This is my sermon from Good Friday. We are using Wilda Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year A. The lectionary for Good Friday was Judges 11:29-40, Psalm 22, Hebrews 12:1-4, Luke 22:14-23:16, 18-56.

Several years ago, shortly before Holy Week, I listened to an interview on NPR with Nick Hughes, a photojournalist who directed and co-produced 100 Days, a feature film about the 1994 Rwandan genocide.  There was immense sorrow in Hughes’ story and also a touch of hopefulness about a future in which such things as genocide will cease to be.  Perhaps because we were about to enter into Holy Week, this interview touched my heart in a way few others have done.

Hughes talked about how UN soldiers, aid workers, ex-pats, and others who were there on the ground witnessing the horror did little or nothing to help the people. He said “All of them betrayed the Rwandan people.” He talked about how, when push came to shove, these people put themselves and even their dogs first and left the Rwandan people – people with whom they had been living and working – to be slaughtered.  It clearly was a story of immense fear in the face of political power and authority willing to sacrifice innocent people to make a point – their point. He talked honestly, with the still raw emotions he carried evident, about his part in doing nothing or little to help the people. 

What he did do was his job, which was to capture what was happening on film.  His job as a journalist was not to interfere or change history, even a history as horrific as genocide. 

He struggled to see how what he did as he attempted to bring to the world the reality of what was happening to millions of people made any difference at all.  He agonized over what he didn’t do, which would have been to step outside his job to try to intervene. He conceded there is some hope if, and I quote, “there’s some belief that Rwandans are human beings amongst an international audience.”

In that interview, Nick Hughes was struggling to forgive himself and to believe he is worthy of forgiveness.  He acknowledged he could not go back and change what happened.  He said, “There is no redemption.  You can’t go back.  Those people are dead, and it will happen again.”

I was struck by how his story of genocide resonated with the Passion of Christ.  As we hear the Passion story and put it in the context of what we know about people then and people now, it seems some things have not changed all that much. 

We continue to struggle with how to do what is good, what is right in the face of evil and political power. 

We continue to put our own plans or needs first, even when faced with almost unimaginable crisis, even when others are literally dying.

We continue to act or, in some cases, not act in ways that ensure the status quo, from which we benefit, is not overturned.

We let our comfort and our fear inform and shape our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in ways that are contrary to the Gospel.

And we continue to wrestle with what that means for us as a people.

In today’s Gospel, Judas and Peter – the one who betrayed Jesus and the one who denied him – don’t sound all that different from the UN soldiers, aid workers, ex-pats, and journalists Hughes talked about.   Afraid of what it would mean to them and how it would change their lives if they spoke up for what is right, one betrayed the one person who could truly make a difference, and the other denied even knowing him.

And then there’s Pilate. He clearly did not agree with what was happening but kind of threw his hands up in the air as if helpless, rather than stand up to the crowds.

And then there are the crowds. It hardly seems possible that no one felt or thought what was happening to Jesus was wrong, and yet we see that kind of behavior all the time in this country. How many acts of violence against our black and brown-skinned siblings, our LGBTQ+ siblings, or our children sitting in schools must we witness before we do what is necessary to stop the violence, to save a life?

Even Joseph of Arimathea, who stepped in to care for Jesus after the crucifixion, sounds a little bit like Hughes and the others who told the story after millions had been slaughtered.  Well-intentioned, perhaps, but in no way did their witness make a difference to the men, women, and children who lost their lives.  And yet, the willingness to do these things is not insignificant.  It says something profound about how we see ourselves, perhaps who we hope we could be all the time.

Nick Hughes said there is no redemption in the story of the Rwandan genocide.  What has been done is done; period, end of story.  And that is where the stories of the genocide and the Passion move in such different directions.  That’s the difference between how we see and respond to things and how God is and does.

With Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, there is no “period, end of story.” It’s a story that continues for all time. The hope we hold is that we will be able to experience the promise of the love of God, who would willingly sacrifice himself upon the cross so that we might experience that love and God’s presence in our lives in new ways.  It is through Jesus’ offering of himself that we are able to better understand the immense love of God for each and every one of us. It is through Jesus’ offering of himself that we are forgiven and redeemed.

So today we remember the crucifixion of Jesus. We sit in the sorrow, the emptiness, the bleakness. In the starkness of the prayers and the depth of the silences, we are mindful, perhaps painfully so, of the choice Jesus made to let himself be crucified.  In this we see our worst selves.  This can be hard to bear, yet sit with it we must if we are to fully experience Easter and the opportunity to see ourselves as God sees us, worthy of a love beyond our capacity to fully imagine.    

In the gift of this striking contrast is the hope that we might all make the choices that would enliven, empower, and embolden us to be people who would actively work to prevent harm from coming to any of God’s people at any time, in any place, for any reason. 

And in this gift is the hope that we will all come to know ourselves deserving of forgiveness and redemption.  Amen.

This is my sermon from Maundy Thursday, We are using Wilda Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year A. The lectionary for Maundy Thursday was Exodus 15:11-21, Psalm 136:1-16, Hebrews 11:23-28, and Matthew 26:17-56.

Maundy Thursday is one of those heartbreakingly hopeful days. We have Jesus’ betrayal by one of his friends. We have Peter saying, “Oh, yeah. I’ll stay awake. I won’t deny you.” And we know that doesn’t happen to be true. And we have all the others, the other ten disciples, who are there, and Jesus is saying, “My friends, this is such a hard night. Would you please just be with me? Stay awake with me in my torment.” Even those who knew Jesus best, who loved him, who had given up so much to be with him in a time in which, clearly, it was dangerous to be with Jesus, even those who had made that kind of commitment, couldn’t stay true to it when “the rubber hit the road.” Their own needs, their own brokenness, their own fatigue, all of their own stuff overpowered what it was that they wanted, what they needed, what they knew they had with Jesus.

I think about that because it’s such a great allegory about what it means to be a disciple in 2023. It’s really easy to say, “I’m a Christian. I love Jesus. I love my church community. I love God’s people.” And for each of us there’s that point at which something about who we are and what we need prevents us from going that one step closer, that one step deeper into the heart of God, because that’s just who we are. We are not perfect people. We are not perfect disciples. As faithful as we are, it is always an ongoing journey, it’s a work in progress, if you will. I think that actually is more than just okay because it is when we choose to continue to be the work in progress, each time we make that choice we’re choosing to follow Jesus, we’re choosing to be faithful.

But it’s still sad. I’m sure it’s the same for some of you: I keep wishing I could wake up one day and be the perfect follower of Christ, and have all the stuff I have to pray that God forgives me for to go “Poof,” to be gone, because my heart’s desire is to be the perfect follower of Christ. But, alas, humanly made, it is what it is. That’s the heartbreaking part of it.

The hopeful part of it for me, as told in this story from Matthew, is the breaking of the bread. Maundy Thursday is the day we in the church believe Jesus instituted the Holy Eucharist. This is the day that Sacrament – which is one of two we have in the Episcopal Church, the other being Baptism – this Sacrament that reminds us that we are a part of Jesus and Jesus is a part of us in a way we can’t fully understand because it is a holy mystery of what it is that we are actually doing when we say prayers over bread and over wine, when we come together and a priest says, “The Body of Christ, the bread of salvation” or similar words. It’s something we can’t understand, yet we know to be true.

As we move through the Triduum, the days between now and Easter morning, let’s us be mindful that there is something truly holy about paying attention to the rhythms of this week, paying attention to the fact that on Maundy Thursday Jesus gave us two incredible gifts: one being the Eucharist, the Table fellowship with Jesus; the other being the footwashing, when Jesus kneels at the feet of his friends and tends to their bodies. We have these two gifts of grace, which we get at the same time as our human brokenness is flashing like neon lights. The cock crows three times and just as Jesus said, Peter betrays him. Jesus says, “One of you is going to betray me,” and Judas says, “It isn’t going to be me,” and then, lo and behold, in comes the betrayer and it’s Judas.

The great hope – it’s the hope we carry through Good Friday and Holy Saturday and into Easter – is that this promise that God has given us to be with us always, to redeem us from our sin, to transform our lives so we become more the disciples of Christ that we would want to be, that promise is right there with us, even as we’re doing some pretty awful things. That doesn’t give us a bye on the pretty awful things, but it does remind us that God doesn’t love us because we’re perfect. God loves us because God is perfect. And that is one of the things that is said in this Gospel, “No what I want but what you do.” All of this is, as much as we might want it, is possible for us because God is who God is and God does what God does. These three days remind us of that in a that reminds us of that in a way no others in our history have or ever will. Amen.

This is my sermon from February 26, 2023, the 1st Sunday of Lent in Year A. We are using A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church by Wilda C. Gafney. The lectionary was Genesis 2:7-9, 15-17, 21-25, 3:1-7, Psalm 51; Revelation 22:1-5, 16-17; and Matthew 3:1-6).

So, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this story before, but I ask you indulgence as I tell it again:

When our daughter, Kathleen, was about 10, she and Ron went to the mall near our house to buy me a gift for my birthday, or maybe it was Mother’s Day.  They ended up at a jewelry store looking at necklaces. Katie wanted to buy me a cross but apparently was getting quite frustrated.  As they both told me later – as did the sales person, who was someone I was acquainted with from the usual parents’ circles –she couldn’t find what she liked. All of the crosses in the jewelry stores in our heavily Roman Catholic area were crucifixes.  Jesus was hanging on the cross. And Katie couldn’t understand why, even as she knew that wasn’t what she wanted.  Finally, she vented her frustration, in what was at that time a pretty uncharacteristic public display of annoyance. 

What she said was, “We’re Episcopalian.  We don’t believe Jesus got stuck on the cross.”

I love Lent.

And I do my best to accept the invitation to a holy Lent that is extended on Ash Wednesday service.  I work really hard to change the rhythm of my spiritual life, my spiritual practices so I can go deeper and broader in some, and I can explore some new or have fun, such as with Lent Madness, with the once-a-year, seasonal practices.  All of that is about how to explore deeper, more life-giving relationship with God.

I love Lent, which is why I was thrown for a loop when I had this thought the other day.

There is a problem with Lent. 

I’d go so far as to say it’s likely a problem with Christianity as we understand it and try to live it.  We get stuck.  We seem to forget that that this is a season about the promise fulfilled.  We act as if there is nothing we could possibly do to make things right – as if this broken world, our messed up lives, our broken and battered hearts are what it’s about, is all that there is.

But what if we stepped aside, what if we stepped outside ourselves and our lives for just a minute? What if we turned around, if we turned back to the garden, to see the promise fulfilled, to see that manifestation of the promise from God that was so frightening, that so threatened the snake that it had to lure Adam and Eve away? 

What if we turned to God and believed in God the way that God believes in us?

Can you imagine what would happen?

No more hunger.

No more fear.

No more pain.

A world in which it was safe for all people to live as God created them.

A world in which we didn’t have to rail against racial violence or systemic injustice and oppression, in which all manner of gender identity and expression was normative, in which guns did not outnumber people, in which we didn’t feel the need to use labels like “female priest” or “Black doctor” or “Asian professor,” because we would really, truly love our neighbors – and we would act like it – no matter if they looked like us or loved like us or believed like us.

A world in which political and economic boundaries would be meaningless because we’d all truly be in it together, so there’d be no attempt to justify war or the forced deportation of infants and children from their families to another country.

A world in which there’d be fresh food and clean water and a healthy planet because we’d value people and creation over profit and power,

the well-being of God’s beloved over our very human and broken understandings of success.

A world in which letting go and letting God would be easier and more compelling than grasping at the empty straws of our brokenness and our rebelliousness, easier and more compelling that holding on so tightly to everything we mistakenly think will bring us peace, will make us happy

This is Lent, the season of preparation for Easter – and not Easter as a one-and-done.

This is Lent, the season in which we seek to better understand what it means to be and live as Easter people.

This is Lent, the season in which we prepare to walk by the empty cross and through the empty tomb to see Jesus and to know differently and more fully what that means for us and for the world.

The problem Katie named in all of her 10-year-old frustrated glory relates to us directly to today.  We get so hung up on a moment in time that moving forward becomes harder than it needs to be. We get so hung up on what seems to us an impossible truth of God’s promise to the world, of the frightening reality that we are created in God’s image to live an Eden-like existence. We get so hung up on our fears that we can’t achieve that, that we cannot let go of our failures, our brokenness, our sinfulness.  We can’t see what lies beyond, and we fail to see the truth, we fail to live the truth, that we were created as part of the promise.

John the Baptist isn’t running around the Galilean countryside in uncomfortable clothes, eating something other than delicious food to hold us in place, with no way out.  He is proclaiming the sometimes harder truth, that we get to choose more, we get to choose better, we get to choose love, and we get to choose love now, not in some distant heavenly place. 

“Repent, for the realm of heaven has come near.” 

Heaven is near enough that we just have to turn around, to turn back to face God and the perfect existence from which we came.  Amen

This is my sermon from October 23, 2022, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost in Year C. The link for the lectionary is here.

When I was in college, many moons ago, I took a political science course about game theory. To say I struggled with this course is an understatement. I could never quite buy into the “there are absolute winners and there are absolute losers” part of the theory. The idea of a zero sum game, in which when one person wins another must lose the exact same amount never sat well with me. Though I didn’t couch it in theological terms at the time, I realized later that I just didn’t believe that in God’s economy, in God’s vision for the world, that this could be true.

I also realized later that some of my struggle was because I am not a black and white thinker. I love the shades of gray. The gray spaces have always seemed to me to be the fertile places, the places where there is possibility, where there is hope.

In our current political climate, where it seems rudimentary standards of civility have been tossed aside, very many people, including people of faith, proclaim an understanding of what is right that seems so very, very wrong. People who deeply desire to be a part of this amazingly wonderful and sometimes crazy feeling Jesus Movement say things, do things, advocate for things that are totally inconsistent with the way Jesus lived. It makes me wonder how there can be such vastly different understandings of what it means to be Christian, of what defines a Christian value or moral. 

It is a Christianity in which there is an “in crowd” and an “out crowd,” distinctions made based on right behavior or belief, as determined by people who think they have it right. And, if they have it right, anyone who acts or thinks differently must be wrong.

They are Christians, so Muslims must be wrong.

They are white, so people of color…

They’ve been living here for a while, so immigrants…

They are men, so women…

They are wealthy, so those struggling to make ends meet…

They work, so the unemployed…

The list goes on and on…

And that way of thinking, which has nothing to do with Jesus, with the way he lived his life, leads to all sorts of reactions and decisions  an ways of being that underscore difference for all the wrong reasons. This emphasis on the difference that separates results in fear and anxiety and more distancing behavior, and this cycle, too, goes on and on.

Pick up the paper, or listen to a newscast, and you cannot help but come across this. People are talking non-stop about how to control others, about how to get people in line with their way of thinking, of their way of behaving. We encounter people working overtime to erect barriers to inclusion, to unity, to the common good, in order to protect their own positions, their own understanding, their own privilege. This is “in crowd” and “out crowd” writ large.

These are not evil people. These are people like you and me, people who want to do the right thing, who believe they know what it takes,  who believe they have the answers to the questions of what has gone wrong. In big ways and small, we all fall into this way of being sometimes.

Now, you may be thinking that I am reading the Gospel in a particular way – the way I grew up hearing it read, in fact: that the Pharisee and the tax collector are examples of a wrong and a right way to approach God.  It’s the equivalent of a zero sum game. In that reading, the Pharisee is self-righteous and Jesus is saying that he has it all wrong. It is the tax collector, who has it right.

But what if it’s not quite that simple? What if the message for us is that faithfulness is not just a matter of doing the right things v. doing the wrong things? God’s love is not finite. God’s love is more expansive, more generous, more forgiving, more merciful, more just than we can imagine. God’s love is unconditional. God’s love is not a zero sum game, and we are not one-dimensional players.

Each of us has a bit of the Pharisee and the tax collector in us. There are ways in which get it right and can offer thanks to God for that, as the Pharisee is doing, albeit gratitude tinged with something of a litany of his righteous behaviors. There are ways in which we realize we fall short and need to ask God’s forgiveness, as the tax collector is doing.

What would happen if we read this Gospel passage keeping in mind that it is part of the larger narrative of God’s love, grace, mercy, justice, and compassion – the source of hope?

Each of us is called to act faithfully and to express our gratitude to God for the opportunity to do so, and each of us has the opportunity to ask God’s forgiveness when we fall short. If we believe in the mind-boggling expansiveness of God’s love, in which there are not winners and losers, but only God’s beloved, humility is key. For it is when we are humble, whether in our faithfulness or when we stray, that we know God is God, and we are not. In our humbleness, just as in those fertile gray areas between black and white, we experience the possibilities, the promise, and the grace of God.

This is my sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Pentecost, Year C. You can find the lectionary here.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is asked by one of his disciples to teach them how to pray.  And in what seems like an uncharacteristic response given that Jesus often responds to questions with yet more questions, Jesus teaches a prayer.  And it is a prayer that we pray together every Sunday and which many of us pray daily.

If we were to outline this prayer, it might look something like this:

1. Praise God’s name.
2. Pray that everyone gets what they need.
3. Commit to a way of living in community and discipleship.

As I read this prayer in Luke’s Gospel with the parable, which Dr. Amy-Jill Levine calls, “The Parable of the Pushy Pal,” I realize that, as familiar as this prayer is, as commonly prayed as it is, I am not sure that we always understand what it actually means.   

I also find it somewhat ironic that a parable – parables being known, perhaps being notorious for raising more questions, causing more confusion – acts as a commentary, an explanation, of a prayer that is known and prayed fervently throughout Christendom.

The Lord’s Prayer, as it is commonly known, is far more radical and counter-cultural than we may realize.  It is rooted in the ancient Jewish tradition of praying daily for what you need to shape your so that you are able to live righteously, and that is “faith” as a verb, what we often refer to here as “living our faith.”  It is that kind of faith that we hope to shape. It is something of a roadmap to living our days as God would have us live them to achieve God’s dream on earth.

Jesus is giving this prayer to the disciples, to us, at a time  of political conflict, at a time in which he is working day in and day out to all attention to social, political, and economic injustice, to ensure that everybody gets what they need to thrive. It is offered at a time in which the institutions and religious legalism make it really difficult to reconcile the way people are forced to live with Jesus’ mission of mercy, justice, compassion, and hope.

The prayer starts with a command.  We are to praise God’s name.  We are to ground everything we say and do in an awareness of the sacredness and mystery of God’s holy name, the sacredness and mystery of the Divine.  We are to acknowledge that God is God and we are not.  And that leads to everything we pray after that.

We ask that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Note that there is an immediacy to this.  In asking that God’s will be done her on earth, we are asking that it be done now, not at some future time when earth is not more.

What we may not understand is that this request is a bit dangerous, at least for those of us who fear the kind of change that is necessary to realizing God’s dream now.  This is a prayer that is all about “us,” all of us, all of God’s children, all of God’s creation, and not about “I.”  Though we pray it personally, we always pray it “give us.”  It’s about building community.

We ask God to give us – all of us – what we need to live each day, no more and no less.  Coupled with the immediacy of asking that God’s will be done on earth, that means that we are praying that all of God’s people get what they need now, as as soon as they need it, not when it’s more comfortable or more convenient for us to do our part. 

This is the choice that the “pushy pal” in the parable is making.  He chooses to disturb his sleeping neighbor because it is the only way he can feed his unexpected and hungry guest.  This man chooses to risk his status as a  good neighbor to ensure that he extends the radical hospitality that Jesus would have him extend.

In doing this, he reminds us that God’s will is not magically achieved.  We are Christ’s Body in the world.  We are Christ’s hands and feet.  We do the work, the on-the-ground work, of ensuring that everyone has what they need.

We then acknowledge that we don’t always get this right.  We ask God to forgive us for our failures and misdeeds.  And we ask this knowing that part of the work God has given us to do is to forgive others for the ways in which they, too, need forgiveness, for the ways they have hurt us and other people. 

Seeking God’s forgiveness while forgiving others is part of the whole.  We need both if we are to be part of the realization of God’s will being done here on earth now.

And then, because we know that in our brokenness we need reassurance that we can praise God’s holy name in all that we are and all that we do, every single day, we ask God to help us stay the course.

This Gospel gives me hope that as people of faith we can make a difference in God’s world now.  I heard this week a description of prayer that brought this home:

Prayer is powerful…Are we living with the understanding that when we pray, God enters into the situation about which we’re praying and uses the work of the Spirit to create real change. [This is my aside:  That is the Spirit who works in and through us.]…

Prayers are aspirational.  They are speaking into existence things that we hope will happen, but do we actually trust that they will?”  (The Rev. Will Ed Green)

I would add to that the question of whether we are willing to risk the kind of change that embodying Jesus’s radical love and hospitality requires.  The Lord’s Prayer is a call to action, which brings with it certain risk that we have to let go of some things we hold dear, some of the ways of living and being with which we are so very comfortable in order to ensure that everyone has what they need.

I am reminded of the adage, “Be careful what you ask for.”  And I pray that God gives each of us the strength and the courage to be a part of changing the world from the nightmare it is for so many, into the dream that God has for it (to paraphrase Presiding Bishop Michael Curry).   Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, preached on July 3, 2022. The lectionary is here.

In October of 2020, seven months of living in a deadly global pandemic in a year that also saw an escalation of deadly racial violence and an intensification of truly frightening political maneuvering around such issues as how to care for infants and children caught up in the debate about immigration, I was weary.  I was so weary that I wrote a newsletter message about being weary.  Although it may be the height of hubris to quote one’s own writing, I share that message with you now:

“Beloved Community,

Are you as weary as I am?  Weary of the constant influx of news that reminds you of how broken the world is?  With the seemingly never ending tide of news about war, about conflict? About an almost unimaginable array of ways we fail to love one another as Jesus calls us to do?  About our apparent creative genius in finding new ways to ignore the call to respect the dignity and worth of every human being and the world? 

Even in the midst of a life that is full and rich and good, on this journey deeper into the heart of God with all of you in this amazing community, this week I have been feeling weary.  I have found myself wondering why it is I think I can make any difference at all to address problems that are far beyond my resources and capacity.

And then, as she so often does, the Holy Spirit (“wild and free” as my former bishop says) reminded me that the call to me simply is to be a faithful disciple, to live my life in such a way that whatever I do, small or not, is done with love for God’s people and creation.  It is not up to me to solve the problems, but it is up to me to be a part of the solution.  And that shifted my thinking, lifting the burden of weariness, at least for now.

I hope this message, from the Talmud, speaks to you as it does to me:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

“Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.”

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Peace & Blessings,

Paula+”

You may be wondering why this journey into the newsletter archives. Or perhaps you get it without explanation.  The world seems even more broken today than it did then.  I find myself just as weary, though now often without an awareness of the energy or resources to do the work that needs to be done, even as I understand that work as a call on my discipleship just as strongly as I ever have.

As I’ve rallied for sensible gun laws on the national mall, listened to a man yell, “I’ve got a gun!” and witnessed hundreds of terrified people stampede to escape the threat, I’ve grown weary.

As I’ve watched the January 6^th hearings and read the news from the Supreme Court, with decisions that strip the rights of women to control their own bodies; Miranda rights, gun safety laws, and climate change regulations diluted, I’ve grown wearier.

As I’ve talked to my young adult daughter about how scared and despairing she is about the future ahead of her, it’s impossible to believe but I’ve grown even wearier. 

And when I’ve thought about how many times we’ve fought these same fights over the years, I’ve wondered if it is even remotely possible to make the kind of difference that needs to be made. 

I’ve been angry. I’ve been afraid. And I have been wearier, more exhausted than I ever remember being.  There are days I feel as if I am looking up at the bottom of my hope, trying to see a glimmer of light to motivate me to do the work that I’ve been doing since I developed a social consciousness, some 50 years ago, all over again as if for the first time.

And then I read today’s lectionary.  That wily Holy Spirit got me again. This line from Galatians seemed to jump off the page:

So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

It was as if the Holy Spirit was speaking directly to the weariness of my heart, reminding me of what I know to be true:  the call to people of faith is to persevere.  Working for the good of all whenever we have the opportunity is an essential element of Christian discipleship.    

It doesn’t matter that the work that needs doing now is work that has already been done.  We work for the good of all.

It doesn’t matter that the resources of a seemingly unstoppable minority of privileged, powerful people can wreak havoc on the lives of a majority of the rest of us.  We work for the good of all.

We advocate for the rights of women and children, immigrants and the poor, people of color and all whose voice is not heard and whose basic humanity is often denied, and for God’s creation.  We grab onto our hope, even if our grasp feels tenuous, less full of hope than it has in the past. 

We do not let the enormity of the world’s grief or our own weariness overtake our faith in the promises that God has made to us and to all people.  Those promises are faithful and true. We follow Jesus, no matter what the rest of the world seems to be doing or not doing. We invite the Holy Spirit to work in and through us, reflecting God’s love and God’s light in all that we are and all that we do. We do this because it is the work we have been given to do. We live our faith.  We persevere. We show God’s love for all people all of the time. Full stop. 

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon from June 26, 2022, the Third Sunday after Pentecost. It was a great day at St. Stephen’s. We baptized two of God’s beloved.

The lectionary may be found here. We use Track 1.

In this week in which we are reminded by congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, and a mass shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people in Norway, of these reminders of our brokenness and the ways in which we struggle so often, so consistently with living into God’s commandments, today’s reading from Galatians some much needed clarity, some comfort, and some hope.

We are reminded that God is a liberating God, the God who will free us from all bondage, including that which we inflict and impose on one another and ourselves.  This is the God of love, God human and divine, the God who gave us the command to love one another and lived with us, lived as one of us, to show us what it means to overcome our fears and our brokenness and to incarnate, to embody, the love of God for all people. This is the God of love, who died as one of us and then rose again to show us that even death cannot overcome God’s love.

We are told that living by the flesh – which is a way of saying living according to our will, as opposed to God’s will – that living by the flesh limits our ability to feel and express the love of God in us and for all people. But when live by the fruits of the Spirit we can be free from all that limits our ability to experience the fullness of God’s love.  And that, my friends, is the comfort and the hope.

Wen we live as God created us to live, as Jesus showed us how to live, as God’s Holy Spirit, here alive with us, will guide us in the way of faith, then , and only then, we will know what it means to be truly free.

Br. Luke Ditewig of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic order, wrote:

What God promises and commands, God also enables.  By the Spirit, we coming more into life, one step at a time.  Jesus keeps telling us that there’s more.  What is Jesus inviting us into?  What might our teachers in our lives and our collective history reflect about Jesus’ invitation into more?  It is not a height to be reached, but a widening embrace of mercy and grace.”

And that brings us to today

Today we are going to baptize Beatrice and Alistair.  Baptism is a Sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” (BCP 857)  “Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” (BCP 858)  That’s the teaching of the Catechism in the Episcopal Church.

In Baptism, we are welcomed into the household of God, reminded of God’s promises and God’s commands. It is a step we take together – those being baptized and the community of faith.  It shapes  us and it forms us in ways that are truly a holy mystery. And it reminds us that we are part of a collective history, the story of God’s work in and through creation since the beginning of time. 

Baptism frees us from the limits of our brokenness. It is the foundational way of accepting Jesus’ invitation to be part of something bigger than ourselves, something so much better than ourselves, something that is about the unimaginable, unconditional love of God for all of God’s people.

We are welcomed into the embrace of God’s mercy and grace. We are claimed as Christ’s own forever.

And then to remind us that is real in our lives today in ways that are more tangible, maybe more accessible, we are welcomed into the love and safety, comfort and security, challenge and opportunity of a community of faith that commits to helping us to grow into the fullness of who God created us to be so that we can better reflect the image of God within us.

We become a part of that widening embrace in which all of the fruits of the Spirit are present and in which we are emboldened, enlivened, encouraged, and empowered to live by that Spirit and to love one another as we are loved by Jesus.

We going to welcome Alistair and Beatrice into that embrace, reminding them of a truth that exists whether we do that or not: God’s love for all of God’s people and God’s invitation to all of us to live into that reality with joy and intention in all aspects of our lives.

For those of us who have already been baptized, we’ll affirm our faith using the Baptismal Covenant, as a reminder that the Spirit guides us every single day, not just the day we are baptized, and that this journey of moving deeper into the heart of God is one we can choose to take each and every day of our lives. Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon from June 19, 2022, the Second Sunday after Pentecost. On June 16, 2022, at a potluck dinner, a man welcomed into the community at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, shot and killed three members of that parish. This tragedy hit close to home for us. The parish was founded by The Rev. Douglas Carpenter, whose sister is a long-time member of St. Stephen’s Millburn.

The lectionary for the day may be found here. We use Track 1.

At the start of today’s service, I offered the prayer from our Presiding Bishop for those who were killed and those who survived the shooting at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama.  I heard about that shooting when I logged onto the internet after getting a couple of notifications on my phone, one being news of the shooting at St. Stephen’s and the other being an update on the arrests of the 31 men who were heavily armed and in body armor on their way to a Pride event in Idaho. 

Though I’m not sure why, because we’ve had a steady diet of these kinds of violent acts, literally several in any given week, but there’s a part of me that is still surprised. It boggles my mind that in a country that has all of the resources we need to stem this flow of violence and death, we continue to lack the will to do it. And I know that it is because resources without the will to use them for good is the civil equivalent of praying with no intention to change one’s behavior and attitudes.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is continuing his healing ministry, his ministry of radical love and radical hospitality. He’s been journeying by boat and by foot all around the Sea of Galilee.  He’s veered off into the countryside away from the shore and then comes back to where we meet him today.

As they arrive by boat to the southwest shore of the lake, he and his followers encounter the man struggling with demons.  We’re told that the other villagers, the man’s community, have been trying to help him.  No doubt, trying to protect him was also about protecting themselves. Demons are unpredictable and scary, but they do try to help him.  He asks Jesus not to hurt him as Jesus is exorcising the demons, restoring the man and his community to health and wholeness. 

Now the man is thrilled. He begs to be able to follow, to travel with Jesus, but Jesus says “No. What I want you to do is to go back home and to witness the Good News of God’s love working in you. The man does just that.  That really doesn’t come as any surprise.  I’d like to think that all of us would listen to Jesus, who has just healed us, and that all of us would do what Jesus asks.

But there were so many other people.  I would have expected that this man’s community would be thrilled.  Or, if not thrilled, I would expect that they felt some relief. Yet that’s not what happens.  We’re told that some were afraid and then, in verse 37, we’re told, “Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear.”  

“Seized with great fear” after witnessing a healing. Why? 

Was it the magnitude of Jesus’ power that overwhelmed them, causing them to feel afraid? 

Was it that Jesus spoke to the demons, giving them what they asked for, only for them to be drowned with the sheep when the sheep flee into the lake?

Was it that the loss of those sheep, their livelihood, meant economic peril? 

We’ll never know. It could have been one of those things. It could have been all of those things. The Scripture doesn’t tell us so I’m going to offer another possibility, and that is:

Even the change we say we want can be scary and overwhelming if we get it, especially if it means we have to give up something important or familiar.  We would rather hang onto to what we know, what we have, even if it is contrary to our wholeness and our wellbeing, and to God’s will. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and there’s a reason for the phrase “fear of the unknown.” We need something to fill the broken places, something to fill the places where fear resides in us or we choose to hang onto it. 

We don’t like to feel vulnerable.  Vulnerability scares us. Fear makes us feel vulnerable because it reminds us that we are not in control. And, for some people, at least, feeling vulnerable and afraid, out of control, makes them feel angry and leads them to act violently. The anger and the violence mask the fear and fill the place in them where the control they think they should have doesn’t exist.

When I read that all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them,             

when I heard about the shooting at St. Stephen’s and the situation in Idaho, when I heard about the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin, and the mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and Uvalde…, I wondered why it is that we can’t trust in God’s love, why we can’t trust our faith to be what fills those broken places.

Why is it that we sometimes act more like the demons in today’s Gospel, asking for what we need and then still going to a place that is about violence and destruction and our own deaths, both literally and figuratively?

Why is it that we cannot see God’s love, mercy, justice, and compassion, God’s grace, for us and all people? Why is it so hard for us to let God’s Spirit, God’s grace fill the place where fear resides?

I don’t have an answer to these questions.  What I do have hope, though I’ll admit in this moment that if it is possible to feel a bleak hope, I think I do. And yet it is still hope. It is hope rooted in Scripture, which is how we’re help to understand God working in and through us.

In today’s story from Luke’s Gospel, as is true in all of the Gospels, we are shown the unconditional love of God for all of us.   I heard on a podcast this week [Terrell Carter on Pulpit Fiction] that “Jesus always goes to all the wrong places, at all the wrong times, and spends time with all the wrong people.” Obviously, “wrong” is a human understanding because for God there are no “wrong” people. There are only people needing healing and wholeness, compassion and forgiveness, love and grace.

In today’s Gospel we are reminded that Jesus travels a long, hard road, literally and figuratively, to give us what we need to fill the places of vulnerability and fear. And all it takes is one teeny tiny crack in our defenses, in our hardened hearts, for God’s Holy Spirit to make her way in and to do what she does best: to work in and through us to guide us deeper into the heart of God, deeper and deeper into that place where we are a reflection of God’s love, and not our own vulnerability and fears.

God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s hope can overflow our hearts and fill all of the brokenness in our lives. That is what happened to the man cured of his demons. And then he does what we should do. He does as Jesus asks, as Jesus would have us act.  He goes and he gives witness to God’s love and God’s grace.  And I have to believe that his witness opened at least one heart, changed at least one life in a way that furthered Jesus’ mission of mercy, justice, compassion, and hope.

The man cured of his demons is an example for us of how live our faith, how to live our trust in God, how to invite God’s Spirit to give us what we need, to empower, enliven, and embolden us to act in ways that bring healing and reconciliation.  That is our call as Christians.  We are to shed light on the darkness, to be beacons of God’s light and God’ hope in the world.

I’m going to end with a passage from the book that Alex’s brother Doug wrote in the book, The Story of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church: Birmingham, Alabama 1972-2008:

Yes, it was cozy at St. Stephen’s, and yes a parish is the best place in which to absorb the shocks of brutality. The parish is also the best place to learn how to respond to cruelty near at hand and far away. Jesus responded to the news of the brutal death of John the Baptist by feeding five thousand people and healing the sick later that day. He responded to the brutality that preceded his own death by spreading out his arms that all might come within his saving embrace. Paul sums up this radical teaching of Jesus in Romans 12:21, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Let us all be the good that God created us to be.  Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon from today, Trinity Sunday. If you’d like to read the lectionary, you’ll find it here. Near the end there is a reference to rainbow masks. As part of our Pride celebration, which also included having a table at NJ Pride, we wore rainbow masks this week.

Today is Trinity Sunday and we are reminded that the nature of God is unity.  God the transcendent, God the incarnate, God the imminent, all one God.  God the creator, redeemer, and sustainer – not separate but one whole, in relationship with and to God’s self and to us. 

This is so very hard to understand.  This Sunday is often talked about in preaching circles as “heretical” Sunday because it is so easy to move into heresy when talking about the Trinity.  I think the Trinity is one of those truths that might be described “within our reach but beyond our grasp.” (borrowing from Rabbi Heschel) 

We are created in God’s image, though no one of us can ever even begin to come close to what that means, to being a full reflection of the divine.  Together – and that means all of us – we can get ever so incrementally closer, but it still is one of those truths that it beyond comprehension and one that takes focused intention, effort, and energy as we seek understanding.

That brings me to the question I ask myself and you all the time: “If we believe in God, if we trust in God, if want to follow Jesus, how do we live our faith?”

Today’s reading from Proverbs has something to say about that.  The last verse feels like the place we need to start:

              rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race.

God delights in the human race.  Not just one of us. Not just some of us.  The whole human race.  All of us.

On this day that we will be at North Jersey Pride, God delights in all of us.

On this day after some of us were at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C, God delights in all of us.

In this week before Juneteenth – and if you’re wondering what is Juneteenth, it is the recognition that it was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation that the enslaved people were told they had been emancipated – that is Juneteenth.  In this week before Juneteenth, God delights in all of us. 

In this time in which it is all to clear that we do not understand what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves, when we let hatred and vitriol and division lead to unspeakable violence and death, God delights in all of us.

No matter who we are or where we’re from, God delights in us.

No matter what we look like or who we love, God delights in us.

No matter the language we speak or the way we know God, God delights in us.

Sometimes that seems as incomprehensible as the Trinity.   How can God delight in us, how can God delight in me, when it is so clear that we repeatedly fail to live into being created in God’s image? When we repeatedly fail to live into the image of a loving, merciful, compassionate, healing, and reconciling God?

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that he understands how hard it is to understand how to live into this truth.  He says, “I have more things to tell you but you cannot bear them now.”  He also says that the Spirit, the third person of the one God will be among us to lead us into deeper understanding.  And, lest we forget, that is the same Spirit who descended upon the disciples and the crowds on Pentecost, opening God’s Word so that all could hear it in the way they needed to hear it.  That is the same Spirit who abides in and with us, and who works in and through us.

And that brings me right back to the question: “If we believe in God, if we trust in God, if we want to follow Jesus, how do we live our faith?”

And once again, the reading from Proverbs has something to say, this time in the very first verse:

              Does not wisdom call and does not understanding raise her voice?

When we know that God delights in the human race, we listen for the voice of the Spirit.

We trust the Spirit to help us discern how to act.

And then, because we are created in the image of God and followers of Jesus, we raise our voices, literally and figuratively.

First of all, we raise our voices in prayer.  We ask for the guidance and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and we ask for the courage and the strength to follow where we are led.

And then we act, which is sometimes known as “praying with our feet.”

We align our voices with and for those who suffer every day from injustices that are really hard for those of us who don’t experience them to imagine.

We march.  We rally.

We send in letters to the editor, if we’re in a place where such a thing still happens.

We write to and we call our elected officials.

We vote.

We reach out to our siblings who are hurting and suffering and tell them clearly and unequivocally that they are loved by God and that we love them, too.

We give them space to express their sadness and their grief, their frustration and their anger, their hopes and their pride.

We do not claim to be experts but to be allies and people who seek deeper understanding in ways that do not put the burden of our understanding on them.

We recognize and acknowledge, publicly as well as privately, that we do not have to have had the same life experiences to know that these our siblings speak necessary truth.

We love them and we honor them.  We celebrate them and their lives, with a whole lot less of a focus on how they are different from us and whole lot more about how we are all beloved children of God.

We lift our voices, literally and figuratively, always seeking deeper understanding of how to reflect the unity of God.

We do all of these things that people of faith and good conscience do to show in real ways – and those are the ways that matter now and in the future – that we share God’s delight in the human race.

And then we keep doing it.  We do it as often as we have to until “this world becomes the dream God has for it, rather than the nightmare it is for so many.” (The Very Rev. Michael Curry)

I pray for you and with you and for us that we continue the ministry of outreach and social justice that is such a hallmark of this place.  We each have a voice – we’re expressing it nowb in a fun way with rainbow masks, of all things – but let us together lift our voices.  Let us together pray with our feet.  Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This Eastertide, I am doing something I have not done before: preaching a sermon series on the Acts of the Apostles. This is the sermon from the Second Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 24, 2022. The lectionary can be found here.

Open our minds that we might hear your truth.  
Open our hearts that we might know your love. 
Open our lives that we might share your Gospel to the ends of the earth.

At the end of my sermon last week, Easter Sunday, I shared an image I have of Mary Magdalen looking back as she leaves the tomb.  She realizes that the tomb is not empty but full of God’s promise, God’s love for all people, and hope for a transformed world.  Jesus has sent her on a mission to share this good news, a mission that we are called to join.  Like Mary Magdalen and all who walked this earth with Jesus before his death and resurrection, we are invited to figure out what it is we do, how we are to be, as people who share God’s love with the world.  It can be a daunting task, this calling to follow God’s Holy Spirit wherever she will lead.  It can be daunting as we undertake our personal faith journeys.  It can be daunting as we discern how to live our faith together, in community.  Daunting as it may be, we know from the Incarnation and the Resurrection that life with Jesus is transformed life, with blessings and grace beyond our wildest imaginings.

Part of the rhythm of our shared faith is that each Easter season, from the Second Sunday of Easter through the Seventh Sunday of Easter, our lectionary omits a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures in favor of a reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  Although not historical in the way we understand that word today, Acts is a history of the origins of Christianity and the Church.   Through the stories of many apostles (those who were in Jesus’ inner circle) and many more disciples, we hear about the trials and tribulations, successes and celebrations of those who responded to the call to share the Good News with as many as possible.  It is a beautifully compelling story about people from all walks of life coming to believe in Jesus and choosing to allow that belief to shape their lives, changing them forever.

Early in this story, in the second chapter of Acts, is a passage that is an integral part of our faith tradition:

“The devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.”

If this sounds familiar to you, it may be because it is the first promise we make in the Baptismal Covenant, the covenant we renew each time we baptize someone.  The four promises that follow flow from it.  The five are intended to help us to better understand how to live our lives in ways consistent with our faith, to live as Jesus would have us live.

For the past several years, since at least the start of the search almost five years ago, you (and then we) have been discerning how God is working in this parish and what it is we are being called to do. This is something your Vestry and Finance Committee talk about all the time.  It is a frequent theme of other conversations, such as in Adult Formation and less formally.  It is conversation we all can engage in, together and in our personal prayer. 

The pandemic and then the flood added layers of complexity and, in some ways, distraction that we had no choice but to accept.  Now we are at the place in which we are not quite as unsure or reactive as we’ve had to be since March of 2020, even as we know we need to remain nimble and flexible, which is always a good thing when one is committed to following the Holy Spirit.   So, we are now ramping up a conversation we thought we would be having in early 2020, after we’d spent a year getting to know each other.

This Eastertide, as we pray and break bread together, we will explore what it means to be Church in a sermon series focused on the readings from Acts.  We’ll hear about Peter, Paul, and Silas, Tabitha and Lydia, as well as some unnamed people. We’ll ask ourselves how their stories, which we know are part of our story, can help us to better understand what it is God is calling us to do now. In other words, what does it look like for us to accept the invitation to walk alongside Mary Magdalen?

Today’s reading from Acts picks up in the early middle of the story with Peter blatantly defying the high priests’ orders not to teach in Jesus’ name, i.e. tell the good news of the Resurrection.  He clearly states that as “witnesses along with the Holy Spirit,” they “must obey God rather than any human authority.”  What happened before this point in the story might help us to better understand how the ministry of Peter and those he encountered connects to where we find ourselves today in ways that may be surprising.

From before the beginning of Acts, which is something of a continuation of Luke’s Gospel because they were written by the same person, Peter and others are on a mission that includes the Scriptures that formed Jesus and some of them, praying for and following God’s guidance, gathering, preaching, and testifying to their experiences of God.  In the telling and re-telling of Jesus’ story, they make following Jesus central to everything they do. 

Their mission is not just about telling the stories that connect the past and history with the present and future – they take action.  They actively participate in many “signs and wonders,” for which they give God the credit.  They commit to doing all things for the common good and to helping their neighbors in whatever ways are needed.  They praise and worship God every day.  There are highpoints, such as the many times thousands of people heard or overheard their stories about Jesus, believed, were baptized, and committed to living differently.  There are low points, such as when they are imprisoned or when a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, try to work both ends against the middle with horrible results.

They are doing all of this in times that sound a lot like the times in which we live today.  It seems as if little has changed in the past 2000 years. There is conflict and violence, devasting illness and oppression. There is so much chaos in the world and in the developing Church.  It seems that since the last supper, the apostles and disciples are being constantly surprised and that life with Jesus is not what they signed for, or at least not what they thought they were signing up for.  So, in some ways, little has changed.  What has not changed is God’s love for God’s people, Jesus’ presence with us, or the Holy Spirit’s desire to guide us to new life. Their stories illustrate how the Spirit works in or, maybe, despite the chaos to bring new life.

What the stories of the earliest Church tell us is that remaining grounded in the faith: relying on Scripture, prayer and worship, good works, and active love of neighbor can change the world in good and life-giving ways.  Holding the usual trappings of success loosely, taking risks and acting courageously in the face of deep fear and even threats, opens our hearts, minds, and lives to deeper experience of the abundance of God’s grace in ways that continually surprise and transform.

Though the specifics of the story in 2022 will be significantly different than those of the story from the first century, the basic premise is the same: 

God is God. God’s love is unconditional and unequivocal. 
We are Easter people. We believe in new life each and every day. 
We are people of faith. We believe in the power of prayerful discernment. 
We are people of the Word. We believe in the wisdom of our holy Scriptures. 
We are Episcopalians. We believe in the ministry of the baptized. 
We are St. Stephen’s. We believe in the power of love to transform us and the world.

Won’t you join your leadership and me as we walk with Mary Magdalen out of the Easter tomb?

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland