The Book of Common Prayer defines a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of God’s inner and spiritual grace.” They convey the generous and gracious love of God to us (inner and spiritual) by tangible means (outward and visible).

The Church has two primary sacraments – baptism and Eucharist. The outward sign of baptism is water and the sign of the Cross made with chrism (blessed oil); the inner grace is new life in Christ. In Eucharist the outward sign is the bread and wine, and the inner grace is participation in God and being at one with fellow believers.

Five other sacramental rites are available in the Episcopal Church and are all vehicles of God’s grace, but are not rites that every Christian will necessarily be part of: Confirmation, Marriage, Reconciliation (private confession), Ordination, and Anointing at the Time of Death (“last rites”).

The word sacrament has to do with making something holy. The outward, tangible part of a sacrament reminds us that God uses the good creation he has made to be an avenue of divine grace and blessing for us.

To lament is to express grief, sorrow, or pain in an open and heartfelt way. It is not something our modern American culture tolerates very well; we always hear that we should be strong and carry on without complaint. There certainly is a time and place for that. But lamentation has deep Biblical and Christian roots. The Psalms are full of lamentation – both as individuals and as a people, a communal statement of anguish. Perhaps the most well-known and profound example of lament is Psalm 22 which begins: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus utters that Psalm verse when he is dying on the Cross.

Lamentation is a way of being honest before God and before one another. It says that something is not right, out of joint, broken and painful – whether that is in our personal lives, in public life, in the tragedies of disaster. Lamentation lays bare our hearts and allows room for the healing light and presence of God to come within us and among us. To lament is a very faithful way to pray.

A covenant is relationship between two parties, with rights and responsibilities on both sides – with the emphasis on the relationship. There are a number of different covenants in the Bible, and they have all been initiated by God. The best known is the relationship between God and the Hebrew slaves after they had been freed from slavery in Egypt. In the desert, on Mount Sinai, God promised that he would be their Lord if they would be his people. The commandments that God gave to the people through Moses were to be markers and patterns of life that would show they were living according to God’s ways (what we call the Ten Commandments).

Covenants are about loyalty and faithfulness, which is why the Prayer Book refers to “the covenant of marriage.” At the Last supper Jesus also referred to the bread and wine as the sign of the new covenant that God was making in the Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples and all others who would follow were being invited into a new and life-giving relationship with God.~ VGM+

Sabbath is the practice of regularly refraining from work and resting. It is about trusting that the world will go on, the sun rising and setting, without any help from us. Our trust is in God. God made the universe and gave it life, and God’s care for creation far exceeds any of our efforts to make things happen. In the Ten Commandments, given to Moses after the Hebrew slaves were freed from bondage in Egypt, God tell the people to “remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.” In the first story of creation in Genesis (the first book of the Bible) we hear that God made all things in six “days” (large periods of time), and on the seventh day, God rested. And so we are called to rest, as well.

In Judaism the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and extends until sundown on Saturday. Christians originally celebrated the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, the day of Resurrection, on Sunday. Those two practices merged over time, as Gentiles (non-Jews) became followers of Jesus.

Sabbath, for Christians, is primarily Sunday and is to be a day dedicated to God in worship, rest, family time, even unplugging from the rest of the world. But any day or period of time can be taken as time to practice an intentional Sabbath for renewal, refreshment – physical, emotional, and spiritual. ~ VGM+

 ~ VGM+The word peace appears nearly three hundred and fifty times in the Bible. It is far more than the absence of war or strife. Nor is merely a polite “go along to get along” attitude. Peace is a state of wholeness and balance that comes from being in a right relationship with God and with neighbor – and within oneself. The ancient Hebrew word for peace was “shalom”, meaning wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety, prosperity, and serenity for an individual and for the community. It is still used as a greeting in modern Judaism. Peace is a positive state; the way God wants us to be. It is a value that is expressed in one of the blessings in our services: “The Peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” ~ VGM+

Words of Faith
Words matter – what they mean, how we use them, the feelings they convey, the way they shape our experience of life. For centuries Christians have had a “vocabulary of faith” which was a collection of words and ideas that was generally understood by society at large and by believers in particular.

Over time that changed. Some words became very secularized; for example, in sports we hear about players making sacrifices for their team, but originally “sacrifice” meant “to make holy.” And then some Christian groups have taken faith words and defined them in ways that most Episcopalians would have trouble resonating with.

Add to all of that the perceived split between “public life” and “private faith” – and we have lost confidence in our ability to know and use the vocabulary of our Christian lives. That can make it difficult for us to think and reason clearly about our faith, and to express to others what it is we believe and why we behave as we do.

As we have been living through this time of health crisis, we know that whatever is on the other side of this will be different than what we started with. We will be different, and we will face some new challenges and realities.

It will be good for us to remember and renew and become confident once again in the words of our faith and our expression of the Christian life as we understand it in our Episcopal and Anglican tradition. To help us with this I’ll be sharing a word on most days, with a short definition or explanation of what it means, Christianly-speaking. I hope you find this encourages you to think about the words you say, the words you pray, and the way God is shaping, forming, and equipping you to do God’s work in the world.
Blessings, Vicki+

Grace
Grace means gift – God’s gift to us of love and blessing that we neither earn nor deserve. God offers us grace before we are even aware that we are in need of it; and God already loves us fully, before we even do anything to respond to him.
We often think of someone being graceful or moving with a quality of grace, like a dancer. That image conveys a sense of fluidity, ease, motion, even beauty. When we are on the receiving end of God’s grace we gain that sense of moving through life with greater ease and dignity because we know that we are loved to our very depths.

Jesus said: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:7

This is the season of The Schedule. It’s the time to make sure the family Google calendar syncs up with the new fall routine, after the glorious disruptions of summer and vacations. And if you have children in your household you know (or may remember) the particular September scramble of fitting in after-school activities, sports, homework, social events, with work, household chores, and volunteer efforts. Sometimes it feels like you need a computer program to figure out who needs to be where, with what, or whom, when. And heaven help you if a small detail changes and you have to rearrange everything! Even if you don’t have children at home, the early fall always arrives with the drive to get organized, make sure your commitments are in your calendar in ink, so you know what you are doing, and begin the new program year. It can feel like multiple requirements are pressing in on you all at the same time – at least until you can get your schedule somewhat tamed.

And into the midst of all of this September scramble comes Jesus, with his challenging and difficult words this morning. The carefully stacked blocks of our schedules and commitments may just get knocked over, like pulling out the last block which collapses the tower in a game of Jenga when we hear what Jesus has to say; and we may not like it at all!

He addresses the large crowd who were travelling with him, people who had seen his miracles and healing and wondrous works, who had heard him speak with authority about God’s purposes and had followed along to see what else was going to happen. Maybe there would be an even more spectacular miracle; maybe Jesus would even more brazenly denounce the Roman governing system and hand the running of the country back to Jewish rulers; maybe there would always be food enough for all of them. Curiosity and desire can draw people on for a long time.

But instead of encouraging the crowd, Jesus turns to them and says, “If you want to come with me and be part of what I’m doing, here’s what needs to happen: you can’t put your family first; you need to know that there’s a strong possibility this is going to end with a torturous death; you can’t be weighed down by an overabundance of possessions. You need to count the cost of all of this before we go any further together.” Wow. Take a minute and let all that sink in.

And then the objections come: isn’t Christianity supposed to be family-friendly? didn’t Jesus die so that we don’t have to suffer? What’s wrong with owning lots of things? These are all really good questions, and we could spend an hour pondering and discussing each one. For now, I’ll just say that Jesus is making it very clear that anyone who wants to follow him, to be his disciple, needs to be aware of the realities and costs involved.

I recently heard about a church in another part of the country, in a downtown area that had a big banner on its front lawn that read: “Come on in. It’s easy.” That may seem like a good marketing strategy – a low bar to get folks to cross the threshold. And in many ways, it’s what the socially-accepted expectation of church was – at least in America, in the decades after World War II: “Come through the doors, you’ll meet people like yourself, you can be comfortable, not too much is going to be required of you.” Now, of course, that’s an over-generalization, but the point here is that the message on that 2019 church’s banner is not true. It’s not true of Christian faith, of following Jesus, of worshiping God; it never has been true.

The very first commandment that God gave Moses after the Hebrew people were freed from their slavery and they were being gathered and shaped as a people, the very first command was “Hear the commandments of God to his people: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.” This command to worship and serve God alone was of course about turning away from the various Egyptian deities, or the Canaanite gods they would later encounter. But it was always understood to include any person or idea or value that we might want to put in God’s place as an idol; whether we are intending to do that or not. And Jesus, as God Incarnate, is bidding his followers to make sure they understand and are prepared for this challenge. It’s anything but easy.

The New Testament scholar Tom Wright uses this image in commenting on this passage: ‘… think of the leader of a great expedition, forging a way through a high and dangerous mountain pass to bring urgent medical aid to villagers cut off from the rest of the world. ‘If you want to come any further,’ the leader says, ‘you’ll have to leave your packs behind. From here on the path is too steep to carry all that stuff. You probably won’t find it again. And you’d better send your last postcard home; this is a dangerous route and it’s very likely some of us won’t make it back.’ That’s truth, that’s real; there’s a lot at stake in following Jesus.

And if we think that setting out the costs of discipleship in a clear way is a lousy recruitment tool, that it merely drives people away, I would ask us to think again. I would offer the example of a number mythic stories that have been written by faithful practicing Christians as an expression of their understanding of God and the world and being disciples, books that are beloved and have huge followings: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Harry Potter.

In each of these books, while there are one or two central characters, there is always a larger core group of people and beings (because not all the characters are human). Each member of the group has their own very different gifts, abilities, personalities, graces, physical features, and attributes. And they are all drawn together, not by their fondness for each other, but to take on a dangerous and important mission that that they could not ever have imagined on their own: those who are loyal to Aslan, the Fellowship of the Ring, Dumbledore’s Army and the Order of the Phoenix.

Certainly, each of these series of books – which have spoken so profoundly to so many - is full of stirring, heroic scenes and battles between good and evil. And they seem very exciting and attractive… from a distance; kind of like the feeling of watching a video of runners crossing the finish line at the New York City Marathon and thinking that would be a really cool thing to do – until you start the actual training. But the crux of these stories, the turning point, the truth-with-a-capital-T in each book has to do with the protagonists making a hard choice, giving something up, coming to a costly awareness or decision – whether it is mercy or repentance or sacrifice. It is because Tolkien, and Lewis, and JK Rowling write the Truth – even without mentioning God – that their work endures and continually finds new audiences. The Truth they portray is hard and beautiful and good.

Jesus’s words are hard; they are challenging. They call us to examine our lives, our schedules, our commitments. Did we think faith was going to be easy? Do we try to fit God in as an after-thought, a “nice-to-have”? As the Prayer Book puts it in Eucharistic Prayer C, do we look to church “for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal”? Solace and pardon can be good places to start, but we can’t stay there – not if we are going to go the whole way with Jesus.

So, at the start of this new season, let’s take the time – each one of us - to ask God how we might count the cost of our faith, the cost of what God is asking us to do and to be, so that we can be more fit and ready to serve our Lord with truth, mercy, beauty, and goodness.

Let us pray.
Grant, Lord God, to all who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, that, as we have put away the old life of sin, so we may be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and live in righteousness and true holiness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. ~ BCP, p. 252
 
Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2019

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Luke 10:41

One again, we have a very familiar Gospel passage at the center of our worship. Last week we heard Jesus tell the parable of the man from Samaria. Today we have an account of an event from Jesus’ ministry. And just like last week it will be helpful to hear the story afresh, lest we think we know what it says and just gloss over it.

In the course of his ministry travels towards Jerusalem, Jesus arrives in the village of Bethany and a woman named Martha opens her home to him, and his traveling companions. Remember back several weeks ago we heard Jesus sending out the seventy disciples and telling them to expect and accept the hospitality of those strangers they encountered? Well, here is a real-life example of what he was saying.

Martha is the homeowner, there doesn’t seem to be any husband, brother, or father around; her sister Mary lives with her [In the Gospel of John we do hear about their brother Lazarus, but he does not appear at all in Luke’s Gospel]. Somehow in the village, Martha encounters Jesus and extends an invitation to her house.

Martha welcomes Jesus and then sets about to prepare a meal. Mary takes a place in the front room, sitting and listening to what Jesus has to say. Something that would have been very obvious to first-century hearers of this story but may be lost on us is the fact that in faithful Jewish households the areas for men and women were pretty clearly demarcated. The kitchen was a woman’s area of influence and activity; the public room belonged to the men. And it's still that way in traditional Muslim households.
So when Martha comes to the door and tries to recruit Mary’s assistance, she’s not just asking for help, or chiding Mary for shirking responsibility for their guests, she’s trying to get Mary to conform to the traditional division of men’s and women’s spaces; and not to scandalize the important visiting rabbi.

But Jesus tells Martha that she’s so frantic and distracted that she’s missing the point of his visit, and missing out on being able to hear what he has to say; that in fact he wants both Mary and Martha to be in on this conversation.

It’s like those times when family or friends come to visit and you or someone else in your family has to be coaxed out of the kitchen, or whatever other place they are working, to set that aside for a while and spend time with the folks who have come to call – which is the whole purpose of the visit! After all, how easy would it be to put off reading a story to a young child or hearing about a teen-ager’s college plans or an adult son or daughter’s new young man or young woman because you were hyper-focused on getting a meal served or meeting some last-minute work deadline? We’ve all done that; and we’ve probably all regretted it later. Those moments come and go, and you can’t always get them back.

So, Jesus is saying to Martha: it’s important for you to be here, too. I want you to hear what I have to say, as well. We can take time for conversation now and enjoy the meal a bit later.

When Luke describes Mary as sitting at Jesus’ feet, he’s saying that she’s taking the role of a student who will one day be a teacher. That’s the way first-century rabbis-in-training were talked about; St. Paul describes himself as having sat at the feet of Rabbi Gamliel. It means that Jesus was inviting and expecting Mary to listen to his teaching, so that she would be equipped to share his teaching with others. And Jesus was inviting, urging, Martha to do the same.

In the Kingdom of God, as Jesus was living it and teaching it, the old boundaries were being broken down. Paul puts it very succinctly later on in the Letter to the Christians in Galatia: “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28).

It’s a mistake, therefore, for us to think that there is some sort of hierarchy between different modes of service – as in, prayer and study are better than hands-on care for others. That is a false dichotomy that is very unhelpful. After all, in last week’s Gospel the Samaritan’s physical and financial care of the beaten Jewish man was offered as a very clear example of living God’s law. And at the start of that reading when the religious law scholar gave Jesus the answer about inheriting eternal life and the answer was: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, that covered both contemplation and action. And the week prior to that, when Jesus was sending out the seventy disciples he fully expected them to accept the hospitality that was offered them; so clearly cooking, serving a meal, providing a clean and restful place are all valuable, and those things don’t just happen by themselves.

But today the invitation is to stay focused on Jesus and on what he wants us to learn, on what he wants us to receive from him. Jesus wants us – men and women both – to take the time to listen, to learn, to put what we hear into practice, to take what we live and believe as disciples and share it with others. We can’t do that if we are worried, and frantic, and distracted. The challenge for most of us, I suspect, is to find ways to take time intentionally on as close to a daily basis as possible. Coming to church to worship with others, to hear the Sunday Scriptures, to listen to the sermon, to pray the liturgy are all essential – but it can be a long time between Sundays; and even longer when your schedule doesn’t permit you to be here every week. At those times the near-daily practice of sitting quietly, listening to God in prayer and Scripture and silence becomes even more important. Otherwise we will all too easily find ourselves running on fumes and getting spiritually exhausted and ill-equipped, and even lose the thread of what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to us.

So hear the voice of Jesus speaking to you: come, sit, rest, listen, pay attention, and know that I am calling you in love so that I may send you forth in compassion to the world.

Let us pray.
O God of peace, you have taught us that in returning and
rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be
our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray you,
to your presence, where we may be still and know that you
are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. ~ BCP

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
July 21, 2019

Luke 9:51-62

Today’s Gospel contains four encounters between Jesus and other people, and when you look at these four encounters, at first, it might look like they’re unrelated.

There isn’t ever just one way to interpret any passage of scripture. There are actually myriad ways to look at it, and whenever Jesus speaks in the Gospels he is always saying a multitude of things at the same time. One way we might look at this particular text is to sort of helicopter up and try and understand what Jesus might have been saying in a general, thematic way.

The first encounter, between Jesus and James and John, always makes me laugh because it’s one of those Three Stooges moments in the Gospels, where the disciples were completely clueless about the nature of God. The setting here is that Jesus and his followers had gone to a village of Samaritans. Now, Samaritans were actually Jews who had been left behind in Israel after the other Jews were taken into exile in Assyria and Babylon and so after the exile, there was a disagreement between the Samaritans and the Jews about where the center of worship should be. So here the Samaritan village had rejected Jesus' teachings because he was a Jew who believed Jerusalem was the center of worship and the Samaritans believed that their temple on Mt. Gerizim was the center, and because of this disagreement, James and John turn to Jesus in complete seriousness and ask him “So – do you want us to incinerate them?” And it says here “Jesus rebuked them”, so I can just imagine Jesus going “NO!! I do not want you to set them on fire! Let’s just move on!” and what I see here, in my own interpretation of this scripture, is Jesus telling them, as he does people over and over in the Gospels “I’m not that kind of god,” meaning here “I am not the god of vengeance and destruction that you have been brought up to believe I am. I am not the god who’s going to destroy all your enemies and help you all take over the world.” And so here, Jesus is telling the people to let go of their old notions about what they think God is, and instead listen to him, the incarnation of God himself, explaining that he is actually a God of love and compassion.

The other three encounters in this Gospel, between Jesus and people who are curious about following him, might seem to go into the category of what my esteemed former colleague, the Rev. Stephen Gerth at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City, refers to as the “Mean Jesus." Father Gerth says that in the Gospels there are instances of the Nice Jesus and the Mean Jesus because Jesus says some pretty harsh things to people. I tend to reject that theory, though. I don't think Jesus is ever a mean Jesus. I think he's the loving God of my understanding all the time so I am going to let him off the hook here.

With the first man, I would like to think that Jesus is simply telling him “The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” as a profound observation about the inability of society to understand who he actually is, rather than ignoring the poor guy’s desire to follow him and simply complaining about not having a permanent place to live. Jesus here is simply telling the man yes, come and follow me, but it is not going to be easy. He is saying to him “Right now there is no safe place for my teachings to dwell, in such a broken, dangerous world.” He’s probably also speaking symbolically here in reference to foxes and birds. Later in Luke he calls Herod Antipas an “old fox” and in the book of Isaiah, Cyrus of Persia was referred to as a bird of prey, so it’s possible Jesus was saying the rulers and the false teachers of the world have a safe, secure place for themselves and their message, but God does not.

When Jesus tells the second man “let the dead bury their own dead” I don’t think he was literally saying “Don’t go to your own father’s funeral. I know they’re expecting you and that you probably have some duties to perform for your family, but don’t go. Follow me instead.” That sounds a little too egotistical and dictatorial for the Jesus of my understanding. I would like to think maybe Jesus might have instead meant something about inviting this man to reject old religious practices and the beliefs of his family and his culture that are no longer working, and instead embrace something new.

The third man tells Jesus he will follow him but he first needs to say goodbye to his loved ones back at home. Jesus says to him “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” I think what he means here is not “Don’t go to be with your loved ones and set things right with them.” But rather “If you want to follow me, don’t do it halfway. Don’t stay stuck in old ways of thinking and keep wondering if you should go back to that. If you’re going to commit to my new way, you have to commit with your whole heart.”

We can see Jesus' instructions to embrace something new in our own spiritual lives today. We can try to be vigilant about not becoming what they sometimes call "the mechanical church" – to not fall into a pattern of just going through the motions and saying the words without having any real energy or meaning behind them. In our prayer life, we can try to leave behind any methods that have become dry and empty and instead find ways to connect with God that are alive and that promote our spiritual growth. In the church, we can try to always remember the reasons why we do things, and if we can’t remember, then we need to ask ourselves why we are still doing them.

Jesus’ entry into the world was meant to turn everything upside down and to challenge the beliefs and structures that were in place at that time, and I believe that in our lives, and in the life of our world, Jesus is still trying to do this. He is asking us to leave behind the things that are empty, negative or destructive and instead embrace his good news of life and love and hope.