This year, Fr. Paul will guide us as we explore the words Jesus us taught us to pray–the Lord’s Prayer.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. Isaiah 55:8.

Today, as soon as I finish writing to you, I must face that dreaded dinosaur: the annual parochial report. Yes, I realize that I’m late. It was due yesterday. Ignoring the advice of a colleague to turn the thing in on April Fool’s Day—thus exercising the prophetic voice of my diaconal call—I am committed to getting it off my desk this week. (To anyone at Trinity who might have hoped that at this year’s convention we would win the diocesan award for timely filing of said report, I can only say, “I’m sorry, my dear begonias. Start praying for next year.”)

The parochial report is essentially a church report card that goes to both the diocese and the national church. Holy Trinity’s will likely say, “Sometimes struggles with appropriate behavior, but generally good-natured and a pleasure to have in class.” The report involves a lot of math—counting, adding, averaging—and is primarily concerned with butts in the pews and money in the coffers. In short, it enables the Episcopal Church to monitor how fast it is dying.

Cynical? Me? Of course not. I have great hopes that the Church will rouse herself from her slumber and recognize that charting pledge dollars and slotting human beings in to acronyms like ASA (Average Sunday Attendance) has little to do with the Good News. I could ignore that most of Trinity’s fruits go uncounted on the report, fill out the damned thing, and get on with building the Kingdom, except that I’m married to a statistician.

As he has observed: “What you measure determines what you strive for.” It doesn’t matter if you say you don’t believe in the measures or insist they don’t apply in the real world. When a system measures something, there is a powerful and insidious pull to live up to (and into) those measures.

So we’re trapped in an ecclesial version of teaching to the test. Episcopal churches across the country—secretly or overtly obsessed with butts and dollars—cling to the attractional model of church: if we can just figure out what people want, we can engineer a perfect product that blends consumer desire with tradition. Then we just have to promote ourselves! Oh, but today’s consumers are just so difficult!

Even if we could do this well—which we don’t—we’d be living not into God’s dream, but into His nightmare. As Walter Bruggeman writes in The Prophetic Imagination: “The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.”

We’re left with a Body riddled with anxiety and delusions of scarcity, a Church that thinks that the Good News depends on a marketing campaign instead of God’s love and power. If we believe the Scriptures that God idea of fruit involves good news for the poor, release for the captives, and freedom for the oppressed, then we must also believe that God is surely weeping.

So what’s the alternative?  To begin, we can stop using human metrics and start using God’s metrics. What fruit does God want? Scripture is pretty clear on this. The trick for the 21^st century Church is to figure out how to translate the broad strokes of God’s dream of reconciliation into the specific lives of those he longs to save.

We begin by listening: What are the deep wounds and longings of those God brings to us? How can we help all people experience true religion (from the Greek, religare: to bind or “re-ligament”) by reconnecting them to the Body and helping them cross those great breaches that separate all of us from God, from each other, and from our true selves? How do we fill the valleys and make low the mountains, so that all flesh can see the salvation of God?

And for those who believe we must not only feed His sheep but count them, never fear. This kind of transformation can be measured. It just takes a willingness to ask the right questions. And the questions will vary depending on the unique role each parish is called to play in the Body of Christ. How many meals does your parish provide to its neighbors? How many recently released prisoners does your parish invite into the community? How many times a week do families in your parish pray together? How many of your parishioners have changed what they buy in order to promote justice?

I can hear now a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. But the church needs members! The church needs money! Are we so deep in roles confusion that we really think we are in charge of this? Or can we trust God—maker of all things, seen and unseen—to provide for His Church? To live in God’s will we must surrender our obsession with survival. We must do the work God has given us to do, even if that means we must lay down the life of the Church as we understand it. We can trust that even if the Church we’ve known must die, it will be resurrected to live abundantly into and beyond the 21^st century.

” . . . And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Luke 13:35b.

Every town has its prophets. In Santa Rosa, California—the town where I was born—our prophet was named Pepper.

As a child, I didn’t fully appreciate Pepper’s occupation, but looking back I’ve pieced together the innuendos. Pepper was in sales. So to speak. She didn’t exactly dress for success. Pepper favored carnival tones arranged in jarring combinations that offered a glimpse of the hurly-burly of her mind.

Most likely schizophrenic, Pepper lit up the downtown streets, not just with her wardrobe but with her demeanor—cheerful, friendly. Except when someone threatened the well-being of a child or an animal. Then, the usually placid Pepper would go Old Testament right there on the sidewalk, mercilessly dressing down some frazzled housewife who’d left her child alone in the car while she’d darted into the post office or the bank to tend some small matter. And if Pepper discovered your dog in the car in the summertime—windows cracked or not—well, only God could help you then. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, like Jesus, like us, Pepper was called to lift up the most vulnerable among us. And Pepper took her call seriously.

Most of us have known a Pepper or two. A character. Nutso. Off her rocker. And as such, easily dismissed.  And we all, whether we know it or not, have less entertaining prophets enter our lives every day. Our prophets make us uncomfortable. They’re the ones who push buttons we didn’t know we had, and fray on our last nerve. They might be transient, showing up for a moment to remind us we are thoroughly human. Or they might set up shop—a longtime friend, a boss, a family member—a continuous challenge to who we imagine we are. Don’t think it will feel good. But here’s the amazing thing: if you engage them, if you hold them as a mirror revealing your limitations, if you maintain that great heart muscle as something pliable, you will be stretched into something more like God’s dream for you.

Eventually, someone—probably a local police officer—gave Pepper a badge. Like any good prophet, she only used this authority with great clarity and only when necessary. But most prophets are not so easily identified. You have to look beneath the agitation they create, listen beyond their shrill chiding for God’s passionate vision of a transformed you—a transformed world.

We travel these austere days of Lent together, prophets to one another as we stumble along, colliding at the most unexpected times. Lean in. Listen. Now is a good time.

We hear from Jesus in the Ash Wednesday liturgy: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This comes to us during Lent both as caring and compassionate warning and advice—be careful which treasures you set your heart upon. If they’re treasures that divide—treasures that keep us turning in upon ourselves and away from others—they are surely not the treasures that endure, not the treasures of God. These are the treasures that create “winners” and “losers”—treasures that continue to prop up this broken kingdom, all the while obscuring the greater Kingdom of God, in which all are marked as “special” and “good enough.

We’re invited, as the church, into “the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature,” we’re invited to kneel with our whole selves before the One who love us into being, and who loves us still. May we all see, from this posture so near the substance of our beginnings and endings, where our treasures are rightly to be placed. And may our hearts, with renewed joy and solidarity with others, follow thereafter, all the days of our lives.

Find the treasure that endures @ www.trinityspokane.org

When my mother was dying, one of my deepest fears was that I would forget her face. We sorted photographs for the memorial service, and I realized I had already forgotten. I couldn’t remember what she looked like before the cancer, before the chemo broken her body under its toxic weight. It had been so long since she had really been herself.

This amnesia went on for months. I would look at an old photo—my mother smiling, her hair sunlit from behind as she threaded a worm on a fish hook for my son—and I’d hold her in mind for a moment, before memories of those last wrenching months would overwhelm me, and I’d be left with the face of her dying—familiar, yes, but utterly strange. Now, six years later, it’s better. For the most part, I see through the memories of her last days to the “her” that has always been and always will be.

I wonder if something like this—something like fear—prompted our dear foolish Peter to blurt out: I know! Let’s make a shrine! Just as we clutch the memories of those we have loved, we want to hold fast those moments when God seems real. And present. And so solid! But it’s not long before life interrupts, water on the stone of our knowledge of Him.

Often it seems that feeling out of His presence is the same as being out of His presence, so we spend a lot of energy trying to feel connected with God. The results can make us a bit crazy, always seeking the next reassuring encounter, a new spiritual high. And in the process, our standards get higher. Next time we want Moses, Elijah and Abraham. Before long, we fail to see God’s face where it truly dwells. I find my mother now, not in photos, but in the particular shadow a butterfly casts over me as I tend the garden, or in my son’s lightning wit which is 100% her.

Thomas Merton writes: “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.” How could we possibly forget God’s face? And yet, this fear of the loss of Him can keep us from finding His radiance in the world—especially in those dark and broken places where hope seems lost. Jesus returned from the mountain to the crowds, the chaos, the loneliness, and there!—can you see it?—a moment of healing threaded with Light.
 
Catch the shine @ www.trinityspokane.org

The church will also be open for prayer with interactive prayer stations on February 17, Ash Wednesday, from 8am to noon.

Our services for the day are:
Ash Wed. service w/ ashes @ noon evening prayer @ 5pm
HT Dinner Table ashing @ 6pm

Buckle up, my friends. We’re gonna talk about the e-word.

Edification? Nope. Enlightenment? Bzzzzz! Episcopalian?! Sorry. But thanks for playing.We’re talking about evangelism. We Episcopalians know that e comes just before f; ergo, the e-word must come right before . . . yeah. It just feels dirty somehow.Trouble is: God isn’t overly concerned about our discomfort. I mean, if you had gone to such lengths to reconcile with your beloved—if wayward—children, wouldn’t you want your kids to spread the Good News until every last sibling comes home?Now if you’re worried that everyone at Holy Trinity is going to be issued a John 3:16 sandwich board to wear to work—please, breathe into the paper bag, it won’t be as hard as that. It will be much, much harder.

Think noun, not verb. Evangelism is not so much a thing to do as something to be. How we are in the world, especially in our relationships, speaks much more loudly than any God-talk we can dream up.ow we are is directly related to how frequently we say Yes to God. The story of the call of the fishermen captures just the very first yes. Our Christian life is one of continual renewal—of our minds and hearts, of our relationship with God, and of the promises we make when we are baptized.

And h

Two perpetual  motions create ongoing conversion of life. We must continually hear God’s tender command: Don’t be afraid. For only when fear is relinquished can we take the second step. We must continually bring the boat of self to shore, leaving behind everything that does not serve His vision of a reconciled world.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.  1 Corinthians 12:14-15

Every so often, someone gives you just the pastoral response you need. Mine came from a visiting priest. As we were vesting in the Holy Trinity sacristy, he asked me about my then-tentative call to the diaconate. I said, I wasn’t really sure I could be a good-enough deacon. He asked me when I was going to drop the false humility and get on with it.

That’s what we, in the biz, call a pastoral dope slap.

In this week’s Gospel we hear Jesus revealing yet another vision of his identity as he claims the words of the prophet Isaiah. It’s a manifesto of sorts that puts all of the epiphanies of the last few weeks in perspective. It assigns to these revelations–Jesus as King, God’s Son, and miracle worker–a purpose. And a very specific purpose at that.

Jesus doesn’t apologize, or say “I think maybe I kinda have this Savior-of-all-humankind thing I do pretty well.” He doesn’t hide away hoping someone will realize how special he is or what snazzy gifts he’s been given by his Father. He takes a risk. He makes himself incredibly vulnerable, and lays it all out, in public, in the temple: not just Who has sent him, but those to whom he’s been sent–and here our plot takes a turn. Jesus hasn’t come for those who’ve already made it or got it all together, but for the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed. In short, he’s the Messiah. That’s likely to create some push-back for this fellow who, so far, has been recognized around town as a pretty good teacher.

If someone had written a prophecy about your life, what would it say? What is your manifesto? Who sends you, and to whom are you sent? What are called to proclaim in both word and deed?

The answers to these questions will tell you a lot about your vocation, about how you fit into the Body of Christ. These answers bind who you are to God’s mission. These answers don’t always come clearly, and they don’t come all at once. But our God is still in the epiphany business.

The real question is: as God reveals to you who you are, who you’re for, and what your life is to proclaim, will you be ready to own it? Are you sufficiently over yourself: trusting God for your worthiness, embracing salvation, rejecting false humility? Are you ready to claim your call, take your place in the Body, and get on with the good work of building the Kingdom?