Funeral Sermon for The Hon. Herb Rollins - 1/23/09

I was honored to deliver the sermon at the funeral of the Honorable Herbert Rollins who died on January 20, 2008. He was a beloved member of our Frederick community and devoted member of Calvary United Methodist.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Poet and Anglican priest John Donne penned these famous words in his Meditation 17 almost 400 years ago while he battled a chronic illness which eventually claimed his life. He is right in saying “any man’s death” anyone’s death diminishes us. And how much more true it is when the man is Herb Rollins. When we consider the depth and breadth of his impact on us and our community, I think it’s fair to say his death diminishes all of us because he was involved with all of us. And yet, the converse of this is also true – we are all tremendously blessed to have known Herb as a friend and companion on our earthly journey.

Herb was a child of God; loving husband, father and grandfather; active church member; veteran; lawyer; judge; hunting buddy; chorale member; mentor; friend … I could go on, but Herb would have been uncomfortable with that. He wasn’t one to “toot” his own horn or over polish the apple. Even in his obituary (which he wrote) he didn’t want it all to be about himself, so he took the time to praise his colleagues and say how proud he was of your accomplishments. Over the past several days, his family, friends and colleagues have shared so many wonderful remembrances that I frankly wondered how a preacher like me could provide an appropriate summation to a life so richly lived. Fortunately I didn’t have to because Judge Theresa Adams provided one to me on Tuesday during my visit with the family. When she came to express her condolences on hearing the news about Herb, Judge Adams said, “What a lovely, lovely man.” That said it all – he was a lovely, lovely man.

While I had heard much about Herb (who around here hadn’t?), I only had the privilege of meeting him a month ago. When I visited him at the hospital, he was already hosting a guest! I told him I didn’t want to intrude, but he reached out to shake my hand and welcomed me with a warm smile and bright eyes. Even on the day when he received the hard news that his cancer was back, he was still able to welcome me. The same was true last Friday when I visited him at home and brought him Holy Communion. He welcomed me with grace and hospitality. He was so quick to express his gratitude for all the visitors he had and how much everyone was doing for him that I was reminded of the 14th century German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart who said, “If the only prayer you ever uttered was ‘thank you,’ it would be enough.” Herb prayed that prayer often. He was truly thankful for all of you and for everything God had given him.

This lovely life of grace, hospitality and thanksgiving was a testimony to the fact that Herb knew both who he was and, more importantly, whose he was. His public vocation to serve as an attorney and judge as well as his more private vocations as husband, father and friend were all built on the foundation of his faith in the God who created him and his Lord Jesus Christ who redeemed him. That faith infused him with the Holy Spirit and gave him a sense of purpose, guided his ethics, and gave him that innate sense of fairness he tried to apply in his life and his courtroom. As Scott Rolle said in the newspaper interview this week, you may not have always agreed with Herb but, “You knew if you went before him, you were going to get a fair shake.”

In the words of Psalm 84 which Judge Adams just read, “No good thing will the LORD withhold from those who walk with integrity.” By God’s grace and his faith, Herb walked with integrity and there is no doubt that he heard the words of his Lord and Savior saying, “Well done good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your Master.”

In his 2nd letter to the Corinthians, Paul says, “For we know that if our earthly house, the tent we live in, is dismantled, we have a building from God, a house not built by human hands that is eternal in the heavens.” Paul compares our earthly bodies to tents – temporary and fragile dwellings which are easily destroyed. But he also speaks the promise of Christ, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” God has prepared for each of us that permanent dwelling, not built by human hands, eternal in the heavens which will never die. This is the resurrected life Herb now enjoys in full communion with the Lord.

We too are entering a resurrected life with Herb because our relationship with him is not over. It is forever changed, but it is not ended. In the days and weeks to come, each of us will enter into a new relationship with Herb. Whether it’s being outside in the garden and seeing a beautiful flower that reminds you of him, or watching a sunset in Florida where he loved to visit, or seeing something absurdly funny and laughing to yourself about what Herb would have said about the situation, or struggling over a difficult case and without warning coming to an insight that would have made Herb proud – all of these will happen as you come to know him in a new way in his resurrected life.

In the same Meditation 17, John Donne describes resurrection in a way that I think a judge or attorney would understand and appreciate. He uses the metaphor of books and if there’s one thing that pastors and lawyers have in common, it’s a passion for books. Donne wrote:

“… all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

Amen.

Epiphany 2 - January 18, 2009

“I know how God talks to you Mommy.” Erin was all of 4 years old when she decided to explain this to me. “Really? Tell me about how God talks to you.” “Well, God talks to your heart. It’s like when you are talking to your friend on the phone and your friend says something in your ear, and then your ear takes that to your brain and your brain takes it to your heart and your heart takes it to God.” So far, so good. “And then, God talks to your heart and your heart takes that to your brain and then your brain takes it to your mouth so you can say something to your friend.” At that point, I was wondering why I was in seminary and not her!

In truth, I think she had it right, but I’ve found as I get older, things get more complicated. Hearing God’s voice can be hard in the midst of competing and conflicting messages. As I’ve aged, I’ve found that God also talks to us through other people – especially through our faith community.

Two of our readings, the Hebrew text and the New Testament, are about ways God calls us. In the first reading, the boy Samuel gets a direct call from God – God is speaking to his heart and his heart took it to his brain and his brain thought that the voice came from Eli the Temple priest. Samuel didn’t know God’s voice and didn’t realize God would call him directly. Samuel needed the assistance of the older priest to help him understand what was happening. This is true for us too – it takes the input of others to help you make sense out of God’s call.
In the reading from John, Jesus calls Philip directly; however, it is Philip who calls Nathaniel. Philip tells him we’ve found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Nathaniel’s response was less than enthusiastic in fact it was downright snarky: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But Philip doesn’t try to argue or get snarky in return … he merely says, “Come and see.” Jesus greets Nathaniel as “the Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” What he means is, Nathaniel is honest and transparent. He may be wrong, but he’s going to call it like it is. Once Nathaniel hears this from Jesus, he realizes he is fully known by the Lord and this leads to his proclamation that Jesus is the “Son of God, the King of Israel.”

We all have a call from God to a particular vocation. Theologian Frederich Buechner calls vocation that place where your deepest desire meets the world’s greatest needs. But our calls come both from God directly and through the voices of the community and our friends. When we are living fully into our calls - our vocations - we are more fully the people God created us to be. We become more real. And as we become more real, we are more able to reach out to others who do not know God.

This weekend we commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was a powerful pastor, teacher and preacher. He was a scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the works of theologian Paul Tillich. Dr. King could have stayed at the Ebenezer Baptist Church and had a successful career. He could have taught theology as a professor with his doctorate. But we all know that his deepest desire was to work for social justice. His work for social justice began with fighting segregation and working for civil rights. But many forget that he also was a peace activist who vociferously protested the Vietnam War and fought the issue of poverty. The former action put him at odds with the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who felt he was taking his eyes off the prize. But Dr. King saw the issues of poverty, war, violence and segregation as all interrelated social evils which could not be fought piecemeal. He heard God’s call, not just from God through the Scriptures, but also through his friends like Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, and Jesse Jackson.

On Tuesday, we will witness an historic event when Barack Obama is inaugurated as president. Barack went to Harvard law school. He was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He could have taken his degree and credentials and gone to work for a prestigious law firm or corporation. But his call – his vocation – was to return to Chicago and fight for the rights of those who had been oppressed through community organizing. He listened to God’s call which came both directly through his faith community and through the voices of those who needed the help he could give them.

God’s call comes through our faith, our community and our friends. That call can come at any time – as Samuel showed us, God’s call isn’t just for grown ups! Where is God calling you? Where does your greatest desire connect with the world’s deepest needs?

Christmas Eve 2007

Christmas Eve 2007
Gathered by Christ Episcopal Mission
Buckeystown, MD

I’ve been listening to some tracks from a band called Over the Rhine. I’d never heard of this band until I read about them on the blogger site RevGalBlogPals. Evidently, this duet has quite a local following in their native town of Cincinnati, Ohio (“Over the Rhine” is a reference to a downtown neighborhood in Cincinnati founded by German immigrants). OTR, as the band is known by their fans, has a new Christmas CD out called Snow Angels, which you can hear through their web site. In it, they reinterpret the classic carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem. Their version opens with the familiar first verse of the carol, but continues on in a very different tone:

The lamp lit streets of Bethlehem,
we walk now through the night.
There is no peace in Bethlehem,
there is no peace in sight.
The wounds of generations
are most too deep to heal
a scarlet timeworn miracle
and make it seem surreal.

This is the stark reality of Bethlehem, isn’t it? “How still we see thee lie” seems to be more of a wish for this town than the reality it ever has known. Bethlehem, and Palestine for that matter, has always been caught at a cross road. In the ancient world, it was bound on the north by the great empires of Greece and Rome, to the south by Egypt, and to the east by the empires of Assyria, Babylon and Persia. At one time or another, Palestine and Bethlehem were overrun by the occupying forces of these major world powers. Bethlehem has always known conflict.

That was certainly the case 2,000 years ago when a dirt poor, unwed teenage mother and her fiancé entered the town on the order of an occupying force’s unfunded government mandate to be counted in a census … no doubt so the government could raise their taxes. They arrive in Bethlehem only to find they can’t get a decent room. Obviously they didn’t have the shekels to grease the palm of the local innkeeper for better digs, so they end up in the barn loft with the animals and the other poor people who couldn’t get into the inn either. Oh sure, they might have been able to stay with relatives, but the shame of sticking by his pregnant girlfriend likely put some stress between Joseph and his extended family – would you want to have to explain the situation to your relatives?

Yet, as the prophet Isaiah had predicted, God was going to do a new thing. Oh sure, God was … well … God. This God who formed the foundations of the world could have come in great glory and light and power and special effects which would make Hollywood seem pale in comparison. But instead of doing the predictable thing, God came in a new way – as a helpless, powerless, poor, marginalized baby. And over 2,000 years later, we are still trying to understand what this means.

What does it mean that Christ was born 2,000 years ago? What relevance does this have for us, right here, in Adamstown, Buckeystown, Urbana, and all the other little towns where we live? If we freeze this story in time, we can be tempted to turn it into something that seems surreal and disconnected from us. So what does it mean for us?

Ironically, one of the best responses to this question comes to us from our past too. From the 13th century to be exact, in the words of a German Christian mystic named Johannes Eckhart – Meister Eckhart. I was introduced to Meister Eckhart by the priest at the church I attended in college. Eckhart was a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Boneventure. But Eckhart was not exactly a “party line” kind of guy. He dared to speak of God in terms which rocked the establishment and even caused him to be tried by the Inquisition as a heretic (he died before receiving the results of the judgment which acquitted him of the charges). He dared to image God as a woman, a fertile woman – a woman giving birth to all creation! Those terms might even shock some people in our own day who cling to a uniquely masculine image of God.

Meister Eckhart addressed the relevance of Jesus’ birth in his own day. He said to the congregation in Erfurt, Germany one Christmas:

“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity.... But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.”

And to paraphrase another quote:

“What does it matter that the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago if I do not give birth to Christ in my own day?”

This is the essence of Christmas. It was not just the birth of one child 2,000 years ago far away and removed from us. It is the ongoing birth of Jesus in each and every one of us which is the continuation of the Christmas story here and now. Giving birth to Christ in our own time, in our own hearts, in our own lives, is the essence of why Christmas is still relevant today. Giving birth to Jesus in our hearts means living lives grounded in Christ’s teachings, giving to others, reaching out to the last, lost, little, least and lifeless among us, and being the people of God even as we live in an imperfect and wounded world.

The baby in the manger
grew to a man one day,
and still we try to listen now
to what he had to say:
“Put up your swords forever,”
“Forgive your enemies,”
“Love your neighbor as yourself,”
“Let your little children come to me.”

This is our call at Christmas: to make Christ born anew in our lives and in our world through our faith and deeds.

O holy Child of Bethlehem
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in
be born in us today.

Amen.

Good Friday

Good Friday 2006
St. Thomas' Episcopal Church, Hanock Maryland

Attachment. A word to ponder on the day our Lord was nailed to the cross. Attachment. It comes from the French attache which means, “to be nailed to.” Jesus was attached, nailed to, the cross. We know attachment. It is a part of the human condition.

I’m revisiting a book my spiritual director gave me last year. It’s called Addiction and Grace by Dr. Gerald May, the late spiritual director and physician. Dr. May spent his career working to treat addicted people. Through this work, he concludes that addiction stems from our human nature of attachment. He says there are two forces which enslave our wills: repression, which stifles our desires, and addiction which attaches, bonds and enslaves our desires to certain specific behaviors, things, or people. Attachment nails our desire for God to these other specific objects and creates addictions. Now he’s not being flippant when he says we all suffer from addiction. His point is that the same biological, psychological and spiritual processes which are responsible for additions to drugs and alcohol are also responsible for addictions to work, ideas, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, success, achievement, money, power, intimacy, the approval of others, even our own self-image. Addictions are part of what it means to be human. When we nail our desires to objects instead of God’s love, we have misplaced our trust. Misplacing our trust is a classic definition of Sin. Martin Luther says we are in bondage to Sin and cannot free ourselves. Yet, I find it easier to understand the bondage to addiction better than the abstraction of the “bondage to Sin.”

Let me give you an example. As many of you know, I am the mother of two daughters. I love my daughters dearly and they are gifts from God, but as a parent, I constantly struggle with the process of letting go. I want to do the right things to protect them from harm without being so overprotective that I stifle their development. There was a time I obsessed with making sure everything was safe and I worried about them constantly. When my concern became an obsession which caused anxiety in me, that’s the point where I had attached myself to cross of sorts – the cross of being the “perfect mother” who could always protect her children from all danger and harm. This distorted image was an addiction which gripped me and I could not free myself from its grasp. This is but one of many psychological / spiritual addictions I have battled in my lifetime.

Addictions, like the cross, are paradoxical. Addictions make us willingly nail ourselves to the objects of our desires – they become crosses on which we crucify ourselves and we have no power within ourselves to come down from them. Addictions make us idolaters because they force us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly and freely loving God and one another. Addictions breed willfulness in us yet paradoxically they also erode our will and rob us of our dignity. Addiction is both an inherent part of our nature and the antagonist of it as well. It is the absolute enemy of love yet, in another paradox, it is addiction which can lead us to a deep appreciation of grace. It is our addictions which can bring us to our knees. Dr. May describes the point he faced his own addictions head on:

“It occurred to me that my original ‘professional depression’ had happened because I had been addicted to success and control. It was, in fact, a withdrawal; it happened when I couldn’t get my fix of professional success. I can honestly say, then, that it was my work with addicted people, and the consequent realization of my own addictive behavior, that brought me to my knees. I am glad. Grace was there. To state it quite simply, I had tried to run my life on the basis of my own willpower alone. When my supply of success at this egotistic autonomy ran out, I became depressed. And with the depression, by means of grace, came a chance for spiritual openness. To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace.”

Cappadocian father Gregory Nazianzus said, “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” which means Christ assumed the totality of our human nature. Did Christ assume our addicted nature to redeem it? From what Scripture tells us, the object of Christ’s attachment was God’s will and that he was human in every way yet did not sin. Ideally, we would all attach ourselves to God’s will and this is not addiction because it is a properly placed trust. But I do think that Jesus did experience something of our addicted selves on the cross on Good Friday. On that day, his friends were not there – they had abandoned him to his fate. Addictions isolate us from friends and loved ones. Our loved ones and friends feel powerless to do anything to help our addictions just as the disciples felt powerless to do anything for Jesus in the face of the cross. Jesus felt the separation and isolation we experience with our addictions. And on that day, God was silent. Jesus heard no words of affirmation from God about being beloved – instead, he heard nothing. Jesus experienced what seemed like complete abandonment by God in that moment he cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” It is the same cry from our souls when the despair of addiction drives us to our knees. Through the cross, Jesus was detached from his very physical life and taken to the Throne of Grace. In the despair of our addictions, we fall to our knees at the foot of the cross where we too find grace. Through grace, God removes the nails which hold us to the crosses of our addictions. We cannot save ourselves, but the grace outside ourselves is the means by which God saves us and redeems us. Today we look to the crucified Christ and see through the cross … and we find the grace which will heal us.

Amen.

All Saints Day 2008

I gave this sermon on All Saint's Day 2008 at St. John's Episcopal Church in Hagerstown where I was invited to preach and preside at the renewal of my parent's wedding vows on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. I sang the stanzas of the hymn I Sing a Song of the Saints of God as a part of the sermon. You'll have to imagine the singing bit, but I do have a pretty decent singing voice.


I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green:
they were all of them saints of God and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

I love this hymn! It’s not just because it is so quintessentially British and not because it is a flashback from my teen years (I first learned it when we joined the Episcopal Church in 1975). The reason I love it is because it captures what the Communion of Saints is all about.

I’ve just spent my first month as the quarter-time interim rector at St. Luke’s Carey Street in southwest Baltimore. As I worked with our organist and senior warden to plan out the music and worship for All Saints Sunday, we chose this hymn and had quite a discussion about how it typifies the Anglican view of the saints. Our Senior Warden, Andre, shared the story about how St. Luke’s and the local Roman Catholic Church once did a “Stations of the Saints” for All Saints Day. He went on to say that the Roman Catholics were ok with him including Martin Luther King, Jr., but … well … they drew the line at John Coltrane! I said, “Geez … what do they have against Coltrane?”

But Andre’s experience was running into the Roman Catholic tradition regarding how one officially becomes a “saint.” It’s an arduous process. Once a person professing the Roman Catholic faith and who lived a saintly life has died, the cause of making this person a saint is taken up and their life is examined for evidence of general holiness by no less than three different groups of Roman Catholic theologians. If there is agreement at that point, they are deemed “venerable” by the pope. The second stage of becoming a saint differs based on whether or not the person was a martyr. If they were not martyred, then two miracles must be directly attributed to this saint’s intercessions on behalf of the living (if you are a martyr, you get to “pass go” on this step). After this stage, the person is considered “beatified.” Finally, a third miracle (or first if you’re a martyr) must be documented and then the person is canonized as a saint by the pope. Saying the process is involved is an understatement.

The tradition of the saints in Catholicism had some unintended consequences. The emphasis on only recognizing dead people disconnected the saints in heaven from the saints here on earth who continue to do God’s work. The idea that saints are dead people is a persistent notion. I recall a seminary intern we had at St. Michael and All Angels church running into this issue as he tutored my younger sister to prepare her for confirmation. He gave her an essay question on this subject: “Could you be a saint? Why or why not?” I’m sure he thought it an age appropriate and yet profound question; however, seminary profundity is often dashed on the rocks of 13 year old coolness. My sister’s responded in one sentence: “No, because you have to be dead to be a saint and I am not ready to die yet.” … full stop.

The other major unintended consequence to this process was the practice of saintly adoration which reached its peak in the medieval Church. The medieval Church downright deified the saints. Relics of saints (usually bones or petrified body parts) were enshrined in churches all over Europe and the Near East and collected by royalty. Local legends grew up around the saints’ abilities to affect miraculous healings, raise people from the dead, apparitions, and other supernatural events. Pilgrimages to saints’ shrines were enormously important to the local economy. Adoration of the saints was elevated to the point of being as important as worshiping God and this was the practice against which the leaders of the Reformation rebelled.

Martin Luther wrote stinging condemnations of the “cult of saints” in his collected works. Luther felt the “cult of saints” had taken the focus off of the saving work of Christ on the cross and therefore it had no place in the church. Having attended a Lutheran seminary, I witnessed the effects of Luther’s desire to purge the church of the cult of saints. It’s best enshrined in the continental protestant tradition of celebrating Reformation Day … which is the day before All Saints Day (Coincidence? I think not!). Our Lutheran brothers and sisters have conflicting feelings about the whole issue of All Saints Day. If we say we believe in the “communion of saints” in the Nicene Creed, then shouldn’t we celebrate All Saints Day? How do we define saints? Are they only the living saints, or can we include the dead ones? If we recognize the dead ones, are we betraying the premises of Luther’s Reformation?

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and his love made them strong;
and they followed the right, for Jesus’ sake,
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

The Anglican tradition steps into the divide between the rigid rules regarding sainthood in the Roman tradition and the desire to scrap the whole thing from Protestantism. We believe the Church does have a vested interest in recognizing and raising up those people who have embodied the Gospel in their life and work. We do have a process. Every three years, our General Convention adds new names to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts of those saints who have gone before us (and we don’t require supernatural phenomenon or miracles).

In addition to the official recognition of our saints who have gone before us, we also believe in the saints on earth. The essence of being a saint is living a life of devotion to God. In that broad definition, we are all saints. Being a saint does not mean you are perfect, even the saints in heaven were not perfect. Do any of you know why Saint Augustine, the patron of the Anglican Church, ended up in Canterbury? It’s because he was such a cantankerous pill that they threw him out of London and told him to go away and not come back! He wasn’t perfect, but he lived a life devoted to God.

Today we come together as the saints on earth to remember the saints in heaven who have preceded us. We come together each week to hear the Word and receive the Sacrament to be strengthened to live our lives for God … so we might be the saints on earth and continue the reconciling work of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

In a few moments, we saints on earth will renew our baptismal vows and recommit our lives to God. We will also witness another renewal of vows, that of my parents, Bob and Earlene Ayrer, who celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary just a few weeks ago. Without them I wouldn’t be here today … and I don’t mean just as your guest preacher. It is fitting to do this on All Saints Sunday surrounded by all of you here at St. John’s. Mom and Dad are saints in our family … remember, that doesn’t mean perfect … but it does mean they live lives dedicated to God and, for 50 years, each other. My sister and I have witnessed them integrate their faith and life seamlessly. Their devotion to Christ is just who they are and it permeates their daily life and work. This is the essence of what it means to be a saint.

They lived not only in ages past,
there are hundreds of thousands still,
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.

Amen.