Text of Bishop Steve’s Lenten Video Series

Holy Week – Good News
April 4, 2012

Thank you for joining me in practicing the presence of God. I think the various difficulties we have with Lent, the difficulty we have in remembering that God is always with us, is actually a difficulty we have with the nature of God.

What we would like is a god and a life that always leave us feeling good. We’d like a physical life of endless health and happiness. We’d like a world without trouble or struggle. But that isn’t the life we have.

And that isn’t the nature of the God who is always present with us. Rather, as Holy Week reveals, our God is a God who uses the very pain and suffering of life to create new life. The Paschal Mystery, which we mark and celebrate this week, points us to the heart of darkness at the center which rests the heart of God.

As much as we try to practice the presence of God, we ultimately, collectively, forget. And we live and act as though God were not present. And we hurt ourselves and we hurt one another, even to the point of killing one another, murdering one another. The evening news reveals every day how often we forget the presence of God.

But mystery of this week is that God’s presence, though forgotten, trampled, defaced, paved over, is not thereby extinguished. In fact the trampling and defacing somehow open the way for God to do God’s work, to take the rough clay we’ve offered and shape a new world.

Next to the altar is at St. Andrew’s, Millinocket, is a large crucifix with a bronze crucified Jesus. And Jesus is simply erupting, bursting, from the cross – exploding upwards to new life.

That’s a wonderful image for me of the presence of God with us. We can do our level best to hide from the God’s presence, but we can’t succeed. Because in the midst of the deepest darkness, God simply erupts into our lives. God’s presence among us is simply inexhaustible and irrepressible no matter what we do.

May you know the joy of God’s presence this Easter.

Lent 5 – What is Our Hope?
March 28, 2012

At a recent Sunday morning coffee hour, a man was speaking rather urgently about global warming. He stopped suddenly, and then asked, “How can we have any hope?”

I suspect many of us harbor similar questions. Our shaky global economy, our fears of environmental degradation, wars and rumors of war, our toxic politics – all these may leave us feeling quite hopeless. We act as though the future of the world rests solely in our hands, as if it were all up to us – and we have no answers.

As people of faith, we know, or should know, that it’s not all up to us. Our lives are lived in the presence of God. It is God who holds the world. It is God who takes what we do and uses it for true transformation, for creating a new heaven and a new earth.

There’s an old story that asks what one should do if one knew that there was one day left, one day before the world ends. And the answer given by the story is to plant a tree, to act as if there is a future beyond our imagining. Because our fear of the future is really about a failure to imagine a reality beyond ourselves, a failure to recognize that God is with us.

Practicing the presence of God reminds us that we are not traveling alone. We are traveling with God, and we believe that God is faithful. We believe that God has promised us a new heaven and new earth, and God keeps God’s promises. What may be our personal last day is not God’s, and therein lies our hope.

Practicing the presence of God shifts the lens by which we view everything, perhaps most of all, our view of what’s to come. It is the presence of God among us that gives us our hope.

Lent 4 – Where are we going?
March 21, 2012

The goal of Lent is, as I’ve said, to deepen our awareness of the presence of God. And, in fact, that is the goal of the whole Christian life – to live each day, all day, in the presence of God.

We use all sorts of metaphors to try to capture this. We talk about journeying to the new Jerusalem. We talk about going to heaven. We speak of going home. All of these are images of the place where God is and where we want to be.

But let’s not forget they are metaphors. They are symbols of the deeper truth of God’s continuing presence with us. When we experience, even for just a moment, that truth, then it feels like we’ve come home, like we’ve gone to heaven.

T.S. Eliot, near the end of his Four Quartets, wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

We are already home. We already live with our God. We are already part of God’s mission to make the whole world new. We are already walking in the way that leads to new life. We don’t need to wait for anything, only to open our eyes and see.

Can you see God’s presence with you?

Lent 3 – Saying Yes
March 14, 2012

If we understand our lives to be gifts of God to ourselves and to the world, then we must begin to see ourselves as fundamentally good and as beloved by God. Oh certainly, we can improve, certainly we can grow and mature. But the place we begin is the goodness of God’s creation, and the place we live is the love of God.

That means, I think, that examination of our lives starts in a place of acceptance and affirmation. The heaviness with which so many of us view ourselves, the desire we have to be somehow other or better than we are, misses the truth that God created us and loves us as we are.

So our Lenten disciplines of self-examination and repentance are rooted in the affirmation that we are good creations of a loving God who walks with us – always – and invites us to be true to ourselves and to God.

In other words, our work in Lent begins simply with saying yes – yes to ourselves, yes to our lives, yes to God.

That’s very hard for many of us. What we are so conscious of is our flaws, our weaknesses, our failings. I believe God wants us to grow and mature. But such growth doesn’t happen by punishing or attacking or hating ourselves. It begins by loving ourselves and nurturing the good that is in us.

Parker Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak, writes: “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks – we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”

God has give you your life. Say yes to your life.

Lent 2 – Who am I?  What do I want to do?
March 7, 2012

One of the difficulties with self-examination is that it begs the question of identity. Who am I? How do I understand myself? What do I want? What is authentic for me? What does God want me to do?

When I was a youngster I admired my uncles who were doctors, and I thought I should be a doctor. My parents thought that would be a good career path for me. My dad was a teacher, and he often seemed unhappy, so I thought I definitely didn’t want to do that. So I went off to college and to pre-med, which seemed like a good idea until I encountered organic chemistry. I decided I really didn’t want to be a doctor after all. Since I had mistaken the question of vocation for the question of being, it took me a long time to sort things out.

The fundamental question, the one that Lent asks, is the question of being. Who is Steve before God? What does God want of Steve? I’ve been working on that for years.

Our Lenten affirmation is that God is always present. That God was present at our creation, indeed, God is the source of our creation. We are, in fact, a gift to ourselves and world from God. And therefore the most important thing we can do is be our true selves – for me to most fully myself, the truest Steve I can be. And so the question is – where is God in my life? Where do I see God? Do I act in such ways that I might see God more often? Am I willing to be more fully the person God created?

In Lent we lift not only our actions, but our very selves to God.

Lent 1 – A Meditation on Repentance
February 29, 2012

We began Lent with ashes. Ashes were a traditional symbol of mourning – dust you are and to dust you shall return. We mourn not only our mortal nature – that we will die. We also mourn our failures, our seeming inability to live the lives God calls us to live. As St. Paul wrote, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Our failure weighs heavily on us, and Lent has often been viewed as a season of remorse for our failures.

As a result, the word “repent” often carries a heavy layer of guilt. Lent becomes the season of feeling guilty And none of us can live for long with that.

But the word repent comes from the Greek meaning, “to turn around.” We might think of that as meaning that we are invited to turn from sin, to turn from our failures – and that is certainly one meaning. More importantly, it means to turn toward God, to turn in a godward direction – to conform our lives to God.

Since God is everywhere, since God is always with us, I think repentance actually is a call to live in the awareness that God is with us. Every action is begun, continued and finished in God. God is the one, as the collect for purity says, to whom all ears are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. When we behave as if our actions were somehow hidden from God, then we fool ourselves – because God is present everywhere we are.

St. Augustine is famous for saying, “Love God and do what you want.” What would it mean if we held all our actions before God? What would we want to do?

An Ash Wednesday Meditation
February 22, 2012

So we come again to Ash Wednesday and the church’s invitation to self-examination and repentance, to prayer, fasting and self-denial, and to reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. I always come to Ash Wednesday with both anticipation and dread – anticipation because I have experienced Lent as a time of genuine growth and renewal on several occasions; and dread because sometimes it seems like a lot of tedious and unrewarding effort. You may have had a similar experience.

What is the point of the invitation to a holy Lent? What are we trying to do? Where are we trying to go?

I think the short answer is that we are trying to re-discover and live out what is always true – that our days and our nights, our joys and our sorrows, are lived in the presence of God. We are trying to experience again the truth – which we forget – that God is always present with us. We are trying to refresh, renew, reawaken our sense of the presence of God.

Brother Lawrence, in the little volume entitled The Practice of the Presence of God says this: “Take care that you begin your actions, continue them, and finish them with an inward lifting of the heart to God. As it takes time and trouble to acquire this habit, so you need not be discouraged by failure; as its formation is difficult, so will your joy be great when it is attained.”

As we once again enter the season of Lent, I invite you to think of all your actions as something you lift before God – in thanksgiving, in prayer. Brother Lawrence washed dishes as though God depended on it. May we do what we do with the same mind. May this Lent be a time of attuning your awareness to God’s presence, of seeking God in all you do and everywhere you are. May this Lent be a time to discover again that God is with you.

2011

An Easter Greeting: Courage to Act for New Life
April 24, 2011

We’ve arrived at this Easter season in a time when death, even apocalypse, seems to be ascendant. Our Companion Diocese of Haiti still reels from the devastating effects of the January 2010 earthquake. We watch in fascinated horror as whole Japanese villages float slowly across the Pacific to our shores, and Japanese nuclear workers struggle to prevent a nuclear meltdown. In this country gas prices are threatening to cripple our economic recovery, and our political leaders debate who will be cut out of the American Dream. As our Presiding Bishop put it her Easter message, the world seems full of graves…

Yet such graves, as she also notes, are also seedbeds of new life. Our faith is that God calls life out of death. In every disaster, in every death, there lies the hope of change and of new life. And God has put a hunger for new life in each of our hearts, inviting us to look for new life and to act for new life.

Our celebration is an affirmation that God is with us in the midst of all the graves, showing us that the power of death has been broken, that life has the last word. Easter is a call to us to claim our vocation as people of hope and new life, signs of the kingdom that is coming.

My prayer for you is, that whatever deaths you are confronting in your life, this celebration of Easter will give you courage to act for new life – in your home, in your church, in the larger community. May you be a sign of the new thing that God is doing in every place. May your life be a springtime of hope for the people around you.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Holy Week – April 20, 2011

From a spiritual point of view, one of the problems with Holy Week is that we already know how it will end. And, despite our best efforts, most of us clearly have Easter in mind as we work our way through the week. We are, of course, the redeemed. We celebrate Christ’s death as those who are members of his risen body. So we do not grieve as those without hope. We know that even death must bow to Jesus.

Yet, I think our commitment to resurrection causes us to give Holy Week short shrift. Most Episcopalians do not attend any Holy Week services. That’s why the church has changed Palm Sunday to Passion Sunday – to give most worshipers at least a taste of crucifixion. But spiritually I think many miss the grief. We do not grieve about Jesus’ death. We avoid grieving the deaths caused by human sin.

What’s the place of grief in your spiritual life? How do you incorporate sadness and loss into your ministry? Have you allowed yourself to think that because you are ordained, you know how to deal with grief? That you know what to do? How to take away the sting?

My father died this past summer and it was a relief in many ways. He’d been unhappy a long time, and we were all happy for him that he had been released from his misery. In talking about his death with my spiritual director, my spiritual director told me that now I have the chance to decide who I am apart from my father. In other words, my Dad is gone, forever. We will not talk
again. I need no longer accept his understanding of who I am. And I can no longer blame him for who I am. I have to accept the hard work of doing it for myself.

Grief is all about being alone, about accepting that we are now traveling without a beloved – or a hated – traveling companion. It’s about coming to terms with standing alone before God and one another without the companionship or protection or disfigurement of the one who has died. It’s a very painful time. But also a time alive with possibility. It’s a moment to choose.

Holy Week forces us to confront our grief – grief over the deaths in our lives. Grief over the deaths we have caused. Grief over our need to stand before God without excuse and without protection. I think we’d all rather not. I think we as clergy, wrapped up in the busy-ness of the week, may also hide from this grief, even as many of our members do.

The journey of Holy Week is a journey into our standing alone before God – no cover, no protection, no assurances. Sin and death are real. Our participation in them are real. Our need to trust God is real. We know that God has always been faithful. We have every reason to hope God will be now. But there are no shortcuts. Holy Week is our annual practice for the deaths and the griefs we will all face one day. May this week be good practice for you

Lent 6 – April 13, 2011

Engaging your heart in worship

Jennifer Philips asks how we as clergy pray, especially in public worship. How or how well do we pray as we preside over and participate in the liturgy? I feel particularly caught by this question.

When I was first ordained I discovered the emotional and spiritual power of presiding at the Eucharist. I remember saying once, in a burst of enthusiasm, that I would be happy if all I ever got to do was celebrate the Eucharist. And I still find the encounter with the faithful at the Eucharist to be deeply moving.
Of course the bloom is off the rose now, and over the years I’ve found myself caught up in the effort to provide creative and powerful worship each week.

Often I’ve been too busy coordinating the players or obsessing about the sermon to pay much attention to my own need to worship. Indeed, some days I’ve ended the service feeling tired, perhaps even satisfied about the worship, but not fed.
Perhaps that’s why music is so important to my worship life. When I sing, I can give myself fully to the music. I don’t have to think about leading. I can let go and allow the spirit to carry me where it will.

It’s also why I approach every celebration of the Eucharist as a new event. I try hard to be deliberate, to think about the words, to deliver them with the weight they deserve. In fact, I often choose to emphasize different words in the text in order to force myself to hear them freshly.

Sometimes I emphasize nouns; sometimes verbs; sometimes pronouns or adjectives. And I always remember that Eucharist is anamnesis, making present for the gathered community Christ’s once and for all time offering on the cross. There is no greater drama that that.

Years ago, as a member of a Clergy Leadership Project, I learned a new way to celebrate the Eucharist from Ron DelBene. He presided in a manner of great simplicity, stripped of every superfluous motion or gesture. The simple dignity of his presence caused me to completely rethink how I presided at prayer, what I said and what I did. I learned that the greater danger is saying too much, rather than too little. I try to keep that in mind even now.

I think that presiding at worship is the moment of greatest tension in our roles as priests and deacons, the time when our roles as presiders, spiritual leaders, and worshipers collide. Do you give thought to what feeds you in worship? Do you plan services, not only with things you “like” or “prefer,” but also with things that challenge you, that stretch you, that move you? Do you seek to engage your heart as well as the hearts of those you serve?

If you’re finding yourself unmoved – or even bored – perhaps it’s time to make a fresh start in leading worship.

Lent 5 – April 6, 2011

Circles of Trust

At our Fall Clergy Retreat, we learned about and practiced “Circles of Trust” according to a method developed by Parker Palmer. Palmer’s work is itself rooted in the Quaker “clearness process” – a process that attempts by a series of open-ended questions to deepen our understanding of what God is calling us to do. It is work that requires community, patience, silence, and openness to the spirit of God. The Clergy Day Committee presented this work because we believe that the deepening of trust among us is essential to our work as clergy.

We live in a time of extraordinary change and the deep anxiety that accompanies such change. The recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan serve for me as metaphors of the kind of change we are experiencing in church and society. The change cannot be stopped, and the damage to beloved institutions and to familiar ways of living is in many ways incalculable. For those of us who love the church, this is a time of grief both for the losses we’ve experienced and for the losses we anticipate.

As we also know from witnessing the aftermath of earthquakes, recovery comes when everyone lets go of petty concerns about territoriality and power and agrees to share both the burdens and the responsibility of the work. Disasters release creativity, and new ways of doing business are discovered and shaped.

For us as clergy, I believe this means moving out of our congregational silos and seeing one another as trusted companions on a journey. We can indeed help one another, and not just in administrative or programmatic ways. We can be fellow sojourners, helping one another to learn what God has in mind for us. Perhaps the Circles of Trust process, despite its requirements, can be an important resource as we struggle together to deepen our understanding of God’s call.

This Lent I invite you to consider who are your traveling companions. With whom might you develop a circle of trust to help you plumb the depths of your ministry? As you connect with one another for fellowship and work perhaps you might think of building a circle together.

Lent 4 – March 30, 2011

Innocent of Alaska

I must confess that the history of Alaska is a piece of American history
that I know very little about. I do know that the Diocese of Alaska is
geographically our largest diocese. I do know that the population of the
Episcopal Church in Alaska is sparse and includes many isolated Inuit
communities above the Arctic Circle. But I don’t know anything about the
planting of the church in Alaska.

The Feast Day for Innocent of Alaska fills in some of the gaps. Innocent,
born John Veniaminov, was born in Russia and raised in the Orthodox
Church. In 1823, John was sent to Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands to
serve as missionary priest. He left with his young family and journeyed to
Unalaska, a trek that took more than a year. Once there he began work of
evangelism and conversion that lasted more than fifty years.

He taught the people to be blacksmiths, carpenters and brick layers. He
built a church with them. He worked not only in Unalaska, but on the Fox
and Pribilof Islands, traveling between the islands in a canoe. He learned
the languages of the people, created an alphabet for the Aleut language
and translated the Gospel of Matthew along with many hymns and prayers.
In 1829 he traveled to the mainland of the Americas and preached along
the coast of Bering Sea. In 1834 he was transferred to Sitka Island where
he began work among the Tinglit people.

One thing that strikes me about Innocent’s work is that there was
no separation between his life among the people and his work as a
missionary. His life was unimaginably difficult, but then so was the life of
every resident of the Aleutians and Alaska. Innocent made a home among
the people and from there he preached the Gospel.

How do we see our work among the people? Are we set apart or firmly
rooted in our community? Is our work life and our religious life one and
the same or do we make distinctions between what is religious and what is
not, what is in church and what is outside of church?

As Jennifer Philips asks, do we encounter God only in the church or also on
the street and among the people?

Lent 3 – March 23, 2011

My reflections today are directed toward Holy Women, Holy Men and Richard Allen, a new entry in our calendar.Holy Women, Holy Men is a significant change in the calendar of saints as we have known it. Formerly called Lesser Feasts and Fasts, the calendar was a slim volume containing mostly Biblical, early Church, Medieval and Renaissance saints. Strikingly absent were saints from the modern era and from our own Episcopal Church. The new calendar, modeled on those of the Church of England and other calendars from the Anglican Communion, now embraces saints from our own history.

Richard Allen is one of the proposed American saints. We know Richard Allen from his partnership with Absalom Jones in founding the first black Christian congregations in the Methodist and Episcopal Churches. Both were former slaves. Both purchased their freedom. And both were much influenced by the Methodist revival. Together they brought a number of black Christians into St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. When the white members of the congregation attempted to segregate the black members in the balcony, Allen and Jones led their members out of the church to form the Free African Society in 1787. From there, taking different paths, Jones founded St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church, and Allen founded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. When the African Methodist Episcopal Church became independent, Allen became its first bishop.

Allen believed deeply in freedom for all people. He operated a station on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. He preached and wrote hymns about the unity of all who belong to Christ. As we celebrate Allen’s feast day, the desire for freedom still pulses in the hearts of people all across the globe. Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are now alive with cries for freedom. Do we in our ministries see Christ at work in the cries of the oppressed? Do we see the uprisings in the Muslim world as simply political uprisings or as acts of God? Are we free enough of our own fears to be advocates for all those who seek freedom, even at the cost of higher gas prices? How do you connect the life of the larger world to the life of your community?

Lent 2 – March 16, 2001

I think it was after Eckart Horn’s funeral service that Bishop Chilton said to me, “Being a Bishop will break your heart.” That short statement struck as being profoundly true not only because my heart was breaking at that moment, but because I was having to learn to make room in my heart not only for my own grief, but for the grief of a whole diocese: for Eckart’s family, for the people of St Nick’s, for the clergy of the diocese. And it occurs to me now that the breaking open of my heart has not stopped. It has continued through the death of James Dalton-Thompson and the pain that all the change in our diocese is causing: the loss and reduction of priest positions, the fear of congregations about the loss of their way of life, the discomfort of trying to be a new church in a new time.

Jennifer Philips in her questions to us for Lent, questions offered in preparation for our May 10 Clergy Day, suggests that making room in our hearts is the fundamental task of clergy leadership. Can we make room in our hearts for all the people, all the pain, of our ministries? Can we embrace all that’s going on, all the change that’s taking place? Can we find compassion for the very different people to whom we minister in all their different perspectives and different needs?

And can we find room in our hearts for ourselves? Some of her questions suggest that we are most alienated from ourselves, from our own fears, from our own needs. If we are going to represent the love and mercy of God for the world, we need to find love and mercy for ourselves.

Let me suggest that our wellness project must be rooted in a belief that God loves us, knows us, accepts us, wants us to flourish. Without that conviction, we are divided against ourselves, and wholeness is not possible.

How’s your heart doing? Is it growing wide enough to hold even you?

Ash Wednesday – March 9, 2011

This short video is the first of a weekly Lenten series I’m undertaking in concert with the diocesan Clergy Day Committee. The purpose of these videos is to create an opportunity for more frequent conversation between bishop and clergy. Although anyone is welcome to share these videos, they are designed to address matters of importance to the clergy. The topics will cover a variety of subjects, some related to Clergy Day Programs. A blog will be created to for clergy and others to respond to the video. We hope that these videos might be another way to deepen our relationships and our ministries in Christ’s name.

As Lent begins, liturgical Christians everywhere are considering the ancient disciplines of giving up and taking on – giving up sweets or alcohol and taking on daily prayer or sacrificial giving. And the intent is to discipline the life of faith, to experience a little rigor or self-denial, to express a sense of solidarity with poor. All of which is fine as long as we remember that the ultimate purpose of Lent is the restoration of right relationship with God and one another – to be whole and holy.

I’d like to suggest that wholeness must also include a right relationship with our bodies, with our families and with our schedules. The words “whole,” “holy” and “healthy” all have as their root the Old English word hal meaning “whole” as in “undivided” or “unwounded” or, more potently, as “made whole” or “restored to wholeness.” So perhaps our Lenten efforts this year might include some effort to restore personal, familial and vocational holiness.

Many of clergy of the diocese, both priests and deacons, have been in touch with me since I wrote to them inviting us all to share in a wellness project. A number have spoken of finally scheduling a visit to their physician or to their spiritual director. I’m aware that a few have discovered health problems and some have scheduled necessary surgical procedures. I must say I’m delighted by such good outcomes.

And let me suggest that this Lent might be an opportunity to extend our efforts a bit further. Perhaps in these coming weeks, as part of our “prayer, fasting and self-denial,” we might schedule regular private time with our spouses, partners or close friends, a date night or quiet conversation over dessert and coffee. Perhaps this Lent we might finally get together with that colleague for lunch or meet with our prayer partner. Perhaps with better weather on the horizon we might say our daily prayers while walking and learn walking meditation. Perhaps we might even begin see exercise as a form of prayer for the body. Perhaps we might finally tackle our schedules and find more than a day each week – maybe an evening or an afternoon – for rest and recreation – for reading, for music, for a hobby.

To repent means to turn. It not only means to turn away from sin – that’s the meaning we often give repentance – but also to turn toward God. And that means to embrace the things that make for health and wholeness, to see
our health and our happiness as signs of the abundant life God promises all people. May this Lent be a time of renewed health and wholeness for each of you.

+Steve