"Yes, Me Too"

“Yes, Me Too”

In church growth and vitality circles, you can often hear the adage that the AA meetings that happen in our church buildings do church better than many churches do. Oftentimes, I’ve heard that framed in terms of welcome. It’s true that everyone who walks through the doors of a 12-step meeting is welcomed, quickly connected to the group, and given a role from setting out chairs to making coffee.

But there’s more than welcome going on here. 12-step groups aren’t filled with people whose lives are going pretty well, people who want to reach a hand out (and perhaps also down) to include people out of a sense of magnanimity. Instead, it’s about people gathering around the shared recognition that their lives are completely unmanageable without God, and that people who have turned their lives and their wills over to the care of God are always in the process of repeating the steps of surrender, self-examination, repentance, and making amends. It’s about people gathering around a shared honesty about our human weakness – and yes, about our capacity for sin – and saying to each other “yes, me too. You aren’t alone in your struggles.” In doing so, there is always a return to the beginning. Self-offering to God isn’t a one-and-done act, it’s a continuous process. When we say the confession each week before communion, we say to each other as well as to God, “yes, me too.” 

In a little essay called The Return to Baptism, Robert Jenson reminds us that “What we do between baptism and the kingdom…is not to march forward from baptism into something else but rather again and again to return to baptism – indeed, to creep back into it. Once it has been said, it is clear that this is the only answer that Christianity can give” about the character of the Christian life.

At Trinity, we’re blessed to have far more baptisms than the average Episcopal parish. Every time we do, we all are given the opportunity to return to our own baptism, to give ourselves to God all over again. One of the questions asked at baptism, and which we all answer as we reaffirm our baptismal covenant, is:

“Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”

When we say as a congregation, “I will with God’s help,” that’s another way of saying “yes, me too.” And when we do so, I pray that we are all reminded that we aren’t alone in our struggles.

Yours in Christ,

Kara+

Fellowship Is (Also) Formation

In the Baptismal Covenant, we promise to "continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers." Right there, in the commitments we make to God and to each other, teaching and fellowship go together. The early Church could never have imagined that we could be formed in faith apart from one another, or that friendship alone, without shared learning and prayer, would make us disciples.

We sometimes treat fellowship as the pleasant extra, the gathering of old friends and new after the “real work” of worship and study. But formation happens at those tables too. We learn patience from the person who disagrees with us about the hymn choices. We learn generosity from the parishioner who checks in on a friend they haven’t seen in a while. We learn hope from the longtime member who has kept faith through decades of change. Christ forms us not in isolation but through the Body.

The reverse is also true: our fellowship and friendship deepens when it is rooted in something larger than shared interests. Studying Scripture together, praying the Daily Office together, asking honest questions together bind us more closely than small talk ever could.

This fall, I invite you to join one of our fellowship groups and attend one of our opportunities for formation. You won’t regret it!

In Christ,

Mtr. Kara

Setting Out

Photo: St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury

 West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

This is how Jack Burden, the corrupted idealist in Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men, described his predicament as he drove to California in an existential fever-dream with his life imploding around him. These lines were constantly on my mind last summer as I made my own journey West under much happier circumstances.

Setting out on a journey into an unknown future is complicated. There are things we hope to find up ahead, and things we hope to leave behind, and things we’re just not sure about. This is the tricky problem when we hear stories of call - and stories of sending like last Sunday’s Gospel from Matthew 9. We would like them to follow what we in modern society think of as the default path of time: an upward trajectory of success, the moving staircase of progress and human history. It's easy to think of answering God’s call to us in terms of a forward springing into action. And last Sunday’s Gospel might suggest this: “Go proclaim the Good News,” Jesus says, and they do it. “Don’t plan ahead, don’t pack a bag, just go!” It’s a story of a heroic level of faith and trust.

Our paths aren’t quite so straightforward, and indeed we don’t know what was going through the disciples’ heads when they heard Jesus’ words either. We know what they did in the end, but we don’t know if they had second thoughts they kept to themselves. We don’t know if they were wondering where they would find the courage to start.

If Jesus was sending me out on an unknown, perilous journey, I suspect I might have a reaction more like that of St. Augustine of Canterbury, the first Archbishop of Canterbury sent by Pope Gregory I in 595 AD on a mission to Britain. Daunted by the magnitude of the task and the fierce reputation of the Anglo-Saxons, Augustine and his companions turned around in Gaul and tried to return to Rome. The Pope urged them onward with letters of encouragement, and the eventual mission was a success.

Much more often that not, those who dare great things for God would not have dared much of anything without the support of their community, and without the gift of the Holy Spirit. With God’s help, we can step out on our own journeys of witness, knowing that God is with us each step of the way – and knowing that we aren’t alone.

Yours in Christ,
Kara+

Magnificent Humanity

On Monday, the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence). To be sure, we are Anglicans and not Roman Catholics, and we don’t have the same relationship to the Pope as our Catholic siblings do. But this letter is addressed to Christians throughout the world, and indeed to all people of good will. It’s worth engaging with in that spirit. The debut of this document has been an important event for me personally, as I sit on the House of Bishops theology committee on artificial intelligence. I encourage everyone to take a look at it, or at least at some articles about it. (It’s 180 pages long!) Here’s the (very compelling) video “trailer” for the encyclical. Here’s the Vatican panel discussion featuring a number of prominent scholars, which I woke up at 5:30 AM on Monday to watch live. Here’s a short summary. And here’s the whole thing.

One of the overarching images Leo uses is the contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem in Nehemiah. The Tower of Babel, he writes, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other.” The rebuilding of Jerusalem proceeds from a different basis, “not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.” The challenge that AI presents to us is the challenge of remaining resolutely human in a world that chafes at limits, that devalues the mutuality of relationship, that prizes efficiency above anything else.

There is much that we can do, each in our own lives, day by day:

The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. (Magnifica Humanitas 213)

May we all play our part in building that civilization of love in all we do, here at Trinity Church and in our community of Princeton.

In Christ,

Kara+

You Will Be My Witnesses

Dear friends,

 This Sunday, we’re in that strange place between the Ascension, which happens this Thursday, and Pentecost, which will be on the 24th. But this Sunday’s lectionary looks towards Pentecost even as it tells the Ascension story. In Acts 1, Jesus says “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” To be a witness to Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is to be sent out to share the Good News everywhere we go.

Having attended a Methodist seminary, I confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for John Wesley. In a time when the predominant strain of Anglicanism was heady and philosophical, Wesley called the church to be attentive to the real, powerful work of the Holy Spirit today, not just in history. He shared the love of Christ in the highways and byways of his time and place - in fields and in mining towns as well as in city churches. Today, Wesley still reminds Anglicans, and indeed all Christians, that the Holy Spirit is alive and active, changing hearts and transforming minds.

Edgardo Colon-Emeric, Duke’s current Dean of the Divinity School, writes,

When John Wesley first stepped out of the walls of the church in order to reach people working in fields, mines and markets, he preached from the passage from Jesus’ inaugural sermon: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). This textual choice was not free from controversy. The 18th century dismissed those who talked about the ongoing work of the Spirit as ignorant and irresponsible. 

Against the theological currents of his day, John Wesley refused to limit the Spirit’s presence and power to the age of the apostles or the institutions of the church. The rise of Methodism was for him proof that the power of Pentecost was still at work in the world. The Spirit was still active in history, particularly among the marginalized.

According to Scripture, the love of God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (cf. Romans 5:5). For Wesley, the social dimension of this love is made visible through works of mercy. Pentecost’s power is at work when we feed the hungry, visit the sick and welcome the stranger. It is also at work when we call sinners to repentance and encourage Christians in the way to holiness.

As we walk the road to Pentecost in the coming week, I invite you to pray with me that perilously life-giving prayer: Come, Holy Spirit. I pray that the Holy Spirit will continue to enliven and empower our parish for ministry, and set us on fire with love for the God who has given us this Good News to proclaim.

Yours in Christ,

Kara+

The God of Surprises (A Sermon Spoiler)

One of my favorite stained glass windows at Duke University Chapel shows the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The disciples are walking down the road, and Jesus is walking up behind them, looking like he’s about to tap one of them on the shoulder: boo! Jesus’ appearance to his friends comes as a surprise-a welcome surprise, a world changing surprise, but a surprise nonetheless.

In our Gospel for Sunday, the disciples find out that the resurrection isn’t just a rumor – it’s real. And they discover that it’s real in a tangible way as Jesus breaks bread with them. In Jesus, God shows himself to us as not just able to be seen, but able to be touched. And God chooses to be known that way. God gains nothing by being seen or touched. God would be God regardless of how we experience God. But God chooses to be with us, to share Scripture and bread with us, to be perceived. The fact that God chooses to be there on the road with us, that God breaks bread with us, shows us that this is a God who can be trusted in the absence of perception as well as in its presence. God chooses to be in that kind of intimate relationship with us, and that tells us how much God loves us, how safe we are in God’s hands. God chooses to invite us into a relationship of new life - a new life of peace.  This is the new life that Jesus invites us to share in, through baptism and every time we share the Eucharist with each other. Our faith isn’t ethereal and theoretical, it’s something that we touch and that touches us.

Join us this Sunday to be surprised once more by grace, and to find out how this story ends!

Yours in Christ, and in Christ alone,

Kara+