Ascension Day Homily

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Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

Chapel of our Lord, Episcopal Church Center

Ascension Day, May 30, 2019

Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53; Psalm 47

“Thus it is written . . . that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

Repentance and forgiveness of sins. Wait. Isn’t it still Easter? Why does it feel like we're going back to Lent. Why is this one of the last things Jesus tells his followers? Because it matters. Repentance matters. Forgiveness matters. They both matter a lot to our own faith journeys and to our lives as a community. If we are not practicing repentance and forgiveness then we are not following Jesus, and we are not building authentic community.

I believe our Gospel today offers us an invitation to check in on our own spiritual lives. How are we doing? Are we practicing repentance and forgiveness? Notice that the two of them are lumped together. I don’t think this is an accident. Think about some of the most familiar words of our tradition. Think of the Lord’s Prayer. What very important conditional statement do we pray nearly every time we gather as followers of Jesus? We pray that our sins, our trespasses will be forgiven AS we forgive those who sin against us. Our forgiveness is contingent on our ability to forgive other people. There is a complicated dialectic there. Our relationship with Jesus is not a solo endeavor. It is not just about how we as individuals relate to Jesus or whether or not we have accepted Jesus as our personal lord and savior. The only way this works, the only way we grow more deeply into relationship with God is through community. It matters how we treat each other.

It is a subtle thing and the language of the Lord’s Prayer is so familiar we can lose track of the importance of single words or turns of phrase. We are called to live daily into this cycle of repentance and forgiveness. I am guessing many of us don’t struggle with the first part so much. Repentance can come easily. In our performance driven society that seems to thrive on competition and comparison, it is all too easy for us to be aware of our own shortcomings.

What can be far more challenging is the practice of forgiveness, the spiritual practice of letting go of our anger, our frustration, our guilt, our shame. Remember, our call to forgiveness is not just about how we treat each other, it is also about how we treat ourselves. Notice there is no asterisk, no brackets on Jesus statement that the disciples are to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to ALL nations. Jesus doesn’t say, “Except you. Or except this person or that person.” God forgives everyone who repents. Everyone who owns up to their own challenges and struggles.  Everyone who falls short. Everyone who gives into temptation. God forgives. Period. So who do we think we are to withhold that grace from ourselves or from others? God makes no exceptions, so neither should we.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote a book about his experience of chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It is entitled No Future Without Forgiveness. If you have not read it, I recommend it highly. It is a challenging, beautiful, and inspiring book. And its title applies just as much to us as it did to post-Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, there is no future without forgiveness. If we cannot let things go, if we cannot choose Love, if we cannot be open to the healing redemptive power of God’s love in the world, in our communities, and in our own hearts. If we cannot do those things, then we will be stuck. We will be stuck looking back and holding on to the past. To move into the future, we do indeed need to practice forgiveness.

Now, I think it is important for us to remember that practicing forgiveness does not mean condoning evil. It does not mean we are excusing or approving of sinful behavior. If we have been the victim of an injustice, the truth, the reality of that injustice still stands. The choice for forgiveness means that we are taking back control of our own lives. We are subverting the power dynamic. Think of Jesus on the Cross. What does he say? “Father, forgive them.” The powers and principalities wanted to have domination over Jesus. They wanted to punish him. They wanted to come out on top. But rather than fighting back, Jesus forgave them. He sucked the wind out of their sails, and flipped the whole situation on its head. Jesus took back the power by claiming his right to offer forgiveness to his persecutors.

That is what they did in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa too. They broke the cycle of hate by changing the power dynamics. The process allowed victims to claim back their power through the act of forgiveness. Practicing forgiveness is about claiming our freedom and claiming our dignity. May we always have the courage to do so. AMEN.

Chatting with God

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Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
Chapel of our Lord, Episcopal Church Center
May 14, 2019
Acts 11:19-26; Psalm 87; John 10:22-30


May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

The people said to Jesus: “‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ “Tell us plainly.” Isn’t that the truth? Don’t we so often wish for that to be true? Couldn’t we just have a clear pronouncement from God? A clear revelation about what God thinks and what we should do in a given situation? Perhaps could we have a voice from the heavens or a letter that arrived in our mailbox? Actually, it’s the 21st century, perhaps God could just send us a text?

Wow. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be great to have that sort of clarity whenever we need it. It would be like those chat windows that pop up when you are trying to make a customer service inquiry with a company, except it would be God, so you would get instantaneous help that actually answered your questions. No wait time. No long winded explanations. No please provide all the possible identifying information we might need to solve this problem. Just help and clarity.

The disciples must of had that, instant clarity and help. I mean there they were walking around with Jesus. They had the Lord himself. Right in front of them. They could talk to him. They could touch him.

But what does Jesus say to them, when they ask him to “Tell us plainly.” He said, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe.” Hmm. I wonder if that applies to us too?

“I have told you, and you do not believe.” I think that might very well apply to us. I know it applies to me. Jesus has told us. God has told us. In so many ways, we have been told who God is, and what God expects of us.

But just like St. Paul, we (individually and collectively as the whole of humanity) fall short again and again. We do those things which we know we ought not to do. We have our moments of thinking we have the answers or we are in control. Or we are just tired or short on patience, and so we seek what seems like the easier path.

Funny thing about that. Why is it that we are tempted to follow our own way? Or tempted by laziness or tempted to lash out at someone we love? We are tempted to do this, even when we know on some level that it is not the right thing to do?

For me, this cycle is most evident in parenting. Take the end of a long day when we are all hungry and tired and trying to get home to start dinner. One of our kids could ask a simple question or just be slow in getting their seat belt on. I snap an answer or a command. I am not being my best self. I know that. Pretty much as soon as the words are out of my mouth. But somehow it still happens.

But it does not always happen, and that is where the hope is. There are days when I can keep my voice even, and I am able to delve into their question or just wait while they struggle to get buckled. What is it that makes those days different?

I will offer my experience, in the hopes that it is something of value to you all as well, whether your moments of frustration come in parenting or some other facet of life.

I have noticed that I have more patience. I am more able to follow on the path that I know I should follow, the Way of Love. I am more able to be my best self, to live more fully into who God is calling me to be, when I am grounded. What does being grounded look like?

It looks like taking care of myself - body, mind, and spirit. It means getting enough sleep and exercise. It means eating foods that taste good and are good for me. It means having regular time for worship and prayer. It means have sabbath time. Now that does not always mean a whole 24 hours “off” in a week. It might. Or it might just mean that I take a day in which I do the tasks I have to accomplish at a less hurried rate, with a sabbath mindset. And it means actually taking vacation with my family. It also means making use of the myriad of opportunities we have to learn something new. Finally, it means making sure I am making good use of the support system I have developed. Regular time for in depth conversation with my husband, so that we talk about more than all the logistics of family life for the next. Time with my therapist, my spiritual director and an invaluable group of colleagues with whom there is a covenant that we will support each other and tell each other the truth (even when it is hard) for the rest of our lives.

So that is my list of what keeps me healthy, grounded, filled up, so that I can live more fully into who God is calling me to be. So that I can at least more often avoid the temptation to ignore what Jesus has told us about who is and how we are supposed to live. If you have not made that list for yourself recently, I would encourage you to do so. And I would encourage you to make a habit of checking in on it every few months. Indeed, Jesus has told us and shown us our Way. The challenge is in having the self-discipline and the capacity to follow it. The good news is, Jesus is also really clear that we are not meant to do it alone. AMEN.

Julian of Norwich

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Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

Chapel of our Lord, Episcopal Church Center

Feast of Julian of Norwich, May 8, 2019

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.

It was a gift of the Holy Spirit that I have the privilege of preaching today, the feast day for Julian of Norwich. She is one of my favorite theologians. She is one of the five thinkers with whom I engaged for my doctoral dissertation, so I literally have spent years of my life with Julian and her writings. 

There are lots of reasons why Julian is remarkable. She was a 14th century woman who survived into old age. No small feat given the number of times the plague passed through Norwich in her lifetime. She was a 14th century woman who could read AND write. Amazing. She was blessed with visions and felt compelled to share those visions with everyday Christians. She devoted much of her adult life to reflection on the visions. And those reflections survived in two texts that were handed down through the centuries, through wars and persecution. Through the Reformation. There is no shortage of amazing, even miraculous things about the reality of Julian’s life and her writings. [For an excellent examination of the history of Julian and her manuscript see here.]

But for me, what makes her particularly notable and influential in my own life, is what is in her writings. In a word, there is hope. Julian is probably one of the better known spiritual writers of the Middle Ages. But often she is known just for a single sentence: “All shall be well.” This is, indeed, a good and accurate summary of her theology. If she is going to be known for one sentence that is the right sentence. And yet to often it is quoted all by itself, and if you don’t know the rest of Julian’s life story or much about her writings it can seem like a spiritual trope or some kind of Pollyanna statement that fails to account of the realities of sin and suffering in our lives and in the world. [For a great book on Julian that really unpacks this quote see here.]

Julian was no Pollyana. She took very seriously the reality of sin and suffering in the world. One of the things I value greatly about Julian, and why she was important in my own research, is that she is someone who writes theologically about the reality of suffering from profound personal experiences. When she was thirty years old she suffered a life-threatening illness (perhaps the plague) and everyone (including Julian herself) was sure she was going to die. In the midst of that illness she had a series of visions that taught her about Christ’s suffering and who God is. She spent the remaining decades of her life reflecting and expounding upon those visions. And what I would like to do today is to share three of those insights with you. I hope these insights will show you that Julian’s statement that all will be well is, in fact, a statement of deep faith and hope that can be a gift for our own faith journeys as well. 

Julian’s first insight is one of perspective. She has a vision of the world as a hazelnut, a tiny nut held in the palm of a hand. Talk about a wide perspective. Long before anyone had been to outer space and realized that earth was our “fragile island home” (Eucharistic Prayer C), Julian could see that God’s perspective was so very different than our own. She was able to acknowledge that there is far more to the reality of life than the immediacy of our experience. Quite a vision for someone who spent the majority of her life living in a single room and likely never left the town in which she was born. 

This perspective is not just about astrophysics or our place in time and space, Julian invites us to have a wider perspective on our own lives and the realities of the human experience as well. This is perspective in regards to sin. Julian says that sin is necessary. And by sin she really means all that is wrong with the world not just short list of cardinal sins. This is not to say that God causes evil. Julian is really just being matter of fact. She has witnessed the ravages of war and disease with her own eyes. She personally knows the fragility of human life. Sin is a just a part of life. Julian does not dwell on the why. She accepts the reality of it, and then tries to see it with a wide perspective. 

When she looks at sin from a wider perspective it is not an all consuming reality. This is because one of Julian’s most profound insights is about the breadth of God’s mercy and love. At a time when the Church was so often focused on the wrath and judgment of God, Julian is notable for her message of hope and love. Over and over again in her visions, she sees God as loving and merciful. She likens Jesus to a mother hen who broods over her chicks. God is full of compassion and mercy. Even in the face of the evil humanity can do to each other and the terrible tragedies that can befall us, we are loved by God. God is ever seeking us, desiring to be with us, and desiring to bring us to bliss. 

We can get frustrated with Julian. Just as we can get frustrated with God. We can rail and kick and scream and put all our energy and frustration into asking “why?” Why is there evil? Why is there suffering? Why do terrible things happen? But Julian would caution us that to do so will not serve us. She knows. She too asked “Why.” And she came to understand that is not something we will know or understand this side of heaven. She invites us instead to focus on what is true and sure in the here and now. 

What can we be sure of? We can be sure of who God is. We can be sure that we are beloved of God. We can be sure that God desires to bring us to bliss. God desires for us, as Jesus said, to have life, abundant life. And what Julian’s life experience taught her was that we actually experience the reality of bliss, the true abundance, more fully because we also know the terrible pain of suffering. That does not mean suffering is in and of itself good or that it needs to be sought out. It just means that if we are paying attention, if we are open to God’s presence at work in the world and our own lives, we will find joy and comfort, even in the face of profound suffering, just as Julian did. 

I do believe that with Julian we can proclaim that “All shall be well.” It may not be “well” yet, but as our reading from Hebrews reminds us, God is faithful and so we have hope. We have hope, because the truth at the heart of the Christian story is that God is always at work, bringing light into the darkness and bring new life out of death. So yes, indeed, there is a truth that we can hold on to no matter what comes our way: “All shall be well.” AMEN.  

Bread of Adversity

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

Chapel of our Lord, Episcopal Church Center

Sts. Philip & James, May 1, 2019

Isaiah 30:18-21; Psalm 119:33-40; John 14:6-14

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord. Our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

The prophet Isaiah tells us: ‘"Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it.”’

This passage invites some important reflections for us. No doubt all of us have known the bread of adversity and the water of affliction. The difficulty is that this passage would seem to imply that God gives us these. I don’t know about you all, but the idea of a wrathful, vengeful, spiteful God who sends us hardship just because God can does not sit well with me. It does not fit with my understanding and experience of a loving, liberating, life-giving God. So what do we do with passages like these? Or with popular theologies in our culture that say that says if we are experiencing hardship it is because we have done something to deserve or that we have superior coping skills, because “God does not give us more than we can handle.”

I don’t find these approaches to be particularly helpful or enriching. And I think our passage from Isaiah, and our reading from the Gospel of John can help us to see things differently. Notice what Isaiah says, “your Teacher will not hide” and “you shall see your Teacher.” So what if we think of "the bread of adversity" and "the water of affliction” not as punishments sent because we have fallen short or failed somehow. What if they are the realities that come with learning, with being challenged and with being pushed to be our best selves? The important caveat here is that learning and acceptance of suffering only applies to that which is endemic to the reality of being human. If the suffering we experience or witness is a result of injustice then that suffering is not to be accepted. To follow in the Way of Jesus is to stand up and fight against injustice whenever we find it.

Pope Gregory the Great called grief “The Great Teacher.” Indeed it is. I don’t know about you, but I have learned some of the most important and profound life lessons through the experience of grief. The reality of loss makes us sit up and pay attention. I am a cancer survivor. I had bone cancer when I was a teenager. The gift of confronting my own mortality at such a young age is that I was able to carry with me from that day the profound truth that life is precious and fragile. Each day is a gift. We never know how long we will have. In that knowledge and perspective there is an invitation to gratitude, an invitation to live life to the fullest.

The reality of grief, because of real or possible loss, is indeed a great teacher. Not just because we can gain valuable perspective out of our experiences. There is also a wonderful invitation to meet God more fully in the midst of our experiences of grief. In our readings today, we are reminded that Jesus is “The Way.” We are reminded that if we follow in that Way, Jesus will be with us. There is powerful comfort in this reality. It is no small thing to know that Jesus is with us even in the midst of our afflictions and challenges. And we are not so far removed from Holy Week. We can easily remember that Jesus does indeed know the fullness of the human experience. There is no pain or suffering that he does not also know.

So many places in our Scriptures - in our readings from Isaiah and John today - in the beloved passages of Psalm 139 - remind us of the beautiful, intimate nature of our relationship with God. God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. God has known us since before we were born. There is no where on earth that we can go, from our own homes to the outermost parts of the sea where God will not also be. God will be with us at our waking and our sleeping. At our births and at our deaths.

God is steadfast and faithful. We will never be alone. Even in the midst of whatever challenges we face, God is with us. God shares in our experiences. God is our companion and our guide. So the next time you find yourself eating "the bread of adversity” and drinking "the water of affliction,” I hope that you will first do the “injustice check” regarding the source of your suffering to see whether you should respond by fighting back or with a healthy curiosity. When we encounter the realities of endemic suffering, I hope we will remember the truths of our readings today. I hope we will be curious and open students, on the lookout for what we might learn in the midst of it. I hope we will also always remember that we are never alone.

AMEN.