September 29, 2024 - The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. I first want to say thank you for last Sunday’s installation service, our “renewal of ministry with the welcoming of a rector.” Canon Tracie was gracious enough to visit and preside and preach, and when she asked if Epiphany was ready to “continue in your ministry with me as your rector,” your enthusiastic response made me just a bit emotional. Thank you for calling us here to South Haven, and thank you for that enthusiasm. I hope that continues throughout many, many years!
As some of you know, this is not our family’s first attempt at moving to and living in the great state of Michigan. We are confident this move will be more successful than the first... it already has been... but for those who don’t know about our first attempt, let me tell you a story (I've been told to use this fall's sermons to introduce myself to Epiphany a bit, if you remember). Well, Abbey and I got married in Columbus, Ohio, the home of the Ohio State University – sorry about last night’s game, Spartans fans. I actually proposed to Abbey on the field at Buckeye Stadium after renting the whole place out... that was 13 years ago next month.
I grew up in St. Louis, but Abbey was (is?) a Buckeye, and all the various sides of her family are from the Buckeye State, so us getting married in Columbus made good sense. (Several of her family members, by the way, will be with us here at Epiphany for the pet blessing next week, so please treat the invaders kindly.) But with so many in-laws there in Ohio, I (or we) realized we needed a little distance from extended family in our first years of marriage, and we ended up in the northern suburbs of Detroit in the fall of 2012. We rented an apartment in Troy, we shopped and hung out and went to church in Royal Oak, and Lily, our oldest daughter, was born at the Henry Ford Hospital in West Bloomfield. We made a decent attempt to be Michiganders.
But then, the winter of 2013-2014 drove us to near insanity. Stuck in a small suburban apartment with our newborn daughter and a small dog from California that had zero interest in braving the cold, we endured what the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index called the most severe winter Detroit had ever seen by far. (And I do have research to prove this.) The meteorologists claim that winter that year lasted 157 days. Far more snow fell that winter than any other winter in Detroit history, morning temperatures were colder than all but one winter, the winter of 1977, and afternoon temperatures were colder than all but one winter, the winter of 1962. No other winter comes close on the index. It was awful. We slipped-and-slided on ice covered streets and sidewalks nearly every morning for months, our dog went to the bathroom inside more times than I can count. Just one year into our Detroit adventure, we were done. We were suffering. We wanted to move south.
And move south we did. Most of you know we came here from Charlotte, North Carolina after a year at the Episcopal seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee. But when we sent out job applications, Charlotte was not our goal destination. That was Asheville, North Carolina.
Asheville, for those who haven’t been, is a small city of about 90,000 people nestled in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a city known for the arts and its River Arts District, for being “granola,” for breweries, for historic architecture, and of course for its proximity to the Appalachian Mountain range, to trails and rafting. They even have minor league soccer and baseball teams, and Abbey and I thoroughly enjoyed an anniversary trip there from Detroit. Asheville was a pretty cool place, we just couldn’t find jobs there.
You may have noticed that I used the past tense that time, Asheville was a pretty cool place. As you might have heard this week, or maybe you haven’t, Hurricane Helene blew through the American southeast on Thursday and Friday to catastrophic results. As of this morning, over 60 people have been declared dead from the storms and the resulting flooding, with those numbers sure to rise. Entire cities have been wiped off the map; the videos posted on social media have been heartbreaking. Tourist towns like Chimney Rock, a little stop southeast of Asheville, will literally never recover. Their equivalent of Phoenix Street was completely erased, nearly every building in town is gone. News headlines for Asheville describe “biblical devastation,” like something out of the apocalypse. The River Arts District is under twenty feet of water, now literally part of the river. Smaller cities, where we have friends who live and vacation, will need federal and state aid for months if not years.
There was a historic, disaster-level event this week in an area of the country that our family used to call home... and when you stop and really think about the suffering those who live there are enduring this morning while we gather and will now face for the foreseeable future... it’s almost too much suffering to bear.
Suffering, as we know, is not exclusive to those dealing with natural disasters, though it is certainly easier to recognize. It also comes in degrees... our suffering through the 2013 Detroit winter paled in comparison to that caused by Helene this week, but it still affected us deeply. This week alone, as your rector here at Epiphany, I have borne witness to suffering of all kinds. I have had brought to my mind and my attention those suffering with the recent death of a loved one; those suffering with illnesses, both acute and chronic; those suffering with loneliness and neglect; those suffering with the difficulty of parenting children with special needs; those suffering with special needs; those suffering with guilt, with shame, with family trauma, with addiction, with anxiety, with homelessness, with loss, and with pain. Suffering is here, in this room; it is with us today.
This morning, I had hoped to preach on the gospel of Mark... there are some really interesting nuggets in Mark 9 about inclusion, service, eternal punishment, and even salt. They are all worthy of further study and reflection. But Hurricane Helene hitting a place my family loves instead brought me back to the letter of James again. This is the last time James shows up in the lectionary until December 2025, so I probably should have started with James in the first place, but I’ve preached on it quite a bit lately and I didn’t want to sound like a broken record this morning. But since it’s the last time for a while, and since the message is so vital for us today: as you have heard me preach in recent weeks, the letter of James reminds us that through our membership in this holy Christian church, through our life of faith, our entire lives should be transformed, our actions should be different from those without faith, our responses to outside events and situations should be shaped by a life spent close to the spirit and the heart of God.
Our James reading this morning wastes no time in saying what those responses for Christians might look like, and if you notice at the bottom of page 6 in your bulletin the very first direction is intensely appropriate for us today. “Are any among you suffering? They should pray.” That’s obviously important and applicable on its own, and I'll come back to it, but James continues: “Are any cheerful? Sing praise to God. Are any sick? Have elders pray over them and anoint them.”
James is concluding his five-chapter letter with this final bit of advice, these eight verses we read this morning, and his parting advice echoes that of the entire book: your entire life should be based in the transformative power of being a follower of Christ, of being in community in the church. If you are suffering? Turn to God. If you are cheerful? Turn to God. And if you are sick? Well turn to each other, and then together, turn to God.
These three directions are part of what Pastor Steve Small called this week “the most powerful passage on community” in the Bible. James is his favorite book, and this his favorite passage in it, and I think it speaks beautifully to what it is to be part of the church, part of Epiphany this morning. There is power in being in Christian community. We remind each other of the responses we should have in good times and in bad, not of self-congratulation or self-pity, but of our deep need to turn to God. We lift each other up, we take care of each other and those around us. This passage even says that we work out the forgiveness of our sins in confessing them to one another, and that the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.
Prayer. The suggested response to suffering that James gives us is prayer. Though I am only a few months from finishing the long ordination process and have studied the topic in countless seminary courses over the last 15 years, I am no particular expert on prayer. I am still not entirely sure what happens when we pray, there are countless opinions about it, but I do really like the ancient Christian phrase often repeated in Episcopal circles: “lex orandi, lex credendi,” essentially our praying shapes our believing. As we pray, we are formed, we need not believe specific things prior to prayer for it to work within us. Thomas Merton is probably the “prayer expert” that I have come to most appreciate, and he famously began a prayer with, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end.” Even a famous monk knew not what was ahead, but he did know to turn to God, to trust in prayer.
Prayer when viewed this way, not as magic words offered up in hopes of everything turning out fine but as a turning toward God, a trusting that we know will form us, now that, that can offer great relief in the midst of suffering. It may indeed lead to miracles, as James writes about here, or it may lead to an impassioned response within us, one full of perspective, of recognition that we are not alone in suffering. Or prayer may lead those of us who are not currently suffering to help those who are, to see that there is need in our midst and then to live into our calling as the church to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, to offer of our finances, our time, our strength.
Prayer, as we are promised, is indeed powerful and effective, should we make the time.
Now, there is plenty of suffering in this world, friends, and this week, especially so in the storm-ravaged southeast, in our family’s old beloved towns in western North Carolina, but also here with us today too. Friedrich Nietzsche even wrote that “to live is to suffer,” but that’s a little too hopeless for a sermon. Instead, the biblical response, from the book of Romans, is that suffering, which will indeed be a part of all of our lives... well, suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.
In the face of suffering of all kinds, I pray that we can all remember daily that the response for Christians in every situation, good or bad, suffering or cheerful, is to turn to God, to turn to our community in the church, to turn to our identity as Christians, to turn to prayer, and to let that turning form us into the people who we are called to be. Amen.
コメント