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Ezekiel the Crazy Prophet

Posted on September 12, 2017 by megancastellan

I returned to work on Sunday from a lovely two week stay-cation.  It was lovely.  I spent the two weeks knitting, watching Netflix, and going to protests, because this is the Year of Our Lord 2017 and the world doesn’t improve because I’ve decided to take time off of work.

It was quite a Megan vacation.

I also spent a fair amount of time up in St. Joseph, where I went to the Glore Psychiatric Museum (which I highly recommend.  If you’ve never seen Barbie and Ken act out a medieval witch burning, have you ever even been alive?***)

I forget how helpful vacations are until I take one, and then I recall that irritation is, in fact, not my natural state, and motivation does, in fact, return with the proper amount of rest.

Oh, that everyone were afforded vacations in this world.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

September 9,10, 2017

Ordinary Time, Proper

Ezekiel 33:7-11

 

Of the Hebrew prophets, you can construct a sort of scale of social acceptability.  On one end, you have the nice guys:  your Micahs, your Isaiahs, even your Amoses.  Amos was a dresser of sycamore trees–and while no one knows exactly what that entails, you’d probably be safe inviting him to dinner.  In the middle, you’ve got people like Jonah, Jeremiah–folks inclined to do some inappropriate yelling at some awkward times, at People who Should Not be Yelled At, but they didn’t DO anything horribly embarrassing.

Then, on the far end, you have Ezekiel.  Ezekiel belongs on the ‘special’ end of that prophet spectrum.  He is one of those prophets who wasn’t just concerned with preaching the word of God; he also undertook specific actions that were symbolic of what God was doing in the world.  So his prophetic work was two-fold.  (Hosea was another one of these, and it’s how he ended up married to a lady of questionable morals, and saddled his children with long and unfortunate names.)  

The downside of engaging in lofty symbolic acts all the time is that they make a person look insane.  Ezekiel lived and worked at the same time as Jeremiah, so clearly a lot was going on, and his acts had a flair for the…shall we say, desperate?  He ate a chunk of the scripture parchment, to illustrate that the word of God was sweeter than honey.  He lay for 390 days before a brick to reenact the siege of Jerusalem. He cut off his hair with a sword and burned a third of it in the city center.  

Basically, he was the town weirdo.  If you saw him pacing down the street, you crossed to the other side.  In life, he was probaby a fairly offputting dude.  

But I tell you what–he lived in some anxious and troubling times.  Ezekiel was one of the first wave of exiles from Jerusalem to be carried off in the Babylonian invasion.  He, and the rest of his comrades, had been rounded up and dumped in a foreign land with no language skills, no friends, no rights–cut off from their family and friends.  Meanwhile, the Babylonian army was destroying the homes they had been snatched from.  The prevailing sense was that God had abandoned his people for their sins, or–that somehow the gods of Babylon had proven stronger than the God of Israel.  And there didn’t seem to be much evidence to the contrary, because all the exiles could see was one disaster unfolding on top of another.  Stacking up like firewood.

That sort of dire situation can make people do some pretty unlikely things.  When people are surrounded by disaster like that–unrelenting, unending bad news on all sides, with seemingly no hope of an end–it becomes hard to hold on to ‘normal’ behavior or beliefs.  

Our tendency, in such situations, is to fall back into fear, and into the most knee-jerk patterns of belief.  God has abandoned us!  Evil has overtaken us!  God is punishing us! The most primal, the oldest thought patterns we have tend to surface around great and implacable disasters, and it’s because of this sort of base level fear that rises up when we feel overwhelmed and under siege.

For Ezekiel’s society, it comes out in the form of an old belief that God was smiting them for their sins.  (Thankfully, this is a belief that no one ever mentions during natural disasters nowadays…..)  The exiles, in their exhaustion and in their panic, believed that they must have done SOMETHING to bring this upon themselves, and so God was now going to destroy them in their wickedness.  The whole people were convinced.  Even though–nothing they knew of God to this point would suggest that God worked that way.  

{This happens on an individual level too.  I have chronic migraines, and in college I had a particularly nasty one, which lasted for a few weeks with no relief.  By the third week, I had come to think of the pain in my head, that pulsing, throbbing thing as a demon–as I prayed for relief.  The whole time, mind you, I KNEW that this was ridiculous.  I knew that the world didn’t work that way, and that what was happening was a neuro-biological process.  But in those moments, I was tired, and I was in pain, and I just wanted it to stop.  }

So up steps Ezekiel, who informs the people that while they, like everyone else, have gone astray–it is not the will of God that they perish.  “As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways.  For why will you die, O house of Israel?”  

God never wants the destruction of anyone.  God wants to give us a second chance so we can do better and learn.  God does not send disasters upon us to teach us “lessons”, or to punish us.  God does not do that, God does not work like that–it is our own fear and human nature that makes us think that in these times of peril.  

Because, after all, wouldn’t it feel slightly better if we could blame disasters on God?  That way, we could take comfort, cold though it might be, that we were morally superior to those afflicted.  And we could promise ourselves that if we just prayed hard enough, if we just did X, Y, and Z, then we wouldn’t be the next to suffer.  And if we are the ones afflicted, then that same fear can turn us inwards, make us blame ourselves for our own evil–robbing us of the chance to reach out for help.  

In times like these, when we have deadly hurricanes stacking up along the coast like planes around O’Hare, and threats of war coming from overseas, and upsetting decisions coming from our leaders, people are doing some odd things.  There are religious leaders out there announcing God’s wrath is upon us for various reasons.  There are other people trying to deny that anything at all unusual is occurring.  

Overall, the anxiety in our world is reaching a fever pitch.  And that tone of fear can be seen and felt in so many aspects of life right now.  The same old fear-based beliefs that rose to the surface during Ezekiel’s time are coming up again now.  What if God has abandoned us?  What if we are being punished?  What if evil has overtaken us?  

When you are tired, and when there is so much anxiety in the air, those thoughts are harder to push back against, because they can be so easy to believe.  So, when you feel those thoughts crowding into your head, remember Ezekiel, and his crazy antics.  Remember the lengths he went to to convince the despondent exiles of God’s undying love and presence with them.  

Here was a man who threw away dignity and common sense to illustrate in word and deed just how much God loved and stood by his people–even in the darkest and most anxious of times.  

Maybe we are called, in our own anxious times, to be Ezekiels for this time and place.  Maybe we are called to act extravagantly to illustrate just how committed God is to our human flourishing, in defiance of those voices who would doubt it.  Maybe we have been sent to throw caution to the wind and stretch out our hands and live largely so that all can see and believe, through us, that God loves all people, and does not abandon us to anything–not even fear.  

 

Amen.  

***Half the museum is the preserved psychiatric state hospital as it was in the mid 1960s, with the practices and equipment explained.  The other half are recreations built by patients from the 1960s to explain mental illness treatments through time.  One such recreation is something entitled the “Bath of Surprise”, in which the medieval person would be lured up onto a platform, then SURPRISE! dumped through a trapdoor into a pool of water.  The plaque noted that the treatment had a low success rate, but patients did seem to be calmer.  This display is helpfully illustrated by a department store mannequin seated in a wooden tub, covered in blue paint.   NOT TO BE MISSED.

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Don’t. Panic.

Posted on November 7, 2016 by megancastellan

I am part of a Slack group of clergy and lay people who discuss everything from evangelism to politics to what we are going to preach on Sunday.

Last week, we were agonizing over how to preach on the Sunday before this election.  What do you say when everyone is so freaked out?  I, personally, spend most of my days now frantically checking polls and lying in a prone position hoping for time to speed up.

My brilliant friend Holli Powell commented that as a person in the pews, all she wanted to hear from the pulpit was that Jesus was still Lord, and everything else was secondary.   (She actually used slightly different words, but the sentiment was the same.)  Holli is right about most things, so I tried to write that sermon.

Here’s what I said:

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

November 6, 2016

Ordinary Time, Proper 27

Luke 20: 27-38

I figured out that I did the math wrong earlier–there are actually only 2 days to the election.  So how are we feeling?  You panicking yet?  Do you find yourself checking Fivethirtyeight.com several times a day?  Have you bookmarked several polling websites to update you when something changes?  

Or have you gone in the other direction–are you one of those people who has gone full news blackout, ignoring all sources of news coverage and political advertisements until after Tuesday (or whenever this thing gets called) and focusing on calming things instead.  Rediscovered a love for cat GIFS?  

What can I say–this is stressful.  I was reading something the other day that said that psychologists are advising people to turn off the news, because they have recognized a strong uptick in ‘election anxiety’ on all sides of the political spectrum.  Regardless of who you support, because we’re so polarized right now, there’s a feeling that if THIS DOESN’T GO THE RIGHT WAY, EVERYTHING WILL END FOREVER OMG.  Trump supporters are convinced that if Clinton wins, the country will be plunged into a morass of taco trucks on every corner, open borders, and free healthcare for all that will bankrupt us.  Clinton supporters are sure that if Trump wins, we will have political opponents thrown into jail, martial law declared, and probably a nuclear war within a month.  So everyone’s biting their fingernails.  

I don’t want to downplay this–elections are important, and this one is important.  You need to do what you can.  Go vote in two days if you haven’t already.  But there’s a difference between taking something seriously and letting it overwhelm you.  This election is a big deal.  But once you have done your part, remember that it is not the most important thing .  And remembering the scale of things when we’re panicking is vital.  Especially when the world likes to hand us reasons to panic.  (Looking at you, FBI director.)  

Nothing the world likes better than to hand us things to freak out about–whether its polls or emails, or this thing that guy said, or OMG, what if?  Because here’s how anxiety and fear work, after all.

Anxiety and fear are, ironically! much like the viral videos of adorable kittens we watch on the internet to combat anxiety and fear.  For many people, our feelings of fear aren’t real until we’ve shared them with someone else…and they’ve shared them, and on and on until they go viral.  Much like the viral cat videos.  The number of shares builds exponentially.

So fear builds on itself–in order for one anxious person to feel even slightly better, they need to get someone else to feel scared.  And so on and so on.  Which is part of why, when everyone is freaked out–it’s easy to feel like everything becomes scary.  FBI!  QUOTES!  HEADLINES!  EMAILS!!!!!

Here’s the thing, though.  Take a breath.  (Seriously.  Right now.  Take a breath.)  We are Christians.  We follow Jesus, we take our cues from him.  And that will be just as true tomrrow, and Tuesday and Wednesday as it is today, no matter what happens.  

Just because the people around us right now are breathing into paper bags, does not mean we need to.  

Let me point out that when the Sadduccees come up to Jesus with their smarty-pants brain teaser, this anxiety web trick was part of what they were trying to do.  This theoretical idea about the resurrection, and what it would mean, was hotly debated at the time.  People were really into it.  So they wanted to get Jesus to side with them on this REALLY TRICKY BRAIN TEASER.  They wanted Jesus to be as invested in the thing that was driving them nuts as they were.

Jesus is having none of it.  Why?  Because first off, the question is dumb.  It’s one of those hypothetical brain teasers that doesn’t happen in real life, and doesn’t happen to real people.  And there’s another problem with it too.  

The Sadduccees aren’t asking because they are concerned by what will happen to the woman–about her health or wellbeing, or worried about the welfare of all those brothers.  (They keep dying, for one.  Don’t tell me that’s not troubling.)  They are worried about proving a hypothetical. They are worried about being right, about satisfying their ego.  And that, though it may worry the Sadducees, doesn’t worry Jesus.

Jesus, as it turns out, is worried about other things.  Preaching the gospel.  Feeding the hungry.  Helping the sick. Freeing the oppressed.  Showing the love of God.  Those things that are real, are important, and that continue whether or not this hypothetical thing they’re scared of happens or not.

Because whether or not this Sadduccee’s brain teaser comes true or not, Jesus will still have a call.  And so will we.  No matter what happens on Tuesday, we still will have a job to do.  Jesus will still be Jesus.  God will still be God.  And we will still be called to do what we have always been called to, no matter what happens around us.  We will still need to preach the gospel, to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to free the oppressed, to show the love of God.  No matter what.  That’s the most important thing.

So on Tuesday, go vote.  Do your part.  And then, think of those big, reassuring letters from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and “don’t panic.”  And when we get up on Wednesday, we are just going to go out and follow Jesus like we’ve been doing.  Because God will still be God.  And God does not abandon his people.

 

Amen.

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Hype Babies, and Reassurance

Posted on January 18, 2016 by megancastellan

I would like to make it clear that I did not plan on preaching on the Primates communique.  I was pretty much over it by the time I got to Friday, and I assumed most everyone else would be too.  (A tiny amount of projection helps in preaching, don’t you know.)  As I commented to someone over the weekend, I haven’t spent this much time explaining the workings of Anglican polity since the GOEs.

But when I went to look at the lessons, there was that piece from 1 Corinthians, as if the Holy Spirit herself had planned this whole thing, and was off in a corner giggling at us.  And all day Saturday, as I was handing out food to the hungry and cold of Kansas City, parishioners asked me, “So why are the Anglicans being so mean to us?” “What happens now at church?” “Are we really being kicked out?” All the social media that flows past my eyes daily bore witness to a heightened level of anxiety about this which, frankly, really surprised me.

I think those of us who are enmeshed in church geekery assume that these squabbles are just that, and no more.  We forget that there are times when our political arguments are not just theoretical, but they do affect real people, who really care what happens.

So, dear reader, I preached about the Primates.  And parties.  And wine.

Here is what I said.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan

January 16-17, 2016

2 Sunday after Epiphany, Year C

John 2:1-11, 1 Corinthians

 

So there are good things and bad things about preaching from a lectionary.  Sometimes, it’s your week to preach, you look up the gospel, and discover that Jesus has just told a story about a servant who embezzled cash, then gets rewarded.  (Thing that happens!)  That’s a downside.

Then, sometimes, the media spends most of the week deciding that your worldwide Anglican Communion is on the verge of collapse, OMG, and the lectionary assigns this reading from 1 Corinthians.  

I haven’t decided if this is a good thing, or if the Holy Spirit is just cheerfully trolling us.  

So, a few notes for background:

If you weren’t anxiously glued to the #primates2016 on Twitter this week (and why should you have been? You have lives, you have jobs!), then you may not be aware that this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury called a meeting of the different heads of the different Anglican churches from all around the communion.  For what amounts to a very large tea party, as is their wont.  

The stated purpose of the meeting was to work through the conflict in the Communion which has been festering for some years now.  Or decades.  Or even longer, depending on how you’re measuring. The conflict can be traced to a lot of things: colonialism, western imperialism, differences in scriptural interpretation,  differences in authority, but where most of the blame has been focused is the church in the US’ openness to women’s ordination, ordination of LGBTQ folks, and willingness to bless same-gender marriage.

In the run up to the meeting, everyone was doing that whole chest-out, I’m very tough, routine.  The conservative group of primates released a statement threatening to boycott, and/or walk out.  The English media wrote a lot about how this would be the END OF ANGLICANISM, OH NO.  

It was dire.  

But you know what happened?

None of that.  Pretty much none of that.  

No one walked out, except one guy from Uganda, and he apparently forgot to tell anyone about it until Thursday.  On Thursday, the primates leaked/released a statement which affirmed the primates’ commitment to stick together–but also said that many of them were worried by what the US church had done, so it recommended that we take what amounts to a time out for 3 years–not representing the Anglican Communion on ecumenical dialogues (which we haven’t been doing anyway, since 2009) and abstaining from some internal votes.  Now, we’ve pretty much been doing those things already, so this is not actually as big a deal as it  sounds.  It has not affected our life here in Kansas City, because I daresay none of you even noticed.  

The statement went on to say that the primates were against the criminalization of homosexuality, and believed in caring pastorally for all people.

So that’s what happened. It’s not the greatest possible outcome–it would have been wonderful for the primates to have agreed, to have immediately gotten on board with what we did, when they heard our explanations.  But I don’t think that this is the worst possible outcome either.  It’s not the death knell for Anglicanism, it doesn’t mean we have been kicked out of the global church, or punished, or sanctioned, or anything like that.  We. Are. Fine.  

There’s a lot still that’s unknown.  Stan and I have been arguing about what is supposed to happen in three years–both because we don’t know, and we disagree in our theories, and because we are clergy, and so are paid to argue about things like this during the week.  What’s clear, though, is that right now a few things are true:

  1. The churches of the Anglican Communion have said they are committed to sticking this out together.
  2. The Episcopal Church isn’t changing its stance on the full inclusion of GLBTQ people.  The Presiding Bishop told the other primates that, and he reaffirmed it in his statement to the church.  We are doing what we believe God has called us to do, based on how we have experienced the Spirit at work.  And certainly, our life at St. Paul’s here in KC isn’t changing.  

It’s like all these member Anglican churches, together at a giant party.  A wedding, why not, since we are all called to the wedding of the Lamb, says Revelation.  And yet, the wedding has hit a snag.  A crisis.  And the whole thing is thrown into a shambles.

Yet we know, from today’s gospel, from that tricky lectionary, that Jesus has a thing about parties it would seem.  Parties need to go on.  *****

Running out of wine at a wedding feast may seem like an incidental problem, but it would have been a huge crisis.  People saved their whole lives long for weddings–they lasted several days, up to a week, and you invited literally everyone in town. Wedding banquets were the one time in a person’s life where you had to rub elbows with people you may not know–people different than you, because EVERYONE was invited.  To run out of food or wine was to show that you were failing in showing hospitality to these people you lived with.  It was a loss of honor–which is why Jesus’ mother is so perturbed by the situation.  The party is in danger of shutting down before it starts.  She’s looking out for the bride and groom.  And so Jesus does something unexpected.  Instead of giving a speech, or running to the wine merchant, he provides the best wine.  And a lot of it–Jesus churns out 120 gallons of it.  

An unexpected miracle.  And so the party continues.  

It’s not comfortable to be in this place where we are right now in the church.  It’s not a great place.  But I do believe that our call is to be right where we are.  Because for as uncomfortable as it is to be at this particular party we find ourselves at, with this particular guest list, I do believe that St. Paul is also right–we all need each other.  And for as painful as it is at this particular moment, I think our particular gift at this time, like our Presiding bishop has said, is to bear witness to the gifts we have received through the presence of our LGBTQ members.  That’s the gift that we–and no one else, right now!–has.  We need to share that–and we also need to listen and receive the gifts of the other Anglican churches.  Something that we, who benefit so richly from the presence of our South Sudanese community, know very well. Their presence with us and their perspective make us better able to see the God of infinity.

We need to stay at this party.  Even when it hits a bump.  Even when Real Housewives-type drama breaks out.  Because if we stay here faithfully long enough, sooner or later, there’s going to be a miracle.  

Amen.

 

****Very important NB.  At the 10:30 service, it was at this point, when I paused to let the importance of parties sink in, that a baby from the very back screamed “YAAAAAASSSSS!” at the top of her lungs.  The congregation burst out in laughter and applause.

This has given me a new idea:  I will haul a baby around with me to all future preaching appearances, in order to have Adorable Affirmation of all of my homiletical points.

 

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A Long, Long time ago

Posted on December 28, 2015 by megancastellan

Happy Fourth Day of Christmas!  I hope everyone is enjoying a well-deserved rest over these holidays.

Advent ended for me in a whirl.  I had grand plans this year of doing so much holiday baking, of discovering new cookie recipes, of wandering aimlessly through the Plaza lights, reveling in the scenery….absolutely none of that happened.

Instead, as my parish admin put it, “People just people-ed all over everything” as is wont to happen around major Church feasts, and I did absolutely no baking whatsoever.  I managed to ship off my family’s presents on the absolutely last day possible, and I did no aimless wandering anywhere.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent is always one of my favorites.  We get to read the Magnificat and talk about Mary, Mother of Jesus, who is easily one of the most kickass women in all of scripture, and a good model of the priesthood**

So despite the fact that my brain had reduced down to mush, and I was amusing myself making lists of biblical mascots for the deanery***, I wrote this.  See what you think.

December 19-20, 2015

Advent 4

Luke 1:39-47

 

So, I, like the rest of America, has been obsessed with the musical Hamilton for a few months now.  It’s the story of Alexander Hamilton–American founding father–as told through hip hop.  Believe me when I tell you that it works.  

One of the central themes of the show–all of which: book, music, lyrics, everything, is written by a young Puerto Rican man–is that who tells the story is important.  Easily the most important thing.  The show is narrated by Aaron Burr–who shot Hamilton, but it’s sort of meta-narrated by Hamilton’s wife…who, in history, survived to tell Hamilton’s story….never mind.  Just go see it.

Here is why I’m telling you this.  There are two stories about what happens to his parents before Jesus is born–one in Matthew, one in Luke.  Two versions of the annunciation.  
Matthew tells it from Joseph’s perspective.  Joseph is hanging out, minding his own business, when he hears that Mary, his fiancee is pregnant.  Joseph decides to be nice about it, and break up with her quietly, rather than make her go through the (literal!) public stoning which would otherwise ensue.  Sweet guy.  

Then, he gets an angel appearing in a dream, which tells him, not so fast.  “Do not, in fact, be afraid to marry Mary, because she’s having a special kid.”  So, Joseph changes course, and all is fine. (Until the magi and Herod, and that’s later.)

But Luke is another story.  Luke’s gospel tells us about the angel that appears to Mary, informing her of the coming birth.  It’s Mary’s story here, rather than Joseph.

And that makes a difference.

 

We see, from Mary’s perspective now, as she hears the news of the angel, processes it, consents to her role in this weird little adventure, and immediately, as our story kicks off today–races off to see her cousin.

And it’s detours like this one which are instructive.  Mary could be heading off to see her cousin for any number of reasons–we aren’t told why she’s going exactly–she misses her, she just likes visiting Elizabeth, she wanted to empathize with another relative who was also pregnant, she wants to fact-check the angel, who told her about Elizabeth’s pregnancy…but it’s worth noting too that there’s also a less cheerful possibility for her trip.  Like we saw in the Joseph story, there was a harsh penalty associated with young women turning up pregnant out of wedlock.  So Mary just might be following the age-old tradition of heading out of town until the scandal had died down, and her life was no longer in danger.

Regardless of whether this was the case–the stakes were higher for her anyway.  She was involved in this story in a different way than Joseph–she had more to lose.  No one’s going to be hurling rocks at Joseph because of what they assume about his life choices any time soon.

 

Perhaps this is why Mary plays twenty questions with the angel once she hears the news.  The angel tells Mary she’s blessed and highly favored, and Mary wants to know what on earth this means.  The angel tells her she’s about to have a baby, and Mary wants to know exactly how.  Mary, in other words, is not going into this blind or uninformed.  She’s doing her homework.  She’s asking questions, taking notes, voicing opinions.

So when she says that she’ll do it, it’s not passive–it’s the furthest thing from it.  Mary’s obedience here is active.  She actively engages with what she’s been tasked with.  All right, I’ll do it!  And we’re off to the races.

 

Because as soon as she sees Elizabeth, Mary takes the opportunity to sing out the news of what has happened.  My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior.  He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.  

 

Mary’s song recaps what has just happened to her, but it also goes a bit farther.  Mary’s song–and you can think of this as Mary’s own Broadway style show stopper, where the character becomes so filled with emotion that they have to start SINGING–basically sums up the whole gospel that she, Jesus, and the disciples will spend the rest of the gospel trying to live out.  This is the gospel message Jesus preaches.  This is the good news the apostles later tell.  But it starts here–with Mary’s agreement.  It’s Mary’s “I will” that starts the ball rolling–her consent to be an active partner in this unfolding plan.

 

God, after all, isn’t all that interested in passive obedience, in passive followers.  God wants us to think, to question, and to figure it out as we follow in the way.  Our relationship with God is a two-way street, founded on our free will, and our ability to engage with God’s mission in the world.  

When God lifts up the lowly, when God casts down the proud, and feeds the hungry, that requires our engagement.  That requires our participation.  

When Mary says that her soul magnifies the Lord–that means that she’s doing something. So when we echo her language, we’re committing to the same thing.  Both that we would be willing to be lifted up, fed and used in such a way, but also that we would give ourselves to take on this mission as well.  That we would promise to be co-agents of this mission along with God.  

 

There are, after all, enough puppets in the world.  There are enough idols begging for blind faith and obedience.  God doesn’t need any more.  What God wants isn’t puppets, but Marys.  People willing to be bearers of good news on the mountain.  People willing to risk for the sake of the gospel, and participate in God’s plan of a new world.  God needs us to birth a recreated world as a teenaged girl did so long ago.

Amen.

FURTHER IMPORTANT AUTHOR’S NOTE:  This is where my original sermon ended, as given.  However, my rector commented, in the 10:30 announcements, that while he had never, in over 30 years of ministry, corrected nor challenged a fellow cleric’s preaching, wouldn’t it have been better if I had ended with “as a teenaged girl did, a long long time ago, in a Galilee far, far away”?

So I promised that I would make the addendum on the blog.  Because Star Wars fandom is JUST AS VITAL as the Hamilton fandom.

   

**And it’s not just me saying this–it’s the pre-1920s Vatican saying it as well.  Long story–I will unpack in a later blog post.

***A real thing!  When I get punchy, I get creative and punchy.  Occasionally, the entire clergy of the metro KC area bears the brunt of it.

 

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When you can’t hide under the bed

Posted on November 17, 2015 by megancastellan

I realized, recently, that I have a habit of compulsively searching for good news.  I have a deep-seated fear of being thought of as a Debbie Downer in conversations, so whenever I vent to someone, or break some bad news, or discuss some awful aspect of the world, I try to tack on something good, however small.

Traffic was horrible, global warming threatens us all, and the American healthcare system is a waking nightmare.  (But cat vs cucumber exists!)

I have 3 conference calls in a row, hosted by people who don’t understand the value of keeping their phones on mute when not speaking. (But, know what’s awesome? The Great British Bake-Off!!)

The good things never cancel out the bad–life doesn’t work like that–but they do help keep focus on something other than the refrain of “EVERYTHING IS AWFUL” all of the time.

But lately, the struggle to find good news has been harder than normal.  My parish is dealing with several parish leaders’ health crises, one on top of another.  Couple that with the spotlighting of racism at Mizzou, and the violence around the world, and by the time word broke about the attacks in Paris, I was about done.  I was ready to crawl under my bed, and listen to Hamilton** until the world decided to get its stuff together.

Then, you know, I had to preach.

There are times, hopefully brief, when good news is difficult to find.  And I’m not a preacher who believes that the job of the pulpit is to dispense sunshine over everything.  Preaching should be truthful, since Jesus is, y’know, the Truth–so ideally, preaching should name where we are,  name where God is, then take a guess at where we’re called to go next.

So, easy stuff.

Anyway, here’s what I ended up saying.

 

November 15, 2015

Ordinary Time, Proper 28

Mark 13

 

Every year, when we approach these propers, I think that surely, this will be the year when they seem out of place.  When the world will be so quiet and blissful that the oncoming of Advent and the prophet’s lamenting and calling for justice will just seem off key, because the world will finally know a moment of peace and wholeness, and all we’ll have to worry about is actually who’s done the Christmas shopping.

 

But every year, when I read over Jesus’s warnings about the end, and the destruction of the temple, and wars and rumors of wars, I wonder again if he had access to Twitter.  Or some sort of  first-century social media.  Because every year, this idea of a world on the verge of collapse seems all too familiar.  

 

As it does today.  Yet again, we’re witnessing violence and bloodshed around the world–the attacks in Paris Friday night, the attacks in Beirut, in Syria, the earthquakes in Japan, and the hatred that seems to be fester everywhere you look these days.  Not to mention the smaller, more personal earthquakes that affect us as well.  It’s a lot.  And it’s a mess.  

And it has made me wonder several times this past week how soon we could colonize Mars, because that seems like a nice option.  

 

In this equally-scary sounding gospel, Jesus and the disciples are still hanging out in the temple, where they were last week.  And they’ve just witnessed one of those small earthquakes.  A poor widow (poorest of the poor, last of the least) came in and gave away the last of what she had, to support a rich and exploitative temple system.  Jesus is upset–wouldn’t it have been better if one of the rich priests had given more, instead of this widow giving away all she had?  

And in response, they have this conversation here.  The disciples marvel at how large, how fixed, how immovable the whole thing is–the Greek here (yeah, I know, but bear with me. Because I’m going to talk about the Greek again.)  The Greek here can be read like the disciple is frustrated, and not just in awe.  “Good grief–how big this system is!  How immense!”  How could it ever change?  It’s too big.  It’s too broken.  It’s too much to hope for.

 

And then comes Jesus’ apocalypse.

 

Here’s the thing about apocalypse.  Powerful people never write them.  Not real ones anyway.  Powerful people, who have all the money, all the power, all the control, never want the world to change in major ways, because they like the world as it is.  

The people who write apocalypses, stories where the world changes so dramatically as to seem like it’s ending, are people who have no money, no control, no power.  They’re people who have nothing, and are getting kicked around by everything and everyone. Because apocalypses are built around the idea that when everything has gone so terribly wrong that there’s no hope left, God will still come and save God’s people.  God will still turn the world back around.  Because nothing is too big for God.  

 

So when confronted by the enormity of the corruption in the Temple system, which is basically their entire socio-political structure at the time, Jesus assures the disciples that it’s huge.  And it’s wrong.  But God is still working and God is still here.

 

In fact, there’s something weird about his little apocalypse speech that he gives.  (And here comes Greek lesson #2!)  The verb tenses start changing around from future to present to future and back to present.  Which is not really what you’d do, if you were Mark (or whoever) writing a speech trying to foretell coming events.  

Scholars think that one possible reason for this is that the writer wrote this part while the Temple was actually being destroyed, while there was a massive war on–when the Jewish people rose up in revolt against Rome, and got destroyed as a result–another small earthquake.  And so, the events described here aren’t misty in the future–they’re happening to Mark’s audience.  They’re happening now.  The audience is living through their own apocalypse–their own enormous big, bad thing.

 

So it’s in response to an actual war that Jesus gives this speech, reminding them that God is still here and God is still working, and the story isn’t over.

 

Wars aren’t new.  Violence like we’ve seen this week isn’t new.  The human capacity for brokenness isn’t new.  Suffering and death aren’t new–and we are faced time and again by problems that seem insurmountable, unfixable, and intractable–in the world and in our own lives.  

 

But what we are promised today is that we have a God who will stay with us through the earthquakes.  Through the wars.  Through the upheavals of our lives.  We have a God who will stay with us no matter what comes.  

 

Because even though this world can be scary, and it can be,  And even though we can face the worst problems imaginable, God-in-Christ promises that none of this is the end–that God will bear with us through even the worst of it to make a world that is not broken, that is not scary, but that is whole, and fully redeemed.  

 

And that is where we place our hope.  

Amen.

**Just through ‘Room Where it Happens’.  I’m not an emotional masochist.  One does not listen to ‘It’s Quiet Uptown’ or anything after, and expect to feel better about life; one listens to that and pulls the car over because you’re sobbing too hard about historical figures that you’ve become very emotionally invested in.

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