This sermon was preached on Sunday, February 2 at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Holliston, MA for the occasion of the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord. The texts for this sermon were: Malachi 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40, and Psalm 84.
It's been such a joy for me to work with St. Michael's and the teens and adults of my church who are going on the Appalachia Service project together this summer. I'm so grateful that you have already been showing us the way and teaching us how to prepare for our trip. The trip preparations have also been bringing me back to my own experiences from high school volunteering with the Appalachia Service Project with my home church. My first trip in particular as a freshman when I was just 14 holds for me very vivid memories.
See, the Appalachian Service Project mission trip that summer was my first really intimate encounter with the heart-breaking effects of chronic, generational poverty. I remember walking into that first trailer that summer and just being struck by the smell, and then grime, and this strip of fly paper hanging from the kitchen ceiling that was full of flies. I knew enough at that point to do my best to hold in my reaction to what I saw around me but I also remember being fixated on that fly paper. How full it was. Its feeble attempt to hold back the decay and the poverty and the rot that seemed to consume this family and their trailer and their lives.
That first project we were renovating a bathroom so we actually had to move the family’s only toilet out of the house at the beginning of the day and take it back at the end of the day so the family could keep using it overnight. Because the bathroom was so small and cramped there was often not a lot our seven-person work crew could all be doing at once. One afternoon, when I was feeling particularly useless, I had the bright idea to clean the bathroom sink. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for making myself helpful, I felt a hand on mine, stopping my careful scrubbing. It was one of the summer staffers--one of the college students who lives in the town for the summer and organizes the trips and projects for the volunteers.
She pulled me aside and gently asked me how I would feel if a wealthy stranger came into my home and started cleaning my bathroom sink. In that moment, she asked me to think more deeply about what my actions were saying to this family. I can still feel the burning shame that came over me at her words and I realized what I had done, my own embarrassment mingling with the embarrassment I imagined the family might have felt. It was intense, and painful. But even at the time I knew it was a good burning, a refiners' fire. The gift of a new revelation, born out of greater depths of empathy, and love.
The staffer was trying to teach me to see the grime or the poverty or the flies, yes, but to not let all of that stop me from seeing and loving the people, as they were, who they were: A welcoming family with their own dignity and unique story. She was warning me to not be so distracted in my purification and fixing attempts that I forget the real reason we go to Appalachia in the first place: to be in relationship with the cast aside and to love them right where they are, as they are, in all their dignity as children of God. To love, first. And from that love, that flawed and still-learning, stumbling love, comes transformation.
Today is the Feast of the Presentation, as known as Candlemas, the day we recount the story of Jesus’ presentation at the Temple in Jerusalem. “When the time for their purification came,” says our Gospel passage. Used to be, this feast day was known as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, the time when, as a Jewish woman who had recently given birth, Mary came to the temple to be purified so she could rejoin religious community. This was not just a Jewish practice--in fact, this ritual was even in earlier versions of our own Book of Common Prayer, where it was known as the churching of women. It was a practice where women who had just given birth after a certain number of days would come and be prayed over and purified and to give thanks to God for surviving the ordeal of childbirth.
So the theme of purification still runs through our readings and our collect today: we pray that we may be presented to God with pure and clean hearts. Malachi speaks of refiner’s fire and fullers’ soap.
As backwards and as old school as the churching of women might sound to us, purification rituals are virtually universal throughout human societies, cultures, traditions and faiths. The yearning to be pure and clean is alive and well in our own culture. We've got cleansing diets, detoxifying your life and relationship fads, decluttering advice columns, TV shows, and books. The urge to purge is there and real. Perhaps you know how it feels to long to be clean from substances or bad habits or unhealthy patterns, to be set free from the things that weigh you down, to be pure and whole. Or to want that for others.
I wanted it for the family we were serving in Appalachia that year. I wanted their home to be as clean and safe and warm and dry as my own. I wanted to fix their bathroom and I wanted to fix their lives. Perhaps, a bit, in my thoughtless actions, I was saying to the family that I wanted to fix them, too. That’s not love, at least not the higher love to which God calls us.
Here’s how I know it’s not--I’ve forgotten their names. I can't picture their faces. I don't remember their story. I wish I could tell you about their quirky pets and funny anecdotes, their hopes and dreams, the way I can tell you about some of the later families I served. But in that first summer, in my fixation on fixing, I still had so much to learn about love.
The bathroom sink, I'm sure, returned to its usual state of grubbiness very quickly. No doubt that the shoddy trailers I attempted to fix over five summers of service have crumbled back into disrepair, despite everyone’s best efforts. But the kind of purification we long for deep down, true, lasting change, takes a lot more than hammers and nails.
Thing is, God's purifying love doesn't always feel good. Growth and transformation require discomfort the way the purification and refinement of metals require a burning flame. It can be tempting to focus on the ways love and service to others feel good and gratifying--especially we are actively recruiting teens for mission trips. And sure, my experiences in Appalachia were shaped by fun and joy and connection. But they were also shot through with shame and disgust. The small shames as I learned just how hard it is to authentically set aside judgment in thought, word, and deed. The greater disgusts I still carry with me--like the horror that our country allows so many to be beaten down by poverty, addiction, and neglect. In the right hands, shame and disgust at our own failings can be tools in shaping mature faith, greater love.
That day in the temple, the day of Mary’s purification, a wise old prophet looked Mother of God in the eye and told her that her precious love, her greatest joy, will also come with sorrow. A sword will pierce her heart.
I wonder what would happen in churches if we said that to one another more. This way of love, this being church, it will be uncomfortable, it will hurt, it will burn. Transformative faith is no easy fix. We each know this, I think, in our own ways. Sometimes we just need to say it out loud.
It's been such a joy for me to work with St. Michael's and the teens and adults of my church who are going on the Appalachia Service project together this summer. I'm so grateful that you have already been showing us the way and teaching us how to prepare for our trip. The trip preparations have also been bringing me back to my own experiences from high school volunteering with the Appalachia Service Project with my home church. My first trip in particular as a freshman when I was just 14 holds for me very vivid memories.
See, the Appalachian Service Project mission trip that summer was my first really intimate encounter with the heart-breaking effects of chronic, generational poverty. I remember walking into that first trailer that summer and just being struck by the smell, and then grime, and this strip of fly paper hanging from the kitchen ceiling that was full of flies. I knew enough at that point to do my best to hold in my reaction to what I saw around me but I also remember being fixated on that fly paper. How full it was. Its feeble attempt to hold back the decay and the poverty and the rot that seemed to consume this family and their trailer and their lives.
That first project we were renovating a bathroom so we actually had to move the family’s only toilet out of the house at the beginning of the day and take it back at the end of the day so the family could keep using it overnight. Because the bathroom was so small and cramped there was often not a lot our seven-person work crew could all be doing at once. One afternoon, when I was feeling particularly useless, I had the bright idea to clean the bathroom sink. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for making myself helpful, I felt a hand on mine, stopping my careful scrubbing. It was one of the summer staffers--one of the college students who lives in the town for the summer and organizes the trips and projects for the volunteers.
She pulled me aside and gently asked me how I would feel if a wealthy stranger came into my home and started cleaning my bathroom sink. In that moment, she asked me to think more deeply about what my actions were saying to this family. I can still feel the burning shame that came over me at her words and I realized what I had done, my own embarrassment mingling with the embarrassment I imagined the family might have felt. It was intense, and painful. But even at the time I knew it was a good burning, a refiners' fire. The gift of a new revelation, born out of greater depths of empathy, and love.
The staffer was trying to teach me to see the grime or the poverty or the flies, yes, but to not let all of that stop me from seeing and loving the people, as they were, who they were: A welcoming family with their own dignity and unique story. She was warning me to not be so distracted in my purification and fixing attempts that I forget the real reason we go to Appalachia in the first place: to be in relationship with the cast aside and to love them right where they are, as they are, in all their dignity as children of God. To love, first. And from that love, that flawed and still-learning, stumbling love, comes transformation.
Today is the Feast of the Presentation, as known as Candlemas, the day we recount the story of Jesus’ presentation at the Temple in Jerusalem. “When the time for their purification came,” says our Gospel passage. Used to be, this feast day was known as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, the time when, as a Jewish woman who had recently given birth, Mary came to the temple to be purified so she could rejoin religious community. This was not just a Jewish practice--in fact, this ritual was even in earlier versions of our own Book of Common Prayer, where it was known as the churching of women. It was a practice where women who had just given birth after a certain number of days would come and be prayed over and purified and to give thanks to God for surviving the ordeal of childbirth.
So the theme of purification still runs through our readings and our collect today: we pray that we may be presented to God with pure and clean hearts. Malachi speaks of refiner’s fire and fullers’ soap.
As backwards and as old school as the churching of women might sound to us, purification rituals are virtually universal throughout human societies, cultures, traditions and faiths. The yearning to be pure and clean is alive and well in our own culture. We've got cleansing diets, detoxifying your life and relationship fads, decluttering advice columns, TV shows, and books. The urge to purge is there and real. Perhaps you know how it feels to long to be clean from substances or bad habits or unhealthy patterns, to be set free from the things that weigh you down, to be pure and whole. Or to want that for others.
I wanted it for the family we were serving in Appalachia that year. I wanted their home to be as clean and safe and warm and dry as my own. I wanted to fix their bathroom and I wanted to fix their lives. Perhaps, a bit, in my thoughtless actions, I was saying to the family that I wanted to fix them, too. That’s not love, at least not the higher love to which God calls us.
Here’s how I know it’s not--I’ve forgotten their names. I can't picture their faces. I don't remember their story. I wish I could tell you about their quirky pets and funny anecdotes, their hopes and dreams, the way I can tell you about some of the later families I served. But in that first summer, in my fixation on fixing, I still had so much to learn about love.
The bathroom sink, I'm sure, returned to its usual state of grubbiness very quickly. No doubt that the shoddy trailers I attempted to fix over five summers of service have crumbled back into disrepair, despite everyone’s best efforts. But the kind of purification we long for deep down, true, lasting change, takes a lot more than hammers and nails.
Thing is, God's purifying love doesn't always feel good. Growth and transformation require discomfort the way the purification and refinement of metals require a burning flame. It can be tempting to focus on the ways love and service to others feel good and gratifying--especially we are actively recruiting teens for mission trips. And sure, my experiences in Appalachia were shaped by fun and joy and connection. But they were also shot through with shame and disgust. The small shames as I learned just how hard it is to authentically set aside judgment in thought, word, and deed. The greater disgusts I still carry with me--like the horror that our country allows so many to be beaten down by poverty, addiction, and neglect. In the right hands, shame and disgust at our own failings can be tools in shaping mature faith, greater love.
That day in the temple, the day of Mary’s purification, a wise old prophet looked Mother of God in the eye and told her that her precious love, her greatest joy, will also come with sorrow. A sword will pierce her heart.
I wonder what would happen in churches if we said that to one another more. This way of love, this being church, it will be uncomfortable, it will hurt, it will burn. Transformative faith is no easy fix. We each know this, I think, in our own ways. Sometimes we just need to say it out loud.
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