Grace Cathedral

2 Samuel 23:1-7; Revelation 1:46-48; John 18:33-37

I’d like to think I’m not the only person who’s a little puzzled by what we’re observing this Sunday. The Reign of Christ comes with so many images of kingly splendor and power, which – well, is that what we really want from the divine? Do we really want to designate the place where we live in harmony with God’s generous love as a kingdom? Didn’t Jesus himself repudiate the notion of his role as one of power and majesty? What’s going on here?

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who was and who is and who is to come… On this, the last Sunday of our liturgical year, we celebrate the splendor of salvation, the magnificence of the love that reached down to us through all ages and reaches out to all still. We can imagine what it might look like if smaller kingdoms and more petty loyalties were dissolved. We can look past leaders who demand our obedience to support their own agenda, to a shrewd and affectionate shepherd who guides us past danger and into our own deepest truths.

That’s most certainly not a kingdom of this world. Yet can we see it moving behind the shapes of what is, and what we fear to come? Does it gain more strength and substance, the more we love it, the more we name it, the more we seek to embody it in our daily actions?

Carol James has been part of the cathedral community for over a decade. She has served as a co-mentor in the Education for Ministry (EfM) program. She currently leads the evening prayer providers in the Jail Ministry and is a cathedral staff member.

Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Today’s readings seem focused on the promises that God makes to us at the end of our lives — and yet here we are blessed with the presence of so many who are at the beginning of their lives!

Many cultures see times of beginning and ending as “thin places,” where we stand at a moment of choice between the old and the new, and where there’s a special porous quality to our experience. We can’t stay there — we let go some possibilities as we move into the future. There’s a commonality to birth and death as seasons of transformation, times we can’t take anything for granted.

When Jesus calls forth his friend from the sealed cave, he cries for Lazarus to be unbound. Through the prophet Isaiah, God promises to remove the shroud that clouds our perception, the ways that fear and pain distort our experience of divine goodness. The path to new life is open before us.

Today we celebrate so many new voyages into an unknown future. We celebrate all those who, much to their own surprise, have been hailed as saints. We celebrate the glorious possibilities within those we baptize today. We celebrate our brother Mark Stanger, who has encouraged the voyages of so many others as our teacher, our colleague and our pilgrim guide, and who is now stepping into the next leg of his own journey. We celebrate ourselves, loved and loving, and God making all things new.

Carol James has been part of the cathedral community for over a decade. She has served as a co-mentor in the Education for Ministry program. She currently leads the evening prayer providers in the Jail Ministry and is a cathedral staff member.

Proverbs 1:20-33; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

Have you heard that old saying, “God loves us as we are, but too much to leave us that way”? That’s what I like to think of when we share stories of divine impatience, as we do today. Wisdom, in her embodiment as a generous but dramatic hostess seeking to bring guests to her bounteous table, is yelling on street corners. Jesus calls one of his best friends “Satan.” James is pretty sure most of us should just keep our mouths shut.

I hope these images have made you smile, because you recognize the loving invitation that underlies all of them. In our frailty and in our earnest but sometimes awkward attempts to get closer to God, we don’t always choose rightly, or act rightly, or speak rightly. Jesus understands that if he wants us to have a path to doing better, he’s got to tell us. We can’t embark on the journey if we don’t know that anything’s wrong.

On this path, how blessed we are to have so many wonderful companions! Today we celebrate our congregation – that is to say, each other – and the variety of ways we accompany each other, praying, growing and serving. I invite you to learn more about what our ministries are doing, and ways that you can learn to respond more deeply to God’s unique call to you. There’s a place at Wisdom’s table for each of us.

Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above.” James reminds us that God first, foremost and eternally offers us abundance. We may struggle to recognize it or to respond to it with our whole hearts. We may mistrust that God’s gifts are freely given. We may feel obligated to “pay them back,” or be ashamed because “we don’t deserve them.” Is discomfort or guilt the response we want to make to God’s generosity? Or will our celebration and praise have a greater power to participate in and multiply divine abundance?

The singer of the Song of Solomon can hardly contain the joy of being alive and being loved. The poet sees all creation participating in this invitation to rejoice. Desire is celebrated as a source of growth, motion and connection. Doing “the right thing” can be grim and sterile when it comes from a place of fear and constraint. Jesus wants us to look past the rules to a faith that shares its blessings from an abiding sense of love and gratitude. That faith grows sweet and nourishing like the fig on the tree, the grape on the vine. That faith bounds through the world like a flashing gazelle.

Carol James has been part of the cathedral community for over a decade. She has served as a co-mentor in the Education for Ministry program. She currently leads the evening prayer providers in the Jail Ministry and is a cathedral staff member.

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is more than a little insistent on how he nourishes the people of God; it’s hardly surprising that some of his listeners balk at what he’s saying. The Church and its people have often wrestled with how literal an interpretation to put on his words about his Body and Blood. It defies common sense, yet Jesus will not let us get away from it. He wants to give his very Self to us – not an abstract concept, not an intellectual theory, but the very substance of his incarnation, uncomfortably intimate. Is he asking us to look past the literal, into the essential?

Solomon, taking over the throne of his formidable father, asks for wisdom rather than any of the traditional trappings of wealth and authority. He’s got a hunch that discernment, the ability to sift through experience to find the essential, will give him more life, more joy and more satisfaction than any temporal gift. In other parts of scripture, Wisdom is portrayed as a woman – a woman of substance setting out a feast to those who will take the time to seek out her table. Is that the feast Jesus invites us to? Can we meet his joy in offering himself with our own joy in being invited closer?

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus encounters some literal-minded folks who are unhappy with an image he uses, one that is central to what we’re experiencing in our worship today. “How can he be the bread of life?” they fume. “He’s a guy we know!”

Bread itself can be a paradox – the most basic of foodstuffs, but produced by a particular alchemy of grain and yeast that requires skill and delicacy to bring forth. This Sunday, our bread-baking team is providing a demo of how our Eucharistic bread gets made, in the Chapter House kitchen before and after the 11am service. Our own “bread of life” is made by human hands – and something more.

In Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen invites us to join Jesus in seeing our lives as an ongoing celebration of communion, with us as the bread. What if we imagined ourselves as continually taken, blessed, broken and given? We’re made of simple elements, but with the kindling yeast of the Spirit, we can be so much. Where do our lives nourish others? Where do the blessings we receive radiate out into the world? Where are we open to transformation, to the rising and expanding we need to experience to be fully alive? Taste and see – the bread of life is everywhere!

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99:5-9; 2 Peter 1:13-21; Luke 9:28-36

Today, as the Church invites us to remember the Transfiguration, we’re reminded that encounters with the truth can be overwhelming. The light that shines on Moses as he converses with God, the light that transforms Jesus from a beloved friend and teacher into a being streaming with glory — a light that still shines on in Peter’s memory as a lamp in a dark place — they can be dazzling and disconcerting to us. We fumble for the right response.

The unfolding of God’s glory happens on a scale so much larger than the human, it’s not surprising that Peter wants to confine it to a nice set of side-by-side shrines. Yet the truth is already moving onward, down the road to Jerusalem. That destination is grim, but the journey will continue past it, to a new place of radiance.

As we celebrate the baptism of beloved children today, we know that their growth will be terrifyingly fast, and parenting them will shine a powerful light on all that’s glorious and all that’s difficult in our lives and our world. We hope that parents and caretakers will hold to their hearts the truth that we are all loved beyond reason and understanding. If our response is to meet that love with love, it may be clumsy, but it will never be misplaced.

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99:5-9; 2 Peter 1:13-21; Luke 9:28-36

2 Samuel 7:1-14a, Psalm 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 5:30-34, 53-56

As a dyed-in-the-wool introvert, I’m so pleased when the Gospels tell us that Jesus tried to get away from people sometimes. “Sit down and rest,” he tells his friends. “Eat, tell me what happened to you while you were away. Let’s find a quiet corner to chat.”

There are few quiet corners left for Jesus as word gets out of his compassion, his wisdom, his power to heal. People who need these things so desperately come running from all angles at top speed, from towns, from farms, from the desert, from the shore of the lake. Will there ever be a peaceful pasture for them … for us?

It’s important to find and savor even the smallest slices of sabbath, a moment to rest in our trust in God, even as we struggle to respond to the needs of ourselves, those we love and the world at large. It’s a faithful act, to let ourselves accept the gift of non-doing and the limits of our ability to do, to let go our insistence that “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.” God wants us to sit down, to enjoy a snack, to share the story of what we’ve been up to. We’re not doing any of God’s work alone.

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

Our readings today offer us very different notions of what a ruler is supposed to look like and do. We see David showing his unrestrained joy before God, dancing “with all his might” before the ark. He is surrounded on all sides by shouting and singing, and joins in with no restraint or stress. He shares the abundance he feels and the wealth he controls, in good things to eat and to do for everyone.

Herod, with all the machinery of the Roman state at his back, should feel more secure, less vulnerable than the former shepherd boy, but his actions are narrowed by fear and worry about how he appears to others. He “must” kill someone whose holiness he is dimly, persistently aware of — because of what others might think of him and his authority if he reneges on a foolish after-dinner pledge.

Why do some of the powerful and the privileged seem to fear so much? None of us are rulers on this scale, but where do our own love of comforts and control keep us from abandoning ourselves to full-throated celebration and welcome? Where are we tempted to see someone as too uncomfortable, too problematic to be fully human and deserving of life and freedom? Are we willing to take on the foolishness of being at the head of the parade, dancing and singing with all our might?

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10, Mark 6:1-13

“Whenever I am weak,” says Paul to the faithful at Corinth, “Then I am strong.” That’s an encouraging thing to hear these days, when there’s so much that feels pressed down, discouraging, impossible to move. Those feelings are real, but taking a moment to refresh and refocus on God’s ability to act when our capacities falter is a Sabbath gift we need to take.

We’ve got a long haul ahead.

When Jesus sent his friends out, stripped of the usual prudent resources for travelers, he knew they weren’t going to have an easy time of it. I imagine they had many tired, bickering walks down narrow goat tracks, wishing there was more bread or a coin that would buy a flask of wine, stopping to knot up one more broken sandal lace and hating the feel of their own dirty skins. It must have felt endless, and pointless, and lonely.

What did it feel like to reach the next village? To be ushered into a small room under a wavering lamp, to encounter the eyes of a child tormented by disease of body or mind … to take her up, bony as a bird, and feel the warm oil trickling into the core of her hurt and fear? Was it worth the long walk, the meager supper? What did they say when they returned to Jesus? What did they learn about God, and about themselves?

1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20; Psalm 138; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

Our readings today focus on people in conflict, yearning to be ordered and “normal.” Even when told of all the harm an absolute authority could bring to their community, the elders of Israel want the simplicity of being told what to do by a king “like other nations.” In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, we’re told that his family was troubled and alarmed by his actions, hoping to bring him out of the all-too-dangerous spotlight that his preaching and healing attracted.

Even within ourselves, we can be divided, pulled by contrary impulses. This week, I recognized myself in this description from Kathleen Norris’ Acedia & Me: “I have become like the child I once knew who emerged one morning from a noisy, chaotic Sunday school classroom to inform the adults who had heard the commotion and had come to investigate, ‘We’re being bad, and we don’t know how to stop.’”

I laughed, and I hope you do too – because that’s a heart-cry that I think many of us have felt at some time or another. Paul urges his downcast friends in Corinth to realize that we continue to be renewed by God’s grace and love, even when it seems ridiculous that God should care for such wavering, vulnerable creatures as us.

Is that why Jesus asks us to think of sins against the Holy Spirit as “unforgivable”? We need to hear and trust that still, small voice that each of us carries, and it’s so much softer than the voices of the world. It may be the only voice that leads us to enduring peace.

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