t mean you get to avoid it. If there are no good answers, say that. If it’s a hard story, say that.
The more you can confront and name the discomfort in the safety of the liturgy, the more your people can confront and name the discomfort in the wider world.

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Toddlers, and Object Permanence

Posted on October 1, 2013 by megancastellan

Today, when I woke up this morning and discovered that our government would not be working today, I stomped around, made coffee, stomped around some more, and scared the cat.
I wondered what this would mean for one of our food distribution programs at the church, which channels federal funds through the states to give out groceries once a month (spoiler: not right now, it won’t! Which is great because it’s not like we didn’t just cut WIC or SNAP). And I posted snarky things to Twitter.

Then, still fuming in a manner worthy of a cartoon character, I drove to school. I led chapel with the preschool, and I looked at zoo animals with Pre-K (there was a sugar glider and a boa constrictor). And I decided to eat lunch with the toddler class.

Toddlers are adorable, and charismatic, as anyone can tell you. However, they lack certain basic skills–like the ability to pour milk reliably without spilling, or the ability to ask for what they need, or the ability to problem-solve, past “I want my cake now.” This is never on better display than lunchtime.

But their teachers were brilliant. Every two seconds, they calmly interjected, “Use your words.” “You can’t eat your cake now–what will you have for your dessert?” “You can’t take his sandwich, because what will he have to eat?”

Again and again, they tried to teach the toddlers to think outside themselves. It was lovely.

Let’s send them to Congress.

(Here’s what I said on Sunday. It relates to toddlers, too.)

September 28-29, 2013
Ordinary Time, Proper 21, Year C
Luke 16:19-21

There’s this concept in child psych development called object permanence. The idea is that infants don’t realize that when they aren’t looking at something, it still exists. They close their eyes, it vanishes.
Babies get over the initial phase of this pretty quick—you won’t find a toddler all that amused by peek-a-boo at 2 or 3 years old.
But from this initial concept flow other, more subtle ideas: teachers must live at school. Priests must live at church, when it’s clear that this only REALLY holds true during Holy Week. Toys might come alive at night, since I’m no longer watching them.
Basically, the idea that people only do the things I see them do. They perform the roles I assign in my life’s drama. And that’s it.

And most of us, MOST OF US, get over this. We grow up. We move beyond. It’s called maturity. And we get there…

Except, evidently, for rich man in the parable today—This rich man, who interestingly has no name–he goes his entire life–everyday!. Living his life, with Lazarus right in front of him, right by the gates of his house.
Their lives are described as happening in parallel–the rich man had food, Lazarus had scraps. Rich man had a big house, Lazarus lived on the streets. Rich man lived in comfort, Lazarus lived in misery, plagued by an icky skin disease, and dogs who would lick the sores. (Which has to be one of the grossest descriptions in the gospels. Ew.) Then they both died.
Connected lives they led–practically tripping over each other too. Lazarus lived right outside the rich man’s house. He begged from the rich man’s table. He knew exactly who and what the rich man was.
Yet the rich man never noticed, never acknowledged him.

And then parallels end. They die– The rich man goes to torment, Lazarus to bliss…though I’m going to pause and point out that this description of the afterlife isn’t our current cultural understanding of heaven with the singing cherubs, puffy clouds and harps, up above, with hell as a fiery pit of torment far below. (It’s another sermon, but that’s something that’s more Dante and the middle ages, than actual Jesus.)

What Jesus is describing is the Jewish version of the afterlife, where all the dead people end up in essentially the same place, on the same plane of existence–its just a question of how happy you get to be when you get there. Clearly, the rich man is less happy than Lazarus.

And so, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to do something for him, please! I need some water, pronto. Because eternal torment is so very hot and thirsty.

This is pretty breathtaking gall. They’re DEAD. It’s OVER, there’s no power left to be won or fought over, and the rich man is still ordering Lazarus around like that’s all he’s good for. .
Even now, EVEN NOW, the rich man hasn’t gotten it.
Because when Abraham vetoes that first suggestion, the rich man still keeps going, and tries to send a resurrected Lazarus to save his brothers from his fate. (Note that he does not volunteer to go himself.)

But as Abraham says–that won’t fix it. The problem here isn’t that the rich man didn’t know what was right during his lifetime. The problem wasn’t that he was confused or ignorant, or even mean. He probably was perfectly nice to those around him.

The problem wasn’t any of those things–the rich man’s problem was that time and again, and even after death! he failed to see Lazarus. He failed to see him for what he truly was– a fellow child of God, worthy of his recognition and care as an equal.
To the rich man, Lazarus was a set-piece, a prop. Someone there to do his bidding, to get him what he needed.

That was how the rich man thought of the world and it so shaped how he thought, that he couldn’t see anything else. He couldn’t see the suffering of Lazarus. He couldn’t see his humanity, or how much they had in common, or even how he might help him.

Because to the rich man, he probably never really thought about Lazarus, since Lazarus never seemed to him as a fully-formed child of God, with thoughts, dreams, and a life of his own. Lazarus never appeared to him as real, as worthy of full consideration, and until that happened, the rich man was stuck.

It’s easy, in the busyness of life, to start shrinking people down. To start believing that people are here for uses, to reduce them to functions and what purpose they can serve. It’s easy to believe, on a very busy afternoon, that the checkout lady in Target is there only to wait on you….and that she isn’t also there to make ends meet, feed and clothe herself. It’s easy to assume, if we’re not careful,that the homeless man on the corner is there only to wave his sign and collect money…and had no life previous to this moment, or life after this.
And it’s easy to give in to the voices in our public discourse that shrink entire groups of people into stereotypes, the better to make us afraid and keep them in power. How often have we heard that it suggested the poor are lazy, and it’s their fault if they can’t make ends meet? Or if you are sick, well, it’s on you to get better, and if you can’t, then that’s probably your fault somehow. Or how often have we heard a so-called Christian preacher threaten of a great End-Time Battle, where blood will flow in the streets, and all the righteous will be saved, at the cost of the unrighteous…who evidently were just there to prove a point?

Our government is about to tear itself apart right now, because Congress can’t let go of these two-dimensional images of the sick and the poor. That’s how far this has gotten. That’s what this leads to.

It should probably go without saying, but there is nothing Christian about that. There is nothing Christian in shrinking each other down. There is nothing Christian about letting everything fall apart, because we can’t take the time or energy to see the full humanity in each person.

It might be easier, quicker, more politically expedient to deal in stereotypes, and 2-dimensional figures, but that’s not where Christ calls us. Christ calls us to find the image of God, the full, complete person in everyone we meet. Not just the part that makes us comfortable or that meets our needs.
Even when the person we encounter is not like us, even when they do things we disagree with,, even when they are quite literally needy,— when our recognizing their humanity means that they need something from our abundance, and we have to do something to accommodate them.
Even then.
We are called upon to recognize the fullness of each person. As a full person. As a full child of God.
Only in that way, will we begin to see the fullness of what God is up to in this world.
Because the real tragedy in the story of Lazarus and the rich man is that these two never got to know each other here on earth. This rich man, who counted himself among the faithful of God, never got to see the love of God working in the life of Lazarus.
As people who follow Christ, we owe it to ourselves to see the Spirit of God working in each and every life. Because that is too good to miss.

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Writing on the tablecloth

Posted on September 18, 2013 by megancastellan

I’ve been in Kansas City over a month now–hooray! The kids at the school have figured out who I am, though the younger ones can’t pronounce my last name. On one of the early attempts, a kindergartner called me “Chaplain Chocolate” and that stuck–and even produced several drawings of a happy giant chocolate bar, clutching a cross, and holding the hands of children.
My apartment is nearly all unpacked. I have managed, several times, to get places without the aid of my GPS. I have even found good Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern, and BBQ places (though that last wasn’t hard at all).*

So as fall begins (and I had almost forgotten what Fall+Humidity felt like), Kansas City is feeling more like home.

Here’s what I said on Sunday.

September 15, 2013
Ordinary Time, Proper 14, Year C
Luke 15:1-10

My mother tells this story about the first time she met my father’s family. They had gone out for pizza at some local Italian restaurant, my father, my grandfather, who was a renowned chemistry professor, and my two uncles, and they were trying to decide what to order–a pizza to share, or several slices each? They asked the waitress, she had no opinion. Grandpa was perplexed. “Look,” he said, “It”s a simple math equation. What’s the price per square inch of pizza for each option? We need to maximize the value!”
My father nodded solemnly, and handed him a pen, and together, they bent over the cloth covering the table, and began to scribble equations for area and circumference on the tablecloth and menus. The waitress looked on, astonished.
And my mother, in telling the story, would pause here, and sigh. “And that was your grandfather. He WROTE on the TABLECLOTH.”

That was her takeaway from that story. Not so much that he committed a fauxpas, but that my grandfather was singleminded enough to write with a pen on the tablecloth in a restaurant.

This is not an inaccurate lesson to be learned from this story. My grandfather did do that.

But there’s other stuff in there too.

Things like Grandpa’s socially-awkward use of math. Or my father’s clear admiration of this quality. Or Grandpa’s insistence in showing his work to the the college-aged waitress, so she could learn too. (Because, as he put it, she worked there! She should know how much the pizza cost!)

People are complicated creatures. When we tell stories about them, the entirety of who a person is can’t be conveyed in a single reading of a story…which is why stories work so nicely. Each time you hear a story, more and more unfolds. More and more depths are there.

And if people are complicated…how much more complicated is God? If people are tough to adequately convey in soundbites, God is impossible.

So we should probably approach these parables today with some caution. Because parables are stories Jesus tells to explain God, and how God operates.

And because God is complicated, and..well, God, the parables aren’t just simple stories. They’re always a little bit odd. They’re like really short episodes of the Twilight Zone–if they make perfect sense to us, we’ve probably missed something, because there’s always a catch. Parables explain God in human terms…but they also explain how different God is from us. How other God is.

For example, how many among you, Jesus asks, having a flock of 100 sheep, and losing one, does not immediately leave the 99 in the wilderness to go hunt for the one lost sheep?

No one. The answer is no one would do that.
No shepherd in his right mind would leave 99 sheep to fend for themselves in the wilderness, not if he wanted to still have 99 sheep when he got back. You didn’t go chase the one sheep that was dumb enough to have wandered off in the first place; you double-checked the 99 sheep you still had.

Likewise, if you’ve only got 10 coins to begin with, and you lose one. You will search for the one you’ve lost, but you will probably wait til morning, and not waste expensive oil in your lamp. And, chances are, when you find it, you will not immediately throw an expensive party for all your friends in celebration. That’s only going to land you back on the street, with no coins. If you lose one of your 10 coins, you’re going to curse your luck, and lock up your remaining 9.

That’s the human response. But that’s not God’s response. God’s response, in Jesus’s telling, is to charge headlong after each and every one of us, regardless of the costs, regardless of the risk.

God comes after us, until we are back again, surrounded and convinced of the love of God. No matter what it takes. No matter the risk.

God is extravagant. Beyond what human logic says is prudent, God’s love is extravagant in these stories of Jesus. And that’s one thing we hear. God goes where humans dare not.

But another thing we hear is that God ends up in places that aren’t always safe. Aren’t respectable.
In both these parables, Jesus compares God to unusual, unpopular folks. No one liked shepherds. They didn’t get invited to dinner parties. They smelled bad, on account of the sheep they hung out with, and they were viewed with suspicion because who knew what they did all day, wandering around in the desert with wild animals? Shepherds were low class–the janitors, the fast food workers of the ancient world.
And women were women. Pretty much second class citizens with some rare exceptions that proved the rule.

And yet, this is the story Jesus tells about God. God is an extravagant shepherd who risks everything for a sheep. God is a poor woman who celebrates wildly upon finding a coin.

Instead of being distant and safe from humanity, instead of sitting in judgment from a safe distance from us, Jesus paints a picture of God who is immediately involved in the muck of our lives, in our world. A God who is intimately involved to the point of risk, to the point of suffering and loss, as a result of it.

And this is the God of the incarnation, after all. This is the God who so wanted to be with humanity, so wanted to partner with us, that God became human, lived a life on earth with us in the person of Jesus. Even when that choice meant bearing the worst of human misunderstanding, fear and violence. God doesn’t stand apart from the worst of us–God plunges right into the midst of it.

That’s what God does. God chases after us. Time and again. In ways that are surprising, and extravagant and that don’t quite make logical sense to us, God comes after us. In ways large and small. Collectively and individually, God comes after us. To be with us. To help us find our way back to the goodness we were created to be.

God dwells with us. In our ordinariness,in our plainness, and in our brokenness, God dwells with us in order to call us back to the creation we were made to be. In all it’s goodness and dignity of the image of God.

So no matter where our stories take us, however complex and complicated they get, no matter how broken or dark they end up–God always follows us. No matter where we are.
So no matter our story, the ending is always the same. Amen.

*I am still looking for a good Mexican place. Each time I try some place new, I discover ‘cheese sauce’ on a taco, and must restrain myself from calling down fire from the sky to consume this heresy against all right-thinking humans. However, good street tacos can be got in Westport, I discovered…just no mole. My search continues.

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In which British actors have a good grasp on privilege

Posted on September 2, 2013 by megancastellan

I continue to ‘settle in’ here in KCMO. I got all the empty boxes out of my apartment last weekend, so I feel a corner has been turned, in the War of The Unpacking. But now that the apartment looks like a human dwelling, this puts more pressure on my office(s)–both of which still look relatively unoccupied. But these are minor inconveniences.
Work is beginning to make sense–I have memorized my chapel schedule finally, so I feel I have a handle on when I am supposed to be where, and with what children. This means I get to wander around the school and hang out in classrooms more when I’m at school, which is a blast.

And yesterday, as I posted on Twitter, I somehow or other ended up preaching on Benedict Cumberbatch and privilege. Afterwards, one of our teenaged acolytes came up to me and said that she was a HUGE Sherlock fan, so she was so psyched I referenced that in the sermon.

And here’s what I said.

September 1, 2013
Ordinary Time, Proper 17, Year C
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Benedict Cumberbatch has perhaps the most British name ever. And he is a fairly famous TV and movie star in the UK right now. He’s on Sherlock, on the BBC, and he was the voice of Smaug, in the Hobbit movie And a number of other British-y things.
And so, accordingly, he was being followed around by photographers last week.
And then, Benedict Cumberbatch did something rather amazing. Rather than get into a shouting match with them, or run and hide, or steal someone’s camera, that would have been par for the tabloid course, he held a sign over his face on which he had written, “Hundreds of people were killed in Egypt today. Go take pictures of something that matters.”

One quiet sign, one quiet action, and he made everyone think for a moment not about a rich TV star, but about the nameless hundreds dying in the streets of Cairo. He took all the power that the world handed him, and he used it for something really good…though the photographer might not agree.

This scene that we’re watching in the gospel is another one of Jesus’ awkward dinner parties. Jesus never seemed to be a very well-behaved guest at dinner parties, and here is no different.

He’s been invited to dinner on the Sabbath by a leader of the Pharisees–and that’s a pretty big deal. It’d be like the local congressman inviting you for a Labor Day BBQ. You’re there to see and be seen. There are some politics involved, and it’s an important invitation, with movers and shakers there. It’s a pretty big honor, actually, for Jesus.

And Jesus responds by loudly criticizing the entire gathering. It was customary for everyone to sit around a low table, with the host at the head, and the most important guests nearest the host. Seating order and placement was very important, because it revealed, and preserved, social hierarchy. You got to sit next to those closest to you in the pecking order, so you never really had to deal with those outside your status.

Everything was ranked, everything was stratified, and you knew where you fit. And most importantly, gosh darn it, you knew who was beneath you and who you were better than, in this system.

And Jesus looks at it, and wants no part of it. Jesus argues first, that if you’re smart, you’ll always sit lower than you should, in a lower position than you should so that you’ll be invited to move up, rather than being sent down a few rungs. That way, you’ll never risk losing face in front of all those important people you’re trying to impress.
But moreover, if you’re really smart, any time you throw a dinner party, you’ll never invite any of those important people to begin with.
If you’re really smart, Jesus says, you’ll invite people who actually need dinner. Invite the poor, the blind, the sick, the outcast. People who need what you have in abundance, not people you’re trying to impress. Chances are–they have dinner.

Share abundance with those who lack, Jesus says. It sounds so simple, and yet, it can be deceptively hard.

Especially because it can be hard to see our own abundance sometimes. Not so hard with things you can count–we learn that as children. You have two cookies, give one away. But it’s the things you can’t see, the intangibles that are trickier.

Especially since we live in a society that’s predicated on making us believe that none of us has abundant anything. Advertisers constantly run on reminding us of what we don’t have, and what we desperately need to be whole. New car, new clothes, new toys, new everything. If we don’t feel like we’re lacking something than we aren’t consuming things, and that’s no way to run an economy–so from every corner come voices telling us that we are in need.

When in fact, the reality is that every one of us has abundance of some kind. Every one of us has power. You got out of bed this morning? Good! That took power, that took abundance, because some folks can’t do that. You decided to come to the church of your choosing? Good. Some folks can’t do that. You ate breakfast this morning? Great, that took abundance. Since some folks can’t do that.

You came from your house to here without passing through a checkpoint? You can vote on Election Day? You can read a newspaper or a website and find out what’s happening in the city? You can go home without fear of what will happen to you when you get there–all these little things that we mostly don’t recognize are signs of abundance in one way or another.

And it’s so familiar to many of us that we don’t notice it. But this is abundance. This is the dinner party that we sit at, each and every day.

And the truth is that the abundance of the world is handed out so haphazardly in all directions and what Jesus calls us to do is to share our abundance with others, but in order to do that, we have to be conscious of what we have. We need to be conscious of our own abundance. The ways in which we have been given prominence at this world’s dinner party.

Not so that we can feel guilty–guilt doesn’t help. Guilt just paralyzes– but so that we can do our part to use our abundance in the service of others, and in the service of God’s kingdom. So we can use the power we have to help those around us.

And that requires us to be aware. To realize and be in touch with our own abundance. To recognize the times that we have it good, and someone else has it less good. Then to ask, what can I do to support them right now? How can I use what I have, the power I have, in service of those without?
We are called to use our voice for those who have no voice, as the proverb says.

The more we are in touch with the abundance we have, the more we come to realize the dinner party we sit at daily, in all sorts of ways, the more we can come to throw open the doors of that party to everyone, to spread our abundance ever wider. And the more the world will slowly come to resemble the reality of the kingdom of God, where all are equal, all beloved, all at one table.

Amen.

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