Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Bishop Jake Owensby's visit and additions to planned services at Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph

Christ Episcopal will offer the following for the next few weeks: 

---Wednesday, Mar 30: 5th lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Sunday, Apr 3: Holy Eucharist with Bishop Jake Owensby, 10am

A reception will be held after the 10am service.  Horderves will be provided.

Please join us to visit with Bishop Jake.

---Wednesday, Apr 6:  6th lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Sunday, Apr 10:  Palm Sunday, 10am

---Wednesday, Apr 13:  7th (final) lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Friday, April 15: Good Friday service, with The Rev. Deacon B. Kauffman, 5 pm.

---Sunday, April 17: Easter service with The Rev. Paul Martin, 10am

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

The Rt. Rev. Jacob Owensby to celebrate with Christ Episcopal, April 3 at 10am

Christ Episcopal will offer the following for the next few weeks: 

---Wednesday, Mar 23:  4th lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Sunday, Mar 27:  Morning Prayer, 10am

---Wednesday, Mar 30: 5th lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Sunday, Apr 3: Holy Eucharist with Bishop Jake Owensby, 10am

---Wednesday, Apr 6:  6th lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm

---Wednesday, Apr 13:  7th (final) lenten study session with soup dinner, 5pm


Forgive & Remember


A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend who was going through a hard time. She has an adult daughter who suffers from bipolar disorder.

I have experienced mental illness in the family and it is a tough road to walk—a very tough road. Every member of the family is affected by it. You might say, accurately, in my view, that when one member of the family suffers from mental illness the entire family suffers.

My friend described some of her conversations with her daughter and some of the terribly hurtful things her daughter has said to her. Apparently the daughter views her mother as the source of all her problems, and she berates her mother in ways that break her mother’s heart.

So I said two things to my friend. First, and I know this doesn’t help very much, but first remember that it is the mental illness speaking, not your daughter per se. Expecting a mentally ill person to interact normally is like expecting a person with a broken leg to run a marathon.

Second, I said to my friend, get some help from a professional yourself who will help you set some healthy boundaries with your daughter. I went on to explain that her daughter was saying abusive things to her and nothing in the concept of parental love and nothing in the concept of Christian love requires us to accept abuse at the hands of family, friends or anyone else.

I sometimes think we are a bit simplistic in our approach to Jesus’ mandate that we love even our enemies and people who seek to do us harm. That particular friend is not the first or only person to interpret today’s Gospel lesson in ultimately self-destructive ways.

Of course the call to not judge or condemn others and to love our enemies is real and serious; Jesus was not joking when he said this. So our challenge is to find ways to love, on both individual and societal levels, that do not involve acquiescing to evil or to oppressive social systems and cultural norms, or to being a doormat to every abusive person in our social circles.

One such way—the best way I know—to love those who do us wrong is by being quick to forgive, unconditionally, and even when the other has not asked forgiveness. This is God’s way, and besides being God’s way, it is also good for us. We forgive for our own sake as much as or more than we forgive for the other’s sake.

Being stuck in unforgiveness will eat a person alive. It takes mental and emotional energy to hold on to and nurse our wounds, mental and emotional energy that is therefore unavailable for joy and wonder and gratitude.

Forgiveness is not an emotion we feel so much as a choice we make—a choice that liberates us from a shrunken, dreary world of bitterness and anger and fear.

Forgiveness also is NOT saying that the evil or hurt or abuse that happened is now suddenly “okay.” We have all heard, and probably have been admonished by someone, to “forgive and forget.” To which I say, “Nonsense.”

Back when I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, one of our sociology professors wrote a book titled “Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure.” I never read the book because I always felt that the title said it all.

Forgive, and remember.., because only by remembering can we establish and maintain healthy boundaries in our interpersonal relationships.

Forgive and remember because only by remembering can we learn from and overcome the evils of the past. Post World War II Germany is the best example I know of a society seeking to do that. Nazi concentration camps and the site of Hitler’s rise to power in Nuremburg have been converted into teaching museums that confront the evil that was the Holocaust with gut-wrenching honesty and lay out details of how and why it happened—all to the cause of making sure it never happens again.

These not-so-United States of America need to do the same. We need to confront and own the evils of our own past—the genocide of Native American peoples and the building of our country and economy on the backs of enslaved Africans.

We as a society have not done that. Far too many are still engaged in denial and in rejecting responsibility because the actual perpetrators are long dead. But we as a society will never heal from the divisions rooted in those evils until we have named them and claimed them, fully and with brutal honesty.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his priest daughter Mpho turned their own experience of and struggle against the evil of apartheid into a book called “The Book of Forgiving.” In it they write:

Forgiving does not require that we carry our suffering in silence or be martyrs on a cross of lies. Forgiveness does not mean that we pretend things are anything other than they are. Forgiving requires giving voice to the violations and naming the pains we have suffered.

So we love our enemies and those who hurt us by forgiving them because it is good for us and frees us from tending our pile of hurts. We forgive and love for our own sake.

We also love and forgive because mercy and forgiveness are God’s way, which we are committed to following. We forgive for God’s sake.

But finally we also forgive for the sake of those very enemies, the sake of those who have hurt us, for it is through forgiveness that we acknowledge their humanity. By forgiving, we set free those we are forgiving to change, to grow, to become more fully human. 

Only in the context of forgiveness can transformation happen. It might be a long time coming. We might never live to see the transformation our forgiveness makes possible. But only in the context of forgiveness can transformation happen.

I will give the last word today again to Desmond and Mpho Tutu, who wrote:

Just as we take a leap of faith when we make a commitment to love someone and get married, we also take a leap of faith when we commit ourselves to a practice of forgiveness.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

[Sermon given by The Rev. Deacon Bette Kauffman, 20 February 2022, St. Luke’s Episcopal Chapel, Grambling, LA]

 [Genesis 45:3-11, 15; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50; Luke 6:27-38]

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Rev. Deacon Bette Kauffman's sermon from March 6, 2022, Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph, LA

 An Opportune Time



An opportune time. An opportune time for what? Obviously, the devil—whose thoughts we are hearing at the end of today’s Gospel lesson—was looking for an opportune time to resume his temptation of Jesus. But—thanks be to God—we know the devil never succeeded in getting Jesus to sin.

WE are quite another story. It seems no time is other than an opportune time for us to be tempted to sin! And we, indeed, fall for all the things Jesus resisted at the end of his stay in the wilderness.

We do live by bread alone. That is, our own earthly cravings, our tendency to see our every desire as a need, our insatiable collecting of worldly things do dominate our time and attention and energy. The struggle for power is real and we get swept up in refusing to see the shortcomings of “our side” and demonizing the “other side”—as if there were only two sides to everything.

Today’s world is pretty much the epitome of the world the devil was trying to seduce Jesus into embracing. Our politics are bitterly divisive. The art of debate, negotiation, and compromise in the name of the common good seems lost forever. The “rugged individualism” that served U. S. America well in our early developing phase has turned into an ugly “my way or the highway” mentality. 

The yawning gap between the wealthiest in our society and the middle and working classes continues widening. It is entirely possible today to work not just one but two jobs and still have trouble feeding your children—this at a time of corporate profits through the roof. 

Several of us here this morning just returned from Diocesan Convention, where we heard, first, a stirring sermon by Fr. Michael Bordelon from St. Barnabas, Lafayette, and an equally inspiring convention address by our Bishop. I want to borrow from both of them this morning.

First, the Bishop asked us to consider three questions. These are not questions we can necessarily answer off the top of our head, so Lent 1 is a good time to begin reflecting on them.

His first question was, “Who am I, really?” He talked about the toxic individualism I mentioned above that our society has devolved into, and he contrasted that with creatures made in God’s image. That’s us, and all humankind. And as creatures made in God’s image we are the very manifestation of God’s love in the world.

His second questions was, “How am I my true self in the church?” As Christians, we believe we are the body of Christ in the world, and at least a couple of times a year, we read in church the Apostle Paul’s exposition of what that means. But perhaps our hearing has grown dull with familiarity.

Indeed, the first question, “Who am I, really?” can only be answered by the second question. In other words, although each of us is a unique, distinctive being, our very being is also shaped by the communities we are members of and relationships we have entered into. Or, in the African philosophy called “Ubuntu,” “I am because we are.”

That is especially true of Christian community, which professes to be the body of Christ doing the work of Christ in the world. Each person brings something to the table, each has a gift to put into the mix, and “the mix” comes together best for the common good when every part of the body is present, contributing and valued.

Finally, the Bishop posed his third question: Who should the church be in this dramatically changed and changing world? And this question is what Fr. Michael Bordelon’s entire sermon was about.

See, our church has changed more and faster over the past couple of years that anyone thought possible. Yes, change has always been “the norm,” but not the kind of change we have just come through.

Well! Let me hasten to say, we think we’ve come through it. We hope we’ve come through it. The truth is, we don’t know if we’re through it or if this is a short-term reprieve.

We speak longingly of “getting back to normal” or cautiously of a “new normal,” preferably one as much like the old normal as possible. But I think we know deep down that Covid is now part of the landscape and we must learn to live with it because it is not going away. Moreover, all the experts are telling us we better prepare for the next pandemic.

Not only has the pandemic devastated our health and social lives, but the economic consequences are still ravaging our church budgets and personal pocketbooks. Add to that the devastation—physical and economic—caused by extreme weather events—hurricanes, especially. To top it off, we witness today the horror of one sovereign nation invading another sovereign nation, thereby dragging the entire world toward cataclysmic violence—perhaps even self-annihilation by nuclear war.

Brothers and sisters, we are in a situation. We are worn out and burned out by pandemic and loss, by political animosity, by fear for our democracy, not to mention the very future of our planet home.

So, I propose that now is an opportune time. What it is an opportune time for is up to us, because, you see, God also waits for opportune times in which to stretch us and move us out of our comfort zone into a world that needs us now more than ever.

So let us ask, What should church be and do in this situation? Going backward has never really been an option. We can engage in bouts of nostalgia but we cannot roll back the clock.

To make matters more challenging, at this very moment that the church must think outside the box, those of us still inside the box are, shall we say, a little long in the tooth and gray of the head. The church is aging and we want most of all the comfort of familiarity and stability.

And here we are instead, as Fr. Michael preached, called to innovate and to move out of our comfort zone.

All of the Canterbury kids and a few adults associated with Canterbury had lunch together at convention. The conversation turned to music in church, and one of the things I learned is that I, myself, must be a bit more open to contemporary Christian music. I love the old hymns! But I myself am also  aware that the theology expressed in many of those old hymns just is not what we believe today and does not up speak to today’s young adults facing and dealing with the challenges of today’s world. What do we do about that?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do have another idea. We also heard a report from Camp Hardtner at convention and it was a powerful reminder that summer camp is the first and best way for our diocese to minister to kids from primary school through high school. And we were urged to think of that ministry as—not just to the kids of our church family—but to all the kids of Louisiana. I wonder how Christ Church might offer a potentially life-saving experience at Camp Hardtner to some kids from St. Joseph, La

Brothers and sisters, we are in a situation, a challenging, daunting situation. We face our own mortality this Lenten season, not only as individual people but as a church.

But a situation is also an opportune time. We can yield to the temptation to look backward and yearn nostalgically for the past, or we can face it head on, step out in faith and follow Jesus to and through the cross. After Lent comes Easter. After death comes resurrection. And we are resurrection people.

In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, AMEN.

[Year C, 1 Lent Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13]