This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 23, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 28:10-19a, Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23, and Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.
Like a lot of churches, like St. Mark's in fact, the first parish I was a part of had a ministry to a handful of local care institutions, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities - a Eucharist for folks there once a month. All lovely places with lovely people. But there was this one nursing and rehabilitation center just down the street from the church that we hadn’t managed to visit in years. It had fallen on hard times; the staff there did their best but it was poorly funded and there was high turnover so the services were difficult to coordinate. Many of their permanent residents - older folks with dementia, young folks with brain damage, folks suffering from the irreversible effects of alcoholism, drug use, and poverty - were not there by choice. They were there because they had no family to advocate for them, no financial means to move somewhere better, or because this place was all Medicaid and Medicaid would cover.
That year I asked my rector to do a Eucharist there on Easter Sunday. I knew it was a big request - it would push his number of Easter services from four to five Eucharists in less than 24 hours - but he said yes anyway. That morning, as we packed up to walk down the street, he called me over to show me a local news article that had come out just the day before. It was all about how that same local nursing center had failed their state inspection, again. My heart sank, thinking maybe this news would be the end of our little ministry experiment - that we couldn’t keep asking parishioners to come do service at a place that was teetering on the brink of forced closure. But then I saw the look on my rector’s face. His eyes were shining with excitement. “This.” he said, “This is why we do what we do.” This article was proof that our little band of parishioners were about to be exactly where we were meant to be, proclaiming the resurrection in a place of death to the ones who needed to hear Good News most of all.
So we did “what we do.” We placed Easter lilies in the room where my colleague had human excrement thrown at her and beside the beds of the folks who had no one to come visit them on Easter. We sang Amazing Grace over blaring TVs and knelt beside wheelchairs to share Christ’s peace. We pulled up chairs for the harried and overworked staff and gave them a moment’s rest. We broke the bread and shared the grape juice and God was there, too.
God was already there.
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| Making bouquets for the residents in the center. |
At this point in Jacob’s story in the Genesis reading today, the young man is fleeing from his justifiably incensed twin brother who has threatened to kill him. On the way to his mother's people, Jacob goes to sleep in a random and strange place and dreams of angels. God has a message for him. Jacob wakes up beside himself. God was here! “This is none other than the house of God,” he declares and marks it by anointing his stone pillow. Jacob is so riled up by his experience of God in this very special place that he almost misses the point of God’s message for him. God isn’t just here. God is with Jacob wherever he goes. God will be in every place Jacob is. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
I will not leave you.
This question - whether God is with us when we are far from home - echoes all throughout the Hebrew Bible. Abraham wonders whether his God will accompany him in a strange land. Hagar is surprised to find God with her when she is banished in the wilderness. When the Jerusalem temple is destroyed and God’s people sent into exile in Babylon, they wonder if God could possibly be here in the foreign city of their occupiers.
This question of God’s presence also lies at the heart of Psalm 139. Could God really be here, too?
“Where can I go then from your Spirit? *
where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb up to heaven, you are there; *
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.
If I take the wings of the morning *
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand will lead me *
and your right hand hold me fast.”
Even there.
I’m often asked by curious children, “Where is God? Is God really everywhere?” My simple answer is yes, but my longer, more complicated answer is that even though God is always with us, there are times and places where it is easier or harder to feel and experience God’s presence. I suppose I am Episcopalian in part because the symbols and rituals of this tradition bring God’s presence to my awareness most intensely, most acutely. Christ’s presence is made most real to me in the bread and in the wine.
And yet, that’s not always true for me, and it might not always be true for you. Sometimes the bread seems to be just bread and it’s those maple scones at the coffee shop in the hospital lobby at the end of a long night where you can actually taste the presence of Christ. Sometimes sitting in a crowded church feels empty but standing alone on a winter morning in a pine forest feels full to the brim. Sometimes God feels very far in the places you need God’s presence the most, and very near in the moments you least expect.
When has it been most difficult for you to believe God was with you?
We in the Episcopal Church owe much of our Eucharistic traditions to a mid-to-late 19th century Anglican religious movement called the Oxford Movement. The leaders of the Oxford Movement may have elevated the sacraments to a decree that offended the sensibilities of the mainstream Anglican Church, but their priests were the real deal. They set out to prove what Psalm 139 proclaims: no place is godforsaken. The Oxford Movement clergy brought their candles and incense, embroidered vestments and stained glass right into the overcrowded, filthy industrial slums of London. In the midst of the ugliest underside of societal neglect and aching poverty of their time, the priests offered beauty, the most beautiful thing they knew - Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.
Where is it most difficult to believe God is present in our own communities today? How can we make it known that God is there, even there, in new and familiar ways? The truth is that you can find people who feel abandoned by God anywhere. But that pain, I think, is most acute where folks are also being abandoned by their community and society. My rector and I got our answer at my parish from that news article- it was right down the street. I wonder what our answer would be for St. Mark’s. Where are people isolated and neglected here, in Greater Springfield?
When we started out our ministry at the rehab center, we tried a bunch of different simple songs that we did at other nursing centers - children’s songs and spirituals we could pull off a capella. But at this place we soon learned just to sing Amazing Grace every time, sometimes three times a service. See, many of the residents that were wheeled into our worship gave no response to much of the worship. These were people unable to hold a conversation or they couldn’t tell you their names, a few only stared into space. But we discovered that when we sang Amazing Grace, even at the first few off-key notes those same folks would lift their heads, we would see a shadow of a smile, they would even sing and hum and sway.
Now I can’t tell you what those residents’ experiences were, whether that’s when they felt God’s presence with them or not. But I can tell you that it was that moment for me. The moment I believed what God told Jacob: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” What the Psalmist knew: “Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”
No place is godforsaken. No person is beyond God’s love. That's why we do what we do.
Amen.
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