:: tomrryan.com ::

11 December 2011
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Mercer Island, WA
10:30am

A couple months ago I ran across an article in the Atlantic Monthly that I thought was for sure a fake. I read it once in disbelief; I read it a second time, and thought, surely, the Atlantic is too reputable of a publication to make something like this up. The story just seemed too outlandish.

It was an article on something called the “Paris Syndrome.” It went on to explain that every year, about 20 tourists in Paris are diagnosed with a physical illness that manifests itself as hallucinations, dizziness, anxiety, sweating, and an overall feeling and perception that they are a victim.

What’s fascinating – and here’s what I thought was a joke – is that this isn’t the result of drinking too much good French wine or indulging in too many pastries. No, “Paris Syndrome” is triggered in tourists when what they imagine Paris to be collides with what they come to experience; when they’re hit with the cold reality that Paris isn’t the romantic city that the postcards and movies tell us it is.

Isn’t that amazing?

The article goes on to say that this syndrome largely affects Japanese tourists, because the image of Paris in their culture is of a city populated with stick-thin models, all smartly dressed in the latest from Louis Vuitton. Apparently what the ads of Paris don’t tell them is that the Metro smells, pickpockets are everywhere, and not everyone looks like Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant.

What stood out to me the most, however, was the conclusion reached by a physician studying this phenomenon. He said that Paris Syndrome is ‘a manifestation of psychopathology related to the voyage, rather than a syndrome of the traveler.’ In other words, the excitement resulting from visiting Paris causes the heart to accelerate, causing giddiness and shortness of breath, which results in hallucinations.

So if I understand this correctly, “Paris Syndrome” seems to be just a really bad hangover from getting too excited. The depth of anticipation these travelers feel – and the dramatic letdown they experience once they arrive to Paris – is enough to bring them physical illness.

Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine what this must be like. I can’t imagine being told that I’m about to visit one of the most heavenly and perfect and idyllic cities on earth, and then receive a cold slap in the face upon arrival. I think I’d feel confused, betrayed, and like these travelers, probably a little dizzy, too. It can be tough to handle life when it doesn’t meet our expectations, or when our worlds feel like they’re flipped upside down.

***

I thought about that story a lot this week, because each text we read this morning in our Lectionary offers echoes of a similar disorientation. Advent is upon us, which means we, as a church, are in a posture of waiting and anticipation. We’re prepping the Nave and lighting candles and remembering the needy; and as families we’re shopping, preparing trees, cookies, gifts, and food. All of our rituals and preparation are geared towards remembering and celebrating that night when Christ was born, delivered into this world by teenage parents amid straw and hay and barn animals. But amid all of the seasonal chaos of this month, our liturgy and Scripture are here to reorient us and remind us this is a season of hopeful watching and hopeful waiting.

But these texts this morning are also something of a prophetic warning; a warning that what we’re waiting for is not what we think; Christ’s incarnation is not the gentle, quiet baby of our Christmas carols, but rather it represents a violent and radical reshaping of the very world in which we live. And the question is this: will we still want what we hope for? If these tourists knew that what awaited them in Paris wasn’t streets of romance bathed in soft movie lighting, that it was an old city with a bad sewer system, crime, racial rioting, and real, genuine people, would they still make the trip? Would they still want to experience the beauty and the depravity of the city? In much the same way, these texts provoke us to ask, So do we really know what we’re waiting for and anticipating?

Do we want what we’re waiting for?

***

Let’s start in Isaiah, where we read this:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me;
He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners;
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God…

These are pretty strong words. What the author is saying here, essentially, is this: there is someone coming who will bring good news to all those who suffer and are oppressed. Your day of liberation is coming; those who are captive will be free; those who are poor will be made wealthy. In short, all you know to be true about this world – its social, political, and economic order – all will be upended by the one who is coming. An innocent little infant, Jesus is not!

What’s more: embedded in this prophetic discourse is this curious little phrase: “To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” which refers to the ancient practice called Jubilee. In Scripture God decrees a year of Jubilee every 50 years, and what follows is a complete reordering of property and wealth. All servants are set free and all property purchased is returned to the previous owner. Can you imagine what America would be like if we instituted this? If all property was reordered and redistributed? If our migrant workers were immediately given an office job with benefits and a six-figure salary? It would throw our society into chaos, wouldn’t it? And it would probably make Republicans’ heads explode because apparently, God is a socialist after all!

But this kind of radical social and economic change offers only a hint of what’s to come. Isaiah is saying, this birth of the Messiah will be something big, something enormous. Our world will not be the same; justice will be done and everyone will feel the effects.

Do we want what we’re waiting for?

***

Jesus’ own mother also chimes in. We have this beautiful song from Mary this morning, where she says:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord…
He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel.

Are you hearing any themes here yet? We hear in Mary’s words, “lifting up the lowly”; “the rich he has sent away empty”; we hear words of justice, of strength, of love. All of which we hear in Isaiah, and again in our Psalm, and again from John the Baptist in our Gospel lesson. These writers and prophets are trying to prepare us for what’s to come; to prepare us for the reality that the Incarnation isn’t a casual, sweet little happening as so many of our songs and writings depict; God doesn’t take on human form just because. When Christ comes it’s an extraordinary event, and everything in God’s purview, all of creation, will be shaken.

Indeed, our Lectionary texts remind us this morning that in God’s economy the last are first, and the first are last. In God’s world, you must lose your life in order to gain it.

Do we want what we’re waiting for?

***

Call me crazy, but I enjoy heading to the mall on Black Friday. I usually never buy anything – if I do, it’s only an item or two. But there’s something about the energy and the excitement of those first days of the Christmas season that I like. This year, as I stood in line waiting to buy a couple things I didn’t need, I was struck by the fact that here I was, less than 12 hours removed from Thanksgiving – a day we set aside to be grateful for what we have – and I’m already telling myself I don’t have enough. That somehow my life would be a just a little more complete if I had these two shirts. It was enough to make me think about turning around and walking out. But I didn’t. I wish I’d had, but I didn’t.

As I walked out of the mall, feeling guilty and indulgent for what I’d just bought, I became acutely aware of the narrative our stores try to sell us. They are superb at telling us that what we have isn’t enough; they are great at making us feel like we’re missing something. But they’re also selling an overall mood, aren’t they? An antidote to this feeling of not being enough. The message of the mall in December is that this is a season to dress warm, drink warm beverages by fireplaces, be surrounded by people you know and love, get great discounts on stuff that will be super fulfilling, and genuinely be of bright and good cheer. Oh, and this dream can be yours for the low price of $99.99.

I walk into the mall hopeful that, like our tourist friends, I’ll be ushered into a new and better life with new and better products. But of course our lives can’t be lived like idyllic dreams and ads, can they? The mall simply produces ads for a way of life and a way of belief that, if we buy into them like tourists buying into ads of Paris, will leave us bitterly disappointed. Isaiah, Mary, and John the Baptist remind us that despite these cozy and seductive images of the season, we live in a world rife with violence and injustice. And as we wait for the gift of Christ’s coming and his return, we’re reminded he’ll also be bringing the gifts of goodness, justice, liberation, and salvation for all.

***

One of the things I enjoy about this season is reveling in the paradox that is God. That for all the dramatic language from our prophets this morning – all the language of justice and peace – all of this begins with a baby being born in Bethlehem. There’s something rather unbelievable about the notion that God – a being whom we name as existing outside time and space, sort of hovering above it all – first takes on human form and enters into the dirty, nitty-gritty of the earth. As one of my favorite philosophers says, Christ enters the “funk” of the world to be “God with us,” Emmanuel. And as a new father – and a stay-at-home dad, at that – I know how inelegant and “funky” it is to be around a baby. The urine, the poop, the spit-up; I end each day smelling like a combination of diaper wipes and breast milk.

And yet this is our story. That Christ has come and will come to redeem the world through his dramatic Incarnation. That God simultaneously defies our expectations, rearranges our neatly ordered lives, and yet offers us peace and hope in spite of it all. And just as Christ enters the “funk” of our world, so he enters the chaos and disorder of your life to bring you peace and hope. But this is not a cheap hope or a cheap peace; this is not hope gained easily at the mall, and it’s not peace that we can find by buying the right goods. No, Christ’s vision of hope and peace costs us with our lives. It humbles us. But the good news is that in the midst of it all God is with us.

So again, do we want what we’re waiting for?

***

As I was writing this sermon yesterday, I learned that a friend’s brand new baby passed away. It was unclear if he had passed away before birth or shortly after, but either way it is an unspeakable tragedy. And my heart hurts for them. And later yesterday evening my wife learned that another friend’s 1.5 year old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. These are tragedies on a scale that don’t compute for me. As my wife said so elegantly last night, “Life just isn’t fair.”

And she’s right. Isaiah knows this, Mary knows this, and John the Baptist knows this too. Most importantly, God knows this. And thankfully our prophets tell us he has come to bind up the brokenhearted, and bring good news to the oppressed, and to comfort those who mourn.

I don’t know how to handle tragedy on this scale. I don’t know why things like this happen, and I don’t know how it fits into God’s plan, if there even is one. They are stories that make me scream because of their injustice and because, really, life isn’t fair. I feel the dizziness and the anxiety like our Parisian tourists at the beginning, because really, this is not how life is supposed to go.

And it’s when I’m faced with these stories that all I can really say is truly, deeply, I don’t know what I hope for. I’m not fully sure I want what I’m waiting for.

But please…Come Jesus, Come.

Amen.

9 October 2011
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Mercer Island
10:30am

Good morning!

It’s been said that most pastors really only have one or two sermons to give; that most sermons are really just different iterations of the same one or two sermons they always give. I’ve found that to be quite true (not from Hunt and Beverly, of course. In other churches.)

I’m happy to report that after this morning I will have preached the only two sermons I’ve got in me. So if you heard my sermon last time, and you’re here this morning, my apologies. This is all I’ve got. Feel free to sleep in the other mornings I’m scheduled to preach.

I want to turn our attention to the Old Testament reading this morning, and in particular this peculiar story of the Israelites creating a golden calf, and God becoming so angry that he threatens to destroy the very people with whom he’s made a covenant. Of course, as we read, Moses steps in to reason with this angry God, and God relents.

I wonder, did you catch that when it was first read? I mean, did it really seep into you? God changed his mind. I mean, he didn’t take just take Moses’s protest into consideration, he didn’t patronize Moses by saying, “That’s cute, Moses. But they’re going to die.”

No, he listened carefully to Moses and changed his mind. The God of the Universe, the being who is defined by his omniscience and omnipresence, is convinced by Moses against wiping his covenanted people from the earth. It’s a staggering moment in the Exodus story, isn’t it?

Truthfully, I’m not sure what to make of this scene. I’m tempted to say that’s demonstrative of a God who decides to act lovingly rather than violently. And that it shows that God fundamentally is a relational God, one who can be influenced by his people as much as we are influenced by him. And I think those things are true. But I wonder, what sort of behavior would make God this angry?

Let’s put this episode in context. Our story begins with Israel in bondage to the Egyptians. God declares a covenant with his people, pledging to deliver them from this torment and to a “a good and broad land,” a land flowing with milk and honey.

And if you remember those iconic scenes from the Charlton Heston film, Moses is put in charge as God’s mediator, and sent to reason with Pharaoh.

Pharaoh is not interested in losing cheap labor, so he protests, and is greeted with a scourge of plagues from God. And then of course there is the climactic scene where the Israelites finally escape from Pharaoh’s control, and God parts the Red Sea to deliver his people and destroy the Egyptians. It’s quite dramatic, no?

This event is the fulfillment of God’s promise and a sign from God that something big is happening. This event is a kind of re-creation. The Israelites have been given a new “garden of eden,” as it were.

But they soon get restless. They wander in the desert for awhile, and eventually Moses leaves them to run an errand. He doesn’t intend to be gone long, but he had some business to work out with God on Mt. Sinai.

And then Scripture says, “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

So as this passage goes on, they fashion a golden calf from their jewelry, call it their god, and plan a festival to honor it.

So let’s review, God has promised to deliver them from slavery and into a rich land filled with milk and honey. Moses leaves them for a bit, they get anxious, and decide to build a new image of God. This is how they repay God? Really?

So the construction of a golden calf probably wasn’t the smartest move. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Consider that for much of this story, Moses is the mediator for God to his people. And since Moses has been gone for some time, their creation of the calf is more an act of panic than it is of malice. The Israelites simply didn’t know how to function in the absence of God very well.

But I think there’s something else going on here besides the anxiety and panic of the Israelites.

In many ways the calf represented a transfer of authority. It’s not the Hebrews altogether abandon God for other gods; rather the center and authority of their faith was switched from God and Moses, to the golden calf. Quite simply the calf represented God on their terms, not God’s.

Now, I think that’s an important distinction, and one that demonstrates the subtle and corrosive nature of idolatry. The idol was a representation of God on their terms, not God’s. It didn’t mean they had ceased belief in God, necessarily, but their loyalty had shifted elsewhere.

***

And of course this shift in loyalty happens to us all the time in our day. Naming our current cultural idols is pretty easy. We place a lot of authority and loyalty in our economics, in our jobs, and our entertainers. We’ve even decided to call them “american idols.” And if you paid attention to the response of support and grief to the death of Steve Jobs this week, you get a sense for how deeply we value what technology can do for us.

Now, in and of themselves, are jobs, the economy, entertainers, and our iPhones bad things? Of course not – at least, I hope note. But if I understand this passage, it seems it’s really a question of authority. What or who has authority in our lives? I heard this great quote that goes something like, “If I want to know what’s most important in your life, show me what you love.” I’m not doing that quote justice, but the point is, what we love – what we choose to show affection and honor towards, tells us a great deal about what has power in our lives.

No doubt, some idols may be easy to name in our lives. And yet I’d venture to say that most of us are unaware of the depth and power of our most influential idols. They exist in our work, our relationships, and yes, we even worship idols in this building.

One of my favorite quotes is from a 14th century German mystic named Meister Eckhart. He was famous for saying, “God, I pray that you would rid me of God.” It was Eckhart’s way of saying, God, strip away everything in me that I think is you, but isn’t. And I find myself wondering about my own spirituality and where I’ve attributed things as being absolutely God that absolutely aren’t.

The thing is, it can be deceptive, can’t it? My spirituality has become the spirituality of the desert in so many ways – for the last decade, I think, I’ve felt like a wandering spiritual gypsy with no tradition or statement of faith to call my own. So much of what my pursuit of God looks like is through the prism of the question. I can’t understand God apart from rigorously assaulting him with skepticism, doubt, and piercing questions. And I dearly love that part of me. But I also understand that skepticism and doubts are idols that prevent me from actually enjoying what God can offer me through peace, security, and rest. Is God a god of questioning? Absolutely. Is he a God of peace and answers? Yes. He is both. Always.

So this is the part in the sermon where a good preacher would look at you and say, What are those idols in your life? Those places where you think you understand God most clearly? Well, I think those are important questions to ponder, and perhaps over lunch today with your spouse or family, you can think about that.

But I’d like to offer you something different. Call it just one look into this community .

I haven’t been here that long, and I’ve been a member of the staff an even shorter amount of time. But I’ve witnessed an interesting tension occurring in our community. This is a 100-year old parish with a rich history and heritage. And from what I understand, this Island wouldn’t be the same without the fingerprints of our church on it. And that’s pretty cool. This is a parish that has done some good, good work in its history.

But from what I understand of the conversations, we’re also a community in transition. We’re a community that needs to revitalize and reenergize if we’re to be around in another 100 years, which is why I think we’re working hard to breathe life and vitality into our youth program, and attract more families to our community.

We’re on a good trajectory, to be sure, but I hear two things echoing in these halls. The first is a lament for the way things used to be – a lament that our music is no longer what it was, that our pastor isn’t who we’ve had before, and a general sorrow that it just isn’t the “past” anymore. No doubt the life of our parish is different – time brings inevitable change, and the past is always looked at more fondly when we can selectively remove the blemishes. But we have what I’d call an idolatry of a nostalgic past.

And yet I also hear an idolatry of our future. That if we only get enough young people in the doors we’ll have a “good” church again. That if we open our doors wide enough, and show folks we’re a welcoming community, that more people will come. That if we get our fiscal house in order we’ll somehow be a more effective church.

Now, I don’t want to arrogantly assume either stance is wrong. Please here me, we should be people that remember well and look to the future with hope. Absolutely. But what I’m suggesting is either of these postures when dwelt upon – looking back or looking forward – fundamentally ignores the work that God is actually doing right here and right now.

Could it be God doesn’t really care about this building? Or the work we’ve done in the past? Or the work we plan to do? God is at work on this Island presently in some profound ways, I promise, and it’s our job as a parish to join the work he’s already doing. Which means, in some ways, that we need to be people that prays to God to rid us of God, to rid us of those things which have become central to our lives, and that prevent us from hearing and seeing the still small voice of God moving in our midst.

Several years ago there was a story circulating in some church circles about a church in the South, I think, that had a vibrant and enthusiastic music ministry. The church’s musicians were borderline professionals as each week the drums, guitar, and vocals were mixed to a kind of perfection. The church produced numerous worship CD’s and attendance in this church was booming, as people from all over made worshipping at this church a kind of Mecca. It seemed to everyone that God had offered a unique blessing to this music ministry, and each week people left services having had an intimate moment with the Creator.

But, as the story goes, the church began to realize that its music program was becoming a hindrance to actually encountering God, that it grew a life of it’s own and they were no longer attuned to the Spirit.

So they did the unthinkable – they removed music from their church entirely. Not just the worship part of the service, but all of it. All the instruments, all the microphones, everything. What they said in that moment was that music was a beautiful and deeply intimate way of worshipping God, but it had become an idol for them. They needed to strip themselves of what had become a fundamental part of their lives in order to hear God afresh.

I know for us, here at Emmanuel, this story hits a little too close to home because music has been such a big part of our heritage. But as we continue to press forward as a parish, I think we need to continually think about what is the golden calf that removes the authority from God and places it elsewhere. Is it the Eucharist? The liturgy? The youth program?

It will be different for all of us, I think. But my deep hope for this parish is that we are a people who are led by the voice of God, not our lament for the past or our vision for the future. That we listen to each other carefully, thoughtfully, and with a spirit of openness and curiosity to what God is up to in each of our lives.

May we be people, at our core, that pray to God for him to rid us of God. Amen.

7 August 2011
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Mercer Island
10am

Good morning!

I wanted to start by introducing myself. I’m Tom Ryan. My wife, Jessica, and our son, Asher, have been attending Emmanuel for a little over a year now. And I joined the staff this January as our Theologian-in-Residence, a cool little title that means I lead Theology Pubs, and other encounters with theology in our parish. It’s a position I’m excited about, and we’ve felt quite welcomed as a family into the life of the parish. So thank you for that.

I’d like to turn our attention towards this passage from Matthew this morning. It is, I’d venture to say, one of the more iconic stories in the life of Jesus. Along with the narrative of Christ’s resurrection, and the story we heard last week of Jesus feeding the five thousand, these narratives stand as something of the holy trinity of stories from his life. After all, nothing quite proves one’s divinity like multiplying loaves and fishes, and then walking on the water.

The focus of this text is unquestionably Jesus walking to meet them in the middle of the sea, but I want to wonder together about Peter in the story. Spend any time in the gospels and you’ll begin to get a picture of the disciples as bumbling, fearful ninnies who can’t get anything right. At different points Jesus appears exasperated by their humanness yet also patient with the time it takes them to learn what he’s there to teach. The gospel writers tend to share no such charity, however, and so you get passages like this one, where Peter (and the rest of the disciples) are seen as doubtful, fearful, desperate, and downright confused.

So I’d like to reframe this story for us. Remove yourself from this beautiful, sunny Seattle morning and transport yourself to first century Palestine. It’s hot, dry, and dusty. You are Peter from Bethsaida. You are married, and you are partners with your brother in a fishing business. You’re first introduced to this man, Jesus, through a mutual friend, John the Baptist. Jesus’s reputation precedes him, however, as you’ve heard John talk about him incessantly. (I imagine Peter saying, “John, enough, I get it. He’s the Son of God. Can we stop talking about this now?”) You’ve respected Jesus as a “master” for some time, but one day as you’re fishing, Jesus walks by and simply says, “Follow me.”

And you do.

You drop everything, leave your business, and give your life over to following this peculiar man around Palestine. You become an earnest and deeply loyal follower. And over the next three years you soak it all in – his random, seemingly pointless stories about fig trees, prodigal sons and mustard seeds, and witness his stunning miracle work.

In fact, you have so many questions for this man, but he doesn’t give you any answers. Instead, he offers more odd stories that seem to have no relationship to the question just asked. You try to make sense of his miracles, but sense-making betrays you because you’ve never seen things like this before.

And again when you ask Jesus for an explanation, again he tells you a cute little story with no ending – this time about farmers putting money in the ground for later – and refuses to provide any clarity about what he meant.

You are a bit like a small child being pulled on an inner tube behind a boat – getting whipped around by your dad over big waves and around corners, hanging on for dear life, hoping you don’t get thrown into the cold water.

No wonder the gospel writers saw the disciples as dazed and confused. They were!

The thing is, the disciples make us feel better about ourselves because we can say, “At least we get it. At least we’re not as confused as they were.” And about some things this may be true. We live in a world where the “right” answers, certitude, is of extreme importance. In economics, business, medicine, politics. And this is also the case in the church, where theological battle lines are drawn, and wars of words are waged over who has the “right” view on homosexuality, hell, or whatever else seems to threaten our dearly held beliefs.

But I think this is the beauty of a story like this one from Matthew: even one of Jesus’s most earnest and loyal followers had difficulty grasping what Jesus was all about. By the time Jesus walks on water he’s spent a good deal of time with his disciples talking with them, eating with them, and teaching them. And yet in a moment of sheer terror as their boat was being tossed about by waves, Jesus appears to say hello and calm the winds. And the response by the disciples is this: “You’re a ghost!”

It’s an understandable response, but also not one you’d expect from your closest friends.

Jesus has just done something remarkable – he’s blown their minds. He’s walked where one doesn’t walk. And he’s silenced that which is unable to be tamed. In an instant, what the disciples thought they knew about Jesus was both disturbingly upset (“you’re a ghost!”) and spectacularly confirmed (“Truly you are the Son of God!”)

So the question I wonder about then, is this: if Peter – someone who knew intimately the life and work of Christ – has a hard time recognizing him during this story, what chance do we have to recognize God in our lives at all? We lead busy lives, to be sure. And often it’s difficult to pay attention to our own bodies, much less the voice of God. But my bet is that if God was bold enough to speak to his disciples and others in Scripture, then God is waiting, lurking, and speaking ever so softly to us now within the mundane rhythms of our lives.

A friend once told me that the core message at the heart of our spirituality is this: pay attention. That’s it. Just pay attention. In many ways spirituality is a willingness to be attuned to the ways God has chosen to speak to you, both the content of those words and the medium. And a willingness to be attuned to God’s movement in the world in our communities.

A few weeks ago the question I posed in our theology pub was this: do you hear the voice of God speaking to you? If so, how is that voice communicated? And if not, why not? The responses were quite mixed: some thought God’s presence was the small voice in our head orienting us to what’s right and wrong, while others simply didn’t think God spoke at all. But at the heart of my question was my own curiosity: does God still surprise you when God speaks? Are you willing for God to surprise you even still?

Jesus made his presence known to the disciples in the most unlikely of ways as he met them on a boat. And this text is a reminder that we serve a living and active God, one who has the ability to completely disorient what we know to be true. Make no mistake: God is in the business of disrupting what we know to be true about both God and the world. Always. God is a God we only ever really know in part, and who takes pleasure in saying to us, as Jesus often did, “you’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” This business of paying attention is a worthwhile discipline, but also wildly unpredictable. Tread carefully!

Much of my spirituality these days is informed by a poem from T.S. Eliot. In his work “The Dry Salvages,” he says,

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

If there was a model disciple, Peter was it. He was the disciple on which Christ was to build his church. And based on our Gospel lesson for today, even Peter had a hard time understanding what Christ was all about, as Jesus was always doing something else to surprise him. Jesus was the “gift half understood.”

Indeed our spiritualities are nothing more than “hints or guesses,” but they are also, as Eliot says, filled with prayer, discipline, thought, action, and most importantly, observance. If we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, my hunch is we’d unexpectedly see God walking, speaking, and talking in our midst.

We might even see a ghost. Amen.

12 November 2011
Tamarindo Beach, Costa Rica
Sunset

Mel, I heard you yesterday say about this place, “this is paradise.” And I’m not sure what exactly paradise is for all of us, but I imagine this gets pretty close. And as someone who spends a good deal of his time in the church, I’m not embarrassed to say that a wedding here beats a musty old church building any day!

As we’ve talked about this day you both have explained your love for Costa Rican culture, and how you wanted your wedding to be a reflection of that more than anything religious. And I think that’s cool. This day and this ceremony bears your unique, authentic fingerprints.

And so while we’re not reading scripture today or saying prayers, I think there is still something mystical and “other” about this. There’s something deeply spiritual in the commitment you are about to make. You are saying to one another, I choose you. I choose you, Mel. I choose you, Steve. At my core, i know you are the one I want to be with. You have made that choice for the last six years together. You are making that choice today. And as you get up tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, you’ll again need to say, I choose you.

And yet as many of us know, that choosing can be some of the hardest choosing we have to do. As you look back on the pictures of this day, you’ll see paradise, you’ll see all of us beautifully dressed and looking good (well, the ladies more than the men), and you’ll see a snapshot in time when life seems to stand still for a moment as we simply “be” together.

But like so many photos, they only tell half the story. Because what lies underneath these photos is a commitment to work, a commitment to labor. Relationships can be a huge pain, can’t they? Nothing causes us more heartache, joy, and sheer frustration than disharmony or disunity with the one we love. It will keep you up at night, it will make you want to scream. Make no mistake, you will labor at this relationship more than any other.

And you thought you were just reciting a few vows!

One of my favorite quotes about marriage is from a theologian who was writing to a young couple on their wedding day, a couple a lot like you. And he said this, “Know that it’s not your love that will sustain your marriage, but your marriage that will sustain your love.” It’s an important point, I think. This is a great day, and one that will pass as quickly as it came. But soon your life together will reach an equilibrium, and you’ll once again settle into the routines of life – trips to the grocery store, home repairs, and the simple living of life. And it’s here, in the mundane and ordinary, that I think you have to make the choice to sustain your love. You will have to choose the hard, sometimes toiling, labor of sustaining your relationship. And that will not be anything close to paradise.

But here’s the good news: you are surrounded by 60 faces today who know you and love you. And there are countless more back home thinking of you and praying for you, people you probably don’t even know about.

The dirty little secret of marriage, I think, is that you need all of these people to succeed. There will be days when you wake up and to choose Steve and to choose Mel will be so, so difficult. And it will be during those days you need your community to do the choosing for you. But what’s great about marriage is that although it can be excruciating and painful at times, you don’t have to go at it alone. You don’t have to labor alone. This “paradise” can last, I promise, but, it will cost you.

So as you look back on the photos of today hopefully 20 years from now, you’ll be able to laugh at our fashion and our haircuts, and you’ll be able to reminisce about the beauty of this day and this week. But I also hope you’ll be able to say, yes, we have labored well. We have chosen one another each day. And while it has been utterly painful, we have been sustained and encouraged by those we love.

It seems to me that paradise doesn’t mean perfection, but rather, paradise is laboring through the ups and downs your relationship will bring, using those as fuel for deeper, more intimate commitments with one another. Paradise is emerging on the other side, with weary faces that are weather beaten and worn, and yet more convinced of your choice to be with one another each day.

Steve and Melissa, may you truly know paradise.

Dwight, from “The Office“:

What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany’s at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier; it’s priceless. As I’m taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It’s her father’s business. She’s Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico but I go to Canada. I don’t trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later I get a postcard. I have a son and he’s the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She’s been waiting for me all these years. She’s never taken another lover. I don’t care. I don’t show up. I go to Berlin. That’s where I stashed the chandelier.