In high school I worked as a groundskeeper on a family owned and operated golf course.  The owner’s son and I were mostly responsible for keeping the course well groomed, the greens in good shape, and the sand traps well raked.  On occasion, however, we were tasked with weeding the flower beds and boxes that adorned some of the tees and the Clubhouse.   It would be an understatement to say that weeding wasn’t one of my boss’s favorite tasks.  His approach to weeding gardens and flower boxes was to get it done as quickly as possible.  “All we have to do is make it look good for my sister,” he would say.   And he offered two axioms to guide our work:  The First:  “If in doubt, pull it out.”  The second was like unto the first:  “If it don’t look right, yank it out of sight.”  One thing was certain, we could weed a bed of flowers in record time and have the gardens looking “perfect”–well pleasing in his sister’s sight,  in short order.

At least that’s how we saw it.

There’s no telling how much innocent chlorophyll stained our hands.

Weeding can be a dangerous activity: an exercise of judgement, bias, control; a violence against what one sees as out of place or unknown; things unrecognized or believed to be wrong.   Perhaps this is why Jesus suggests that weeding be left to angels–to himself, the master gardener.  Let the business of growing and bearing fruit be ours, the work of weeding be left to divine love.

I am taking the next two weeks away from the Diocese to nurture the garden in my own soul.  Patricia and I are traveling to Rochester and Sodus Bay in NY to spend time with my children and our granddaughter, Piper, who is now 17 months old. We are also looking forward to spending time with my parents. We haven’t been together since Christmas.   While it might not necessarily be a “quiet” time away, we know it will be peaceful, refreshing, joyful and bear much fruit.

The petitions and responses remind us that while we have much to celebrate, honor, respect, and for which to offer our thanks; we as a people must not fall into idolatry of our nation.  We must not conflate religious and political authority, nor accept that our nation has achieved and represents God’s righteous Kingdom, denying our shortcomings, our abiding injustice, inequality, and exploitations of people and the earth.

As we celebrate this July 4, let us give thanks that we have the freedom to worship God, to discern God’s righteous will, and to pursue God’s justice and peace as revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord.  In our celebrations may we remember that this nation–or any nation, is not the Kingdom of God, but always in need of healing, forgiveness, inspiration, enlightenment, and renewal.

Though citizens of this nation, we are first and foremost, citizens of God’s Kingdom.  May we never tire in our witness to the higher calling of God’s righteous Kingdom; and may we be strengthened in our work and service to the Kingdom’s justice, peace, and righteousness as citizens of this nation.

Heal us.  Forgive us. Inspire us. Enlighten us.  Renew us.

Happy 250th.

The Litany of Thanksgiving for the Nation (BCP pg. 838)

Almighty God, giver of all good things: We thank you for the natural majesty and beauty of this land. They restore us, though we often destroy them.
Heal us.

We thank you for the great resources of this nation. They make us rich, though we often exploit them.
Forgive us.

We thank you for the men and women who have made this country strong. They are models for us, though we often fall short of them.
Inspire us.

We thank you for the torch of liberty which has been lit in this land. It has drawn people from every nation, though we have often hidden from its light.
Enlighten us.

We thank you for the faith we have inherited in all its rich variety. It sustains our life, though we have been faithless again and again.
Renew us.

Help us, O Lord, to finish the good work here begun. Strengthen our efforts to blot out ignorance and prejudice, and to abolish poverty and crime. And hasten the day when all our people, with many voices in one united chorus, will glorify your holy Name. Amen.

A cup of cold water given to a little one—a child, seems a pretty low bar as an expression of care, welcome, or hospitality. But what if we imagine that “little one” refers not  just to a child, but also to someone whom the powerful and privileged in this world see as “little,” someone in their eye unworthy and below contempt, someone who even the offer of a cup of cold water seems like a priceless sacrifice beyond or well above someone so undeserving.  Those considered the least in our world can be identified by where water is withheld or where water rights and clean water are denied:  low-income communities, tribal lands, detention centers, to name a few.  Sometimes even a cold cup of water seems too much to give.

You can’t get water from a stone, especially a heart of stone.

One of the recurring themes of scripture, however, is God making  water  flow from stones.   In the book of Exodus, when instructed by God, Moses strikes a rock at Meribah and water gushed out to the relief of the angry and quarrelsome people.  Zechariah speaks of living water flowing out of Jerusalem—the “foundation stone” of all creation.  And Ezekiel offers a vision of life-giving water flowing from the Temple, bringing healing and life wherever it goes.

God can make water flow from the most unlikely sources, and offers this water for the life of the whole world—the WHOLE world. “…But whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.  Indeed the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  John 4:14.

Jesus offers living water for the life and healing to all creation.  He offers it abundantly to and for all of the “little ones,” to me and to you and to our neighbors.  This living water is a divine welcome given to us in Jesus:  a cup of cold water to refresh us and wash away from our hearts the hardness of our prejudice, cruelty, greed, and selfishness.

A heart filled with the living water of God—the living water that Jesus gives all human hearts, will likewise flow from those hearts with generosity, welcome, and healing for all the world’s little ones.

Can you give  a cup of cold water for one of these little ones?

Compassion. I’ve heard it said many times over the years that compassion is in short supply in our world.  As much as my hopeful spirit doesn’t want to believe this, and despite the fact that I often witness extraordinary acts of compassion around me, I fear that cruelty, indifference, greed, and selfishness seem to be in much larger supply.  Regardless of how one measures, perhaps all can agree that the world can always use more compassion.

As a follower of Jesus, to say that the world could use more compassion is to say that the world could use more Jesus.  Compassion is the mark of Jesus’ ministry.  As one of my favorite hymns expresses it:  “Jesus, thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love thou art” (Hymn 637).   To be compassionate is to live faithfully  into the Gospel of Jesus.  Life and ministry in Jesus’ name finds its fullest expression in compassion.

To know Jesus, to follow Jesus, to serve Jesus is to be compassionate.  I would even argue that compassion is the sum total of the Fruits of the Spirit as described in Galatians 22-23. “…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Compassionate people bear all these fruits of the Spirit.

The world needed more compassion in Jesus’ time, too.  And his remedy was to send his disciples out to be compassionate: to heal, to cure, to restore life, cast out all demons and the darkness in people’s lives, to relieve suffering and disease.

Jesus didn’t send his disciples out just to feel badly for others.  His Gospel isn’t a Gospel of sympathy, but a call to action grounded in recognizing the suffering and the needs of others with a passionate desire and commitment to alleviate it, to do something about it..

Being compassionate is not the same as feeling sorry for others.  Compassion recognizes our common humanity in the suffering of others, in the exploitation of the vulnerable, in the cries of the hungry, in the injustice of poverty, and the cruelty of prejudice.  Compassion recognizes these as the scandal that they are: a scandal against the image of God we all share; a scandal against the love God bears to all creation; a scandal against God’s gift of life.   Compassion recognizes these and then does something to alleviate them; to change them; to heal them.

The world can use more compassion

Jesus sends out disciples to be compassionate.  Jesus is calling you.  Compassion is calling you.   Find your partners and go.

It’s the wrong question.

Or maybe it’s the right question asked the wrong way.  I think we know why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners.  He does because time and again Jesus reveals that a family meal must include every member of his family.  He eats with those who are not welcome at the tables of worldly power, prestige, segregation, and elitism because he knows there is no room for those things at God’s table–the table where true life and fulfillment are nourished.

But to ask the question another way might say a bit more about us.  Instead of  “why does Jesus eat with tax collectors and sinners,” we might ask: “why do the tax collectors and sinners eat with Jesus?”  Why do they follow him?  More, what would cause them to drop everything, even if what they are dropping is meager and all they have, to follow.

In “Confessions,” St. Augustine expressed the core truth about the desire of our human hearts:  “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  As my friend and colleague Bishop Jake Owensby interprets Augustine’s words:  the human heart has infinite desire, but the true desire of our heart is for the infinite.  Which is to say that we desire God.

Our problem is that the infinite desire of our heart can put us on a grinding pursuit for fulfilment–for life, through finite things–power, wealth, fame, elite status, all the selfish and self-serving practices that bring us a sense of control, security, or happiness.  The problem is finite things never last.  That hunger, the desire for the infinite, always returns.

Jesus gives us an invitation to feast at the table where the infinite is served.  There our hungry hearts may find nourishment that lasts.   This is the path of life, the table of life, that the sinners and tax collectors realized in Jesus.  They dropped their pursuit of a life of infinite hunger to eat with the one who feeds the human heart with its one true desire, its fulfillment, its rest–God.

What must you drop to follow Jesus? What keeps you from feasting at his table of life?

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday.  From the perspective of our Church year, it might be said that Trinity Sunday is a reflection point: an occasion to pause and evaluate or contemplate all that we, the Church, has come to know about God.  The irony, of course, being that while we have come to know and experience so much the glorious nature of God and the love and hope that is ours through faith, God is always beyond our human knowing, beyond our definition, beyond our finite words and imaginations.

Or, as St. Augustine described:  “God is higher than [our] highest and more inward than [our] innermost self.”

One God: begotten and born into this world as Jesus, who healed, served, and proclaimed God’s kingdom giving us a witness of our calling to love one another; who suffered and died for us then rose from death and the grave and ascended into heaven showing us the love that God bears for us and God’s salvation hope for us and all creation; and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to fill us with the power and presence of God to complete God’s mission of salvation–the healing of humankind and all creation from the power of sin.

All of that in Unity.  One God beyond our defining and beyond our knowing but for UNITY.   Perhaps that is a lesson we can understand and take away from our celebration of Trinity Sunday:  to know God, to seek God, has less to do with clever formulas or metaphors, and more to do with seeking UNITY in all things:  unity in holy love, unity in self-giving care, and unity through reconciliation.

This Sunday, May 24^th, is the Day of Pentecost, the Church’s celebration of the dramatic descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles as a rushing wind and tongues of fire.  The dramatic coming of the Holy Spirit–“the Advocate” is the fulfillment of the gifts promised by Jesus that he would abide with them always, strengthen them, guide them and empower them to do HIS works and to be witnesses to HIS Gospel message of hope, salvation, and life in the Kingdom of God.   The Day of Pentecost, therefore, is also the celebration of the birth of the Church–the body of Christ alive and active on earth and in heaven.

We often associate the Day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit with the speaking in tongues.  This is, after all, one of the dramatic details of the story of the Day of Pentecost recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.  The Spirit empowered the Apostles–and, therefore, the Church, with the ability to make the Gospel message of Jesus and his love heard and understood by a crowd of people from many different cultures and  languages.  The Spirit’s presence reveals that the Word of God has no “official” language, but hears and understands the language of every human heart.   Many congregations will celebrate the Day of Pentecost by hearing scripture read in many different languages.

But the gifts of the Holy Spirit are much more than the universal language of God.  In fact, the Church has long identified seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Recorded in the prophecy of Isaiah 11:1-3, these seven gifts are associated with the Messianic mission described in Isaiah and other prophets.  They are, therefore, the gifts of Jesus the Christ–the Messiah, given by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the Church–His body in this world, to abide with us and empower us to be witness and servants of His Gospel: His way of salvation, justice, reconciliation and love.  In our liturgy of Holy Baptism we pray these seven gifts will be received by and sustain every newly baptized member of Christ’s body the Church.  We sing in joyful hope and praise of these 7 gifts in nearly every hymn for the Holy Spirit in our hymnal (1982).  We seek to be strengthened by these gifts as we grow into the full stature of Christ.

Can you name all seven of these gifts?  How might you celebrate them, unwrap them in your heart, and give them in witness and service of the Gospel?

• Wisdom: The ability to see things from God’s perspective and make choices that align with divine truth.
• Understanding: The grace to grasp the deeper meaning of faith and the mysteries of God’s love.
• Counsel: The capacity to make good, morally sound decisions and to offer prudent advice to others.
• Fortitude: The courage and endurance to stand up for the faith and persevere through life’s trials
• Knowledge: The awareness and understanding of God’s revelation and how to apply it to our lives.
• Piety: A deep reverence for God and a heart motivated by love and devotion rather than duty.
• Fear of the Lord: A sense of awe, wonder, and respect for God’s majesty (the “gift of joy and wonder”).

(AI source:  this list was generated by a Google Search, however, the source referenced by the search was “The Episcopal Diocese of AK, Bishop Mark Lattime”)

May the gifts of the Holy Spirit fall afresh on the whole Church that we might fulfill our call to witness and serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“O God of unchangeable power and eternal light:  Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility  the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”  Amen  (Prayer for the Church from the Ordination Services of the BCP)

Happy Ascensiontide.  Today (I’m writing on Thursday, May 14), is the Feast of the Ascension, one of the Principal Feast of the Church Year (right up there with Christmas Day, The Epiphany, Easter Day, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and All Saints’ Day).   Always on a Thursday, Ascension Day is celebrated 40 days after Easter Day.  It celebrates that Jesus ascended into heaven in physical form.  THAT is an important point for physical forms–bodies.

The Ascension story appears in two places in Scripture:  in Luke’s Gospel as the last word of the final chapter, and in the Acts of the Apostles where it serves as the opening act–chapter 1.  In the Acts of Apostles, the details of Jesus’ Ascension, are developed a bit more than in the Gospel of Luke–in Acts there is more action in the story. Luke records Jesus’ final words to the disciples as occurring over a meal of broiled fish in Jerusalem; after which, they walk to Bethany where Jesus blesses them and is “taken up into heaven.”   In  Acts, however, Jesus’ last words to the disciples seem to happen immediately before his ascension.  He promises his disciples that they will receive the power of the Holy Spirit and that they will be His witnesses to the ends of the earth. Then, “when he had said this,” Jesus ascends–he is “lifted up” and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

The big difference between Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, however, is what happens next.  After Jesus disappears into the clouds, the Book of Acts describes the apostles as standing, one imagines them awe struck–their mouths gaping, looking toward the sky.  Two mysterious white-clad men appear to break their wondering gazes, bringing them back to earth,

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

How often does our faith have us focusing on the clouds, staring at some remote far away heaven we cannot see, but only imagine.  How often does a hope that heaven has no business with the earth, with the world, that it  draws us away from seeking heaven–God’s Kingdom, and serving heaven here on earth?

The Kingdom of Heaven, where Christ is, is not remote, it is not “out there,” but, indeed, it is here.  It may be shrouded in clouds, but it is here where the Holy Spirit moves and renews the earth and human lives.  It is here where Christ’s resurrected body, the Church, lives and moves and has its being.  It is here where that same Spirit working in us as the body of Christ calls us to witness to Christ’s Gospel; to serve heaven’s righteousness; to seek reconciliation, justice and peace for all people; and to love as Christ loved, on earth as it is in heaven.

Faith in a resurrected Lord who has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to us is not intended to be an escape clause from this earth, nor an invitation to hold no love or concern for this world and all who live upon it.   To the contrary, Jesus’ ascension reveals that we are called to serve and care for this world and our brothers and sisters; because in Christ they ARE the stuff of heaven.  We are called and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to this very point, seeking and serving the kingdom of heaven at all times and in all places.

As the body of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, let us ascend into heaven even to the ends of the earth.

Lord beyond our mortal sight, Al-le-lu-ia!

raise our hearts to reach thy height, Al-le-lu-ia!

there thy face unclouded see,  Al-le-lu-ia!

find our heaven of heavens in thee, Al-le-lu-ia!

                                                                               Hymnal 214 v.4

May 5th is National Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day.

The Tanana Chiefs Conference website reports that: “Indigenous persons experience disproportionately high rates of violence, and, relatedly, are reported missing or are murdered at high rates. Alaska Natives experience disproportionate rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other violent crimes, according to the Indian Law and Order Commission’s 2013 report.”

In a recent Letter to the Anchorage Daily News, I joined our ecumenical judicatory leaders of the ELCA, Presbyterian, and UMC churches to “urge Alaskan political leaders, religious leaders, police, and all residents to advocate for and prioritize thorough investigations of crimes against Indigenous people, systemic reforms like improved jurisdictional coordination of law enforcement agencies, and support for Indigenous families.”  And stated that our churches stand ready to partner in grief support, awareness events, and policy advocacy.

Again this year, on May 5, I will participate in a gathering of Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons at the Golden Heart Plaza at noon here in Fairbanks.  Again this year, as with every year, the list of names of Missing and Murdered Alaska Natives will be read–the names remembered.  It is a solemn and sacred act of remembrance.  But even more, it is a call to action. Our brothers and sisters are suffering.  The old legal maxim holds true: Justice delayed is justice denied.  Silence perpetuates harm; but action honors the divine image in every life–and serves to restore the dignity of every human being.

I urge all Episcopal Communities to honor a time of Remembrance May 5 either by holding your own service of Remembrance or by joining in a service in your community.   The Rev. Shirley Lee has prepared a Liturgy of Remembrance for MMIP that is available for all communities to use.  You are free to download this liturgy and to adapt it for your local context.

This May 5, this Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Day, let us all lift our voices in common prayer for those who are missing, for those who have disappeared, for those whose lives have been taken from them; and let us stand in solidarity with those who mourn, with those who wait and watch; and let us commit ourselves to the on-going work of advocating for justice and the dignity of every human being.

Click the hand  for the Liturgy for MMIP

Alleluia.  Christ is Risen.

It is good to point out that the Church’s  Easter Acclamation and greeting is always in the present tense.  We say that Christ is risen and not Christ has risen.  Jesus is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and giving life to those in the tomb.

Easter abides!

Nevertheless, by now, much of the world has left Easter in the rearview mirror and moved on with the business of the grave.  Most grievously this is more often than not business as usual for our world:  war, personal interest over concern for others, power, prejudice, and the pursuit of some form of greatness that is defined less by Christ’s triumph over death and more like the perceived strength of crucifixion over life.

But Easter IS and remains God’s final word, God’s judgment, on this world’s ways of death.  As the Psalmist sings:  “You show me the path of life.”  Easter is that path.  There is no power or pursuit on this earth greater than the life and hope that is revealed in Easter.

That is the path, the present and abiding path, that we are called to pursue.  To proclaim Easter is to embrace with hope Easter’s path of life and to become a living witness through word and deed that all manner of death in this world is being trampled down under the feet of our risen Lord’s victory over the grave.

The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia