Sermons by Katherine Ragsdale

2011-05-15T14:11:00.000-04:00

Easter Thursday, 2011
at Episcopal Divinity School

Gospel: Luke24: 36b - 48

This is the time of year when I most miss parish ministry – not Xmas, but Lent and Easter. Lent and Easter, which I always see as a happily conjoined pair.

I love the 50 days of festive Easter celebration – the Easter hymns and acclamations, the descants, the buoyant joy of it all. I also loved crafting, week after week, step by step, liturgies designed to help ground us in the solemnity and penitence of Lent – the counterpoint that gives Easter its resonance.

Now, it may sound a bit paradoxical for an old feminist theologian to love the penitential aspects of Lent. I came of age theologically in the 80s, on the heels of Valarie Saiving Goldstein’s pivotal journal article wherein she opined that, while Pride might be the original sin of man, that its opposite, lack of pride, might be the original sin of woman – the self-abnegation that caused us too often to consent to our own disempowerment – and, thereby, to fail to put our talents to full use in the love and service of God. Penitence, guilt, we thought, were just the Churches’ equivalent of the medical establishment’s valium; patriarchy’s tools to suppress our outrage, our righteous indignation – to keep us docile and in our place. So we rejected patriarchy’s tranquilizers – whether they came in plastic pill bottles or ancient liturgical texts.

And that was a good thing. But, like many revolutionary good things, in the long run it works better as one part of a both/and balance than as one pole of an either/or.

Revolutionary in its time, in this age of “look at me, me, me”; trophies for everyone; salvation through self-esteem – in such an age as this a guilt and penitence-free Lent looks more like an acquiescence to culture than a critique of it.

So I embrace a good old-fashioned Lent as, once again, a counter-cultural act and because, still, it is the ballast that gives Easter its meaning. I need Lent to remind me that I need Easter. I can’t be the person God created, and intends, me to be without God’s help – without Jesus. Which takes us to the heart of today’s Gospel.

Today’s Gospel speaks of both repentance and resurrection.

Before we fully dive into that, let’s pause and acknowledge that Jesus’ scolding of the disciples for doubting their eyes (or perhaps he was just poking fun, but, wither way) was a bit unfair. They saw him die; they’ve been hiding in terror for their own lives ever since. Now they see him standing before them and he laughs at them for thinking they’re seeing a ghost rather than recognizing that he’s their real, flesh and blood, companion restored to them?

But that’s what the text says – flesh and blood, standing before them.

This, by the way, is the point in the story when you lose credibility with a lot of the Xmas and Easter only church-goers. It’s why they checked out in the first place. There’s no way they’re going to believe shat is, rationally, impossible. You can, at this point, show off your great seminary education. You can brush off your Greek, your historical criticism skills, your best quotes from, and critiques of, the Jesus Seminar.

Or … what I usually do is simply acknowledge that there may well be people in the congregation who doubt that Jesus was really resurrected in the flesh. And, if so, they’re in good company. Many very smart and very faithful people share their skepticism and disbelief on that point. And many other very smart and very faithful people believe that’s exactly what happened. And we could spend a great deal of time arguing the point. But I won’t. Nor will I tell you which camp I fall into. Because I really don’t much care.

You see, I think the real danger is not believing wrongly on the facts of this matter. The real danger is getting so absorbed in the question of whether it’s factual that we forget that it most certainly is true. The truth matters far more to me than the facts. And the truth is – something profound happened. Lives were changed, the world was changed. Resurrection happened then. It happens still. I’ve seen it – in the Biblical texts, throughout history, in my own life, and in the lives of others.

Flesh and blood don’t matter all that much to me – resurrection and redemption do. Lent has reminded me that I need them – that I can’t be who God made and intends me to be on my own. I can’t know the fullness of life in God or grow into the full stature of Christ alone. Even on my best days I don’t get all the way there. And many of my days are not my best. I cannot save myself. I need Jesus. Jesus, who, this Gospel reading says, was to suffer and die.

This takes us into another conundrum aptly articulated by Joanna Dewey last week – Atonement theology. Atonement theology posits a God who functions as a sort of dispassionate bean-counter. Our sins carry a price. We don’t have enough virtue capital to cover that cost. The only way to stay out of debtors’ prison/hell is for someone to cover our bill. No one has that much virtue capital – except Jesus. Jesus dies to cover our debt, the books are squared, we get out of prison. Jesus, as the text says, must die.

Frankly, I have a hard time imaging how I could ever worship and serve such a God as that. I think I’d rather stay in hell.

But it says – the Messiah must die.

Could that, though, not mean that Jesus’ persecution and death were inevitable given who Jesus was and how the world is? Not that God intended, and wanted, Jesus to die but that the Father and Jesus both knew what the inevitable outcome of a life lived as Jesus lived it would be?

The world, as Lent has reminded us, is filled with both the wondrous goodness of creation and with sin. And sin, faced with absolute integrity, unblinking Love, always tries to kill it. Being completely, fully, who God intended Him to be, living with absolute integrity, Jesus was bound to anger and frighten and shame the powers and principalities – of course they killed Him.

Being who He was, of course Jesus must die – for our sins.

And, rather than cave to that oppression, rather than give us a half-hearted, partially actualized example of what it means to live into the fullness of Being, the full glory of God, Jesus saw it through – even unto that quite predictable death.

Jesus died – for us.

We who follow the way of Jesus won’t pull it off as well as he did. That perfection of integrity will elude us (not because we’re bad people but because we’re people) yet if we manage to do even a middling good job of following Jesus, the world may well kill us, too – our bodies, or our dreams, our career, or our sense of self. It’s apt to happen; we may as well prepare for it.

But here’s the Good News –the Easter News:

Resurrection is true – whatever the facts of the matter. Resurrection is true. I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, I am a witness.

When we get it together to risk and face those deaths – to go through them rather than around them – we invite resurrection and redemption; we become strong through our very wounds. We find ourselves blessed in ways that exceed our hopes and our best imagining. Through those little deaths we find ourselves ushered into new life – resurrected, born again, becoming ever more who we were created to be, redeemed.

And when we let God into our lives that profoundly; when we, through fasting and prayer as well as feasting and celebration, through hard work and service and steadfast love and joy cooperate in our own growth into the full stature of Christ – what our heirs will discover is that even the big death is not the end of us. Our lives, lived with that integrity, that openness to death and resurrection and redemption, our lives will comtinue to make a difference even after our bodies have returned to dust.

When the people of God gather to worship, work, or play together; when they stand at the altar, or march on the Capital, or kiss a child, we, too, will be in the midst of them continuing to bless them and shape the world.

We, too, will be resurrected, never really to die.

And that’s the Truth.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen.

Baptized Into the Fullness of Life

2009-04-23T16:47:00.000-04:00

Katherine Ragsdale

In just a few minutes we’re going to go over to that font and Baptize this child into the life and death of Jesus Christ. We’re going to pledge, on her behalf, to “renounce all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God;*” to “persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever (we) fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord;” to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ;” to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving (our) neighbors as (our)self;” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” We’re going to promise to teach her to model her life on the example of Jesus of Nazareth.

So the question I have for you is … Why would we want to do such a thing to this perfectly lovely baby, to this infant who has never done anything to us? You do remember what happened to this Jesus whom we’re pledging her to follow? He was killed – rejected by the religious authorities and executed by the State as a threat to the established order. All that striving for justice and respecting the dignity of every human being was wreaking havoc on the social policies and traditions of the age. And the folks in charge were having none of it. For the most part they still aren’t. They killed Jesus and a good number of his followers, and they’ve never stopped. The faces have changed, as have the methods and the excuses. All too often it’s those who call themselves followers of Jesus and purport to be defending the faith who are doing the killing, or at least, cheering on those who do. But the fact remains, those who truly work for justice for all people; who insist on standing up to the powers that oppress the children of God; who refuse to compromise their integrity or hide either their talents or their passionate indignation are too often killed – by governments, assassins, or the inexorable toll of poverty and marginalization. Never to turn back from the path Jesus mapped can land us into some dangerous places.

Even should this child we love manage to find a less dangerous route, we have still promised to do everything in our power to deny her the contemporary version of the good life. Not for her this season’s American dream – the self-absorbed search for endless self-gratification; the quest for beauty and power and money enough to satisfy every appetite; the cult of celebrity bought at the expense of the loser class. No, if we are successful in fulfilling the promises we are about to make, the vows we are about to take before God and one another, this child will be denied, will deny herself, everything that modern culture has taught us defines success.

Why would we deny her that? Because we want for her so very much more.

We have learned, from our sacred texts; from our forebears and teachers; perhaps from our own experience, we have learned that money and prestige and power and beauty and celebrity and things can never assuage our deepest fears or sate our greatest hungers. They may sometimes bring pleasure but the pleasure is fleeting and never fully satisfies. We want more than that for this child. We want this child to have the rich, full, deep life that, paradoxically, can never be reached through the unrelenting attention to self-fulfillment that television and ad agencies preach from their bully pulpits.

Many years ago I had a dream. I still think of it as a dream about my vocation to the ministry. In this dream I, along with many other travelers, was invited into a grand castle. We were tired and hungry and our beautiful host invited us into a huge formal dining room. A wide table ran the length of the room, piled high with every food one could imagine. Heaping platters of roasted meats, bright vegetables swimming in exquisite sauces, vast bowls of dew-bespeckled fruits ready to burst their skins with ripeness covered the full length and breadth of the table. The aromas alone made us weak-kneed with desire. Our host smiled and urged us to eat to our hearts’ content. There was, she assured us, no end to the banquet before us. Her servants would replenish the feast as quickly as we could eat it. No platter, bowl, or goblet would ever become empty.

And suddenly I knew – this was not real food. It was merely an illusion. It had no substance to nourish us nor would it ever ease our hunger. Quite the contrary. We were so very hungry and this mock food looked like it should satisfy and delight us. If we began to eat it, its inability to truly feed us would make us hungrier still. With each bite we took we would become more desperate for sustenance and would crave the feast that appeared to be before us even more. We would seize more and more, quickly becoming captives at the table, unable to stop desperately ingesting the illusion that then left us hungrier, and more desperate, with each bite. Eventually we would starve – waste away and die – having spent the balance of our lives in this devil’s playground with all our energies devoted to ingesting that which could never bring us life or joy or satisfaction.

My job, in this dream, was to stop us before we took that first bite and became trapped, unable to pull ourselves away from the fake castle and its table, unable to return to the less glamorous, but ever so much more substantial and sustaining, real world. Our job, which we take on this day, is to teach this child the difference between illusions that will destroy the good within her and things of substance upon which she can build a life worthy of her talents and her passion.

Here is what we have come to know. A life devoted merely to self-gratification, to sating our appetites, to the endless search for pleasure, will never satisfy the deep hunger within. And the more we devote ourselves to such a quest the smaller we become as we struggle to deform ourselves into creatures petty enough to be so easily satisfied. We were created to be more than that. We were created to be big … vast … infinite. We were created to be one with God, the force that creates and animates and sustains all that is, seen and unseen, known and yet to be discovered. We were created to know, and fall daily deeper in love with, the wondrous grandeur and complexity of the whole created order. We were created to take our part in the care and keeping and unfolding of that creation, to play our part in a holy task that began before history and will continue beyond the scope of our imagining.

We come today to Baptize this child, beloved of God and us, into the fullness of life. We come to begin the life-long process of reminding her that someone as gifted and precious as she can never be reduced to mere appetite and ambition – and neither can any other of the children of God, gifted and precious in their own right. We come to begin teaching her that she matters and what she does matters, that every choice she makes shapes the world for better or for worse. Every time she meets the world with greed or jealousy or malice she will make the world that much meaner a place. Every time she embraces the world with integrity, love, respect, and peace she will make the world that much more holy a place. We come to remind her that she is a part of creation, intricately and intimately linked to everyone and everything that is. We come to encourage her to spend her life exploring and enhancing those connections.

We come to remind her that she has it within her to walk a path of holiness and righteousness and we come to pledge her our support. We ask her to do this not because it will make her life easier, for it is unlikely that it will. Probably it will make her life far more difficult than it would be if she chose a more self-absorbed path … a smaller path. The path of holiness and righteousness may someday get her killed, it will certainly bring her hardships, but it will assuredly make her whole. In knowing and embracing her connection to the whole of creation she will become big: bigger than any solitary soul has it within itself to be; big enough to be God’s own partner in the on-going creation of all that is; big enough to know a peace and joy and fullness of life that simply is not available to the self-referential, that cannot be contained by those who have made themselves small.

We come to Baptize her into the fullness of life.

Palm Sunday

2009-04-03T07:11:00.001-04:00

Palm Sunday, 2005
St. David’s, Pepperell (MA)
Katherine Ragsdale

It’s Palm Sunday, the longest morning in Christendom. It’s not your imagination; this really is going on forever. The problem is that we’re doing two liturgies, two days, in one today. We started with the Palm Sunday liturgy and then, with the reading of the Passion that we just completed, moved into Good Friday as well.

So why does the Church do this to us?

I’m inclined to tell you that you have no one to blame but yourselves, but the truth is, we have lots of people throughout the Church and around the world to blame. We do two liturgies today because we know that a lot of you won’t be here on Good Friday. And we also know that Easter without Good Friday is as hollow and as nutritious as one of those big chocolate bunnies your kids will find in their Easter baskets.

A free floating Easter of new clothes, bunnies, peeps, jelly beans, and the occasional joyful acknowledgement that Christ is risen can provide a nice spiritual sugar high – but it does not nourish us, it will not sustain us, and it trivializes God’s great work in our lives. So, knowing that, but knowing also that, short of tying us to our chairs and prying our jaws open, it’s not always possible to get us to take what’s good for us, the Church, in its wisdom, has decided to cram as much of the important stuff as possible into a meal we’re reasonably likely to eat. You can think of Palm Sunday as a regular family dinner wherein all the familiar dishes have been vitamin fortified.

First, we’re given Palm Sunday and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. In this part of our liturgy we’re reminded what it was the people wanted, what they were looking for. They expected a military savior who would end their oppression and get revenge. The lust for revenge is not alien to the people of God. We may be warned not to indulge it but there’s no point in pretending we’re strangers to it. Check the Psalms. The psalmists lament their grief and oppression, their pain and their loss. But what they’re really mad about is that the people who did it to them keep getting away with it. People hoped for, expected that Jesus was, the one who would smite their enemies as well as restoring justice.

Their first clue that they were not going to get what they were expecting should have come when he arrived. He rode into town not on a horse, the symbol of military might in that time, he didn’t ride in perched atop a tank. He came in on a donkey, more like an old VW van. This Jesus came not to conquer but to preach a new way; to announce that, all appearances notwithstanding, Empire could not, would not, prevail; and to stand firm in those proclamations even though it meant that the Empire would kill him, as he knew it would, as he knew it, being Empire, must.

But this morning we see the people, people not unlike us, still hoping for an easy way out – for someone to fight and sacrifice for them; to conquer for them; to win, for them, a peace that no one else can, in fact, bestow.
And when, on Good Friday, the chickens come home to roost, when the full weight of Empire fell upon this itinerate preacher, this son of a Nazarene carpenter, this apostle of peace – those people, people not unlike you, not unlike me, those people turned on him. Disappointed, angry that he wasn’t what they expected, they threw him to the wolves. Even his followers, who kind-of got it, distanced themselves – "I don’t know him; he is nothing to me."

These stories of dashed hope, betrayal, failure, despair, cowardice, and fear… these are our stories. These are what get taken to the cross and the tomb with Jesus on Good Friday. These are what get redeemed, these are the people who get resurrected, on Easter.

Easter does not promise us that everything will be pretty; it doesn’t tell us that we can just forget our problems, put our miseries and shortcomings behind us. Holy Week teaches us that we achieve resurrection, redemption, and Easter glory not by turning our back on these things or going around them, but by going through them and coming out, with Jesus, on the other side.

Easter is not here yet. Don’t rush it. May you, instead, enter fully into this time of the Passion and have a blessed Holy Week.

Amen

The Big Question

2008-08-11T15:23:00.005-04:00

I asked it at one of the Lambeth press briefings but, just for the record, let's get it down here. (It has been reported elsewhere -- thanks Jim and Katie -- but may as well get it on my site, as well.)

The bishops were calling for moratoria on: 1) Blessing of same-sex unions; 2) consecration of lesbian or gay bishops; 3) incursions into each others' dioceses. They continually spoke of the need for concessions and sacrifice for the good of the whole.

Finally, I was called on for a question:

"Bishops, you continue to speak of sacrifice and that is understandable as Christianity is built upon the realization of the potential holiness of sacrifice. My question for you is -- do you see a difference between sacrificing oneself on behalf of others and forcing others to sacrifice themselves for you? And, if you do see a difference, what are the implications, then, for requiring the lesbian and gay faithful to sacrifice our lives, loves, and vocations as these moratoria do?"

Really, it just repeats a theme that has surfaced for years in my reproductive justice/abortion rights speeches: Sacrifice can be a noble and even holy thing but no one -- not politician, partner, or priest -- no one gets to tell someone else what sacrifice she must make.

Seems that, whatever the venue, that's a hard concept for some to grasp. Go figure.

KHR+

Sold into Egypt

2008-08-10T16:41:00.000-04:00

They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, "Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams." But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, "Let us not take his life." Reuben said to them, "Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him" -- that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.
Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh." And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.

Preparing to preach on this text today, I found myself thinking about the Church, its lesbian and gay sisters and brothers, and the Lambeth Conference. Ready to throw the gay and lesbian faithful into the pit to wither and die – having already thrown us there with centuries of denying our existence, much less our vocations; decades of asking us to remain quiet; two years of moratoria on blessing our relationships our consenting to consecrating any of us bishops – the Church, at Lambeth, has conceived the idea of drawing us out of the pit and bargaining us away for a profit.

The bargain? Our lives, loves, and vocations sacrificed to buy credit with those who insist we not be tolerated. Extending the moratoria shows good faith. Not to us, of course, but we, it seems, are not the ones who matter. And why should we, we’re on our way to Egypt. Sold for the appearance of unity, bargained away to make our betrayers look holy and self-sacrificing.

But remember what happened in Egypt. It was the one who was bartered away who saved not only the nation but also the family who sold him. Looking for redemption in the Anglican Communion? Keep your eyes on the folks in the many-colored coats (or boas). Keep your eyes on those who were sold into oblivion.

Gay Pride

2008-08-09T14:02:00.002-04:00

All this Lambeth talk has me wanting to re-say a few things. So, here's a repeat of an oldie -- but still true:

Interfaith Pride Service, 6/14/03
Sermon
Interfaith Pride Service
Boston, MA
June 14, 2003
Katherine Ragsdale

First, I’d like to thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. It is good to be here. I’ve just returned from a week in Washington – a week spent addressing a variety of peace and justice issues. And I need to say a word about that, because, if I don’t make an effort to de-compartmentalize, to integrate, my life, I spin out into a fragmented mess – and it’s not pretty. But I promise, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll bring us back home quickly.

So, first, there was a 2-day roundtable of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian religious leaders—discussing the meaning of peace in today’s world and the conditions in the Middle East (and here at home) that might make peace possible. Only one person stormed out of the room, too angry, and, perhaps, too frightened to continue the conversation. That’s one too many, but, still, given the circumstances, not bad. For the most part, the group was able to embody the peace we yearn for.

Then there was a press conference by leaders of the women’s movement outlining some of the losses of freedom and dignity suffered lately and some of our plans to combat that. Let me tell you now – put April 25, 2004 on your calendars for a March on Washington for Women’s Rights – particularly reproductive rights.

Then we had a women’s leadership summit tracing the perils and oppression faced by women at home and across the globe and highlighting some of the ways governments, businesses, the entertainment industry, and activists are trying to respond to these challenges.

And finally, more informally, there was another of those exchanges where a gay man was arguing for our rights on the grounds that we can’t help being gay – the old take pity, have mercy, argument. You know, the one that concludes with a plaintive – who would choose this?

Let me answer that with three words:

Me! Me! Me!

In a New York minute! Me!

I can only hope that my straight sisters and brothers are as happy with their place in the sexual orientation continuum as I am with mine. But, alas, the conversation would not be de-railed; it continued with more insistences that we must be tolerated since we have no choice – the underlying assumption being that if we did have a choice we would, and should, choose to change.

So – war, poverty, religious disputes, politics, freedom, civil rights, gender, sexuality … it was a long week. And, frankly, I can’t quite decide whether to be energized and impassioned that there is so much good work for us to do and so many amazing people with whom to do it, or to be overwhelmed and depressed because there is so much important work to be done and, even with so many talented, passionate people working so hard, the end is nowhere in sight.

Energy, passion, depression, despair – and let’s not even get into frustration, righteous indignation, and outrage. I suspect that this cauldron of emotions is not some odd shortcoming peculiar to me. Perhaps you, too, know all these feelings. Perhaps they play tug of war with your psyche, heart, and spirit, as well. And perhaps, you, like me, find that, given the free reign of benign neglect, in this world of so many injustices and so much violence, the emotional balance seems, more often than not, to tip toward frustration and despair.

Actually, I think it speaks well of us that we look at the world and, even from the positions of privilege and comfort most of us inhabit, we notice the wrongs of this world and they matter to us. I pray that we may never become blind to the injustices that surround us – never cease to notice – never cease to care.

But -- but...

Even as we commit ourselves to noticing and caring about those things that require and deserve our attention – things we have to, have to, fix – let us not make the mistake of noticing only those things. Let’s never allow ourselves to become so focused on the work yet to be done that we neglect to notice and celebrate our successes and our blessings.

This, too is human, I think – this tendency to hyper-focus on the work ahead and miss the bigger and more complex, nuanced, and deeply textured picture. But it’s a dangerous tendency – for all too often it leaves us discouraged. Dis –couraged. And to be dis-couraged makes me useless and it erodes my soul’s health. I suspect the same is true for you.

So, let’s try to resist that temptation to narrow in only on the job ahead am try to look at the whole picture for a moment.

It is true that there is plenty of important work ahead. The NGLTF reports that fully 1/3 of lgbt college students experience harassment. We know that there are far too many schools and families where it is not safe for teens to reveal or explore their sexual orientation. We know only too well the benefits that are denied to too many of us because we can’t get legally married. Personal and professional frustrations, roadblocks, and even dangers, persist for all too many of us or our sisters and brothers. There is work to be done.

But, sisters and brothers, just in case you haven’t noticed, let me make this very clear – the work that remains to be done? We do it as victors. We know the outcome of this struggle. We have already won.

Listen to this:

88% of Americans support equal opportunity in the workplace. (Only a generation ago I’m not sure 88% of Americans knew we existed and, of those who did, I’m not sure 88% would have supported our right to live – much less to be given equal opportunities)

Today, 75% of Democratic voters, 70% of Independents, and 56% of Republican voters supported sexual-orientation non-discrimination laws.

Only 40% of the public supports our freedom to marry (still – 40%!) but 73% believe we should have inheritance rights and 68% think we should get Social Security survivors’ benefits.

96% think HIV and STDs should be covered in sex-ed in the schools.

Today, any day of the week, a child anywhere in this country can turn on the television and find images of happy, healthy gay people. Doctors, lawyers, sports and entertainment figures, parents, grandparents, members of Congress or the clergy … on television, in the movies, in the newspapers, in our communities, any child in America can find evidence – reason to hope – that they, too, can grow up to lead a happy, fulfilled life, no matter what their sexual orientation.

This was certainly not true 30 years ago when I was a teen who didn’t even have the vocabulary to conceptualize why I didn’t fit in. This is huge. Every gay child has access to signs of hope. And every straight child has exposure to the idea that other sexual orientations are simply other ways of being – or, as my then 10 year old nephew explained to his 6 year old brother, “of course women can marry women and men can marry men. It’s really no big deal.”

We have changed the world and there is no going back. As you have Acted Up in the streets and cared for one another in your homes through those early, devastating years of the AIDS crisis, our community set a new standard for compassion and commitment; as we came out of our closets and faced down the bashers and oppressors, we added a new category to the list of the courageous; as we raised our children, adopted others, claimed our alliances, named our loves, we have changed the meaning of the word family. And every family in America (even the 17% of them that follow the old Ozzie and Harriet model) every family in America has been enriched by this broader definition.

The world has been changed in profound – awesome – ways. And we have played a part – a large part – in making that happen. Gay pride? You better believe it!

Yes, we still have work to do. There are laws yet to be passed, kids yet to be saved, opportunities yet to be opened up and explored. And, as long as we’re broadening our vision, let’s remember what God told the children of Abraham:

You must never take advantage of a stranger, for you know what it is to be a stranger. You, whom God has set free from bondage and need, must never ignore the bondage or need of another. You who have been so richly blessed must share your blessings with those in want.

Sisters and brothers, the conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East; the rise of poverty and the loss of hope here at home; the loss of civil liberties, freedom, choice, and opportunity – we are not free to ignore these either. We who know what it is to be marginalized, denied opportunity and hope, denied basic human rights, denied safety; we who know these things and yet have been so richly blessed, are not free to ignore the plight of others.

We have work to do – but we have powerful tools with which to do it. We have the communities and alliances we have built over the years, we have our passion and our vision, we have the things we’ve learned.

Let me just highlight a couple of those things –

1) We have learned not to give in to the temptation to be dis-couraged. We have learned not to be afraid.
Fear undoes us –
It renders us useless
It erodes our souls
And it is a faithless an ungrateful response from those who believe that we are never abandoned to the fray, never left alone, unaided or uncomforted – from those who have been carried so very far already.

2) We have learned that you cannot sustain a movement, or a spirit, on opposition – to anything, no matter how worthy of opposition it may be. Movements and spirits are sustained by vision – by what we are for not what we are against. As we march, today and every day, we march not primarily away from all that is wrong but toward all that is good and true and honorable and just. Yes, there may be, will be, skirmishes along the way, but they are incidental. They are not the point.

The vision is the point. We march and we fight and we persevere because we yearn for a world where every human being grows up safe and loved, where her dignity is respected and his particularity is celebrated. We dream of a world where everyone understands that the God who created us loves us -- and where true love is, God’s own self is there.

3) We have learned that Gandhi was right – you must become the change you wish to see. We will achieve our vision not by hiding and hating but by loving and celebrating. The world we dream of – a world free from fear – can be ushered in only by our own fearlessness. A world of rich diversity, beauty, love can only be achieved by our own refusal to be seduced by despair, our own refusal to live small, to be less than we were created to be. We win the ability to love only by loving – with powerful, extravagant abandon.

4) We have learned that we can afford to live like that. For the victory is already ours. And our adversaries would do well to remember the words of Gamaliel, a Pharisee and elder of the land who warned those who wanted to eliminate the followers of Jesus. Be careful, Gamaliel said. If this is of man alone it will surely fade of its own accord. But if it is of God nothing you can do will stop it – and you might even find yourself to be working against God’s own self.

We know where God is in this. We know it deep in our hearts – in our very marrow. And we see the evidence. The world has already changed – more profoundly than we could reasonably have hoped. Surely it is God who saves us – we shall not be afraid.

Yes, there is work to be done and, as people who have been so richly blessed, we are not free to shirk or disengage. We must press on – but we do so secure in the knowledge that the victory is ours; the prize has been won and claimed for us already. We do so grateful and proud to be allowed to play some part in seeing God’s love for the world brought to light and fruition.

Sisters and brothers – we are blessed to be able to be a part of this. Blessed to have each other. Let us press onward, march forward, this and every day, fearlessly, with confidence and joy, with grateful hearts, and yes, with Pride.

And may God continue to bless us and those we love this and every day.

Amen

Advent III, 2006 (Dec. 17)

2006-12-23T19:22:00.000-05:00

One of the older heresies of the church is Marcionism (not “tian” but “cion”). Marcion asserted that there were two Gods – the "Old Testament" God and the "New Testament" God. The Old Testament(sic) God, he said, was a god of wrath, judgment, and vengeance and violence while the New Testament God was a god of love and mercy and salvation. And Marcion insisted,the New Testament God had prevailed over the Old Testament God and, therefore, we ought not even to be reading about the dead, overcome, Old Testament God.

There’s nothing like today’s readings to turn Marcionism on its head. Listen to the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures:

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The LORD has taken away the judgments against you,
he has turned away your enemies.
The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst;
you shall fear disaster no more.
On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands grow weak.
The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.
I will remove disaster from you,
so that you will not bear reproach for it.
I will deal with all your oppressors
at that time.
And I will save the lame
and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
and renown in all the earth.
At that time I will bring you home,
(Zephaniah 3:14-20 NRSV)

And from today’s psalm (85):

You have been gracious to your land, O Lord,*
you have restored the good fortune of Jacob.
You have forgiven the iniquity of your people*
and blotted out all of their sins.
You have withdrawn all your fury*
and turned yourself from your wrathful indignation.

No love? No mercy? No joy? No salvation? Really? And that’s the God Marcion said was only about judgment and wrath. Listen to what that God promises.

And then, on the other hand, we have the reading from the New Testament, which is supposedly full merely of the love and mercy and joy and kindness of God. We get, from the Messiah’s herald, John the Baptist, “You snakes. You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee the wrath that is to come? It will do you no good, for even now the axe is laid at the root of the tree, ready to chop down all those who do not bear good fruit – the fruit of repentance and righteousness – and cast them into the flames. The axe is there and ready to go. You are doomed. God is coming back to gather the few faithful and the rest are destined to be burned as on a trash heap.”

This is what we get today in the New Testament – where we don’t have to encounter a God of judgment and wrath! But, ok, having demonstrated the fallacies of Marcionism, let’s put it away and see if we can figure out what all this means for us. Because the reason Marcionism was deemed a heresy in the first place was that the Church, in its collective wisdom, determined that the truth is to be found not in any one simple message but in the bringing together of these different, often complex, sometimes contradictory messages and trying to make sense of them as they fit together.

So let’s look just at these readings appointed for today and see what we might learn from trying to fit them together.

First, we have Zephaniah saying to the people who had been suffering and outcast and were now entering the reign of one who was allowing them to worship God and to keep the law, “ Rejoice, Israel. Look, I am bringing you home where you will be allowed to keep the law, allowed to be the people I created you to be, allowed to bear the fruits of righteousness, allowed to be my people.”

And we have John saying, “We are called to bear good fruit.” After screaming “You brood of vipers, the axe is laid at the foot of the tree” to the very people who were following him around looking for hope, they looked at him, a bit dumbfounded I’d guess, and said, “Well, ahhhhh, uhhhhhh, what should we do?” And to the whole lot of them he said “ Well, for starters, you who have plenty, share with those who don’t. If you have two coats – you can only wear one at a time; give the other to someone else. And if you have more food than you can eat, share it with someone else. If you have more than you need, share it, because until we all have what we need, none of us can be saved.”

That’s the basic message – for the general public. But then the scourge of the earth were also there seeking the way – the tax collectors. {A boo, hiss from the congregation. Preacher laughs and responds – sure go ahead, a little rehearsal for Purim over here – boo the bad guys.} And these were the bad guys. The tax collectors weren’t just the IRS – collecting taxes that we resent paying sometimes, but know they’re going to help other people… no these tax collectors were private contractors of the Roman Empire. (Some of this may sound familiar to you in other, more modern contexts).

The Roman Empire occupied Israel. They had come in and defeated them, abolished their government, and were occupying their land. And they levied taxes against them. But, rather than collect those taxes themselves, they sub-contracted out to private enterprise. And those private contractors, oddly enough, made as much money for themselves on the deal as they possibly could. They went in and were allowed to charge anything they wanted, exorbitant amounts, as long as Rome got its share. So the tax collector could for example go to Courtney here, whose taxes Rome had assessed at $1 and require her to pay $50, send the $1 to Rome, and keep the other $49 for themselves – the cost of doing business. (I know it sounds absurd to imagine that private enterprise would do something like that – but that’s what they were doing.)

And they were despised for it. So they asked, “How about us?” For who would expect that the God of Israel would save them at all after what they’d done? And John said simply, “collect what is owed and don’t use your position to take advantage of others. That’s enough.” And then the soldiers came. Not soldiers of Israel; Israel had no army. The soldiers of the occupying force. The soldiers of Rome came – the occupier – and said, “How about us? Can we possibly be saved?” And John said, “Don’t use your superior strength to bully, terrorize, or extort. It may even be true that you are underpaid but take that up with Rome. Where you are, as the occupier, settle for the wages Rome gives you. Don’t steal, Don’t take more from people who are completely under your control and your power.”

John said, the axe is lying at the root of the tree but there are things you can do to change your lives to get salvation. Because John kept coming back to salvation. John echoes for us Revelation, that apocalyptic book that says the world as we know it is coming to an end. But he also echoes that part of Revelation that says, “and Empire cannot save us.” And self-absorption cannot save us. We cannot save ourselves. Only God can save us and God has saved us. We have only to claim it and, in doing so, to produce the fruits of righteousness.

But that’s a hard message. For, in the very act of saving us, God severs us from the false gods of empire or self – which can be uncomfortable and frightening. Empire causes, not resolves, the violence, injustice, and oppression which hold us in bondage – in hell --and which God’s wrath will destroy. And self isn’t big enough to save the world – and to save merely ourselves is intrinsically impossible. Self-fulfillment will make us neither happy nor fulfilled. When God’s new life brings an end to injustice and oppression, to idolatry of empire, power, money, celebrity, pleasure… those of us who depend on those things will lose our foundations.

That’s the warning. The Good News is – those were never stable foundations anyway and we’re offered an alternative. There is Hope in John’s promise. But it’s a promise that leaves us nothing to rely on but God and, as we talked about last week, it’s hard to rely on God in the period of waiting. We can adopt optimism (let me ask you to remember what we talked about last week -- the difference between optimism and hope – and we’ll probably talk about it again before the season is over) we can adopt a Pollyanna-ish optimism that ignores the awful things that are around us – sometimes in our own lives, always somewhere in the world. Always there is someone who has a heart that is broken too badly to be mended with simply an upbeat attitude. Always somewhere there is destruction and oppression and catastrophe too great to say simply, “Oh, well, that’s horrible, but eventually it’ll all work out for the best.” Optimism won’t address the really big stuff. Only hope in that which is unseen can get us through. But how do you hold on to that hope?

Well, the truth of the matter is we’re given some advice on that in today's reading from Paul. Paul says:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

In rejoicing, in holding onto Hope, we will be given a peace that surpasses all understanding and that guards both our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. But how? How do you do it? You know, the truth of the matter is, it’s not easy but it has something to do with focus. Whether it’s driving a car or a golf ball, aiming a bow and arrow or a camera – whatever it is, you tend to get what you look for and at. You tend to do what you see and you become what you do.

As a friend and as a counselor, I have encountered people, (you probably have them in your lives too) people who have been hurt in their lives -- abused, abandoned, they have suffered greatly – until that has become their life’s story. And it doesn’t matter what else happens, it doesn’t matter how amazingly they may be blessed, their life story remains one, in their own minds, of their damage. They, in fact, drive happiness away. They would murder love before they would embrace it because it interferes with their life story.

And those stories are also based on truth. I’m not saying to ignore the painful facts of our lives. Any therapist will tell you, you ignore them at your peril. That which you ignore is apt to bite you from behind. You have to face them, and you have to deal with them, but they don’t have to become the focus of your life. They don’t have to become the only thing you look at. They don’t have to become your life story. They don’t have to define you.

I spend a great deal of time telling people – people I counsel, friends – you get to choose. You don’t get to choose all the facts of your life – the disasters and the griefs that befall you, but you get to choose the story you tell about them. You get to choose the memories you hang onto. You don’t get to choose all the ones that stay with you – some always will. But, but, if you choose to focus on rejoicing, then the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus and minimize the damage that those things can do.

So much comes down to the stories we choose to tell. We’re told that our story is one of Hope. We’re told that our story is one of faith in that which is beyond our imagining, faith in a promise that we will be saved and that the fruits of righteousness can blossom in our lives no matter how much we have suffered, how much we have been damaged, no matter how much pain we have experienced, the fruits of God’s love can blossom in every one of our lives. We can be the instruments that bring about the promise of God.

How do you do that? How do you focus? Here’s more from Paul in Philippians:

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

You will become what you do and where you look. You will go where you look, and do what you see, and become what you do. So, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things... and the God of peace will be with you.

Amen.

Doubting/Faithful Thomas

2005-04-06T15:16:00.000-04:00

Easter 2
St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

You have, no doubt, noticed or learned, by now, that the Church operates on a three-year cycle for our Eucharistic readings. Each year in that three-year cycle we hear a different Gospeler’s version of the Passion on Palm Sunday, and of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. But, oddly enough, each year, on this second Sunday of Easter, we hear the same reading from John; the same account of Thomas’ first encounter with the Risen Lord.

That, all by itself, should be enough to catch our attention; to signal to us that there’s something going on here that the Church considers very important. And if that doesn’t suffice to make us take notice there’s the fact that a figure of speech has developed from this story. It is this story that gives us the phrase “doubting Thomas.” Thomas said, in effect, “I don’t believe he can have, or has, risen from the dead and I won’t believe it unless and until I see it for myself.” And for that he has picked up the epithet of “doubting” and a reputation for a lack of faith.

I think Thomas got a bum rap. Let’s think about what else we know about this guy. This is the same guy, who spoke up in the Gospel reading from the week before Palm Sunday. Jesus has received word of the death of Lazarus and he makes plans to return to Jerusalem to deal with that. The disciples ask him if he’s lost his mind. “Rabbi,” they say, “we were just there and they were threatening to stone you. Why would you go back there?” But Jesus is adamant; he’s going back. Thomas says, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.” Not, “Hey, he’s Jesus, he knows what he’s doing. It’ll be fine.” No Pollyanna confidence, just a deep commitment to the rabbi he followed. “If he is set on doing this thing that will surely get him killed then let us not abandon him. Let us go and die at his side.”

And why didn’t Thomas see get the opportunity to see for himself at the same time as the other disciples? And let’s be fair and remember that the thing Thomas asked for, a chance to see for himself, was exactly what the other disciples had already had. Jesus came to them while they were hiding in fear behind locked doors. Thomas, like the women but alone among the men, had, apparently, found the courage to leave the hiding place. He was out when Jesus first appeared. Upon seeing for himself he immediately proclaimed his belief and his allegiance.

So, this raises the question – what is most indicative of faith, what we say, what we believe even, or what we do? I am reminded of the parable Jesus told of the father with two sons who said to them one morning – over a hearty breakfast, I’m sure. I’m having visions of Ben Cartright and the boys. “Sons,” he said, “there’s a lot of work to be done today. I have a field that needs tending.” And, says Jesus, one of the sons said, “Certainly, Father. Whatever you say.” But he never showed up at the field. The other son said, “Sorry, Father, but I have other plans and no interest in the field, anyway.” Yet this son did go to the field and worked hard there all day. Which son, Jesus asked his disciples, did the will of his father? Which son was faithful?

You see, faithfulness is not about having no questions. It’s not about having no doubts. It’s not even about always being willing to do what we’re called to do. Faithfulness is about doing it in spite of our questions, our doubts, and our unwillingness.

And this is a good thing. For doubts are ubiquitous and it would be a pity if having them made us faithless. There are, I suppose, some people whose faith is so strong and pure and deep that they never question, never doubt. For the most part people like that scare me – too often their lack of doubts extends to how the rest of us ought to live out our own faith. But there are, perhaps, some who have this deep, unshakable, un-agitatable faith in their own hearts and lives. And more power to them. But most of us, I think, have doubts and questions from time to time. Fortunately, we are in good company and have good role models. Abraham and Moses, the Psalmists, Mary, the Samaritan woman, Peter, Thomas – even Jesus himself who prayed, “Must this happen? Can this cup pass me by?”

Faith is not about having no doubts. Faith is about living out our commitments even in the face of doubt. It’s about fulfilling our Baptismal covenant even when it seems fruitless and unwise. In that covenant we promise to be regular in our attendance at “worship, in the prayers and community and breaking of the bread.” It is not unfaithful to find sometimes that the worship doesn’t speak to us or that we cannot find God here. Faithfulness simply requires that we keep the promise, trusting, even when we can’t feel it or see how it could be true, that the community our presence helps to build is for us, too, and will feed us, too.

We promise, in our Baptismal covenant to “work for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.” Our faithfulness is found in our commitment to doing that even when the world’s cutthroat version of success seems more attractive. In fact, during those times, most of the time, I hope, when we see clearly that nothing of value can be bought at another’s expense, that mere things will never satisfy us, that only in our connections to one another and to our God can we ever hope to find peace or joy – in the times when we can see that, it takes no great faith to respond accordingly, to follow the laws and directions of God that we can see will lead us to our greatest joy. It’s precisely in those other times, the times when we can’t see it, the time when the world’s temptations are so tantalizing and promise so much, and we can’t see through the deception – it’s in those times that our faithfulness is tested and called forth.

Thomas, I think, is a very model of faithfulness. When he saw nothing but death and disaster before them, he still stood firm in his commitment to his teacher and set forth to die by his side. When, for all he knew, his fears had been fulfilled and all hope lay entombed, he was still out in the streets. Thomas, a man of questions and doubts, was faithful to his commitments, and to his friends to the end.

I want to share with you something written by an old friend and colleague of mine, the now Bishop of Maine, Chilton Knudsen. In a homily at the funeral of a deacon from that diocese, Chilton said:

Janet’s love affair with God was all-consuming, ecstatic, intimate and real.

Like all genuine love affairs, it had stormy moments, feisty pushings and pullings, seasons of disillusionment, and the fullest, most absolute fidelity of which we flawed humans are capable, responding to the total fidelity of God.

Janet taught us that passionate God-lovers are not sweetly pious people driven by the need to keep everyone happy, to compulsively smooth every ruffled feather…God-lovers are not always nice, but they are real.

Faithfulness is about being real – honest about our doubts and tenacious about our commitments. May we have the strength and commitment, the faithfulness, of Thomas.

Easter, 2005

2005-04-06T13:27:00.000-04:00

St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Today’s reading from Acts is an interesting choice for this most major of all the Feasts, Easter Sunday. You may have noticed that we’re halfway through that reading before we get to anything about the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. The first half of the reading is about an argument. We’ve talked about that argument before. It was part of an on-going fight between Peter and Paul – two of the great leaders of the Church. It was an argument so intense that it threatened schism. Imagine that, schism within the Church!

Peter and Paul were fighting about rules. What were the rules for someone wanting to join this community of the followers of Jesus? Peter said that anyone could join, even those not born Jewish, as long as they were willing to become Jews – to convert and conform to Jewish law. Paul opined that maybe God was doing such an incredibly new thing that all the old rules were up for grabs. Paul thought that God was calling into this community even goyim as goyim. Even those who didn’t become circumcised or keep kosher could be welcomed. Peter was more than willing to let anyone become “one of us” as long as they were willing to become like one of us. Paul wanted to throw open the doors and welcome people in their own uniqueness. So they fought and one suspects that those around them at the time wondered if the community could withstand that fight.

So maybe this story does fit in with our Resurrection narrative of the day. Because this was a fight about who the Resurrection was for. Before we can decide if we care about what God is doing today it helps to know who God is doing it for. Does what we celebrate today matter to me? Is it for me? Am I included?

The fight told about in Acts ends with the words that start today’s reading. Peter has a dream – a vision from God – after which he says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” Peter came to agree with Paul that the Good News of God in Christ, the gift and grace of the Resurrection, is for Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. It’s for circumcised and uncircumcised, gay and straight, kosher and tref eater, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, those who strive to know and follow the rules and those who fling themselves forward in faith – all of us.

This day is for all of us.

So, given that what we celebrate today is for us, matters to us – what is it that happened; what is it that we celebrate?

Today was the first day of the next week – the week after everything fell apart and hope died. Jesus had been executed.

It was inevitable. He had been standing up to the Empire and people were starting to listen. He was saying that Empire would not, could not, can not ever, survive. He said that starving the poor to fatten the wealthy, trampling the weak to protect the powerful, subordinating all things to the ambitions of Empire, was not only immoral, it was untenable. It could not work for long.

Rome couldn’t ignore that. He had to be stopped – he had to be crushed, as an example – so they executed him. Jesus’ friends and followers went into hiding. They locked themselves in, hoping to avoid the same fate that had befallen their leader. They sat out the Passover, the Sabbath, in hiding.

And on that first day, while the men still hid in fear, the women gathered their oils and perfumes and other supplies and set out to tend the body of their dead friend. Not prudent, perhaps, to be seen, in broad daylight, tending to the body of an executed insurrectionist, but sometimes we all need to let our hearts lead us places our heads know better than to go.

So, off they went to the tomb – and they found it empty. They must have been outraged as well as grief-stricken. The authorities had removed the body to keep it from becoming a rallying point. Without a by-your-leave or even a by-the-way to the family, they had taken even his corpse. All things, even common decency, had been made subservient to the needs, or fantasies, of the Empire.

Except they hadn’t.

He hadn’t been removed; he’d been resurrected. He had Risen.

Now, this is the point where I always expect to lose some of you. I’m sure there are at least a few folks in the room who are saying to yourselves right now, “Well, that’s a lovely story. Very sweet. But surely I’m not expected to actually believe in the Resurrection – that someone rose from the dead. It’s all a misunderstanding or a manipulative fiction.” So, should you be one of those people, let me say to you that you’re in excellent company. There are many people, respected scholars, faithful church-goers – bright people of strong faith and good conscience who don’t believe in a literal Resurrection – as there are bright, faithful people who do believe in it. Good, bright, faithful people who disagree. So, either way you go, you’re in good company.

And thinking about whether the Resurrection literally happened or not can make for an engaging academic exercise – but it’s not the point. There’s a danger of becoming so obsessed with the facts that we lose sight of the truth.

Here’s what’s true:

Out of dust and ashes – utter defeat – God created something new and beyond our imaging. And 2000 years later it still shapes our world. Those fear-filled men came out of hiding to proclaim what they had come to know – the power of Resurrection. And, as they had feared, some of them were killed for it. Some of them were killed horribly. And they did it anyway. Because the power of the Resurrection was too intense to be ignored.

Resurrection – those amazing times when things work out, not in spite of all that has gone wrong but somehow through, even because of, the very wrongness.

We know some of the times the Bible tells of. We know of times of living in happy complacency, occasionally wondering, perhaps, if there’s something missing, if there’s not more than this, but mostly just glad of our blessings and contented with our lives.

And we probably also know the times of yearning for more. Times of despair and hopelessness. Times of frustration. Times of loss and pain and bewilderment. And we know how those things pass and life goes on and gets better and all is, eventually, well again.

But, if we pay attention, we will also, every now and then, know the amazing miracle of Resurrection – when all our pain and loss are not erased, not negated, but transformed. When, against all reason, all logic, all possibility, our wounds become our strength, our loss becomes our victory, our pain becomes our triumph. We are re-born. Everything is new. We are new. It doesn’t just get better – heal with time. Our lives, and we, are transformed. Our trials are redeemed. We are Resurrected.

At Easter, we are called to celebrate Jesus’ Resurrection – and our own.

Christ is Risen and so are we. Risen to new life – new work, new responsibilities, new possibilities, new joy.

We are followers of the Risen Lord; how can we expect anything less than Resurrection for ourselves?

Alleluia, Christ is Risen.

The Work of the People -- Good Friday, 2005

2005-03-26T11:15:00.000-05:00

St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

We gather tonight to do together the Good Friday liturgy. The word liturgy comes from the Greek for "public service." Today, we generally translate it as "the work of the people." So we gather tonight to do the work of the people – to do our work. And the work before us today, in this liturgy, is to pray for the world.

There’s certainly plenty to pray about:
We are at war. People beloved of God and their families and friends are killing, and being killed by, other people beloved of God and their families and friends.
Children in other parts of the world are dying of AIDS in vast numbers. In fact, entire nations are being decimated by this, not curable but certainly treatable, plague.
People everywhere go to bed hungry and without shelter.
Our schools remain unsafe. Last week the headlines spoke of the most recent school "gunman." Next to the headline was the picture of a boy – a child. There was no "gunman" involved. Children are killing children.
And, even as we sit here, political points are being scored over the body of a helpless FL woman while those who love her fight rather than mourn.

This is the world we’re to pray for. It’s hard to know where to begin.
And sometimes it’s hard to know why to begin. For, no matter how hard we pray, when we leave here tonight it’s a good bet that all these problems/tragedies will still await us. The only thing we might well expect to change as a result of our prayer tonight is … us.

Which is a pity. Most of us would, I suspect, prefer magic prayer. You know, the kind of prayer where, if you get it just right, if you want it badly enough, if you pray hard enough – presto, it magically appears. We could fill this church to the rafters if we preached convincingly about that kind of prayer. But it would be a lie – or, at the very least, wishful thinking. We know better.

Instead of magic we get offered an opportunity to change ourselves. To turn our hearts to that which is, and those who are, broken. To turn our heads and our hands to doing God’s work of re-creation, restoration, blessing, healing, resurrection, in and for the world. Which is, of course, where any transformation starts.

It’s not as if we, God’s creation, really need magic, after all. There’s not a problem I listed that doesn’t have an answer within the grasp of willing human hands. You, or I, or even you and I, individually, may not have the power, the knowledge, the ability to repair all those wounds ourselves. But humankind as a whole?

There are enough resources on this planet to satisfy the needs of every living creature. We’ve sent people to the moon, decades ago, yet we can’t figure out how to distribute resources across the globe? We may not be able to stop death (but why would we want to. Death is a part of our lives and provides the context that gives poignancy and meaning.) We may not be able to stop death or to eradicate all disease, but we know how to stop an epidemic, and how to care for our ill, and even how to say good-bye to our dead.

It’s not that we, humankind, can’t do these things; it’s that we don’t want to – not enough, anyway.

And so we come here tonight to do our work. To pray for this broken world in the hope and faith that those prayers will change us. They’ll make us want that healing just a bit more, work for it just a bit harder, risk and sacrifice for it just a bit more courageously.

We come to shape ourselves more fully into who God intends us to be and to invite as much of the world as we can reach to join us in the journey.

Maundy Thursday/Purim, 2005

2005-03-23T14:47:00.000-05:00

Maundy Thursday, 2005
St. David’s, Pepperell (MA)
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

By an interesting coincidence, this year Purim and Maundy Thursday fall on the same day. You may remember that we’ve celebrated Purim here the last few years (and will again, though belatedly, in a few weeks). We’ve been doing it ever since a few of my Rabbi friends and colleagues convinced me we were missing out on a good thing.

Purim is one of the particularly fun Jewish holy days. There are special foods, sweet treats, associated with it. Children, maybe children of all ages, dress up in costume and come to the synagogue to hear the reading of the Book of Esther – also known as the scroll or the Megillah. The entire book is read, giving us the phrase, “the whole Megillah.”

People cheer the heroes and boo the villains and have a grand old time telling the story of how Esther and her uncle Mordecai outfoxed Haman and saved the Jews in Persia from extermination, even turning the table on their enemy. It’s great fun and we’ve enjoyed sharing the tradition here at St. David’s.

But it’s also serious. Before the happy climax of the story, when the tables are turned, it looks likely that Esther’s people will be utterly destroyed by the malice of another. The mighty will salve their egos at the expense of a host of the innocent. The only chance they have requires that Esther take a terrible risk. Esther, who was not known to be Jewish, who was a wife of the king and so probably could have “passed” and survived the massacre, Esther is called upon to risk execution in order to, maybe, save her people. And she does it. She says to her uncle, “Though I well may die in this endeavor, I will do it. Give me three days to spend with my friends to prepare myself for this and you gather all the Jews in the land to pray for me and for the success of our plan, and then I will do this, even though it lead to my death.”

And Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knows but that you were born for just such a time as this?”

“Who knows but that you were born for just such a time as this?”

Tonight, on Purim, we celebrate Maundy Thursday. Our celebration has three foci:

1) We Celebrate the Last Supper. Jesus, who was about to die to save his people,
gathered with his friends, his chosen family, for one last meal, one last time together. Every time we gather at the altar to break bread together we remember and re-create that moment. On this night, though, on Maundy Thursday, we take special note, and we give thanks, that, before dying for us, Jesus left us this memory; this tradition; this communion with all who have gone before us and all who will follow after us; this unfathomable sustenance for our own journeys.

We are invited, tonight and always, to bring to this altar our hope and our heartbreak, our vision and our fear, all that we have and all that we are, to be strengthened for our own work and to listen for the whisper of a voice saying to us, “Who knows but that you were born for just such a time as this?”

2) We remember and honor Jesus’ commandment to us. “Maundy” comes from the
Latin “mandatum” which means “commandment or mandate.” At that last supper Jesus gathered with his companions and began to wash their feet. Peter (isn’t it always Peter?) protested. It was not right that their friend, their teacher, their Rabbi, their leader and Lord should perform a task usually reserved to the most menial of servants.

And Jesus said – there is no shame in service. Service can be, should be, an act and expression of love. This is my commandment (mandate) to you – that you love one another as I have loved you. Love pays no attention to relative status as it washes or massages tired feet, binds wounds, lifts burdens …

And I wonder, did Peter, as his getting it wrong, once again, provided an opportunity for Jesus to teach us all, did Peter hear, “Who knows but that you may have been born for just such a time as this?”

3) Finally, our liturgy moves to the stripping of the altar in preparation for the horror
of tomorrow, Good Friday. Like the disciples, we are invited to watch and wait with Jesus as he prepares himself for what he must face. We go with him into prayer. We know something, perhaps, just a little, of what it means to pray his prayer of that night, “Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass me by. But, thy will, not mine, be done.”

How often have we, in far less dire circumstances, but still with fervor, with passion, prayed the same thing – or at least the first half of it: “let this pass me by.”

How often have we been called to spend ourselves, to risk some small bit of ourselves (our prosperity, or prestige, or popularity), or even all of ourselves – our lives or all we live for? How often have we been called to use our gifts without counting the cost? How often have we quickly shut our eyes and ears to the need around us and the call to us? And, when the call creeps past our defenses and into our consciousness, how often have we prayed, “Let this cup pass me by?”

Jesus, too prayed: “Let this cup pass me by; but, not my will, but Thine, be done.”

Did he, perhaps, in that dark night of despair, hear a familiar voice saying, “Who knows but that you were born for just such a time as this?”

Tonight we come to the altar to be sustained by the food we are offered and by communion with a great community of saints.

We wash, and are washed, to remember the ways we are bound one to another in love manifested by service. Love and service given and love and service received – neither always easy.

We watch with Jesus through just a few moments of his agony of waiting, trying to claim for ourselves some small measure of the courage and love that makes such self-sacrifice, such self-fulfillment, possible.

And we learn to listen so that when our moment comes we will be able to hear and recognize the voice that whispers to us, "Who knows but that we were born for just such a time as this?"

Palm Sunday, 2005

2005-03-20T15:00:00.000-05:00

A Word With Evangelicals (about abortion)

2005-03-18T09:12:00.000-05:00

OK, this isn't really a sermon. It's a speech I just rediscovered. Although delivered almost 10 years ago the issues, alas, remain unresolved. If anything, they've simply grown more intense. It does, though, illustrate that the pro-choice community's call to "the other side" to work with us to make abortion less often necessary is not new. We've been pleading for help in giving women more options for a very long time.

A Word With Evangelicals
Mars Hill Forum
1/25/96
The Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Thank you for the invitation to speak with you tonight. I’ve been asked to pose to you what I consider to be the three toughest questions facing evangelicals who oppose a woman’s right to choose abortion. I am, of course, a pro-choice Christian. I speak to you tonight as an individual Christian trying my best to discern and act on the will of God for my life; and as a priest, who has vowed, before God and the people of God, to care for God’s people and most especially those who are poor, vulnerable, or oppressed; and as the President of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a coalition of 36 national organizations from over a dozen denominations and faith groups all of which support a woman’s right, and, indeed, acknowledge her responsibility, to make reproductive choices, including, sometimes, the choice to abort a fetus. Our coalition represents the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterians, the Disciples of Christ, the Moravian Church, and the reform, reconstructionist, and conservative movements of Judaism, the Unitarian Universalists, the American Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, and the YWCA, as well as the women’s caucuses of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Church of the Brethren.

This is the position from which I address you tonight. Although the Coalition is not an exclusively Christian organization, I am a Christian minister asked to address evangelical Christians and so my remarks tonight will assume that shared faith. And from this perspective I do see three questions. The first is one I would address to all of us, regardless of our position on choice. The second is more complex and specifically addresses areas where we disagree. The third has to do with how we disagree – with how Christians conduct ourselves in the midst of passionate disputes.

So, the first question – addressed to us all – is: what are we doing to reduce the need for abortions? None of us, regardless of our position on choice, approves of a world where pregnant women are faced with despair and see no viable options but to abort. But what are we doing, as God’s agents in the world, to change that situation?

Are we struggling – with the same fervor we invest in our anti or pro choice battles – to insure that women who wish to bear children can afford to do so? Are we working to reduce joblessness, to support wages that are sufficient to support families, to see that safe and affordable child care is available to every family that needs it, to provide adequate parental leave, and to assure that everyone has access to adequate health care?

Do we support comprehensive sexuality education and the availability of safe, affordable, and effective contraceptives so that those people who choose to have sex (including young people who choose to have sex) do not find themselves facing a pregnancy with which they are ill equipped to cope?

Finally, are we working to provide adoption services and supports so that those women who choose to bring their pregnancies to term but cannot care adequately for a child can see that child placed in a safe and loving home? And I mean every unwanted child, not just healthy, white infants.

Doing these things will not eliminate abortions. There will still be women whose health would be jeopardized by bringing a pregnancy to full term. Women who know that they cannot care for a child but who can also not face the prospect of nine months of intimate relationship with the developing fetus only to turn it over for adoption upon its birth. Women (and children) pregnant as the result of rape and incest.

No, we cannot eliminate the need for abortion. But we could dramatically reduce it. What are we doing to make our society more supportive of children and families? What are we doing to reduce the need for abortion?

My second question has to do with our areas of disagreement. But I need first to note those things about which I suspect we do agree. I suspect we agree on the marvelous goodness of God the Creator. I imagine you agree with me that all life, indeed all of creation, is sacred and that our stewardship of it is a holy trust given us by God in creation. I trust you believe, as I do, in the infinite love of God, revealed in Jesus, the Christ, through whom we have been redeemed and are offered, in every moment and circumstance of our lives, indeed, with every breath we take, are offered the opportunity to turn from sin and faithlessness and to bring our lives into conformity with God’s will and God’s plan for us.

These foundations of my faith are verified for me in Holy Scripture, by my faith tradition, and through my own experience as a person trying to live faithfully in this world. These are, in fact, not uncommon beliefs among the body of faithful Christians. Yet, although we may hold these foundational beliefs in common, it is also true that there are differences of opinion between faith groups, and even within faith groups, about what it means to put these beliefs into practice.

We differ as to whether faithful application of our beliefs requires vegetarianism, or tithing, or pacifism. We differ about whether capitalism is compatible with Christian faith and life. We disagree about whether conscientious objection to military service should be merely an option, or, instead, a requirement, of all Christians.

We disagree about whether women should be ordained, or infants Baptized, or whether to use wine or grape juice when we gather at table together. We disagree about whether Churches should offer sanctuary to refugees fleeing El Salvador or Haiti and about whether the government should respect that ancient concept of sanctuary. About whether our institutions should have divested their business interests in South Africa. About the intifada and the Persian Gulf War.

There are so many important issues about which we disagree passionately. Yet somehow we manage to disagree with mutual respect. We respect one another’s consciences and the faith that under girds them.

Why, then, is the issue of abortion different? Why do so many anti-choice Christians presume to deny pregnant women the right to consult, and act upon the dictates of, their own consciences? I respect your right to decide for yourselves what would be the most faithful response to your own unwanted, or untenable, pregnancy. Should you decide that abortion would be an inappropriate and faithless choice for you I would applaud your courage in making and living with hard decisions.

Why can you not show the same respect for others? It is not true that only those who do not know, or care about, God seek abortions or support the rights of those who do. On the contrary. If any one thing is demonstrably true from the last 20 years it is that people of faith, people of good will and informed conscience, disagree about when, if ever, abortion is an appropriate choice for a woman to make

That should not surprise us. That is the nature of moral discourse. It is characterized – always – by ambiguity, conflicting needs and values, and disagreement. It should also be characterized by mutual respect and tolerance.

I think of Evangelicals as a group characterized by respect for individual moral agency; a people who rely not on papal mandates or edicts from church bureaucracies, but on the discernment of individual conscience guided by prayer and Scripture. Why, then, do you so adamantly deny this moral agency, this respect for individual conscience, to pregnant women?

I imagine you will respond in one of two ways. That you will tell me that the Bible prohibits abortion and so there is no room for individual conscience. Yet surely you know this is not true. The Bible is silent on the subject. Or, perhaps you will try to tell me that abortion is the taking of a human life and this is proscribed by the Bible. Again, I would point out first that the Bible is, indeed, not so clear that it is always wrong to take a life. But, more to the point, to attribute personhood to a fetus begs the question.

This is, indeed, the crux of the moral discourse upon which we are engaged and the answer is not so easy as many anti-choice protestors would have it. The Bible does not make a claim for fetal personhood; indeed, it suggests otherwise. Science cannot make that claim for science cannot be expected to answer what is essentially a theological question.

The bottom line is that we disagree. Why can we not do so with tolerance and respect and without imposing our answers upon another’s conscience? We do so in so many other areas of serious and faith driven disagreement. Why not here? I must tell you that it appears to many of us that the answer to that question is that in this arena it is women who must make the final decision and that you do not respect the moral agency (or full personhood) of women simply because we are women.

My final question is related to the last. It has to do with how we disagree. Because I believe many of our diverse positions are rooted in our common faith, and because I believe that the members of Christ’s body have much to learn from one another – especially in those areas about which we disagree—I think it’s vitally important to all of us that we be able to engage one another in moral debate.

I confess that the liberal branch of the body has often thwarted this good end by failing to hear respectfully and consider seriously the arguments and insights of our conservative sisters and brothers. We have too often and too easily merely dismissed your perspectives as naïve, outdated, or evil.

I think, though, that we are not alone in this sin. Too often we have felt that our faith was not taken seriously; that you have dismissed us as slaves to current trends who don’t pray, or read the Bible, or care about the will of God.

When we dismiss each other so easily, we sin. We individual parts of Christ’s body say to one another, I have no need for you. We are foolish and we will be judged for it.

But far more serious than this is the violence that has come to characterize the struggle to eliminate safe and legal abortions. Doctors have been shot; one was killed. Clinics have been bombed. Doctors, nurses, and other health care workers have been stalked and harassed. Women have been accosted as they sought health care. Women who struggled, who sought godly counsel, who prayed, and then decided, with deep regret, but with a conviction that abortion was the best, and most faithful, choice available to them, have had to endure gauntlets of shrieking, insulting, frightening people, claiming to act in God’s name, as they sought to enter the clinics and act upon their decisions of conscience.

You who argue against abortion in the name of God must stand up and clearly and unequivocally oppose this violence and the violent rhetoric that spawns it. This violence is enacted in the name of pro-life Christians. This violence is perpetrated in your name. If you do not clearly, constantly, and publicly denounce this violence, you implicitly condone it. Furthermore, the name of God is invoked in support of this terrorism. That, it seems to me, is blasphemy. It is not something I would like to have to answer for at the day of judgment.

And so my question to you is – what are you doing, what will you do, to put an end to this terrorism? What will you do to assure that the members of Christ’s body can engage in moral discourse, can disagree, even passionately, without disrespecting, or killing, one another?

Those, then, are my three questions to you, and, in some cases, to all of us. I look forward to your questions and comments.

Dry Bones

2005-03-15T11:26:00.000-05:00

5 Lent, Year A
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale
St. David’s Pepperell

We talked last week about the progression of Gospel stories we’ve been hearing the last few weeks. Three weeks ago we had the story of Nicodemus, a successful man, a powerful man, a man of substance, who, one day came to Jesus to say, in essence, “There must be more. What must I do to find this God in whose name you clearly act?” And Jesus tells him that finding God, finding eternal life, is not just a matter of one more thing to accomplish or possess, it’s not the capstone to a resume. It requires a total reorienting of life. It requires being born again. And more, he tells him that this rebirth is his for the asking.

Two weeks ago, we get the story of the Samaritan woman, the woman at the well. This woman, through some combination of bad choices, bad luck, and bad treatment at the hands of those she should have been able to depend on, has been relegated to the margins of society. One suspects that there isn’t much to her life but survival. She has been cast out of the relationships, the society, that might have brought her joy. But Jesus says to her, “I can bring you water that will quench any thirst you have – forever. It will be for you a well-spring of eternal life bubbling up within you, always.” He promises to remake her life.

Last week it was the story of the blind beggar. Through no fault of his own, blind since birth, his options and possibilities were severely limited. He spent his time begging. One wonders where there could be joy, or the possibility of fulfillment for him. And for him Jesus ups the ante. Jesus reaches to the ground, and takes dust, and spits into it, and puts the mud on the man’s eyes and gives him something he has never known – sight. In taking up dust Jesus reminds us of the creation story. In Genesis God created humankind from the dust of the earth. In this story Jesus re-creates the blind man from the dust of the earth. Not merely re-born, this man is re-created.

And then today the stakes rise even higher. Lazarus is dead. And not just kind-of dead. Not that, standing on the verge deciding which way to go (come to the Light. No, come back to your body, to us!) kind of death. Lazarus is really, really dead. He’s been dead for four days. He’s beginning to decompose and to stink. He’s dead. And Jesus gives him his life again. It’s a powerful story, but even more powerful, for me, anyway, is the Ezekiel story with which it is paired this morning.

Ezekiel sees the whole people of Israel not merely as dead and decomposing. He sees them so far gone that there is nothing left of them but scattered bones. Dry bones. Bones almost ready to return to dust. Desolate. There is no hope to be found, nothing to hold onto. And yet God says, “I will take up these bones, and put them back together. I will hang flesh upon them and I will breathe life into them. I will remake you and I will restore you to life and will give you a land of your own. You will be my people and you will know life and joy and all the fullness of my promise.”

I suspect all of us can find ourselves, our story, in one of these stories. Many of us have been around long enough that we can probably find our stories in most, maybe all, of these stories. But, for those of you who are young yet, let me say a few words about how these stories are reflected, or will be reflected, in your lives.

You’re a bright, talented, and charming bunch. I have no doubt that the future holds many great things for you. But the story of Nicodemus reminds us that, no matter how many awards you may win, how much money you may earn, how much cool stuff you may accumulate, none of it will ever be enough, by itself to bring you true joy and peace. Without a connection to God and to other people whom you love, without people and principles in your life that matter to you more than life itself, without God, all the awards and possessions won’t be enough to make you truly happy. You will always be left wanting more. Nothing will satisfy. But, even if you make the mistake of trying to find happiness through power or possessions, no matter how far down that wrong road you may go, God will always be there, waiting to turn your life around for you, to let you be born again, to have another chance.

And, like the Samaritan woman, you may from time to time be treated badly by others. They may make fun of you, or shut you out, because of mistakes you’ve made or because of things completely beyond your control. But, as Jesus reminded the Samaritan woman, God loves us – no matter what. And God knows, and helps us to know, what things really matter. But, to tell the truth, while all of us get teased sometimes, and it’s never fun, we’re still not likely to be treated really badly or really unfairly – not as unfairly as people who are poor, or disabled, or who don’t speak English very well yet. And because we know that God loves those people just as much as God loves us, and because we’ve been Baptized and promised to help God make the world run, we have a responsibility to stand up for everyone who is treated badly. We’re not allowed to join in when others make fun of them, or are unfair to them – but, more than that, we’re required to stand up for them, to stand beside them.

Then there’s the story of the blind man. He was born with limitations. Maybe you haven’t discovered any limitations yet. Maybe everything you’ve really worked hard at you’ve been able to do. And that is wonderful. But it’s also true that everyone has limitations, and, sooner or later, we begin to discover them. For example, you may have your heart set on being a pro-basketball star, but if you only grow to be 5’3” it’s probably just not going to happen. And it you grow to be 6’6” and broad-shouldered you’re probably not going to be able to be a jockey – no matter how hard you try. And it’s a hard thing when you have your heart set on something and then discover that your limitations mean you’ll never have it. But here’s what God promises. God promises that, if our limitations keep us from doing what our heart is set on, God can re-set our heart. And will if we let Her. God can re-set our hearts on things that we really can do, things better than we could have thought up on our own, things that will bring us more joy than we ever could have dreamed of.

Finally there’s the Lazarus story, and its companion story of the dry bones. This is a hard, hard story about loss. I trust most of you have never experienced anything like this. I hope you never will. But, in the course of a long life, many people do. This is a story about losing everything and everyone that matters. It’s about looking at the world and seeing nothing that brings you joy and no hope of finding it. It’s about what it’s like when you can’t even figure out what to do to try to make things better because every direction you look you find nothing. Everything you do seems pointless. You can’t figure out any way to fix it and you can’t find even the tiniest shred of hope – not even one small seed left to plant and pray over. All is dust and ashes.

I hope you never, ever, experience that but I can tell you that some of the adults in this room right now have. And they’ve come out the other side. Because, even in the face of all that, God still promises to be with us and to put us and our lives back together again. If you ever face such a horrible time and you can’t remember anything else, remember that – God promises to be with us and to put our lives back together again.

Sisters and Brothers, these Lenten stories remind us that Lent is our story. And if Lent is our story, so, too is Easter. Whether we find ourselves at this moment, like Nicodemus, at the height of our success or, like the people of Israel in Ezekiel’s time, in our most abject despair, we are, in either case, lodged firmly in this unfolding Lenten/Easter story. Nothing, neither heights nor depths, can separate us from the love of God. The stories of God’s encounters with the people God loves are our stories.

We are not promised perfect lives or easy lives. But we are promised that we can know the fullness of life. We can be reborn with hearts centered on those things which bring joy and peace. We can be sustained, through good times and bad, with a sense of purpose, a sense of ourselves, that is not contingent on the circumstances of our lives.

And, in the times of our deepest despair, when we can find no blessings, no hope, no reason to go on, we still belong to the God who says,

“I can and I will take up the scattered, dry, desolate bones of your life and dreams and hang new flesh upon them,

and put a new heart within them,

and breathe new life into them.

New life.

I will give you new life.

And I will give you your new heart’s desire.

I will put you in your own land,

I will bring you home,

and I will be your God.

And when you see me do these things you will know that I am God

and that I love you more than words can tell.

I will never abandon you.”

This is the Easter promise given to all of us who find our stories in Lent. Once again, beloved in Christ, I invite you to a holy Lent. In these last, climactic weeks find your story or stories here. Enter into your own stories. Claim them. And then bring them to the Easter feast to claim, as well, the Easter promise.

Amen

Baptized Into the Fullness of Life

2005-01-26T12:38:00.001-05:00

Interfaith Pride Service, 6/14/03

2005-01-25T18:48:00.001-05:00

Sermon
Interfaith Pride Service
Boston, MA
June 14, 2003
Katherine Ragsdale

First, I’d like to thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. It is good to be here. I’ve just returned from a week in Washington – a week spent addressing a variety of peace and justice issues. And I need to say a word about that, because, if I don’t make an effort to de-compartmentalize, to integrate, my life, I spin out into a fragmented mess – and it’s not pretty. But I promise, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll bring us back home quickly.

So, first, there was a 2-day roundtable of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian religious leaders—discussing the meaning of peace in today’s world and the conditions in the Middle East (and here at home) that might make peace possible. Only one person stormed out of the room, too angry, and, perhaps, too frightened to continue the conversation. That’s one too many, but, still, given the circumstances, not bad. For the most part, the group was able to embody the peace we yearn for.

Then there was a press conference by leaders of the women’s movement outlining some of the losses of freedom and dignity suffered lately and some of our plans to combat that. Let me tell you now – put April 25, 2004 on your calendars for a March on Washington for Women’s Rights – particularly reproductive rights.

Then we had a women’s leadership summit tracing the perils and oppression faced by women at home and across the globe and highlighting some of the ways governments, businesses, the entertainment industry, and activists are trying to respond to these challenges.

And finally, more informally, there was another of those exchanges where a gay man was arguing for our rights on the grounds that we can’t help being gay – the old take pity, have mercy, argument. You know, the one that concludes with a plaintive – who would choose this?

Let me answer that with three words:

Me! Me! Me!

In a New York minute! Me!

I can only hope that my straight sisters and brothers are as happy with their place in the sexual orientation continuum as I am with mine. But, alas, the conversation would not be de-railed; it continued with more insistences that we must be tolerated since we have no choice – the underlying assumption being that if we did have a choice we would, and should, choose to change.

So – war, poverty, religious disputes, politics, freedom, civil rights, gender, sexuality … it was a long week. And, frankly, I can’t quite decide whether to be energized and impassioned that there is so much good work for us to do and so many amazing people with whom to do it, or to be overwhelmed and depressed because there is so much important work to be done and, even with so many talented, passionate people working so hard, the end is nowhere in sight.

Energy, passion, depression, despair – and let’s not even get into frustration, righteous indignation, and outrage. I suspect that this cauldron of emotions is not some odd shortcoming peculiar to me. Perhaps you, too, know all these feelings. Perhaps they play tug of war with your psyche, heart, and spirit, as well. And perhaps, you, like me, find that, given the free reign of benign neglect, in this world of so many injustices and so much violence, the emotional balance seems, more often than not, to tip toward frustration and despair.

Actually, I think it speaks well of us that we look at the world and, even from the positions of privilege and comfort most of us inhabit, we notice the wrongs of this world and they matter to us. I pray that we may never become blind to the injustices that surround us – never cease to notice – never cease to care.

But -- but...

Even as we commit ourselves to noticing and caring about those things that require and deserve our attention – things we have to, have to, fix – let us not make the mistake of noticing only those things. Let’s never allow ourselves to become so focused on the work yet to be done that we neglect to notice and celebrate our successes and our blessings.

This, too is human, I think – this tendency to hyper-focus on the work ahead and miss the bigger and more complex, nuanced, and deeply textured picture. But it’s a dangerous tendency – for all too often it leaves us discouraged. Dis –couraged. And to be dis-couraged makes me useless and it erodes my soul’s health. I suspect the same is true for you.

So, let’s try to resist that temptation to narrow in only on the job ahead am try to look at the whole picture for a moment.

It is true that there is plenty of important work ahead. The NGLTF reports that fully 1/3 of lgbt college students experience harassment. We know that there are far too many schools and families where it is not safe for teens to reveal or explore their sexual orientation. We know only too well the benefits that are denied to too many of us because we can’t get legally married. Personal and professional frustrations, roadblocks, and even dangers, persist for all too many of us or our sisters and brothers. There is work to be done.

But, sisters and brothers, just in case you haven’t noticed, let me make this very clear – the work that remains to be done? We do it as victors. We know the outcome of this struggle. We have already won.

Listen to this:

88% of Americans support equal opportunity in the workplace. (Only a generation ago I’m not sure 88% of Americans knew we existed and, of those who did, I’m not sure 88% would have supported our right to live – much less to be given equal opportunities)

Today, 75% of Democratic voters, 70% of Independents, and 56% of Republican voters supported sexual-orientation non-discrimination laws.

Only 40% of the public supports our freedom to marry (still – 40%!) but 73% believe we should have inheritance rights and 68% think we should get Social Security survivors’ benefits.

96% think HIV and STDs should be covered in sex-ed in the schools.

Today, any day of the week, a child anywhere in this country can turn on the television and find images of happy, healthy gay people. Doctors, lawyers, sports and entertainment figures, parents, grandparents, members of Congress or the clergy … on television, in the movies, in the newspapers, in our communities, any child in America can find evidence – reason to hope – that they, too, can grow up to lead a happy, fulfilled life, no matter what their sexual orientation.

This was certainly not true 30 years ago when I was a teen who didn’t even have the vocabulary to conceptualize why I didn’t fit in. This is huge. Every gay child has access to signs of hope. And every straight child has exposure to the idea that other sexual orientations are simply other ways of being – or, as my then 10 year old nephew explained to his 6 year old brother, “of course women can marry women and men can marry men. It’s really no big deal.”

We have changed the world and there is no going back. As you have Acted Up in the streets and cared for one another in your homes through those early, devastating years of the AIDS crisis, our community set a new standard for compassion and commitment; as we came out of our closets and faced down the bashers and oppressors, we added a new category to the list of the courageous; as we raised our children, adopted others, claimed our alliances, named our loves, we have changed the meaning of the word family. And every family in America (even the 17% of them that follow the old Ozzie and Harriet model) every family in America has been enriched by this broader definition.

The world has been changed in profound – awesome – ways. And we have played a part – a large part – in making that happen. Gay pride? You better believe it!

Yes, we still have work to do. There are laws yet to be passed, kids yet to be saved, opportunities yet to be opened up and explored. And, as long as we’re broadening our vision, let’s remember what God told the children of Abraham:

You must never take advantage of a stranger, for you know what it is to be a stranger. You, whom God has set free from bondage and need, must never ignore the bondage or need of another. You who have been so richly blessed must share your blessings with those in want.

Sisters and brothers, the conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East; the rise of poverty and the loss of hope here at home; the loss of civil liberties, freedom, choice, and opportunity – we are not free to ignore these either. We who know what it is to be marginalized, denied opportunity and hope, denied basic human rights, denied safety; we who know these things and yet have been so richly blessed, are not free to ignore the plight of others.

We have work to do – but we have powerful tools with which to do it. We have the communities and alliances we have built over the years, we have our passion and our vision, we have the things we’ve learned.

Let me just highlight a couple of those things –

1) We have learned not to give in to the temptation to be dis-couraged. We have learned not to be afraid.
Fear undoes us –
It renders us useless
It erodes our souls
And it is a faithless an ungrateful response from those who believe that we are never abandoned to the fray, never left alone, unaided or uncomforted – from those who have been carried so very far already.

2) We have learned that you cannot sustain a movement, or a spirit, on opposition – to anything, no matter how worthy of opposition it may be. Movements and spirits are sustained by vision – by what we are for not what we are against. As we march, today and every day, we march not primarily away from all that is wrong but toward all that is good and true and honorable and just. Yes, there may be, will be, skirmishes along the way, but they are incidental. They are not the point.

The vision is the point. We march and we fight and we persevere because we yearn for a world where every human being grows up safe and loved, where her dignity is respected and his particularity is celebrated. We dream of a world where everyone understands that the God who created us loves us -- and where true love is, God’s own self is there.

3) We have learned that Gandhi was right – you must become the change you wish to see. We will achieve our vision not by hiding and hating but by loving and celebrating. The world we dream of – a world free from fear – can be ushered in only by our own fearlessness. A world of rich diversity, beauty, love can only be achieved by our own refusal to be seduced by despair, our own refusal to live small, to be less than we were created to be. We win the ability to love only by loving – with powerful, extravagant abandon.

4) We have learned that we can afford to live like that. For the victory is already ours. And our adversaries would do well to remember the words of Gamaliel, a Pharisee and elder of the land who warned those who wanted to eliminate the followers of Jesus. Be careful, Gamaliel said. If this is of man alone it will surely fade of its own accord. But if it is of God nothing you can do will stop it – and you might even find yourself to be working against God’s own self.

We know where God is in this. We know it deep in our hearts – in our very marrow. And we see the evidence. The world has already changed – more profoundly than we could reasonably have hoped. Surely it is God who saves us – we shall not be afraid.

Yes, there is work to be done and, as people who have been so richly blessed, we are not free to shirk or disengage. We must press on – but we do so secure in the knowledge that the victory is ours; the prize has been won and claimed for us already. We do so grateful and proud to be allowed to play some part in seeing God’s love for the world brought to light and fruition.

Sisters and brothers – we are blessed to be able to be a part of this. Blessed to have each other. Let us press onward, march forward, this and every day, fearlessly, with confidence and joy, with grateful hearts, and yes, with Pride.

And may God continue to bless us and those we love this and every day.

Amen

Preparing for Lent

2005-01-24T12:14:00.000-05:00

2nd Sunday After Epiphany, Year A
Saint David’s Church, 1/16/05
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Well, if you think there wasn’t enough time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Today is only the second Sunday after the Epiphany, yet we have only three more Sundays before Lent. Easter is early this year and with Lent coming so quickly it seems a good idea to begin preparing – or at least to begin thinking about how we will prepare.

Before I talk about Lent, let me remind you of something we’ve discussed before – the Law. You will remember me telling you, many times, that the Ten Commandments, the Law, was God’s great gift to God’s people. It was not given so much to condemn as to point the way to Salvation. These were God’s people who wanted to know how best to love and serve the God who loved them. The Law was God’s answer. When we hear Law we hear constraint and punishment. But the Law was, to the people of Israel, not so much burden as gift and means to liberation.

Similarly, we tend to think of Lent as a time of self-denial and guilt, of suffering and flagellation. But the purpose of Lent is not to make us miserable but to make us mindful – mindful of who and Whose we are. So, whose are we? Who is the one to whom we belong and whom we are expected to follow?

John asked a similar question in a recent Gospel reading. He heard about Jesus and sent his followers to ask, “Are you the one for whom we have been waiting or shall we keep looking?” And how did Jesus reply? He said, “Go back and tell John what you have seen. The hungry are fed, the sick are healed, the lonely are visited, and prisoners are set free.” We are, it seems, to be identified not by what we believe as much as by what we do. We, who wish to follow Jesus, are to feed the hungry, visit and heal the sick, set free those who are imprisoned. We are to care for one another.

When John asked who Jesus was Jesus didn’t say, “I’ve come to end hunger, and poverty, and illness, and imprisonment, and despair.” We might wish he had done just that. We may still hope that he will. But what he said was that he was one who responded to those needs, one at a time. I think many of us, facing the magnitude of the problems of our world become paralyzed. Since we can’t fix it all we do nothing. Since we don’t know how to be Martin Luther King we assume we can be no one. But I suspect that Martin Luther King, and many who have made huge differences in the world, didn’t start with a grand plan. Like Jesus, they simply did what was before them, met the need of each moment. Which is, of course, exactly what each of us is called to do.

Now I should pause here to acknowledge what you already know – I’m more a systems than a band-aid person. I don’t believe in just patching up the individual in front of me and ignoring the systemic problems that left them in need of patching up in the first place. You’ve heard me tell the story of my friend and colleague Ntsiki who says that if a bloody body floats down the river into your village a good Christian must pull the body out and bandage it and nurse it back to health. And if another battered body floats into the village the Christian must do the same thing again and again and again. But eventually, if those bodies keep coming, the Christian must go upriver and find out who’s doing that to them and put a stop to it.

We do need to take on hunger and poverty and the myriad things that maim and imprison the bodies and spirits of our sisters and brothers. But we do it one step at a time, addressing that which washes into our lives or steps into our paths. We start by healing one sick individual or comforting one despairing person.

Yet even that can seem overwhelming. We talked about this at the Vestry meeting last week. We got to talking about what one says to someone who is grieving the death of a loved one. Some of us were saying that we are so very aware that there’s nothing we can say that will make it better. Knowing that anything we could say would be inadequate, we hesitate to speak at all. Another member told of a time when she was grieving and how much a simple, “I’m sorry for your loss” meant. She reminded us that even little, inadequate things matter. We do have it within us to do the things we are called to do. By meeting each moment as it presents itself we may well discover that we have it within us to do more than we could ever have imagined.

Did you hear what Paul said in this morning’s Epistle? Talking to the church in Corinth, Paul said, “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind-- just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you-- so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” So that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift. You are not lacking in any spiritual gift. You, and you, and you ... you are not lacking.

Now the good news here is that this fear of our own inadequacy is not some modern, or personal, moral failing. Apparently this has been a problem, a part of the human condition, for at least 2000 years. The bad news is that it’s not just a modern moral failing – we are not excused from the call to action because our world is more complex and our problems at least seem bigger. People have, it seems, always tended toward paralysis in the face of problems bigger than we know how to address.

But we’re only commanded to deal with this day’s need, this individual’s pain. We’re instructed to follow the example of Jesus, one day at a time. And we’re assured that we have what it takes, already within us, to do that. We are not lacking any spiritual gift necessary to do the work we were created to do – to be God’s stewards, God’s partners, in caring for the world around us.

Lent calls us, not to dwell on and condemn ourselves for our failures, but to remember what Paul has told us – we are not lacking any spiritual gift necessary. Lent doesn’t command us to give things up or take things on for their own sake, or based on how difficult it will be to do it and how unpleasant we will find it. Lent invites us to choose a discipline that will keep us mindful of who and Whose we are. Lent encourages us to embrace a discipline that will help us to become aware of those gifts and strengths and talents within us – and to nurture and hone them. Lent hopes to seduce us into taking the time to know ourselves and our gifts so well that using those gifts in the service of God and God’s people becomes second nature to us. In Lent we are invited to become who we were created to be – who we already are – so that we, like Jesus, respond to the needs before us, no matter what their size, without thinking twice. If we do that we may find ourselves feeding one hungry person – or we may save a whole village, or change the world in ways as yet unimaginable. But we will not be paralyzed by our own doubts or fears of inadequacy. And, should anyone ever send someone to ask us, “Are you one of them, one of the followers of Jesus?” we won’t have to marshal a lengthy defense. We can simply say, “Tell him what you have seen. The hungry are fed, those who mourn are comforted….”

It is not too soon to begin planning and preparing for your Lent. Let me know if you need any help.

Tsunami Sermon

2005-01-23T16:41:00.000-05:00

2 Christmas
1/2/05
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale +

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

If you take a look at your bulletin insert, at the citation for the Gospel I just read, you’ll see something interesting. There’s a gap. Three verses in the middle of the selection are left out. We read of the angel warning Joseph to take Mary and the baby and flee the wrath of Herod. Then we read of the angel telling Joseph Herod is dead and he can bring the family back to Israel. What we skip is what happens in between, the massacre of every male baby under two years old. I don’t know why the compilers of the lectionary chose to leave that out. Maybe it’s because it’s just too horrible. The readings of this season, today’s readings, focus on the power of God, God’s grace and blessings, the joy awaiting God’s people. Perhaps it was just too hard to imagine all that rejoicing in the face of the horror of the massacre of innocents.

I can understand that feeling. I’m having the same problem myself today. I don’t know how to get into the spirit of rejoicing in God’s power that today’s lessons call us to when today’s news is still full of the horror of the tsunami. Once again babies are ripped from their mothers’ arms and sent to their death. Once again, we stand stunned at the horror. Once again, we try to rejoice for those who were spared but the horror of those who were not overwhelms us.

At times like this I am reminded how fortunate I am not to be one of those Anti-Darwinian, Creationists who are convinced that God micro-manages every moment of history. They somehow think that to acknowledge the intricacy of the natural world, the complex wonder of natural selection and evolution, the glories of the natural world doing its thing, is to diminish, rather than highlight, the awesomeness of the Creator. How, I wonder, if they are unwilling to acknowledge natural forces at work without God’s constant intervention, do they make sense of something like the tsunami?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I know the answer. They say that God did, indeed, directly and deliberately cause this disaster. It is all, they say, God’s punishment. Already they’re preaching that God did this to punish licentious tourists reveling on the beaches when they should be in church – demeaning the Christmas season. Or, they say, it’s because some of those beaches were popular destinations for gay and lesbian tourists. God, they are saying, wiped out families, communities, villages to punish a few.

What I don’t know is how anyone could worship a God like that. If that’s the way God works then the only reason to worship Him is to spare ourselves from punishment now or in the afterlife. I have to tell you, I’d rather be damned than knuckle under to a God like that. On the other hand, I know that not everyone is quite as stubbornly oppositional as I am. Some folks might be willing to worship such a God. But, that’s not the God we meet in scripture. That’s not the God Jesus tells us about.

We’re told of the God who promised Noah that He would never again wipe us out to make a point. The prophets tell us that God comes to us as a loving suitor wanting our love in return; that God has engraved our names in the palms of Her hand and will never stop loving us. Jesus tells us that God loves us and cares for us more than the best and most devoted parent we can imagine. This is not a God who would massacre us or anyone.

Instead, we’re told of, and experience, a God who set a world in motion, a world within which nature and people can do awful things; things that God can’t, or won’t – doesn’t --stop.

So, we’re reassured that our God is not reprehensible but faced with the possibility that He’s either impotent or impassive, which leads to the question – why bother? What’s the point of a God who can’t, or doesn’t care enough to, fix things for us? To answer this perhaps it’s best to ask God. And God’s words come to us most clearly in God’s Word – Jesus, the Word made flesh. Jesus, who endured his own encounters with depravity and evil. Jesus, who escaped the slaughter of the innocents only to face the crucifixion.

Jesus, who again and again reminds us that the choices we make, the things we do or fail to do, matter. We matter. God doesn’t, it seems, follow us around like an over-bearing parent cleaning up after us as we go so that our passing becomes invisible, inconsequential. What we do matters. It has consequences in the world and it pleases, or breaks the heart of, the God who loves us. The God who loves us allows us to matter.

The message of Jesus is that we are to love God not in the hope of being pulled out of our messes but because God loves us enough to stay with us in them and to be with us on the other side. We’re to love God much as we love one another at our best – not for what we can get out of it but simply because of who She is and how we are loved in return.

God does not spare us tragedy, disaster, or even crucifixion. But somehow God does provide an unquenchable spark of hope. It’s that spark we spoke of last week even as the drama was unfolding, as yet unknown to us. Last week’s Gospel told us that God sent a light into the darkness and the darkness could not, can not, will never, overcome it.

We’ve seen a few such sparks of hope:
Japan has pledged $500 million in relief aid.
I heard on the news this morning about a brewery that has suspended its beer-making operation and is devoting all its resources to bottling water to send for relief.
The US has sent troops to aid the effort. People who give their lives to their country’s service deserve to know that they’re making the world better. The troops now doing relief work have that assurance.

In the midst of horror there are sparks of goodness and we are invited to see them and to be them – not in fear but in love.

It’s hard to know how to respond to this disaster. I know of only a few ways:
We can give generously to relief efforts and there are baskets by both doors to collect your donations which will be sent to the Episcopal Relief and Development agency.
We can pray – for those who have died, those who will die (for there will be more), those who have lost everything and everyone, and the responders who will sacrifice their own comfort, and maybe their lives, to serve others.
We can remember that this could have been us. There is no level of prosperity or power that can insulate us from disaster. These things can happen to us, too. In fact, because we are all bound one to another, this did happen to us. We can remember that.
And we can come to this altar today to receive the gift and grace of God, not only for ourselves, but in communion with all those who have died and those who live in need of grace and blessing but who are too far removed from any sight of the light to easily see or reach for them today.

We do these things, holding on to the unquenchable light of hope for those who cannot now find it, trusting that, in our own times of darkness and despair, others will do the same for us.

Christmas Eve, 2004

2005-01-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

St. David's, Pepperell, MA
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale+

Some years it’s harder than others to get into the Christmas Spirit.

Of course, that raises the question, what is the Christmas Spirit? Is it the one depicted in all those TV specials and the commercial barrages, which accompany them? Happy families gathered together, bringing one another joy and delight through perfect and abundant gift-giving, basking in the glow of familial love?

I’ve had Christmases like that. I hope you have, too. I hope this year is like that for you. But I’ve been hearing too much, of late, from folks who are finding themselves in the midst of Blue Christmases. People who are less aware of the loved ones around them than of those not with them – dead, estranged, deployed, or simply grown up and gone away. People who find all the Christmas hype nothing more than a painful reminder of their losses and regrets – of all the pain of their lives.

Or maybe the Christmas Spirit has to do with that proclamation of Peace on Earth and our fervent desire to believe that all’s right with the world and that anything that isn’t all right is in God’s hands and not our concern—even though God has never suggested anything of the sort. But the problems are so big and complex and overwhelming that we don’t know where to begin and so we yearn to embrace a message that tells us it’s all ok. And some years we can pull it off. Other years the news is too bad and too ubiquitous to allow us that easy escape.

Or maybe the Christmas Spirit calls us to abandon sentimentality and look at the story the Bible tells. James Carroll, in his Boston Globe column, walks us through that real 1st Christmas story:

The single most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome’s day is over….

The Gospel of Luke puts an even more political cast on the story. The narrative begins with the decree of Caesar Augustus calling for a world census – a creation of tax rolls that will tighten the empire’s grip on its subject peoples. It was Caesar Augustus who turned the Roman republic into a dictatorship, a power-grab he reinforced by proclaiming himself divine.

His census decree is what requires the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, but it also defines the context of the child’s nativity as one of political resistance. When the angel announces to shepherds that a “savior has been born,” as scholars like Richard Horsley point out, those hearing the story would immediately understand that the blasphemous claim by Caesar Augustus to be “savior of the world” was being repudiated.

When Jesus was murdered by Rome as a political criminal – crucifixion was the way such rebels were executed – the story’s beginning was fulfilled in its end.

Maybe the Christmas Spirit has to do with exploring and embracing the meaning of liberation – the revolution that these stories point to. But that, too, can be too overwhelming to face, especially knowing which roles we’d be cast in if that story were unfolding today – as, of course, it is.

Any way you look at it, there are some years in our individual or corporate lives when it’s hard to get into the Christmas Spirit.

But…But, there is a promise in these stories – a promise given to each and all of us no matter where we fall on the Christmas Spirit spectrum in any given year. We’ll hear it Sunday when the Gospel reading is from John and includes this: “A light shone in the darkness and the darkness could not quench it.” The darkness could not quench it.

These stories don’t require us, or even ask, or allow, us to deny the darkness. Darkness let loose in the world or the sins and griefs we harbor in our own hearts. We don’t have to pretend in order to claim Christmas. In fact, it’s better if we don’t. God knows all about darkness. God sends a light – unquenchable hope. Even if your own hope should, from time to time, flicker and die, it can always be relit from that never dying hope born again this day.

But what do we hope for? Well, how about Love and Joy and Peace – for miracles. Not big, cataclysmic, turn nature on its ear, miracles. But those everyday unfathomables that turn our lives upside down and thereby empower us to become who we were meant to be and to do the work God has given us to do in God’s world.

Falling in love… and being loved in return. Being really seen, really known, by another human being, and, somehow, finding that more comforting than terrifying. Staying in love – even though that person has hurt and infuriated you more than anyone else ever has – or ever could – many times – and will again. Love makes no sense and yet in it we are reborn. It’s a miracle.

Or the birth of a baby. Out of next to nothing grows this new life, and that tiny little creature changes everything. And, more often than not, you’re glad of it. It’s a miracle.
Every day of our lives is full of miracles; and why should we, who rely on miracles, ever give up hope?

Very soon, this baby whose birth we celebrate tonight is going to grow into a revolutionary, preaching a new way and calling us to practice that new way. We are called to be God’s agents of Peace and Justice and Love and Joy. Tonight, though, we’re invited to pause, to take note of the light, to take note of the miracles, to take note of the joy and love that surround us and to be sustained by them, to prepare ourselves to accept, expect, and work miracles.

And how do we do that?

First, by opening ourselves to Love – God’s Love for us – the Love we’re instructed to bring into the world and to let guide all our decisions and all our actions. At Christmas, the birth of a baby points the way to that Love, for babies teach us about Love and about God. You know, we don’t just love babies; we adore them. We love them with senseless extravagance – even when they cry all night and spit up all day. We love them.

At Christmas, the birth of this baby reminds us that this is how God loves us – and how we are invited to love one another. We are encouraged to embrace the miracle of unconditional, unreasonable Love. We are invited to adore one another – even when we whine all night and throw tantrums all day – even when our behavior makes us pretty unlovable.

And I have a suspicion that, if we can love one another with that kind of abandon, we’ll be able to let go of some of our fears, insecurities, and defensive aggression and become, in fact, considerably more loveable.

We adore babies not because of what they do but simply because they are. How much more ought we to adore one another – who have suffered so much, learned so much, done so much. The people sitting in this room with you are adored by God. Look at them; there is so much there to love, adore, and wonder at.

Come, let us adore the babe in the manger, yes. But let that miracle inspire us to unashamedly, unreservedly love one another and be strengthened by the miracle of Love, given and received. Strengthened not to blind ourselves to the darkness but rather to face it, head on, and, holding on to that flame of hope, to light yet more candles – to do the work given us to do. To fight in every way we can imagine for justice and peace among all peoples – fueled by Love and expecting miracles.

Amen

Good Friday and the Passion of the Christ

2004-03-25T08:03:00.000-05:00

Good Friday, 2004
St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

It’s hard, this year, to go into this day without thinking about the movie The Passion of the Christ. So let’s go ahead and take note for a moment. The movie has much to condemn it, but it does do us one service. It illustrates the danger of Good Friday – the danger that we become so fixated on the crucifixion of Jesus that we neglect to notice his life, and so miss the point -- and not just the point of his life, but even the point of his death.

The movie’s unrelenting emphasis on this last day, in addition to grossly misrepresenting the Gospel accounts and the historical evidence and indulging an unhealthy and unholy obsession with violence, this focus on only the last day means focussing entirely on Jesus as object of other people’s deplorable actions and pays no attention to Jesus as subject of his own life and story – making choices that led him to this moment.

The only theory that even begins to make sense of such an approach is the old (and not very edifying) Theory of the Atonement. By that theory the sins of humanity carry a price and that price must be paid. There’s no forgiveness here. God’s love for us, God’s unwillingness to lose us to the eternal damnation that is, supposedly, the inevitable price for our sins, results not in God forgiving us but instead in God transferring the debt – to Jesus. In this version of the story Jesus comes not to show us a better way to live, not to woo us to God, not to invite and entice us to the feast, but simply as a pawn to pay our bill with his blood.

And we, watching his agony and death, are given a stern, “see what you’ve done” and sent away, presumably to feel ashamed of ourselves and therefore clean up our acts so this doesn’t happen again.

Ahhh, but there’s the rub. By this theory the debt is paid, once for all, and covers all sins past and yet to come – of our ancestors and our offspring and ourselves. Which pretty nicely lets us off the hook. Unfortunate as the whole episode may have been and as bad as we may feel about it, it is, nonetheless, done. Nothing we do or fail to do now can undo it – either by causing it not to have happened or by negating its effect. So, why exactly is it that we need to behave better now? In what way do our actions matter?

But – if instead of focussing on the Crucifixion as some cosmic and eternal check-mate, pre-planned, pre-ordained, we focus on the life and teaching of Jesus, we see that we are invited to live a life like his… not because if we don’t he’s gonna get it, but because that’s the way we get to be like him – complete, joyful, authentic, fully and only who we were created to be, whole. That’s how we get to experience the glorious banquet that was prepared for us from the dawn of creation and that waits for us even now.

And the real importance of the Crucifixion is also brought home to us. We live in, we are a part of, a world where those with power and privilege will do anything to keep it and even those without much of either toady to those who do have them in the hope of a few scraps – or at least of avoiding a kick.

It is not true that the Crucifixion was the most horrible thing anyone has ever suffered. Oh yes, it was horrible, but humans have a talent for inflicting suffering. We do it daily – just open a newspaper to see a fraction of the evidence. Daily, people die slow and horrible deaths because we live in a world that fails to follow the example of our Lord and Savior, a world full of folks, like us, who refuse to give away all that we have – power, privilege, possessions – and take up our own crosses and follow. A world that sanctions killing others and taking all that they have rather than letting ourselves do without or be put at risk.

And we can’t get off the hook by saying Jesus died for us and so we’re in the clear.

On Good Friday we are called to remember and repent – not just of the sins that sent Jesus to the cross 2000 years ago, but of the sins that kill and maim and break the heart of God’s people, God’s own self, today. And for our part in creating and sustaining a world where such sin thrives.

God knows how hopeless and helpless we feel in the face of this pervasive sin. God understands the enormity of it and our own oh –so-human limitations. And God does not condemn us to hell for our failure. On the contrary – God promises, implausibly, to redeem it. God continues to invite us to the feast.

But, before you go your way rejoicing in our salvation – and in our good fortune not to be among those in agony this day – let us take this day to pause and remember our culpability and pray for the strength and courage and wisdom, and grace, to become instruments of peace and salvation in the world.

Easter Morning, 2003

2003-03-24T11:20:00.000-05:00

St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The women went to the tomb on this, the 1st day of the week, many years ago, to mourn. It took courage to go there – to the tomb of a recently executed insurrectionist – for it would have been reasonable to assume that is was being watched. That the authorities were on the look-out for this man’s friends. That they would be, at the very least, taken in for questioning, held, perhaps tortured for information, branded as accomplices, and perhaps executed themselves. It’s not hard to imagine the possibilities. And, if your imagination fails, just open a newspaper. It’s not hard to see why they would be afraid. Peter understood; he denied having met Jesus – 3 times – while Jesus was still alive to be hurt by that betrayal.

But Mary and Mary and Salome went to the tomb anyway. They brought spices and went to the tomb to anoint him, to give him the last tender care the living can offer the dead.

They went grieving. Their best hope for a new and better world was shattered. Their hopes, dreams, and plans lay in ruins. And someone they loved was dead. So they gathered their apparently vast resources of courage, strength, compassion, and love and went to the tomb.

And they found it empty.

God had done it again. The God who had so often redeemed Israel from bondage, rebuilt it from dry bones and ashes, had done it again.

But this time was different. In the past God had, again and again, restored Israel – but over time and through the workings of history. This time, in one fell swoop all the loss and despair, all the evil intentions and vile acts, were turned on their head. Death was simply un-done. Jesus rose victorious.

Now, it well may be that some of you here are saying to yourselves – well, that’s a nice story, but ‘rose from the dead’? I have a hard time believing that. And, if you are saying that, let me just say that you’re in good company. There are lots of smart and good folks who just aren’t buying the story.

Scholars have long argued about whether Jesus literally rose from the dead – whether the Resurrection is literal fact. It’s an interesting and fair argument. But it’s also peripheral. Don’t let the facts distract you from the truth – for it’s the truth that counts. And here’s the truth –

Peter, who denied Jesus, became, indeed, a rock – immovable in his faith and commitment and an unwavering follower of his Lord. The disciples, who had been hiding in fear, came out and began to preach the Gospel. And it did cost some of them their lives. And they did it anyway. And the teachings of Jesus did not fade away but grew to fill the earth. And the ministry he began continues 2000 years later.

One way or another, Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus lives – in Jerusalem right after his death and in Pepperell in 2003.

Even death cannot stop God’s good work. There is no loss, no setback, no tragedy that marks an end to God’s grace and power. For in ways mysterious and wonderful our God resurrects hopes, dreams, even us from the dead.

And not only resurrects, but redeems. We survive and thrive, by God’s good grace, not in spite of the evils and losses that befall us, but through them. The pains and deaths we endure become the foundation of our new lives and new strengths and new hopes and new possibilities. Jesus Christ is not defeated by death, and, because he lives, so, too, does the rest of creation – so do we.

Our task now is to come out of our own small, dark rooms of fear and doubt – to claim the grace that has been given us and to join God in the share of God’s work that has been given us -- with courage and hope and joy.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

Easter Vigil, 2003

2003-03-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Readings included the Exodus and the Valley of the Dry Bones.

We come together tonight after the Crucifixion and before the Resurrection. We come together in our despair to find comfort with one another, to share hope, to remember who and whose we are and where we come from, and what the God who made us and brought us this far has done for us, and for our fathers and mothers from the beginning of time.

We remember that when our people were just a motley crew of tribes, wanderers in the wilderness, who ended up enslaved in a land not our own, God set us free and bound us together into a people, a nation, a community so that never again would we live alone in the world – isolated and unattached. We remember a time when our nation, our people, were conquered and dispossessed. A time when it seemed we were a people no more but just a mess of scattered bones, not even recognizable as the skeletal remains of a people. So long, and so far, gone -- dry bones with no life left in them. And God said – out of these bones I can, and will, re-assemble a people. And it seemed impossible. The bones were little more than dust. There was nothing, nothing, to work with. And yet God reassembled the people of Israel.

And we remember times in our own lives, or those of people near and dear to us, when it has seemed that there is little left of and for us but dry bones and dust. The proud provider with a dream for his family, who sees the market, and his dreams, crash and looks longingly at the high-rise window. The high school senior who can’t get into the right college and sees her hopes and plans for the future dashed and considers the trees on the side of the road. The couple who watch their marriage, their home, and their family come apart and begin to eye the sedatives. The parents whose child dies young and who lose interest in food, life, and one another. Those in Afghanistan or Iraq who watch their homes, their loved ones, everyone and everything they know blown to dust and rubble. All those who see nothing ahead for themselves but more dry bones and dust. Who know, down to their marrow, that there is no way to reassemble a full life from the wreckage that surrounds them. And we remember how often we have seen such lives impossibly reassembled, their dreams implausibly re-kindled, themselves reborn once they allowed God to get Her hands on them and to breathe into them.

We remember those, perhaps even ourselves, who have been hurt so badly that we’ve turned our hearts to stone that we may never suffer like that again. And we remember a God who has said, “I will remove from you body a heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you.”

And, because we remember, we gather here to wait, and hope, and expect God’s saving power in our lives and in the world.

We gather at the tomb – hoping to see Jesus rise again. Knowing that Jesus’ resurrection confirms yet again that God can create new life, new hope, new chances, out of nothing – out of less than nothing.

Because Jesus rises we can, too. And because we can, we must. And, having risen and reclaimed God’s love for us, we have a responsibility to search for ways to take that healing, redemptive, life-giving power out into the world – to spread Good News and hope – to look for ways that we can work with God as He goes about God’s work of re-creating life that has seen its substance blown apart, its own dreams dashed.

We are due for a celebration – for God has promised us resurrection, redemption and joy, and has blessed us with work worthy of our best efforts and our passion. Our hopes have been fulfilled – Christ is Risen.

Good Friday 2003

2003-03-23T13:19:00.000-05:00

Good Friday, 2003
St. David’s, Pepperell (MA)
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale+

Let me take us back, for a moment, to Ash Wednesday and the extended confession we made then.

We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven.

We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us. We have not been true to the mind of Christ. We have grieved your Holy Spirit.

We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives.

Our self-indulgent ways, and our exploitation of other people,

Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves,

Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work,

Our negligence in prayer and worship, and our failure to commend the faith that is in us,

We confess to you, Lord.

Accept our repentance, Lord, for all the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty,

For all false judgments, all uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us,

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,

Accept our repentance, Lord.

These, of course, are the things that led Jesus to the cross.

Maybe we, ourselves, didn’t commit the particular sins that created a society within which Jesus’ crucifixion was inevitable – but only because we weren’t born in time. We still engage in the same kinds of sins that they did those 2000 years ago. And the people who conspired against him, turned him over, condemned him, and nailed him up were, themselves, born into, and shaped by, a world already perverted by these sins long before their time.

And every time we indulge in these sins, every time we allow this brokenness to dictate our thoughts, words, and deeds, we nail him to the cross again. Every time. We help create a world in which his execution was inevitable – a world in which persons beloved of God continue to die needlessly each and every day.

And every time we choose, instead, to reject sin – to reject pride and envy and malice and greed, to reject the idea that we are the center of the universe, to reject the notion that we are not all connected in and by God’s love – every time we make those choices, every time we align ourselves with Jesus, we move ourselves and the world one breath closer to the Creator’s vision and hope.

So, now … we pray – the Solemn Collects. We pray for the broken world and those who suffer because it is broken.

We pray as our duty – for we share in the blame for the world’s brokenness.

And we pray as our exercise – for in praying we turn back to Jesus and practice, and strengthen ourselves for, rejecting the sins that cause that brokenness.

And we pray as our privilege – for, even in our own brokenness and guilt, God allows us still to work with Her to bind and mend and midwife Her dream into reality.

Let us pray.

Easter Morning, 2002

2002-03-23T12:15:00.000-05:00

8am (lost the 10am one)
St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

It’s Easter. One of our options is to go with the cultural flow. Enjoy a celebration of Spring, of new life and hope. Declare a moratorium on worry. A day, maybe even a season, of optimism.

But God and Jesus have never promised us an escape from our lives. Rather, they consistently lead us deeper into our lives and then redeem them.

Which is too bad. There are times when a little escapism seems like a very good idea. And, for a lot of people, this is one of those times. Six months later, the second wave of grief over Sept. 11 is rolling over the nation. Grief not only for those whose lives were lost or shattered that day, but also for lost innocence, for the things we will never be able to take for granted in the same way again. The second wave, even though the first has not really passed away. And what can we do in the face of it all?

And as we gather here in worship today, Jesus’ people, our sisters and brothers, Arab and Israeli alike, are living through, or dying in, the latest cataclysm in a flow of terror and despair that has come to seem eternal. And what can we do?

And it’s not just despair about the world around us that we face. It’s the world within us, too. Confessions have skyrocketed, as have teary visits. Call me a cynic but I don’t think sin is up. I think pain and despair are up. It has become harder to repress and ignore our own suffering – the big things and the little, day to day things, as well.

And, tempting though it may be, Easter is not really an invitation to try just a little harder to avoid it all or to enlist God’s help in repressing it.

Easter isn’t about sweet, pretty, sunshiny days. It’s about Resurrection. And only that which gets faced, taken to the cross, made and acknowledged as real, can be resurrected.

Resurrection isn’t about disappearance. It’s about transformation. Resurrection doesn’t ignore our experience; it doesn’t erase any part of who we are. It redeems them. It turns everything, everything, it touches to good. It turns injury to pardon, hatred to love, despair to hope, darkness to light, sadness to joy, doubt to faith, fear to confidence, turmoil to peace, death to life.

Over time I have come to know that to be true. Sometimes I find it easy to believe and embrace. Sometimes I can see it all around me. Other times it’s not so clear. When I am hurt or lonely or afraid, or just too tired or too sad, then I, like the disciples at the tomb, look for Jesus and see nothing but emptiness.

But because of the witness of the ages, as well as my own experience, I try to be more like the women than like Peter and Thomas. To hang around and wait. Hoping Jesus will call my name – as many times as necessary to get my attention. And I know that if I am attentive I will hear that, and, having heard it, I will see with new eyes. See the resurrection and redemption all around me and in me. See that there is nothing, seen or unseen, that does not become integrated into God’s plan. Nothing that does not get turned to joy.

Christ is risen and, because he is risen, so are we. Even if we can’t always see how. Don’t walk away in despair. Stay in hope. And, if you stay, you will see the resurrected Jesus and the redemption of everything that is, in the nation, the world, and your own heart and soul.

That’s the promise of Easter. Not as easy as a quick shot of blind optimism, perhaps, but oh so much richer.

Christ is risen and so are we – Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Easter Vigil, 2002

2002-03-23T11:20:00.000-05:00

Easter Vigil 2002
St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

We stand here tonight at the cusp – post-Crucifixion, pre-Resurrection. We stand in the darkness remembering the despair of Jesus’ friends and followers; feeling our own despair – our own pain and losses -- kindled. We rehearse our sacred history – telling stories of the many times God’s people have stood in darkness and hopelessness and found, against all the odds, against all reason, their lives redeemed, restored, even resurrected. We stand here in darkness, with only this one small flame of hope to sustain us, trying to make sense of it all and trying to believe that the light will break through again.

Trying to make sense of it all. There’s an ancient theory offered to make sense of the Crucifixion. It’s the theory of the Atonement. That theory holds that this is all about a bill come due, a debt that had to be paid. The thinking is that the world is held in a delicate balance. That every sin must be atoned for, every debt paid. And since no human is sinless nor able to set right the sins we daily commit we would all have to die in the end – to give up our lives and souls for eternity – to pay our debts. The only way we can be saved is for someone else to pay our debt. But no one is sinless; no one has the capital to pay our way out. So God, loving us and unwilling to lose us, sent God’s own self, sinless, to live among us and take on our debt. The suffering and death of Jesus, according to the theory of the Atonement, pays for our sins and buys our salvation.

It’s an interesting theory, but not one that I find compelling. I’m not convinced by the idea of a bookkeeper God who demands payment from us for being the less than perfect creatures we were created to be. I’m certainly not inclined to worship such a God.

I’m more moved and convinced by what someone else (and I’m sorry I can’t remember who) once said: Crucifixion is not God’s response to human sin. It is human sin’s response to God’s Love.

We’ve talked before about the authorities killing Jesus because he threatened the status quo and, therefore, their positions. But we’re reminded in the various Passion readings that it was not only the Romans and temple authorities who called for the Crucifixion, but the regular folks as well – the folks who suffered under the status quo. This is, perhaps, harder to understand, bewildering even, unless we listen again to the Exodus story we heard tonight. The people of Israel, people who had suffered grievously in Egypt, became angry at Moses for leading them to freedom. Blessed with water in the desert, manna and quail from heaven, and freedom, they yearned for the life that they knew, that was familiar to them and they turned on Moses. So maybe it’s not a surprise that the people turned on Jesus. He threatened change – profound change – and change, even change for the better, is frightening.

But I want to suggest that the cry to crucify Jesus was rooted not just in fear of change but that it was the response of sin to God’s love.

Sin prefers to live in darkness. It grows in darkness. The light can kill it. Those of us gathered here don’t want to be sinners. We’d like to clean up our lives. We’d like to go down into those dark places and clean them out – or at least we’d like for them to be clean. But too often we take a look and are overwhelmed. There’s mold in that basement, and other bad stuff. It’s too big a job. So we close our eyes and close the door … and our sin flourishes undisturbed.

But Jesus, God’s very Love incarnate, just by being Jesus, exposes sin. Jesus, in his very being, by the way he lived his life: by his integrity, his steadfast refusal to compromise or to bully, by his sinlessness and authenticity, showed, in contrast, our sinfulness and inauthenticity. He turns on the lights. And sin’s response is to try to turn them off again.

Sin has another trick, as well – diversion. But it doesn’t work with Jesus. Jesus won’t bite. If he had just got mad and yelled, coerced, complained – if he had just done that, then the sinners could get mad in return. Their attention (our attention) could be drawn away from their own failings and focussed instead on the conflict. But Jesus would never bite. He never got drawn in. Never provided that escape. He didn’t say, “you must do this, you must stop that”. He said, “if you want what it is you see in me, eternal life, oneness with God, to be entirely and only what and who you were created to be, if you want these things, then here is what you must do. Follow me. Give away all your possessions, feed the hungry… But it’s entirely up to you.”

He would never bite. Never provide the conflict that provided the escape.

And so, when Jesus was around, when Jesus is around, there is no way to avoid that gaze that reflects back to us the depths and reality of ourselves.

And so all those things we can admit to in a pro-forma way: Oh yes, there’s mold in the basement. Bad thing, that. We’ll be wanting to do something about that. Or, as in the General Confession: We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have done those things which we ought not to have done and not done those things which we ought to have done… we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, not loved God with our whole heart.

Or, more explicitly (from the Ash Wednesday confession):
we have been jealous of those more fortunate than ourselves.
We have been impatient with those who are different.
We’ve not been careful of the environment, failing to treat it as God’s own creation and to protect it for generations to come.
We’ve held onto resentments, refusing to forgive.
We’ve held onto pride, refusing to ask for, or accept, forgiveness.
We’ve spent our resources of money, time, and spirit in ways rooted more in fear than in generosity.
We’ve done things that were selfish.
We’ve said things that were hurtful – even destructive.
We’ve thought things that were uncharitable.
We’ve failed to commend the good/the God that is in us.
We’ve failed to use our talents – to spend ourselves.
We have sinned against God, against our neighbors, and against ourselves.

But, though we can read the words out when it comes to that place in our common prayers, we don’t really want to look deep inside and identify the ways those things are particularly, specifically, true about ourselves.

But – when we encounter Jesus, we have no choice. Standing next to his presence, his unflinching authenticity and sinlessness, every corner, every nook and cranny, of our souls is cast into clear, unavoidable, unambiguous, unrationalizable relief.

The only way for sin to avoid looking at itself when confronted with Jesus is to create a diversion, to pick a fight. And Jesus won’t play along – he won’t fight.

So sin kills him.

People like us did it once. They nailed him to a cross to get away from that confrontation. We do it – every time we turn him into a plastic icon rather than a real presence in our lives. Every time we close our eyes or turn away to avoid letting him live in us. Every time we mouth the words without letting them penetrate to the places where we really live. Sin, our sin killed and kills him.

But then there’s Love.

Jesus’ love that goes to his death rather than be untrue to God, himself, or us.

LOVE that knowingly walks the path that leads to his own torment in order to show us who and whose we are and who and how we can be.

LOVE that, knowing it is our sin, our choices, that killed and kill him, goes to his death loving us still, praying for us still. And then comes back – to us.

Love bears all things – even our sins.
believes all things – believes in us still
hopes all things – that we will, indeed, embrace our own salvation, claim the love that is there for, with, and in us.
endures all things – the agony of as-yet unrequited love, as-yet unfulfilled hopes.

Love never dies. Jesus’ love, God’s love, never dies. But neither does the love given to us to live in us. Within us still, every one of us, is love.

Love that can find the faith to look Jesus, our God, in the eye and not flinch from what we see of ourselves there.

Love that is able to accept the understanding and forgiveness and LOVE which we see in response.

Love that has the courage to surrender itself to LOVE and open itself to be changed – to be healed.

Love, in us, will allow LOVE to wash away our sins and make us clean and whole and authentic.

Sin kills in order that it might continue to hide in darkened confinement.

Love endures the agonies and the ecstasies of birthing new life.

Even now Jesus is arising to offer his embrace to those he loves – to us.

And, just like those who crucified him, and those who followed, and gave their lives to, him, we have within us – each of us – sin and love.

With which will you greet his return?

Good Friday, 2002

2002-03-23T09:04:00.000-05:00

Good Friday, (noon) 2002
Ecumenical – 7 Last Words – Service*
St. David’s, Pepperell
Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

* This was pieced together from notes made a few days after the homily was preached. For context – earlier that morning the news had reported that Israeli tanks had surrounded, and were bombing, a building in which Arafat was trapped. This launched the newest round of active conflict that has not yet abated. It was also the first Holy Week and Easter following 9/11/01 and answers seemed in short supply.

This was preached as one of seven short homilies at an ecumenical service.

He said, ‘it is finished’ and he gave up his spirit.

The night before he was crucified, our Lord Jesus Christ celebrated the feast of the Passover with his family of choice. But, before he broke the bread, he washed their feet and he said, “remember what I have done for you … I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. By this shall the world know that you are my disciples: that you love one another.”

Actually, this “new commandment” was not entirely new. Jesus himself had said before,
Shema Yisroel – Hear, O Israel,
‘The Lord your God is one God
and you shall love the Lord Your God
with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.’
This is the first and great commandment
And the second is like unto it
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’

Want to know what the bible says about something? Anything?
Shema Yisroel

Love your neighbor. Not like your neighbor, mind you. That’s nice when it happens. It makes that whole loving thing so much easier and more pleasant. But we are not commanded to like, or feel affection for, one another. Or to piously pretend that we do.

We’re commanded to love. To take to heart the other’s best interest as if it were our own. To care about and for one another with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength. Even when it means personal loss. Even when it means giving something up.

“Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end.” Having done all he could do and suffered all he could suffer for us, he gave up all that was left – his spirit – for us. He chose to die, to let go his spirit, for love of us.

And today our Lord’s beloved people, his sisters and brothers – our sisters and brothers, through him and through Eve – fight and die. For pretty much the same reason people always have. For a place to call home. For a place to put down roots, to tend flocks, grow crops or do business, to raise children, worship God as they have been taught, to grow old and die and be returned to the earth from which they came. Both sides – all sides – of the conflict fight for these things.

And they also fight from the lust for revenge – born from the bitterness of lives lived in terror, dispossession, and indignity.

And we who live in the magnificent isolation of our wealth, ocean borders, and might of arms – we who have never (unless we are American Indians or Japanese Americans 60 or more years old) have never known any credible fear, much less the reality, of loss of our own home – our own land – we in this illusion of isolation have, perhaps, found it too easy to forget the plight of our sisters and brothers in the Middle East.

But, though we may not know the bitterness of dispossession, we have, in these last months, nonetheless, come to know something of the lust for revenge.

Perhaps our Christian discipline, that Love by which our Lord says we are to be known, perhaps that Love has helped us conquer the blood-lust. Perhaps some, maybe many, of us have turned aside from thoughts of revenge. But I doubt there are any among us who can say that the urge never entered their minds. We now know something, just a very little, about what it means to live with fear and insecurity. We know something about frustration, feelings of powerlessness, and the lust for revenge.

Perhaps it’s just a little harder to dismiss the devastating suffering that marks each day as something happening to those people – over there.

Perhaps we can remember that those people of Jesus – Arab and Israeli alike – are our people, too. And we can work with all our heart and spirit and mind and strength to figure out what it means to love them – and then do that.

I don’t know what that would mean giving up. Jesus gave up even his spirit.

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem.

Maundy Thursday, 2002

2002-03-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

Maundy Thursday, 2002
St. David’s, Pepperell
(as best as can be pieced together from notes)
KHR

So much is going on tonight. So many things are packed into this service. We’re in the midst of Passiontide. As we enter the spirit of the season, commemorating our history, we gather to wait with our Lord whose crucifixion we know is soon to come. We remember his command to love and service and we remember, and re-enact, the Last Supper he shared with his disciples and, through the Church’s sacraments, with us.
Every time we gather together to make Eucharist we re-enact and commemorate the Last Supper. But we especially on Maundy Thursday are we called to remember where this tradition comes from and what it means for us – what it calls us to.
On this last night before the Crucifixion Jesus gathered with his friends, as Jews still do today and have done this week, to celebrate the Passover. The Passover meal was a time of remembering. When God visited Egypt with the final plague, the death of each firstborn, in order to encourage Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go, he "passed over" the houses of the Jews, sparing their children and leaving them free to make their exodus. And they were told to remember this mighty act. Each year since the fall of the temple and the diaspora Jews have gathered wherever they may be to eat a seder meal together and to remember who and whose they are.
So, too, we gather. Every Sunday we gather to recreate that meal and remember who and whose we are. The trick, then, is to remember what it is we’re supposed to be remembering. And that’s where Maundy Thursday comes in. On this night we take special care to commemorate that Last Supper and to remember what it is we are called to remember every week, every day, every moment of our lives.
It’s too easy, and too tempting, to think that what we are called to remember, and to do, is to come to this table regularly. But on this night we remember that, when his friends had gathered, Jesus began to wash their feet. And, when Peter protested that such service was beneath his Lord and Master, Jesus said that any who would lead ( and any who would follow Jesus) must serve – and must love. Remember how I have served you, he told them. And remember how I have loved you.
He doesn’t say – remember to eat and drink regularly. He says whenever you do, do it in remembrance of me. Remember how I loved you and served you and follow my example. Whenever you do this. By "this" does he mean "celebrate the Passover" (an annual event)? Or does he mean "at every meal’? Or "whenever you happen to gather for any purpose"?
It’s not clear. He doesn’t really say. And so over the years the Church has tried to figure out how often to do this commemoration. And I think the question we need to ask is not "how often must we do this to satisfy Jesus’ commandment" (because he didn’t say), but "how often must we do it in order to satisfy our own hunger?" We need regular sustenance to keep away the gnawing of doubt, despair, and sin. We need regular sustenance to give us the strength to do the things Jesus did clearly command us to do – to remember to love through service.
A lot of rules around all this have developed over the centuries. We’re not told by Jesus, "do this every week." We’re guided to that by our own need and hunger and by the advice of a Church which has noticed how very much the people of God need that regular sustenance. We’re not told by Jesus to be careful not to spill the wine and to treat the elements with respect. We have come to do that out of our love for the one we remember whenever we re-enact this feast.
What we are told – what matters most – is to love one another. And our ability to do that is rooted in the love Jesus first showed us – the love he teaches us, the love for him that we nurture in ourselves every time we gather like this.
Tonight we are invited to wait and watch. We watch to learn how to love. We wait because we do love. We wait with Jesus because we have come to know him and love him and because it’s all there is left to do. We love him because he has taught us how – because he first loved us.
Remember what we have been ordered to do. But, tonight, wait and watch –to fit us for the task.

September 11, 2001

2001-09-16T18:09:00.000-04:00

Editor’s Note: The following sermon was delivered on September 16, 2001at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Pepperell, Massachusetts.

Listen to the Prophets by Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

I can’t confine my sermon to the appointed lessons today. The matters we are trying to deal with are too big. I need the whole Book to help me wrestle with what has happened in New York and Washington — really throughout the country and the world. I need the Psalms to help me break through the shock and FEEL; and to help me deal with WHAT I feel once those feelings come. I need the Prophets to help me move beyond my feelings into thought and action. I need the Gospels and Epistles to sustain me in the face of the horror and uncertainty.

When we met here on Tuesday night to worship and to cope together, folks seemed to find it relatively easy to talk about their shock and their grief. But it took a little longer for us to begin to talk about the anger and the vengefulness. Perhaps that’s because we’ve come to believe that such feelings aren’t Christian. And it’s true that we’re taught that it’s inappropriate to act on those feelings — or to nurture them. We’re to weed them out rather than tend them and help them grow.

That’s all true. But it’s also true that they are human feelings. People sometimes feel that way. Even good people. Even the people of God. And, if you doubt that, if you’re tempted to feel guilty for having these feelings, just turn to the book of Psalms. Psalms is a collection of hymns, poetry, conversations with, or at, God. They were written by a people who knew about suffering and injustice. The people of Israel had been enslaved, mistreated, oppressed, dispossessed more times than we would care to count. They knew about unjust suffering and destruction. And often they raged about it. In fact, if you want help getting in touch with your own rage and grief and, yes, even vengefulness, I suggest you look at the psalms (start, if you like with Psalm 94) to see just how angry God’s people could get.

And we do need to get in touch with those feelings. Because the truth is, we can’t weed them out until we notice and acknowledge them. If we bury those feelings deep in order to hide them even from ourselves, they simply WILL NOT go away. Rather they will grow, unhampered by our better judgment. If we refuse to see them they will, sooner or later, come out and bite us from behind. They will manipulate and control us. We cannot manage these feelings, we cannot choose not to let them govern our judgment and our actions unless and until we acknowledge that we have them.

But eventually, the shock and grief subside and then (and, sometimes, before then) we have to decide what we think and how we will act. For that I turn first to the prophets. The psalmists, too, eventually moved beyond rage, despair, and vengefulness. They, too, began to think about how to think about the awful things that happened to them. They would begin to look for what they could learn; to search for their own responsibility; and to thank God for "punishing" them so that they could be saved from their own errors. Today, we understand these things not to be God’s punishment. We believe that God never wills terrible things upon us or anyone else. But still, if we are wise or faithful, we look to see what we need to learn.

This is where the prophets prove invaluable. They, too, tend to use language of punishment, but the whole dynamic of prophesy illuminates terrible events as the logical consequences of human choices rather as something divinely imposed. You see, the prophets were not fortune-tellers. They didn’t look into a crystal ball and foretell the future. What they did was more along the lines of reading the handwriting on the wall.

The prophets would say to the community, "If you don’t change your behavior, you will suffer consequences. If you continue to accrue wealth at others’ expense, leaving many to starve while a few revel in luxury, those poor will eventually rise up against you. If you enslave and oppress others they will rebel. And when these things happen it will not go well with those who led the oppression, those who benefited from it, or those who could have done something yet stayed silent." And sometimes people would listen, change their ways, and be saved and other times they wouldn’t and catastrophe would follow. This is what made the prophet’s life so miserable. The best she could hope for was that people listened and amended their lives. But then, of course, the dire consequences the prophet had predicted would not occur and no one would ever know for sure that the prophet wasn’t a crackpot. The alternative was that people ignored the warnings and continued to carry on as before, the inevitable destruction follows and everyone can see that the prophet had been right. But how much pleasure can you take in being right when it means your community has been left in ruins?

So, the prophets teach us to look for our own responsibility in the disasters that befall us. Please understand, I do not want to suggest that God caused this attack to punish us, nor do I want to suggest that it was justified. Still, our hands are not entirely clean and the prophets tell us that we had better learn from this or expect to see it repeated. The fact is, a large group of people prepared a long time to do this to us. Many people were willing to die to do this to us. What could bring them to such hatred and hopelessness and are we, in any way responsible? Others danced in the streets when they heard of our suffering. Not their leaders. Not entire countries. But significant numbers of people in various places rejoiced in our pain and loss. What could bring anyone to hate us so much?

I don’t pretend to know all the answers to those questions. But I suspect that it’s not unlike the reasons the psalmists sometimes asked God to do terrible things to others. I suspect that it has to do with economics and land and oppression. When a people starve, when they watch their children and their parents die in hunger and their society disintegrate while others have more than they know what to do with and do nothing to help, hatred can grow. When a people see the land their ancestors have lived on for generations taken from them, when their homes are destroyed over and over and their children are killed and the bullets and the bombs have "Made in America" written on them — is it any wonder that they laugh to see us get what must seem to them a taste of our own medicine? And when we train others in terrorist tactics, and arm them, and send them out to fight those we perceive as our enemy so that we won’t have to fight ourselves, how can we be surprised when they turn the skills and the arms we gave them against us?

Our hands are not clean. And the prophets tell us that, unless we acknowledge that and look to amend our common life — well, the handwriting is on the wall.

We must, as a nation and as a part of the community of nations, decide how we will respond. What will we do with ourselves and what will we do to those who did this? Again, I don’t pretend to have the answers to those questions. I turn to the Gospels and the Epistles not to provide those answers but to provide the foundation from which such decisions can wisely be made.
Tuesday night we used the Compline service (the service for the end of the day) as the framework for our time of prayer and conversation. There’s a short reading in that service from one of the epistles. It says, "Be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary as a ravening lion walketh about seeing whom he may devour." Be sober. Be vigilant. Be careful.

If you believe that evil was behind those attacks — not that the attackers were evil, but that their actions were — let me tell you this. Evil is not interested in our bodies. It does not care about killing us. Evil wants to devour us. It wants our souls. It doesn’t want us dead. It wants us evil. It wants us to become what we hate.

The terrorists’ goal was not to destroy some buildings and kill some people — even thousands of people. That was merely a means to an end. What they want to destroy is us — all of us. They want to destroy our way of life. And to the extent that we respond by eliminating ANYONE’s civil liberties; by abandoning, in fear or hatred, any of the principles of freedom and justice for all that we hold so dear, that have shaped this nation; by persecuting others at home or abroad, to exactly that extent, they will have succeeded.

Evil wants more than our destruction. It wants to own our souls. And to the extent that we allow our anger and our lust for revenge to rule us, we will have become the very thing we abhor and evil will have won.

I don’t know how we get beyond the anger. It’s too soon for me to see that path with any clarity. But I know it’s the path we must take. And I know that denial of our very real and very human emotions will cripple rather than help us. So I invite you to turn to the Psalms and let the anger and grief of our forebears help you to notice and acknowledge your own.

I know also that we must learn even from something as horrible as this — especially from something as horrible as this. So I urge you to turn to the prophets to learn how to hear and accept judgment and how to find God’s love and care and mercy speaking to us even now.
And I know that we have been promised that we will never be left alone. So, when you are so blinded, by grief, or rage, or despair that you cannot even imagine a path that will lead to peace and renewal, I urge you to turn to the Gospels (or back to the Psalms) to be reminded that the God you cannot find has not lost you. And neither has God abandoned those who died or those who mourn.

Evil cannot devour us without our permission. We have to choose to surrender to hatred and anger and fear before we can become the evil we deplore. Use every resource at your disposal, the whole Book, the community, the God who travels, and suffers, with us to resist that temptation. And then, somehow, that peace which passes all understanding will be with you and in you even now.
Amen
The Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale is vicar of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Pepperell, Massachusetts, and chair of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Katherine is a former staff officer for women’s ministries at the national Episcopal Church Center, and she can be reached by email at vicarofpep@aol.com