By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Interim Rector

Genesis 21:8-21

Every so often, I hear people talking with a certain nostalgia about biblical family values.  Clearly, those people have not read the book of Genesis.

All summer long, we are going to hear stories from this first book of the bible, stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of our faith.  And it’s a lesson in how daunting the very idea of family can be.  There’s some pretty weird stuff in there.  The culture of the ancient near east was a nomadic one, and the social conventions are certainly not what you and I would think of as, well, conventional.   Multiple wives are bought, sold, and traded around like cattle.  Children are conceived maybe with a wife or maybe with a mistress, but it doesn’t really matter too much in pursuit of an heir.

The real breakdown in “family values,” though, is not seen in these accidents of history.  It’s emotional wreckage–which actually seems quite contemporary.  All these stories from Genesis make clear that our ancestors four thousand years ago were no more adept than we are at navigating the complexities of the human heart.  Genesis reminds us that human beings have always struggled with favoritism, and jealousy, and anxiety, and fear.

Read between the lines of our story today and you will hear a lot of familiar questions, questions that we don’t always like to ask but that nonetheless persist in our flawed lives.  Like, what happens when we think we’re going to fail at our most intimate relationships?  Will we be able to love our partners enough?  What about our children?  What happens when our resources are limited?  Are we humans bound to fail?  What about God?  Can God fail at relationships, too?

To remind you what the stakes are here, we’re in the midst of the stories about Abraham and his wife Sarah.  God has promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation but has been frustratingly vague on the details of how that might happen—especially when it appears that Sarah is unable to have children.  At first, Sarah thinks she can fix the problem herself: she follows the custom of the time and sends her slave Hagar to sleep with her husband, so that Hagar’s child—a son named Ishmael—might serve as heir.  God has a different solution in mind, however.  We heard last week how angels showed up at Abraham’s tent and promised a child to Sarah, an idea so far-fetched as to make her bust out in laughter.  But here it has come true: that miracle child is born, and not only born but growing and thriving and ready for his first big party.

And here’s where we see it all fall apart again.

Genesis does not pretend that the players in this story have any particular virtue.  It is painfully honest about how these men and women are, like us, all kinds of good and bad and magnanimous and small all mixed up together.  Sarah, the laughing one, the one who has endured so much waiting for the promise of God—she is also the one who cannot escape jealousy.  “Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac.”  And she was determined to get rid of her son’s rival.  In the Hebrew, those last four words—with her son Isaac—don’t even appear; Sarah simply cannot stand to see this other child playing at the feast.  There is not enough room in her heart.

And Abraham—he doesn’t come off much better.  Abraham the faithful one, the one who has held so steadfastly to the covenant—he is also the one who cannot figure out how to care simultaneously for both sides of his strangely blended family.   There is not enough room in his imagination.  He prays to God and gives Hagar a little food for the road and then just brushes off his dirty hands.  To me, it looks like he wants to do the right thing but really doesn’t have much idea what that would be.

And Hagar.  If any player is wronged in this story, it is she; she is the casualty of Sarah’s insecurity and Abraham’s weakness.  And yet she is also the one who gives up.  She runs out of water in the wilderness and, unlike Abraham and Sarah, who made their own solution to every problem, she just sits down and waits to die.  Literally.  She gives up on her child, and she gives up on herself.

Everyone here fears failure.  Everyone here fears loss.  And everyone here is complicit is failure and loss, too.

So what might redeem this story?  And what would redemption look like?

“The angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, sand said to her, “What troubles you Hagar?  Do not be afraid.”  And here we have the fundamental promise of the whole book of Genesis: that we may fail, but God does not.  That our love may be limited, but God’s is not.   God shows up.  We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we know that God is going to show up.  And because we know that, we do not have to be afraid.

What’s particularly compelling to me about this redemption—what makes it ring true—is that is it, like the rest of Genesis, so very realistic.   There is no papering over human flaws here; there is no pretending that God can put everything back the way it was before these people and their flaws messed it all up.  But there is the insistence that God will not stop loving anyone.  God made a declaration of love to Abraham, and he kept it.  God made a declaration of love to Sarah, and he kept it.  God made a declaration of love to Isaac, and he kept it.  And now he will find a way to love Hagar and Ishmael, too.  There is no way that God will let human smallness keep him from love.

The gospel we heard this morning was spoken for different circumstances, but its message seems fitting here, too: “Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”  Do not be afraid; God is paying attention.  Do not be afraid; God will find a way to love you, too.  Whoever.  Wherever.

The story of Genesis may seem long ago and far away; none of us is worried about being sent out with just a loaf of bread and a water skin.  But we are worried about being in the desert, aren’t we?  Human nature just hasn’t changed a lot, and failure of our human relationships and human emotions haunts us still.  Whether you are worried about a marriage, or a parent, or a child, or even the web of relationships that makes up this family we call parish—whatever the setting, the weakness of human character is there.  It is really easy to be afraid that we will be enough for one another.

But God promises us: you do not have to be afraid.  There’s enough love to go around, because that love comes from God, and God does not fail.

Brothers and sisters, we can make no promises about one another.   But we can make promises, and we can trust promises, about God.  God was in that desert, and God is in this desert, too.  God saw Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, and Hagar and Ishmael, too.  And God will not overlook anyone.  God will not overlook you.  Take heart, and get up, and keep going, and be brave.  God will never forget any one of us.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Interim Rector

Matthew 28:16-20

This week, I was introduced to the idea of quantum entanglement.  It’s a concept in physics, which says that two things are linked—they are entangled—when they are correlated at their most fundamental level.  The state of one thing cannot be described independently of the other.  Change in one thing will produce change in the other.  Entanglement happens at a subatomic level, and it is apparently common in the aftermath of particle collisions.  But what’s really weird is that even though the scale of entanglement is small—I mean, teeny weeny particles, right?—it’s also really huge.  Theoretically, two molecules could remain entangled even if they are a million miles apart.  Einstein was one of the first researchers of quantum entanglement, and he called it “spooky action at a distance.”

Lots of people have questioned quantum theory, including the very scientists who thought it up.  But research continues to bear out its truth.  Entanglement can be documented.   Pieces of this universe we inhabit are measurably, persistently connected to other pieces.   A particle spinning in one direction in a lab can tell us something about a particle spinning counter to it in a lab halfway across town.

As I read about all this science this week, it felt really crazy and bizarre to me.  It also felt familiar.  Because I know the truth of entanglement.  Any of us who worship as Christians talk about it on any given Sunday because of the way we talk about God.  We talk about things that are separate and connected at the same time.  We talk about how there’s this Father who is also son who is, by the way, pay attention, also Holy Spirit.  We talk about Trinity.  And this is the Sunday when we talk about it an extra lot, because it is Trinity Sunday, and we are celebrating this crazy and bizarre understanding of our universe.

I have to be honest upfront: I do not understand the Trinity.  If you are looking for doctrine, go read a book of theology, because it will help you much more than I will.   I do not understand the Trinity, any more than I truly understand quantum physics, because these things are really, really complicated.

But even if I cannot understand their philosophical contours, I can tell you something about their truth.  Because they make sense at an emotional and spiritual level, don’t they?  Entanglement: this is something we know to be a fundamental part of our lives, isn’t it?

When the early church fathers—as the theologians of the first few centuries were called—set out to describe God as three in one and one in three, they got stuck with two irreducible and seemingly contradictory claims, just as much as Einstein did.  On the one hand, Jesus was a different person from God, who was a different person from the Holy Spirit.  And, two, Jesus was God, who was also the Holy Spirit, and none of the three could be known separately.  Theologians floundered around looking for different models to explain the connection—was it like a ray of light emanating, maybe?—before settling on the somewhat mysterious formulation we have today: a trinity of persons and unity of being.

I think they settled on this formulation because it expresses this truth we all experience.  It insists that there is no connection without wholeness—and, at the same time, no wholeness without connection.  The nature of this universe is the same as the nature of the God who created it.   The nature of this universe is entangled.

Perhaps it’s apt to be thinking about spooky action at a distance as we read for the gospel this day the story of Jesus preparing to leave his disciples for the last time.  It’s the ascension again, another version of the same story that we have been living with, liturgically, for the last few weeks.  The resurrection has happened and now Jesus is preparing to take off, presumably for good, headed up to heaven.  He’s giving his final, final words to his disciples.  And for the finale, he tells them this: “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Goodbye.  But not really.  Talk about action at a distance.  Jesus is leaving forever.  Yet Jesus is promising to be always near.

I think it’s more than a feel-good promise.   Really, it’s not even a promise at all as much as a statement of reality.  Jesus promises to be always near because that’s who Jesus is—someone who knows connection at the subatomic level.   This is the truth of the divine nature, and so the truth of the human nature, too.  Jesus cannot truly leave his disciples because Jesus cannot truly leave anyone, period.  Jesus is with them, with us, always.

I don’t know if we are really entangled with Jesus—if our particles are entangled in the classical sense of physics—but imagine this: that our molecules spin in relation to the molecules that make up Jesus, not caring about time, not caring about space.  Or imagine it in the words of the hymn we sang around our gospel this morning, Saint Patrick’s Breastplate—I bind to myself this world, and the flashing lightning and the moon at even and the incarnation and God’s eyes and hands and the name of the Trinity itself—all those things chosen to become a part of me and me, maybe, a part of them.  Entangled.

What changes if we know this?  What is made possible if we can perceive this truth about our world and our God—that connection is in the very fabric of being?

Most of us fear separation. There are people we love that we never want to leave us.  Parents are supposed to live forever.  Spouses are supposed to stay for always.  Children are supposed to be around long after us.  Friends are supposed to be like rock.  Priests are supposed to be that way, too, I’ve sometimes heard.  We’re not supposed to go anywhere, any of us.  When the circumstances of life tug against those hopes, it hurts.  It makes most of us frightened.  Change is hard.  How can we bear losing anything in this world full of what we love?

And yet, in a Trinitarian view, nothing is ever lost.  Because distance—whether of time or space or any other force—distance does not truly separate us.  We continue to affect one another and be affected by one another.  Your state depends on mine.  Our state depends on God.  We are entangled, for better or for worse, measurably, demonstrably tied to one another.

Love on a subatomic scale, as one of the articles I read described it.  This universe is made of up of love on a subatomic scale.  We are made by and for connection, and we can do nothing apart from it.

So what would it be like if we didn’t have to be afraid of separation?  What would it be like if we didn’t have to be afraid of change?  What would it be like to trust the particles that God put in your soul, particles that are at home in the soul next door and the soul down the block and the soul around the globe?  What becomes unimportant?  What becomes possible?  What can you do differently in this church, in your home, at work?  What can you risk in the world?

We are entangled, in all the best ways, brothers and sisters—entangled with one another and with our human family and with the God who made us.   And we can be brave knowing that nothing in the nature of that God will ever let us go.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Interim Rector

Acts 2:1-21

For years, I have felt let down by Pentecost.  It’s not for lack of trying: I have celebrated all the traditions that modern parishes celebrate.  I have worn red.  I have heard about the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites in French and Chinese.  I have eaten any number of slices of cake, all in honor of the birthday of the church.  But I have been pursued by this nagging sense of anticliamax.

Easter has come and Christ is risen and I wait to see what’s next, only to find . . . it’s the  church.  And something feels small about that to me.  People go and look for the Spirit of God in church.  Believe me, I am invested in the church.  But.  Isn’t the church a small place for God, in the end?

This week, I shared my sadness with a friend of mine, and she said, you know, you’ve got it backwards.  Pay attention to the story in Acts, she told me.  It’s not that people want to find the Spirit and so they go to church.  People get filled with the Spirit and they go make the church.  The church is not the home of the Spirit.  It is evidence of its passing by.

I’ve been turning that possibility over in my mind.  Do we let this happen to us?  Do we let the Spirit inhabit us?  Do we let the Spirit work through us?

Honestly, at first blush, the answer might be no.  Episcopalians are known as God’s frozen chosen for a reason.   Our worship is rote by design.  We read the same words, week in, week, out.  We sit in pews—sit being the operative word—facing in pretty much the same direction.  We’re polite.  And while I love our liturgy, I know that the risk of this kind of formalism is that it iterates into meaninglessness, that it stiffens into mindless repetition.

And—yet—I am standing up here, I have chosen to remain in this church, because I have witnessed something more.  I suspect the same is true for each of you.  There have been moments where a word catches the light and shines with new meaning.  There have been measures where an old chestnut of a hymn has lifted my heart.  And there have been the flat out surprises when I see the person in the next pew crying for no reason that I can name and my heart is filled with empathy and I want to cry, too.

The Spirit is at work.  And it is at work among us because it is at work in each of us.

We don’t talk nearly as much about the Spirit as we do about Jesus or about God the Father, and that’s a shame, because the promise of the Spirit is so persistent in our story.  Read even a little of your bible, and you will trip over the Spirit, because it is everywhere.  The Spirit moved over the surface of the earth at creation.  That Hebrew word for Spirit—ruach—it also means wind, and it also means breath.  When our creation took its first breath, that breath was the Spirit.  And it is the promise in the new creation of Jesus Christ, as well.  We heard about it in our gospel today, as the resurrected Jesus appears again from the dead and does the one thing he can do to show he’s not dead—he breathes—and then he breathes on his friends to share that air with them.  Anywhere that Paul wants to talk about having life, he talks about the gift of the Spirit—in Greek, it’s pneuma.  God is in the very air we breathe.

If you go to a yoga class, you may learn that the noise we make with your exhalation is the sound of the universe; in the Hindu tradition, the word Om is so sacred because it is the breath of all life.  In our Christian tradition, that sacred breath is all around us, too.  The preacher Rob Bell suggests that the Old Testament name for God—the four Hebrew letters YHVH—may be unpronounceable by tradition but is, really, the sound of breath going in and out.  The Apostle Paul, in the book of Romans, tells us that the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.  Those sighs are in our bodies and in all bodies, in our bellies, in the involuntary reflex of our brain stems.

I speak about all of this to remind you, to remind myself, that we know the Spirit of God.  There is nothing we can do apart from the Spirit, because Spirit is what makes us alive.

And so my idea that the church could somehow be a container for the Spirit—well, that does seem pretty turned around, doesn’t it?  My friend was right.  The Spirit is a precondition for church, not the other way around.   The Spirit holds the church, not the other way around.

What then does it mean for you, this day, to live in the Spirit—to worship, as Jesus says in the gospel of John—in Spirit and in truth?

I ask this big question knowing that it finds its answer, in part, in the smaller and more immediate questions before us.  We are at a moment in the life of this congregation where the church is being made new.  This parish is poised to call a new rector and so is thinking systemically about what life together going forward should look like; very immediately, many of you will meet today after worship to talk about calendars and ministries and plans for the months ahead.  And we who administer lots of business in our ordinary workaday lives—well, the temptation for us is to focus on executing the tasks, on the administration.

But what would it be like to be guided not by the good judgment of our minds but by the conviction of our guts, by breath of life?  What would happen if we trusted that sustaining power?  What could we let go of?  What could we risk?  What would fall to the ground?  What would rise to life?

And what if we asked those questions not just in the church of this parish but the church of the world?  For that, in the end, is the real promise of Pentecost: That we have the capability to see and name that sacred breath in all places.  That we have the ability to build the church not just in here—but out there.  Everywhere.   This temple of the world waits for our worship.  What would it mean to let God’s spirit connect us to places in need of power, in need of transformation, in need of revitalization?

My frozen chosen brothers and sisters, you don’t have to move one muscle in your pews to be filled with the Spirit.  In fact, I ask us to take a minute of quiet and listen.  Listen to the Spirit we share.  Listen to your own breath.  Listen to the breath we share, moving in and out.

Know it’s not just your body.  Is it your soul.  You have the power to hold God’s being, that that power to know God and make him known.

By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Interim Rector

Acts 1:6-14

My grandmother used to tell me that I was going to write the Great American Novel.  Back in high school, my fingers were always stained with fountain pen ink, and I carried around half finished stories in my backpack.  I was editor of the literary magazine.  And so my grandmother took to declaring my future to me, with unwavering certainty.  I was going to be a writer, with a capital W.

Whenever she told me that—whenever she named me as a writer—I swelled a little with pride.  And then I deflated.  Because the vote of confidence carried a strange burden with it.  I couldn’t quite understand it at the time, but I see now that it was the burden of expectation, the weight of potential.  Someone thought I could be someone.  Did I think the same?  Someone thought I could do something.  Would I?  Could I?  The Great American Novel cast a long shadow.

It was all the more difficult because my grandmother was an artist.  Every time I visited her studio or saw her pictures hanging in a gallery, I was reminded where I got my creativity from.  If I was to be living up to her hopes for me, I would really be living up to the standard she had set.  How I wanted to be the person she believed I could be.

This week the church invites us into that long shadow of potential.  We are in between, not yet, breath held, waiting.  Thursday was the feast of the Ascension, when the resurrected Jesus ascended to heaven.  We heard about it in the reading from Acts this morning, the cloud that lifted Jesus up and away.  Next week will be the feast of Pentecost, and you probably know what that’s about without reading ahead in Acts.  That’s when the Holy Spirit descends and sets everyone on fire.

But today, we pause in this moment of promise, this moment of maybe hope or maybe expectation or maybe even anxiety, and we hear not what Jesus has done for us but instead a declaration of what will happen: “It is not for you to know the times of periods that the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power . . . You will be my witnesses.”  You will be Apostles, with a capital A.

The bible does not record the reaction of Peter and James and John and all the rest.  But I know my own reaction to this proclamation.  And it is a complicated one.  Because I know myself and I know my abilities.  And I can get some stuff done but I’m not sure if that could be described as having power.  I can tell a good story, I can preach a sermon, but I am not sure if that is exactly witnessing to the ends of the earth.  Honestly, Jesus seems to have more confidence in me than I have in me.  I’m pretty sure he has more confidence than I deserve.

I know he has more confidence than those disciples deserve.  Given the story of the passion, they have shown themselves to be a bunch of weak-kneed, self-deceiving, fair-weather friends.  If you were to look through the gospels and pick a crew to carry the good news to the ends of the earth, really, there are better candidates—those people who recognize Jesus right off the bat, or those people who get healed and are willing to follow him wherever he goes at the drop of a hat.

In this moment the disciples carry what we all carry, at one time or another—the burden of a hope we cannot fulfill.   The burden of potential.  The burden of expectation.  It is doubled when it comes from someone whom we love and respect.  We want to be our best selves for the people who believe in our best selves.  But the truth is, if we know ourselves, it’s long odds.

Where I find hope, though, is in paying close attention to what Jesus promises his disciples.  And it’s not what I first assumed.  Because I hear about capital-A Apostleship and I am figuring out how I can work myself up to that task, which strengths to play off of, which talents to leverage, which traits of my personality to deploy strategically.  But Jesus confidence in me is not based in my strengths, which are few, or my talents, which are limited, or my strategic sense of self, which is really quite frail.  Jesus’ confidence in me is based in the power of God.

What Jesus promises his disciples, and what Jesus promises us, is not that we are enough.  That’s the promise of a Disney movie: Believe in yourself, and you will prevail.  Frankly, I’ve met myself, and I won’t.  Instead, Jesus tells the trust: left to our own devices, we are not enough.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.  It is God working in us that is the ground and the extent of our confidence and the ground and extent of our hope.

What we hear from Jesus does, indeed, cast a long shadow over this week, over these lives of ours.  We are cut out for some kind of greatness.  What makes that expectation bearable is not any belief in ourselves, in the people we are.  It is instead trust in the person Jesus is.  When Jesus makes these predictions about who we are going to become, it is not given as a burden.  It is given as something more like a talisman, a compass.  It is given as a reminder of just what God is able to accomplish from this raw material we offer from our limited human lives.

So many hopes are sketched out for us who sit here.  The hopes we have for one another in our relationships and in our families.  He will be the one to say what needs to be said.  She will be the one who is able to change things.  Or there are the hopes we have for one another in our church.  They will be the ones to make the good decision.  This group will be the one to heal the wound.  There is even the legacy we inherit as people living in this country, this place and time, this Memorial Day weekend when we are so acutely aware of the legacy of service that we inherit as a people.  They will be the ones who can take a stand for good.  They will the ones of make it right.  Good with a capital G, right with a capital R.

We want to live up to them.  We can’t, not always.

But there is Jesus, declaring not our greatness but God’s greatness.   There is Jesus declaring not our power but the Spirit’s power.

I say this because, like anxious children, we can crumble under the weight of expectation.  And I want us to hear what Jesus offers: not a legacy that has to be protected or earned, but a gift to be inherited.   So reach for the gift.  Don’t be afraid to trust the promise.  God will make you the person you need to become for the work that is given to you to do.  That power comes to each one of us, in its own way and time.  We wait, of course, sometimes.  And waiting is terrible hard.  But we can wait in hope.  We can wait in trust.  And we can stake our lives on knowing that God will be who he has promised to be so that we can become who God needs us to become.