Freedom is a charged word in our culture. It conjures up a host of images.
As individuals it can mean the ability to choose among a range of alternatives:
what we eat and wear, how we choose our life mate or chose the single life, or more profoundly, how we chose the last days of the end of our life—with all the health care that can be mustered on our behalf or not. Our choices can be meaningful, changing the course of the rest of our life, or they can be trite, affecting us and others for a few minutes.
As individuals in the United States, we take some freedoms for granted, and the founding fathers and mothers of our nation codified them in the Bill of Rights. We get caught up in them occasionally, disagree about what exactly they mean, but generally we don’t think about them unless someone tramples on one of them, or our life changes in a way that restricts our freedom, like having a debilitating illness, car crash, or being abused by another person. And we know people whose choices seem a lot more constricted than ours, such as single moms who sometimes don’t have a lot of resources or options, older adults who can’t get around as well as they used to, young adults, who are often strapped for the resources they need to pursue their studies, move to a job market, get married, or get the living arrangements they would prefer.
And there are whole classes of individuals who historically have been kept from making their own choices. The extreme of this is our country’s history of enslavement of Africans, and the continued prejudice that keeps many African-Americans today from realizing their full potential because their choices have been restricted. More recently Hispanic immigrants, both documented and undocumented, can’t exercise their choices because of the problems of our immigration system and systematic racism as well.
Anti-racism training is required of all seminarians in the Episcopal church now. This training helps us realize that racism can be found whenever our institutions—the church, school, business, government—use their power for or against any race. Prejudice with power is the definition of racism, and this training helps priests in training learn how to recognize when systemic racism underlies our thinking and actions. Martin Luther King pronounced in the 1960s that there was no more segregated place in America than our churches on Sunday morning. I know I have witnessed this segregation in both big cities like Chicago as well as our own bluegrass region, in Episcopal churches both in the north and the south.
How and why our churches have become so single-colored is pretty well known, given the history of racism in our country and the need for people of color to gather with each other to build up their spirits in the face of prejudice in their lives. How to change our churches so that they reflect many colors is the aim of the Union of Black Episcopalians. UBE encourages the involvement of Black people in the life of the Episcopal Church -- mission, stewardship, evangelism, education, liberation, leadership, governance, and politics. Its goal is to eradicate racism within the church, and they are meeting this week in Houston. This is a goal that is not achieved by a single act, but by choosing anti-racism every day.
When Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech at the march on Washington for civil rights, he finished his remarks by quoting the hymn we sang this morning: let freedom ring, and he called out all the places where freedom should ring—naming northern states, southern states. Then he said that as freedom came to all people, both black and white, men and women, Jews, Protestants and Catholics, we would really know the meaning of the words, we would be able to join hands together and sing the words of the Negro spiritual:
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.
The powerful images of Martin Luther King come to me today as I hear Paul’s words to the Galatians: for freedom Christ has set us free. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
As a woman, the idea of serving others is not new, and I think all women should beware of using this scripture to be slaves of their families in ways that are hurtful to them psychically. But we are called to freedom in Christ, in love, loving our neighbors as ourselves. Our freedom is one of responsibility. We are used to defining freedom as getting our way, but this is not the freedom of Christ. The freedom of Christ lies in knowing and living like we are a forgiven people. Knowing that we are Christ’s own in love, so that we act out that sense of overwhelming love. Like the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with her tears two weeks ago in our gospel reading, when we really know our freedom comes from being loved just as we are, we cannot do anything else than spill that love out onto others.
Our freedom cannot be divorced from others’ freedom. We cannot be free unless all are free, and this dilemma is central to our Christian awareness. We cannot love some and not others, just as God does not love some and not others. If our love of neighbor is to mirror God’s love for us, our freedom is expansive as well. We are called to love all, we are free and love is for all. This freedom is what Dr. King was talking about —that when we clasp hands together as free, then we all become free to love.
As we approach Independence Day this week, these issues of freedom for all are at the forefront of our minds. How can we make sure that our freedom as Christians to love and serve our neighbor does not get distorted into a kind of restricted freedom, where we love some and not others, because they are not like us in religion or thinking or color. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said more than a century ago that when individuals, or small groups, like a church, or nations become isolated whether as a result of ignorance or arrogance, Oppression or depression, our way of thinking begins to be distorted. As individuals and as a nation we do better when we think about freedom in relation to others.
As Christians, being free happens best when we are in community. This community we know as the church, where we test out our sense of being loved, where we come together to learn how to love our neighbor, to serve our neighbor together. Whether we give donations to the food pantry, provide rides to sick older folks, or scholarships to young adults, we have decided, in our Christian freedom, to choose how to love our neighbor. We love best when we love together and serve together those around us who need to see the love of Christ.
Our nation was built on these principles of Christian freedom, by some of the same founding fathers and mothers who designed how the Episcopal church would work. They wrote both our US and Episcopal constitutions, basing decision making on the principles that all are equal partners in freedom. While our nation has not always used this freedom wisely, for the benefit of others, or loved our neighbors with the sense that we have been blessed by God with goodness, we have tried, through our freedoms, to allow diverse opinions to be heard. In this time of conflict in Iraq, our nation and its leaders especially needs our prayers that our choices in freedom are the ones God would have us make.
In Lift Every Voice and Sing there are many negro spirituals with images of freedom. We will sing one from Abraham Lincoln’s era and the war he presided over, another time in our nation’s history where people had different ideas about what freedom meant. I believe our nation came through the crisis over slavery in a way that showed Christ’s love for all people. But that freedom came at a great cost, as people in the Commonwealth of Kentucky were very much involved, sometimes brother fighting against brother.
The freedom Christ provides us came at a great cost—the cost of the cross. But just as lives were freed from slavery by the resurrection of our nation after the Civil War, our lives are free through Jesus’s resurrection. Freedom in Christ is freedom from slavery to hate, hate of ourselves and of others. We are free to mirror the love of God in Christ, through the love we know in Christ. Just like anti-racism must be worked on every day, our freedom in Christ must be realized over and over again, every day of our lives.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Canterbury Pub Schedule
July 17 What Do Episcopalians Believe about Scripture?
Presenter: The Rev. Dr. Joyce Beaulieu
July 24 What Do Episcopalians Believe About God?
Presenter: The Rev. Canon Johnnie Ross
July 31 How Does Our Liturgy Inform our Beliefs?
Presenter: The Rev. Elise Johnstone
We will meet at Azur Restaurant, on the patio, at 6:30, and enjoy age-appropriate beverages and a fun evening of discussion!
Presenter: The Rev. Dr. Joyce Beaulieu
July 24 What Do Episcopalians Believe About God?
Presenter: The Rev. Canon Johnnie Ross
July 31 How Does Our Liturgy Inform our Beliefs?
Presenter: The Rev. Elise Johnstone
We will meet at Azur Restaurant, on the patio, at 6:30, and enjoy age-appropriate beverages and a fun evening of discussion!
Saturday, June 2, 2007
The Music of the Trinity
Trinity Sunday Year C
St Andrews Lexington
It is somewhat of a joke that seminarians are always asked to preach on Trinity Sunday, which is today, with the idea that they will be taxed to study up and present an exposition about the nature of the Trinity as a theological concept.
Well, somehow I escaped this fate as a seminarian and as a deacon, so here I am today as a priest ordained for 70 days, preaching on my first Trinity Sunday. And the joke is on me still, because, having just moved back to Lexington and waiting to have a new office at St. Augustine’s chapel on the UK campus, I moved all my professional books there. But since there is no office for me yet, the books are still in their 20 boxes. So much for theological study.
So, I think this is the good news, that Trinity Sunday will have to preached by me today with nothing more than my own personal opinions and experiences with how our God is Trinitarian.
Perhaps for us all, to keep this sermon down to earth even more, and perhaps shorter as result, it is the case for me that I never even gave the thought of God as Trinitarian much time until an encounter about 7 years ago. I was stuck in the Altanta airport waiting for the last plane to Lexington, when I saw a very good friend of mine, also a professor at the UK medical center with whom I did research and teaching. As it was midnight, and late night often opens up conversation, and we turned to ideas of God and faith. Nancy, my friend, is Jewish and she and I talked about many faith issues, including why Christians condemned homosexuality, which I was more than eager to talk about. But she really surprised me with a question about why we worshiped three gods.
That one caught me off guard.
I had never thought of it from her viewpoint. That from on outside viewpoint, the concept of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit was three different persons of God, separate individuals, that were each worshiped. From a Jewish and, I also suspect although I have not had this conversation personally, from an Islamic perspective, worshiping the One True God, Yahweh or Allah, must seem compromised when Christians talk about Jesus as God and the Holy Spirit as God. When we talk of the Triune God and repeat the words of our faith in this triune God every Sunday.
I was taught in seminary that theology was faith seeking understanding. So if we do some theology about the Trinity this morning, what understanding do we normal human beings, not theologians or philosophers, have of the Trinity?
I have seen many preachers try to explain how God is three and one using some interesting metaphors.
One priest tried to juggle three balls. One talked about water being able to be solid, liquid, and gas. Some theologians speak of three separate personalities that have a relationship; or three states of being of one divinity equally shared.
None of this means a lot to me, and perhaps not to you either.
What I relate to is how I experience God in my life. Now this kind of theology is not acceptable by theological standards—
It is too personal, subject to the vicissitudes of my personality, my neuroses,
It’s not enough on my own, with my own misinterpretations of experience, my projections, my ego, and a lot of other psychological problems.
But when it comes down to faith, if I can’t experience God first hand, and have faith that God is my beginning and end, what can I believe.
I encourage each of us to contemplate how we experience God in all of God’s divinity, as limited as we are as humans.
So in my limited humanness, I can give some tentative words to describe my own personal metaphor for God, and it is something like music.
Maybe like singers. My sisters and I used to sing duets. Now if you know anything about singing, you know that people who are related often have voices that are very alike and blend nicely. My sister and I were once singing at a state park for an ecumenical church service. Some older man came up to us afterwards and told us we sounded just like the Andrews sisters. We smiled and thanked him. Later in the car, we had to ask our dad who the Andrews sisters were.
So, blending like singers seem to speak to me, but it is in the final analysis too simple.
So how about a symphony, where the French horn and strings play back and forth, flute blends in more complexity with the other woodwinds, percussion and brass. Where Mozart could provide us with ethereal qualities that seem like the creation itself interplaying with the incarnation and the guiding light of the Holy Spirit.
But a symphony is regularity and predictability, following a script, keeping to the score. If God is a symphony of Creator, Savior, and Sustainer, this metaphor misses in the regulated nature of movement and relationship.
Maybe the music is more spontaneous, improvisational, where the instruments come together and apart, go solo, then in a duet, then in a trio, then each following its own melody, then maybe reprising the main theme, then going solo again. That sounds more like jazz to me.
If God is music, then jazz is a more free-flowing, give and take between Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, acting together toward some final note, along some theme, but each with its own character in the same rhythm. If God is like jazz, then we see ourselves as coming into the theme, giving our humanity into the divine scheme, hoping we understand what the main theme is, trying to keep in a key that means something in the grand scheme of creation.
This music is creativity to the nth degree, it is open to its surroundings and the feelings of the players. This music creates and responds to creation itself. God the Creator sets it going, the Redeener accompanies and keeps it, the Holy Spirit gives energy and drive in the music of co-creation, redemption, and preservation.
We thank God in some prayer book prayers for our creation, redemption and preservation. We acknowledge the jazz music of God in our lives.
How we respond to God’s music is our choice. How we experience this music is dependent on how close we listen, to tap the foot of our heart, sing along with the theme as it weaves in and out; and even as we try we cannot predict where this music will go and how we will be swept along with it.
God’s music sometimes crescendos loud and we feel like we are in the same room where the music is coming from;
At other times, God is a whisper, a low thrum that we must be very still to hear.
Sometimes, God’s music may sound like Duke Ellington’s big band, loud and brash and bluesy. To some of us, it is more like Ella singing scat, or Carmen McRae, smooth and wild at the same time.
And so we hear God the way God best reaches us, in our own jazz, so that we can hear and be part of the creation.
We also hear in community, the voices and sounds of God, creating, redeeming, and sustaining us and those who we accompany on the faith journey. We come together in faith, often to share our stories of how God’s music fills our lives. Sometimes we come when we can’t hear God’s music at all, holding firm to the love that you know is present in all our relationships through divine mercy. We come to proclaim what we hear, and to be comforted in times when we can’t hear.
My metaphor of the God as three in one, in their jazz won’t speak to everyone today. But what is more important, I hope I have helped you to begin to make your own connections in whatever way helps you, with God who is at once both loving creator, redeemer of our world and sustaining spirit of love and care among us.
I pray that each of us takes time to meditate on God’s immensity, complexity, beauty and overwhelming care for us and our world.
I pray that we take this message into the world, which needs so much care, to be the bearers of the truth of God’s presence and love for us. And I hope we sing a little along the way, echoing back to God the music of creation, the symphony of redemption through the Word made flesh, and in harmony with the spirit that guides and sustains us.
St Andrews Lexington
It is somewhat of a joke that seminarians are always asked to preach on Trinity Sunday, which is today, with the idea that they will be taxed to study up and present an exposition about the nature of the Trinity as a theological concept.
Well, somehow I escaped this fate as a seminarian and as a deacon, so here I am today as a priest ordained for 70 days, preaching on my first Trinity Sunday. And the joke is on me still, because, having just moved back to Lexington and waiting to have a new office at St. Augustine’s chapel on the UK campus, I moved all my professional books there. But since there is no office for me yet, the books are still in their 20 boxes. So much for theological study.
So, I think this is the good news, that Trinity Sunday will have to preached by me today with nothing more than my own personal opinions and experiences with how our God is Trinitarian.
Perhaps for us all, to keep this sermon down to earth even more, and perhaps shorter as result, it is the case for me that I never even gave the thought of God as Trinitarian much time until an encounter about 7 years ago. I was stuck in the Altanta airport waiting for the last plane to Lexington, when I saw a very good friend of mine, also a professor at the UK medical center with whom I did research and teaching. As it was midnight, and late night often opens up conversation, and we turned to ideas of God and faith. Nancy, my friend, is Jewish and she and I talked about many faith issues, including why Christians condemned homosexuality, which I was more than eager to talk about. But she really surprised me with a question about why we worshiped three gods.
That one caught me off guard.
I had never thought of it from her viewpoint. That from on outside viewpoint, the concept of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit was three different persons of God, separate individuals, that were each worshiped. From a Jewish and, I also suspect although I have not had this conversation personally, from an Islamic perspective, worshiping the One True God, Yahweh or Allah, must seem compromised when Christians talk about Jesus as God and the Holy Spirit as God. When we talk of the Triune God and repeat the words of our faith in this triune God every Sunday.
I was taught in seminary that theology was faith seeking understanding. So if we do some theology about the Trinity this morning, what understanding do we normal human beings, not theologians or philosophers, have of the Trinity?
I have seen many preachers try to explain how God is three and one using some interesting metaphors.
One priest tried to juggle three balls. One talked about water being able to be solid, liquid, and gas. Some theologians speak of three separate personalities that have a relationship; or three states of being of one divinity equally shared.
None of this means a lot to me, and perhaps not to you either.
What I relate to is how I experience God in my life. Now this kind of theology is not acceptable by theological standards—
It is too personal, subject to the vicissitudes of my personality, my neuroses,
It’s not enough on my own, with my own misinterpretations of experience, my projections, my ego, and a lot of other psychological problems.
But when it comes down to faith, if I can’t experience God first hand, and have faith that God is my beginning and end, what can I believe.
I encourage each of us to contemplate how we experience God in all of God’s divinity, as limited as we are as humans.
So in my limited humanness, I can give some tentative words to describe my own personal metaphor for God, and it is something like music.
Maybe like singers. My sisters and I used to sing duets. Now if you know anything about singing, you know that people who are related often have voices that are very alike and blend nicely. My sister and I were once singing at a state park for an ecumenical church service. Some older man came up to us afterwards and told us we sounded just like the Andrews sisters. We smiled and thanked him. Later in the car, we had to ask our dad who the Andrews sisters were.
So, blending like singers seem to speak to me, but it is in the final analysis too simple.
So how about a symphony, where the French horn and strings play back and forth, flute blends in more complexity with the other woodwinds, percussion and brass. Where Mozart could provide us with ethereal qualities that seem like the creation itself interplaying with the incarnation and the guiding light of the Holy Spirit.
But a symphony is regularity and predictability, following a script, keeping to the score. If God is a symphony of Creator, Savior, and Sustainer, this metaphor misses in the regulated nature of movement and relationship.
Maybe the music is more spontaneous, improvisational, where the instruments come together and apart, go solo, then in a duet, then in a trio, then each following its own melody, then maybe reprising the main theme, then going solo again. That sounds more like jazz to me.
If God is music, then jazz is a more free-flowing, give and take between Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, acting together toward some final note, along some theme, but each with its own character in the same rhythm. If God is like jazz, then we see ourselves as coming into the theme, giving our humanity into the divine scheme, hoping we understand what the main theme is, trying to keep in a key that means something in the grand scheme of creation.
This music is creativity to the nth degree, it is open to its surroundings and the feelings of the players. This music creates and responds to creation itself. God the Creator sets it going, the Redeener accompanies and keeps it, the Holy Spirit gives energy and drive in the music of co-creation, redemption, and preservation.
We thank God in some prayer book prayers for our creation, redemption and preservation. We acknowledge the jazz music of God in our lives.
How we respond to God’s music is our choice. How we experience this music is dependent on how close we listen, to tap the foot of our heart, sing along with the theme as it weaves in and out; and even as we try we cannot predict where this music will go and how we will be swept along with it.
God’s music sometimes crescendos loud and we feel like we are in the same room where the music is coming from;
At other times, God is a whisper, a low thrum that we must be very still to hear.
Sometimes, God’s music may sound like Duke Ellington’s big band, loud and brash and bluesy. To some of us, it is more like Ella singing scat, or Carmen McRae, smooth and wild at the same time.
And so we hear God the way God best reaches us, in our own jazz, so that we can hear and be part of the creation.
We also hear in community, the voices and sounds of God, creating, redeeming, and sustaining us and those who we accompany on the faith journey. We come together in faith, often to share our stories of how God’s music fills our lives. Sometimes we come when we can’t hear God’s music at all, holding firm to the love that you know is present in all our relationships through divine mercy. We come to proclaim what we hear, and to be comforted in times when we can’t hear.
My metaphor of the God as three in one, in their jazz won’t speak to everyone today. But what is more important, I hope I have helped you to begin to make your own connections in whatever way helps you, with God who is at once both loving creator, redeemer of our world and sustaining spirit of love and care among us.
I pray that each of us takes time to meditate on God’s immensity, complexity, beauty and overwhelming care for us and our world.
I pray that we take this message into the world, which needs so much care, to be the bearers of the truth of God’s presence and love for us. And I hope we sing a little along the way, echoing back to God the music of creation, the symphony of redemption through the Word made flesh, and in harmony with the spirit that guides and sustains us.
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