A Poem by Don Snow, member of the Community of the Lamb

I had a notion
that emotion
was devotion.

But now I sense
it is obedience.

Calmness Makes a Good Friend, by Pieter Drummond

When I asked my seven year old son what makes a good friend he said, “calmness”. One of the greatest surprises that came from meditation was a personal sense of greater openness and less reactivity in daily interactions with others. Before beginning regular meditation, I felt great stress interacting with family, friends and co-workers. The stress came from always trying to impose my will on the moment, my need to control. This put a lot of pressure on relationships and created a distance between me and others. I was certain about what everybody else needed to do, even down to when they should wash their hands. When my son would tell me what he did at school that day, rather than honoring his presence and following the story as he told it, most of my attention would be devoted to strategizing on how to get him to do what I thought he needed to be more successful. I experienced stress, for myself and others, by taking everything too seriously and wanting to control outcomes as much as possible.

Meditation over time helped me to not take things so seriously to not be so controlling. Even the more challenging unavoidable conflict problem solving with a challenging co-worker became smoother and more productive. This does not mean that I have become overly nice. I am more willing to have difficult discussions around a conflict. At work for example, I am more honest with myself and with others to address and solve problems with mutual respect.

The Spiritual Side of Meditation
Before I learned meditation I thought I was satisfied: I had a great circle of family and friends and a successful career. But, I noticed that my day to day interactions with others seemed repetitive and mechanical. I was set on automatic pilot, preoccupied with a tomorrow that would never come and while the present was passing by: parents were growing older and children were growing up.

Since beginning to meditate eight years ago, “my” understanding deepened from two kinds of learning: intellectual learning and experiential learning. Intellectually, I learned as much as I could about how different spiritual traditions framed meditation as a spiritual practice. Through this I found that each tradition was a path that is designed to remove that which causes us to feel separate and isolated from the divine.

But all of this learning was only as useful as it could be connected to the experiential learning. For me the spiritual practice is where the real transformation happened. As I began using the prayer of the Lamb, I found it to be especially helpful for being open and present in each moment of relationship. In the Prayer of the Lamb I was able to let go of the burden of an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. I did not even have to believe any doctrine to engage the practice but somehow, someway I discovered through the experience of the practice a process of spiritual healing through Jesus.

I am very grateful to the Rev. Beverly Hosea for articulating the Gospel of Jesus that presents the Christian path in a way that is about discovering the spiritual process we are brought into for discovering our being in union with God. In Buddhism for example, it is the dissolution of attachments that blind us from knowing our true nature. In Christianity I find it to be the dissolution of a self-obsessed world view which distorts one’s understanding of being in union with God. By practicing the Prayer of the Lamb I am also developing a relationship with a Jesus as I discover creation happening as God’s continuing expression, a whole new world view.

Pieter

Sermon for 2 Advent at Emmanuel, Mercer Island

Well, we can tell it’s Advent
because here’s John the Baptist
proclaiming the quintessential Advent theme:
Prepare the way of the Lord!

The image that is given for preparing the way of the Lord
comes from the Prophet Isaiah
and it could read as thought it were a scene from the movie 2012,
or some such disaster movie
a cataclysm of the end of the world
or the end of life as we know it.

It is an image of clearing the way
described on a gigantic level – divine road excavation –
to drive home the point that
“…all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Clear all away so that nothing shall obscure the view,
the seeing, the perception.
Prepare the way,
so that we …
so that all will know salvation.

Well, dare I ask the question? What do we mean by salvation?

This is very important because this is one of those key words
associated with the heart of our Christian faith,
right up there next to Jesus,
and somehow we Episcopalians
don’t directly talk about salvation very much.

Salvation is liberation, is being set free;
set free from what?
Whatever imprisons us, constricts and binds us,
whatever thwarts living out our full humanity,
that is, sin,
which is expressed blatantly
in the kinds of greed, violence and hard-heartedness
seen so easily all around us,
and sin
which is the littleness of our minds,
our self-centered focus of attention,
the blinders we wear so as not to look too much
at the human suffering all around us.

We need saving out of all of that.

So salvation is what we realize as the result of Jesus
working intervention in our lives,
and the state of being saved is the outcome of the revelation
of the awareness of the present Jesus with us.

So the John-the-Baptist Advent message is
prepare the way for seeing salvation.

Now, December is a very dark month,
not just for lack of daylight,
this being the time around the winter solstice
when nights are longest,
when seasonal affect disorder kicks in.
December is dark
because it is also a depressing time for many
in grief or want or loneliness,
for whom the holiday cheer
associated with rosy family scenes
and full of happy expectation,
is more like a cruel taunt,
something hopelessly out of reach,
a painful reminder of your isolation and loneliness,
of how bereft you are.

And this year, in particular, December is darker for more people
impacted by a whole year hit hard by the state of the economy.
It weighs heavy on my mind how so many more people that I know
are struggling financially because of job lay-offs or job cut-backs,
or are attempting to refinance the mortgage on the house,
and are rapidly depleting life savings
meant to see one through the end of life,
people living dangerously close to disaster.

It is a time of fear, a time of increased anxiety.

As we look around the pews this morning,
the one you are sitting near
could be facing some bleak aspects of December right now,
or it might be you yourself.

So we are faced with the very real and personal challenge
of living the Gospel in a crumbling culture,
the end of life as we have known it
without a clear view through the terrain at the salvation of God.

Too often, I fear, suffering people just quietly give up
and silently drift away from church; they just quit coming.
They didn't have a connection with or identity with
the Gospel hope such as Paul places before us.

So let’s turn to the epistle for today.

The Apostle Paul, corresponding with the Philippians,
was in prison at the time of writing.
He knew incredible difficulties.
And yet this letter he wrote to the Philippians
stands out particularly among all his epistles
because of its joy.
Why? Let’s take a look at it:

“I thank my God every time I remember you,
constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you,
because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.
I am confident of this, that the One who began a good work among you
will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
It is right for me to think this way about all of you,
because you hold me in your heart,
for all of you share in God's grace with me,
both in my imprisonment
and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.”

Verse 6 again:
“I am confident of this,
that the One who began a good work among you
will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

Now and again we need to hear a message of hope,
not the pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by kind of hope,
but the Gospel story of God's mercy and saving grace and loving kindness.

This kind of hope grapples with all the negative stuff,
and faces up to the suffering which is universal,
so that negativism and grief and disillusionment
do not end up siphoning off all that is positive, joyful and hopeful,
or obscuring from view the tremendous love of God for all of creation.

And notice this tremendous clue given here
as to why Paul spoke out from such a capacity of joy:
“because you hold me in your heart.” (verse 7)

This was more than others just having a warm feeling about Paul.
“because you hold me in your heart.”

Being held in the heart of the community:
what might this look like if we applied that to Emmanuel?

Here are some of the more humble ways
in which we are holding others in the heart of the community:
• taking poinsettias to shut-ins and those who have experienced recent loss
• eucharistic visitors and Emmanuel Friends regularly attending to those whose physical limitations keep them from being with us
• members of the altar guild taking part in the Toy ‘N Joy program of the Salvation Army
• the giving tree in the Narthex and all those participating in that project
• the teachers and mentors offering spiritual formation for our children
• and here’s an important one – those praying and offering intercession
o both at the Wednesday healing eucharist
o and in the Prayer of the Lamb meditation group
o and also people like Ruth Mary Close, who although she says it is now too much for her physically to attend here on Sunday mornings, nevertheless prays faithfully every day in intercession for each name on our prayer list.
She hold the whole parish in her heart!

Other ways in which people can be held in the heart of the community
is in our work of reconciliation, bringing peace to others,
standing by one another
asking how your neighbor is
with the intention of really wanting to know how they are.

These are small ways in which we can be
a community holding one another in our hearts.
And in these challenging times may that Spirit-given love and compassion
rapidly expand within us
to meet much greater needs that are sure to come.

With the Apostle Paul I trust that
“…the One who began a good work among you
will bring it to completion/to fulfillment/to fullness
by the day of Jesus Christ.”

In Advent we recall that the life of the whole church
is an in-between time of waiting, watching and preparing
between the first coming of Christ
and his appearing in fullness in our lives and at the end of time.

But it is also a time of great hope
in which we too can become like John the Baptist
and cry "Prepare the way of the Lord."

BECAUSE our hope is based in God's love for us,
a love so profound that God became one of us,
and was born in Bethlehem
just so that the times of grief and loss,
the times of hardship and difficulty,
could be overcome through and dissolve away in
the love of God
present here and now in the Spirit of the Resurrection Jesus.

And so I would join with Paul in saying:
“…this is my prayer (for you),
that your love may overflow more and more
with knowledge and full insight
to help you to determine what is best,
so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless,
having produced the harvest of righteousness
that comes through Jesus Christ
for the glory and praise of God.”

25th Anniversary as a Third Order Franciscan

May the power of your love, Lord Christ, fiery and sweet as honey,
wean my heart from all that is under heaven,
so that I may die for love of your love,
who was so good as to die for love of my love.


This is a prayer of St. Francis
that has been a challenge and inspiration for me for years.

At the suggestion of my Spiritual Director,
this will be my Franciscan witness to 25 plus years
of living a Rule of Life as a Third Order Franciscan,
not a sermon, but a witness,
an occasion to stand and deliver
about what being a Franciscan has meant to me.

I am thankful for this opportunity to share personally with you this evening.
One doesn’t often get the chance to talk about one’s self.
So here is something of my personal story.

I began exploring this Anglican religious order of Franciscans
who can be married and living in the world,
because, out of the blue, my husband said that he was going to do this,
and he asked me to consider it too.
I never figured out fully his attraction
or even how he came to learn about the Third Order,
but what happened pretty quickly for me
was the discovery of a whole world wide community
with the same spiritual values and practice
as I had been attempting to live out on my own.

This was an amazing and delightful discovery,
and also like finding water in the desert.
I could see immediately how the Rule of Life and community
were going to be significant supports and important spiritual resources
for my own personal work in living faithfully
what I had been baptized into – Life in Christ.

So I began this journey and formation process in 1981
as the Franciscan world celebrated the 800th anniversary
of the birth of St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis became a guide, role model, exemplar, mentor for me
in how I too would be in discipleship with Jesus.
The more I studied Francis’ life,
the more I discovered the depth of this man’s soul,
way beyond the bird bath
and some simplistic and archaic sounding stories
from the devotional book, The Little Flowers of St. Francis,
which previously seemed to me as being overly sweet.

Instead I discovered a complex man who felt deeply
and with great courage faced hard truths about himself.
Here was someone who could ignore what his father wanted of him,
who was not afraid to act counter culturally,
who could give all of himself to our Lord Jesus
when he discovered that Jesus had put a claim on him,
and who would struggle honestly to live his life with extreme integrity.

Now I don’t claim to have walked in his footsteps to the same degree.
For one thing I have never disrobed in public
except to get into a hot tub,
which is not at all making a profound statement
of renunciation and faith like Francis did.

But I have found myself keeping on the look out for lepers to kiss,
and I have kissed a number of them along the way.

The first one I remember quite clearly.
It was 1985, June 8 to be exact,
the day of my ordination to the diaconate,
to which order Francis had also been compelled by the Church.
The big impressive liturgy at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco,
of the ordination of four priests and 8 deacons
came to the final hymn followed by the spectacular postlude,
the toccata from the 5th Symphony by Vidor.
We poured out of the cathedral through the beautiful Ghiberti replica doors
into the balmy bright sunlight,
and there was someone I hadn’t seen in two years.
The last time I had seen him he was healthy and vigorous.
That day as I looked at him I was aghast.
His hair had turned all grey and hung limp,
he had lost weight
and was slowly and painfully walking bowed over two canes.
His face looked haggard as though he had aged at least ten years.
I gasped and asked him what happened.
He said simply, “AIDS.”

Now this was 1985,
and I was currently serving as a chaplain
in a cutting edge trauma and research hospital in Houston.
The impact of the AIDS epidemic was just beginning,
and not much was known about it then,
so the fear was great about how contagious it was
and how it was transmitted,
and all our AIDS patients in the hospital
were kept under strictest isolation precautions.
But here was a human being in front of me, not a stranger
and someone undergoing great suffering.
Without hesitation I enveloped him in my arms and held him
as we both wept.

What I was given that day
was a taste of the sweetness Francis had experienced
when he embraced the rotting form
of a leper confronting him on the road.
Francis later wrote: (from the Testament, 1226)
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis,
thus to begin doing penance in this way:
for when I was in sin,
it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers.
And the Lord Himself led me among them
and I showed mercy to them.

And when I left them,
what had seemed bitter to me
was turned into sweetness of soul and body.
And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world. …

And he goes on to write:
And after the Lord gave me some brothers,
no one showed me what I had to do,
but the Most High Himself revealed to me
that I should live according to the pattern of the Holy Gospel.

Francis has been the inspiration in my life
challenging me always to go to the next level in living out
what I say are my beliefs and values.
In his extreme example of following Jesus in literal gospel poverty
Francis provided me with permission and encouragement
to take my own spiritual journey much more seriously
than the cultural norm,
which affirms being “religious” as long as you are not fanatical.
Extreme spiritual work is looked upon with suspicion,
and for good reason as we can readily see in the world today
with the extremes of fundamentalism in every world religion
that results in spiritual terrorism.

But Francis lived his extreme devotion to our Lord in such way
that others were drawn to life, not death,
to ecological integration, not exclusiveness and separation,
to realization of union with Christ so deeply and completely
that he bore in his body the same wounds of the Cross.

Francis became a welcome beacon light for me,
an encouragement of the possibility of living every more fully
into the fullness of my human potential as a follower of Jesus.

From him I was able in my own small way
to discover the secret of gospel poverty, of non-possession.

A number of you have heard my story
of preparing to take a two year sabbatical
in order to devote myself fully to meditation
and scripture study.
I was delighting in selling or giving away most of my possessions.
But one thing remained – my house.
It had been on the market to be sold for months,
and no one even was looking at it.
The date I was scheduled to begin the sabbatical was rapidly approaching
and this one thing stood in the way.

A week prior to the end of my job and the beginning of this sabbatical
I went to see my spiritual director
and we talked about this concern
about how this one thing was holding me back
from being able to freely and whole heartedly
dive into the meditation work.
He said to me simply this, “Well, you’re a Franciscan aren’t you?
You could give your house away.”

Suddenly the light bulb came on,
and with a rush of joy I realized I could really be a Franciscan now.
I went home and called the diocesan planned giving officer
and told him I wanted to gift my house to the diocese.
He was quite delighted,
but told me that it would take awhile
for all the paper work to be done,
and he would need to be in communication with the bishop,
board of directors, trustees of the diocese, chancellor,
diocesan council, standing committee.
So meanwhile continue to have the house on the market
while he worked out all the details.

The following Sunday people started coming to the door to see the house.
On Monday an offer was made,
and by Thursday we had agreed on a counter offer.
Three weeks later the transaction closed and keys were handed over.
I tithed what I gained from that sale to the diocese.
God’s mercies are so great, and I have been so blest.

One more illustration of what I have learned from Francis,
a significant awareness he has given me regarding sin.
Francis would speak of himself as being a great sinner.
Sure, his youth was spent in revelry and excess,
something he certainly was repentant about after his conversion,
but his repentance went on and on life long.
He expressed his concern that coming so far,
up to the very gates of the Kingdom of Heaven,
he should find himself excluded because of his sins.

One might say,
“Oh, Francis, what a baseless worry.
You are so good, so self-sacrificing, so scrupulous.”
But, no, I am coming to understand what he was saying.
It was not a statement of super pious self-effacing humility.
It was a statement of fact.
The more we awaken to reality, the truth of life,
the more we are aware of the work of the Holy Spirit within us,
the more we are engaged in the spiritual process of discipleship,
the more we come to recognize the subtlety of our own sin.

The gross sins, the blatant sins are not a problem.
It is what is at the core of our beings,
what emerges in attitude and habit and motive and desire.
It is essential in the spiritual life to be brought beyond our self-delusion
to the truth about our huge need for God’s mercy
and of our utter reliance on Jesus
to heal and transform and bring us to the wholeness
in which we are created.

Francis, by all the time spent in deep self-reflection,
gave me permission to leave behind other ambitions,
more recognizable and acceptable to the culture of this world,
and to give myself ever more fully to this excruciating
but also exhilarating process of purgation/purification,
which I engage in meditation practice.
So I am one of many, some 3,000 of us Anglican Franciscans world wide,
and this is my testimony.
I consider myself very blest to be among the company
of other great tertiaries, who are also inspirations and examples,
other Third Order Franciscans such as:
Desmond Tutu
Emily Gardner Neal
Peter Funk (of Funk and Wagnell)
and Bishop Mark MacDonald,
who will be our speaker on January 30
at the Communion With Creation conference,
and so many others I meet at our Franciscan gatherings
when I hear about their many exciting ministries,
and Dianne Aid and Susan Pitchford and Steve Best
and Diane Brelsford and Carole Hoerauf
and Bill Berge and Edie Burkhalter
and Nedi Rivera
and so many more.

This is a fellowship which sustains me,
and supports my heart’s greatest desire in living my life in Jesus.


May the power of your love, Lord Christ, fiery and sweet as honey,
wean my heart from all that is under heaven,
so that I may die for love of your love,
who was so good as to die for love of my love. Amen.

Sermon Nov. 1 All Saints, Emmanuel, Mercer Island

All Saints Day, when we remember all those,
regardless of their acknowledged sainthood, or their obscurity,
who have died in the faith,
the capital letter Saints and the small letter saints,
the obvious Saints and the quiet, hidden and forgotten saints,
a day especially for celebrating all the saints
who don’t have their own day on the church calendar.

And then there’s the next day, November 2, All Souls Day,
when we remember all the faithful departed,
our own Memorial Day.

As we came in this morning
we saw memorialized there around the baptismal font
loving reminders of all those who have died in the last year:
members of the congregation or their family members
or close friends.
So this is a time to be reminded
of the common theme of mortality – Death.

Now these Saints, we may note, were often martyrs,
and all of the Saints are dead.

Saints are different from heroes.
With Saints it’s not all happy endings and success stories.

The reading from the Book of Wisdom states
“In the eyes of the foolish … their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction …
in the sight of others they were punished”

The passage then goes on to say
that they were being disciplined and tested by God,
refined like gold in the furnace, and like a sacrificial burnt offering. This is the discipleship process
that anyone who is a Saint is called to go through.
This is the spiritual process that Jesus called his disciples into.

To follow Jesus faithfully is not just a one time altar call,
being fairly regular in church attendance
and keeping your nose clean.

Be assured that simply by being initiated into the household of God in baptism
we are now susceptible to this refining process in our lives.
It goes with the territory, part of the deal when we’re baptized.

Jesus, the spiritual master, is mightily present with us
as Resurrection Spirit, Holy Spirit,
doing spiritual housecleaning within us.

And I have learned from experience over the years
that if I don’t attend to what needs attention in my life
- spiritually, emotionally, behaviorally, relationally -
life is going to hit me up side the head - over and over again,
as much as it takes,
until I get the lesson,
until I awaken to my need for God’s incomparable grace, unconditional mercy and healing love,
and I start cooperating with,
instead of frustrating, this process of refinement.

You see, I have the belief that we are all saints,
and I don’t mean goody-two-shoes kinds of people
who are always sweet and smiley and self-effacing.

We are people upon whom Jesus has put a claim
and now there’s no use resisting.

You want life to work better for you?
Stop resisting and pay more attention to Jesus.

Remember he was the guy
who told Peter, Andrew, James and John
to push their boats out into the deep
after fishing all night and not catching anything.
And now when he tells them to cast their nets
all the fish in the lake make a bee line for the boat,
coming at the call of Jesus.

But then we humans aren’t half so cooperative as the fish
so that it often takes a lot more to get us to realize
that the One we call Savior actually can save us,
save us from ourselves.
Lazarus died.
He was gravely ill when his sisters sent the message to Jesus,
but Jesus had purposely stayed away
and he even informed his disciples that Lazarus was dead
before he started back to Bethany.
And indeed by the time he gets to Bethany
Lazarus has now been dead long enough in that climate
for significant decay.
There could be no disputing of the fact that he was dead.

Jesus was being very intentional in his delaying
and this was to serve a purpose in the school of discipleship
for Mary and Martha and those with them and his own disciples.
This was to refine their faith in a severe way,
through the intense personal experience common to all humanity,
the death of one we love.

For when we have come face to face with death
and discovered God with us,
discovered that nothing can separate us from the Love of God,
then we know that faith is simply trusting that reality,
and this will carry us through anything
and reveal our nascent potency as saints.

Jesus came to raise Lazarus from the dead,
the brother of two women who had great faith in him,
coming with disciples who ought to know what he could do.
And he encounters
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Here was the Resurrection and the Life
standing before them personified in Jesus,
and they couldn’t look up from their tears
to catch even the possibility of hope
that Jesus’ presence at that moment might make a difference.

It was enough to make a grown man cry.
But, of course, these tears that Jesus wept were more than frustration.
This was also Jesus taking within himself all their grief,
all their sorrow, all their hopelessness and despair.

“Take away the stone,” he tells them,
and when Martha protests
because she anticipates the corruption of the body,
Jesus’ rebuke must have come like a bucket of cold water
splashed in her face.
“Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

Then the only one present realizing faith in Jesus at that moment
was Lazarus – and he was dead.
But the voice of Jesus is not to be resisted,
like the fish swimming into the net
Lazarus responds to those words shouted into the cave tomb
and bound as he was, the burial cloth wound about both legs,
he somehow managed to hop up out of the tomb,
so powerful was that voice.



What they all went through, Mary and Martha, their friends, the disciples,
from grief
to what must have been a huge fright
seeing a dead man emerge from his tomb
to unspeakable joy.
Such an occasion will change a person – most profoundly.

That’s how saints get formed.

Jesus says to each one us,
“Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

We could see the glory of God being worked right here in us
if we would believe, if we would trust,
if we would not resist quite so much.

We would be Saints.
The potential is there.
We can be so much more than we are right now.
That is always the case.
God sees in us all the unrealized potency that is there
God sees us as great Saints,
ones who have gifts and ministries that can
bring living water to thirsty people,
that can unbind people,
that can loose them from all the various ways
in which lives can get bound up in death.

We’ve been baptized.
Jesus has put a claim upon us as his own.
He wants to disciple us,
so that we can be of some good use to the rest of a world
struggling in darkness.

We would be Saints.