Music for Holy Week, on Spotify

A few years ago I began creating mixes of music for specific liturgical seasons and occasions. Every year I tweak them a little, depending on what new music I've heard and what old music I've discovered. Holy Week is my favorite week of the year, and I've published on Spotify a playlist of songs for this week.

Clearly, not all these songs were intended by their writers to be about Holy Week. So here are some brief annotations of the playlist to explain why the songs are meaningful to me.

Palm Sunday

Sufjan Stevens - The Palm Sunday Tornado Hits Crystal Lake. Mood music: it's not just that it has "Palm Sunday" in the title, although that's how I stumbled upon this little instrumental in the first place. I love the sense of foreboding this piece evokes.

Isaac Everett - Preparation. From his liturgically organized album Rotation, this is the song for riding into Jerusalem ... to die.

Matisyahu - King Without a Crown. How many Hasidic Jewish reggae artists do you know? This song is just really cool, and hopefully my Jewish friends won't mind me re-appropriating Matisyahu's work as I ponder what sort of king Jesus intended (or didn't intend) to be.

Living Colour - Cult of Personality. One of the rockin'est songs 1989 had to offer, this is all about political power. The more of it you have, the harder it is to keep it pure.

Coldplay - Viva La Vida. I always think of Palm Sunday when I hear this song. "Who would ever want to be king?"

Monday

Johnny Cash - Personal Jesus. Everyone seems to want Jesus to be personal. And I think he is. But does "personal" also mean "convenient"?

Tracy Chapman - Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution. Here's a song for the Zealots among Jesus' disciples. Change is coming, and we're going to bring it! And Jesus will lead Israel to a glorious new day! We'll kick the Romans out and take back our country!

The Beatles - Revolution. This is Jesus' answer to the Zealots. What kind of revolution are you thinking of, really? Are you sure I want to be at the head of it?

Tuesday

Prince - Thieves in the Temple. I guess here I'm taking a metaphorical love song and turning it literal again, but we'll let that one go. The sanctity of the Jerusalem temple has been compromised.

Stone Temple Pilots - Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart. Perhaps I'm taking the most liberties of all with this song, which is probably about an acid trip. But I can totally imagine Jesus tearing around the temple, knocking over tables, releasing sacrificial animals, and screaming, "God is not for sale!"

Wednesday

Sting - Jeremiah Blues Part 1. Nobody seems to know what time it is. Don't they see their civilization collapsing around them?

Sixpence None the Richer - Melody of You. I imagine Mary Magdalene singing this to Jesus.

Thursday

Leonard Cohen - The Guests. The guests are arriving for the Passover feast, but the mood is ... off. Just a bit. No, a lot.

Isaac Everett - Valediction. A beautiful poem about wheat, grapes, life. Someday I'd like to use this in church.

Son Lux - Betray. I know you're about to betray me, Judas. But I still want to have dinner with you.

The Judybats - Being Simple. This is the first of a series of songs I imagine Judas singing. Judas can't comprehend the kind of simplicity it takes to love unconditionally. Nor can he trust that it will come to him.

Cher - Heart of Stone. Maybe it would be easier not to care at all. "With a heart of stone, you'll be well protected/ With a heart of stone, love's not resurrected."

Audioslave - Like a Stone. And a man decides to turn to stone.

U2 - Until the End of the World. Here's Jesus singing to Judas.

U2 - With or Without You. Yet Judas makes his choice. He can't live, "with or without" Jesus.

Don McLean - Vincent. We're in the garden now, and this song isn't only about Vincent Van Gogh.

Coldplay - Death and All His Friends. Jesus is tormented. He doesn't want to play this game with death, yet it's the only way to knock its weapon out of its hand.

Sixpence None the Richer - Love. "Unless a seed goes into the ground and dies, it remains a single seed."

U2 - Pride (In the Name of Love). This song isn't just about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Friday

Sufjan Stevens - For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti. "I did everything for you ..."

Isaac Everett - Execution. Psalm 22, as sung from the cross.

Jesus Christ Superstar - The Crucifixion. From the musical itself.

Isaac Everett - Sermon. The tune is "What Wondrous Love Is This."

Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos - Victimae paschali laudes. The Lamb has been slain ... but that's not the end of the story.

Saturday

Isaac Everett - Lamentation. The text is "Stabat mater."

Radiohead - Where I End and You Begin. Where is that, anyway? And how do we make sense of all this unbridled chaos? It's like the end of the world ... and the beginning, all rolled up into one.

Chapelle du Roi - Lamentations of Jeremiah I. Jeremiah's words apply here as well.

Sufjan Stevens - To Be Alone with You. O Lord, I'd give anything to be with you again.

All About Money

“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right … she moves in mysterious ways.” – U2

One thing seminarians consistently worry about is money. Who’s going to pay for all this? Luckily for us, VTS has some pretty stellar financial aid, and we’re certainly grateful for that. But there’s paying for seminary, and then there’s making sure you have enough cash flow to buy the next round of groceries or to put gas in the car. And the longer I spend in seminary, the more I find that we have everything we need. Yet despite the overwhelming generosity from friends and family at St. Thomas and beyond—despite the way things always seem to work out—despite the fact that simply acting responsibly has proven to be enough—my anxiety about money continued to run high through my first semester at VTS. Having no financial buffer to speak of is nerve-racking!

And then, like Christmas presents streaming in throughout the twelve days, amazing things began to happen. First I was commissioned by the Diocese of Olympia to build a Facebook presence and gathering place for Episcopal young adults in Western Washington.  An additional scholarship for which I hadn’t even applied dropped right into my lap. And to top it all off, my personal website went viral, garnering 30 million hits in the month of January!

The site, www.numberoneinhistory.com, has been a very slight moneymaker since I contracted with Billboard magazine in 2009 and ads began to appear. But in a sudden rush of activity on Facebook right after New Year’s Day, I found myself to be the talk of the internet … and a very helpful chunk of change landed in my bank account. The fad leveled off quickly (to be replaced by this intriguing meme), and subsequent months will produce much smaller amounts, but I get the point: God sure has a great sense of humor.

I imagine God saying with a loving smirk, “OK, you’ve proven to me you’re not ready to live on the edge just yet without falling apart. The day of reckoning will come, and so will the grace you need to handle it—the grace that was already with you, and which you completely failed to see all around you. But in the meantime, I’ll throw you a bone.” This kind of pure, unadulterated gift probably won’t happen again. For years we’ve wanted to start a college fund for Sarah, and now we have that opportunity. Although we do not intend to spend any of this money on ourselves, it’s nice to have an emergency buffer again.

Yet I keep reminding myself that money is merely a tool, not a thing of value itself. Strategizing its use is all well and good, but Jesus called us beyond that into something a little less … controlled. Jesus called us to have more faith in God than in money. Bishop Jeff Lee used to say, “Money is frozen desire.” To collect more and more money, just because we might use it someday, is folly. To give money away to someone who needs it more is to use it well. And a gift is a gift—not a contract.

In reality, I have more money than I need … as do most of you reading this. Compared with most of the world, we’re doing just fine. So why wouldn’t we give more of it away? Is saving it for our daughter the same as spending it on ourselves? Yet education is extremely important to us, and we want to be sure Sarah can pay for it. Still, we can tithe from it, and we have the pleasurable challenge of making decisions about this one-time tithe.

I may seem to be talking pretty baldly about money. I’ve heard it said that sex is by no means the most taboo topic in America. Actually, we talk about sex almost constantly in our culture. What we don’t like to talk about is money, and we even indoctrinate our children at a very young age not to talk about it, or only to talk about it in certain ways. Think of how you would feel if your child asked one of your friends—or worse, a business associate or boss—“How much money do you make?” In his book Health, Money and Love (and Why We Don’t Enjoy Them), author and Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon writes about the cult of money and suggests an experiment: at a party, pull out a twenty-dollar bill and use it to light a cigar. Just see how the crowd reacts!

I’m reminded of the woman who poured expensive perfume all over Jesus’ feet to anoint them for his impending burial (Matthew 26:1-16). To whom do we relate most in this story? Most of us, if we’re honest, would have to admit we relate to Judas: he’s the sensible one. But let’s not let it escape our notice that this altercation about money pushes Judas over the edge, convincing him that Jesus needs to be gotten rid of.

I know, I know … you’re all thinking, “It’s not October. Get off the stewardship stump.” But these are my current seminarian musings, plainly and honestly. I’m intrigued by the idea that one of Jesus’ goals was to help us let go of our love and worship of money (and what better discipline to take on during Lent?). Yes, we need enough money to survive, and we need a little more of it in order to participate in American society to any meaningful degree. But once we have that much—and most of us in America do—things start to get fuzzy, and it’s easy to start making excuses. To quote a favorite George Michael song of mine, “The rich declare themselves poor/ And most of us are not sure if we have too much/ But we’ll take our chances, ’cause God’s stopped keeping score” (“Praying for Time,” from Listen without Prejudice, Vol. 1, 1990).

One more thing: This week, Bishop Greg pointed me to a great article about money and tithing from the Sojourners website. It says a lot of what I’ve been saying here, but much more elegantly. Check it out.

As of last week, another round of exams is behind me. I have completed my three quarters of Church History. I will now pick up a one-quarter class called Crisis Ministry: I figure it’ll be great to have taken this class before beginning Clinical Pastoral Education in May. Old Testament and Hebrew will continue, along with a semester-long course called Constructions of Youth and Youth Ministry. This class is teaching me all the things I wish I’d known before beginning work at St. Thomas! It has occurred to me that things I learn about youth ministry going forward may be information I’m responsible for propagating rather than implementing, depending on what kind of position I’m called to after seminary—we’ll see. But I hope I can get back to working with youth more intently than do many of the priests I know. One big plus is that while I’m absorbing all this new knowledge, I also bring years of on-the-ground experience and wisdom to share with my classmates.

In January term, I took two consecutive week-long courses on critiquing and writing curriculum. I learned that both of these jobs are more demanding than I had anticipated, and that there are many resources out there that are helpful even if we don’t adopt them wholesale.

Christy among D.C. cherry blossoms

This fall, I will begin my field education at Church of the Ascension in Silver Spring, Maryland. Another seminarian named Sarah Carter is already there; she was my TA in Hebrew first quarter, and I think we’ll work well together. Our first joint task will be to kick off a young adults group. I think the very possibility of a young adults group—always the last missing demographic—is a great sign of a healthy congregation! Actually, I fell in love with this parish on my very first visit. With all due respect to my friends at St. Thomas and the welcoming spirit we’ve worked hard to foster, Ascension is an incredibly hospitable parish. While we’re still “practicing the hospitality of God,” they seem to have come closer to mastering it! They’ve internalized hospitality to a degree that I myself would love to achieve someday.

Sarah falls off a monument in front of the U.S. Capitol building

Christy is still our family breadwinner in her job at the Cokesbury book store on campus. Sarah is growing like a weed, learning to read at a brisk pace, and reveling in her enjoyment of math. She is making good friends both within and outside the seminary community. She has also presented us with some distinct parenting challenges of late, in the form of aggravating obstinacy. While this is an area in which she will certainly grow, I find that my parenting skills are also stretching and growing in painful but healthy ways. I suspect that these skills—patience, choosing battles wisely, swallowing my pride, moving closer to the difficult loved one instead of going into orbit and flinging pronouncements from above—may also come in handy in parish life!

Please continue to keep us in your prayers. We miss you all, but we are planning a trip to Seattle in August. Stay tuned for details.

In Christ,

Josh Hosler

Blogging through seminary

I hope to keep up this blog throughout my time in seminary. I have no idea how much time I'll feel I have for this, but I am so grateful to the parishioners of St. Thomas, Medina, and all the other friends in Western Washington who are supporting my family as we begin this adventure. Stay tuned for my ruminations on the seminary experience ... and, as usual, reflections on popular music, which I can't help but write from time to time as well.

A playlist for the end of the world

Happy end of the world, everyone! Here's a chronological playlist for the Rapture.

Feel free to offer suggestions for me to add next time the world ends, too.

Skeeter Davis - The End of the World
Barry McGuire - Eve of Destruction
Eddy Arnold - Make the World Go Away
The Doors - The End
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - Fire
Three Dog Night - Til the World Ends
John Sebastian - Welcome Back [to Jesus, not Kotter ... OK, that's a little obscure]
The Police - When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around
Pink Floyd - Goodbye Cruel World
Blondie - Rapture 
Nena - 99 Luftballons
The Hooters - All You Zombies
Rick Springfield - Dance This World Away
David Bowie - As the World Falls Down
Anita Baker - Caught Up in the Rapture
Men Without Hats - Pop Goes the World
R.E.M. - It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
U2 - Until the End of the World
Megadeth - Symphony of Destruction
KRS-One - Step into a World (Rapture's Delight)
iio - Rapture (Tastes So Sweet)
Sufjan Stevens - They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
Pearl Jam - World Wide Suicide
Metallica - My Apocalypse
Britney Spears - Till the World Ends

Living a Saved Life

LIVING A SAVED LIFE
sermon preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA
by Josh Hosler, Associate for Christian Formation
The Fourth Sunday of Easter/ May 15, 2011

When I was in the 7th grade, I had a fabulous Sunday school teacher named Mrs. Nielsen. She did something very simple one day that I will always remember. She drew a stick figure on a piece of paper. The stick figure was climbing some stairs. It looked just like this, except that I’ve blown it up bigger so more of you can see it in this large space.

Mrs. Nielsen showed us her primitive little drawing and said: “Some people think Christianity is like this: that the more good things we do, the more God will love us, and that if we do enough good things, we’ll get to heaven. But this is NOT Christianity! We don’t earn our way to heaven with brownie points! God’s love is a gift, and it has nothing to do with how good we’ve been. God loves you … NO MATTER WHAT.”

I will never forget that Sunday school lesson. Would that every Christian had had a teacher like Mrs. Nielsen! Her simple drawing cuts through all the clutter of popular opinion about Christianity. You can’t earn your way into God’s good graces. You are already there. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.

This theological point is central to nearly every form of Christianity, at least officially. Whether the average Christian on the street believes it is another matter entirely. Even those of us who have intellectually absorbed it don’t always act as if we believe it. But it’s Good News, and it makes me want to share the news, not just in words that people might find hard to believe, but also in actions that make the words real.

This is what the Jewish Christians did in the earliest days of the Jesus movement. They were coming to understand that the God they had followed and worshipped so faithfully was even more loving and more powerful than they had dared to believe! With fear banished from their lives, they went wild with love. Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us that Jesus’ disciples formed a commune: they pooled all their money and resources to make sure that nobody went hungry. They spent more time in the temple than ever before, and their time in their homes was marked by gratefulness and generosity. Their joy was contagious: “Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

When I hear “being saved” in this context, it’s worlds away from the notion of “going to heaven after you die, if you’ve only been good enough.” The people’s lives in the here and now were saved by the immense depth of joy and grace that Jesus had shown them. Jesus had gone to the mat for his friends, his people, and the world. Had he merely died, he would have left only hopelessness and fear; there would have been no explanation for this sudden explosion of joy. But instead, Jesus showed himself to be more alive than he had ever been before—a state he only could have achieved by going through death first. So the people began to live saved lives, and by living in love and generosity, their joy spread to more and more people.

This leads us to today’s reading from the First Letter of Peter. Did you know that a sentence has been left out at the beginning? It’s this one: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly” … etc. Whoa … the audience here is slaves!

Now, I think I understand why this verse has been left out of our lectionary. It was used by the Confederacy during the Civil War to justify the institution of slavery: If the early Christians didn’t specifically say slavery was wrong, then it must be OK. Well, no. Actually, the earliest Christians honestly believed the world was ending. They thought Jesus would be coming back any day or any month now to gather everyone into God’s heavenly Kingdom, so they didn’t see the point of making any big changes. As it turns out, they were mistaken. If the billboard in my neighborhood is to be believed, Jesus will actually return this coming Saturday! Hmmm … that’s the day St. Thomas is throwing me a pre-seminary fundraiser dinner. I trust that’s not significant!

But where were we? Oh yes: in a way, it’s too bad that the verse addressed to slaves has been left out of our lectionary, because it removes the passage from its context. We can all too easily assume that the intended audience is us. Now, if we believe that the Bible is in some way the Word of God, we do need to wrestle with the possibility that it is addressed to us. But that doesn’t mean that every word of every passage of scripture is applicable to our own personal situation all the time. Slaves in this time period had no legal recourse at all. There was no way they could possibly improve their standing in society. The writer’s advice to them, then, is to make the most of a hopeless situation—to draw their strength from God, since clearly they had no other source of strength.

In a more subtle way, though, these words can apply to us today. The appeal to treat abusers with respect is very difficult, and yet it is a necessary part of living a saved life. Most if not all of us have had some experience of being abused by someone in a position of authority, whether it was a parent, a teacher, a boss, or a priest. People aren’t perfect. People abuse other people. And when the abuse happens to us, we need to decide on an appropriate reaction for a person living a saved life.

There are two obvious ways we can deal with being abused: the basic biological urges of fight or flight. We could strike back in self-defense. Or we could avoid conflict as much as possible, hiding ourselves away or building defensive walls to keep the abuser out. Either approach might save our mortal lives, or at least our pride. But neither is likely to lead to anything transformative.

Now, Jesus did use both fight and flight from time to time in his ministry. The moneychangers in the temple made Jesus so angry that he started a riot. But on another occasion, when a crowd tried to throw him off a cliff, Jesus escaped. He challenged the Pharisees directly, thus endangering his life. But when even an adoring crowd got to be too much for him, Jesus slipped away to a quiet place to be alone. Fight and flight are good tools; we are not called to live our lives as doormats. To fight an abuser in court is one possibility for us. To leave an abusive spouse is very often the best course of action.

But when the time came for Jesus to really make his mark on the world once and for all, to transform the entire situation, he didn’t use fight or flight, because preserving his mortal life was no longer his top priority. The time came to step into a much larger picture in which death became the pivotal scene—by no means the final scene.

Yet Jesus didn’t come back and wreak vengeance on those who made themselves his enemies. As far as we know, the Risen Christ didn’t engage with his enemies at all. He sneaked back into the picture just for a little while, just long enough to light some kindling, and then he moved on. It was enough. The flame spread, beginning at the tomb, continuing on the Road to Emmaus, out from Jerusalem at Pentecost and into the world.

Jesus showed us how to live a saved life. He died not so we would never have to, but so that we might know how to follow in his steps. Many people have done so: in our own century, I might name Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero. I didn’t create or save my own life. It was a gift from God. So, like Jesus, I am called to use my life well, to use it abundantly, and if and when necessary, to surrender it, either because (God willing) it has run its course, or because surrendering it will help save others. I am also called never to stoop to the level of the abuser. Revenge is not a Christian virtue. It never has been, and it never will be. But revenge and self-defense are clearly different from each other.

Most of us won’t have to lay down our mortal lives for others. But as Christians, we are called to realize that we have enough, and that giving from what we have will not destroy us. We are called to be non-victims, and this means getting real about what hurts us and what doesn’t. When people slight us in little ways, perhaps our pride gets injured. But living a saved life, we can develop an inner core of self-respect that we know comes not from our own actions or our own perceptions, but from God. If God loves us infinitely, who can take our dignity away from us? This kind of strength means experiencing pain without allowing it to control us. It means knowing that our store of riches is bigger than we or anyone else might imagine. It means knowing that we are supported not just by ourselves, but by God.

Last week on the NPR program This American Life, reporter Nancy Updike took to Tahrir Square in Cairo to ask people about their reactions to the news of the death of Osama bin Laden. Her most common answer was this: “I’d love to talk, but I’m on my way to a meeting.” What meetings were people in such a hurry to get to? Not corporate business meetings, but something bigger: people getting together to decide what kind of country Egypt will become.

Ms. Updike sat in on a number of these meetings. One of them included two very different parties: a secular group of writers, actors, artists and intellectuals who want to keep Egypt secular. The other group was made up of former members of the Gama’a-Islamiyya, an Islamic group that was responsible for or linked to many murders, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Some of the secularists in the room with them may have been former targets. The Gama’a-Islamiyya publicly renounced violence fourteen years ago and continues to do so, even going as far as trying to talk Al-Qaeda over to their side.

Now these Islamists and these secularists are sitting down together to get real: to discern whether they can work together to help build a new, more democratic Egypt. If they continue to talk and work together, doubtless people on both sides will experience slights little and big, hurt pride, disappointments, and events that may feel at first like deal-breakers. They may feel that people on the other side have abused them.  But their willingness to talk at all gave me a thrill of hope for the future of Egypt.

I believe these non-Christians have caught a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that Jesus witnessed to. Like Christians, they have been called not to fight, not to run, but to step into the conflict in faith. These Muslims, in renouncing violence, understand that they are called to allow God’s agenda, not their own, to win the day. The secularists may not speak of God, but I believe God is also at work in their desire to create something bigger and more transcendent than their own partisan ideas. God’s agenda runs on reconciliation and resurrection, not on our own human steam, but through divine love and understanding. That agenda runs in and out and through all human communities, breaking into the world in surprising places.

When we can find it in us to rely on the dignity given to us by God, when we can recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd calling us through the gate and out to the good grass, when we can allow God’s rod and staff to redirect us away from the wolves of hate and vengeance toward nobler deeds, we are living life abundantly. We are living on God’s agenda and not our own. We are living saved lives. Amen.

Conversations with kids about death

We’ve been talking a lot about death in my family. Christy lost a beloved great-uncle last Friday; happily, she and Sarah got to pay him a visit a few days before he died. And one of our cats, Epitome, is getting very old and creaky, and we’re waiting for word from the vet on whether her kidneys are failing. Sarah is aware that our kitty will probably die in the next few months, if not sooner.

After all this, I found myself being asked last night, “What’s Ash Wednesday?” If the “sex talk” is the one that scares parents the most, the “death talk” may come in a close second. Yet kids don’t carry the same baggage we do about death. Sarah knows that we will all die someday, and we've talked about it many times since she was about two. So by now, I wasn't scared at all ... just a little overwhelmed.


I explained to Sarah that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and that at this service, a priest or deacon marks your forehead with ashes in the shape of a cross and says, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

"Dust?" Sarah laughed about that. I tried to explain a little about the idea of returning to the earth, but mostly, I just let the liturgical language speak for itself. Better yet, Sarah will get to experience it first-hand tomorrow night.

I love to tell the Godly Play story of Abraham and Sarah. Kids eat this story up—they love that it takes place in a giant sandbox, and they love the language about how “people don’t go into the desert unless they absolutely have to.” They love the language describing prayer: "Abraham came so close to God, and God came so close to him, that Abraham knew what God wanted him to do." And: "Abraham went up on a hill and prayed again, and God was there too. God wasn't just here or there ... God was everywhere!"

At one point late in the story, I tell the story of Sarah dying, and later, of Abraham dying. I dig a little pit in the sand with my finger to indicate the burial of a body. While I’m doing this, I quietly cover the figure of the dead person with my hand and remove it; most kids don’t notice where it went because they’re focusing on my finger digging in the sand.

I always ask the kids after a Godly Play story, “What was your favorite part?” The vast majority of kids talk about the deaths. Kids love to hear death spoken of gently, respectfully, reverently. And they love to hear, “By this time, Sarah was very old and full of years. She died, and Abraham buried her in a cave near the Oaks of Mamre.”

Kids make sense of the world by playing. For them, death is just one more thing about life that needs to have sense made of it. Liturgy is how adults play, to make sense of the most important things in life and beyond life.

Consider bringing your kids to an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow night. Don’t worry about whether they sit quietly the whole time. Bring crayons and paper. You may not think they’re “getting anything out of it." But it is by bringing our children to church that, over time, they learn to speak the language of Christianity and make sense of the relationship they already have with God, who loves them and speaks to them in the silence of their hearts every day.

Growing beyond our own lives

Sometimes while sitting in church, I can’t help but grab a pen and start writing. Thoughts flood my mind. I think: “I know I’m not preaching today, but I have a sermon anyway!”

It was like that yesterday. I was particularly struck by the modern paraphrase of Psalm 15 by Stephen Mitchell:

Lord, who can be trusted with power, and who may act in your place?

Those with a passion for justice, who speak the truth from their hearts;

Who have let go of selfish interests and grown beyond their own lives;

Who see the wretched as their family and the poor as their flesh and blood.

They alone are impartial and worthy of the people’s trust

Their compassion lights up the whole earth, and their kindness endures forever.

It occurred to me that my work as a youth minister—and as a Christian formation director for all ages—could be summed up in the task of urging people to “grow beyond their own lives.”

When have you grown beyond your own life?

The Emerging: Suites for Advent

The Christian year begins with the First Sunday in Advent, which often falls on Thanksgiving weekend. Advent continues for four Sundays, the amount of time we need to get ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas.


Here's some music for Advent. No, it's not Christmas music ... at least, not until right at the very end! These suites are built around the seven ancient "O" Antiphons, as sung by the choirs of St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. Pop and choral music alternate and, hopefully, leave you with a feeling of anticipation and expectation.


Yes, these recordings are under copyright, but the way I have mixed them into suites is original to me. If you hear something you like, please go buy it. I also welcome feedback on Advent music I might use to expand these suites next year!

(Right-click each header to download the suite.)

Advent Suite 1: Eschaton

R.E.M. - It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
Crazy World of Arthur Brown - Fire
George Michael - Praying for Time
Mary Poppins - Stay Awake/ Sufjan Stevens - Year of the Sheep
Peter Hallock - Let My Prayer Come Up as the Incense

Advent Suite 2: Wisdom

Godspell - Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord
Sufjan Stevens - O Come, O Come Emmanuel (1)
Peter Hallock - O Sapientia
Sixpence None the Richer - Sister, Mother
Martina McBride - Love's the Only House
Sting - Love Is the Seventh Wave

Advent Suite 3: I Am That I Am

Peter Hallock - O Adonai
Sixpence None the Richer - Anything/The Waiting Room
Hooters - All You Zombies
Sufjan Stevens - O Come, O Come Emmanuel (2)

Advent Suite 4: Come and Save Us

Peter Hallock - O Radix Jesse
Toad the Wet Sprocket - Pray Your Gods
Aimee Mann - Save Me
U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Herbert Howells - A Spotless Rose
Seal - Love's Divine

Advent Suite 5: You Open and No One Shuts

Peter Hallock - O Clavis David
Mr. Mister - Kyrie
Sufjan Stevens - Chicago
Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

Advent Suite 6: Rising Dawn

Peter Hallock - O Oriens
The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun
Sixpence None the Richer - Waiting on the Sun
The Polyphonic Spree - Light and Day
Sufjan Stevens - O Come, O Come Emmanuel (3)

Advent Suite 7: Prince of Peace

Peter Hallock - O Rex Gentium
J.L. Hosler - You Heavens Above
Simon & Garfunkel - Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream
John Mayer - Waiting on the World to Change
John Denver & Robin - When the River Meets the Sea
Goo Goo Dolls - Better Days

Advent Suite 8: But What If ... ?

Peter Hallock - O Emmanuel
Joan Osborne - One of Us
Isaac Everett - Expectation

Advent Suite 9: Amen

Sting - Gabriel's Message
Conductus - Ave Virgo Virginum
Franz Biebl - Ave Maria
J.S. Bach - Magnificat in D, BWV 243, I: Magnificat
St. Mark's Cathedral Choir - O Come, O Come Emmanuel
Isaac Everett - Incarnation

A Place for Mary in a World of Martha

by Josh Hosler, Associate for Christian Formation

for The Collect, a publication of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA

When I talk about my vision for the St. Thomas youth groups, sometimes I feel like a bit of a hypocrite. The whole idea is to offer a place for youth to get away from the mad rush. But first, I have to add to the mad rush with my own dates and times!

And sometimes I feel pushy with my incessant invitations to retreats, beach parties, hikes, special church services, etc. Regardless of the type of event, the idea is to build community in a space where God’s voice just might come through. And building community takes time and commitment—not just from me, but also from those who participate.

I grew up in a small tourist town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There were no soccer leagues, no summer baseball teams, no Girl Scout camps, no competitive cheerleading squads, no Young Life events, and no mission trips. There was one woman in town who taught piano. My brother Seth and I were the only two kids in the Episcopal Church, so we took turns as the lone acolyte. In the summertime, there was absolutely nothing to do.

For a while, I fell in with an Assemblies of God youth group. I am forever grateful to these wonderful friends for helping me clarify what I do and don’t believe: our theologies overlapped very little. But I had an amazing time! I was able to be myself there, even when everyone else seemed to believe very different things. I didn’t need just the right group—I only needed a faith-filled group. God took care of the rest.

That’s my hope for the youth of St. Thomas. In a city with so many excellent opportunities, we spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to get our kids into just the right sport, just the right musical group, and eventually, just the right college or university. We ourselves might spend decades trying to find just the right church! But does it exist?

Eventually, time runs short. Kids are only kids for a little while. What did they commit themselves to? What did they stick with through thick and thin? Lessons learned from not quite fitting in may be far more valuable than the energy we spend jumping from one opportunity to the next in a quest for perfection. Becoming a pivotal part of a community that sometimes rubs you the wrong way is far holier than maintaining a safe, marginal connection.

Slow down. Sit at Jesus’ feet for a while. Let that Martha energy go, and be Mary. Commit your child to a faith-filled group. Commit yourself to a community of faith, whether or not it’s St. Thomas. Choose a place to bloom. If you don’t, you may never slow down long enough to hear God’s call to you.

Our Father

Here's a sermon I delivered on Father's Day three years ago. The lectionary readings are not the same today as they were that day, but it is about fathers.

OUR FATHER
June 17, 2007
sermon given at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, Washington

When I sat down to look at today’s lessons, I was shocked and amused to find this reading from the Second Book of Samuel. It reads like something from a soap opera. But we didn’t hear the entire story this morning, so please allow me to summarize.

King David, the greatest political figure in biblical history, is a peeping tom. It seems he has become intimately familiar with the bathing habits of Bathsheba, the wife of a soldier named Uriah. So while Uriah is out fighting on the battlefield, David calls Bathsheba to the palace. They have an affair, and Bathsheba gets pregnant. Well! How about that for biblical family values?

Naturally, David tries to cover this up. He calls Uriah back from the battlefield: “Uriah, how’s the war going? Splendid, splendid. Hey, you look like hell. Go home and take a break. I bet you miss your wife – wink wink, nudge nudge!” And he packs a royal feast for Uriah to share with his household.

But Uriah refuses to go home; he goes to the barracks instead. He may not be out on the front lines, but he’s still a soldier on duty, and propriety keeps him from enjoying his wife’s company. So David calls him back the next night and, intending to override Uriah’s sense of honor, gets him drunk. No dice. Uriah stumbles over to David’s couch and crashes there.

So David takes drastic measures: the next morning, he sends Uriah back to the war, all the way to the front lines, where the fighting is heaviest, and he orders all the soldiers to fall back on cue. But – oops! – it seems nobody ever told Uriah the cue. Uriah is left exposed and is shot full of arrows. Immediately, King David sends for Bathsheba and marries her.

Where was Ken Starr during the David administration?

Well, this is where the prophet Nathan steps in to point out David’s sin in the reading we heard today. Nathan uses a simple parable to judge the king’s actions. David is distraught that he could have done something so unconscionable, and he begs God for forgiveness. Bathsheba’s son is born, but almost immediately, the baby gets sick and dies.

Happy Father’s Day!

Fathers and sons … fathers and daughters … most of us have at least some memory of our fathers, and many of us have ongoing relationships with them. Hopefully, we respect them more than we respect King David in this story. But even if we never knew our biological fathers, we all have a concept of fatherhood. Priests often play this role in a person’s life, for good or ill. You could say Nathan was a father figure to David when nobody else could be. And all of us who are the least bit familiar with Christianity know this phrase: “Our Father, who art in Heaven …”

In his classic book Your God Is Too Small, the Rev. J.B. Phillips wrote: “The early conception of God is almost invariably founded upon the child’s idea of the father. If he is lucky enough to have a good father this is all to the good, provided of course that [his] conception of God grows with the rest of [his] personality. But if the child is afraid (or, worse still, afraid and feeling guilty because he is afraid) of his own father, the chances are that his Father in Heaven will appear to him a fearful Being.”

Phillips went on to say, “Christ Himself taught us to regard God as a Father. Are we to reject His own analogy? Of course not, so long as we remember that it is an analogy. When Christ taught His disciples to regard God as their Father in Heaven He did not mean that their idea of God must necessarily be based upon their ideas of their own fathers … It is the relationship that Christ is stressing.” The relationship is that God is “our superior [to the degree that] we are the superior of an infant child crawling on the hearthrug …”

As someone who is relatively new to fatherhood, I’ll paraphrase Phillips in this way: God is Daddy coming to your crib in the morning. He smiles, sings softly to you, picks you up gently and changes your diaper.

Fathers and sons … fathers and daughters … we learn how to love from our parents. In his book Good Goats, the Rev. Dennis Linn postulates: “God loves us at least as much as the person who loves us the most.” But what if I have a deadbeat dad whom I’ve rarely met, who seems unable or unwilling to pay child support? How good can I possibly imagine God, my Heavenly Father, to be? As Keanu Reeves said in the movie Parenthood, “You need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car … you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any [expletive deleted] be a father.”

Then there are the good fathers whose very example is hard to live up to. My father is a perfectionist. I say that not critically but with admiration, because I, also, tend toward perfectionism. But having grown up with my father, I have also seen some of his biggest flaws in action. For years, I’ve worked hard at not falling into any of the same traps he did. So imagine my shock when I realized a few years ago what I was really saying to myself: “My father tries to be perfect, so I’ll be perfect, too … only more so!” Dad, if you’re listening to the podcast … I love you. Happy Father’s Day. Forgive me.

For many of us, God is the Big Daddy who holds us up to impossible standards, and from whom we must seek forgiveness. Thank God for Jesus, who demanded that we do better, but who did not demand perfection. Jesus reminded us that God wants a relationship with us: a relationship of mutual caring, a relationship of authenticity, a relationship that brims with forgiveness simply because it is all about love.

So Jesus is at dinner with the richest and most powerful religious figures of his day. And a woman crashes the dinner party. The text says she was a “sinner.” What might this mean? A prostitute? (Yes, I know your mind went there first!) Well, even Jesus assures us in this passage that this woman has done some pretty awful things. She is an outcast – she is ritually unclean. And that means that anyone she touches, no matter how law-abiding he might be, will then have to go and perform certain rites to be allowed into the temple again. It’s the kind of thing that can throw off your whole weekend.

So the host of the party, Simon, is shocked—shocked—that Jesus allows this woman to touch him. And she doesn’t just touch him: she wets his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and smears ointment on them.

We don’t know anything about this woman’s father, but we do know something about her culture’s father figures, the Pharisees. All her life, she’s heard them pronounce that God despises her because of her sins, and that He always will. It is not the fault of Judaism; a simple reading of the Hebrew Scriptures could tell her God loves her, if she could only read. No, this is an issue of power—of the wealthy few living a comfortable life at the expense of women like her.

Then Jesus came along saying just the opposite of the Pharisees: that God forgives sinners. He was merely referring us back to the Scriptures again, but he was going a step further. He spoke about God’s forgiveness with such fatherly authority that he sidestepped the usual religious channels. This woman had heard all about Jesus, and she knew that if she could just touch him, he would understand.

Jesus showed us what a good father is really like: a living icon of God the Father. The example of Jesus can banish the ghosts of all our human fathers. Again, in Your God Is Too Small, J.B. Phillips wrote, “For all we know there many have been many of [Jesus’] hearers whose fathers were unjust, tyrannical, stupid, conceited, feckless, or indulgent.” The Pharisees could certainly have been accused of a few of these things. But Jesus redeemed the father-son analogy.

We human fathers do the best we can based on our image of God. If our image of God is warped, so will our parenting be. But if our image of God is refined by patience, gentleness, and forgiveness, our children will learn something about what God is really like. And we have Jesus as the example that both fathers and children can check themselves against.

In 2004, pop singer John Mayer gave us these lyrics:

Fathers, be good to your daughters/
Daughters will love like you do/
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers/
So mothers, be good to your daughters, too.

Amen.