Do it now

Proper 17 B; August 30, 2009
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

What moved me most about the coverage of Senator Kennedy’s funeral was learning that the church he chose was the place he had gone for daily prayers while his daughter lay gravely ill in a nearby hospital. He would just come in unannounced, without entourage or fanfare, would kneel and pray, would attend mass, would sit quietly. It was in that place, where he had prayed for healing for his daughter, and dare we say, for himself as a care-worn and weary father, that he wanted the words said over his body which prepared him for his final resting place. I was touched that this ultimate “doer” brought the whole world together yesterday to this place where he had listened intently to hear the word.

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.”

For centuries, there were Christians who regarded that sentence, and the whole Epistle of James that surrounds it, as a second-rate bit of scripture. “An epistle of straw,” Martin Luther called it, fearing that it would focus Christians on work, work, work, law, law, law, do-gooding, do-gooding, do-gooding, and so they would forget the abundant and undeserved grace of God that is at the heart of Jesus’ message. There is no way that we can earn what God through Jesus has done for us – no way that the abundance of God’s love is something that we can turn off or on like a faucet, just because we do, or don’t do something. All those things that James would have us do, Luther thought, can get in the way of our hearing the true word of God’s abundant grace and love.

Over time, though, we find we read scripture differently – the needs of the day cause some words to jump out at us. Aha, we think. This is the word I need to hear right now! This word helps me understand what is going on, what God is trying to say to me right now.

“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers” is one of those texts that kind of lies fallow, in the back of the Bible, as it were, until when we need it, it leaps right to the fore with a clarion call. It’s not that we’ve heard enough of “the word” – how can anyone hear enough of what God has to say? There are times in the world, in our own lives, when we know that God wants us to act – to do something about all those things that God has been telling us about for all those years. Now’s the time, the Epistle of James says, get up. Act. Do something.

You can say that the Epistle of James is just one big to-do list. Don’t get angry, and take care of orphans and widows tops the list. That’s a good place to start: if we let our anger – justified or not – get it our way, it will just block everything else God wants us to do – and then James just gets right on it: take care of those people who have no one else to take care of them.

The Gospel of Mark reminds us about just how much trouble we can get into by being a “doer of the word.” Jesus would have us care not just for the orphans and widows that we like, but ALL orphans and widows. Not just orphans and widows who might come to church – or, as in Jesus’ day, orphans and widows who were “clean” or ate kosher food or who were able to follow all the Jewish laws concerning food and cooking – but ALL orphans and widows. It’s that grace thing, again. That abundant love. That troublesome God who knows no limits, who sets no boundaries, who takes us in no matter how dirty our hands are or whether we have stains on our clothes. It’s not the outside, Jesus says, but the inside. And more than that: even if we carry some bad stuff on the inside, if we let that stuff go, God’s abundant love will come in and fill that place, so that once again we can hear and act on the gracious word of God.

The Song of Solomon, where we get our first lesson today, is another one of those books of the Bible that is sometimes put on the back burner of our attention. It’s a curious, poetic book that uses the metaphor of erotic love to describe the actions of God in the world. God’s love, God’s grace, God’s abundance knows no limits. God delights in us, and the Word in this book is all about how easy it is for us to delight in God.

Be doers of this word, and not merely hearers. “The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom.” Come to the party. Bring everyone you know with you. There is enough to go around.

With us with bread

Proper 16 B; Aug. 23, 2009

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84

Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

Jeremi reminded us in vivid terms last week that the images Jesus uses are indeed, as he asks his disciples in today’s gospel, offensive. Drinking blood and eating skin – not a pretty picture. Bread? Yes, wonderful. Wine? Yes, as well. Communion? Yes, we those we get. But body and blood? Why such a sacrifice? Why such a commitment? Why such a risk?

What is shocking about today’s gospel is that Jesus lets a whole lot of his disciples go. For these folks, this imagery is just too much. Is it the grotesqueness? Is it the commitment? Is it the allusion to sacrifice and death? For whatever reasons, they walk away, and Jesus gives even his inner circle that option, too. Just how convincing is Peter’s answer? “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.”

One of the earliest images of Jesus, from the earliest days of the Christian community, are images of Jesus sharing bread with his friends. They are depictions of communion, of the Last Supper. It was not until centuries later that Christians dared depict Jesus on the cross – remember that many of those early Christians faced martyrdoms and deaths of their own. Perhaps in the early days of the church they were living the scandal of the cross – of the God made human – sharing all too closely in his life and death – to want to reflect on it in art or symbol. We, now free from danger of crucifixion ourselves, can find the cross a meaningful symbol of the God who walked among us as one of us.

Our English word “companion” has relevance here. Its roots “com” meaning “with” and “pan” meaning “bread” imply that a companion is one who is with you with bread. A companion is one with whom you share your bread, your nourishment, your life, as you walk along your way. And indeed, Jesus, our divine companion, continues to share the bread of his eternal life with us, even if we, like Peter, are not always absolutely convinced that walking along with Jesus is a wise thing to do.

Full confidence in the faith is hard. Things do come by – frequently – to test us. We can read scripture, say, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and nod our heads vigorously in concurrence: Yes! We are bold in faith! Yes! We wear the armor of God, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit. Yet to be honest, we must admit that the sayings of Jesus are difficult, and the life that Jesus bids us live carries with it costs and sacrifices.

Maybe the best we can do is eat the bread. To stand in line with everyone else, put out our hands and take a piece of that bread in faith. Maybe the important thing is getting up week after week to do this: to listen to the scriptures, to spend some time in quiet prayer, to worry about how hard it really is to follow Jesus, and then, nonetheless, get up in that line anyway and put out our hands, take the bread and eat it.

That’s the power of the sacrament, and the power of the community. We are not in this alone. On any given day, when the words of Jesus are just too hard to understand, or too difficult to follow, someone next to us will be able to. We are in this together: that is the essence of communion, of COMMON prayer, of companionship. We take, we eat – we may not be able to “get it” that day, or every day, but by taking, by eating, we DO “get it” – it’s not so much the eating, but the abiding – the Christ dwelling in us and we in Christ that happens when we stand here, side by side, hands outstretched, ready to take Christ into our selves, our souls and bodies ,whether we know what we are doing or not.

The bread of life and the cup of salvation, broken and shared, Holy Manna, bread from heaven, where earth and heaven meet.

It grows, we know not how

Proper 6-B; June 14, 2009
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34

Simon’s 5th grade class had a science fair this week. Two of the children experimented with plants: did a plant grow faster if one played classical music, rock music or rap music next to it?

The children were convinced rap music did the trick. In one boy’s experiment, one plant was kind of shrunk down compared to the others. The other boy said that the rap music one was taller – the classical music one looked vigorous and healthy to me – but the rap music one had broken its stem on the way to school. But I was skeptical. Maybe I had today’s parable in mind: we sow the seed, but it sprouts on its own – it grows tall – we know not how. It grows to tall, ripe grain, or to become a shrub so mighty that the birds nest in its branches. Even controlling for variables in a scientific experiment, it is still God’s seed, God’s mystery, God’s power, God’s time.

That is kind of what is meant by “the kingdom of God.” That kingdom is not necessarily a place, with border guards and boundaries, but a sense of God’s power. God’s dominion. God rules here. God’s rules rule here. The seeds sprout and grow into plants. The sun rises and sets. We work, we sleep, we rise. We see God’s kingdom at work in the world around us.

Following the rules of God’s kingdom is a balancing act between the work God calls us to do, and an utter detachment from the results of that work. In every way, God wants us, I think, to participate in the work of that kingdom: to plant seeds. What are the seeds God has given you in your life? How do you think God wants you to participate in the kingdom of God?

What was God looking for when he chose David out of all the warriors offered to him, David, the youngest, to be the one chosen and beloved of God? What could David have possibly done to deserve such a blessing?

In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul encourages the believers. “The love of Christ urges us on,” Paul says. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away.”

There are moments in our lives when we just can’t make things fit. Try as hard as we can, something just doesn’t work. A relationship, a task, a problem to be solved. Aren’t we just prone to worry ourselves sick? Don’t we just want to get this right, that perfect, to please ourselves, to please God? Is this what God would want? How do we know what is the right thing to do? What if we just worked a little harder, fixed this thing a little better, dug a little deeper, stayed up a little later? Wouldn’t there be more justice in the world? Wouldn’t there be more mercy? Wouldn’t things be RIGHT?

One of my favorite summer stories is set in New York City, in an indeterminate decade sometime in the middle of the 20th century. It’s a story of boys playing marbles on the street, in the deepening dusk. The narrator is Buddy, shooting marbles with his friend, Ira. Buddy’s brother, Seymour, comes up to them.

One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on - some on, some still off- I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to - his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's - and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of our house. Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from - well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. 'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.' *

There are no accidents in the kingdom of God. We sow the seed, we shoot the marble, we reach out to the friend in need. The seeds sprout, we know not how, and when we turn around, a great tree has grown up in our midst, and the kingdom of God is here.

* J.D. Salinger, from "Seymour, an Introduction" in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction (New York: Little, Brown, 1963)

Jan Juan Jean Joao Yohana 3:16

Trinity-B; June 7, 2009
Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

How many of you have been to the southern United States? Not just Florida, but the deep south? The real south where the culture really is different?

Across the deep south – the “bible belt” of America – you can see billboards that read “John 3:16.” Nothing more. If you were a native speaker of the “deep south” you would know what that meant. But like with any culture that is not originally our own, such signs can be mystifying. The “in crowd” knows the cues; the rest of us are standing on the sidelines, scratching our heads.

That’s one of the problems with short-hand religion: since we don’t get the cultural cues, we think it must not apply to us. If Southerners put John 3:16 up on billboard, well, that might mean it’s not so good. Hold on, here: let’s not throw the baby out with the fundamentalist bath water. John 3:16 actually says some pretty good things. Let’s hear it in some other languages, languages that some of us here speak, languages that some of us here originally heard God speak to us:

Jan 3:16 (Haitian Creole Version)
Paske, Bondye sitèlman renmen lèzòm li bay sèl Pitit li a pou yo. Tout moun ki va mete konfyans yo nan li p'ap pedi lavi yo. Okontrè y'a gen lavi ki p'ap janm fini an.

Juan 3:16 (Nueva Versión Internacional)
Porque tanto amó Dios al mundo, que dio a su Hijo unigénito, para que todo el que cree en él no se pierda, sino que tenga vida eterna.

Jean 3:16 (Louis Segond)
Car Dieu a tant aimé le monde qu'il a donné son Fils unique, afin que quiconque croit en lui ne périsse point, mais qu'il ait la vie éternelle.

João 3:16 (O Livro)
Deus amou tanto o mundo que deu o seu único Filho para que todo aquele que nele crê não se perca espiritualmente, mas tenha a vida eterna.

Yohana 3:16 (Swahili New Testament)
Kwa maana Mungu aliupenda ulimwengu kiasi cha kumtoa Mwanae pekee, ili kila mtu amwaminiye asipotee, bali awe na uzima wa milele.

All these languages say the same thing: “For God so loved the world …” – not just the Spanish-speakers, or the Cape Verdeans, or the English, or the Trinidadians, or those white Southern Protestants who put up those billboards. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

There is an author from this world of the deep Southern Bible belt, Flannery O’Connor. She was actually an Irish Catholic, but she grew up privileged, and white, and in the deep south of Georgia, and her novels and short stories took a long, hard look at this really quite distinctive culture. For sure it is a very religious culture, and a culture that can be seen as odd by some other Americans, and certainly by some others. Out of a lifetime of living in this deeply religious, deeply southern culture, this is how Flannery O’Connor reinterprets John 3:16:

… life “has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for."

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son …” It’s the essence of the Good News in just a few words. The world, in all of its complications and troubles, is what God loves, and cares for. God wants to be here, in the middle of it all, begging, cajoling, pleading, instructing, working with us to make this world a better place – to make this world the place God intended it to be. We aren’t there yet, but that is the intention of God with us.

Our reading from Isaiah comes from a very different kind of literature: it’s spooky and mysterious and mythic. It’s an image of the Ancient of Days, and at first glance you might think, what has this to do with us? This image of the remote and all-powerful glory of God?

But look at the last lines: “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” God is asking: who will tell God’s story? Who will bring God’s message to a world that very much needs it? How we will answer that? In our neighborhood, our community, our city, among our family and friends? That indeed is the central question of evangelism, the one that the short-hand version, of putting “John 3:16” up on billboards and hand-painted sign posts, addresses. Who will go for God into this world? Who will tell God’s story, of how much God loves this world and all of us in it?

All of us are in church today because SOMEONE bothered to tell us that story, and so I think you will know the answer to that question when God asks you: Who will go for us? Here am I; send me.

The Spirit of truth speaks

Pentecost/B; May 31, 2009
Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104
Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through me to others. Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through others to me.

That old prayer is a form of Evangelism -- perfectly appropriate for Pentecost, the feast when we celebrate the Spirit of God speaking in many languages to the very new church gathered Jerusalem.

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through me to others. Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, speak through others to me.

This day is also known as the birthday of the church. The ecstatic spirit of the church is described in Acts. In John's gospel, Jesus breathes the spirit on the disciples and gives them their marching orders -- their authority: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

So Jesus can speak to us and through us in a variety of ways, and the Holy Spirit speaks the truth to us and through us in a variety of ways, through what may appear to an outsider as drunken, crazy behavior. Paul, of course, says it better than anyone: "The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."

Jesus can speak through us and to us in ways that make us happy, and that's what Pentecost is usually about. It's the day when people who speak in tongues can really shine. But Jesus' words are sometimes more ambiguous than we would like. We're left hanging, with questions in our mind, conflicts not quite resolved, solutions not yet formed.

The Pentecost experience happens, as you will recall, after the Ascension – after Jesus has left his disciples for the last time. Remember the words Jesus spoke to them, during one of his appearances to them after the resurrection: “Peace be with you.”

The disciples were probably not in a very peaceful place just then. John reveals none of the disciples' emotions other than they were glad to see him. Surely they were in turmoil: their friend and leader had just been killed, they were in hiding, grieving and mourning, and then he appears. Surely they were astonished, stunned, shocked. Neither the "before" or "after" of this scene can be described as peaceful, but that is what Jesus says to them, twice: "Peace be with you."

Our passage today comes from when Jesus teaches his disciples what to in these days – these post-resurrection, post-Ascension days: Be strong. The Spirit will come, and will direct you in all truth.

With these with these words of encouragement, Jesus is sending the disciples, and, by extension, us, out into the world. We are not allowed to indulge in a spirit-filled peace for very long. We cannot linger with the mountaintop experience, for Jesus is calling us into the world, the world that longs for and desperately needs peace. Jesus breathes his spirit upon us -- speaks his peace -- and then sends us out into the world where people hurt and get sick and go hungry, and expects us to speak peace to them, to speak truth to them, to bring hope to this broken world that does not know what to expect next. The Pentecost story reminds us that the Spirit makes up for our deficiencies – in sighs deeper than the words we cannot find, and in the words of all the languages we cannot speak.

St. Paul’s Church is at an exciting moment in its life. We are making a name in this community, a name that speaks the truth that the Spirit has told us: that God wants a community of faith on this corner. That God wants us to make this corner a beautiful part of God’s blessed creation. We are engaging in a great deal of listening, of trying out new things, of being willing to make mistakes, of risking that something wonderful and new might indeed emerge from what seems an unsettled present.

This is a moment of great hope, and in the words of our patron saint, “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

On this day of Pentecost, the Spirit speaks the truth to us: God is calling us to be here, now. On this day of Pentecost, we hope for what we do not yet see. On this day of Pentecost, we persevere, with patience.

Now we are with God

Easter 7-B May 24, 2009

Acts 1:15-26; Ps. 1

1 John 5:9-15; John 17:6-19

This 7th Sunday of Easter is the Sunday after the Ascension: we remember this time, 40 days after the resurrection, as the first time Jesus is not around his disciples. Jesus will no longer just pop in unexpectedly. Jesus will deliver no more new sermons, heal no more sick people, teach us any more new lessons – Jesus in the flesh, that is. What the church, and what our lessons today tell us, though, is the miraculous truth: Jesus still has power in our lives, to comfort, to inspire, to bless, to protect. That’s what this passage from the Gospel of John reminds us. Jesus prays for his disciples – for us – that we might be close to God.

During the Easter season we celebrate Christ's victory over death and in the Ascension we celebrate his entering into heaven; the two are not identical.

The Ascension is the taking of our human nature into the territory where we were never allowed to go. Our created nature -- our kind of people -- were cast out of paradise, and God posted cherubim at the gates to keep us out. Now, with Christ, our status is raised higher than the angels.

Celebrating Ascensiontide was important to early Christians, celebrating this new reality of not only God with us, but us with God. In the 5th century, times were tough: plagues, pestilence, economic uncertainty – sound familiar? A devastating earthquake struck Vienna. The Bishop got active. On Ascension Day in 470, he sent the clergy and people out into the streets, into the fields, to offer prayers for God’s grace, for relief from these bad events, for abundant crops and a return to prosperity. As the years went by, this custom of processing around the town and countryside became very popular – by the 8th century it was the practice in England, and the association of the ascension of Jesus with springtime prayers for deliverance from pestilence and abundance in the fields was set. In England, the Ascension procession became known as the beating of the bounds – the people of the community would walk the boundaries of the parish, and boys would be bumped, or beaten, at markers along the way so they would into their old age remember the boundaries of the common lands. At the end of the procession, there would be community party, with lots to eat and drink, to make sure everyone, poor and not-so-poor alike, would remember the occasion as one of community spirit and abundance.

We, too, are going to have one of those parties next Saturday. We’re going to walk the boundaries of our PleasantGreen neighborhood, pray to God for abundance, give thanks for the service of our local councilor, Mike Brady, and end with a good party. It is important for every one of us to be there.

These sorts of community events

 are sort of archaic – this one has these old, English ro

ots, kind of quaint and kind of quirky. When I was reading up on them, several of them would end with the disclaimer, “This kind of thing isn’t needed any more. It comes from the days when people could not read, when maps were not accurate, when boundaries would be frequently in dispute.”

But I think “beating the bounds” is a very important custom for a community, today, especially a community like this one – a poor, not very well developed community, a community whose landowners neglect their property, who provide poor housing for their tenants and who allow trash and blight to collect. Communities like ours forget where our boundaries lie at our peril.

I went to college in Washington, DC, where massive sections of the city were devastated by riot and fire after the assassination of Martin Luther King. For decades those neighborhoods, and others, were left to languish, and decay. Middle class people moved out; poor people moved in. The other day on the radio I heard people talking, not too happily, about “the Plan” for redevelopment of parts of the District of Columbia. “Things happen without our even knowing about them,” one woman said. She named several elementary schools. “They closed them for renovation, they told us, but then they were opened up as expensive condos. Of course there are no children left. They moved us out, and moved in rich people. That’s the Plan.” A neighborhood loses its memories of its boundaries, of its heart and soul, at its peril.

On this Sunday after the Ascension we remember that not only is God among us, in the person of Jesus, but through the ascension of Jesus into heaven, WE are now among God. Jesus, who has walked these very neighborhood streets – Pleasant Street and Green Street, Warren Avenue and Main Street – has now taken all of this reality with him. Through Jesus, this is now God’s reality, too. God KNOWS PleasantGreen, just as God knows you, and you, and you, and you and me.

Love and Baptism

Easter 6-B;May 17, 2009
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Welcome, to the family and friends of Olivia Jayla! Thank you, Olivia, for bringing them with you today!

How many of you are new to the Episcopal Church, or to Episcopal baptisms? You know what everybody says: Those Episcopalians are so sweet. When they baptize you, they do it in a Jacuzzi.

The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.
Just stand up and kneel down and say what the others do.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.*

Well, all church jokes aside, isn’t that what has brought us here? Love? “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” Love is laying down one’s life for one’s friends. On this 6th Sunday in Easter, it is all about love.

I think that each child, to the proud parents and grandparents, is the Baby Jesus, and each child is an embodiment of love, just as Jesus was an embodiment of God’s love for all humanity.

Such love of God for the world is often described as sacrificial; God sacrifices everything for us. Well, is it a sacrifice? I mean, when you love someone so much, as a parent loves a child, as love between spouses, wouldn’t you do anything for that person? And could anything you do for a person you love be a sacrifice? Perhaps we humans are not called upon to express our deepest love in that way, but wouldn’t we give all that we are, and all that we have, for someone we love, and not even care? Not even think about it as a sacrifice, as something we are giving up. Love is all there is.

Love can be a worry; maybe those of us who are older siblings maybe once upon a time felt like when a baby was born into our families that there would not be enough love to go around. How many of us can resonate with the honesty of the older brother discussing with his father his new baby sister: “But you’ll still love me more, won’t you, Dad?”

In a world of zero sum games, of collapsing economies and falling values, where mortgages can’t be re-negotiated and wages drop and prices rise, why wouldn’t we think that love is just one more limited commodity? There doesn’t seem to be enough of other things to go around; it stands to reason that love is the same. Could it be that every human being is born with, say, a Cup of Love, and that if you spill any of it along the way, there might come a day when you won’t have any of it left?
That is the trick the world tries to play on us, that there is not enough love, or that we are not worthy of love, or that no one will ever love us.

But what we are doing here today – what God tells us here today, and everyday – is proof that, contrary to all those forces that try to tell us otherwise, we know we are loved, we know how to love, because we have been loved first, and you, who have brought Olivia here today, have wrapped her in that love.

When we baptize Olivia, we incorporate her into an understanding of the world that is contrary to that of the zero sum game. We baptize Olivia into the confidence that God continues to love the world God created – and that means God loves all of the world -- all of the world – the lovely bits, the confusing bits, the forgotten bits, the dark bits – all those bits together, for only a God who loved all of this world, and all of us in it, would throw himself into our lives with the passion and compassion of Jesus.

* Thanks to Garrison Keillor, for this commentary on church life.