(N.B.: At the beginning of this sermon, in silence I set a table using some of the loveliest linens, china and silver I received from my mother before she died)

There were so many spaces of silence and absence where my mom would have been when I got to Panama on Monday.  In a very unexpected way, today’s readings helped fill those silences and also helped me understand a bit more about my mom, and a bit more about God’s grace.

My mom knew how to throw a party.  She was a gracious, warm and welcoming hostess.  She would spend weeks planning and organizing for a party, with endless lists and phone calls and decisions and actions.  I watched her painstaking efforts to get things just right for all kinds of parties from the very formal to silly, funny times with friends.  She left few details to chance because she was convinced that what people couldn’t  see, the apparent effortlessness with which they were welcomed was at the heart of true hospitality.  One afternoon this week, I spent almost 3 hours sorting through all her tablecloths, napkins and other table linens.  She had an absurd number of salt and pepper containers from the sublimely elegant to the absurd because even that was important to her.

If my mama worked as hard to throw a good party as she did, I can only begin to imagine what the king who was throwing a wedding feast for his beloved son did to prepare.  I decided early this week that I would try to set a table for you like my mom would, using some of pieces she gave me.  I love each and every item on this table and I am mindful that they are nothing but the palest, the dimmest, most unremarkable reflection of the glory that was the feast the king prepared for his son’s wedding.

I can imagine setting a table, cooking a feast and throwing wide my doors and being devastated, absolutely devastated when no one shows up.  Of course, the king would be furious–bite through nails, spitting mad angry at the callousness and disregard of the first bunch that didn’t show up.  Under all that reaction there must have been quiet desperation–what will it take, how much more can I do if instead of coming to my party they kill the people I have sent to invite them?  I have tried everything, I have laid out my finest and done my utmost and still, they will not come.

It is easy and tempting to see his final response–his instructions to bring any one, any warm body will do–as an expression of an ego-driven ruler not used to being thwarted who won’t take no for an answer.  But what if the feast this person had to offer was a gift of life itself.  What if it wasn’t that the silverware was newly polished or the linens of exquisite silk?  What if the king didn’t care one whit about all that money he’d spent to have the best caterers in town prepare the most delicious morsels of food imaginable.  What if the thing that mattered most was the hope, a hope against hope, that there would be someone or some people who would recognize that the feast was pure gift for the guests.  That what the king had to offer was what the guests most needed.

Especially after all these years of living in Florida and dressing down, that whole thing at the end,  the part where the person who is not properly dressed gets thrown out and condemned to an eternity of weeping and gnashing of teeth, just seems outright mean and callous.  Really, God?  Throw that poor person to eternal damnation just because his shoes were wrong or that blouse too eighties?  That’s harsh.  In fact, the whole passage has a real edge to it that makes me uncomfortable.

I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own temptation to skip over the parts where it sounds like God is not being very nice.  I want my God to be nice, reasonable, non-reactive and lovable.  Matthew does not see God that way and maybe in part that has to do with living at a moment of tremendous, violent upheaval in his world.  Remember, he had witnessed the violence and desolation that accompanied the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

There is also something really important in Matthew’s insistence that it isn’t enough to show up at the party, but that we must come dressed appropriately for the occasion.  You see, if we don’t even understand enough about the party to know how to dress–if we are so insensitive and unperceptive and self-absorbed that we cannot even make that one gesture for the sake of the party, how will we be able to recognize and receive the mercy and graces that are to be found at the feast?  God wants a relationship of reciprocity and mutuality with us. God wants a relationship of give and take with us because it is in that kind of trust and commitment that the seeds of the spirit can take root, and grow and flourish and bear rich fruit. In this parable, we also have the sense of a God who understands the urgency of our need, that the time is now to come to the party.

Our instinctive response goes something like this:  “God you ask me to come to the party now?  When things are falling apart all around us?  When all we see or hear on TV is the rage, the disappointment, the fear and the despair?  Are you serious God? Your answer is a party?”

My family has always been prone to Nordic angst.  In fact, my husband calls my two brothers Commander Gloom and Commander Doom.  When my big brother calls and we get to talking about the sorry state of things, a moment usually comes when I say, “Hans, I’m getting either homicidal or suicidal, so it’s time to get off the phone now”.  I look back now and I realize that my mom was on to something with those parties of hers. They taught us about joy.  I am also beginning to think that being joyful is both counter-cultural and a really important part of being a community of faith.

Here at St. Ambrose we don’t have all the trappings and finery and special salt and pepper shakers–but we do have a party each and every week, without fail.  No matter what else has happened, we come together to party.  It is a marvelous party with the most gracious host imaginable.  And when we have allowed ourselves to accept the invitation, when we have overcome the despair and the inertia that tempt us to say, “why bother”, when we have clothed ourselves in hope, we leave here with a little more spring in our step.  A little more gratitude.  A little more awareness of brothers and sisters who are also in need of that kind of goodness.

Thank you for coming to the party today.  Thank you for being willing to dare to find joy.  I have thought of the fact that often at parties, we receive party favors, and today there’s one for each of you in the insert to your bulletin.  Take a look at passage from Philippians.  There’s one paragraph that I hope you will cut out and put in your pocket, or tape to your mirror for the week.  It is a wonderful reminder of this time together and a promise of the enduring favor and mercy that is at the heart of God’s love for us.  Read it often this week.  Read it as a prayer for someone you know who’s struggling–or for yourself.  And remember, the invitation is simple:  Come to the party…

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Being the parent of a child with severe emotional and behavioral issues keeps you honest.  Rigor and transparency are essential.  I have never stopped learning that in this particular version of the world, there are few curtains or doors you can close behind you, not much in the way of privacy.  Today the local child protective services agency is beginning an investigation of an incident that occurred with our daughter at the end of last week.  It is painful to think that others felt a need to report us. It is more than a little mortifying to be placed under such scrutiny.  When I found out, I wanted to weep, I wanted to lash out, and I wanted to quit.  The work of loving this woman child is hard.  And it is also true that all along, I have been strengthened as I found my way through life.

One of the lasting gifts I received from my seminary education was the concept of “disponibilité”.  This is a concept first articulated by Gabriel Marcel somewhere in the late 50’s. There is no good translation for it in English–the closest is “availability”.  In Spanish, it is “disponibilidad” and has layers and layers of connotation about hospitality and openness, but openess in a very active sense.  In Spanish we say, “me pongo a su disposición”–again, translations are very imprecise here, but the closest is, “I place myself at your service.” A more literal translation might be “I am at your disposal”, though somehow, this connotes more of a sense of allowing ourselves to be used and then discarded. In the online “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/#9) the entry on Marcel says the following about this whole notion:  “the term disponibilité refers to the measure in which I am available to someone, the state of having my resources at hand to offer; and this availability or unavailability of resources (material, emotional, intellectual and spiritual) is a general state or disposition”.

As taken as I was by “disponibilité” when I first read about it at when I was a 24-year-old seminarian, it is only now, when I’m twice that age that I think I begin to “get it”.   And I get it as I keep learning about parenting my daughter.  Today, disponibilité means making all my worst fears, my greatest vulnerabilities and deepest wounds available for prodding and poking by someone who has been given a job to do.  It means putting myself and my efforts to work with what sometimes feel like impossible situations out for someone to inspect and decide if I and they are good enough.  Everything in me begs to withdraw, get off the grid,  go someplace far, far away.  If I have understood disponibilité correctly, it means making the resources, the grace I have received available to my daughter and to myself in order to get through this, understand, forgive, heal and grow.

P.S.  The investigator has come and gone, there will be no charges filed nor further action recommended. No amount of preparation and steeling oneself for that process takes the sting away.  Even this must be offered up as well.  My friend Robin once posted a beautiful link of a youtube video of the Suscipe, one of the prayers of St. Ignatius of Loyola.   Disponibilité…

Add a pinch of salt, a little bit of good vanilla extract, a little almond extract and a couple of chopped dried apricots to 1/2 c old fashioned rolled oats and 3/4 c almond milk, and cook for about 5 minutes. Yum, yum, yum.  Just another quick way of making vegan food that tastes good…Have a good day!

Our friend Tom lives away from here but comes into town with some frequency and we always enjoy the time we get to spend with him.  One of the things I love are the stories he tells.   He comes from West Texas, where life is not ever real easy.  The last time we saw him, Tom told us a story about his grandmother.  Flossie and her siblings became adults as the Great Depression was strangling the life out of this country and what they had to face was the reality that they had next to nothing, except a farm, a farm that kept the whole family through that time—15 people in all, some cattle, the other things that you find on a farm that help people keep going.

Flossie’s job was in the cooking.  Before the sun came up, she was in the kitchen, getting breakfast ready—biscuits and gravy, eggs, sausage, grits.  The rest of the family went out to work the farm and Flossie went back to work in the kitchen, cleaning all those dishes, putting everything up and then getting started with lunch that included pie and cake every day.  Every single day.  It sounds delicious, but in a day when you did it all by hand, imagine the start of the morning knowing how much you had to get done by noon.

After everyone had eaten lunch, it all started again, the cleaning the putting up, the getting ready for one more meal.  And after dinner, there wasn’t catching up on “Dancing with the Stars”—it was time to clean up and put up and get ready for another day of more of the same.  It was incredibly poignant hearing our friend say, “just about every single day of her adult life, my grandmother worked from the moment she got up to the moment she went to bed. Each and every day.”

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 

Jesus was not a space alien come from a distant galaxy.  He was not a super-friend from Krypton.  He was not even the Messiah that the people Israel had longed for, a heroic warrior king, capable of restoring the former glory of the kingdom—a glory probably more shaped by nostalgia than by reality.  Jesus was not any of those things and when Peter tried to rebuke him for talking about how things would end, he must have thought, man how can someone get it so right and be so wrong.  Peter had just confessed that Jesus was the Messiah—but now he was showing that he was clueless about what that meant.  This wasn’t about magic, or might, or even the miracles in and of themselves.  This was about a selflessness that was stronger than every single one of our darkest impulses.  Jesus had come into the world to do what ever was necessary, not to show us that he loved us, but to love us.  To love us with everything he had and everything he was.

I would say to you today that Tom’s grandmother Flossie knew something of this kind of love.  I can imagine that there were times when she stood there, beating the egg whites for one more merengue, to make one more pie to serve for one more lunch and wondered if this was really all there was to her life.  She didn’t have monthly appointments at the spa to get a mani-pedi and maybe even the occasional massage.  The family didn’t have a nice getaway by the lake.   What stretched ahead of her was a parade of days that blended into one, like Groundhog Day and you know that as she got older, her hands began to ache, and standing on her feet got harder and surely there were days when she wished she were Dorothy and she wasn’t in Kansas any more.

If you want to become my followers, take up your cross and follow me.  Not easy words to hear.  Not easy words to hear when we are the children and grandchildren of the greatest generation, who knew a whole lot about sacrifice and tried to shield you and me from it, pouring their lives out to give us  comfort,  privilege and the world in an oyster shell.

Jesus was not about super-heroics and utopias not grounded in reality.  He refused to look away from things as they really were, not as he might wish or want them to be.  At this juncture in his ministry, he saw the depth of change that was needed for His people to live into the promises of God.  The miracles had impressed, but mainly they had made more folks want more from him.  The parables he had told had been an invitation, a wonderful, deeply mysterious invitation into a world that was here but that required more of us to actually see it, and smell it and live in it.  Even his disciples, the men and women he loved so much, would end up listening to those stories wondering, “hey, what’s in it for me—am I going to be the first in this kingdom of God?” He upset the establishment, made people nervous, and was uncompromising and relentless in his insistence that love is always both grace and judgment and you don’t get one without the other.  Perhaps the hardest thing of all is that Jesus did not engage in some magical thinking to say, “well, here: I can do this on my own and make it all better”. From the very beginning, he said, “come.  Follow me.” He insisted that no matter what was going on in the world, those who wanted to follow him must face squarely into what is hard and scary and changeable and incredibly complicated, where good and bad and our basest impulses and our highest angels are all there, giving shape to the today we find ourselves in.  He needed us learn to love like he does.

Our own time demands no less.  I bet there are a bunch of people here who are living with some level of anxiety about job security or about the security of your old age.  Maybe the worst has already happened to you, or to someone you know.   We don’t want to think that any of us might be faced with a life like Flossie’s: to work from sun up to sun down, not to get ahead but to just stay afloat?  That is not a thought we want to get our heads around.  Yet we ignore that possibility at our own peril and sell ourselves way too short if we allow ourselves to think that we are not capable of that kind of self sacrifice.

It struck me that that  life for us here at St Ambrose is a lot closer to life on that farm in Texas than we allow ourselves to accept most Sundays we are here.  We don’t have enough to pay our bills.  It’s getting a little better, but to put things in perspective, you and I pay about 1/10^th of what it costs to keep this campus going.  The struggle stretches back for a long time.  It is tempting to say, “I’m tired now, and I’ve paid my dues”.  It is hard, when I come to you, like I have in the past few weeks and say, “listen, we have this opportunity to work with the national church and get their support to do the kind of  redevelopment work that will allow us to become a thriving faith community and offer the love that we have received out to the world. But here’s the deal: I need 4 hours of your time each week for 2 years to make this work.

That’s a lot of commitment and I am deeply grateful to Bill E. because he has been willing to say yes.  We need 2-3 more folks to make that kind of commitment.  Because it is going to take that kind of sustained effort, that dedication, that sheer love for this small and wobbly part of the body of Christ, to get new muscle and grow again.  We aren’t going to get to cut corners or wish that by some magic the pews will be filled back up.  Like Flossie, we still have another pie to bake because tomorrow is almost here again.

By now you may be getting pretty annoyed with me because this isn’t a particularly uplifting kind of message.  None of us. None of us wants to hear Jesus say “pick up your cross”—and we get stuck right there, I suspect.  It’s like we are Flossie, except we think that we have to do our work without those other 14 people who helped her and helped each other keep going.  That feels so real that we don’t even hear the second part of the phrase:  —follow me—.  That part gets lost in the sheer magnitude of what is expected of us.

But it is there.  Follow me.  Jesus says, “let me go ahead of you.  Let me open the way.  Let my body shelter yours when the howling winds would knock you down.   Let me look ahead because I can see so much further than you can, and even though it is dark right now, I can already see dawn breaking.  Pick up your cross and follow me—I will do whatever I need to keep you safe.  We’ll stop along the way and I will feed you.  We will gather around the fireplace or the dining room table or in the parish hall and tell stories and laugh and be together.  I will be with you to the end and if I am with you who can be against you?  Pick up your cross and follow me.”

We have just barely enough people to take on the project that the national church has invited us to be part of.     It is going to be hard, and a lot of it will be slogging along, washing pie pans just to make the next batch of pies.  But think about who it is who leading us. It is he, the Risen Christ. The Messiah.  Emmanuel—God with us, who is saying, “Come on.  This is no easy task we have ahead.   But look around you.  I have not asked you to do this alone—you have brothers and sisters just as surely as Flossie did.  Come with me.  I am with you, I am with you to the end.”

So come on.  Let’s follow him.  Let’s do this thing.

Rosa's Version of Lentil-Sweet Potato Stew

I am continuing to explore the world of almost Vegan.  Some things turn out better than others.  This one’s pretty good.

Ingredients:

1 celery stalk finely chopped
1 sweet potato peeled and chopped in small pieces
2-3 shallots, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 or so tsp minced garlic
1/2-3/4 tsp ground coriander
1/2-3/4 tsp cumin
1 cup red lentils
2 tbsp crunchy peanut butter
Vegetable broth

Saute the  first three ingredients in 1 tsp of olive oil over medium heat for about 10 min, stirring regularly (turn down heat if necessar).  Add the spices and garlic and saute for another minute or so.  Then add the red lentils and vegetable broth and bring the stew to a boil.  When the lentils are soft, add peanut butter and season to taste.  Eat. Enjoy. It is healthy…

How do you connect your answers?

Yesterday, Robin’s question was both simple and deep:  what is the conundrum or question of your life.  For me, at this time (and maybe for always) it has been about both honoring and transcending the story written on my behalf by my family history.  Today, the connection between my answers to the three previous parts of this work is clear as well.  What’s the connection?  life.  The colors I chose are mostly the colors that weave through my life, my mother’s life and my grandmother’s life.  There’s one exception:  Lavender.  Both my grandmother and my mother always dismissed any shade of purple.  Especially my grandmother, a Swedish interior designer trained in France with an amazing color esthetic, created spaces of such beauty that I never questioned her critique.  But a dream I had in early adulthood made me fall in love with purple and one of my favorite blouses is lavender linen.  The life I have lived on my own since I was 18, here in the USA, cut off from the rest of my family, has made my world broader and fuller.  I love the colors I come from.  I love what I keep discovering about the colors that were never in the palate of my life.

The cities:  I grew up in one–Cali.  Stockholm was the city where I discovered churches.  I remember beginning to understand sacred space as I stood in Storkyrkan, in Gamla Stan, the old part of Stockholm.  Even more, I was stunned the first Sunday I ever remember in Sweden, hearing church bells ringing all across the city.  I desperately wanted to go to church.  The child of two agnostic parents, I didn’t even know how to ask.  Look at me now, a priest.  Miami was the gateway to America for me.  I stood in front of an Immigration officer at Miami International Airport, my heart pounding waiting to know if I would get to go on to college.  You see, as a Colombian citizen, I was completely at the mercy of that officer when it came to actually entering this country.  I had a student visa approval–but I did not actually get the visa until that guy decided to give it to me.  It was terrifying.  It was exhilarating when he said yes.  Many times as a child and then young person, I would lie awake at night in my room in Cali, dreaming of the life I would build for myself in the United States. A refrain of my childhood had been “ya casi es mañana” which means, “it’s almost tomorrow”. Going on from the immigration area to baggage claim at MIA, I realized that tomorrow was here and so was my life.  Austin and San Francisco represent an eschatological hope.  When my life was still uncomplicated enough that I could realistically consider any city to live in, these were two I seriously considered.  I don’t dream like that any more.

Robin’s answer to yesterday’s part of this work was a revelation to me.  She discussed how grief is characterized by “failure to notice”–grieving for my mother, I think I understand.  The landscapes I chose are all places of great beauty and they demand that we notice.  I was struck by the fact that one of the first places I thought of in response to this question was a beautiful area of the countryside of Holland that I saw riding on a train from Tilburg to Amsterdam.  I started noticing these structures dotting the landscape and asked my brother, who lives in Holland about them.  Turns out they were bunkers built by the Nazi’s during World War II.  Maybe more than ever in the bizarre days we are living through, I am aware that noticing means noticing the darkness as much as the light, if I am to choose life.

What I said about the interiors in Part II is strongly connected to the theme of life.  I have known abundance–of beauty, of comfort, of safety, of consolation.  I have also survived periods of great desolation.  When I was a hospitalized for months at a time at Children’s Hospital in Boston, no one was allowed to stay with me overnight.  The first couple of times I was hospitalized I did not know how to speak in English and I was filled with absolute and abject terror.  Even later, when I was hospitalized again and old enough to understand that my mom would be back each morning, my isolation and loneliness thundered against the blank and colorless walls of the ward I was in.  I survived. I am still here to tell the story.  I am alive.

Finally, the clothes.  The hardest part of of the exercise for me.  I was just diagnosed with a very preventable chronic illness.  I have been filled with sorrow, anger at myself, fear and determination since I found out about 3 weeks ago.  The hardest part of saying yes to life over the years has been saying yes to my body.  With very few exceptions most of the time, I have wanted to forget more than tend to myself.  And that included how I chose clothes.  I am making some progress understanding and managing the new truths about myself that come with this diagnosis.  As much as I have always thought I loved life, I am discovering that choosing life takes more, is harder and calls me further into faith than I allowed myself to see before.  The honesty it requires is fearsome.  For the first time ever, maybe I am up to it now.  Thank you Robin for helping me notice…

What do you consider to be the big question or conundrum of your life?

Is it possible to write a very different chapter in the story of my family of origin? All through my childhood, my grandmother Vera, one of the people I am named after, had an oversize role in the life our family. She and my grandfather had invested a significant amount of money in my dad’s business at a critical moment and as a consequence were the second largest shareholders in the company. After my grandfather died, this gave my grandmother enormous leverage in our family. She was powerful, charming, wealthy, imperious and self-absorbed. She was merciless on my mother—invasive, controlling and endlessly critical. I’d watch my mom collapse in on herself around my grandmother. It was heartbreaking. And when any of my siblings or I, but especially I, acted out, the worst response I could get from my mother was, “You are becoming just like your grandmother.”

Unfortunately, I am not sure I had any female relative in my family to look up to enough to say, “that’s who I want to be like when I grow up”.  I suspect that many a daughter who has lived through adolescence with her mother mutters under her breath, “I will never do it like my mother did”. I had a double load—I would never be like my grandmother and I would never be like my mother. It was only in her last days before her death that my mother let her guard down enough to be tender, droll, and loving, as I had remembered her to be early in my childhood. I am grateful beyond words for that time. I so wish there had been times like that while she was still healthy and strong and we were both adults.

Now in my middle age, when I examine the arc of my life, I see an incredible number of commonalities across the three generations. I see patterns of relationship, especially in our marriages, that are hauntingly similar. For a long time, I kept wanting to blow up what I had, rather than play out the story to what seemed like a devastating conclusion. I have been so fearful that I’d end up an embittered, guarded and controlling person, not just because of my own failings—and they are ever before me—but also because like my grandmother and mother, I have faced great sadness and you get so protective of that mended and fragile heart after a while. I am protective in ways that make me more brittle, more intent on holding on to what I can, more insistent that there are things that I simply must have a certain way because so much else has been lost.

The conundrum I face is this: do I have the time, the spiritual strength—and the openness to God’s grace—to finish out my days in a way that allows me to grow in love for my mother and grandmother, even though the ways they taught me to love were not so good, to love my own self, even though I am so much like them, and to love those closest to me, especially my husband and daughter, more truly, more kindly and more hopefully?

Within each of your groups, do you see commonalities?  

1. Five colors.  azure, fuschia, yellow, lavendar, green–the colors of my life right now.