Finding Faith in a Netflix Binge

What does Buster Bluth have to do with faith?

Tony Hale is a successful comic actor, producer, and writer. You may know Tony from his laugh-out-loud characters Buster Bluth in "Arrested Development" and Gary in "Veep". He is also delightfully forthright about his faith in Jesus Christ. During a routinely secular interview on television, podcasts, or radio he will cheerfully share about how he depends on God.  

In one interview, I heard Tony refer to the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ from Galatians 5:22-23; “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” To his skeptical interviewer, the actor simply and gently said, “Well, I am working on one or two of those things every day. His ways are higher than my ways and that is why I need Him in my life.”

Tony says one of his favorite moments in church comes in the five minutes before the service begins. After he sits in a pew with his family, as he enjoys the quiet, he slowly scans the congregation. Sitting in the midst of a community of faith, he says, gives him an incredible feeling of support. Tony, like all of us, needs to know he is not alone as a student and follower of Jesus. One gift his fellow worshippers give him is the sure knowledge that he is not alone.

How many of us think about what we give to our neighbor when we worship and not just what it means to us? Gathering on the sabbath is a way to support each other as we seek the nurturing grace, trust, and courage we need to follow the Way of Love. When we pass the peace, when we welcome each other, when we seek out new hands to shake and names to learn, we are building the flesh and muscle of the body of Christ through relationship and through support for our neighbors.  

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

Exhausting Our Lord

Text in graphic: This Week in the Rector's Note: Exhausting our Lord. 10.3.2019.
Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Episcopal
"Jesus must find me exhausting."
Graphic: Photograph of a statue of a woman, possibly Mary the Mother of God,
with her head down and resting on her left hand, with fingers curled under.
The stone statue appears to be attached to a stone building - there are bare tree
branches in the distance in the top right of the image. the stone is considerably
covered with moss on the top of the veiled head and the hand.

Jesus must find me exhausting.
This thought occurred to me while at prayer during my vacation. Here I was listing off all my needs, sharing my sorrows and hurts, praying for my long list of friends and family in need, and begging for guidance, serenity, wisdom, courage, and every other virtue I lack, when I suddenly had tremendous sympathy for Jesus! What would it be like to be bombarded by this catalogue of woes daily by millions of people?

My instant reflex was to mutter an apology to Jesus for bothering him so much. Recognizing my neurotic guilt, I had a good laugh at myself and my stinking thinking and then - by God’s grace - I returned to awe and admiration for Jesus. How much love does it take to have enough love for everyone? I struggle to be adequately loving day in and day out to my little family of four. We are talking about a whole other scale of love here.

That is a huge relief for me and, I hope, for you. While I want always to grow in love as God’s grace nurtures me into “the full stature of Christ,” I need to admit that the world is too big and too demanding for even the highest capacity my loving will ever reach. What the world needs is the love of Jesus direct from him. The best I can do is to hopefully give folks a glimpse of that surpassing, all encompassing love in fragmentary form.
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” sang Burt Bacharach and he was so right. What we realize as we age and grow in wisdom through the crucible of marriage, parenting, family life, community life, friendship, and work is that we need a source of love beyond ourselves if we are going to do our part of that loving.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

Stop Hiding, Open Up those Boxes

Image: A pale wood box with a gold clasp sits slightly open, with the opening of the box turned 20-30 degrees to the left.
Text in graphic: This Week in the Rector's Note "We are all wounded. Self-awareness, honesty, and trusting community help us turn our wounds into gifts of wisdom, sensitivity, and compassion. ...Again and again in pastoral caregiving at St. Martin’s I encounter wonderful people who are adding suffering to their suffering because they think they are the only one struggling in the community." - Stop Hiding, Open Up those Boxes. 9.26.2019. Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Episcopal.

A journalist asked Brad Pitt the following question during an interview about his upcoming movie, “Was Ad Astra a way to work through some of the loneliness you may have been experiencing?” His answer was vulnerable and revealing, “The fact is, we all carry pain, grief, and loss,” he said. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. So you open up those boxes.”

The article then gives the back story which I quote at length:

It was reported that the final straw in Pitt’s 11-year relationship with (Angelina) Jolie came in September 2016, when they fought about his drinking while aboard a private plane. Now, Pitt is committed to his sobriety. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told me. After she filed for divorce, Pitt spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous. 

His recovery group was composed entirely of men, and Pitt was moved by their vulnerability. “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Pitt said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.” 

Astonishingly, no one from the group sold Pitt’s stories to the tabloids. The men trusted one another, and in that trust, he found catharsis. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself,” he said. “There’s great value in that.”

I am grateful for the brave honesty Brad Pitt displays in this interview. My hope is that his example helped hundreds, maybe thousands of people, come out of hiding and into spaces transparency, trust, healing, and growth.

“We all carry pain, grief, and loss.” We are all wounded. Self-awareness, honesty, and trusting community help us turn our wounds into gifts of wisdom, sensitivity, and compassion. Hiding, avoiding, and denying cause wounds to fester into self-destructive behaviors and acting out which passes the harm to others. God’s grace transforms our despair over our wounds into hope for progress and growth into a “new creation.”

Again and again in pastoral caregiving at St. Martin’s I encounter wonderful people who are adding suffering to their suffering because they think they are the only one struggling in the community. They tell me that they feel that “everyone else” must “have it all together;” “have it all figured out,” or “have it easy.” When we only present ourselves as happy, high achieving, successful, and winning - that is, when we only share one side of our life - without knowing it we may be increasing the isolation of someone who is struggling. One of the most helpful things we can say to someone is, “You are not alone.”

I want St. Martin’s to be a community of love, acceptance, and grace where people feel free to come out of hiding and find the healing we all crave. Our church is called to be this way because Jesus was this way, and he continues to give us what we need to brave the journey into honesty and vulnerability.

In God’s presence there is no hiding, no deception, no masks, and no facade. As the Prayer Book says so beautifully, God is the one, “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” We are transparent before God’s pervasive light and all encompassing love.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

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If you'd like to know more about addiction and recovery, please join us at Parish Forum on Sunday, October 6 where Steele Stevens will lead a discussion on Understanding Addictions. Learn more on our Parish Forum page.

Taking God on Vacation

Editorial Note: Today the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel leaves on the youth pilgrimage to Guatemala with a team of two additional adults and eight teens and young adults. Please pray for them in their travels and for safe return at the end of the month. In the meantime, we present a series of guest posts beginning with this one from our newest Deacon, the Rev. Barb Ballenger.

When I was a kid, camping was the family vacation of choice. We had a large Coleman tent that fit five of us like sardines, and a separate awning to create a dining area. My dad had crafted a camp box that held all the camp kitchen essentials, from minute rice to marshmallow forks. To this day the smell of canvas and wood smoke or the taste of Tang can make me feel at least 40 years younger. 

These trips were often long weekends in Ohio state parks; though sometimes they were multi-state excursions of a week or so. They would inevitably include a Sunday and my mom would make sure that we went to church. 

I remember them as a blur of tiny, clapboard rural Catholic churches. The smells would be different from what I was used to, the layout strange, the pews different from the large suburban church we attended at home. Occasionally we would find ourselves at a campground service, seated on cut logs in the amphitheater where we had watched “Charlie the Lonesome Cougar” the night before. 

My mother saw to it that we were a weekly church-going family, and vacation was no exception. Looking back, it was one of the few times we visited other churches, where we got a chance to explore how others marked their Sabbath, sang their songs, or arranged their donuts during coffee hour.  

There is something about summer that changes the feel of church-going. Trips, camps, even just a little time off, can slow things down or break things up when it comes to our Sunday practice. This change of pace can be an opportunity to do some spiritual exploring. For families, visiting other churches during trips can be a conversation starter about faith and religious preferences. What was the same? What was different? What did it feel like to be a visitor? Was I welcome? Did I find God there? These are good insights to bring back to your regular church experience. They are good questions to ask on any Sunday.

If summer vacation offers you the luxury of a quiet morning, consider it an invitation to explore prayer in a new way. Bring a Book of Common Prayer along (or download an app from Apple or Google) and pray morning prayer  with a cup of coffee nearby, or read the psalms to the rhythm of ocean waves or the song of gulls. Even just sitting on a familiar back patio in the presence of a garden box or hanging flowers can extend summer’s invitation to contemplate a God that reveals the divine self through the scents of flowers, the hum of bees, or the distraction of humming bird or mosquito whine. 

This summer, let your time away or your time to yourself be opportunities to rest with the Spirit and delight in the places where God waits for you. When you make it back to St. Martin’s, I’d love to see the pictures. 

Blessings,

The Rev. Barb Ballenger

Deacon and Associate for Spiritual Formation and Care

Editorial: Here are some resources to get you started!

• Find an Episcopal Church near you -- https://www.episcopalchurch.org/find-a-church
• Forward Day by Day - These quarterly booklets offer daily scripture and reflections that fit in a pocket or purse. Copies are available in the back of the church or on the table and in the rack in the Parish House lobby. Donations are welcome. Want an app for that? Download the Forward Day by Day app for your smartphone.
• The Daily Office from the Mission of St. Clare --  https://www.missionstclare.com/english/ -- gives you all you need for the prayers of the Episcopal Daily Office, including songs.
• Listen to Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's Way of Love podcasts, with new episodes posted each Tuesday -- https://wayoflove.episcopalchurch.org/
• Bible Lens app by YouVersion -- Bible Lens “transforms your everyday photos into profound, Biblically-based artistic shareable images.” Take a photo of the places that you are finding God on vacation, and then open them in Bible Lens to see them paired with Bible verses that match!
• Find the Episcopal saint of the day -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints_(Episcopal_Church)#July

The Empty Wagon is the Noisiest

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Nothing rattles quite so loudly as an empty wagon. That folk wisdom came to me through the song “Little America” by REM, my favorite band from 1983 to the present. Much to my frustration, the Christianity I love and depend on for my sanity, sobriety, and hope is too often misrepresented by the loudest, most clamorous and hateful voices today. As a church striving to be faithful to the steadfast way of Jesus Christ, it is appalling that one of our greatest afflictions is the chorus of all those who misrepresent him loudly.

Why is it difficult to pass the faith on to our children? One reason, among others, it that the amplified voice of right-wing Christianity has them convinced that all christians hate LGBTQ people, want women to be subservient, deny climate change, blame the poor for their suffering, and support white supremacy. If your daily media diet is flooded by bullying voices and their often stridently simplistic opponents, then why would you risk the company of Christians in the first place?

So how do we stand up to the playground bullies of Christianity?

The Bible is a good place to start. “If I do not have love I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” (1 Cor. 13:2) Apply the love test. Is it love or is it aggression? Is it love or is it the noise of a rear-guard fight against cultural change and the loss of privilege? Yes, some Christian traditions are being discarded and for some that feels like a fearful loss of power and position. For me, I see us discarding oppression and returning our faith to its roots in liberating love. As a white, upper-middle class, cisgender man I find this disconcerting and disorienting. But as a man of faith, I embrace the loss as the way Christ proscribes for me, “You must lose your life to find it.”

The danger of the moment is increased by noisy gongs and clanging cymbals on the liberal Christian side too. It seems to me at times that liberal Christians are so zealous in skepticism and deconstruction of the tradition that they leave us no place to stand and resist. If we destroy our moral source and framework entirely, who are we to challenge any other (supposedly) equally valid point of view? You will never hear me describe myself as “liberal” Christian for this very reason. Our tradition and scripture deconstruct me more than I them.

I certainly do not want to live in a world without the faithful, long-suffering, and steadfast church of Jesus Christ. At our best we are the moral ballast that reins in our worst collective impulses toward greed, revenge, and domination. At our best we propose an alternative world order that resists the amoral gyrations of unrestrained free markets, even when we are not sure how to completely replace capitalism with something more just.

“If it is not about love it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” says our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. Filling our wagons with love is how we end the clanging and rattling and begin to ground our moral positions in their true and trustworthy source, Jesus Christ. What if we spoke about the love that drew us to a position of advocacy before we start to shout?

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector