Strategies of Hope

My unreasonably large Christmas tree: a strategy of hope.

Audio version

O Lord, arise, help us; and deliver us for thy name’s sake.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I see many familiar faces here, and I think most of you know me, but for those who don’t, my name is Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as Canon to the Ordinary for Administration and Evangelism. It’s my privilege to be with you again for your Consecration Weekend celebration this Consecration Sunday eve. Thank you to the whole Consecration Sunday team, and especially Kelly Nickson, for the invitation, and for your leadership.

Earlier this year, early enough that it was in the “before time,” I was flipping through the Book of Common Prayer, as one does sometimes, and came across a devotion I had never seen before.

It’s called “The Supplication,” and it’s tacked onto the end of the Great Litany, on page 154, if you have a prayer book at hand.

The instructions at the beginning of the service describe it as especially appropriate for "times of war, or national anxiety, or of disaster."

I began incorporating it in my personal prayer life as a way of praying for the country, for an end to its toxic politics that have divided and continue to divide our nation, our communities, even sometimes our families.

It wasn’t long before the prayer became a lot more relevant than I could ever have imagined.

 Here’s all you need to know about the Supplication. It is what it says it is: a straight up cry for help. It says we are in an awful mess, acknowledges that it might be of our own making, that we can’t get out of it under our own power, and pleads for the powerful God who delivered Israel from Egypt and Shadrach from the furnace to deliver us, too.

O Lord, arise, HELP US; and deliver us for thy name’s sake.

Here we are in Advent, this quiet season of expectation. Now you all know Episcopalians sometimes get funny about Advent. We'll say it’s about contemplation, or preparation, or waiting, or that it’s a bit penitential – sort of a Lent Jr., the time of year John the Baptist calls people a brood of vipers and says other impolite things that make us uncomfortable.

But whatever Advent is, it is definitely NOT CHRISTMAS.

I’m going to tell you a secret, though. This year, the weekend before Thanksgiving, we bought the biggest Christmas tree we could fit in our house. It’s 9 feet tall and we’ve had to put rocks in the tree stand to keep it from falling over. My husband strung it with 1,400 lights.

In her magnificent book, Advent: the Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge writes about how Christians need to have “strategies of hope” to proclaim Christ in a suffering world.

Having an unreasonably large Christmas tree is one of my strategies for not allowing my faith in the power and promise of Jesus Christ to arise, to help us, to be overcome by the gloom and grief of this fearful winter.

Surely you have your own strategies of hope – I hope you do. Feel free to share them with one another in the chat.

This gathering, this Consecration Sunday-eve Saturday Night Live, is another strategy of hope.

Literally no one knows how to do a pledge campaign during a pandemic, and this year a lot of churches just aren’t putting that much energy into it. But you, St. Timothy’s, have determined that neither pandemic nor recession will deter you from this essential task of discipleship: of growing in generosity as you grow in your faith.

I call this an essential task not just because of the need to pay salaries and the Zoom subscription and maintain the building you will one day return to, though these are indeed good things. No, this annual ritual of communally renewing your financial commitment to the work God is doing among the people of St. Timothy’s is an opportunity to examine your lives and your hearts and put some things right.

You see, one of the reasons people get squirrely about money is that it is one objective way of measuring the choices we have before us and the choices we have made. Money influences the home you live in and the car you drive.

Look at your financial life and you’ll probably see some things you’re proud of and grateful for: the way you care for your children or an elderly family member, your education, the mortgage that allows you to be in a home you love, giving to a cause you care passionately for.

But you might also find things you’re less proud of, a trail of transactions linked to some vice or addiction, the burden of debt from a past emergency, or frivolous purchases you now regret.

Your finances aren’t the story of your life, but they’re a story of your life. What story do they tell about your faith? Where does God rank when you look at your bank statement?

The biblical standard for giving is 10% of your income. That’s simultaneously kind of a lot but also kind of not. Certainly it’s big enough, though, that if you’re tithing, you’ll notice. And there’s a reason for that.

Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” In other words, your money leads your heart, not the other way around. Giving is a strategy of hope.

"A voice cries out: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.'"

Generous giving is a way to pave that highway, by giving away some of our choices, and handing them over to God. Giving is an invitation to God to smooth out the rough places in your heart and your life.

Tomorrow you will make your commitments together, even if distantly. Some of you will come to the drive-in pilgrimage. Some of you will receive visitors. And some of you will use mail or email to make your commitment.

I invite you to pray about what commitment you will make tonight. Generosity is rarely a cause for regret. Even if you’re not ready to give 10% today, think about what percentage of your income you’re giving today, and consider whether you can grow a step in gratitude, faith, and hope.

And hope indeed is coming. 2020 will end in a few weeks. This pandemic will one day end, even though we don’t know the day.

Consider too, that the first babies conceived in lockdown are now being born. New life amid the devastation of this year.

And soon we will celebrate the birth of another baby, the one who has saved us and is saving us still, and who we believe will come again. We do not know when that day will come either, but it will come.

Christ will arise. Christ will help us. Christ will deliver us safely home.

Sermon preached at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, Indianapolis (via Zoom) - December 5, 2020.

Readings: Is. 40:1-11; Ps. 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Pet. 3:8-15a; Mk. 1:1-8

Led into temptation

Sermon preached at St. John's, Speedway, March 1, 2020 (Lent 1). With both the annual meeting and the Great Litany happening, I kept things brief. I owe the emphasis on the angels in this text to a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr. at a preaching conference sponsored by the Christian Theological Seminary's Ph.D. program in African-American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric in the summer of 2019. Before hearing his sermon I hadn't paid much attention to this detail.

Readings:

Gen. 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Ps. 32

Rom. 5:12-19

Matt. 4:1-11

Audio version

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord; shout for joy, all who are true of heart. (Ps. 32:12)

In the name of the Father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Here at St. John’s, you use the contemporary form of the Lord’s Prayer. I approve. My home parish of All Saints does, too. I prefer it to the traditional version, mainly because it forthrightly asks that our “sins” be forgiven, rather than the more elliptical “trespasses.” I like it when we say what we mean.

I also find “save us from the time of trial” to be more compatible with my conception of God than “lead us not into temptation.” Because what kind of God leads us into temptation, right?

Well, that would be our God, apparently - because this morning Matthew tells us that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness in order to be tempted by the devil. God did lead Jesus into temptation - so that turn of phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is born of Christ’s own experience.

Does this make God cruel? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I wonder instead, if, as Jesus’s earthly ministry really kicks off, what we’re seeing is the Holy Trinity figuring this incarnation business out. This may be a test of the limits that being fully human, with all the appetites  and pleasures and exhaustion and inconveniences and relationships that being human entails, places on God the cosmic Son, through whom all things were made. Can God, divine yet subject to human hunger, go the distance in the desert? Can God, divine yet subject to human pain and fear, commit to the way of the cross?

For the devil’s part, he’s got a sophisticated temptation plan, targeting both Jesus’s humanity and divinity. Better yet, he hopes to entrap Jesus in the words of scripture. After forty days in the desert, Satan finds Jesus to be a famished man, and reminds him of God’s provision for Israel in the wilderness.

“You’re the Son of God, right? Why don’t you do that manna trick again?”

Failing there, Satan snatches Jesus away to the top of the temple, and from that dizzying height above Jerusalem, goads Jesus to prove himself, as if being the Son of God is synonymous with being an unusually virtuous daredevil -

“Shoot yourself from a cannon, walk a tightrope over the grand canyon, throw yourself from the temple, Jesus - show me your power to save.”

And failing there again, the devil tries to sell Jesus the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Worship me,” the devil says, “and I’ll give you all these kingdoms, with their power and palaces, jewels and splendor.”

Jesus responds: “Away with you, Satan, I worship the Lord - you, Satan, have nothing to give me, and to you I have nothing to prove.”

And that is when the angels came.

St. John’s, today we stand just within the threshold of Lent, and we are called to a fast, 

or the assumption of some special act of devotion. I won’t ask what yours is -  that’s a matter for you and God.

But what does your fast mean? Your decision to give up chocolate or alcohol, coffee, diet coke, Netflix or shopping may please God - I don’t know - but that’s not the main thing. It’s a practice for a thing yet to come: a time of trial we may not be spared, a temptation into which God may lead us.

In the Lord’s Prayer we ask that we be saved from that time of trial, or not be led into that temptation, as the case may be, and most days I believe God will honor this request. The world has temptations enough to challenge us without God dragging us into more.

And when I think about what it means for one of us to be led into temptation for the greater purposes of God, I think of a college friend of mine who became addicted to methamphetamine and now works to bring other addicts to freedom, a career that carries the risk of relapse. It’s holy work. God leads him daily into temptation.

For Jesus the time in the desert and the temptation of Satan is a dry run for the crucifixion. When the moment comes, in the agony in the garden, despite expressing his desire - “let this cup pass from me,” he is able to say “not my will, but yours be done,” and so face the cross and the grave.

We may not be called to such heroics. But we prepare ourselves during this holy season so that we too can be ready, practiced, when God has need of our discipline.

But don’t forget the angels. As Jesus’s fast in the desert concludes there are angels waiting to revive him. And as his even greater fast - where he empties himself of all life - comes to an end on the third day, within the tomb there is a spark like the first glimmer of the dawn, and an angel appears to roll the stone away and announce to the women the world’s release from the power of death, and the assurance of new life.

Trust that it will be the same for you. Be blessed in your fast. The angels are coming.