Sermon: A Call to the Grateful Way

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Fr. Peter

This is the final installment of a series on developing an ethic of gratitude. As with the others in this series, this sermon is based on the book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from that book.

I will begin tonight with a quote from the 13th-century Persian Sunni Muslim poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic Rumi: “Gratitude is the wine of the soul. Go on. Get drunk!” This quote seems a fitting end to our discussion these past weeks about how we can adopt a sense and a culture of gratitude.

We have spent time meditating and praying, learning and listening about gratitude both on a personal level and on a corporate or communal level. We live in a world today where anger and division is the way. Politics, and to some extent religion, has caused deep divides in our country, in our churches, and in our families. So many relationships have been broken or estranged because of what is happening in the world, fear and anger are dangerous to our souls, but gratitude is good for us on a physical as well as a spiritual level.

There are plenty of reasons to not be thankful, but for us to change how all of the negativity in the world affects us, we need to adopt a culture and an ethic of gratitude. Some days all we can do is be grateful that we are alive and that we get to see another day because gratitude, like interest, compounds and the more we are grateful, the better off we will be.

In the final chapter of Grateful, that we have been reading together this summer, author Dina Butler Bass writes about how she slowly began to feel more rested and more resilient after she started to feel grateful for just being alive. She writes, “Gratitude is not a form of passive acceptance or complicity. Rather, it is the capacity to stare doubt, loss, chaos, and despair right in the eye and say, ‘I am still here.'”

We just cannot let the world get us down, we have to rise above all that is swirling around us and find the little things to be grateful for, like being alive, and slowly, over time, our worldview will change, and all will be right with the world again.

Bass continues, “Gratitude is defiance of sorts, the defiance of kindness in the face of anger, of connection in the face of division, and of hope in the face of fear. Gratefulness does not acquiesce to evil – it resists evil.” It means standing up for something even if it requires sacrificing everything. As Christians, we are called to be part of participants in the resistance of evil in all walks of life, and we face evil and hatred not with more evil and more hate, but love and gratitude.

In the latter part of 1989, during a speech by the Romanian Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, the crowd assembled outside the government building in Bucharest started to chant anti-government slogans like “bring down the dictator.” They were reacting to events that had taken place a few nights before when people gathered in peaceful protest outside of the cathedral church, Timișoara had been gunned down by the military and local police. The people had had enough and took to the streets to bring down evil.

One of the most poignant scenes from those days of fighting was when a group of women walked into the street, face to face with the armed military, and placed flowers in the barrels of the rifles they were carrying. These women risked their lives to make a change in their world, and it worked. Not long after those flowers were placed, the military started to come to the side of the revolutionaries, and the tide shifted. I am certainly not calling us to armed rebellion instead we are to be the ones putting the flowers in the barrel of the rifles. As Christians we are to offer an alternative way to violence and oppression, we are to provide the way for love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

“Gratitude strengthens our character and our moral resolve, giving each of us the possibility of living peaceably and justly. It untwists knotted hearts, waking us to a new sense of who we are as individuals and in Community. Being thankful is the very essence of what it means to be alive, and to know that life abundantly.”

Gratitude empowers us.

Gratitude makes joy possible.

Gratitude makes all things new.

In the words of Robert Emmons from his book The Little Book of Gratitude;

“Gratitude amplifies goodness, rescues us from negative emotions, and connects us to others in meaningful ways.”

Every day there are hundreds if not thousands of reasons to not be grateful and to not practice gratitude. We all have pain in our lives as individuals and as a community and for those things we cannot be grateful. Gratitude never calls us to give thanks for anything that is evil or unjust in the world, for violence, lying, oppression, or suffering. Do not be grateful for these things.

“Gratefulness grounds our lives in the world and with others, always locating the gifts and graces that accompany our way. Gratitude is an emotion. Gratitude is an ethical way of life. It is a disposition, an awareness, a set of habits. However, ultimately, gratitude is a place – perhaps the place – where we find our trusted and best selves.

Blog

Sermon: At Home with God

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Fr. Peter

On Sunday, August 26, 2018, I had the honor of offering the Sunday Morning Worship Service for reenactors and others at the Red Apple Farm in Philipston, Massachusetts. This is the text of my sermon from that service.

John begins this passage with a somewhat shocking image of eating flesh and blood. I know it is surprising to us gathered here this morning but imagine how shocking it must have been to those listening to these words, Jews did not eat like that this is what the pagans did. However, we must get past the imagery and settle on the phrase that comes after that image, “Abide in me.”

What Jesus is inviting his disciples, and us, to do is to be at home in him and be comfortable with him. Many of us sit here today in the role of soldiers who find themselves very far away from the comforts of home and all they know and love. Perhaps this is strange territory for you, you might be from the big city and find yourself in the middle of the countryside but whatever or wherever you are you are far from home and long to be there once again. We miss the familiar sounds and smells of home and long for lazy days hanging on the porch in the sun that is uninterrupted by gunfire and the call to arms. We are always on guard, not unlike our real lives out in the real world for this world of ours is a place where fear often reigns. A home provides the promise of safety and security and a place where fear does not have the upper hand.

Jesus then goes on to make a comparison between the bread he is offering and the bread, the manna, which was provided in the desert for their ancestors. They ate that bread and, as all living things do, they died, not from eating the bread mind you but from life in general. He uses this analogy to show that their ancestors died but if they eat the bread he is offering they will not die. Now they are confused, will we become immortal if we eat this bread? No, Jesus is speaking in the spiritual sense here for he is providing the spiritual nourishment, not the physical food that was presented to their ancestors.

They were being offered a great gift here in the teaching of Jesus, as are we, but they did not all understand nor do they accept this teaching, and they walk away because “this teaching is difficult.” Jesus reminds them that the spiritual is not going to be comfortable it is going to be very difficult because it is calling them, and us, to look at the world and other people in a very different way.

Our culture tells us that we are in control of our lives. Soldiers on the battlefield learn quickly that it is their sergeants and their officers that control their lives, but we 21st-century folks like to think that we are in control. We are taught that if we work hard, we will be rewarded with material things. We feel good about ourselves when we are successful when we have a good job, children who make us happy, we attend the right church, we live in the right neighborhood in the big house. However, in all of this, we busy ourselves in such a way that we miss the good things in life, like watching a sunset or watching our kids play, and we have no time to reach out to those in need.

Many of the disciples that listened to Jesus were offended by his words, and many of us are offended by the words of Jesus. We feel good about serving in the soup kitchen, but we refuse to offer forgiveness to those who have wronged us. We feel righteous when we teach Sunday School or attend worship, but we get annoyed by the little distractions like babies or children making noises during the service or maybe if someone sits in “our” seat. We make religion about the rules because we can control the rules. We can change the books of order and worship, we can use Scripture to oppress others, and we can punish the rule breakers, and we can say who is and who is not a member of the club because all of this is much easier than compassion and love and forgiveness.

However, if we decide to take and eat the bread that is being offered to us by Jesus, if we chose to abide in him and allow him to abide in us, then we are adopting a different way of life. We have to give up the idea that we are in control, sure we remain in control of somethings but others we have to cede to Jesus.

We realize that fear no longer has the upper hand. We recognize that we are no better than anyone else because of our skin color, our gender, or the nation we call home. We turn over to God that which we fear the most, trusting that we are truly loved and that we are forgiven. When we realize that God loves us no matter what and that God’s grace is sufficient, then we become so filled with that love and that grace that it spills from us to others. We can offer forgiveness. We start to look at others differently. Moreover, we realize that we are called to love everyone regardless of who they are, what they look like, or where they come from.

When we abide in Jesus, when we eat his flesh and become one with him our worldview changes our whole life changes, it has too.

Blog

Sermon: The Grateful Society

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Fr. Peter

This sermon is part of a series based on the book Grateful, The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass.

In my “From the Pastor” column in the weekly church newsletter, I share a little about how as a community of believers we should feel a sense of gratitude during worship, all worship. Worship is a communal experience, and it requires us to feel a connection not only with God but with each other, we cannot worship alone, or at least we should not worship alone.

Over these last few weeks, we have discussed gratitude in a personal sense and that we need to look for those moments in our everyday lives to be grateful for. We discussed how gratitude should become a personal ethic for how we live our lives in the present as well as in the future and is the foundation of a good life.

We then moved into a discussion of public gratitude because gratitude is always social, we are grateful when others do things for us, and we like to show that gratitude, or at least we should. Gratitude is joy and gratitude is justice. To quote from Diana Butler Bass, “True gratitude, real gratefulness, the kind of transformative thanksgiving that makes all things new, cannot be quiet in the face of injustice.

In my preaching, I tend to favor the books of the New Testament rather than the books of the Old Testament. I will, on occasion, preach from the Psalms or use an illustration from the Old Testament but I confine my preaching and teaching to the New rather than the Old. Now with that said, I find myself drawn to the Hebrew Scriptures more and more after all these are the Scriptures Jesus and the Apostles used in their preaching and teaching.

I am mostly drawn to the prophets. I believe the world needs more prophets, true prophets, and we need to listen to them. The Prophet Micha is one that I find myself turning to more and more but especially the 6th chapter and the 8th verse;

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micha 6:8

Some translation says to “do” justice and to walk humbly with your God. We are required to “do” and to “act” justly in all situations and at all times, and when we do this, we move from a “personal ethic of gratitude towards a public one. The ‘me’ of gratitude must extend to the ‘we’ of gratitude as an ethic, a vision of community-based habits and practices of grace and gifts. Gratitude is not merely resilience; gratitude is resistance too.”

As I have mentioned before, my theological understanding revolves around the concept of love. God sent Jesus to us, out of love. Jesus went to the cross for us, out of love. Jesus rose from the dead, out of love. Jesus returned to his apostles and others in the Upper Room, out of love. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be with us, out of love. Everything Jesus did and does and everything Jesus taught was out of love, love of God and love of neighbor, the two great commandments.

We hear lots of talk in certain circles about placing the tables of the law, the 10 Commandments, in various places. This summer when I was at my family reunion in Tennessee, I saw several sites that have these tablets erected as monuments. Now I am all for law and order, but Jesus ushered in a new order one that is not so much based on the 10 Commandments but on the nine beatitudes as found in Matthew.

So here is an interesting wordplay. The word “Blessings” means “gift from God” and comes from the verb to bless, to hallow, to make holy. As with most words, this grew into an association with the phrase bliss or happiness, so we have a double meaning of the word blessing, a gift that comes from God and something that makes us happy.

When Jesus climbed up to that high place and began to teach, “blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who mourn, etc. he was preaching a radical message that those listening had never heard before. You see, the blessing was way out of reach for those at the bottom of the social ladder; blessings were reserved for those at the top. The blessed were the bog shots, those with power and money but what Jesus was saying, what Jesus was ushering in was a new radical way of thinking, blessings were available to all especially those at the bottom of the pile. He preached a message of hope at in the eyes of God all were equal and that these blessings were more than mere happiness but a vision of a new society.

Of the nine blessings, seven are plural blessings, and only two are singular in nature. Jesus was preaching that the blessings of the community are more important than the blessings of the individual. “This is not about my blessings this is about our blessings.” This preaching was such a radical thought that at the end of it all Matthew writes; “Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching” (Matthew 7:8).

We are grateful because Jesus came and broke down those walls that separate people and instilled in us a new way of not only looking at God but a new way of looking at each other. If we can see Christ in the other person, then the only option we have is to seek mercy and to seek justice, not for us, but for we.

If we look at the homeless person and see Christ in him, then we have no choice to provide for their needs. If we see Christ in the addicted person, then they are not some drug addict they are a person who needs mercy and Justice, and we are required to help. It does not matter what color their skin is; it does not matter their sexual orientation, it does not matter their legal status we have no other option but to see Christ in them and love them and seek justice and mercy for them, regardless of the popularity or the cost. That is the new society that Jesus was preaching, God’s blessings are available to all, and it is up to us to provide those blessings.

Blog

Reflection: Communal Worship

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Fr. Peter

“…be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 5:19-20

During the Wednesday evening services, this summer we have been putting our focus on the idea of being grateful and how being grateful can transform the world. We started with the concept of personal gratefulness and eventually ended up with corporate or communal gratefulness, and that is what Paul is reminding us in this passage, that we are to be grateful at all times but especially in worship.

Paul is concerned that the end is near and so he is reminding his readers to be about the work of Jesus Christ here on earth, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting those sick and those in prison, and, loving everyone. He is reminding them that they need to do the work for the people as well as the worship of God.

Starting in verse 19 we see the importance of corporate worship and the idea that we cannot worship God alone we need the community of believers. Our worship does not come from some notion of artificial frenzy, but it comes from the Holy Spirit, “…be filled with the Spirit,” “Sing and make music from your heart.” Worship is at the core of what we do as Christians, we are to love others, but we are to first love God with all that we have. God wants our all not just the parts we are willing to share, and we are to do this as a community.

Worship centers us and reinvigorates us, at least it supposed to, for the work of Christ in the world. Worship depends on the connection that we have to the body of Christ and that we are connected to each other, and the worship experience enriches those connections.

“…always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are to always give thanks to God for all of the blessings in our lives, I know it is hard sometimes to see them, but they are there we need to look for them. This idea of always being grateful requires a sense of radical openness to our existence and the existence of others and God.

Having an attitude of gratefulness as well as an attitude of thanksgiving not only in worship but our lives outside of worship, keeps us pointed towards God and will keep our feet planted firmly on the ground.

Blog

I Find No Joy in Any of This

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Fr. Peter

In a recent essay, I outlined my reasons for leaving the Church of Rome. I noted in the piece that my reasons were my reasons and that I was not trying to convince anyone else to leave to explain my reasons why. My reasons are rooted in emotion as well as in theology. As a public theologian, I expect a certain level of criticism of the things that I write, but one remark was not only unexpected, but it hurt me.

I an online conversation about an unrelated topic I was told that the other person was “wounded by all your obvious joy at the plight of the Roman Church.” My response was that I did not realize I had any joy in the plight of the Roman Church for I do not find any joy in any of this.

I find no joy in the unknown number of lives that have been destroyed by the perpetrators of child sexual abuse.

I find no joy in a system designed to care more for an institution than people.

I find no joy in the smugness of church leaders as they attempt to push the blame on to the victims of their crimes.

I find no joy in the countless number of the faithful that has had their faith shaken to the core or perhaps have lost their faith over this.

I find no joy in people who chastise those I just mentioned and say things like “they never had real faith in the first place.”

I find no joy in seeing for sale signs in front of a church that generations of people not only worshipped in but, in many cases, sacrificed time and resources to build and sustain.

I find no joy in the countless numbers of victims that still have not come forward or for those who have taken their own lives because of the abuse they suffered at the hands of clergy and the abuse they faced at the hands of the church after.

I find no joy in the billions of dollars this has cost the Church of Rome, dollars that should have been used to alleviate the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised.

Moreover, I find no joy in the damage this, and abuse in other religious institutions and the subsequent cover-up, has done to the witness of Jesus Christ. Yes, this has damaged the witness of all churches and the ministry and mission they have.

Simply put, I find no joy in any of this, in fact, it sickens me to my very core.

Blog

Why I left the Church of Rome

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Fr. Peter

This has not been the easiest piece I have ever written, I have struggled over this piece for several years writing and re-writing it, but now I feel it is time. I have delayed publishing this for a variety of reasons many of them personal but with the recent news of an investigation into the practices at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts as well as the releases of the report in Pennsylvania it just seemed like the right time. My decision to leave the Roman Catholic Church is complex and based partly on theology and partly on emotion and for me it was the right decision.

I want to say at the very start, that I know there are many, many faithful priests and bishops and many, many faithful lay people in the Roman Catholic Church and my heart aches for them as their church continues to grapple with the continuation of the revelations of child sexual abuse. This is my story and my story only. The other point I will make is I will be using the term Catholic here not in the universal sense of the word but only for ease.

For as long as I can remember I had wanted to be a Catholic priest. During my senior year in high school I applied to St. John’s Seminary College here in Boston. Let me say that I was not the best student in high school and I spent more time in the band room then the classroom and that was reflected in my grades. The priest running the school felt I would not be able to handle to rigorous educational requirements of the seminary college and suggested I enroll in a Junior College for a couple of years and try again. I did not take this news very well. I had spent the last; I am not sure how many years, dreaming of going to school to become a priest and now it was gone. So, I joined the United States Army.

I am going to skip over a bunch of years here, but during my time in the Army and for many years after, I experimented with a lot of different churches from Southern Baptist to Episcopalian, but I always came back to Rome. There was something always calling me back; I used to think it was the candle that continually burns outside the tabernacle in Catholic Church that signals, as I used to say when I was an altar boy, that Jesus was home. I returned home from the Army, enrolled in college and discovered another world.

After more denominational experimentation I ended up as a member of a Benedictine Monastery where I finally felt like I was home. I stayed there for some years, but I don’t think I was every truly settled there. I not sure why I decided to leave but I did and began teaching middle school, but still felt drawn to the priesthood.

In my fifth year of teaching I reapplied to St. John’s Seminary, it had now been about seventeen years, a little longer than the two years that had been suggested by the earlier, but I was accepted, and in August of 2001 I moved into the seminary to begin a six-year program of priestly formation.
Let me pause here to say that at that time, St. John’s had a world-class faculty of theologians. Some of the best minds in the Church were on the faculty there and some of the best practitioners of the spiritual arts, what we call spiritual direction, were also on the faculty. It was also a house of prayer and, like the monastery, we would gather in the chapel several times a day to pray. It was a fantastic experience.

September of 2001 saw the attacks on New York and Washington, DC and our world would never be the same again. We struggled as a community about what to do. I was serving in the National Guard at the time, and there was always the threat of a call-up. Several other seminary students also served, and we were concerned about what was going to happen in the near future. We tried to continue with our studies as the world changed around us outside of the walls of the seminary.

As was the custom, the seminary students and faculty spent a week on a retreat before the start of the Spring semester. We came out of that retreat to the front page news of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. This report was the culmination of months of research by the Spotlight Team of the Boston Globe that was turned into the movie Spotlight.

Describing the mood around the seminary at that time is hard. These allegations were hard to believe, and almost immediately some students started to call the reports false and fabricated in an attempt to discredit the church and their beloved Cardinal Law. For weeks after the news broke the student body started to divide amongst those who believed it and those who did not. There were arguments at meals and in small areas of the seminary, but it was never really discussed on an institutional level.

Almost immediately groups of seminarians formed, as far as I know on their own, with the explicit task of rooting out the “gays” in the community and one seminarian told me that is was “his calling from God to ensure that certain people were not ordained.” I was glad it was not my job. Support for Cardinal Law was at an all-time high, and if you had the slightest thought of not supporting him, you would be “outed” by what I and some of my fellow seminarians started calling them, the “brown shirts.”

Fast forward, Cardinal Law resigned in disgrace and was shuttled off to Rome and given a cushy job, and the Rector of the seminary replaced him and in his place came a man who was anything but a pastor and is one of the main reasons I left. I saw many a good man run out of the place because they did not match up with what the Rector thought a good priest should be. Seminary is a time of discernment for the seminarian as well as the faculty, but this one man had taken it upon himself to rid the place of guys he determined were unfit.

I know this seems rambling, but my decision to leave was a complicated decision based on many factors, some had to do with theology, and some had to do with personalities.

When a student comes to the seminary, they have to be sponsored by a bishop. When I entered, I was sponsored by the Archdiocese of Boston. During my second year of studies, I switched sponsorship from the Archdiocese of Boston to the Eastern Rite Catholic bishop of the Romanian Catholic Church. This was another complex decision that I cannot explain here other than to say I wanted to be as far away from the Archbishop of Boston as I could.

My studies continued as well as discernment. As I previously mentioned, discernment is a large part of the program of priestly formation, and a great deal of emphasis is placed on this. As students, we had a faculty advisor as well as a spiritual advisor that we met with on a regular basis. These times, as well as the prayer times, were designed to assist us in determining if we honestly had “the call” to be ordained. Seminarians leave for a variety of reasons, and that is the idea of the program to “test” your vocation is you will. Some come and stay right up until the point they have to seek ordination and other leave after a semester; this is how it works. I started to have doubts, not about the calling but about the vows I would have to make at ordination.

As I approached my final year of studies, it was the time for ordination to deacon. Although the office of deacon in the Catholic Church is a permanent state when one is seeking ordination to the priesthood, it is a transitional step and is the first ordination. I was ready, or so I thought I was, but the bishop had others thoughts and decided, a week before my ordination was to take place, to postpone my ordination. I was of course devastated, but it did give me time for further discernment about one specific area, obedience.

Men being ordained in the Roman Catholic Church make three vows, poverty, chastity, and obedience, and it was obedience that I had the most difficulty.

Obedience is not a vow in the abstract; this is a personal vow. During the ordination ritual, the person being ordained kneels before the bishop, places his hand in the hands of the bishop, looks into his eyes and promises obedience to him and his successors. This is a personal vow between the person being ordained and the bishop, and I had a great deal of difficulty with this.

My theology teaches me that humanity is flawed and we are not perfect. My theology also informs me that these flaws flow into the church and that because of that, humanity running the church, the church also has flaws. My theology also taught me that the validity of the sacrament was not hinged on the sanctity of the person performing the ritual, in other words, the person was merely the vessel, and the Holy Spirit worked through them, so it did not matter if the person was a sinner or not. However, I was still having difficulty vowing obedience to a man, a bishop, that was part of an institution that perpetrated a massive cover-up that led to the continuation of sexual abuse of minor children not only in the Archdiocese of Boston but across the globe. The very institution I was to vow obedience to was rotten from the top down, and I could not do it.

For three years I had sat and watched an institution, run by men whose life calling was to serve people, care more about the preservation of the institution than the people. I watched press conference after press conference with Cardinal Law and others with their smug attitudes towards victims. I listened to my fellow seminarians say the vilest things imaginable about victims and others, most of those guys went on to be ordained priests and several of them have since left involved in their sex scandal. I listen to excuses after excuses for why this happened, and I was not buying any of it. I watched as Cardinal Law was whisked off to Rome and given a cushy job there while many of the victims of the clergy in Boston were killing themselves. I could not place my hands in the hands of a bishop and vow obedience to him and his successors, so I left.

My decision was based on emotion, and it was based on theology. For me, it was the right decision, and although I sometimes regret the choice, I believe it was the right one. I dearly love the ritual of my youth and my formation and spirituality, for the most part, will always be Roman Catholic. It pains me to see what all of this is doing to the great and holy priests that are just trying to make a difference. It hurts me to see that this is doing to the faithful of the Catholic Church who is trying to make sense of it all. Moreover, it pains me for the victims that were first abused by a priest and then abused again and again and again by an institution that could care less about them until they were exposed.

It has recently been reported that this scandal has cost the Roman Catholic Church close to $3 billion but what has it cost in the human, and the spiritual? What sort of damage has this done to the witness of Jesus Christ in the world? This has tormented the souls of countless numbers of people, those abused, their families, and to a certain extent the faithful and each time additional revelations happen it reopens those wounds.

I do not expect anyone to agree with me or my decision but it is my decision, and they are my reasons.

Blog

Sermon: Thankful and Festive

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Fr. Peter

Back in the early 90’s, I was participating in a study abroad program for a college course I was taking. I was a biblical studies major with a focus on missions, and the country was Romania. Romania is, as it was in the 1990’s, an interesting place. Although my attention was on missions, the broader topic of my study in Romania was on cultural sensitivity and cultural inclusion.

Before leaving the United States, I studied, as best I could from the available books, the culture of Romania and her people but upon my arrival, the study went into high gear. Romanians, by and large, live off the land. The country was once called the “bread basket if Europe” since they produced much of the food for Europe, but due to poor farming practices over the last generation that had changed. What had not changed was that bread was a large part of every meal.

No matter where you went, bread was baking. Driving through the street of Bucharest or some small village in the Carpathian Mountains, bread was baking in small and large bake shops, and people stood in line each morning for the fresh bread that would last them the day. In the villages of the countryside, the first item on the agenda of the day was to bake bread. To Romanians bread was life and to not have bread with a meal was, well, to not have life.

Bread is central to Christianity as well in the form of the Lord’s Supper that we celebrate as one of the two Sacraments of the Church. We do not believe that anything changes about the bread and the juice that we serve when we pray over it, but I think that it becomes sacred in the sense that it is through those simple elements of the earth, bread, water, salt, yeast, wine, or juice, that we are drawn closer to God and each other.

When we, as a community celebrate the Lord’s Supper, it is a sacred moment of communal worship. The Greek word that forms the English word Eucharist comes is derived from two Greek words, eu, meaning well and kharis, meaning favor or grace. The word Eucharist means “gratitude.” Bread is blessed and shared, to remind us that food is sacred and it gives life to our bodies and is a gift from God grown out of his creation. Wine or juice is blessed as a reminder that drink comes from God, it is a gift that brings joy and warmth to our souls.

Jesus reminds us in the passage of scripture we heard tonight that He is the bread of life. Jesus is the essential part of our lives, and He is a gift from the Father to us. Jesus also reminds us that whoever eats of the bread will never hunger again, not in a physical sense but a spiritual sense. We come to Him, spiritually and communally, and get our fill of Him and His Word as a gift from God and we are to take that gift and give it to others.

One of the spiritual gifts I have received from my coming to the Congregational way of life is that the table of the Lord’s Supper is open to anyone to come. In many, many churches communion, Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper is used as a weapon or a way to divide the Congregation. You can only partake if you are a member of the club. Sadly, I used to believe this and then I meditated on the scene of the Last Supper.

All of Jesus’ disciples were present with him in the Upper Room that night. All of them. Peter who would deny him, the others who would run off and desert him at his hour of need, and Judas, the one who would betray him and hand him over to death. They were all there, and they all participated. Jesus gave himself, spiritually through the elements of bread and wine, to everyone, even those who would destroy him. What a powerful message this was to me.

We come to the table of the Lord not because we are prepared but to be prepared. We come because Jesus is the bread of life and if we eat, we will never hunger again. We come to the table not as individuals but as a community, and we receive, and we eat together, as a community, and we are satisfied as a community.

Jesus commands us to do this in remembrance of him but what is this “this” that he is commanding us to do. Jesus is commanding us to break ourselves open for others. To share the gifts we have been given, large and small, with others. Jesus is commanding us to share our lives with others and to allow them to share their lives with us. Our gratefulness comes when we see the Christ in others, and we allow others to see the Christ in us.

Jesus IS the bread of life, and all who come to him will never hunger or thirst again. Ask yourself this question this week, am I leading people to or am I driving people away from the food that will satisfy them? Am I building walls to keep people out or am I clearing paths that will allow people to come and receive all they need?

Jesus IS the bread of life and whoever comes to him (notice there are no qualifications) will never be hungry and whoever (notice no qualifications again) believes in me will never be thirsty.

Blog

Reflection: I am the Bread of Life

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Fr. Peter

“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” John 6:35

One of my favorite spiritual recording artists is John Michael Talbot. JMT, as I will call him, is the founder of the Little Portion Priory, a Roman Catholic group of men and women based in Texas. JMT’s music is meditational, and it has allowed me, over the years, time to sit and reflect on the words of the song without a lot of shouting and banging on in the background of so much of today’s spiritual music.

In 1989, JMT released a new song called, “I am the Bread of Life” that is based on the scripture passage I have quoted above. Here are the lyrics to the song:

I am the Bread of Life
All who eat this Bread will never die
I am God’s love revealed
I am broken that you might be healed

All who eat of this heavenly Bread
All who drink this cup of the covenant
You will live forever for I will raise you up

I am the Bread of Life
All who eat this Bread will never die
I am God’s love revealed
I am broken that you might be healed

No one who comes to Me shall ever hunger again
No one who believes shall ever thirst
All that the Father draws shall come to Me
And I will give them rest

I am the Bread of Life
All who eat this Bread will never die
I am God’s love revealed
I am broken that you might be healed

For the ancients, and for many today, bread is a staple of their diet and to have a meal without bread would be incomplete. With these words of Jesus he is telling us that he is what completes us on a spiritual level and although we hunger for more and thirst for more, with him, we will be satisfied as he is the bread of life.

This song and the associated scripture is a reminder to us that spiritually if we come to Jesus, we shall never hunger or thirst again. Many of us are always searching for that thing, that something, that will complete us on a spiritual level when it is right there in front of us. What do we hunger and thirst for?

Blog

Reflection: “I am the bread…”

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Fr. Peter

“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” John 6:35

In the 19th century, China hungry people were coming to Christian Churches in large numbers. Churches of that time were providing food when food was scarce in the community, and the church was one place where people could be fed. The problem was after they no longer needed the free food they left the church. Church leaders gave these people a name; they called them “Rice Christians.” They were consumers of the church rather than disciples.

When speaking with people about the church I often hear the comment, “I get nothing out of church so why should I go?” My typical response is that we get out of it what we put into it.

Too often we who are in church leadership fall into the trap that church has to be entertaining. What this is saying is that we are playing into the consumer church mentality and as soon as the church stops being fun people will leave and move on to a place where they can be entertained. The mission of the church is not to entertain, the purpose of the church is to make disciples and making disciples is hard work.

Jesus encounters a group of people who heard about the feeding of the 5,000. They are attracted to Jesus because of the miracle, and they wish to declare him King. Remember, the people who came in search of Jesus were in search of a political and military, and after speaking with Jesus, they discovered this was not to be the case.

They came to Jesus and asked him for another sign, like feeding all of those folks with a few loaves of bread, and a couple of fish was not enough, but they wanted to be entertained, so they asked for a magic show. Rather than entertain them, he told them that He was the bread of life, spiritual life, and all that seek him out would not leave hungry or thirsty. We should seek after Jesus not seek after flashing lights and floor show.

In the end, most of those who came left because they did not get what they wanted, entertainment. The road that Jesus was putting before them required work on their part. Jesus was not going to snap his fingers and save them, he expected them, and us, to put the hard work in. Jesus offers us a way of life but that way of life requires change, and we have to be willing to change.

So, if the church is not offering anything for you, perhaps the problem is not the church but our thinking. The church offers, through Jesus Christ, life but that life requires work, and if we are willing to do the work, we will never be hungry or thirsty.

Blog

Sermon: Grateful Together

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Fr. Peter

During the summer months the church I serve hold their weekly worship service on Wednesday nights. This summer we are reading the book Grateful, The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Dianna Butler Bass. This reflection is based on chapter 5 and all references are from the book unless otherwise noted.

Last week we spoke about individual gratitude and the need for us to make a conscious choice to be grateful as well as to seek out those positive moments in our lives. I reminded us that positive moments are all around us and all we need to do is look for them and hold on to them. Tonight we are going to expand upon the personal side of gratitude with a discussion about collective or community gratitude.

Gratitude is not something we can do alone. Sure, we might be all alone on a hillside, watching the sunrise, but when we have the sensation of gratitude it is for the sunrise, for the place where we are, for the time to be there, and perhaps, for God for, once again, providing a beautiful sunrise for us to witness. So we are “grateful for something, grateful to someone, and, often, grateful with others” (Bass pg. 97).

Gratitude always points toward someone or something else the “‘me’ always leads to ‘we'” (Bass pg. 97). When we are grateful, we acknowledge that we are part of a much larger world and that there exist people around us who are also grateful and perhaps, are there to help us and perhaps, we are there to help them. However, “gratitude is not about repayment of debts. It is about relationships” (Bass pg. 98).

On June 17, 2015, thirteen people gathered in the basement of the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charlottesville, South Carolina. There were there for bible study and prayer. This group gathered each week in this historic black church, the oldest black church south of Baltimore, for prayer and study. It was in this church in 1822 that Denmark Vessey and 34 others were hanged because they were suspected of planning a slave revolt in the town. This church is no stranger to hate.

But about 9:00 pm as the bible study was coming to an end and all of the heads in the room were bowed, a 21-year-old man took a gun out of his backpack and started shooting, he reloaded five times and, before he fled the room, 9 of the 13 people there were dead including the pastor. The survivors reported that, while he was shooting, he screamed, “I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” The young man was later caught, tried, convicted, and now faces the death penalty for his hate.

However, the most extraordinary thing happened later that night and the next day. Church members began to gather to support each other. By all accounts, the church is a very close-knit family, and they needed to be together to help one another. The press was gathering and started asking questions of the church members, and they were shocked when member after member started talking about forgiveness and how they needed to forgive this young man for what he had done and for what he had taken from them. At the sentencing hearing they came and pleaded for his life, but their plea fell on deaf ears. The spoke of the need to show this young man love and that killing him would remove that, and that love would turn to hate, and they would be no better than him if his life were taken.

This is an extraordinary example of gratitude. They were grateful to be alive, but they were also grateful that they had the capacity to forgive someone who hated them with such a passion that he had to resort to violence.

There was one story that reported the shooter saying that he almost changed his mind because they were so friendly and accepting of him but unfortunately his hatred ran too deep, and he carried out his plan.

Gratitude is not about repayment it is about relationships, their strength and their healing came through the community, and it has been an example for me and my ministry since it happened.

Gratitude is a social concept, and it is about being with one another and being in life together. There is a thread that is woven between us which is very fragile, and these strands weave our lives together.

As much as we need to develop that ethic of gratitude on a personal level, as we spoke about last week, our most profound expressions of gratitude move us out of our own self and our own isolation and into a connection with the community. Gratitude is powerful and can transform us and transform a society.

The best part is gratitude is contagious and can spread but it needs to have a start, a foothold, and that begins with us. Gratitude should connect us all, and that means to connect us all across racial and ethnic lines which will allow all of us to unite as a community rather than being isolated and only concerned about ourselves.

However, be warned, gratitude will change us, and we will start to look at people differently. The young man who pulled the trigger in the church almost changed his mind because he was grateful for how he had been treated, perhaps this was the first time anyone had treated him with kindness, but they almost, by their expressions of love, almost convinced a killed not to kill.

Gratitude comes when we least expect it, but, sometimes we have to look for it. Let us pray that we can be as grateful as the saints at Mother Emmanuel and rise to that level of gratefulness and love in our lives and in our community.