Author: churchgoodshepherd823

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 31, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion IV:
It’s All Love

 “Hallelujah!
    O my soul, praise God!
All my life long I’ll praise God,
    singing songs to my God as long as I live.” (Psalm 146:1)

“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart..” (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)

“[These love commandment[s] that I give you [are] much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:28-34)

          The Old Testament reading and the Gospel this morning are completely pertinent to the theme of our meditations this month, on the subject of compassion. Both testaments of our Bible proclaim the same thing, namely, that love is the name of the game of lifeand, in fact, supersedes everything else. Hence I have argued that we all have one need and one wish and that is to be loved and to love, and I have said further that to be loved and to love is all that we need and all that we want.

          We have noticed some of the inherent barriers to this life of joy, freedom and peace. One is our reluctance to understand, to get to know someone more than superficially. Without understanding, our love remains behind a half-open curtain and we can proceed only hesitantly. Of course, love should be unconditionally given, but it is a challenge we often fail to meet when we do not adequately understand where someone is coming from.

          And along with understanding, another vital component of compassion is honesty, for honesty opens the floodgates of both understanding and love. The more honest I am with you and you with me, the more we can meet one another on the same playing field. This playing field is necessarily a playing field of suffering. For compassion means suffering. Our Lord Jesus Christ meets our suffering with his suffering. Hence understanding. Hence love. No cross, no crown. And the crown of thorns is a crown of love.

          Where compassion reigns, differences melt away. And the differences that remain often become enchantments, things we long to know and absorb into our own lives.

          Let’s look at a third impediment to fully engaging in love, both receiving it (despite needing and wanting it) and giving it, because, as we have seen, we are blocked in fully loving others to the extent that we do not love ourselves or have been reluctant to receive love ourselves.

          And that is the big, big “no” we throw out at God, either for an idea or ideas we may have about this God, or about experiences we have that seem to belie any evidence that God loves us.

          I must agree with those who turn their back on God or religion or church because they have gotten the notion that God is a God of wrath and severe judgment. Where they get such ideas really doesn’t matter, but let’s admit that the Bible—both the Old and the New testaments—have some pretty harsh things to say about God and what God is.

          Take this morning’s beautiful readings about commandments. The commandments to love God and our neighbor are beautiful all right, but the very word “commandment” can rankle in our sensitive ears. Why do we have to call these commanments by that name? Isn’t “loving suggestions,” “prescriptions for a happy and rich life,” or just about any way of calling them better than the word “commandment.” After all, we aren’t in the army. I can never recall either of my parents using the word “command” in any advice or warnings they gave me. Maybe it’s just me, but there is enough defiance left in me that I am inclined to turn a deaf ear when I hear talk of commands. On the other hand, perhaps this word points to the absolute essential nature of love. Without it, the world would fall apart, perhaps existence itself would cease to be. So, command does make us sit up straight: “get with the program of loving.” It’s the way of life itself.

          And again, we can turn our back on the God thing when we hear a phrase like that of the Confession in Rite One of Communion in our Book of Common Prayer:

          We confess together, in beautiful Elizabethan English, the following: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”

          Now, wrath and indignation are pretty strong words, and to think that God is a God of wrath might be just what it takes for us to forsake this God. We might even recommend that such a God go and sign up for anger management classes. But as was wisely pointed out to me at coffee hour, when I was ranting about this phrase, this anger from God arises in the context of caring. God cares for us like a parent and has only our best interest in mind. And, as another friend suggested, God is hurt and angry but he doesn’t necessarily lash out in vengeance. He’s not like a child or an abusive parent. In fact, he more than likely doesn’t act from wrath at all. I just don’t know. Do you?

          But the most interesting comment I heard as that the wrath of God is God’s wounded love. These are the same wounds that we see on the cross, where God identifies with our suffering.

          The wrath of God is God’s wounded love.

          So we draw near to the conclusion of our journey into God’s compassion. God’s compassion is about as deep as we limited human beings can go into God’s very being. I truly believe that this is the unique gift of Christian faith over all other religious ideas or creeds. That God suffers: he understands, he identifies and he continues to love.

God’s love is so deep because God understands us fully. Unlike the superficiality of much of our so-called compassion. A lot of this compassion is superficial sympathy, as when a horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

God is the father who greets us at the edge of the farm, welcoming us home. He is the God at the bedside of every dying COVID patient. She is the one who mourns as we mourn the injustices that millions of God’s children suffer.

          What the world needs now is love, sweet love. And the beauty of love is that is freely given. You cannot force anyone to love you, nor can you force anyone to love the source of all love, God. It wouldn’t be love if coerced like that. Jesus is the great courtier. He woos us with gentleness, with mirth and gentle prodding. God wants our love as we want the love of those whom we love! Our love for him completes the gift of our life.

          We live in a love world, and the only thing keeping all of us from loving one another is our blindness, refusal or ignorance in opening our eyes to the wonder of our existence on this fragile earth, our island home.

          I ask you. I have said that our greatest, our only, need and desire is to be loved and to love. But isn’t our deepest love the desire for those we love to be happy?

          Look for your neighbor in yourself. And look for you in your neighbor. Reach out, understand your neighbors as more than names, and you will see the glory of God and rejoice. What’s more you will love.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion III:
Easy to Love, Hard to Love

“God,…increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love.”

 (Collect, Proper 25)

“With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” (Jeremiah 31: 7-9))

“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy.” (Psalm 126:2)

We call on God in today’s opening prayer to increase our love. Goodness knows, we need it, and goodness knows, we know that this is what we need and what we desire. In fact, as I have argued, and I have heard none of you contradict me, love is the only thing we need and the only thing we desire. Of course, I’ll argue for you, we need food, shelter, clothing, a respectable living and many other quite desirable things. Sure, but all of these are predicated on a foundation of love and care.

          “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of….Not just for some, but for everyone.” Remember that delightful ditty from the mid-sixties, sung by Jackie DeShannon.

          And has it ever struck you as odd that this glorious commodity, which brings so much harmony, understanding, peace, and joy, can seem at times to be in such short supply? Why is that, I wonder? For there is plenty of it—love, that is. It’s like a bar advertising free drinks for life and nobody bothers to sidle up to it.

          I can suggest a couple of reasons. Perhaps you can add to my list. First of all, it seems to be that everybody wants to be loved, but few of us want to do the loving. Even this reluctance to love (we could call it selfishness, the human condition), can stem from our own lousy feelings about ourselves. You know when you’re not feeling good, your motivation to be nice, even to family members, can reduce dramatically. We can, in other words, turn into bears. And many of us carry the marks of abuse and trauma and we just aren’t emotionally very healthy and so can’t be very loving towards others—since we aren’t very loving towards ourselves.

          In other words, I have said that everybody wants to be loved, but the longer we nurse deep hurt and sorrow, even abandonment, the harder it may be even to want love, since we really believe that we don’t deserve love. Can there be anything sadder than this? But unfortunately, this seems to be the fate of many of us.

          A second reason many of us may stay away from the fountain of love, that bar that serves free drinks for as long as we wish, is that we are stuck on stupid. That is, we have a pinched, judgmental view of our lives and those around us. I was in graduate school with a very bright man, whose father, in fact, was one of the inventors of television, and he said to me solemnly one day, “Steve, we are born, we live and we die…and that is that!” He said it with such conviction and vehemence that I have never forgotten it.

Sure, in one sense he was right. Looked at it coldly and clinically, we are born, we live and we die. But “Where’s the beef?” as the TV commercial used to wonder. Where’s the music, the color of our lives? As Auntie Mame says in that famous play, “Life’s a banquet and most sons of bitches are starving to death!”

          People who fail to join in the general dance are missing out. Sure, I’m not saying that many of us do not have terrible burdens to bear; wounds too deep for words; and we are not being so cruel or unfeeling not to have heavy hearts for them, especially if they are unable to rally from their pain. I get it. Love’s deepest expression is compassion, our ability to identify with those who are the most unhappy.

          For we saw last week that we cannot generate compassion until we can show some for ourselves, and we really cannot love until we know that we are loved. It’s sort of like a relay race. We must be given the baton of love in order to run with it to others.

          Now that we have acknowledged that most of us want to be loved but are not so crazy about loving others, we ask ourselves the next big question? Why is that? Why do we find it hard sometimes to love? First, let’s be honest. Some people are just easier to love than others. Am I alone in thinking this? One of my favorite Cole Porter songs says it so beautifully:

For you’d be so easy to love
So easy to idolize all others above
So sweet to waken with
So nice to sit down to eggs and bacon with

We’d be so grand at the game
So carefree together that it does seem a shame
That you can’t see
Your future with me
‘Cause you’d be, oh, so easy to love

It’s easy to love those who are easy to love. But this song, a romantic song, sugarcoats the reality that the first blush of love is delightful. Check in on this same couple a short time later, and they have separated. Divorce is the name of hundreds of thousands of relationships. Forming a true partnership with another human being, putting two fallible, sinning human beings next to each other is, to put it mildly, a challenge.

          You’d be so easy to love. Ok. But we all know that you’d be so hard to love as well. Very hard. Heartbreakingly hard. We can easily fall into the deep hole of self-recrimination if we are too hard on ourselves. After all, in whatever relational conflict we have had, it takes two to tango. There are two sides to most misunderstandings. It takes mutual commitment for both parties to understand each other fully, and a breakup is almost in part due to not having sufficient understanding to fully understand the other.

And there is a certain defiance and pride that keeps us from the very reconciliation and love that is our birthright.

          I suppose the most reassuring insight I have been given when I am beating myself up for the thousand and one ways I am not loving enough is to realize that I am not creating more love, for love is always there, flowing in the universe with or without my participation. My only question is whether I am swimming in the ocean of love or remaining dry from my fears and hesitations.

For that ocean of love is the love of God.

O love, how deep, how broad, how high!
It fills the heart with ecstasy.

As Jonathan Edwards said, God’s love is an ocean without shores of bottom.

As John Paul Young, the Scottish-Australian pop singer sings:
Love is in the air, everywhere I look around

Love is in the air, every sight and every sound

Love is in the air, in the whisper of the tree

Love is in the air, in the thunder of the sea

Love is in the air, in the rising of the sun

Love is in the air, when the day is nearly done

          How do we miss it? It is everywhere.

For God is love, and God is everywhere.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 17, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion II:
Please Understand Me!

“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases….And by his bruises we are healed.”

 (Isaiah 53:4-12)

“[His angels] shall bear you in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone….Because he is bound to me in love…I will protect him” (Psalm 91:12,14)

“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mark 10:45)

          From one of my favorite movie musicals, Damn Yankees, they sing,

You’ve gotta have heart/
all you really need is heart./
When the odds are sayin’ you’ll never win/
That’s when the grin should start./

All you really need is heart!”   

And it is in the heart where love is born and resides. It is the mixing bowl out of which comes the most important thing. In fact, to pick up and repeat last week’s theme, there is one need and one wish that every human being has, and that is the need and the wish to be loved and to love. And I further claim that this love is all we need. All you need is love, lots and lots and lots of love. Is there ever enough love? Only if you place a limit on it. It flows like the sun shines. There is no stopping it and no way of stopping it.

          Compassion is another word for love. And compassion is the subject of this series of meditations. As the Dalai Lama sings, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

          Compassion is perhaps the richest, deepest and most challenging of those other-directed emotional words, including the words “sympathy” and “empathy.”

          Let’s look briefly at those words. “Sympathy” is the socially acceptable, Kindergarten-level way of expressing care and concern. “I sympathize with you.” “I am simpatico with what you are feeling.” “I get where you’re at!” Empathy takes it further. It enters into understanding of another’s pain or predicament. It is free of judgment, perhaps the hardest quality to cultivate seeing how most of us love to judge people for where they are in their lives. How often have we thought that someone “complains too much,” “must be a hypochondriac” (as if we were qualified physicians), “should be over their grieving by now,” (as if we were in charge of someone’s emotional timeline). Empathy simply stands alongside someone else, free of judgment, hopefully short on advice, and, if we want to do our friend a big favor, keeping our mouth shut…tight! Empathy is like when someone is stuck inside a dark hole and we might shout down, “Hey, I know what it’s like down there.” Empathy: feeling with someone.

          Compassion is a kind of post-graduate caring, for it not only identifies with someone’s predicament, it shares its love with that person through its own suffering. “Passion,” as we saw last week, comes from the Latin for suffering. I link with your suffering through my suffering. We are brothers in our shared humanity. That is compassion.

          And the reason compassion is such a beautiful reality in the Christian life is because we look to the one Jesus who not just stands with us in our suffering, but who takes on our suffering. He is that close to us. A parent, a sibling, a close, close friend can feel intensely our pain as they sit with us in compassion. But our Lord Jesus takes our suffering into himself. This is the meaning of incarnation, and this is the meaning of salvation. Salvation means healing.

          I want to focus for a brief time on a key ingredient of this wonderful action of compassion. Compassion is not just a feeling. It is also an action. It involves our words, our attitudes, and our actions toward another. And in order for this compassion to take flight, to have real meat on its bones, it must involve understanding. Without understanding, we are flying blind and are apt to come to wrong conclusions about a person’s situation…and, yes, judge it!

          Most people, let’s face it, are facing their own struggles. They may not show it and for sure they may not want you to know that they struggle. For some reason struggle seems to be a sign of weakness. We can assume pretty accurately that almost everybody is shy and hiding to some degree behind unspoken sorrow, pain and fear. Making this assumption is halfway home to understanding and opens the love valve and makes genuine compassion possible.

          In addition to most people facing their own inner struggles and demons, those same people are doing about the best they can to cope with what is in front of them. We can in our arrogance claim that they are lazy. We may ask ourselves, just why are they not doing what I know would help them; just why don’t they stop their drinking and creating such chaos in their families. Good questions, but useless, uncaring questions. Because people are doing what they are doing. And that is the end of the story. We can cajole, wring our hands and judge all we want. As they will do it their way…until the cows come home. Moo.

They’re home. Now what? Moo, moo, moo.

          Where’s the love?

          I know there are examples in your lives when things changed radically when you began to understand more fully exactly where someone was coming from. We stopped being a psychic and filling in the blanks about a person’s life and saw the truth. Love starts the minute we step down from the judge’s bench.

          My favorite story about this is of two children who seemed to be accompanied by a priest were on a subway one busy morning. The kids were running wild throughout the subway car, chasing one another, bumping into the standing passengers. There were glaring eyes and hushed curses as the children continued to squeal and run. Finally, one of the passengers came over to the seated priest and demanded, “Can’t you do something about these children?”

          “I suppose so,” the priest replied, “but we’ve just come from their mother’s funeral, and I thought I would cut them some slack. I’m sorry for their behavior.”

          You see how this simple explanation, which leads to understanding, can change everything. Judgment turns to compassion. I believe if we understood everything as fully as Christ did, we would shed tears, we would wail so loudly, that the heavens would hear our cries.

          Someone said the other day, “Change only comes about with love.” Yes, and I would add understanding is the icing on the cake of love, for now we know more fully.”

          Compassion is entering into the suffering of the world. This entryway leads to a love that brings peace and joy, and yes, laughter through the tears.

          I read this week that we are “hard-wired for compassion.” This may be true. I’m not sure. There is the condition known as sociopathy. And society does teach us to fear and separate ourselves from others.

          But one thing we can do is to remember—re-member!—those times when we were understood. Those recollections can trigger or retrigger an outgoing of our love.

          What do you think about this? A friend put it this way: “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” Wow, what a great way of putting it. “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” We are loved. We Christians know it, or at least we had better know it. That is what all the angels shouting the good news was about. This is what our Eucharist meal is about: a love so great it envelops, surrounds, precedes and follows us every moment of our lives.

          A Hindu saying is this: “Extend your awareness into the bodies of other living beings. Feel what those others are feeling. Leave aside your body and its needs. Abandon being so local. Day by day, constrictions will loosen as you become attuned to the current of life flowing through us all.”

          All we need is love. Love is the divine emotion. Love is the emotion of God. Love is the being of God. And it is ours for the taking.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 11, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

God’s Call to Compassion

“For I know how many are your transgressions,
and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
and push aside the needy in the courts.”
(Amos 5:12)
“Surprise us with love at daybreak; * then we’ll skip and dance all the day
long.”
(Psalm 90:14, The Message Bible)
I believe that there is one need and one wish that every human
being has, and that is the need and the wish to be loved and to love.
And I further believe that this is all we need. And this sentence,
which is the thesis sentence of a series I am beginning this morning,
is the frame in which I wish to speak with you about compassion.
Compassion: the love of and the love for ourselves and one another.
The constant harping on sin that we find in the Bible, and
especially in the Old Testament, as we find in the Book of Amos, is not
so much to chide and shame us but to call us out of what we are
missing—that our lack of concern, of deep concern, for ourselves and
one another kills our spirit. When we hide love from one another, when
we pursue our own selfish ends (this is what all the fuss about rich
people having trouble getting into heaven is all about), then it is
ourselves who will suffer. That is, we bring judgment on ourselves. I
believe that anger, if you want to call it that, is our frustration as to what

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we are missing. Every moment we fail to love is us digging our own
graves of sorrow and alienation. Amos says as much: “Seek good and
not evil, that you may live.” Virtue is its own reward. We simply feel
better. We reflect the light and the love of God itself. This is why the
psalmist has the boldness to declare, “Surprise us with love at daybreak;
* then we’ll skip and dance all the day long!”
Did you hear about the husband who said that his wife said that he
lacked empathy? He replied, “I don’t understand how she could feel that
way!”
Haven’t we all noticed a lack of empathy in the land? What’s
going on with all this nastiness we show toward one another? Can we
even put our minds around the number of people who have died from
this dread COVID? Our own pastor, Father Shearer, fell prey to this
virus. Our failure to fully face our grief is part of what lies behind the
fear and the anger so rampant in our land. We are in an empathy
epidemic. Fear shuts down empathy. And our anger is partly our anger at
ourselves that this empathy is being stunted.
Compassion mean having feeling towards another. Having passion
with someone else. We won’t take time distinguishing sympathy,
empathy and compassion. Love is love and we want and need plenty of
it, both to receive and to give! But, of course, we need for this
compassion to begin with ourselves. Most of us are much too hard on
ourselves. When we are hard on ourselves, it follows that we lack the

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ability to look up and out on our brothers and sisters standing right next
to us.
The Latin word passion means suffering, and we look to Jesus
whose compassion confronts us every Sunday when we look at the Cross
on which Jesus hung. Can we even believe someone’s empathy going
the length of suffering right alongside us, with us? Our pain is his pain.
Boy, that should wake us up! As long as we keep the focus on ourselves,
compassion will be limited.
And yet, and yet, we have to come to be comfortable with who we
are, accept our shortcomings, know that we are not the manager of the
universe. Letting go of the control stick can help us relax into the
wonderful people that we really are, and then we can look outwards and
forget ourselves and join in the dance with others.
The funny thing is this: we cannot really forget ourselves until we
love ourselves and have a clue as to exactly who we are! And, to take
this even further, coming to love ourselves depends on trusting and
knowing that we are loved. We receive the love of parents, friends,
clerks in the grocery store; this strengthens our sense of who we are;
then we can throw this love we have found away on others.
Love, love, love. All you really need is love. The Beatles were
dead right. This love is not all kum-ba-yah. It is not all about feeling
good and rosy. I close with this poem by folk singer David Wilcox:
It is love who mixed the mortar

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And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love that made the stage here
Though it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
In this darkness
Love can show the way
—David Wilcox, “Show the Way”

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 26, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Everything Is Grist for the Mill

“You have made us but little lower than the angels; * you adorn us with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:6)

“What we do see is Jesus, made “not quite as high as angels,” and then, through the experience of death, crowned so much higher than any angel, with a glory “bright with Eden’s dawn light.” In that death, by God’s grace, he fully experienced death in every person’s place.”
(Hebrews 2:5-13, Message Bible)
 

One of the great mysteries, as far as I can determine, is why there is not much more shouting and laughing and weeping with joy in this life of ours. What is with us human beings that we allow ourselves so much sorrow, or why life visits on us such hardship and suffering?

It may not be such a good idea to point fingers here. Certainly God gets a good deal of the blame for our misery, such as it is, for God is, after all, the power that brought us into existence.

Our attitude to hardship has a lot to do our responses to pain and trouble, and we seem, or we are told anyway, that we are pretty much in charge of our reactions. I’m not so sure. Sometimes I do talk myself out of a funk, or I do shift my perspective, which keeps me from thinking dark thoughts. But more often I seem to have little control over my thoughts, moods and attitudes And I sure as the devil had better not judge someone caught in the rut of depression or chronic sorrow. First of all, nobody walks in anybody else’s shoes, and we can identify only to a limited extent with someone else’s situation. And even if we are thoroughly familiar with other people’s circumstance, how dare us think we have the right to judge their attitude or that we have the power to do much more than to be present with those in trouble?

          But the disturbing reality is that, as Thoreau mused, “the mass of [us] live lives of quiet desperation.” It is not just when life hits the fan and we are thrown into a slough of despond. This extremity is sometimes only temporay. Others of us carry wounds with us for decades and never reveal the source of our anguish or dare to speak of it from shame or fear.

A lot of this charade of the spirit is cultural. Certain national cultures teach us to avoid expressing our feelings. And in the South, where I grew up, we were taught that grown men don’t cry. My parents, as lovely as they were, were not particularly expressive or effusive in their feelings towards one another. It just wasn’t done, so to speak. And there are so many hidden stories, toxic secrets that shield us from the sunlight of the spirit and prevent us from living the free life that we somehow suspect is ours by birthright.

The psalm this morning says that God made us only a little lower than the angels and has adorned us with glory and honor. “Doesn’t feel that way to me,” we might argue. And unfortunately many of us betray this despair in our demeanor and behavior.

I suppose one thing to notice about whatever life presents, pitches, or slings at us, is that those things are grist for our mill, are opportunities for growth. We can use them to grow or postpone. Like the things we toss on the compost heap in our backyards. Even seemingly useless things can serve to create something healthy and beautiful. As a friend puts it, everything is either a blessing or a lesson, and every lesson can become a blessing.

And our scripture, the seedbed that nurtures our lived faith, provides so much solace. We needn’t listen to all the scolding and judging we find there (these are but projections from our confused and complex human experiences), but we can listen instead to the overwhelming affirmation from the God who created and abides with us.

“Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord,” the Psalmist writes. (Psalm 130) We cry for the voice of the Lord. Are we quiet enough, patient enough, humble enough to expect an answer? For testimony has it from thousands of us that God does answer—often in ways that we do not expect. I’ll bet each of you can point to situations in your life that turned out in a way you did not expect but in time you saw to have been better, sometimes much better, than what you had dreamed.

“God himself is with us.” I love this line from the hymn. God himself—not an emissary, not an idea drummed up by some preacher, but God itself. Imagine that. Can there be a more wonderful visitor? God himself is with us!

And in the Epistle this morning, the Message translation sheds light on one of my least favorite letters, the Letter to the Hebrews. It literally opens a portal to a glorious understanding of Jesus. It reads “What we do see is Jesus, made not quite as high as angels [this marks the great humility of a God who comes into all the places of our lives, however dark and sad and lonely], and then, through the experience of death, crowned so much higher than any angel, with a glory ‘bright with Eden’s dawn light.’ In that death, by God’s grace, he fully experienced death in every person’s place.”

He fully experienced death in our place. Think of this. God enters our death. Now, each of us can be an angel to our neighbor. We can be present in times of fear or grief, but we can never enter as intimately or as closely into anyone’s life as the one who experiences death. God himself is with us and fully experiences each of our deaths. This is the message of the angels at Christmas: “Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” This is the message of the risen Christ: “Fear not, for I am with you always.”

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…

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with 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.

          Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 26, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Amazing Grace!

“Grant us the fullness of your grace…that we may be partakers of your heavenly treasure.” (Collect, Proper 21)

The prayer this morning asks for the fullness of God’s grace. This request may seem at first blush presumptuous. Do we dare ask, or even hope, for the fullness of God’s grace? Assuming we even know what this is, are we worthy of receiving so much bounty? Many, if not most of us, think less highly of ourselves than we ought and certainly believe that God does not view us as worthy of great honor or praise. Receiving God’s grace is what opens the door to partake of God’s heavenly treasure. Again, we may not even be sure of what such treasure consists, but we are pretty darned sure that we don’t deserve it. But the writer of this collect evidently thinks to.

There is a candy store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Economy Candy; and when you go inside, you’re sure you’ve died and gone to heaven. Candy aisles stretch from the front to the back of the store, with shelves that reach to the ceiling. Every kind of commercial candy you’ve ever heard of is there, plus candies from around the world as well as the store’s own brands. It isn’t healthy to spend more than ten or fifteen minutes in such a place, for there is the danger of a diabetes attack or hyperglycemia—from just looking and thinking about all those delectable sweets.

Now, imagine our life like this. Is it an exaggeration to view your life as so dripping with the love and beauty of God? The only thing that keeps us from this realization is that our eyes are clouded from the dazzlement being so every-day and ordinary. Our ears do not hear the sweet music of God’s presence in every beat of our heart and every sound in the spaces we walk in.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a nineteenth-century English poet and Jesuit priest, and I love the opening lines of one of his famous poems:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed….

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lies the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghose over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

          Everything is holy; all things shine with God’s presence and love, and all is here just for you and me. How do we know this? Open your eyes and look around. Who else is looking? It is you who are looking, and it is you who is receiving, this flood of images, sounds and smells. Let it all in. It is the heavenly treasure flooding your senses, filling your experience.

          Last Sunday for our gradual hymn we sang a hymn that really dazzled me. Did it you?

          It reads:

1 God is Love: let heav’n adore him;
God is Love: let earth rejoice;
let creation sing before him,
and exalt him with one voice.
He who laid the earth’s foundation,
he who spread the heav’ns above,
he who breathes through all creation,
he is Love, eternal Love.

2 God is Love: and he enfoldeth
all the world in one embrace;
with unfailing grasp he holdeth
every child of every race.
And when human hearts are breaking
under sorrow’s iron rod,
then they find that selfsame aching
deep within the heart of God.

3 God is Love: and though with blindness
sin afflicts the souls of all,
God’s eternal loving-kindness
holds and guides us when we fall.
Sin and death and hell shall never
o’er us final triumph gain;
God is Love, so Love for ever
o’er the universe must reign.

          What is so charming—and challenging—about these lovely words is that it affirms with no hesitation that God’s love enfoldeth the world in one embrace. If we consider this picture, and I urge you to do so now, then there is no person, no place and no time when this embrace is absent. It is here now but for our reluctance in seeing it. As the poet Kabir writes, “The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you, as life is hidden in every seed. So, quash your pride, my friend, and look for him within you.”

          This is no gleefully pleasant Mary Poppins affirmation. The hymn sings, “And when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod, then they find that selfsame aching deep within the heart of God.”

          God’s embrace never releases us. When we ache, God aches. The deepest sorrows are known and felt and experienced by God, because he holds us during such times, perhaps closer than ever.

          The Christian story is about presence. The treasure lies at our feet in just being alive. It can be so intoxicating that we might question if we are in a dream or if life may not be a mirage. You know and have experienced how wonderful it is when a friend is just sitting with you in times of celebration or heartache. We experience this presence in worship as we celebrate together as a family, drink coffee together as a family. These are hints, foretastes, images that express the presence of God with us, beside us, in us at all times and in all places. This, then, is the fullness of grace we were at the beginning reluctant to recognize or accept, feeling perhaps that we were not worthy. But we must be worthy, because (guess what?) these riches are right here at our feet.

          So, what do we do in order to unveil and intensify this presence I speak of? My guess is that the less we ponder what to do the better. Just be present! Being present is our natural state. If you have to think about it, you are shifting away, however slightly, from this presence.

          Quiz question: what’s the best gift we can give one another? The answer: presence!

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven
No ear may hear His coming
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him still
The dear Christ enters in

O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel

          Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 19, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Hell, No!

“Grant us not to be anxious about earthly thing but to love heavenly…and to hold fast those things that will endure.” (Collect, Proper 20)

“The ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death.” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:16)

“Render evil to those who spy on me; in your faithfulness, destroy them.” (Psalm 54:5)

“He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37, Message Bible)

How many of us, I wonder, even at our mature age, still believe, either deeply or superficially that there is such a place or condition as hell? Here we are, sitting in a house of the Lord, seemingly fairly comfortable, while at the same time perhaps believing that God consigns a goodly portion of his children to a life of eternal pain and that we, even we don’t live sufficiently righteous lives, may be joining them. Now I ask you, is this something that you can honestly say is consistent with the God of love whom we worship?

          Let’s face it, we have a lot of history and tradition behind us on this most monstrous idea. Theologians have written about it for centuries. The poets Dante and Milton created a whole architecture of hell in their Inferno and Paradise Lost. And Scripture, while it is a little less explicit about the details, does lay out a system of justice where the good are rewarded and the bad punished, and quite severely. We unfortunately see this Sunday after Sunday in our readings of the Psalms. Today’s reading, for instance, warns, “Render evil to those who spy on me; in your faithfulness, destroy them.” (Psalm 54:5) Even the beautiful Old Testament reading from the Book of Wisdom intones, “The ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death.” Destruction and death may not imply being thrown into hell, but the passages do indicate that God’s wrath for our wrongdoing will mean at the very least our death. The rest is left to our morbid imagination!

          And did you hear about the guy who was thinking about taking a vacation in hell.

“Why do you want to go there?” they asked him.

“All my friends keep telling me to go there!” was his reply

          Of course, hell is a tricky idea, to say nothing of being a morally repugnant one. For justice, if it is to be rendered now or at some future time, requires a sense of punishment. Rewards imply punishments, like up requires down. Similarly, God’s anger would seem to be at the very least a reflection of our own outrage at those who have wronged us. But perhaps judgment and rage as attributed to God are projections of our own anger and do not represent any characteristic of the God we claim to worship.

          Who was this Jesus whom we read about? He loved to be in the company of the lost. He had no problem going right up to the leper, the moral outcasts, those who weren’t orthodox Jews. He was more than casually acquainted with women, poor families and those lacking in social or economic status. For whatever reasons Jesus was executed, he challenged the social norms of his day to the point of total unacceptability.

          Does this sound like someone who was in the business of condemning those who didn’t live right or think right or behave and think as the religious authorities dictated? Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Is this consistent with a God who punishes and punishes someone eternally? Jesus was in the business of loving, and his message of love so challenged all negativities that he is remains an affront to our sense of justice, even today.

          We may need a hell to create a sense of justice and final reward, but it seems that God does not. For what is our image of God? And doesn’t our image of God shape us, create us? Seeing God as a cruel tyrant (for that is what he is if he punishes people so extremely) surely cuts off the channel of grace in our lives. If we were raised in an atmosphere of fearing punishment, it can traumatize us. Do we really think or want God to traumatize us?

          How can we be encouraged to believe and trust in the goodness of God and that God loves all of God’s creatures and at the same time have any patience whatever with the notion of a hell? To hell with hell! Most human beings are more loving and forgiving than any God in the business of sending people to hell. Nobody or nothing can be more loving than God. It’s not possible. Such a punishing God is way too small. We must move from a moralistic God into the life of love. As the Inidan poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “The human soul travels from the law to love, from discipline to freedom, from the moral plane to the spiritual plane.”

          And what do we think it means in our creed when we say that Christ “descended into hell”? Was he there to heap further coals of reproach on our heads? Or was he there to shut down the place, to evict its landlord and to send all its miscreants to a fairer place, into the arms of their loving creator and father/mother?

          In conclusion, “Heaven” is essentially where God is. And since the reality some of us call God is absolutely everywhere, the kingdom of heaven is not pie in the sky in the sweet by and by. The kingdom of heaven is within you here and now. Heaven is always right where we are!

          Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 12, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Things That Matter(ed)!

“Grant that your Holy Spirit may direct and rule our hearts in all things.” (Collect, Proper 19 )

“For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness….In every generation she passes into holy souls.” (Wisdom 7:26 passim)

It is indeed a pleasure to be with you good people again, and I look forward to being with you during these fall Sundays into early winter and through the Christmas celebration. These days are so fraught with tragedy, controversy and worry that it’s good to be together to celebrate our lives and to reflect on the events that have the greatest meanings for us.

This is to suggest this morning that we consider for a few minutes that event or those events that we can point to that have had the greatest impact on our lives. What happened to you, who happened to you, that you can say right now has had the most lasting value for you. It may be a fairly minor-sounding thing, like a kind word of solace or advice given you—by a parent, teacher or friend. Or it may be an event you participated in that changed your thinking about things or even over the course your life was set on. Or it may be as simple as something you observed. A painting in a museum, a piece played at a concert or a jazz club, a scene from a movie. Something that, if I were to call on you, you would quite readily share because it is something that is the easiest for you to recall.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how things on paper, things told us by someone else, do not really register in our hearts until we experience them in some way.

Our lives are shaped by every single event that unfolds before us and that we live through. This truth may be hard to absorb, but not the clearer truth that some events register so profoundly that nothing can ever shake them from our memory.

What this something is I am asking you to consider needn’t be some wise or deep spiritual insight. If it affected you as profoundly as I suggest, then, of course, it is wise and deep for you. It is not like these four monks searching for enlightenment.
Four monks were meditating in a temple when, all of a sudden, the prayer flag on the roof started flapping.

The youngest monk came out of his meditation and said, “Flag is flapping.”

The second, more experienced monk said, “Wind is flapping.”

The third monk, who had been there for more than 20 years, said, “Mind is flapping.”

The fourth monk, who was the eldest, said, “Mouths are flapping!”

So much of our religious talk is like this. Mouths moving, tongues flapping.

Two events in my own life that I’d like to share have been very formative on my character and my gratitude for the people whom God has placed in my life.

For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness….In every generation she passes into holy souls.

Aren’t those beautiful words from the Book of Wisdom read earlier?

The first event occurred when I was in prep school in Virginia. Lonely, homesick, writing letters home threatening to run away. You can imagine how upset my parents were. After months of my cri de coeur, a fifth-grade teacher from a public school in Richmond made the 70-mile trip to Orange, Virginia, just to see me. I’ll never forget it. She walked me around campus. It was a winter day and she spoke of how concerned my parents were about my situation, and she told to me that they (my parents) would take me out of the school and enroll me in public school in Richmond. The teacher pointed out how disruptive that would be for me in the middle of the school year. She also conveyed the message that if I stuck it out, they would not make me return to boarding school the following year. So, I stayed. And I have stayed grateful to this teacher for making that long journey to and from my school. Talk about love. This was love in action.

For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness….In every generation she passes into holy souls.

         The second event is similar in showing what love has meant to me. I was in Episcopal seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, and went out to run an errand late one afternoon. I was driving a Volkswagen Beatle, given me by my father to use while studying abroad for a post-graduate degree. Anyway, I turned left and was obviously unaware of an oncoming car. The car crashed into me, knocking me out briefly. Needless to say, the VW as demolished.

Back in the Seminary dormitory, I called my father to tell him about the accident. I was full of remorse and was apologetic. My father interrupted me and said, “Forget the car, son; I want to know how you are. Are you ok?” This was a man who had underwritten my entire academic life. He had every right, I suppose, to chide me and use those hideous words, “After everything I’ve done for you…” No, his words were, “How are you, son?”

For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness….In every generation she passes into holy souls.

        This is what love is, and I believe this episode, perhaps not so dramatic as you might at first think, has gone a long way in shaping my understanding of a God who loves me unconditionally.

        You know, I was discussing the beautiful poetry of the wisdom literature like we read today with a couple of fellow retired clergy this past week, and I asked one of my friends, “How does the love that exists between your lovely wife and you relate to the love of God?” And he replied, “It points to God’s love.” “No,” I rejoined—and I have thought long about what he said. Human love does not point to God’s love, as a road sign points to the center of town. It is God’s love, right here, in our face. The visit from my fifth-grade teacher those many years ago; the words from my father after my auto accident. This was the love of God. Not pointers. The thing itself. A friend used a water analogy. He said his daughter and son-in-law have a summer place on a small bay in Virginia. That bay opens out onto a wider way, and that bay in turn opens into the Chesapeake Bay. Isn’t that a wonderful image about our loves, from the smallest to the largest?

For wisdom/love is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness….In every generation she passes into holy souls.

So, these events are just two that I cite that have played a role in my development. I am tempted to say “spiritual development.” But isn’t all growth in wisdom “spiritual development”?

        A wonderful little poem that points to the impact a single event in our lives can have was written by Edward Field, a 97-year-old American poet living in Brooklyn:

A Journey
By Edward Field

When he got up that morning everything was different:

He enjoyed the bright spring day

But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.

And walking down the street to the railroad station

Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks

It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.

Tears filled his eyes and it felt good

But he held them back

Because men didn’t walk around crying in that town.

Waiting on the platform at the station

The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:

The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.

And in its time it came screeching in

And as it went on making its usual stops,

People coming and going, telephone poles passing,

He hid his head behind a newspaper

No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes

To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.

He didn’t do anything violent as he had imagined.

He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down

A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,

And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:

And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on

He walked, himself at last, a man among men,

With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

        I would love to hear what you are thinking. Perhaps one or two of you will share your stories of moving events like these with me.

        Amen.