THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ I stand before you today as a man who is angry. Those who know me well wouldn’t be surprised to hear this. Those who don’t, well, in retrospect, it’s probably not a big surprise. 

I see planned instances of cruelty and hatred playing out in our national life. I wonder why millions would choose hatred while claiming faith in the one who came because “God so loved the world.” 

I listen as a dear friend is reduced to tears because healthcare systems are so preoccupied with how services are billed that they seem to have forgotten how to provide patient care. 

I answer the telephone to hear yet one more person ask for assistance to pay for a room in a boarding house, only to have to say I don’t have anything available to help, even while knowing it’s just for one month, and the calendar keeps progressing. 
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I wear out the mute button on a television remote to silence advertisements that promise a better life if we’ll spend what we have on their product. I see promises that if you’ll only use this body wash, this perfume, this hair color, this nail color, this makeup, this jewelry, even talk your doctor into prescribing this medication, you can be the “real” you everyone else wants to know. 

I’m angry, in part, because the serpent is still slithering around making promises that can’t be kept, yet even after thousands of years, we keep hoping they will come true. I’m angry because we keep selling our souls to the lowest bidder, hoping for power, wealth and fame even after we claim to know Jesus rejected those same things in his sojourn in the wilderness. 

I’m angry because all these things keep draining our very souls even as we chase after them, deluding ourselves that this time will be different. And we wonder why it all seems so elusive, so far out of our grasp, so futile. 

I’m tired of being angry. It’s so draining, it takes so much energy because I keep thinking that expressing my anger might result in changing everyone and everything around me. And I’m tired of being angry at that not being true. 

That is why I need to return to where we are today. I need to hear today’s first lesson and present my anger at being blamed for something that we're told happened thousands of years ago, if it’s actually true, and not just being held responsible for my own actions after I was old enough to know better. I mean, those things are probably quite enough on their own. 

​I need to offer my anger over being told that I need to work it out for myself, to get myself saved, lest I lose all hope, despite what Paul tells the Roman Church has already been accomplished for all of us, for all time.

I need to offer all the times I said yes to the temptations of power and wealth and fame in some way because, frankly, it felt really good when it happened.

I need to make all those, and all the pain of rejection, loss, and even fleeting success my offering to the only One who can redeem them and make them a loving encounter instead of a continuing source of pain and anger.

You see, when we come together and dare to approach the altar of grace, we place upon that altar, in one way or another, all that we are so that it might be consecrated into the very foundation of our lives. That means that we finally let go of all that has caused us pain and anger, stop letting those things identify who we are by offering them to God who takes what can be the nothingness of our own need to create a better past and somehow create it into a fountain of new life.

That’s the only way I’ve found to see my anger turned into a life-giving acceptance of the abundant life Jesus promises. I need to hear how you have witnessed your own offerings being transfigured in like manner, especially when events of my own life darken the way ahead of me.

I need to hear your stories of walking in the wilderness areas of life, and how you’ve answered the temptations presented along the way. And I need to hear how your return met your starvation and thirst for righteousness with a renewed hope of redemption.

Jesus may have gone into the wilderness alone. But since he did, we are not alone in our own journeys into similar places. He is there with us, or waiting when we wander out, hand outstretched with a cup of cool water, offering a sip of love and redemption to salve our parched souls.
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Reminding myself of that, I’m not so angry anymore.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 

Today is about death. The words we hear are meant to remind us that we will all one day face death. We must do it ourselves, for ourselves, and sometimes, by ourselves. 

Today is about origins. Genesis tells us that humankind was formed from the dust of the earth. God formed it, and breathed life into it. God then performed the first thoracic surgery, we’re told, and even had anesthesia way back then. We’ve been a bit slow to catch up. 
Clergy say the words we hear today as a reminder when we stand at the graveside. The Book of Common Prayer reads, “all we go down to the dust . . . .” The next phrase contains the “A” word we’re not supposed to say during Lent, except when we are at that graveside, so I’ll translate. “Yet even at the grave we make our song ‘Praise God’.” 

It strikes me that it’s entirely possible that in our clinging to tradition and repeating words written for us centuries ago that we could be missing an important point. After all, we have a lot more practical experience with origins and death than we have with the event the Lenten season tries to prepare us for. 

I want to invite you to consider the words, “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” in a different light. To do that, we have to go back to our last big celebration, even festivities that may have resulted in our need for confession. 

I’m talking about the Incarnation. Not Christmas, as we know it in our culture. Incarnation. Remember the Prologue to John’s Gospel heard on Christmas Day and the Sunday following, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” 

Flesh. Flesh and blood. Living, breathing, hungry, often weary human flesh. Walking, talking, healing, loving human flesh that is also the embodiment of the divine cosmic Christ, the very activity of God at creation. Perhaps even the very hands that formed humankind in the first place, the Spirit-filled lungs that breathed life into that new creation. 

And then, that divine cosmic Christ becomes the Incarnate One whose coming to us in complete vulnerability creates the way to our salvation. In other words, the Immortal One becomes dust. 

This fulfillment of Isaiah’s words often translated as “I have given you a new name, you are Mine” takes on new meaning when we turn this day upside down and shake new life out of it. That word “Mine” is with a capital M, a proper name according to Jewish scholars, and not a description or a possession.

Maybe we should consider using a capital “D” for dust. For the Incarnate One, the universal, cosmic Christ, invites us into unity as we are joined with him because he joined with us. Remember that you belong to Christ and to Christ you shall return, in all our dustiness.

And for that reason we can set aside the marks of mourning and death because we can approach God in our confession assured that we are loved, and, yes, forgiven. Oh, we’re still going to mark everyone with ashes, because we need to keep reminding ourselves that we all too often resemble dust more than we do glory. But we can come knowing through faith that Love (capital L) invites us to return home because we, Dust, are part of God’s own, Mine. That makes this day about life, new life, forgiven and redeemed life. Life lived in the intimacy of divine love.
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Why, it’s enough to make a preacher want to say the A word during Lent.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

 ​ The days between the Feast of the Epiphany and Ash Wednesday are a time of revelation of who Jesus is. The first one comes when travelers from distant lands show up and present gifts. The last one comes with a story of Jesus leading three close friends up a mountain where they witness him in conversation with two giants of their faith—Moses and Elijah. 

These two represent the law and the prophets, the foundation of our ancestral Jewish faith. If you look back at their personal histories you’ll find two leaders who were sometimes imperfect in their own faithfulness, yet here they are. The fact that they are present is another revelation, that being life beyond, or after, if you will, death. 

Part of that may be that there is no witness to the death of Moses. He just wanders away after giving a bunch of former slaves some final words before they cross into a land of promise. And, more dramatically, Elijah was swept up in a chariot of fire as his successor looked on in amazement. Did something similar happen with Moses? We won’t know until we possibly get our own one-on-one time with him. 

Today’s revelation of who Jesus is might be a bit more difficult to explain than a disappearing liberator or even chariots of fire appearing in the sky. How do we explain the process of tranfiguration, a term sometimes translated as metamorphosis? That is the Greek word used by Matthew. 

We might be tempted to resort to words like “magic” or consider some type of secret ritual. But those attempts stem more from our own desire to control or express our enlightened rational ways of thinking. 

Just before Christmas I read a book by Richard Rohr that described what he understands about a minute particle called “neutrinos.” Fr. Rohr writes of these as tiny particles of light found throughout the universe and in every living thing. As we preach and teach of the “light coming into the world” during this time of year, it’s easy to translate that into the presence of our Creator in everything that is, and in all that lives. 

It’s a bit more complex than that, as you might imagine. Yet, consider that in the one whom the Gospels say referred to himself as “the Son of Man” the possibility that the cosmic Christ could embody all that lives isn’t out of the realm of theological and Christological study. 
So before I dive completely into esoteric language in an attempt to describe the indescribable, let me redirect. 

I receive a lot of mail offering different avenues to church growth. It seems there are a great number of disciples of marketing ready to take a credit card number. Most of them urge us to spend much time (and money, of course) using their amazing methods to transform the numbers of our membership. They want us to name all those wonderful things about ourselves to let everyone know just how wonderful it would be if they would come and be just like us.

It’s the equivalent of “let us make three booths” except with skee ball and cotton candy. The trinkets wouldn’t be all that different, though.
Today isn’t about who we are, or even who Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John are. It’s about who Jesus is, and even not just about who Jesus is for us. Who Jesus is goes way beyond our language and our attempts to explain it.

Yet, here we are in the time after the time when we are to start telling the story of our witness of who Jesus is. That story is always personal before it becomes universal or cosmic. And the language most suited to the telling of that story is often silence, for the change created in us after our encounter with the cosmic, risen Christ, will be unmistakable when witnessed by those who knew us “back then.”
Even if we were baptized shortly after our first diaper change and were then raised in a community of the faithful, an encounter with the one whose transfiguration we hear about today defies explanation. That’s especially true when we consider that we, too, are to be transfigured into his eternal life when life as we know it changes from our present journey into being in Christ’s eternal presence.

We cannot make even a glimpse of transfiguration happen, nor can we claim it for ourselves. It is to be witnessed by others as they see what a glimmer of the light of love makes possible in all our lives. When it all comes together, when all the ingredients given to us in our journey as disciples of the crucified Lord form a new creation, it’s just possible that the unexplainable transfiguration of creation itself will become the place where the Beloved is heard and seen.
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It’s time to tell that story, and, if necessary, to use inadequate words.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

I often wonder if one of the problems the contemporary institutional church faces is one we’ve created for ourselves. It’s not that different ways of explaining our faith seem to contradict each other. (They do.) Nor is it that we’ve discovered through the years that words in original languages didn’t mean what we thought they did, but we’ve held onto incorrect meanings because, well, that’s what we’ve always done. (That’s true, too.) 

One of the earliest controversies of the church was about baptism. It’s our rite of initiation into the community of the faithful. In some cases, it’s a naming ceremony, too, as birth certificates are a fairly recent thing in our society, and baptismal records were perhaps the only written evidence of date of birth, parentage, and so on. We have a seal used on transcripts of those records as a mark of their official nature. 

Discussions over the effect of baptism included arguments over whether a person could be baptized a second time, and if a person sinned after baptism whether that person was doomed for all eternity. Nevermind the amount of water used, or the question of pouring, sprinkling, or full immersion in the ritual. 

These questions persist in our own time. You might recall a discussion just a year or so ago about the validity of hundreds of baptisms in a parish of another denomination in this country because the priest said, “we baptize you,” instead of “I baptize you.” And, in some instances, I have had to ask whether a person was baptized using a Trinitarian formula, our own requirement for the validity of the sacrament. Even in scripture, the question was raised whether a person received the baptism of John or in the name of Jesus. 

All of these questions, while worthy of discussion, put the emphasis on what we do instead of what God has done in the birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. And so I also wonder whether many of these questions and debates are really about our need to control who’s in and who’s out, turning our fellowship into more of a social club than a living agent of Good News for all people. 

This isn’t new, either. In The Acts of the Apostles, Peter is called before a council to explain why he baptized a Gentile household. We hear a part of his defense every year on Easter Sunday. So, maybe we’re not just trying to control who’s in and who’s out, but we’re really denying a universal effect of God’s act of salvation. In essence, it seems we’re trying to control God. That spills over into our debates about who is worthy of ordination, even though the call stories we hear from candidates echo those made by the ones now making decisions. 

From the time of Abraham, through the prophets, to Mary and Joseph and the first disciples, we’re told that God made the first move in calling individuals to a new relationship of faithful living—a covenant relationship established by God. I suppose any of those I named could have said no, and it could be that we don’t read of initial negative responses because, well, why bother with those? The first indication I read of any choice in the matter is in W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being, where the angel Gabriel says to Mary, “You must choose him who chooses you.”

I haven’t devoted any time (yet) to a sermon on the question, “what if Mary had said ‘no’?”

But it is worth our time to consider whether in all this we have simply made things more difficult than they need to be. So much of popular discourse on religious matters seem to focus on a God who is, frankly, pretty weak. It’s almost as if the act of creation wore God out, eliminating any energy for much of anything else until the resurrection, except for that Red Sea crossing thing.
Even accepted atonement theories seem to weaken God. A penalty had to be paid. A ransom paid to the devil. An ultimate sacrifice had to be made to satisfy all beings of divine origin.

All these points, and many others, avoid dealing with a much simpler question. What if salvation is made possible for everyone, and everything, just because God says so? We might require baptism in order to be a member of our church, but is God unable to work in and through us until that happens? Is salvation only made possible through faithful church membership?

I think you know my answer to those questions, but there are those who might be thinking of channeling their inner Torquemada and looking for enough dry wood to barbecue a heretic.

I believe the Apostle Paul’s point in all his letters is that God has accomplished all that is necessary for the salvation of the world. And, even Jesus himself, when asked “who can be saved?” replied that for humans it was impossible. But, he continues, for God, nothing is impossible.

Think about that. Our “yes” to God is our acknowledgement that God is already working in, through, and for us. Nothing we do here will save us, but everything we do here is in gratitude for the gift of salvation given freely to us. We don’t show up in order to earn anything, nor do we stay away because everything has been completed. We gather to discover again what it means to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world. Children of God.

And that covers such a wide variety of expressions that our understanding of it can only be found in community. Salvation is not something we get for ourselves so that we get into heaven when we die. Salvation is the assurance that death does not have the final answer, so that we boldly proclaim life to its very face. That’s true whether it be in the face of illness, violence, greed, or individual and institutional fear.

​There exist in our own time those powers that weaken when God’s light-filled, dare I say salty children show up and name them for who and what they are. I said recently to a Wednesday gathering that evil is incapable of learning, so it keeps repeating its same mistakes over and over again. It even tried once to forever weaken God. But then God got its attention by pointing to an empty tomb.

Our darkening world needs more and more of the light that continues to shine from the many tombs of our own time. Choose to be the light that has already chosen you to bear it.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ A long time ago in a diocese far, far away, I read a book entitled Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language. I remember it being an interesting book, but didn’t take to heart its real meaning until God decided to remind me what I had forgotten. 

I was in seminary, a place where dreams often find themselves encountered by nightmares. My life was changing in many ways; two other journeys through graduate school didn’t seem to be nearly as personally challenging as did the present. And, the death of a mentor and both of my grandmothers in a four-month span caused much introspection. 

I started having nightmares, really vivid ones that startled me from sleep with the feeling that there was a presence in the room that I feared seeing. I remember being afraid to open my eyes in the darkness to peer into that dark corner where I sensed the presence was lurking. I do remember its shape and purpose forming in my thoughts. It was a vampire, and I did not have Buffy on speed dial, which actually didn’t even exist then. 

These dreams occurred, often nightly, until I posed a question and dared answering it. What is it that seems to be draining the very life out of me? My inability to face the answer led to other issues affecting my life and my ability to glimpse even a slight possibility of what I’ve since understood as Jesus’ promise of abundant life. 

Okay. Enough true confessions, lest someone begin writing a script for the next Lifetime or Hallmark movie. I tell you this because today’s lessons point us in directions away from ways of life that are often draining away God’s purpose for us, God’s promise to us, even, dare I say, God’s dream for us. 

Israel is in trouble, problem child that it has been since Jacob started limping. Corinth is a fractious place, the haves positioned against the have nots, while some others come along and make spreading the Gospel a competitive sport. Jesus’ followers are learning a new way of life, a movement that will challenge the status quo not only of religious leaders, but will expose the lie taught by the governing Pax Romana. 

In The Many Lives of Greta Wells, the author Andrew Scott Greer writes of a young man walking in the New York City snow with his sister and his dog, who does what dogs do at every tree along the way. A woman emerges from her front door in her housecoat and yells at them to “take their dog away. They’re killing the trees.” The young man looks at her and asks, “Ma’am, are you the person you dreamed of being when you were a young girl?” 

I want to paraphrase that question for us as the parish known as Immanuel Highlands. Are we the parish, the people God dreamed of us being when our founders were led to form this part of the Body of Christ in 1870? Looking even further back, are we all together, as that Body, Christ’s Church, whom God dreamed of us being as Christ was raised from the dead? Are we, some of the spiritual descendants of that rascal Jacob, renamed Israel, whom God had in mind, the God whom Jacob wrestled with all night, resulting in that limp I mentioned a few minutes ago? 

The answer we may not want to admit is perhaps “not sure,” or even, “no.” And so, we gather from week-to-week to hear and ponder again what it takes to turn that “no” into a resounding “yes.” Resounding, mind you, because it will be echoed by the God who dreams us into being in the first place. 

To reach that “yes,” we may find ourselves in a great reversal similar to those Beatitudes we might have memorized in Sunday School. We might need to lay aside, slay if you must, our individual achievements and self-congratulations to not just see others as our equals, but to choose equality with them by changing our judgmental opinions of both of us. 

We might also hear that “yes” in response to our uttering the “no.” The world has changed since 1870, let alone since the day of Jesus’ resurrection or of Jacob’s all-night wrestling match. We can’t change that, nor can we stop the changes that lie ahead of us. God’s yes could come as the response to evidence that, no matter what, we remain faithful as we live into the promise of abundant life, reaching out to others with one hand as we reach out toward the possibilities of God’s dream for all of us with the other. 

Yes might mean that we let go of worship as being something we do for a prescribed hour and five minutes on Sunday (with music, forty minutes without) and see true worship as an all-encompassing way of life, our offerings being our whole selves and not just a portion of our paycheck. 

We might need to remember a phrase we hear once a year so that we can truly “walk humbly with our God.” Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. In other words, we are not God. If we see an outward and visible sign of our faith in our accomplishments and our possessions, then we have to admit that the god we worship is pretty much the person we see in the mirror. 

Of course, understanding the meaning of God’s dream might also mean setting aside memories that once exhibited life, but whose re-creation results in life being drained from us. Our devotion to the past too often finds our grip around our own necks, and risks seeing our dreams turned into nightmares of confusion and burnout that cannot offer life, only death in some form as an escape from them. 

So, after all that, what is God’s dream for us? While we engage a process to rediscover the answer, let us keep in mind that it’s been the same all along. From the moment of creation, through the call of Abraham and the prophets, even in the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, God’s dream is the same: faithful children, heirs of a promise that has once and for all eliminated the nightmare of eternal death, choosing instead to present the gift of abundant life that goes on forever. How that dream becomes flesh and lives among us is our commentary on our own re-awakening.