Christ in Us

God Passes By

2010-07-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

God Passes By
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
July 11, 2010

In the 2005 movie the 40 year Old Virgin, Steve Carrell finds himself in a strange situation. His date, who has had one too many to drink, gets into the driver’s seat and asks him to breathe into a Car Breathalyzers, also known as ignition interlock devices. Judges require people with drivers with multiple incidents of drunk driving to have a breathalyzer installed in their car to prevent them from driving while drunk. Ignorant of the purpose of the breathalyzer, Carrell blows into it and his drunken date swerves down the road, on the verge of yet another drunk driving accident.
In the new ABC Series, What Would You Do?, such an incident happens. A drunken woman, really an actress, tries to get a passer by to blow into her breathalyzer so she can start her car and drive it while drunk. So what would you do? The series goes on to present a variety of situations which ask the ethical question: What would you do? What would you do if you saw a customer berate a cashier with downs syndrome? What would you do if you witnessed a restaurant owner sexually harassing a young hostess?
What would you do if you witnessed a person being racially harassed?
Ethical choices confront us every day. Did you ever read the letters to the editor of the Clifton Journal? Many of the letters involve ethical dilemmas faced by our fellow citizens in Clifton?
What do you do when a pagan baits Christians about their beliefs?
What do you when a person proposes that it is ok to berate a person because they do not speak English? What do you do when a person alleges that the female pastor of First Presbyterian church is out to destroy the faith of the city of Clifton?
In today’s readings, God is posing the ethical question to us: What would you do if? Now if you listened to the readings today, I am sure that you are imagining that we should look at the parable of the good Samaritan.
Let’s begin with the first reading from Amos. There was a line in the text that caught my attention: I will never again pass them by. We might look on this line as a word of comfort, a reassurance that God is with us, that God will not pass us by but will be with us. This passage assures us that God’s presence comes to us as a word of confrontation and judgment and not always as a word of comfort and assurance.
Do you remember how Amos is confronted by Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel where King Jeroboam is ruling. We would imagine that the King would go to the temple to be comforted with God’s presence.
Jeroboam built an impressive kingdom with people living the life of luxury. Amos described the life style of the rich and famous of Israel in these words: they “…lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; 5who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; 6who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils.”
I doubt if any of us here have a bed of ivory and live a life of lavish luxury. If you do, perhaps you might want to invite us all over for a lamb feast with fine wines and a band providing idle songs to the sound of the harp. Let’s not let the language of upper class wealth cover up the word that God is saying to us as God passes us by. Are you living a self absorbed life? Are you living an ethically responsible life?
An ethically responsible life involves us in caring for the needs of others. An ethically responsible life challenges us to look deeper than we are accustomed to look. An ethically responsible life is the life that God lives and God passes us by to invite us to pass through the world as God does: Caring for those unjustly deprived of liberty, advocating for the undocumented and the illiterate, women and men and children who are hungry and homeless.
God has given us the gift of worshiping in this section of Clifton where we rub shoulders with those who are different than we are, who speak different languages, who have a different educational level, who come out of a different culture or religion.
God has placed us in a situation where we are given a choice: to behave like the priest and the levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan or to behave like the Samaritan and make the needs of the person on death’s door to be our own needs. If we close our hearts to the person in need, if we blind our eyes from seeing them, if we turn our back on them in Path Mark or Shop Rite, we run the risk of God closing God’s heart on us, of God ignoring our prayer, of God turning God’s back on us when God passes us by.
As we come to this temple to worship, God invites us to play What would you do? God is standing with us, inviting us to a change of mind and heart, a change before it is too difficult to change. What would it take for you to shift your mind and heart to see the world not from the narrow perspective which blinds us but from God’s point of view which heals us. Then God will not pass us by.
As the priest and the levite passed by the person hurt by robbers. We will discover the identity of that unnamed good Samaritan. The good Samaritan is Jesus. The good Samaritan is you.

What A Friend We Have In Jesus

2009-05-02T13:33:00.001-07:00

A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on May 17, 2009
It is not news to you that someone like me who is so involved in movie ministries watches a lot of movies. Recently Carl and I saw an outstanding movie: The Things We Lost in The Fire. If you have not seen it, rent it. It’s one of those movies that opens your heart and searches for the truth.
The story begins on the day of Brian’s funeral. Audrey, Brian’s wife, sends her brother to pick up Jerry, Brian’s best friend and a junkie, and bring Jerry to the funeral. With the exception of the Reel Jesus movies, Brian must be the best person ever depicted in a movie: a loving father to his two children Harper and Dory, an adoring husband to his wife Audrey, a successful real estate developer and a loyal friend to his best friend from grammar school, Jerry, a lawyer turned junkie.
Brian embodies what Jesus spoke about in today’s Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn 15: 13) One night, Brian ventured forth to get some ice cream for Audrey and the children. Coming out of the store, he witnesses a man brutally beating up a woman. When Brian steps in between them, the man shoots and kills Brian.
In a series of flashbacks, you see how Brian unsuccessfully struggled to get Jerry to kick his drug habit and how Audrey becomes increasingly disturbed that Brian is placing himself in danger whenever he visits Jerry in the worst section of the city. Audrey invites Jerry to come live in a one room house on their property and help around the house. Jerry provides Audrey, Harper and Dory with emotional support as they manage their collective grief. But as Jerry draws closer to Harper and Dory, Audrey cannot tolerate how Jerry can get the children to do things Brian could not. In her anger against the senselessness of Brian’s death, Audrey banishes Jerry from the house and Jerry tumbles back into his drug use. As she realizes her mistake, Audrey gets Jerry to enter a rehab program and as the movie ends we are left with the impression that Jerry is on the road to recovery.
All these people, Audrey, Harper, Dory and Jerry were transformed by the life of this one Christ like man: Brian. The heart of the story is about friendship, just as the heart of today’s gospel is about friendship. Brian was a man who could do nothing but good. He ardently believed in the power of love to change people. Yet he could not change his friend Jerry. Jerry was not ready to change. Only after Brian’s death could Jerry begin that road to recovery, only when Jerry began to act responsibly for Audrey, Harper and Dory could he climb out of the pit of addiction.
Friendship exerts such power in our lives. I am sure each of you can think of a person whose friendship you treasured and whose friendship changed your life. I am sure that each of us can think of a person who was there with us when we graduated from school and who held us at the funeral of a member of our family. Friendship brings us to that place of the heart where we find total acceptance, unconditional love, a sometime brutal honesty, and fidelity in the face of the worst crisis.
We might feel surprised when Jesus calls us his friends: “I no longer call you servants…I have called you friends” (Jn. 15:15) Yet everything that Jesus has been saying and doing in the Gospel according to John was leading to this disclosure: that Jesus has been in search of friends and then proving on the cross that he is the true friend. Just think for a minute about Jesus in this gospel, how he goes about drawing people into the circle of his friendship.
Jesus calls his disciples and we see Jesus sharing his life with them and drawing them closer to him and to one another. We meet Lazarus, Martha and Mary, Jesus’ family of friends. Lazarus is described as the one whom Jesus loved and Jesus raises Lazarus from the tomb. Mary would later anoint Jesus’ head with costly perfume as a sign of her love for her friend.
Jesus is preparing them for the greatest reversal of all, when he reveals to them that they are no longer servants but friends.
All too often we address Jesus as Lord Christ, Master, Rabbi, Messiah. All these titles place Jesus in a position above us, as superior to us. Should we not give him respect? Should we not revere him? Yet Jesus is the one who invites us to consider ourselves not as servants but as his friends. Such an invitation opens up to us a relationship of mutuality, of care, of trust, of honesty, of love.
All friendship begins with love and so the beginning of our friendship with Jesus begins with Jesus loving us: “As the Father has loved, so I have loved you. Abide in my love (Jn 15: 10) Love unites us with Jesus.
Yet Jesus asks even more of us in our friendship, Jesus asks that we should love as he loves: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 15: 12) Even as Jesus went about gathering friends around him, so does he continue to gather friends not only around him but with one another.
Many times, we imagine the church as the family of God. I would suggest that Jesus offers us a different model, a community of friends. Into this community of friends, Jesus invites you, invites you to love the other friends of Jesus with a love that accepts, that cherishes, that challenges, that supports.
We are not all called to give our lives for one another as Jesus did for us. Yet we are all called to that difficult task of loving one another with that same passionate love that carried Jesus through the cross to the transformation of the resurrection.
Jesus opens his arms to you in friendship. Jesus opens his arms to you in sacrifice. Will you follow and do the same?

2009-05-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

Engaging the Wild Things
A Sermon by the Rev. Peter De Franco
on the First Sunday in Lent
given at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ

Today, I would like to read to you a story, Where The Wild Things Are. “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another. His mother called him “Wild Thing!” And Max said “I’ll eat you up!” So he was sent to bed without eating anything. That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew. And grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around. And an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.
And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws. Till Max said “BE STILL!” and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things. “And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
Then all around from far away across the world he smell good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.
But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!” And Max said, “No!”
The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good bye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.
On the first Sunday in Lent, we always hear the story of Jesus in the desert. The Spirit of God drives Jesus out into the wilderness. Jesus goes into the desert.
Now if any of you have gone into a desert you are in for a life changing experience. Deserts have little water, little protection from the ravages of the hot sun, little contact with people who can comfort you. There are wild things in the desert.
Jesus goes into that wasteland for forty days. Mark tells us that in the desert Jesus was tempted by Satan. But we do not know how Satan tempted Jesus. Mark tells us that Jesus was with the wild beasts. Mark also tells us that the angels waited on Jesus. For forty days….that is why we have forty days of Lent, so that we too like Jesus can go into the desert. I wonder what this story has to tell us?
Like Jesus, we are all entering into a desert. That desert is called Lent. I hope that each of you has selected something special do to during Lent. I hope that each of you has a plan for yourself. That plan should be for you to work on something you want to improve about yourself.
So some of you might try not to talk back to people. Some of you might want to work on the way you act when you get angry. Some of you might want to change the way you relate to other people be that giving up the need to control people, giving up patterns of manipulating people to do what you want them to do. Some of you might want to work on your addictions: to food, to computers, to video games, to talking on the phone, to texting, to spend hours on Facebook and not interacting face to face. Some of you might want to pay more attention to your body, to give yourself more exercise, to spend less time as a couch potato. Each of us has our own desert place to go, our own Lenten strategy of change, our own plan of self improvement.
But before we can start that plan, we have to take another look at the Gospel story. Because an important thing happens to Jesus before he goes into the desert. Before Jesus confronts the hard things in his life, something phenomenal happens to Jesus. Jesus is baptized.
When Jesus is baptized, he not only has water poured over him. God speaks to Jesus in his heart. God tells Jesus that he is God’s child. God tells Jesus that God loves Jesus. God tells Jesus that God is pleased with Jesus.
So before you go into the desert this lent, I invite you to rediscover your own Baptism experience. Take some time during this Holy Eucharist to listen to that soft silent voice of God who speaks to you in your heart and tells you: “You are my child, You make me very happy, I love you.” Hear that voice of God telling you: “You are my child, You make me very happy, I love you.”
Say these words with me: “I am God’s child. I make God very happy. God loves me.
Let’s say them again: “I am God’s child. I make God very happy. God loves me.”

Now you can go into the desert. Now you can go into the desert and not fear the wild beasts that you will meet there. For like Max, you will discover that the wild things are not that savage, that the wild things can be tamed, that the wild things can become your friends.
Now you can do battle with the evil forces that restrict you, that limit your freedom, that prevent you from becoming the person you want to become. And not fear that you are not strong enough to come out the winner. For God has started out ahead of you. God assures you that you are loved, that you are God’s beloved.
And at the end of your Lenten journey you will find yourself on the other side of your fear, on the other side of your faults, on the resurrection side of the world.

Becoming like the Good Shepherd

2009-05-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Peter De Franco
on Good Shepherd Sunday,
May 3, 2009
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church

Of all the psalms in the bible, perhaps all of us know the words of Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. Every fourth Sunday of Easter, we read the story of the Good Shepherd, we say Psalm 23, at one service we sing various settings of Psalm 23.
The feeling we tend to get is one of comfort, of feeling good, of knowing that we have a shepherd who is with us. I wonder if you feel that Jesus is always with you, constantly by your side, opening your lives to that experience of being loved and cared for by our God. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Say those words with me. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
I hope that all of you feel that those words bring you comfort and peace, a sense that God loves you. Jesus is indeed our shepherd. We are all the members of the flock of Jesus. We are all sheep in Jesus’ flock.
If any of you have been paying attention to the news, a different animal has dominated the headlines. I wonder what animal that is? (PIGS!)
I am going to do something and I will ask you not to tell the bishop. I am going to call this good pigherd Sunday. So today, I would like to tell you the story of a pig and a flock of sheep.
Perhaps some of you know the story of Babe. Now this is a very sweet story, perhaps too sweet for some of you, so some of you might want to take a shot of insulin before we begin.
Babe was a baby pig, the smallest baby pig in the litter. Do any of you know what they call the smallest pig in the litter? The Runt!
Well, Babe was taken away from his brothers and sisters and brought to a country fair where Babe was the prize for the person who can guess his weight. When Farmer Hogget sees Babe, he connects with the pig, Farmer Hogger felt a common destiny with the pig. I imagine he felt like the way Jesus feels about us. Like the way Jesus looks at us, Farmer Hoggert looks at Babe and knows that Babe is going to be his pig. Just like Jesus looks at us and knows that we are his special people.
Farmer Hogget wins Babe and takes him home to the farm. Babe finds no other pigs on the farm so Babe is adopted by the Fly, the mother sheepdog, and her puppies. Babe begins to get confused and Babe thinks he is a sheepdog. Babe starts to act like a sheep dog. Rex, the father sheepdog, does not like Babe. Rex thinks dogs should herd sheep and pigs should stay on the farm and get fat.
One day, Farmer Hoggert takes Babe with Fly and Rex out to the pasture with the sheep. Babe sees how Fly and Rex herd the sheep, running down the meadow, forcing the sheep to return to the sheep fold. Let’s take a look and see what happens to Babe.
You might wonder what does Babe have to do with Jesus the Good Shepherd. I wonder what would happen if we thought of Farmer Hoggert as a symbol of God? And if we thought of ourselves as Babe.
We all could help the Good Shepherd with the sheep. We all could be good shepherds. We all could help the good shepherd with the sheep.
There is a phrase in today’s gospel that I want us too look at closely. “I have other sheep that are not of this fold, I must bring them also.” (Jn 10: 16)
We all think of ourselves as part of the herd of Jesus. And we all belong to that herd of Jesus. Jesus is going to bring new sheep to this herd.
At least once a month, you see new people come into this church. Perhaps you are among those new people. Perhaps you have heard Jesus calling you to come to this herd of Jesus.Perhaps you are among those who welcome the new members into the church.
We all are like Babe, all of us have heard Jesus calling us here, all of us are like Babe, we are all invited to become sheep dogs, inviting others into this flock, protecting the flock like Babe, caring for the sheep like Babe did: with a gentle manner, a loving heart, a kind soul.
Jesus is indeed our good shepherd. But we too are shepherds. Loving the one another. Caring for each other.
Perhaps you do not feel like a sheep dog. But there is a shepherd out there who knows that you can bring in new sheep. Just try it. See how Jesus will make you into a good shepherd. Then we all can not only say: The Lord is my shepherd. But I am also a shepherd.

Call to a Prophetic Ministry

2009-01-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey
on January 18, 2009, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

Today’s first reading presents us with a familiar story of the call of Samuel. You know the story how the boy Samuel was given to by his mother Hannah as a gift to God when Samuel was only weaned. Hannah left the child Samuel with the Priest Eli and his two sons. We might imagine that Samuel was enrolled in a sort of seminary run by Eli since Eli began to teach Samuel how to minister in the temple. Perhaps some of us might imagine Samuel as a cute little cherub of a boy, a sort of Jewish Altar boy who lived in the temple and perhaps he looked a lot like some of our own sweet altar servers.
But the two sons of Eli were priests who considered themselves above of others. When people would come to offer animal sacrifice to God, the sons of Eli would take the best cuts of meat, the parts which should have been sacrificed to God, they took them for themselves. Not only did they desecrate the sacrifices, they also took sexual advantage of the women who came to the temple. I wonder if Hannah knew of the moral character of these men if she would have brought little Samuel to another seminary.
The reading today begins with the description: The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. (1 Samuel 3: 1) The word of the Lord was rare in those days. Considering the moral depravity of the family of Eli, I wonder if that was the cause of the silence of God. Was the word rare since there were no ears to hear the word? Were visions not widespread since there were no eyes to behold those visions?
Yet God is about to do something new with Samuel. God calls out to Samuel. Unlike all those around him, Samuel hears the word. Not only does Samuel hear the word, he responds to the word. Now Samuel is not entrusted with words of comfort for Eli and his sons. Samuel is given a word of confrontation. The bible says that Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. (1 Samuel 3: 15) Yet somehow the heart that heard the word found the courage to speak the word and from that time on Samuel took on his prophetic calling.
The bible says: “As Samuel grew up, the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” (1 Samuel 3: 19)
The Lord let none of his words fall to the ground. I think all of us understand that prophets are people who hear God’s word and communicate that word and all too often to a people not eager to hear the word.
This weekend, we celebrate the life of another prophet of God: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In Lesser Feasts and Fasts, a book of the Saints in our church, Dr. King finds his place with the other holy men and women of our country and Dr. King is called a Prophet and a Civil Rights Leader. Now Dr. King was a holy man; he did have his moments of weakness but Dr. King was indeed a holy man, a prophet who did not let one of God’s words fall to the ground. In retaliation for his prophetic ministry, Dr. King suffered the fate of so many a prophet, from Jeremiah to John the Baptizer to Jesus of Nazareth: they were not only a prophets, they were also martyrs. He did not let one of God’s words fall to the ground, but his own blood fell to the ground and watered the ground so that the prophetic words of racial equality might be watered with his blood and bear fruit in the a nation where today we stand vigil at one of the most historical events in our history: the inauguration of the first African American President.
I wonder what would have passed through the mind and heart of Dr. King if he would have attended that inauguration. I think of the tears streaming down the face of the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the night President Obama was elected, tears of joy that we all had entered the promised land, tears of joy that we were finally living into the reality of which Dr. King but dreamed. Dr. King is celebrated in our church as a prophet and civil rights leader.
For many of us, prophets are people usually relegated to the past, the ancient past when Samuel lived in ancient Shiloh Isaiah walked the streets of Jerusalem or perhaps the ancient past when John the Baptizer was dunking people in the River Jordan. Prophets are safe in the past. Safe because we cannot hear their voices, we cannot see their actions, we cannot be bothered by their message. Prophets possess an uncanny ability to get under our skin and irritate us by their message.
I think that Samuel had his moment when he realized the cost of his prophet ministry, the cost Samuel had to pay was his own fear of proclaiming the word. Samuel was not afraid to pay the cost.
All of us share in that calling to be prophets, all of us are asked to take on that socially difficult role, all of us are invited to speak, to proclaim, to summon others with the word that God gives to us. Jesus shares with us his prophetic ministry. All of us share in that uncomfortable role of prophets.
Many of you have shared stories of how you are teased or ridiculed for being an Episcopalian. I heard one of you tell how she was invited to spend some time in a Roman Catholic Community to try and get them up to speed on issues. We not only have women as deacons and priest and bishops but our presiding bishop is a woman. We not only let gays, lesbians and bisexuals openly worship in our churches but we are ordaining them as deacons, priests and now even a bishop.
We are prophets entrusted with a simple message: All Are Welcome. It is shorthand for saying three other words: God Loves Everyone. We are given the uncomfortable task of being prophets in our community which does not always want to hear our word of universal welcome, of God’s inclusive love.
What do you do with the prophetic word you have received? Do you let your fear silence your prophetic voice? Do you let the comfort of sitting with people you know keep you away from the difficult task of welcoming the person who is new in this community, in your neighborhood, in your work place?
I invite you to take up your prophetic calling, I encourage you to take up the ministry of Samuel and Dr. King, and speak those three words in your community. All Are Welcome. God Loves Everyone. Don’t let the word given to you fall to the ground.

The Baptism of Jesus and Our Baptismal Priesthood

2009-01-12T14:42:00.000-08:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
January 11, 2009

On the beach at Asbury Park, while a gentle snow was preparing to cover the sands, a group of swimmers, called polar bears, braved the frigid water of the Atlantic Ocean, and the below freezing temperatures to take a dip in the water. Wearing only a bathing suit, these swimmers, some might call them brave, others called them crazy, they commented that the day was perfect for a swim since, in spite of the frigid temperatures, the wind was not blowing, so they considered it a good day. Now don’t imagine that just because we are celebrating the Baptism of Jesus that I shall invite us all to imitate those Polar Bears and go for a dip in the Passaic River. Yet today we celebrate a person going to a body of water, not for a swim or a bath, but to participate in a purification ritual.
Mark clearly writes that only Jesus sees the heavens tear open, only Jesus hears the voice from the heaven affirming that Jesus is God’s Beloved Son, only Jesus feels the Spirit, not hover over him, but penetrate the very heart of Jesus and change him into a spirit possessed person. He puts on his tunic and mantle. The river Jordan continues its slow move toward the Dead Sea, another person approaches John to be dunked under the water and Jesus moves into the world, forever transformed, forever transfigured, forever god’s Child.
In a hymn that celebrates this event, we sing of the moment when Jesus is manifest at Jordan’s stream, prophet, priest and king supreme. Like that ancient baptism in the River Jordan, we too have been baptized, we too have come into the heavenly realm of God where we too have been singled out as a prophet, priest and king or queen. This week, I would like us to reflect on our baptismal anointing as priests.
When we think of priests, we usually imagine those people who wear funny clothes on Sunday and plastic dog collars during the week. Yet we seldom consider ourselves as priests. All too often, images of priests in vestments and strange clothing bar our imaginations from claiming the priesthood that is ours, a priesthood which most members of the first century church took for granted. Our patron, St. Peter, describes this priesthood in these words: ‘You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”(1 Peter 2: 9) All too often our imaginations inhibit us from realizing our identity as priests of God. Yet that is what we are. Yet why are all of us called priests?
Primarily because of our consecration in baptism. Like Jesus at the River Jordan, the Spirit comes to us in Baptism, not with a lot of fanfare, not with a blast of trumpets, but with the silent, interior conviction that we are indeed God’s beloved children and, in our hearts, God’s Spirit dwells. Whenever a person is baptized, all of us in the congregation welcomes them with these words: “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.” (Book of Common Prayer)
We all share in the eternal priesthood of Christ Jesus. Priesthood involves more than just special clothing. In any culture that has them, priests usually are the ones who offer sacrifice. The Christian covenant no longer practices the priesthood of the Jews with the offering of animals, grain and wine. As the letter to the Hebrews makes clear, the ministry of Jesus as priest took place once for all when he offered to God the sacrifice of himself. That sacrifice was made once for all. We do not need to offer that sacrifice again and again. What we do as priests is to make the offering of ourselves in union with that offering of Jesus.
In our Rite I service, we pray these words that speak of our priestly offering: “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.” (Book of Common Prayer) In the prayer that we will say today, we ask that God “grant that all who share this bread and cup may become one body and one spirit, a living sacrifice in Christ, to the praise of your Name.” (BCP Eucharistic Prayer D) We ask God to make us a living sacrifice.
To this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, we bring our lives, we bring our hearts as gifts, and as priests, we offer our hearts, that sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
Some among us do function as priests in a different manner.
Some of us are given the gift of the ordained priesthood. That gift includes gift to forgive sins in God’s name, to sanctify the gifts of bread and wine, to bless water for baptism and oil for healing and people in their various times of need. This gift to the community of the ordained priesthood emerges from our common priesthood yet marks some in the community as exercising a different ministry. Even if that gift is different it grows from that same branch of our common baptismal priesthood.
We show that each of us functions in our unique ways by the way we say the prayer during the Holy Eucharist. We all say the Eucharistic prayer yet ordained priests say those parts which sanctify the gifts and offer them to God We all say those prayers which celebrate the great mystery of God’s gifts to us and we make the oblation of our selves, our souls and bodies to God.
Perhaps the understanding of your priesthood comes as a new reality for you. Perhaps your priesthood comes as a long lived reality to which you put a new name. Perhaps you exercise an ordained priesthood, perhaps you might realize that you might have the call to ordained ministry. However you find yourself as a priest, may you exercise your ministry with the grace of bringing your part of the world into the great priestly song of Christ that with Christ we may offer ourselves along with the great sacrifice of Christ Jesus as God establishes among us God’s reign.

Light in the Darkness

2008-12-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco on
November 30, 2008, The First Sunday of Advent

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent. Does anyone know what the word advent means? The word advent comes from two Latin words that mean coming toward. I wonder what is coming toward us? Or who is coming toward us? Christmas is coming toward us. Jesus is coming toward us. For some of us, Santa Claus is coming toward us.
Do any of you remember from today’s gospel what Jesus said is coming? Let me remind you of what Jesus said is coming:
Jesus said that something terrible is coming. Listen to Jesus’ words: “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13: 24-25) What does that sound like to you? It sounds like I don’t want to be around to see that happen.
What would that mean if the sun is darkened and the moon does not shine and the stars fall out of the sky? It would be pretty dark when that happens. We would all be living in shadows. We would all be in the dark. How would that make you feel? I think that I would be afraid. I would be scared.
What happens when everything is dark? What do you need? You need light. You need something to shine in the darkness. You need a light.
I think that Jesus is not only telling us that something terrible is going to happen. But Jesus is also telling us that something wonderful is going to happen. Jesus tells us that when terrible things happen, that kind of world has to end. Jesus is telling us that a world where people do bad things to other people has to end. Jesus is telling us that a world where people do not have enough clothes to wear, enough food to eat, enough space to live has to come to an end. So when Jesus talks about the sky becoming dark, it is only part of the story. Jesus is talking about a world where bad things happen. That bad world has to come to end.
Jesus is also saying that he will come to make everything better. Jesus called himself the light. But Jesus is also talking about the dawning of a new light to replace the darkness. This are the words from the Gospel: “Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. (Mark 13: 35-36)
Do you notice the references to time in the Gospel and how time progresses from evening to midnight, to cockcrow to dawn. Jesus is advising us that we need to keep alert. To pay attention, that we might see when the light dawns and perhaps even more than see.
I want to share a story with you about the battle between darkness and light, a story that played itself out only a few blocks from us. Last Sunday, as the congregation from the 10:15 service were going into coffee hour, a tragedy played itself out at St. Thomas Syrian Orthodox church on Third Street. You know the story of how an angry husband traveled from California to New Jersey to take his wife, the wife he brutalized and beat for years, back with him to California. We all know how that story played itself out in the Narthex of the church, how the husband came into the Narthex, demanded that his wife return with him, how a young man intervened along with the woman’s cousin. Shots rang out in the church, leaving the wife dead, the young man mortally wounded and the cousin still is in a coma on life support in St. Joseph’s Hospital.
On Thanksgiving night, I spent evening at St. Thomas Church along with other clergy, members of the family of Dennis John and the many people who were touched by his short life. Again on Friday night, I sat in the pew, praying for Dennis and his family, for his congregation, and listening to the words of friends, of priests who knew him, of members of his congregation. They spoke of his outgoing character, his profound love for people, his deep caring for others.
When I was asked to speak, I did not have a prepared text and these words of the Gospel came to my mind: Greater love has no one than to lay down his life for his friend. Jesus spoke of those words to describe how he would lay down his life for us. But countless Christians after Jesus have laid down their lives for others. Dennis did what Jesus did. In the midst of that dark hour, Dennis’ sacrifice was a shining light.
Priests came from all over the country. From India came a bishop who is the equivalent of our presiding bishop to lead the prayers and to comfort Dennis’ family and the congregation. Now I am not asking you to become a martyr. Only God can give us that grace. Seeing his mother crying without comfort let me ask God not only for her comfort but that other mothers be spared similar sorrow. Let us pray that none of us are called to that role.
But when a martyr arises in our community, we should recognize that what the world sees as darkness, we Christians see as the dawning light. What the world sees as loss, we see as gain. For the weakness of our human condition, God transforms into God’s own strength. The tragedy of human loss, God transforms by the power of the resurrection into new life. We are all called to be a light in the darkness. Not as dramatically as Dennis in his sacrificial death. But in smaller, humbler, hidden ways.
Perhaps by giving a Christmas gift to a stranger, providing food for someone who is hungry, showing love and affection for someone who is forgotten, you become a light in someone’s darkness. Make your heart a shining light that when you find darkness, the light of Jesus may shine through you.

An Incomplete Sermon on Stewardship

2008-11-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

If you were to put an anxiety thermometer in the mouth of our society, you would see the mercury explode the thermometer and bounce in bubbles on the floor. Unless we exert extraordinary concern, each of us can become infected with the collective unease our society is feeling over the ups and down turns of the stock market, fears over the possibility of yet another buyout by the federal government of first insurance companies, then banks and now perhaps the auto industry.
If you think that today’s stock market is a gamble perhaps you did not pay careful attention to today’s Gospel story. The parable of the talents comes close to high rolling with mutual funds.
But for us to understand the high risks of the story, lets start by converting the biblical money into dollars.
When the Gospel talks about talents, a talent is not a good trait you have, a talent is a sum of money. A talent is worth about 6,000 denarii. A denarius is a day’s wage. How much do you make in a day? If you make $80, then one talent is $420,000. Two talents is $840,000. Five talents is $2,100,000.
If you make $160 a day then we are looking at $840,000, $1,680,000, and $4,200,000. I think we are now in the league with Warren Buffit and Bill Gates.
The investors in the Gospel story take the money they receive and the first two double it.
The third one sits on it and does nothing. What is this money that Jesus is talking about? Let’s face it, Jesus is talking not about small amounts of money, he is talking about excessive money. Money that we might imagine a Wall Street Stock Broker makes. Money being given to the CEO of a major corporation. Money that a Mafia godfather collects.
What is this excessive money in God’s eyes? When God invests in the world, God throws out money in abundance. God flings the money at us. God’s mercy overflows. God’s love is endless.
God wants to invest lavishly, loving without restraint, showing mercy without limit.
The parable invites us to be lavish spenders, unrestrained givers, limitless hosts. God does not hide God’s money under a mattress. God invests it in the world.
You know that today is the day we are going to look at our parish’s money, where it comes from and where it goes. I guess that when I was talking about lavish spenders, unrestrained givers, limitless hosts you might have begun to wonder if that is the way the Vestry spends your money or perhaps worse, how the Vestry expects you to make your financial commitment to the church. If our congregation included Warren Buffit and Bill Gates, I would hope that they would exercise some excess in giving. I don’t know about you but I am no Warren Buffit or Bill Gates. So let’s take a look at this budget and see where the money comes from and where it goes.
Most of the money we receive comes from you. The members of the parish contribute $104,000. Our next biggest source of income comes from donations from the various groups who use our property. You can see that in our budget, on line 24, we are not taking any money out of our endowment. That means that we have a balanced budget.
Let’s now take a look at where our money goes. We give money back. On line 29, you see that we give $7,567 to the Diocese and $630 to Episcopal Relief and Development which supports a variety of charities throughout the world.
We clergy are a large expense: on line 47 you see that we account for 45.6 % of our expenses.
Our buildings make up a good deal of our expenses. Starting at line 62, you will see the cost of our utilities, maintenance and insurance comes to 40,900.
Beginning on line 70, you will see the cost of our office supplies on l77 the total is 17, 300.
Our education costs start on line 78 and with Sunday School, the youth program, and other expenses, we come, on line 87 to $6,500.
Those of you who have been members of the parish for a while know that for many years we have been taking money out of our endowment to balance our budget. When that money was taken out of the endowment, it was called a loan.
On line 96 you can see the repayment of that loan back to the endowment.

I think when it comes to the expenses of the church we are not practicing today’s gospel message of liberality. We really try to keep our expenses in check. In a letter I wrote to you, I invited you to consider your own situations from the perspective of abundance. I invited you to consider that God has provided enough for you to do what you need to do for yourself, your family and your community. I invited you to consider your priorities and work to arrange your priorities so you would be able to support yourself, your family and your community and your church.
I know that we are entering into a difficult economic time. When considering your pledge, I ask you to try to at least sustain the level of giving you presently make.
At this point in the sermon, I think that I am on National Public Radio or Channel 13, doing a fall campaign. So bear with me as I make this pitch. If each of us sustains that level of giving, we could easily make our budgeted amount of $100,000. If you have not pledged before, I invite you to consider making this your first year. If you have pledged before I would ask you to consider moving your pledge to a new amount.
All of us have found a home at St. Peter’s Church. Together, we make this place the inviting community it is. Together, we make possible the ministry by which we serve the broader community.
Remember the God who has so lavished you with love, and be generous in your own giving.
Now I bet you think the sermon ends there.
It only begins. I invite you during coffee hour to talk with someone about your experience of giving.
Not about how much you give. Not about how much you plan to give. But what it means for you to contribute to St. Peter’s Church. Tell someone why you do it. Tell them what you get out of it. Tell them how it changes your relationship with God. So you see, the sermon is not ending, it is only beginning. Amen.

Forming Character

2008-11-08T20:23:00.000-08:00

Most of us live with laws. In this area of Clifton, we put the garbage out on Monday and Thursday nights. If you want the garbage collected you have to obey that law. Driving down the street, we come to a traffic light, or a stop sign or a yield sign. For the common good, we obey these laws so that we, or the other driver, does not slam into another car. Every April 15, we have to meet the deadline for filing our taxes. Now while here in New Jersey we always hear of government officials not obeying that law, most of us dutifully file our taxes and most of us comply with the laws that regulate those taxes. If you are a young person living at home, you know full well how your parents regulate your lives with rules to be followed. How many of us have heard or how many of us have said: If you live under my roof you live by my rules.
We all live according to rules, some of those rules are imposed on us by the government, some are accepted as rules for polite society, some regulate our private lives at home. Yet most of these laws do not impact our relationship with God.
It was not so for Jesus and the Jews of his day. Any observant Jew in Jesus’ day would observe 613 laws. The same is true for most observant Jews today: If you want to be a true Jew you must observe the Law, all 613 commandments. Read through the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you will see laws covering every possible situation in the ancient world. These rules established a system of justice and equality, sometimes to an exacting degree. The law ranked high among the Jews, not only as a way to establish their society, but foremost as the revelation from God and the means of keeping the covenant they made with God.
In today’s gospel, when the lawyer comes to Jesus and asks him what is the greatest law, Jesus knows that the lawyer is setting a trap for Jesus. Everyone knew that the correct answer would have been: all 613 laws are important and all are to be observed.
Now this Lawyer would have known that Jesus failed to observe some of those 613 laws. He broke the law when he worked on the Sabbath by healing the sick. He broke the law when he associated with sinners and those who did not observe the Law. He broke the law when he and his disciples did not follow ritual laws about bathing, hand washing and eating particular foods. If Jesus does not praise all 613 laws, he is breaking down respect for the entire law. If he does endorse all of those 613 laws, he condemns himself and discredits his ministry.
Notice what Jesus does: He turns the question on its head.
He establishes as the highest law the commandment which every Jew would have said every day from Deuteronomy 6: 4-5: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Therefore you shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all you soul and with all your mind.” Then he adds to it a small verse from Leviticus, 19; 18: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. He shifts the argument away from the law to the heart. Jesus does not deny the value of the law, for he quotes the law in his answer. But he makes observance of the Law subservient to the movement of the heart.
For all of us here today, if we are the ones who impose the laws or the ones who observe the laws, or if we are both, I would ask you how do the laws you impose foster the development of love? If we think about the purpose of the laws we impose on our children, or the laws our parents imposed on us, those laws are intended to develop good habits, patterns of healthy behavior that become second nature to us. We do not usually hear much talk about character development, but I think that many of us would agree that laws are in place so that we can develop those habits which we believe to be the mark of a responsible and healthy individual and a person who has developed those habits we call a person of character.
Jesus lays out for us two important areas of character development: love of God and love of our neighbor. I would summarize those gifts as worship and service. Notice how Jesus frames our worship and love of God as engaging our not only our hearts and our souls but our minds as well. We Episcopalians do not shy away from engaging the hard questions and we do not give out predetermined answers to the questions. Episcopalians wrestle with the hard questions about the faith and we form our own answers to the questions. It is not always easy living under a big tent where the answers to the questions are all slightly different.
But we agree on the boundaries to the questions. We call those boundaries the Baptismal Covenant. We agree to a minimum of beliefs which are summarized in the Creed. We also agree to a standard of behavior, we commit ourselves to worship and to respect for others.
As we look at the way we carry out our baptismal covenant, today’s Gospel challenges us to look at our motive for doing what we do. Are we engaged with God and with one another because of love? Are we working with each other because of love? When we come together for worship, do we go from this place with our hearts expanded? When we gather during this week to work on the Rummage Sale, when we cook a meal to share with others, when we prepare a lesson for Sunday School, when we bake for coffee hour, when we sing in the choir, are we doing these things to grow in love? For all of us love because we have been loved, loved with a passionate love by this God who has taken on our flesh, lived our life, suffered our death and in the power of his resurrection opens to us possibilities we have not even imagined.

The Spiritual Gift of Water

2008-11-08T20:21:00.001-08:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco
At St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton NJ

Today we heard in the first lesson the story of the parting of the Reed Sea. That story brings a variety of characters. Whom would you say are some of those characters?
(Moses, Pharaoh, the Chosen People, the Egyptian Army) One character we tend to forget, and it’s the character whose name appears in the title of the story: The Reed Sea.
Bodies of water play major roles in many stories in the Bible. When you open the first pages of Genesis, in the second verse, you cannot move deep into the chapter one before encountering the primeval waters over which hovers God’s Spirit. When you come to chapter 2 and the description of the Garden of Paradise, four great rivers water the garden home of Adam and Eve. Only a few chapters later, Genesis tells you yet another story of water, when God destroys the earth and rescues Noah, his family and the sets of animals.
We hear stories of wells of water. You will recall how Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac and Rebecca is discovered at a well. Moses finds his wife when she and her sisters draw near to a well in an oasis to water their sheep. Jesus also meets a woman at a well in Samaria. wonder if God is telling us that if you want to meet the love of your life you should go to the local watering hole. But let’s get back to Exodus.
Moses and Aaron changed the waters of the River Nile into blood. Moses gives water to the Chosen People out of a rock in the desert. Joshua leads the people through the waters of the Jordan River. That Jordan River witnesses the cleansing of Naaman the leper. Later, John the Baptizer will baptize people in that river Jordan and the disciples of Jesus will continue that water bath as they also baptize.
Not only in today’s story but throughout the bible, water is a significant character in many stories. Water brings life to people, it nourishes crops, it provides for cleansing.
Water also brings death. Its destructive forces overwhelms people. Just recall the fate of the Egyptian army in today’s story about the Reed Sea. All of them are drowned in the waters. Noah’s flood makes us think of the December 26, 2004 Tsunami that struck in the Indian Ocean. We have only to consider Hurricane Ike and the water destruction along the Texas coast line.
Water is both beautiful and terrible, a source of life and death.
We all live close to some body of water. What is the body of water closest to your home? What is your relationship to that water? How many of us know what is happening in Weasel Brook? What are the issues around the Passaic River as it moves through Clifton? What do you know about Barber’s Pond in Garrett Mountain, or the New Street Reservoir, or the Great Notch Reservoir? Does anyone know where Highland Lake is? When was the last time you visited the Paterson Falls?
Or the Dundee lake and dam in Garfield?
We are all surrounded by water. Much of that water is in danger. The Passaic River is slowly being restored after once being called the most polluted river in the country.
The water that surrounds us on all sides forms part of the great mystery of water about which we read in the bible.
While we considered it as a character in many stories from the Bible, water is also a character in our lives. I wonder what would happen if we make the water near us a part of our lives?
I wonder what would happen if we began to relate to the water around us in a more conscious way? Would we take time to find a favorite spot on the water and watch the water flow at different times of the day? In the dance of the soft morning sun, in the strength of the afternoon’s light, in the beauty of the sunset, in the gentle moon light? Would we weep when we saw the water polluted? Would we cry when we saw bottles and other debris floating down the water? Would we be concerned when we knew about the chemical pollutants that infect the waterbeds and aquatic life in the water?
Water is not just out there. We are water. Do you realize that we about 50 or 60% water? If you understood that you are about half water how would you relate the rest of the water that surrounds you? Would you begin to see that the water that surrounds you and the water that is you are but one?
Would you begin to see that the water that surrounds you, the water that is you is part of that original sacred water, that original holy water, over which the Holy Spirit hovered and sanctified? Would you begin to see that the sacred water in which you lived in your mother’s uterus is part of the sacred water in which you received the new life of baptism? Would you see that our most important sacramental actions involve water, bread and wine? Would you begin to see that you are part of one sacred pool of water that flows through the earth as its life blood, spreading the holy life of God through the planet, through your body, through your soul?
As we consider the water of the Reed Sea, I invite you to consider the sacredness of water in your life. To open your heart to the mystery of water that surrounds you. To feel the beauty of water that is you. To sense that you are one with the water of the world, one with the sacred flow of water from the heart of our God. When you come into the church, touch the water not only to remind yourself of your baptism but of the mystery of water in God’s creation. Of the mystery of water that is God. Of the mystery of water that is you.

Transitions in Leadership

2008-11-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
November 9, 2008

In any society the transition of leaders brings no small amount of worry. In today’s first reading, we heard about the end of the rule of Joshua. This reading follows on what, if it were not for All Saints’ Sunday, we would have heard last week: the transition from Moses to Joshua. When Joshua began to lead the people, Israel entered a significant new era. The generation of slaves who escaped from Egypt under Moses had died. The bible says that because the slave generation rebelled against Moses and God they could not be enter the land of promise. I read biblical commentators who state that a generation of slaves could not inherit freedom. That slave generation needed to die off and a new generation, a generation of free persons, a generation which did not experience slavery in Egypt, would inherit the land of Israel. Joshua brought the free generation across the river Jordan into the land God promised to Abraham. Just as the generation of slaves crossed through the Reed Sea, the freed children of slaves crossed the Jordan River into the land of promise.
When Joshua crossed into Canaan, all hell broke loose.
He unleashed a wave of terror on the inhabitants of Canaan, killing kings, decimating armies, destroying the entire populations of cities. We are spared those chapters of the book of Joshua which detail the war of conquest by which the Jews overtook the inhabitants of the land of Canaan. Today’s reading brings us to the completion of the conquest. Today we hear Joshua speaking to the nation of Israel at another historical crossroad. Joshua is about to die. He is asking Israel not to backslide and betray the God who brought them into the land of promise. The people stand at this historic moment and promise that they would be faithful. They promised fidelity and then the tribes slip into the greatest period of anarchy among the Jews.
For four hundred years, the Jews existed as a loose confederation of tribes and they were constantly attached by one of their enemies or another. That generation did not live up to the challenges of freedom. It would take 400 years until Samuel was called as a prophet in Israel and he would anoint as King first Saul and then David, the greatest of the kings of Israel.
The Sunday readings do not always present a parallel between the situation of the bible story and the times in which we live. The story from Joshua is one of transition. We as a nation are in a similar situation of transition.
No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you must admit that we have witnessed a most historical week in our national history. We elected the first African American President in our history. If any of you stayed up on Tuesday night, you saw tears streaming down the faces of so many people as they heard the CNN and NBC declare at 11:01 that Barack Obama was elected president. General Colin Powell, in an interview following the election, said that he was profoundly moved, moved to tears, at the news of the election of President Elect Obama. Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee all cried at the news of the election results.
I was a high school student in Paterson when Dr. Martin Luther King visited the city only a few months before his assassination. Many of us remember Dr. King. We remember the struggle for civil rights which Dr. King lead. Who among us could have imagined we would have lived to see the day an African American would become president. No wonder tears flowed on that night.
I do not want to celebrate the triumph of one candidate over another. I think something profound is happening in our country,
Something profoundly religious is happening. Just think back with me over the past two years since the candidates began the road to the White House. Think back with me, not on the bickering and the political antagonisms. Think back on the language the candidates used. Were you startled, as I was amazed, by the religious language which the candidates used.
Both candidates used the word change in looking at the past few years in our country. We have a religious word for change.
We call it conversion. In religious terms, both candidates were saying that the United States needed a conversion.
Then other words crept into the political discourse. Words like hope and humility and healing and cooperation.
I do not think that any one person can change our country. I doubt if any of us think that we have elected the messiah. But like the Jews of old, we too stand at a crossroads.
Many of you know Maya Angelou. Some would consider her the premier African American writer. When she was interviewed by CNN about Barack Obama’s election as President she remarked: “With this, the country is finally able to see through complexion and see community.”
Together let us pray that God is using the election of Barack Obama to heal our nation of the sin of racism that has divided us for centuries and is uniting us as a community.
Together let us pray that God is healing our nation in the sight of the other nations of the world so that we can assume our place, not as the political or economic or military leader of the world but as the moral leader of the world.
Together let us pray that God is healing our nation of the uncontrollable greed that has undermined our economy and brought our nation to the brink of disaster.
Together let us pray that the Spirit of God will so blow over this country with a purifying fire to cleanse us of all that has defiled us and bring us today, like the people of Israel of old, into that land of promise, rich with promise for all people.
We stand at a crossroads, as did the people did in the days of Joshua. Let us be attentive to the ways God is looking to heal us, bring us together, lead us forward, forward into a land of promise.

The Cross and New Life

2008-08-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

A Sermon preached by
the Rev. Peter De Franco
at
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
August 31, 2008

Last week, we heard the story of Peter identifying Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus thought that God gave Peter a unique insight into Jesus and his mission. Jesus was so impressed with Peter’s understanding that he called Peter the Rock on which Jesus would build his church. Peter must have thought himself very special.
I have some Spanish friends and they gave me a word to describe Peter: Especial. It means someone who thinks of himself as better than others, as velvet compared to cotton, a Don Perignon champagne to Boon Wine, a Lamborghini rather than a banged up Impala. People who feel themselves to be Especial usually have a bit of an inflated ego. And that was Peter.
After all, Jesus singled him out from all the apostles and let him know that he saw things that they did not understand. Since Peter recognized that Jesus was unique, Peter must have felt that he needed to protect Jesus. He must have felt, as any friend would feel, that he had to protect Jesus from harm, shelter him from danger, shield him from disaster. We all would feel the same. None of us would want any disaster to fall on our best friend. If Peter was anything to Jesus, Peter was his dear friend.
Just after Jesus called Peter the rock on which Jesus would build the church, Jesus then goes on to tell the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. Peter hears those words and goes into protective mode. Just imagine Peter as a huge Israeli shepherd; Peter would not allow anyone to touch his Jesus. Suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests, being killed, and that nonsense about rising on the third day – Peter would have none of that for his Jesus. We all would have felt the same. We all would have tried to protect Jesus. All of us except for Jesus.
Just as quickly as Jesus inflated Peter’s balloon, so Jesus did not fail to pop that balloon. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Satan – that is what Jesus called Peter. The Rock becomes the demon. The most important becomes the least important. Apostle Especial becomes first class devil.
If the rest of the disciples do not understand what Jesus is saying, Jesus spells it out for them in no uncertain terms: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Those are very hard words. But let’s just look at the week that has passed. I am sure you read the newspaper articles about two young boys, athletes both, who died tragically while preparing for the football season. On Thursday, we received the tragic news that Fred Richter, a beloved parishioner of many years, died suddenly and his funeral was on Friday. Another member of the parish buried her aunt. Another member of the church underwent major surgery. We could go through a litany of woes that we are all carrying, problems with children, spouses, finances, work and health. Just because it is summer does not mean that problems take a vacation.
As we gather on this the last Sunday of the summer, we find that Jesus is talking to us about a cross. Perhaps this is God’s offer at making sense of the crosses that come our way. To be a follower of Jesus involves us in a process of death and resurrection.
Now I don’t want you to imagine that I am endorsing a Christianity that is all about suffering. Let’s thanks God that Jesus suffered once for us all and we do not have to repeat that cycle of suffering. I think its bad theology to imagine that we have a God who delights in disrupting our lives with anguish, pain and suffering. God does not send pain into our lives to crush us, to punish us, to get back for those offenses we committed at one time or another.
But Jesus knows that suffering is part of all our lives. When Jesus invites us to take up our crosses, Jesus is asking us to enter into the life process where we let go and surrender the old patterns of life that new forms of life might begin.
There is a tendency in all of us, when we listen to these passages about death and resurrection, that we stop at the death part and don’t move on to the life part. We get stuck. Jesus is addressing that pattern of getting stuck.
In today’s Gospel, Peter got stuck. When Jesus told the disciples about the process of death leading to life, Peter could only hear the death part and not engage the life part. For that reason, Jesus calls Peter Satan since the Rock was caught and could not imagine how life could come from death. But God could imagine that process. God could think of a way to get beyond death and make the way of the cross a way of life and peace.
I invite you this day to find those places in your heart where you are suffering, where you feel the pain of the cross, and ask yourself what you need to surrender of your old life to allow space for new life. I invite you to look into your soul, to find those places where you feel the weight of the cross, and ask yourself what you need to surrender in order for resurrection to happen. For in this holy process of life and death, we are not in it alone. God is the one who is drawing new life out of the old. God is inviting you to leave behind the old patterns and enter into the new life God is preparing for you. God is the one who is inviting us to leave behind the womb of our old lives to enter into the new birth of a life we cannot imagine.

Let us pray.
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Hunger for Heaven

2008-08-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on August 3, 2008

Nothing about the history of Sara Miles would have brought her to the place where she is today. An avowed atheist who was raised by atheist parents, A radical reporter on the staff of the left wing publication, Mother Jones. A journalist who covered the 1980’s war in Nicaragua. A sometimes cook in New York restaurants. A Mother of one. A wife of another woman. She is the last person you would have expected to walk into a church. But stranger things have happened.
When Sara Miles walked in St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, little did she anticipate it would be the day of her conversion? Why did she do it? This is what she said: “I was curious. You know, I'm a reporter, and it's a big, beautiful, wooden-shingled building. And it has this gorgeous mosaic icon outside and a sign that says, "All That Is Prays to You." You walk inside and you are struck by this huge mural of dancing saints, only the saints are people like Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez. It's very surprising.”
Sara Miles walked into St. Gregory of Nyssa Church and heard the invitation to receive communion: “Jesus welcomes everyone to his table and so we offer everyone, without exception, the bread and wine, which are Christ’s body and blood.” Deacons and priests came into a congregation standing around a circular altar giving to all a piece of bread broken from a loaf. They passed around chalices with wine. Sara describes her experience in these words: “A woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. And I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening to me. I thought I’ve got to get out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me. And I came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.’
Completely Thunderstruck by what was happening. Now how many of us are thunderstruck when we receive communion?
Here is another way she describes communion: "It was pretty good bread, a nice whole-wheat bread. The other was that God was alive and in my mouth. It was bread, and it was God."
But that was only the beginning. She came back, week after week, drawn to satisfy a hunger that she had long known but could never find the food to fill her. Sara knew that the invitation to receive the body and blood of Christ echoed the radical welcome Jesus gave to all whom he invited to share his table.
We heard that invitation which Jesus extended to 5,000 men. I wonder why Matthew did not include the women and children. To all of them, to girls and boys, women and men, anyone who could eat food, Jesus and the apostles spread out, like those priests and deacons spreading out through the church, giving to one and all a lunch of bread and fish. It was a bountiful meal. There was so much food that they put together doggie bags, twelve baskets of leftover food.
Let’s recall that the gospels speak in symbolic language and when they talk about 12 baskets of extra food, they mean food to feed the 12 tribes of Israel, all of God’s people have enough to bring home. Sara knew something of that generosity of Jesus. She knew that hunger not only touches the heart, as it touched her. Hunger cripples the body.
San Francisco is close to the bountiful fields of northern California. People in the city began to organize food pantries where the bounty of the fields would be sold to food pantries. Sara had the bright idea of starting up a pantry.
St. Gregory’s church does not have a parish hall. The church is a double room. One room has chairs that are set up to face one another. The other room has only one piece of furniture in it: an altar. Sara asked to set up the food pantry in the church, with tables surrounding the altar. Food would be brought in every Friday morning. Volunteers would set out the food on tables surrounding the altar. Melons, fruit, tomatoes, lettuce, rice, beans, boxes of cereal, pasta. People would come with their bags and slowly enter into the church. Candles would be burning in front of icons. Flowers decorate the church. Five tons of food would be handed out to 450 people. They do that every Friday.
The Food Pantry at St. Gregory’s Church was only the start. When you do God’s work, God sees that the work will spread. Money started to come into her pantry and she gave the money to other places to start pantries. Only one church joined her effort. But parents in schools, people in the projects, volunteers started to come from all different places to find food. It all sounds a lot like us.
I invite you this day to come to this table that Jesus sets for us, come with your hunger, come with your heart desiring to be filled. Perhaps this day you too can say with Sara: God was alive and in my mouth. It was bread, and it was God."

Cultivating A Garden of Weeds

2008-07-26T18:50:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the
Rev’d Peter De Franco at
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church,
July 27, 2008

Just think about what will happen today at St. Peter’s Church. We celebrate the baptism of our youngest member and the birthday of one of our oldest members.
So you would imagine that with the parable of the mustard seed, I would preach a sermon where I would compare Ava to the mustard seed and Rosemary to the mustard tree. We would all think that the sermon would encourage Ava’s parents and family to help her grow into the tree, that they would water her soul with love and instruction and discipline and all the things that good parents do for their children. Sort of like the thinks that Rosemary’s parents did for her so that one day Ava will sit in this church and celebrate her 90th birthday and someone will read this same gospel and compare her to the mustard seed that has grown into the mustard tree. Wouldn’t that be a perfect sermon? No, not by a long shot. That sermon would be too predictable.
Whenever we hear Jesus speaking in a parable, we should train our ears to discover the unpredictable. So let me tell you a story.
Someone, way back went in the history of St. Peter’s church, thought that it would be nice to plant morning glories around the church. They thought that morning glories would look really nice where they could do what they did best: climb. So they found the things on which the morning glories could climb: the railings up the steps of the parish hall and the pole in the front of the church. I am sure that the first year the morning glories were planted they were beautiful. Lovely blue flowers opening up to the sun, and every week more and more flowers began to grow on the vine. Every week, the vine must have taken over the railings so that it became impossible to use the railings going up to the Parish Hall.
Every week the vine must have grown up the sign at the front of the church till it covered the sign with a waterfall of blue morning glories cascading down the sign. Were the morning glories a thing of beauty or a weed?
When I first came to St. Peter’s Church, three years ago, there were huge bushes that flanked the entrance to the parish hall. Growing on the crooked branches of those overgrown bushes were morning glories. As they grew closer to the railings, people would pull out the morning glories. I cannot remember a single morning glory flower. No flowers mean no seeds. But, even this year, you can see morning glories sprouting on either side of the parish hall and Fr. Ed pulls them out so they don’t take over the new gardens. And next year, I am sure that we shall continue to find those morning glories continuing to sprout in places where they have not been seen in years.
Morning Glories are invasive. Once you plant them you will have them forever. For those of us who are gardeners, morning glories are like bamboo, or mint, or dandelions, they have a habit of taking over the garden.
In Jesus’ world, mustard was like dandelions, morning glories, bamboo or mint. You would have to be out of your mind to plant it in your garden. Unless you wanted your entire garden to be taken over by the weed. Does that make any sense?
Now every parable of Jesus has something in it that does not make any sense. There is always something in a parable that baffles the one who hears it. A smart shepherd would not risk the lives of 99 sheep for the sake of one lamb. A thrifty housewife would not spend a hundred dollars on a party when she found her silver dollar. A smart gardener would not plant a weed that would take over the garden. Who would plant dandelions? Who would plant morning glories?
Perhaps a God who knows about dandelion wine. Perhaps a God who loves the blue of morning glories. Perhaps a God who knows that mustard can heal and season and prevent disease. Perhaps a God who invites us to look into those places in our lives where we do not expect or even want God, in the dark crevices, in the ordinariness of our days, in the disorders of our minds and hearts, all the places we neglect.
Perhaps, if we anticipate God coming to us in those places we neglect, as we would neglect a weed, we will find God lightening the darkness, cheering our ordinariness, restoring us to peace. It is the crazy seed of God. It is God’s unconditional love. Available to us this day in the sign of water poured, bread broken and a shared cup.
It is the crazy seed of God’s love, that spreads through the world as much as dandelions, when, on a windy spring day the breeze lifts the seeds and spreads them through all the gardens. Not many of us deal with mustard seeds, but many of us know about dandelions, and morning glories, and mint and bamboo.
Today God plants a seed in the soul of Ava. It’s the seed that God plants in each of our hearts when we are baptized – that wild and crazy seed that God plants in mustard plants, dandelions and morning glories. It is God’s unconditional love. That we are loved by God, no matter what we do or say or become.
If you ever watch very young children, and those of us who are parents might remember this happening to us, young children do not seen dandelions as weeds. Children love to go to the lawn and pick a bouquet of dandelions because of their ready made beauty. They see them as a heaven sent gift of God planted in the lawn as a ready gift to pick and bring to mom or dad. Children have that eye to see the beauty of ordinary things. I think they have that eye because they see like the God from whom they have come.
Let us pray this day that we might be overrun with weeds, with dandelions and mustard and mint and bamboo. Let us pray that Ava’s soul will be overgrown with that weed of God’s Love. Let us pray that Rosemary’s heart will continue to be overrun with that same pesty weed. And let us all go out and gather the dandelions and give and receive bouquets of God’s love.

No Condemnation

2008-07-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the the Rev’d Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church,
Clifton, New Jersey
July 13, 2008

Over the last six weeks, we have been reading sections from the letter to the Romans. The first week came as the most positive of all those readings and it has been a steady downward spin as we listened to Paul describe the increasingly dire situation in the world. Last week we heard one of the most difficult passages in Paul, not because we cannot understand what Paul says but because his words are as a mirror to our souls caught in the dilemma of wanted to do God’s good works but also drawn away from God’s good works. Each of us is painfully aware of that tension between what we would want to do that is good, holy and blessed and what we actually find ourselves doing which is less than our idealized plans. Paul speaks of an energy in us that spirals downward, not unlike the flush of the toilet that spins the water and the refuse in a circle and down the pipes and into the sewer. Last week, we ended the reading on a terribly depressing note with the question: What A wretch I am. Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death? Not the best news in the world.
But today, we come to a turning point in the letter to the Romans. Today the water is not being flushed down the toilet. Today the water is dancing like a fountain, spraying upward in joy and delight, as we hear described for us the effect of living in the Spirit. Today’s reading begins with those phenomenal ords: “There is no condemnation for you.” Just imagine that: No Condemnation for you!
I shall speak for myself, but I am not a sterling saint. There are some of us here who have been living the Christian life with devoted energy for a long time and they approach that sterling shine, but for the rest of us sinners, I cannot imagine greater words of joy: There is no condemnation for you.”
Just imagine the person who for their entire lives was told that they could not meet the standards that their parents set for them as children, who for their entire lives lived as underachievers since they could never hope to reach that impossible standard: There is no condemnation for you.
Just imagine that person living with family members who constantly live on a downward spiral so no matter what they do, they cannot reverse that negative energy: There is no condemnation for you.
Just imagine that person who knew that they were lesbian, gay, or bisexual and were told that they would be condemned to hell realizing that God does not create to condemn, that there is no condemnation for you.
Just imagine whatever your circumstance in life, whatever situation drains you of energy, whatever circumstance hampers you from feeling the fullness of life and joy, there is no condemnation for you.
In Christ Jesus. That is the hitch. Condemnation has been lifted because of a relationship. A relationship with Christ Jesus. That relationship begins with our Baptism. Something mystical happens to each of us at Baptism. Something of a miracle. We become part of Jesus. That dipping in water, those words spoken over us, effect a miracle in our souls. We become one with Christ. So when God looks at us, God sees us as part of God’s own Child, Jesus.
If we search deep in our hearts, not just on the surface, but in the very depths of our souls, we will discover an energy deeper than our own spirit, in the depths of our hearts, God’s Spirit is welling up, like a fountain of water, springing up to water our souls and lead them to discover new ways of acting, new ways of seeing, new ways of relating.
I would like to tell you a story about a couple of girls who experienced this strength to follow Christ. The story is told by a woman, a shy woman, who stepped out in the public to become a community organizer. When she was asked why she took this step she told this story: “When I was a young girl in North Caroline, my sister and I began to attend the local Roman Catholic Church. In those days, blacks sat in the back pews. Now I was a very large young girl, rather heavy, and so was my sister. When we went to that church, I saw no reason why my sister and I should sit in the back. So one Sunday we went right up and sat in the first pew. The pastors and ushers were upset. The pastor came over before Mass and asked me if we would please sit in the back, like all the other blacks. I was scared as I could be, but I just couldn’t see where God would care where we sat, so I said no. Finally, the ushers came and carried me and my sister to the back. Carried us right down the aisle of the church. On the next Sunday, my sister and I sat in the front pew again, and the priest came and the ushers came and they hauled us off again, huffing and puffing. On the third Sunday, the same thing happened.
By this time, we were pretty well known. The black girls who got carried away to the back of the church every Sunday.
“My family, my mother particularly, was frightened at what we were doing, but she said we were doing the right thing. On the fourth Sunday, the priests and ushers didn’t do a thin. The Mass started, the choir sang, we took our seats, and from then on we sat where we wanted in that church and in any Roman Catholic church we ever attended.” (Roots for Radicals by Edward Chambers)
God’s Spirit lived in those two girls. God’s Spirit gave them the courage to do the right thing.
Each of us also faces unique challenges, those places where we need to find the grace to move into greater freedom. If you wonder how to find such freedom, just listen to what Paul says: Set your mind on the things of the spirit and you will find life and peace.(See Romans 8: 6)
Those two girls found that peace. They experience that life. You too can move into that life and peace. You too can experience that freedom.

Peter & Paul, A study in Contrasts

2008-06-28T19:15:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached by
the Rev’d Peter De Franco at
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
on June 29, 2008,
Feast of Saints Peter & Paul.

Famous pairs find their way into every area of human life.
Just think of a few you might know: George and Martha Washington, Abbot and Costello, Venus and Serena Williams, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, Sonny and Cher, Chip and Dale. In Christian tradition, Peter and Paul endure as a matched pair of saints, as two sides of a coin, as matching book ends in your library. Peter and Paul are as different as salt and pepper yet closely linked as those two spices are bound together on every table at which you sit. Let’s think of the two for a minute and let’s start with Peter.
Of the two of them, only Peter saw the Lord Jesus in his fleshly existence. From the Gospels, we know Peter as an impetuous, hot headed, loud mouthed leader of the apostles. He is hardly the person whom I think would qualify as the CEO of a major company. Don’t you wonder what Jesus saw in Peter?
Jesus saw in Peter a strong leader. Jesus changed his name from Cephas to Peter, the Rock. Jesus wanted Peter to serve as a stone in the temple Jesus was building, the temple of which we are all a part. Perhaps it was Peter’s big heart that so loved Jesus that Peter left behind his family, his expensive fishing enterprise, his prominent place in his society to follow Jesus for that year of intense preaching, healing and even confrontations that lead Peter with Jesus through the backwoods of Galilee to that fateful week in Jerusalem when Peter would deny the Lord he loved and then see that Jesus transformed from the crucified one to the Risen Lord. After the Spirit descends on Peter and the other disciples on the day of Pentecost, the Spirit transforms those fearful men into bold evangelists, proclaiming the word of Jesus’ Resurrection to their fellow Jews and at the Spirit’s urging to include the Gentiles among the people of God. I cannot imagine Peter, a devout Jew from Galilee, ever thinking that he would be the one who would ever eat with Gentiles. Just imagine whomever it was that your parents told you not to associate with, the kids who always got in trouble, the girl who was a little loose with herself, the boy who would find himself on the other side of the fence, just imagine finding out that those very people were devout believers and that you would join them in a supper at church. Strange things that God has in store for us.
Then there is Paul. The Acts of the Apostles first calls him Saul, a Pharisee, a ancient version of the Congregational style of Christians whom some of you know as going to church at least twice on Sundays and rigidly observing the Sabbath.
They are the Christians of the no: No cards, no dancing, no alcohol, no work on the Sabbath, perhaps even no fun. Hardly Episcopalians! Saul was like them. The No Saul had in his head was No Christians and he started by helping to stone Stephen to death and then leading a band of self appointed self righteous bounty hunters to search out, jail and execute those Christians.
Such would have been his lot in life, and a life which later generations would have forgotten, except for that voice from the heavens and that blinding vision that called out to him: Saul, Saul why do you persecute me? Strange words when you think about it. Saul was not persecuting Jesus, he was persecuting the Christians.
Yet from those words, Paul would understand that all Christians are linked together with Jesus in a mystical bond that makes us but one body with Christ.
Saul would become Paul, the one who persecuted the Church changed into its premier apostle, going through the what is now Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece and ending up in Rome where his preaching of the Gospel lead to his death. Those words from Second Timothy reflect what must have been Paul’s sentiments in the Roman jail when he knew that his execution would be immanent: I am already being poured out like a libation and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Saul, turned into Paul, another hot head, another zealot, another one who, like Peter, Jesus turned around and made into a herald of the Gospel. Strange things that God has in store for us.
What does it all mean for us? Are Peter and Paul only a quaint pair of saints we polish off once a year and use their day to do what we do best: have a party? I would suggest that Peter and Paul come to us as a pair to remind us of what is remarkably similar in the lives of these very dissimilar saints: that God has strange, unexpected tasks in store for us. Strange and unexpected tasks – for those of you who love adventure, you are thrilling at such possibilities. Strange and unexpected tasks – for those of you who hate change, you are appalled that God would so upset your apple cart with such a world shattering proposal. Perhaps you would prefer the words of today’s collect, you know standing firm on the one foundation of Jesus Christ and not venturing into the unknown fields where the lost sheep are scattered.
Peter and Paul fulfilled those words of the prophet Ezekiel; they were shepherds who sought the lost, brought back the strayed, bound up the injured and strengthened the weak. They did it all because of love, love for Jesus who called them, love for Jesus who loved them.
As you share in the same Eucharistic feast that fed Peter and Paul, I invite you to draw strength from this table not to stand on the one foundation, but to go into the world. Find those who are on the edge and invite them to the table that nourishes you. Find those who are wounded and invite them to share in the cup that heals you. Find those who are lost and lead them to the home you have found.
For then Peter and Paul are not two dusty saints from the past. They are living models for you and I to imitate. For we, like Peter and Paul, hear those last words from today’s Gospel, words beckoning, not Peter and Paul but you and me, those two words leaping off the page into your ear, into your heart, those two inviting words of Jesus: Follow Me!

Finding our Home in God

2008-04-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

A Sermon preached
on April 13, 2008 by the Reverend Peter De Franco,
Interim Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey

My mother attended school in the days when class would begin with a reading from the Bible. That bible was always the King James Version. Even though she was a Roman Catholic, she would occasionally go with her girlfriends to attend their church services. I don’t think that her priests would approve stepping into the pasture of another church, but with that wisdom that believers have she knew that God is one and we all worship that one God.
Through the bible readings and her Sunday afternoon trips to the protestant church, she learned the 23rd Psalm. I think it is her favorite prayer. I think of her whenever we come to this fourth Sunday of Easter which is called Good Shepherd Sunday and we usually pray Psalm 23.

I am sure that while many of you read the words of that psalm from our Book of Common Prayer in your head and perhaps even on your lips formed the words of the King James Version.
The Lord is my shepherd; *
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; *
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; *
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
Name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; *
for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
mine enemies; *
thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life, *
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

We all love this psalm. I think one of the reasons we love this psalm so much is the accumulation of images from this psalm brings our hearts great comfort.

Many of the psalms present God as a Warrior who battles for the people, as a King who rules over them with Justice, as a Judge who brings a fair ruling to the people. A recent commentator on the bible called these the psalms of Homeland Security. Secure the borders, summon the army, bring the villians to court.

Psalm 23 takes an alternate approach. In this Psalm, God comes as a shepherd. If you hear this psalm with the ear of your heart, you will find yourself surrounded by feelings of great comfort: Not being in want, finding sufficient food and drink, protected against enemies, enjoying a rich banquet where perfumed oils scent the hall, and your cup is never empty. Those feelings of security come together in the final sentence: And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

If you had to find a word of comfort to summarize all those feelings, I think that word would be home. Even if our childhood memories of home left something to be desired, there is a longing in our hearts to find and to build a perfect home. There is something deep inside us that yearns for that place of abundance, of warmth, of protection, of assurance. If we were to put a name on that home of our heart’s longing, we would call that home God.
In God’s home we are free of want. Let’s remember that this psalm was written by a person who lived in ancient Israel. In a country where the pastures were green only two months of the year, God leads us to perpetually green pastures. In a land where flowing waters could sweep away the sheep, our shepherd brings us to still waters so we can both drink from the waters and even cross them in safety.

Like every good prayer, this psalm enlists not only our trust in God, we are invited to place our trust in God especially in the midst of the most difficult crises of our lives. No crisis can be more difficult for us than death. The thought of our own death or the death of those near and dear to us strikes terror into our hearts. Our souls are crushed whenever we have to endure the death of a member of our family, our parish, our neighborhood or our city. Yet whenever I walk with someone through that valley of the shadow of death, I always say Psalm 23.

I think of my mother who spent the night alone on the day my father died. I wonder what comfort my mother drew from psalm 23 in the night she first heard of my father’s death and mourned the loss of her husband. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
I fear no evil, even in the face of the greatest evil. For the rod which Jesus, our good shepherd carries, is none other than his cross. The cross on which he walked through the valley of the shadow of death. That cross gives us comfort for on that cross Jesus has destroyed both death and fear. He has first gone into that dark and deadly valley and come through with the light of resurrection, of new life, of life in that place where the pastures are always green, where the waters are still, where food is abundant, where faith displaces fear, where want is replaced by plenty.

God creates for us a new home. That home is God. A home where we know that the final victory is on the side of life, even if we walk in the valley of the shadow of death. A home where we can be assured of a meal, a banquet in the sight of those whom we fear. A home we enter through the door who is Jesus. Through that door, all can enter. Through that door, all can find a safe haven. Through that door, all can experience the home their hearts desire.

So listen this day, listen carefully to your heart, and in the depths of your heart, if you listen carefully enough, you will hear the voice of our good shepherd calling us into the sheepfold, calling us home.

Moko and the Whales

2008-04-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

An Easter Sermon for Children
Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey
Easter 2008

On the other side of the world on an island country named New Zealand, a park ranger was patrolling the beach. He would check this beach every day since it was the time of year when whales would sometimes get confused and beach themselves on the sand. The whales would just swim into the shallow water until they swam out of the water and were laying on the sand. This bright sunny morning, the park ranger turned on the beach and he saw the sight he was terrified of seeing: A mother pygmy sperm whale and her baby were stranded on the beach. It was an emergency.

Pygmy sperm whale are not the largest whales. The mother was about 10 feet and the baby was 7 feet. But they were in serious danger. The people had to get the whales back into the water. There was no time to lose. The park ranger called for help and other park rangers and other people came to the beach. They all worked very hard to move the whales. After an hour and a half, both the people and the whales were totally exhausted. Four times they got the whales back into the water. But the whales stranded themselves on a sand bar off the beach. Unless the ranger could get the whales back into the deep water, he would have to kill the whales to spare them from a slow and agonizing death.

Then suddenly, Moko appeared. Moko is a bottlenosed dolphin who would swim along that part of the beach. Many people knew Moko since Moko likes to play with people in the water. Mako is a dolphin most of us would love to meet. When Moko saw the stranded whales, Moko knew that the whales were in trouble. Moko started to talk to them. Dolphins have their own language and Moko was speaking it to the pygmy sperm whales. Strangely, the two whales started to talk to Moko.
Moko swam up the whales and when the human pushed the whales out into the sea, Moko directed them to swim past the sand bar and into the deep water. The park ranger and the other people saw Moko direct the mother whale and her child into the safety in the deep ocean waters.

Today we saw another story about someone calling out someone’s name. Mary was in the garden and she was totally sad. I wonder why she was sad? (Children: She was sad because Jesus had died.) Suddenly Jesus came to her. But she did not recognize. That is something that we can learn about Jesus after he was raised from the dead. You just don’t know when he will appear to you. She thought that Jesus was the gardener. But then he called out her name: Mary. And something in her heart stirred. She knew the voice of her Jesus.
Jesus calls us too. Not in a voice that we can hear with our ears. But in a still silent voice in our hearts. Jesus lets you know that he loves you. No matter what happens to us, no matter the things that we do, or the things that we see, we can know one thing for sure: Jesus loves me. Jesus ALWAYS loves us. Can you say that with me: Jesus Loves Me. I cannot hear you. Jesus Loves Me. One more time. Jesus Loves Me.

Today, you will renew the promises you made when you were baptized. You will tell Jesus that you will be his hands, his feet and his heart in the world. You will promise that you will pray, that you will help other people, that you will treat everyone fairly and with love. We will then sprinkle you with water to remind you of the water that we poured on you when you were baptized. When you feel that water, know that it is a sign that Jesus loves you. When you taste the host and drink from the chalice, know that it is a sign of what? Jesus loves me.
God bless you with a blessed Easter!

Three Ways to Meet the Risen Christ

2008-04-02T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Three Ways to Meet The Risen Christ
A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey
Easter Sunday, 2008

Dark was that Easter morning when Mary Magdalene woke from sleep to hasten to the tomb of Jesus. Any of us who have lost a loved one know that feeling. After the funeral and burial, the grave becomes the new kitchen table where we sit with him and share morning coffee, the tombstone become the couch we sit on and talk about the problem child who just cannot adjust, the lawn of the cemetery the garden we share in the evening twilight and just know again each other’s love. Mary went to the tomb to find such comfort in being close to the body of Jesus. She dare not imagine the possibility of Resurrection. Hers was the simple hope of sitting on the other side of the stone that she might be close to the body of her beloved Jesus. On that dark morning, her heart lead her to the one she loved.

As she drew near to the tomb to pour out her grief at Jesus’ grave, did her eyes believe what they saw? Imagine her horror as she makes her way to the entrance of the tomb to find that the stone had been removed. She runs, says the Gospel, not walks, she runs to find Peter and the disciple Jesus loved. She runs to report that “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have laid him.” The three of them then race back, Mary, Peter and the Beloved Disciple and each has a different experience at the grave. Each of them represents three types of faith when confronted with the empty tomb. Mary is the disciple of Love. The Beloved Disciple is the follower in Faith. Peter is the Disciple of hope.

When the Beloved Disciple gets to the tomb, he does not enter. He waits for Peter to arrive. Then the two of them enter the tomb. The place is a shambles, much like their confused souls. The linen wrappings were lying there and the cloth that wrapped Jesus face is rolled up in a place apart. The forsaken burial cloths might remind you of the abandoned cocoon from which Jesus, the butterfly, has emerged from this life to the new transformed life of the resurrection. The Beloved Disciple sees and believes. He sees the empty tomb and believes. He needs no further evidence, no appearance, no lunch with the risen Christ on the beach. The empty tomb is enough.

There are some of you like that first disciple. You are the ones who live your life by faith and not by sight. You have given your hearts to God and experience that God coming to you, walking with you. You might not always feel that presence but you know that presence as sure as you know your very selves. You are the disciples of faith.

Mary is the second disciple. The disciple of love. While the male disciples cowered in fear, terrified that the authorities will give them the same treatment they gave to Jesus, Mary shows the love that casts out fear. She stayed with Jesus when he died on the cross. She hastens to the tomb in the dark of that Easter morning. She is the one to whom the Lord appears on that first Easter day. Jesus comes to her for Christ knows that the heart who loves him will be the heart that sees him.

Many of you here are like Mary. Many of you approach Jesus by the way of love. Perhaps some of you are like Mary. Your lives might be a bundle of trouble and grief. You bring your burden to Jesus. You approach with love for you know that Jesus will heal them with love. You know that Jesus will come to you, will dawn in your hearts. You know that love brings your heart to God and opens the eyes of your soul to the vision of God. You are like Mary, the disciple of love.

Finally there is Peter, the disciple of hope. Peter comes from Missouri. He sees the empty tomb, he beholds the shroud that covered the body of Jesus, and he lays eyes on the linen cloth that covered the face of Jesus. These are all meaningless pieces of a puzzle that just do not fit together. Peter goes from the tomb as confused as when he came to it. At the greatest moment in Christian history, on the morning of the resurrection, he does not understand. The Gospel says that “He returns to his home.” He does not yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead.

Peter is like many of you. A disciple of hope. Like Peter, you do not yet fully understand. But you trust that Jesus will come through for you. It is just not now. Yet you will receive just as Peter received. For Peter will see Jesus. Jesus will come to Peter with the promise of forgiveness for his denials and with the commission to go and care for the flock of Jesus. Many of you are like Peter, a disciple of hope. You wait in expectation for the promise of Jesus to be fulfilled.

Some of you may find yourself as disciples of faith or of love or of hope. I somehow think that there is a part of Peter, a part of Mary and a part of the beloved disciple in each of us. Each of us comes this day to this great Easter mystery with something in our hearts of faith and love and hope. Each of us returns from this mystery with a deeper experience of the Risen Christ.
As we move ahead with the renewal of our Baptismal Covenant and the Eucharist of Easter Morning, may your hearts be expanded to know Christ’s presence in your souls and your lives reflect that love toward all whom you meet. May you know Easter Peace!

The Doubting Thomas in Each of Us

2008-04-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco
At St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey
March 30, 2008

Every year, after all the hoopla of Easter, every year we gather again on this day called Low Sunday to contrast it to the High Celebrations on Easter Day. We hear on this Sunday after Easter the most comforting Gospel for many of us – the story of Doubting Thomas. This morning I would like to share with you some stories about doubters.

The first story comes from my best friend in grammer school. I will call him Tony. Tony had a terribly scared face. Some childhood circulatory disease of childhood cut off blood to his extremities and left his face horribly scared. You would have thought that he was terribly burned the scars so disfigured him. But somehow, in the way that children understand reality, I did not compare him with the rest of my friends but only thought that this was the way Tony would look. He was my friend so it was all fine.

His mother marveled that his friends only saw the person and not the scars. For her, Tony was terribly disfigured and she was terribly angry. Angry with those countless trips to the hospital for plastic surgeries. Angry that her hope of a normal life was upset by this child. But mostly angry with God that God would allow such a terrible thing to distort her life and make of her beloved baby a disfigured angel. That anger with God led her to lose her faith.
She could not imagine a God who would allow such a disaster to befall her baby.
She is the first type of Thomas. She is the Thomas whose faith is lost when they experience some life changing tragedy and assume that the only God who exists is one who creates a perfect world, not the real world where health is not guaranteed, where fortune is not assured, where stability cannot always endure.

When I was going to seminary, one weekend we visited a couple whom we had known for a long time. One of the women grew up in a neighborhood not unlike my own, with a devout Italian mother who insisted that she go to Roman Catholic School and made her First Communion and Confirmation. As an adult she created a phenomenal career for herself climbing up the ladder in a large and prestigious corporation until she reached the summit of her department. We all praised her intelligence and political savy in negotiating the corporate structures.
That night at dinner, she said that she was an atheist. I congradulated her on taking a positive step in her religious development. For as we were talking about her understanding of God, I realized that, for all her adult understanding of the business world, she still clung to a child’s understanding of the divine world. God for her was the old man in the sky, a distant father figure with whom she could not longer relate. She too lost her faith. But this faith was best left behind. She outgrew the faith that sustained her as a child but did not discover the faith that would sustain her as an adult. She too was a doubting Thomas. The Thomas who doubts because faith has seen a better day.

Doubt is as vital a part of your spiritual journey as is faith. Many of us think that something is wrong with us when we experience doubts in our spiritual path. Doubts arise in our hearts for a variety of reasons. Doubts come when we are faced with a tragedy that overwhealms us. It could be the loss of health, someone we love dies, a financial crisis takes away our security, the evil that exists in the world touches us and we cannot bear its presence. Doubts arise in our mind when the ideas we have about God no longer work for us. When we are moving from our childhood idea of God to an adult idea, we are caught in the middle when we have no viable idea of God. Doubts arise in our minds when any idea of God does not satisfy our mind. When the encounter with the living God robs us of any adequate image that would embrace the living God.

When doubts arise in our hearts, the first impulse is to leave. We sense that the church is the place where believers gather and we find ourselves in a place in which we do not fit. If only we could understand that we are moving from faith to faith, that our minds and hearts are on an interior journey to deeper faith and sometimes we are caught in the middle. When we are in the middle, we can rely on the community to support us in the transition.
When we collectively profession our faith week by week, we affirm that faith as a community so that if we feel that we cannot make that profession with a full heart, we can rely on the others in the community to make that profession with us and for us. The journey of faith is a lifelong journey. I think that Jesus invites Thomas to put his finger into the nail mark in his hand and into the spear slash of his side as in invitation to join in the pain of transformation into new life.

Jesus invites you into that transformation of faith. Put your finger this day into his hand and know that presence in your heart of the one who never abandons faith in you.

The Man Born Blind and Our Journey of Faith

2008-03-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco at
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
March 2, 2008

How many of you are believers? Raise your hand if you believe. Faith is a hard thing to have in today’s world. We live in a world that places a value on what you can see, what you can measure, what you can touch and feel and hear and smell. So when you tell people that you believe, you place yourself in conflict with many people in our society.
Today’s story of the man born blind can help us all to understand our faith and our journey from faith to deeper faith. The story comes from John’s gospel. John writes with rich symbols and in the story of the man born blind we can see a person growing in faith. The Blind man’s growth in faith is a mirror in which we can see the pattern of our own journeys of faith.
We might think that we begin our journey of faith but it does not start with us. Listen to what the gospel says: “As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.”
Just as Jesus came to the blind man so too Jesus discovers us. Jesus brings us what will really help us. Jesus is bringing the man a gift which begins with his sight.
Jesus puts mud on the man’s eyes and tells him to go and wash. The man does what Jesus tells him. So too with us. For our part, the journey in faith starts when we do what Jesus asks us to do. You know what Jesus wants you to do: Go to your room and pray to your Father. Love your enemies. Forgive those who sin against you. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.
Once we do what Jesus tells us to do, we will find ourselves in conflict with those who oppose Jesus. With our culture that invites us to pamper ourselves rather than care for others. With our society that values conflict rather than peace. With our neighbors who fear the strangers and sinners whom we welcome into our midst. With our very selves that run from the daily commitment to pray and talk with God.
When others challenge us, when they ask why we do what we do, we might respond like the blind man: “The man called Jesus told me.” The man called Jesus. For some of us that is where we are in our journey of faith. We look to the man called Jesus.
The man who is the best person who ever lived. The man who is the model of our human lives. The man who lays down the path we walk in.
But let’s go back to the story and see the next step in the blind man’s journey. As the Pharisees confront the blind man and challenge him somewhere in the confrontation the blind man begins to understand that Jesus is more than the man who cured him. When the Pharisees challenge the man: “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.” A prophet. Notice how this man’s faith is growing. A prophet. That is how some of us think of Jesus. He is a prophet. No, not someone who can foretell the future. But a person who speaks in the name of God. A person who mirrors who God is and reflects that for us.
In one of the moments of the greatest irony and hidden humor in this story, the Pharisees again confront the man: “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.”
Cannot you hear that same accusation hurled against you when you make those choices that mark you as a Christian. “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of consumerism.” You are his disciple, but we are disciples of the latest fad.” “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of ….. fill in the blank with whatever you experience as the point of conflict between you Christian life and the life of the culture and society around you.
At this point, the Pharisees came to the end of their tolerance and they expel the man from the synagogue. The religious leaders have rejected this man. His parents have denied him. His society has thrown him out. In this state of total abandonment, notice what happens: “Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This is Jesus, the good shepherd, seeking out the lost sheep, searching for the lost coin. When everyone else has let him go, Jesus once again searches out this blind man to finish what Jesus began when he opened his eyes.
Jesus asks the strangest question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This man has faith in Jesus. But Jesus is leading the man to understand that Jesus is the Son of Man. Jesus uses that strange title because the Son of Man is the one who comes from heaven to bring those who believe in him into a relationship with him and with God.
Jesus seeks to bind this man to his heart.
He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”
Jesus replies: “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.”
You have seen him. The purpose of the opening of the man’s physical eyes was to behold Jesus. You have seen him. The opening of his physical eyes was not as important as the opening of the eyes of his heart. When the eyes of his heart are opened then the man confesses: “Lord, I believe.” He falls down and worships Jesus.
The climax of the journey of faith is to enter into this relationship with Jesus, to have the eyes of our hearts opened that we might see Jesus and in seeing Jesus to see the face of God reflected in the face of Jesus.
At this midpoint of Lent, I pray that may you too enter more deeply into your hearts that you may discover Jesus inviting you, wherever you are on your journey of faith, to an ever deeper relationship with him. As you open your heart to trust in this Jesus, may you find yourself totally immersed and sustained in the mystery of our God.
May you discover Jesus opening the eyes of your heart not only to see Jesus, but in looking into the face of Jesus you will behold the face of your God. Amen.

Pink Hearts

2007-12-15T20:16:00.000-08:00

Pink Hearts
A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on December 16, 2007 – the Third Sunday of Advent

One of the most exciting trips I’ve ever taken brought me to Israel. If you ever have the change to visit the Holy Land, do not let it pass you by. You will come back forever transformed by the sights of the bible, by the knowledge that you set your feet on the very street on which Jesus’ sandals trod, touched the very temple where the apostles prayed, and perhaps view the very rock which saw the shadow of Abraham’s hand as he took his knife to slay his son Isaac. In the north, in Galilee, you find places of unspeakable beauty, the blue Sea of Galilee surrounded by the rolling green hills.
From the heights of Mount Tabor, you can behold the far expanses of towns and fields, lush with people and crops. When you travel south, you move into the barren wilderness.
Of all the places in Israel, nothing is as desolate as the deserts surrounding the Dead Sea. As you stand in the dry wilderness and look out over the salty waters of the Dead Sea, you look up at the bleak stark hills and across empty miles of wastes which cannot sustain life. The salt water is useless, the soil is dry and worthless, the hills are bare of grass and trees. I, for one, was grateful to get back on the tour bus and head up the mountains to the comfort of our Jerusalem hotel with a ready supply of water, a tasty meal and the comfort of a soft bed. I, for one, would not want to make the desert my home.
Yet as I look around me, I find that many of us are living in an emotional state that resembles those dry waste lands of Israel. The trees are bare of all leaves and their drab grey and browns do little to uplift our spirits. While the snow looks beautiful as it falls, give it a day and the soot turns the lovely white into a dull gray. The uplifting blue skies are hidden by clouds. The sun appears every so briefly during the day and all of us can feel the intrusion of the wintertime blues.
For many of us, this holiday season brings us terrible burdens. There just do not seem to be enough hours to bake all the cookies, clean and decorate the house, put up the tree, finish all the shopping and wrapping for those perfect Christmas gifts, send out the cards and attend all the Christmas parties. Somewhere in the picking up the kids from an early dismissal due to two inches of snow, the realization that no store will have the perfect gift for our child, the anticipation of preparing a Christmas dinner after an exhausting week of gift wrapping, cookie baking and snow shoveling, we realize that our smiles are empty, our hearts are breaking and we would love to find the comfort of a log cabin where we can curl up with a good book or movie, near a warm fireplace, with our ideal lover next to us and enjoy the intimacy of a quiet night.
Rather than singing: Have a holly jolly Christmas, it’s the best time of the year.
We would rather sing: You’ll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white, But Ill have a blue, blue Christmas
When I look over today’s readings, I think that many of us can identify with John the Baptist, locked up in a prison. But the bars that contain us come in the form of fulfilling the expectations of others, with our own needs totally unmet and time coming to a crashing halt as December 25 draws ever closer.
I think we can all identify with John the Baptist sending for news of where the Messiah can be in the world around us, a world filled with hustle and bustle and none of the peace we so yearn for at this season. Like John in prison, we too can find ourselves trapped in expectations laid on us, duties we take on ourselves; situations in which we might find ourselves hopeless to find a solution. Like John locked in his cell, we can find ourselves burdened with losses perhaps too heavy to carry, the gnawing pain of situations we are powerless to change, the loss of loved ones who have died either recently or in the past, the distance from family and friends when we would have them close to us. In our prison cells, we can send word to Jesus and ask him what can we expect of him? What word can he speak that would bring us comfort?
Jesus says to us what he said to John’s disciples.
“Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” These are the very words we also heard from Isaiah: “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; 6then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
Jesus is saying that the time is changing, that the world is shifting and God has drawn close to the people. In the midst of all our busyness, we all need to find a place to sit alone for a while, even if only for five minutes. If we regularly sit alone, we need to reach out to someone, to touch the life of someone else, to show compassion for someone in need. Whatever we are doing that is driving us crazy, we need to stop and do the opposite.
Then, in the midst of the frantic days before Christmas, we can retreat to the source, to the love of our souls, to the peace seeking to be born in our hearts. For the Christ who is coming is not to be found in Christmas trees, gifts, lights and cookies. Wonderful as these things are, yet more wonderful is the one who wants to open our eyes to a vision of peace we cannot imagine, to unloose our tongues to sing God’s song, to steady our feet to walk in God’s ways, and to establish us into those right relationships that herald the dawn of God’s presence among us.
Thy kingdom come, dear Christ, thy kingdom come. Fill our hearts with the joy we so need to balance our sadness. Touch us. In the coldness of this third Sunday of Advent, kindle a fire that will make our hearts glow. That will turn us a wonderful shade of pink.

Entering the Riegn of the Anti-King

2007-11-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

Entering the Reign of the Anti-King
A Sermon preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco on November 25, 2007 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, N.J.

A friend of ours lives in Denville, New Jersey so we regularly travel through that town on Route 46. As you travel west on Route 46 toward the center of Denville stands St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church and School. In the front of the school, they raised a statue of Christ the King. Jesus looks as if God the Father just placed the crown on Jesus’ head and, like Queen Elizabeth, he too is posing for the coronation statue. He stands with a crown on his head, a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other. This image of Jesus as the King is among many such images you can find. Jesus sometimes wears one crown while other pictures show him with a double crown. He sometimes stands but he usually sits upon a golden throne, surrounded by angels and other royal attendants.
All these images are related to many of the hymns which are occasionally sung on this day. You will recall the words Crown Him with Many Crowns, the Lamb upon his throne or bring forth the royal diadem and crown him Lord of all.
I sometimes wonder how Jesus feels about this day. In the Gospel according to John, Chapter 6, verse 15, the author tells us that when the people wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king that Jesus withdraws from them. That does not sound to me like someone who enjoys wearing the royal diadem. If the Gospels picture Jesus as King, Jesus is really the Anti-King who wears thorns rather than gold, is nailed to a cross rather than seated on a throne, and is mocked by priests and criminals rather than acclaimed with cries of Long Live the King.
If we look to the Christian Scriptures, the only place we find such a regal image of Jesus is in the Book of Revelation. Out of the pages of that wildly imaginative book we get the phrase King of kings and Lord of lords. I am sure that many of you who love Handel’s Messiah can play in your head the music from the climax of that oratorio when the Hallelujah Chorus proclaims Jesus Kings of kings and Lord of lords and he shall reign forever and ever. Those phrases are all taken from the Book of Revelation.
Both ends of the Christian Scripture, the Gospels and the Book of Revelation acclaim Jesus as King but each does it in almost the reverse images. It is good for us to recall that the Book of Revelation comes out of a period of persecution of the Christian community by the powerful Roman Empire. In protest to the imperial power of the emperor, the Christians acclaim a different King, the lamb who was slain, who is the real power behind the world. The power of the emperors is but an illusion.
We Americans of the 20th century are closer in our political and economic power to the Roman Empire than to the powerless Christian communities of the first century. I think that the images of Jesus as King are dangerous for us not only because Royal families are foreign to our American psyche but also because we are far removed from the situation of persecution out of which the book of revelation was written. I believe that the image of King Jesus is a dangerous image for contemporary Christians since we can use that image to invest ourselves with the power and authority of the world and so find ourselves outside the very reign of God which Jesus proclaims. We need that subversive image of the Crucified King to teach us the real lessons about power and control.

Jesus on the cross teaches us that power comes to us in direct correlation to our vulnerability. Jesus on the cross gives us a model of weakness, defenselessness, exposure and being at risk. Only if we break through the illusion of our own power, our own strength, and our own invincibility can we hope to enter into the reign of the crucified King.
Today’s gospel story presents as a hero the repentant thief. Notice how in the gospel, the people of power and authority stand against Jesus. The leader and soldiers scoff at Jesus. The other thief challenges Jesus to prove himself the Messiah by saving himself and the two men crucified with Jesus. That thief is looking for a show of power. He wants a show of worldly strength. These people stand in the kingdom of this world. These people look for the security of power and invincibly. But Jesus proves his kingly strength, not by stepping off the cross but by staying on it.
Hanging on the wood of another cross is a criminal who acknowledges that he suffers a just fate to underscore that Jesus’ fate is unjust. Strung up on the cross, weak defenseless and exposed, he stands in contrast to the arrogant thief even as in an earlier parable, the humble publican stands in contrast to the proud Pharisee. In the recognition of his own need for mercy the thief, like the publican, finds the ultimate mercy extended to him. In the words of Bishop Fulton Sheen, the repentant thief proves himself a thief to the end since in the final moments of his life he pulls off his greatest heist and steals heaven. Jesus lets himself be robbed of mercy with these loving words we all would want to hear on our death beds: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Lk 23: 43)
We live in a world that values power, strength, brute force, manipulation, control. If we imagine that King Jesus values those same qualities, we place ourselves in the company of the leaders and soldiers who mock his reign. If we imagine that King Jesus amasses troops and weapons, we place ourselves in the company of those who have not entered into his reign. But if we align ourselves with the weak and vulnerable, we seek mercy as do they and so draw near to that Crucified King. If we come close to the cross as did the good thief by surrendering our illusions of power, we will find the strength to enter into that reign. If we pledge our allegiance to the crucified Christ, then we too will be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power.
In the midst of any conflict that meets us on the way, if we acknowledge our vulnerability, we create that place where God may enter and manifest God's presence among us, a hidden presence, yet the ultimate presence. We too will know that peace that has been won for us through the blood of the cross.

Forming our Souls

2007-11-18T04:08:00.001-08:00

Forming our Souls
A sermon delivered by the Rev’d Peter De Franco on November 18, 2007 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, N.J.
I think most us feel a little uncomfortable when we hear talk about the end of the world. Such unsettling talk is what we heard in today’s Gospel: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; 11there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” (Luke 25 10-11) We usually associate such talk with the street preachers whom, if we all were totally honest, most of us think that the guy fell down the stairs when he was a child and there were always a few screws loose after the fall.
So when we hear such words out of the lips of Jesus, we just think that Jesus was having a bad day and he let his imagination get the better of him. We don’t really like to hear such talk on the lips of Jesus. Such talk puts Jesus in the company of the lunatic fringe and we would not have our Jesus being anything but just like us.
But I have to say that I think that something deeper is at work in this passage for I am just captivated with those final words of Jesus: “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” (Luke 21: 19) Most of us think that our soul is something we have, like our own inner Casper the friendly ghost that will take off after death and soar into heaven.
We don’t think of our souls as something we gain, and, if we look carefully at the text today, we see something that is even more troubling than that strange end of the world talk.
We see that the way we gain our soul comes through yet a more challenging door: conflict.
Listen to what Jesus says: “they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. 16You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. 17You will be hated by all because of my name.” (Luke 21: 15-17)
17You will be hated by all because of my name.
Those are not the usual words we would preach to get new members into church. But if we are honest with ourselves, if we really admit the truth in our hearts, all of us know that conflict is a regular part of our lives. If we are really honest, we will admit that being a Christian increases the level of conflict that we encounter. In a world where greed is considered good, we preach a gospel of sharing with the poor. In a world where compassion is considered weakness, we practice a radical hospitality that gives food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless. In a community where our neighbors are afraid of people whose skin is a darker color, whose first language is not English, who do not have the right documents, in this city of Clifton we sing a song that dares to say: All are Welcome.
“17You will be hated by all because of my name.”
Thank you Jesus for putting us in such a mess. Yes, thank you, Jesus, for putting us in such a mess. For in this mess, we gain our souls.
The conflict that Jesus predicts will meet us is the very battle that Jesus fought against the forces in his world, that conflict against the forces that would not welcome all to the table, the conflict against the forces that would give priority to the acquisition of wealth even if that involves engaging in unjust conflicts, the conflict against the love that creates this world and seeks to build a just and inclusive community. It is in conflict that we discover our identity, that we discover the presence of Jesus. He assures us: “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. (Luke 21: 15) For the discovery of our identity is not only to discover who we are but whose we are. We belong to Jesus. We are in the hands of a powerful God. The wings of the Holy Spirit encircle us. All we need to do is to maintain our calm in the midst of the storm and we shall sense that presence who will strengthen us. By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Now you must be thinking that this is a very strange sermon to deliver on Thanksgiving Sunday. You might have thought that I should have preached on those beautiful words we heard from the prophet Isaiah who described the vision of a just society, the vision that inspired the Pilgrims who came to our country to find and build a better world.
They thought themselves heirs to the promise of Jesus who dreamed of a just world, a world where freedom would be enjoyed by all.
Like those Pilgrims, we give thanks for the blessings we have received from our God. We give thanks that God has called us into this community to share with one another the task of building an inclusive community among ourselves and sharing that inclusive vision with those among whom we live and work. We show our thanks in more than just words. We show our gratitude this day in the pledge that we make this day, the pledge to share the monetary gifts we have received with others, the pledge to share our time and our talents with others.
Our pledge is part of that subversive, countercultural activity of Jesus that would make this a better world. Our pledge is part of that work to allow some members of this community to dedicate themselves to the world of building that community of faith. Our pledge enables us to share our gifts with our diocesan family that the work of building up the reign of God will continue in our diocesan and our national church. Our pledge of our time, our talents and our treasure places us in the battle that Jesus promises that we will engage in the world.
Giving to our church is one of the disciplines we all practice that we might gain our souls. By living up to a standard that others do not have, we differentiate ourselves from others, we show to ourselves and to others what we value, and in doing so, we gain our soul. No, not some nice little Casper in our hearts, but a person strong because we have been tested, steadfast because of conflict, faithful in the face of fear.
As we offer this day our thanks to God in our prayer and in our pledge, let us be grateful most of all for conflict, for those times that test our Christian values, for those times that place us in the fire. Let us be grateful for these soul forming times.

"Your faith has made you whole." The healing of the heart

2007-10-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

“Your faith has made you whole.” -- The Healing of the Heart
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey
October 14, 2007

Today’s Gospel story of the ten lepers is familiar to most of us. We all know the story of these ten people, lepers all of them, and because they are lepers, they are outcast, people who could not associate with anyone other than a leper, people who could not worship with others, live with their families, connect with their friends in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their village.
All that was familiar for them was taken away for once the priest declared you a leper, you were cast out, you were forced to tear your clothing, you carried a bell that would ring to alert people to your presence, and you would live on the fringe of society begging or scrounging for food and shelter.
Perhaps some of you know this sign. Looser. That is what lepers were losers one and all. No hope. No relief. No future. Losers
Little wonder, then, when they know that Jesus is in the neighborhood, they find their way to him. They have heard of cures, even people raised from the dead, so where they had no hope, Jesus brings hope, where they had no relief, Jesus brings relief, where they had no future, Jesus opens a door.
Notice when they cry out to Jesus they do so from a distance. They dare not approach him. But they cry out nonetheless, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!
When Jesus hears their cry, he tells them to go and show themselves to the priest for just as the priest would declare them unclean so too the priest would declare them clean, restored to health, free from the disease that marred their skin they could once again return to their homes and families, to their communities, they could sleep in their own beds, eat at their own tables, worship in their synagogue. Jesus sends them back to their old world.
As they go, one of them, only one, looks at the skin once diseased and now restored, only one of them sees not only his restored skin, but that he is not in his old world. A new world has broken in. The reign of God has slipped into his world without his looking. And now nothing will be the same. Nothing will be the same. Nothing will be the same because of that man Jesus.
So he returns to Jesus. Notice how before he kept his distance. Now he draws near to Jesus and falls at his feet. Notice how before he cried out for mercy. Now he cries out in praise. Notice how before Jesus sends him into the old world where priests mediate God’s presence. Not he goes into the new world where God’s presence comes in the person of this Jesus.
There were ten lepers who were cleansed. Only one leper was able to see the new world of God dawning on the horizon and that light was streaming into that former leper’s heart from the eyes of Jesus. While his skin was cleansed, that was not the miracle. The miracle happened not on the leper’s skin but in the eyes of his heart. Those eyes were opened and he could see. That is why Jesus says to him your faith has made you whole. In our world, we are all beset with physical ills that weigh us down. The older we get the heavier that burden becomes. We pray that our bodies might be cured like the ten lepers in today’s story.
Not all of us will be cured of our illnesses. But all of us can be healed. Like the leper in today’s story, do we look only for our bodies to be cured of what ails us and not seek the real miracle. The real miracle happens in the opening of our eyes. The realization that the reign of God is dawning for us and the we only need to go to the dawn of that first Easter day to feel the warmth of the Son of God rising in our hearts.
For our bodies will all give out and if we invest all our hope in cures for our bodies we will be left sadly disappointed. But if we look for the healing of our hearts, if we look to find that a deep harmony unites our hearts with God, then we will experience healing even if we do not know a cure. For healing happens in our hearts. Restoring our hearts to harmony with God. Restoring our hearts even when our bodies begin to wear out.
I invite you this day to look in your hearts for those places where Jesus invites you to behold a new world dawning, a world of restored relationships, a world of hope where there was hopelessness, of spiritual relief where solitude locked us in on ourselves, of a future where we had given up on ourselves. Pray to God for the vision to see the gifts that surround you. Pray to God to behold the miracles that start even before you open your eyes. Pray to God for the insight to discover a grateful heart. A heart that counts each day the blessings that surround you. A heart that does not leave Jesus disappointed with our ingratitude but a heart that beholds Jesus opening new doors for us every day. A heart that has been opened to the world, in its beauty and its pain, its joy and its sorrow, its triumphs and its tragedies. A heart that knows that no matter what happens, we have a God who is so near to us that all we need to do is to fall at the feet of Jesus and worship the nearness of our God with us. Amen.

Clay in the Hands of God

2007-09-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Clay in the Hands of God
A Sermon preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on September 9, 2007

I have a bag that I brought with me today. I think that you might recognize some of these things. An old water bottle. A bottle for apple juice. A bottle for orange juice. There are some cans in here also. A can for cat food. A can for coffee. I think there are also bottles. A wine bottle. A bottle of pasta sauce. Plastic, tin and glass, these are the ways we carry things today.
In the 6th century before Christ, when Jeremiah walked the streets of Jerusalem, people carried things either in baskets or clay vessels. We call Jeremiah a prophet because of his ability to reach into his own heart and hear the meaning in the heart of God. When Jeremiah felt the broken heart of God, he expressed those words from the heart in a dramatic fashion. If you read his book, you will see him wearing a yoke around the city to warn the people that if they did not heed God’s word they would go into exile.
So in today’s story shows when he goes to the house of the potter, Jeremiah again shows his propensity for the dramatic.
For many of us, potters are people who make pots and vases that we use to decorate our house. We classify potters among artists and crafts people. But in Jeremiah’s day, potters were like people who produce plastic bottles, or glass jars, or tin cans. They engaged in mass production of utilitarian products. Now when you make a pot, you get a large heap of clay and put it on a wheel. The potter would turn the wheel with a peddle he would move with his feet. He would shape a pot from the clay. Usually the pot would come out just the way the potter wanted it to turn out. But sometimes, the potter would make a mistake and he would have to start the pot all over again. Pots are useful things.
When Jeremiah went to the potter’s house, he saw the potter make a pot. Then God told Jeremiah that God is like a potter. God is the potter. And we are the clay. God shapes us into something useful. God takes the most ordinary of things, meet dirt and clay, and shapes it into something useful.
On Friday, I saw a movie called Spider Man 2. If you have not seen the series, begin with the original movie. Not only are the special effects great, but you will enjoy the story.
Spider Man has a big problem. He leads two lives, one the life of a super hero and the other the life of Peter Parker. As glorious as is his life as a super hero, so dismal is his life as Peter Parker – though a brilliant scientific student and a daring pizza delivery man, he cannot keep up his grades or his job because he is compelled to rescue people from danger. He cannot confess his love for his girlfriend since he does not want to subject her to possible reprisals from his enemies. When he is Spider Man and he helps other people get out of trouble, he does not have time to do the things that he wants to do.
We would say that Spider Man has a problem with boundaries.
The only way that Spider Man was happy was when he was helping other people. I think that Spider Man knew that God has a special place for him in the world and Spider man has to do what God gave him the special gifts to do special things.
You are all like Spider Man. I invite you like Jeremiah, to go into the deep places of your heart and listen there to the silent word of God inviting you to take your place in God’s great design. I don’t think that any of us will be bitten by a genetically altered spider and find ourselves able to race down the streets of New York City on webs strung from skyscrapers. I don’t know about you but I am too afraid of heights to perform such stunts. But we are all given gifts both for ourselves and for our community. We are all invited to use those gifts at the service of the community in the various places where we sense that God invites us. By using those gifts in the service of others, we allow ourselves to become clay in God’s hand, we allow ourselves to be shaped into the form that God wants us to take. More and more we shall discover that form involves us in service to the community in ways we might not have imagined.
I want to tell you something more about Spider Man. In Spider Man 2, Peter Parker decides that he will give up being Spider Man. He spends a few weeks finding a new job, getting the best grades at school, even making a hit with his long beloved girlfriend. But something is missing. Something is not right. Unless he gives himself to the community as Spider Man, the villains will harass the innocent, children will lack a hero, and a man will frustrate God’s plan not only for him but for his community. When he surrenders to his place, when he allows God to mold him into the vessel God has in mind, he finds not only his own fulfillment but he also realizes all the deepest desires of his heart.
So take the clay. Surrender to God’s plan. Discover the beautiful person God wants you to become.

Relieved of the Weight of the World

2007-08-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

Relieved of the Weight of the World.
A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on August 26, 2007

Two years ago, my mother, my sister and two of my nieces all came to the rectory for a Mother’s Day celebration. It was a great event for us all to be sitting around the table, enjoying a good meal and better company as we celebrated the lives of four mothers across three generations in the family. Since my mother lives with my sister in Browns Mills, which is close to Fort Dix in central New Jersey, they could not make it to the Holy Eucharist. But if they had, you would have had the opportunity to meet my mother. All of us are proud of our mothers and I feel very proud of my mom. At 87, she has survived two heart attacks, two children, four grandchildren, five great grandchildren, three episodes of Congestive Heart Failure, and the usual ailments of old age such as arthritis, numbness in her fingers and high blood pressure. If you sat next to her, she could carry on a conversation on almost any topic since she reads the news paper daily is a student of the Television news and is an avid fan of Oprah Winfrey.
But when she stands to walk, it is then that you would notice that she has a most debilitating case of osteoporosis. Her back is so bent that when she walks, all she can see is her feet. It pains us all to watch her go from her room to the living room since she takes the slowest steps to move from one place to another. So you would understand that when today’s gospel makes its round in the three year cycle, that my thoughts would go to my mother. For if ever I want an image of what the woman whom Jesus cured looks like, all I have to do is to think of my mother. When she walks, her torso is at a ninety degree angle to her body. She bears the weight of a disease that cripples her.
But she is not the only one whom I remember. I also think of other women whom I have seen. I think of the woman whom I meet in hospitals who keep vigil for a family member who is seriously ill and everyone imagines the worst as they wait for news from the doctors. When these women walk to get a drink of water, their backs are usually a bit bent over. I think of the women who come into the pantry for food. Many of them hold their heads high, but many also have a hard time lifting their heads since they are bent over by shame and embarrassment that they cannot do what mothers should do for their families – provide them with food. I think of the women I have seen at funeral homes who carry the burden of a life without their husband, the women who have children who have become addicted to drugs and who do not seem to have a way out of their addiction, the women whose husbands abuse them with words, hands or emotional manipulation.
I think of the women who think that all about their lives is a failure, their job is not what fulfills them, their earnings barely make ends make, and their relationships leave them empty and unfulfilled. I think of the weight that all these women carry and how their backs are bent over.
I think that these women are bent over, but more than bent over. When Luke describes these women in the gospel, he writes that she was bent together, bent in. All these women are bent together, bent in, so bent under the weight of what they carry that they can no longer distinguish between themselves and their burden for they have become their burden. And their burden has become them, like the women we meet every day who are so burdened, the women many of us are, the person so many of us have become, bent over with care, crippled with anxiety, doubled over with pain. It is to this bent and twisted woman that Jesus comes.
Notice that the woman does not come to Jesus. Jesus comes to her.
It was Jana Childers who first helped me to imagine what that encounter between Jesus and that woman was like. Let’s remember this unnamed woman always walks like my mother, looking at the ground. Her vision of the world is dirt and sand and her dirty feet.
Into that world of dirt and sand and dirty feet comes the face of Jesus. Yes, Jesus must have bent down to that woman, bent down to see her, bent down in the dirt and sand and looked up at her with eyes of utmost compassion. Perhaps tears feel from his eyes as he saw her pain; perhaps those tears touched her feet and washed some of the dirt away.
Undoubtedly, she felt Jesus’ love as he said to her: Woman, you are set free from your ailment. She felt Jesus love lift the burden of whatever had crippled her for those eighteen years, lift that burden of emotional pain, of estrangement from her family and community, of separation from her own heart.
Such is the God whom we have, a God who gets into the dirt and sand of our lives, into those places where the burdens of our lives have crippled us and bent us over, into those places of the heart where we feel so unlovable, so abandoned, so alone and washes our dirty feet with a tear of compassion and invites us to be free from the burdens that weigh us down. Such is the God whom we have in Jesus. Such is the God who comes to you this day, who touches you where you are bent like a pretzel, who brings you that love you so desire and yearn for. Such is the God whom we have in Jesus.

Hooked on Hope

2007-08-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hope on the End of a Hook
A Sermon preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco, Interim Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on August 12,2007

Every once in the while, even while we enjoy the beauty of summer, events crowd together that erode the joy of the season we all want to enjoy. News from the mine in Utah is pretty grim as efforts to reach the trapped miners comes up with little hope. Yesterday, three churches in Newark conducted funeral rites for three young people gunned down in what appears to be a senseless robbery gone bad. On Friday night as many of us tuned in the late night news, we heard that the New York City police stepped up security measures in search of a dirty bomb that an Israeli website claimed would be brought into the city.
Such events make us pause and reflect on the deeper pattern at work in our world.
Is there any reason that we can assume that things are getting any better? Sometimes we feel tempted to give in to that tugging sense of despair that borders on hopelessness. It is at times that these, when caves fall in and we can hear no sound from the outside, when promising young people are gunned down, when the threat of violence knocks on our neighbor’s door, it is at such times that we come upon a set of readings that lift our hearts and give us reason for hope.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Do not be afraid, little flock. In those opening lines to today’s Gospel, Jesus invites us yet again to surrender our fear of the events that seems to indicate that the world is falling apart and look deeper into the world to see that God’s hand is creating, even in the midst of disasters, a new world, the place we call the kingdom of God. We can hone our ability to see God at work in the midst of disasters when we hope. When we look beyond the crisis at hand to the hand that is leading us out of the crisis, then we are learning the skill of hope.
At the start of today’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews, we heard these words: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Faith in the assurance of things hoped for.” When I heard many people talk about faith, they speak about the beginning level of faith: they believe in the existence of God. For many of us, our faith consists in believing in God, in affirming that a reality exists that lies deeper than our experience of the world we see.
For most of us our faith lies in the second part of the definition of faith we heard in today’s second reading. Our faith is about the conviction of things not seen. We believe in God, even though we do not see God. We are convinced of the presence of Jesus even though our eyes do not behold him. We are sure of the presence of the Holy Spirit as sure as we are of the love that is in our hearts. We are convinced of things that we do not see.
But faith is more than that. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” “Faith is the Assurance of things hoped for.” There is energy in faith that directs us to look into the future, to seek what lies ahead, to long and pine for a reality that God is preparing but is not yet in front of us. I think that such a desire is implanted by God in our hearts so that we can move to that place where God is working and where God is establishing the city in which we will dwell: the reign of God which ever lies before us.
I recently read a story about Harold Russell. When he heard about the attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Harold signed up with the US Army on December 8th. An accident turned around his dream to fight for his country. He didn’t know that the an explosive he was handling for a training film had a defective fuse which went off as he touched it. When he woke up on his bed after surgery, both his hands were missing. All hope seeped out of his heart. His entire life seemed to me nothing more than a tragedy. He was filled with despair.
At that moment, he received a visit from Major Charlie Mc Gonegal who also lost both his hands in an accident. Charlie encouraged Harold to conquer his greatest enemy: his own fear, his own bitterness, his own hopelessness. “How can I get along in life,” Harold asked, “as a cripple?” “You’re not a cripple,” said Charlie, “you are only handicapped.”
Harold was fitted with two hooks for hands and went on to Boston University.
While studying, he was featured in an army film, Diary of a Sergeant, about soldiers recovering from loss of limbs. Director William Wyler saw that film and cast Harold as a recovering soldier in his movie, The Best Years of our Lives. Harold won the academy award as best supporting actor.
Such is the character of Christian hope; God creates a new world where we thought the old world had fallen apart. As we pray this day for the dawn of God’s kingdom among us, let us go to those places in our heart where we find the circumstances of our lives challenging our faith and pray that our eyes may be opened to behold the new city that God is creating for us to live in. For God is always at work creating new possibilities. We only have to open our eyes to behold God in all God’s creative work.

Becoming the God We Worship

2007-07-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on July 29, 2007.

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you can behold images of the gods of the ancient world, imposing statues of warrior gods, threatening gods, gods that fill your heart with terror. Strapped to the belts of these gods are swords that are ready for battle. To these idols the people of the ancient world fell down in worship. They would offer sacrifices of animals to these statues to satisfy the desire of these gods for satisfaction of wrongs committed against them. And for the ancients, all the gods were warrior gods, ready to march against the enemy, engage in combat and carry home the booty of battle. It is little wonder that the ancient people were constantly at war with one another for they worshiped gods who constantly were at war with each other. As psalm 115 puts it: Those who make them are like them. Or in other words, we become like the God we worship. The ancient people worshiped warrior gods and became warriors.
What about us? But who is the God whom we worship? And are we becoming like that God?
For us Christians, we believe that our image of God is the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The God whom we worship in Christ Jesus is the God who is working in the world the work of reconciliation, restoring the brokenness of the world to order, bringing about our restoration. That restoration comes into the world through the work of forgiveness. God has forgiven all of us our offenses. God has taken away the guilt of our sin. God forgives us so that we in turn can forgive others. So that we can become like the God we worship. For that forgiveness we not only ask God to give to us, but to give us in the measure that we give that gift to others. Those words we pray whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer.
You probably noticed that the version of the Lord’s Prayer we heard today from the gospel according to Luke is somewhat shorter than the version we shall pray later in the Eucharist. Perhaps we might have wished that Luke would have forgotten that problematic phrase. Perhaps we might have desired that the biblical scholars would have said that the phrase was only included in some of the later texts of the gospel and we could delete it. But no such chance. We are called to that difficult task of forgiveness.
I wonder if Jesus invites us to be persistent in prayer because he knew how difficult it would be for us to let loose of the sins that others commit against us.
You know those hard things you have endured from others, the pain, the betrayals, the rejections, the times you were used by someone else, the times you were treated like a thing and not a person. And to those painful situations, Jesus asks that you go and forgive those who have offended you. Now if Jesus were Dr. Phil, he would say that you should forgive others so that the weight of holding on to those offenses would be lifted from you and that you can go on with your life free of that heavy burden. But no.
Not Jesus. He invites you to forgive so that you can be a part of his own work of forgiveness in the world.
If this work of forgiveness seems impossible, I would like you to hear the lesson from a girl made famous during the Vietnam war. Some of you might recall the Vietnam war and the horrible pictures that flashed on the nightly new of the horrors of that war.
I am sure that all of us here will recall the picture of a young Vietnamese girl running down the street, her clothing burned away by the napalm bomb dropped by an American plane on Saigon, the pain of her burning flesh and streaming down in her face in tears.
That young girl’s name is Kim Phuc. After the war, some Canadians brought her to Canada for reconstructive surgery and she still lives in Canada.
Another person is a part of that story and his name is John Plummer. John is an ordained minister in the Methodist church. He is also a Vietnam Veteran. He piloted the plane which dropped the napalm on Kim. When he saw that picture of a child so mutilated by his action, John became an alcoholic until he was able to find forgiveness from God for the deed he did. He met Kim at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and asked for her forgiveness for the pain he caused her. Even though she still suffers from the pain of the scars of that attack, she found it in her heart to forgive John. She said to him: “Let us live in love.” She forgave John, not to ease the burden of her heart but to ease the pain in John’s heart.
That is the way God forgives. God forgives us to ease the burden of guilt only God can ease. We too are called to forgive others with the gift only we can bestow on them: the restoration of the hearts who have offended us.
I know that I am inviting you to a task that is hard and difficult, the very task that Jesus invites you to do. If you find this forgiveness too hard to do, then ask Jesus to help you to do it. Knock on the door of heaven constantly until you heart is moved to that forgiveness. As Jesus says to us: “Ask, and it will be given you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened.”
Pray that you might become the Christ you worship: the Christ who opened his heart on the cross for love of you.

For Freedom Christ Set Us Free

2007-07-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

For Freedom, Christ Set Us Free.

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on July 1, 2007

On this Sunday closest to July 4th, many of us are probably planning something to do on Independence Day. Perhaps it will be a barbeque. Perhaps some of you will attend the Clifton City Picnic this afternoon and then attend the fireworks display in the stadium. I am sure that there is at least one or two among us who will venture into New York City to watch the Macy’s fireworks display.
For most of us, thoughts of July 4th spell out the words party, celebration, fireworks, and fun. Perhaps a few among us might recall the reason for this celebration is that on a hot and humid July 4th in 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the declaration of independence was signed this day declaring that the thirteen colonies were free from the rule of the British monarch. Perhaps some of us might recall the words of some of our founding fathers. Among them stand out Patrick Henry’s famous words: Give me liberty or give me death. Perhaps some of us might know that those words, while they were delivered to the Second Virginia Convention urging them to commit the Virginia Troops to the cause of the Revolution, that those words come from a speech delivered in St. John’s Anglican Church in Richmond Virginia.
So on this weekend, it comes as a sort of blessing that our second reading from the letter to the Galatians lays out a theme close to the heart of many of us: Freedom.
Strange as it may seem, the word freedom does not occur once in the Declaration of Independence. Four times is the word free used but not once is the word freedom written.
Yet in today’s reading from Galatians, Paul proclaims: For Freedom Christ has set us free. In that word Freedom we find a link between the celebration of our nation and the celebration of our faith. When we recall the declaration of independence, we recall that the colonial leaders were declaring their freedom from the King. For all the wrongs committed by King George, the colonists declared “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
Many of us consider freedom as a release from some form of oppression. Just remember when you were a teenager, and for some of us that comes as a real effort of our imagination, but you can recall how you longed to be free from…. Free from the demands of your parents. Free from the rules of your teachers. Free from the restrictions that hemmed in your time, your friends, your activities.
Yet notice how Paul defines freedom in a radically different manner. The freedom that Paul presents for us is a freedom, not from others, but from self. Listen to what Paul says: do not gratify the desires of the flesh. And if we have any question as to what the desires of the flesh include Paul lets us know: Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.
If you carefully examine this list of vices, you will see that at the root of them all lays an intense need to gratify our self. These are the needs of a superficial level of our ego so that if we live our lives gratifying these superficial needs, we will find ourselves living superficial lives. Lives trapped in the endless satisfaction of the needs of our superficial ego.
In contrast to this shallow life, Paul assures us that Christ came to set us free.
Free from the demands of a phony life. Free from an endless gratification of our infantile demands. Let us acknowledge that all of us are somehow trapped in gratification of these needs. Eating when we are looking for emotional comfort rather than satisfying our hunger. Making ourselves a doormat so that others can take advantage of us. Allowing ourselves to be caught in endless cycles of enabling others in their superficial needs. Trapped in the various forms of addictive behaviors be they patterns of anger, disorganization, pettiness, sexual addictions, the need to control. If we take a look at ourselves in these sad cycles in which we occasionally live, if we look at ourselves with the compassionate eyes of Christ Jesus, we can open ourselves to the grace of Christ which comes to us to set our hearts free. To set our hearts free, from the patterns that oppress us. To set our hearts free, from the behaviors the restrict us. To set our hearts free, from the smallness that limits us.
As we continue with the Eucharist, let us confess to Christ those patterns that keep us living life on the surface. Let us ask Christ for the liberty to live life in the depths. Once day in 1775, Patrick Henry said, Give me liberty or give me death.
Let us ask our great and loving Christ Jesus to give us freedom, to give us liberty, for without the freedom that comes from Christ, we are already dead.
Let us pray.
O Gracious Lord Christ, open our eyes to look with courage at those places where our lives are limited, where our patterns are addicted, where our freedom is restricted.
Open our eyes to hear your word and our hearts to feel your love, for your word convicts us of our sinfulness and your love assures us of our loveableness. Set us free this day. As we receive your Body and Blood this day in the Eucharist, may we taste not only your love, may we taste our own freedom. And freed from a shallow life, open our hearts to love and serve others. We make our prayer for your love’s sake. Amen.

Christ on the Loose

2007-07-05T12:56:00.001-07:00

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on Easter, 2007

If you ever take a close look a really close look at the bible, you must come away with the impression that God must be a gardener. If you remember back to the first book of the Bible, you will remember that when God make Adam and Eve, he placed them in a garden. The garden of God was planted as a place of ultimate harmony, of a peaceful co-existence between creatures, of delightful contemplation of the beauty of landscapes, of pleasurable participation in the waters of streams and rivers, of that soul satisfying delight of walking with God in the cool of the evening.
Even though they were expelled from that garden, I imagine Adam and Eve always felt a deep longing in to return to that garden, to the perfect harmony of the place, the scents of the flowers and the plants and vegetables God prepared for them. A longing for the beautiful rivers in the garden in which they would bath and drink and behold water in its beauty.
I sometimes think that we all inherited from Adam and Eve that deep longing to return to the garden. Those of us who are gardeners know that pleasure of digging the spring earth, cleaning away the debris of the winter, tilling the soil, preparing it for the new plants. Those of us with less than green thumbs know the pleasure of beholding the beauty of a garden, be it our neighbor’s garden or the vast expanse of a manicured garden estate. Little wonder then that God started it all over again in a garden.
When the body of Jesus was taken down from the cross, his friends completed a hasty burial in a tomb, a cave in which a tomb was newly carved. But let’s not forget that they found that cave in a garden. To that garden Mary hastened on Easter morning to go as mourners go to the place where the body of the beloved lies buried. Perhaps many of us know that feeling, of going back to the place where we buried our loved ones, finding there some comfort as we weep and mourn their passing from us. Perhaps that is why so many cemeteries are festooned with flowers and plants. My own nieces and nephews called my fathers’ grave Grandpa’s garden since we always decorated his grave with flowers.
Yes, God drew on that deep instinct to return to the garden to start the world over again when God raised Jesus from the dead. God drew on that deep desire for us to return to a place of harmony and beauty, of delight and comfort, of joy and abiding peace. God drew on that deep desire in God’s own heart to replant the garden of paradise and the first seed God planted in that garden was the body of his own son. For in God’s garden of the resurrection, God plants all the worse that humanity could devise against Jesus and transforms it as gardeners do.
As gardeners take old leaves and transform them into mulch, God took what the world considered so useless in the life of Jesus that the world crucified Jesus on a tree and transformed Jesus into the beginning of a new humanity. As gardeners take cast off bricks and transform them into garden paths, so Jesus took the disciples starting with Mary Magdalene, and transformed them into paths on which we could walk to God. As gardeners takes a bulb from here and a plant from there and arranges them in a new design of beauty so Christ has taken us the mismatched of the world and changes us into the new pattern of beauty in this church, Christ’s new creation in Clifton.
God has set Christ loose in the world through the power of the resurrection. God has set Christ loose in the world to transform the world beginning with you and with me.
God is working in the world to change the world, one heart at a time. This work of transformation begins for each of us with our baptism, the moment when God grafts us onto the vine who is Christ, the moment when God washes us in Baptism’s waters, the moment when Christ gives us new birth from the opening in his heart’s flow of water and blood, even as our mothers give us birth in water and blood. God transforms us in our baptism not only that we can profess our faith in this hidden gardener who is creating the world anew. God transforms us that we might be the faithful people who acknowledge God’s presence by our prayer and our faithfulness to this Christian fellowship. God transforms us that we might be the people who with God resist evil in the world even when those around us conspire against the forces of life and liberty. God transforms us that we might be a people whose lives and words proclaim with God the reality of the resurrection. God transfigures our eyes that we might see Christ in the countless forms and faces of people and not only see Christ but serve Christ. God transfigures each of us that we might struggle with God in the world to be instruments of justice where the world deprives people of their fair share, to be soldiers of peace in a world torn by strife and war, to be envoys of respect helping one another discover anew the dignity that God bestows on each of us.
Look out and beware. For Christ is on the loose in the power of the resurrection.
You can be sure of one thing. Christ will not leave you unchanged.

Aflame with the Love of God

2007-06-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

Proclaiming the Good News: You are Loved by God
A sermon preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco, Interim Rector of St. Peter’s Church, Clifton, New Jersey on Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 2007

On May 17, a tornado touched down in Allendale, New Jersey and nothing was the same. Trees were torn from the earth and their roots exposed while the wind knocked down other trees and sent them smashing into homes and on top of cars. The town was a tragedy. Such is the power of the wind.
In the tornado belt, there are people who are captivated by Tornadoes. When tornado season comes, they closely follow the weather and when conditions are ripe for a tornado they get into their cars and search it out for the thrill of seeing a funnel cloud touch down with its unspeakable power and twist and destroy everything in its path. These people are thrilled to be in the presence of such power and strength. Their cousins on the east coast hurry to the beach when a hurricane is lashing the coast to witness the power of the wind and water as it churns the ocean, devastates the coast and even sends houses crashing into the water at the onslaught of such power.
I am not sure if the wind that blew on that Pentecost morning in Jerusalem morning registered as a tornado. I doubt it. I do not think that God is in the business of terrifying people into belief. But the transformation in the hearts and souls of those first Christian women and men on that Pentecost morning more than matched the transformation of the land and sea with any wind storm.
Just imagine who the disciples were before Pentecost. They were the ones who denied Jesus. They were the ones who left him to die alone. They were the ones who were slaves to fear, afraid of what the Jewish and Roman leaders might do to them, afraid to follow Jesus, afraid to share the story of what happened to them.
But then came Pentecost. That group who left Jesus alone to die would go out into the world and all of them would suffer death for the Gospel they proclaimed> That group who were slaves to fear were filled with faith. That group who, before the crucifixion, were afraid of their own shadow covered the known world with the message that Jesus was raised from the dead and that God’s love for them would sustain them even in the midst of the harshest tests that came their way.
Let’s take a look at the patron of our church – Peter from Galilee. Something changed in that man. After Pentecost Peter acted as he never acted before. Something shifted in his heart. The Spirit did something in Peter’s heart. For you see, Peter was a fearful man. Yes, he would brag a lot. Yes, he would say that he would follow Jesus no matter what. Yes, he would be the leader of the disciples. But when it came to the cross, Peter tucked his tail between his legs like a frightened dog and ran off for the house and hid himself under the porch.
After the resurrection, Jesus restored Peter to a new friendship with him. But that was only the start. When that flame of Pentecost burned over his head, it first burned in his heart. That flame of love burned in his heart, burning away the fear and replacing it with faith. Peter, who cowered before a slave girl, who denied Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest, who ran and hid when Jesus walked the walk to the cross, was a changed man on Pentecost. He was a changed man because the Holy Spirit displaced fear with faith. Peter stepped out in faith and laid aside his fear. He shared with others the unspeakable story that we are loved, loved by our God and cherished, cherished and cared for even in the midst of any cross that comes our way.
We for our part are called this day to be like Peter. We can do nothing less. Today many of us are wearing red and four of us will win prizes for the most red clothing. That contest is supposed to make you stand out, it is supposed to make people look at you. And when they look at you, I invite you to tell at least one other person this day that the flame of Pentecost has touched your heart. That you are a person who is loved by God. That you want to share with others the good news that God is pouring down from heaven a fire storm of love burning in our hearts and changing us into disciples who carry the good news into the world.
On this day, Christina and Carmine will be born again in the water of Baptism and will be anointed with the Holy Spirit. They will profess their faith in the love of God who draws them this day into the circle of God’s family. With them, we shall affirm our own baptismal covenant when we promise that we shall proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
On this day, you shall all receive a lapel pin with the flame of the Spirit and the cross. I invite you this day to wear that pin in a place that others can see it and share with someone the good news that you received this day. News of faith. News of release from fear. News of Love. News of faith giving you strength to proclaim the good news of God’s compassion for you this day.

Where is the Spanish Mass

2007-06-25T09:49:00.001-07:00

Taking Down the Walls
A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episocpal Church, Clifton,New Jersey on May 6, 2007.

Perhaps we have all met some who has a case of Know It All syndrome. The major symptom of Know it all syndrome is that no mater what you say, they already know the answer. Now Know it all syndrome comes in a various decrees of severity.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we regularly meet people who have a milder case of the Know It All Syndrome. Last week, we met a mild case of the know it all syndrome in the person of Ananias. You will recall that after Saul is blinded by a vision of the Risen Christ, that same Christ visits Ananias in a vision and tells him to go and baptize Saul.
Thinking that the Lord did not read the latest news in the Jerusalem Journal, Ananias reminds the Lord that Saul have been persecuting the church and so asks the Lord to reconsider his plans for such an unworthy candidate for baptism. God lets Ananias know of God’s bigger plan for Saul. Ananias finally gives in to God’s vision.
In today’s reading, Peter is the one who shows signs of Know it all syndrome. In today’s reading, Peter has been called on the carpet by the church in Jerusalem for baptizing and eating with Gentiles.
For us who are gentiles, we make the assumption that the church always included us. Do we consider ourselves outsiders whom God has brought in? Yet that is exactly how the Jewish Christians would have thought of us. For Peter and the other leaders of the church in Jerusalem, we were the ones who were on the outside, who did not belong to the Church. We seldom think of ourselves as outsiders for we have been a part of the church for most of our lives. Yet until that first meal that Peter ate with Cornelius, all of us who are Gentiles were outside the family of God, excluded from the promises, and strangers to God’s Family.
When God tells Peter that it is OK to eat the Jimmy Dean Sausage, Peter gets an attack of Know it all syndrome. Peter tells God that never has he eaten unkosher food.
God has a bigger plan. Peter does not yet understand that plan. Only after Peter goes to the house of Cornelius and witnesses the Holy Spirit descend on Cornelius and his family does Peter get a glimpse into God’s broader vision. Peter puts it this way: The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.
The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.
I want to tell you another story. Many of you have seen the large sing put up by St. Peter’s Haven advertising the ESL classes. Many of you know that those classes have grown from one class in September to 5 classes this April. We shall begin a Citizenship class in the summer. We are making efforts to help those in our community to become a part of our broader community.
A Spanish speaking volunteer at the Haven is among those studying English. She attends class two days each week. We speak with each other, she in broken English and I in broken Spanish, and she told me that some of the students coming to the class asked her: When is the Spanish Mass? When is the Spanish Mass?
When I first heard that question, I asked myself who is asking the question. It was not the student who was asking the question. In that student’s voice, I heard God asking us, in the voice of that student, when is the Spanish Mass? The people who have been coming to the haven for shelter and food and now education are asking when they can come here to worship.
Today, I am asking us to begin to listen to that question. I am asking us to begin looking at moving out in ministry to the people who are around us but are not a part of this community because we are separated from us by a different language.
I know that many of us might feel as if people who live in the United States should adopt the culture of the country to which they have moved and language is a critical part of that cultural scene. But let’s think for a while about language and prayer.
For most of us here, English is our first language. We speak in English, think in English and naturally speak to God in English. Some of us here have parents and grandparents whose first language was not English. My Grandmother came to the United States from Hungary and she spoke 8 languages. Her first language was German and whenever she prayed she would pray in German. For her, German was her first language and a person’s first language is the language of their heart.
Our conversations with God come from our hearts and flow from our hearts in our first language. So while people can become part of the community in speaking English, the language in which we speak to God is in our first language. By opening our church to those who are different than we are, we can start with a Spanish Mass and eventually move to occasional bilingual services and even to sharing food with one another in fellowship meals.
That would mark a very big change for us. It is not unlike the change to which God invited St. Peter. Peter put it this way: The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.
Today I am asking questions, opening a dialogue, inviting you to consider. In the future, as we look at the future shape of our ministry, we can engage in a dialogue on this issue. This is a complex dialogue, with many dimensions, and we all need to talk about this, to express our concerns, to figure out how we can go from here to there, to figure out if we even want to go there.
I know that you had begun to talk about this form of ministry while Hank was rector. I am making that same invitation. Today’s reading is about God breaking down walls that kept people apart. To take down this wall will gradually change our lives together. We were once on the other side of that wall. By God’s gracious gift we have become insiders. Part of God’s family. Can we find it in our hearts to extend to those who are currently outsiders to our community an invitation to make them insiders? Can we begin to tear down the wall of language that separates us from them?
The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. Just as Peter was changed by his vision to include the Gentiles, is God calling us at St. Peter’s Church to move into a new vision?

Clothed With The Sun

2007-06-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Mystery of the Assumption
A Sermon by the Reverend Peter De Franco, Jr.
Interim Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey

When was the last time you saw a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars? Not even in Times Square would you see such a sight, unless it might be on Halloween or if you were high on something, but she is not the person whom you would gingerly meet on the way. Yet she is the person whom we encounter with the opening antiphon of today’s liturgy: A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
With this language, strange and unworldly, we enter into the world of the apocalyptic. No, this is not the world of those misguided souls who would hasten the coming of the end of the world that they might catch the greatest 4th of July fireworks display. No, this is not the world of those who would more quickly pray for atomic war so as it have the world’s international scene fit their misconstrued notions of the end of times.
No, this is the world of those who are tired of the politics of this world and know that only God can usher in a new world order, and that world order does not need an atomic bomb blast but the gentle wind of the Holy Spirit to cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly. An apocalyptic world view pushes us to edge of the symbolic world, a world where image defines a deeper reality and where flights of fantasy take us into a world of hopes, deeper than the power of the human imagination but not craftier then the might of the divine heart. An apocalyptic world view takes us into the season of Easter, with promises of new life being formed from the ashes of death and the reality of God’s new order formed in the potter’s hand from the clay of the old creation.
In an apocalyptic world view, we behold a world on the brink of disaster rescued by the divine EMT who hastens into the fire and snatches us from the foe. In an apocalyptic world view, we experience a God in the birth pangs of a new creation, crying aloud as a new child enters into the world, a new child with all the hopes that child brings. In an apocalyptic world view, we encounter the breaking down of one world as God creates a new world, the sunset that changes to dawn, the rain gives way to the sun, and the mourning veil is lifted.
This apocalyptic world view is enacted in signs this day: a statue is carried around a church in procession as a sign of the glorification of a woman with the garments like the sun, stars forming her crown and the moon as her foot stool. We process this day, though in the role of the accompanying angels. The angels come as sure signs that we are dealing with an apocalyptic stage for wherever angels appear the wonders of God’s new world soon dawn.
While an apocalyptic vision places us in the world of the symbolic, we stand at the place where the symbol is giving way to reality. At the point where the symbolic gives way to the real stands the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. That resurrection is the moment of breakthrough when the birth pangs of God give way to the new creation of the Christ, the head of that mystical person emerging from the birth channel even as through baptism and the Eucharist the body continues to take form and emerges through the font, the womb of the church, to the breast of the church where the faithful are fed with the milk of the Eucharist. We receive these gifts of new life in hope and so we receive them symbolically, yet with symbols so rich in grace that we call them sacraments since they effect in reality what they proclaim symbolically.
With the assumption, we stand on the other side of that symbolic world, where the language of a new world order gives way to a bodily entrance into the reign of God. The icons of the Assumption describe this reality: the dead body of the virgin lies on a bier as her new body that of an infant lies in the arms of her son -- A divine reversal of roles as the child gives birth to the mother and the mother suckles at the child’s breast. With this mystery of the assumption, we are ushered into the realm of the spirit where the new creation begins, where new life shapes our souls, and the promises of God for the redemption of our bodies begins takes its place even in our very flesh.
The assumption is that moment when the promises become real for one member of the mystical body of Christ and so assure us all that the symbolic world indeed is giving way to reality. That reality is the resurrection of the mystical body of Christ and its formation in the world across the boundaries of time and space. It is a reality that we form even this day, but we form in faith and in hope, heirs of the promise that we hold this day in clay vessels as we await the redemption of our bodies.
Mary has passed from the symbolic into the real. That is the first meaning of this day’s feast. We, in the heat of the summer, oppressed by the heat of our lives and the weight of its deep humidity, find renewed hope for the redemption of our own bodies.
We stand this day in hope, even as we look to heaven to behold a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

With Open Arms and Open Hearts

2007-06-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

With open arms, with open hearts.
A Sermon preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco on June 24, 2007,
the Patronal Feast of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ

On this day, we gather in St. Peter’s church and celebrate the memory of our community’s patron. I have always felt blessed to serve in a church with which I share a name. Whenever I go to Sikora’s, the religious goods store in Passaic, they all know me as Father Peter from St. Peter’s. It’s a fun thing.
Now St. Peter and I go back a long way so I want to tell you a story about me and St. Peter that happened when I was in the second grade. When I was a child I attended St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic School in Paterson, New Jersey. It was October and Halloween was approaching and the nun who taught our class had the bright idea that we all should dress up as our patron saints. Concetta, the girl who lived down the street from me, dressed as the Virgin Mary; my best friend was named Joey and he dressed up as St. Joseph and of course I dressed up as St. Peter.
It was a family project to put the costume together. My mother was a seamstress so she designed a white robe and a cord belt for me. My father, who loved to work with wood, made a three foot key for me. The key was almost as big as I was! And the crowning piece of the costume was a white wig and white beard. I looked like Santa Claus in a nightgown!
On Halloween day, we all came into school in our saint’s costumes and then paraded around the street with all the other children in our school for the Halloween parade. I really felt proud of my key. For years, that key hung up in our living room on a pillar that supported the ceiling near a bay of windows.
We all know that all the saints have symbols. If you look at the stained glass window of St. Peter here in church, you will see two symbols of St. Peter: a set of Keys and an inverted cross. The keys recall those words of Jesus to Peter: I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. The roman church uses that gospel story about St. Peter to remind them of the connection between Peter and the Bishop of Rome. I think they want to remind their people who has the power. Thank God we don’t have that story.
You see, we use a different gospel and it refers to the second symbol of St. Peter: The inverted cross. You will recall after Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and three times Jesus invites Peter to feed his lambs and his sheep. Jesus then says something rather strange: Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.)
Jesus is telling Peter something that must have totally frightened Peter. Jesus is telling Peter that when he is old, he will stretch out his hands and another will lead him where he would not go. Peter knew full well what Jesus was talking about. For but a few days before Jesus had stretched out his hands when a soldier fastened Jesus’ hands to the beam of the cross. Peter would follow Jesus to that same crucifixion. A venerable Christian story says that during the persecution of the Christian Community in Rome under the Emperor Nero, Peter was captured and condemned to death by crucifixion.
He asked that he be crucified head downward since he felt himself unworthy to die the same death as did Jesus. The upside down cross is a reminder of that final following by Peter of his Jesus.
You will all recall that when Jesus was going to the cross, Peter was so frightened that when a little servant girl asked Peter if he knew Jesus, Peter denied it as fast as he could. Somehow, Peter’s fearful heart was transformed into a courageous heart.
I think it had to do with that day on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus forgave Peter for his betrayals and restored Peter to friendship with Jesus. In healing his heart, Peter’s heart was opened. Somehow his heart was opened and he learned the important lesson of embracing all people.
For in the days after Pentecost, Peter is the one who brings the Gentiles into the church. Peter is the one who breaks down the barrier that divided Jewish Christians from Gentiles.
Deep in the heart of this community lays a similar commitment to open our arms in welcome. On this day, we bring together both the celebration of our patron as well as pride day, a day when we open our hearts to our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered sisters and brothers. The seed for this pride celebration comes from Father Hank Dwyer who saw the civil rights movement of the 1960’s embracing the struggle of the LGBT community to achieve full equality. I believe that Hank saw the Spirit of God opening up hearts and minds of Christians to embrace those whom God already loved. God is putting into our hearts a desire to love others with the same love God has for them. The beginning of such love lies in opening our hearts and minds.
For us Christians, we, like Peter, learn how to do that from Jesus who stretched out his arms on the cross. Jesus learned that lesson when his own arms were stretched out on the cross – that God opens our arms that we might open our hearts to include all in the embrace of our love. To open our hearts like Peter comes as an invitation to overcome the fear that keeps our hearts closed. A first step in overcoming that fear is to see the other as a person like us, a person loved and cherished by God, a person. I believe the deeper we go in opening our hearts to the love of God, the easier it is to release fear from our hearts.
We are in a time in our parish life when we are asking ourselves where is God calling us as a community. We are a community who have done so much with so little.
In part, we have done so much because we are a people who love much. We do not only receive God’s love into our hearts, but we ask how can we share that love?
What is God asking us to do in the next five years? Shall our response be one that flows from closed arms or from open arms? I invite us this day to look to the example of our patron, to look in the way we have opened our hearts and minds to embrace our Lesbian, gay and bisexual sisters and brothers. We have the courage to continue to open our arms in welcome for God has opened our hearts in love.
So if you see a little boy with a white wig and robe carrying a key in his hand, ask him for the key. It will open your heart.