The Greatest Of These, IX: Integrity
November 5, 2023 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • 1 Corinthians 13:6, Daniel 3:13–30
What a strange and beautiful text for All Saints’ Sunday. It works perfectly in so far as those Saints of Light whom we love themselves live with integrity, taking, at times, radical and necessary risks for the sake of their own ethical benchmark. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—not their original names, of course, but names given by the Babylonian Empire—were displaced persons, deportees, prisoners of war, people of the exile brought to Babylon after the siege of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar. In an earlier part of the story, they were spared from the King’s quick anger by the book’s namesake, Daniel, and now they are back in the grip of Nebuchadnezzar’s frothing rage, this time about to be thrown into the furnace.
Joy Anyway, II: Complicated Joy
August 6, 2023 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Philippians 1:19–26
He is writing as a prisoner, also knowing that his words could become a spark or fodder for a fire of Roman authoritarian violence to spread through his community of women, orphans, and elders who are themselves, risking more than they should to come visit him in jail to feed him to encourage him. Paul is writing in a way that is measured. He is not outlining any hardships that prison is placing on him. He does not describe torture, hunger, chains, dark, dark nights, or the screams of others. But you can hear all of that just under the surface as he works out the central question of this portion of his letter: will he die at the hands of the Romans; or will he live and be able to continue his ministry in Philippi? He wants to be released because he knows, he trusts that there is something life-changing about the mystery of faith in the spiritual presence of Jesus, the anointed One, Jesus, the resurrected One.
Joy Anyway, I: Praying With Joy
July 30, 2023 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Philippians 1:3–10
When things are hard, the remembering is different. The joy is different. It wells up. It is held at the depth of an aquifer. It is joy forged over time. It is rooted in something beyond words. Something sacred. It is a deep joy that lures you toward those you those you love. Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel described a memory of a fellow prisoner trading a ration of bread for materials with which to piece together a makeshift menorah during Hanukkah. Shocked that the man would trade something so essential to his survival, Wiesel asked him, “Hanukkah in Auschwitz?” And the man replied, “Especially in Auschwitz.” On a day when the lived realities of suffering were beyond reckoning, even there, the rites and rituals of prayer and remembrance were so life-giving, so life-affirming, that one might trade bread for candle wax, food for one candle lit against the darkness.
The Valley of Lost Things, IV : The Party I Refused to Attend
May 14, 2023 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Luke 15:25–32
A lost coin, found. A lost sheep, found. A lost son, found. After each lost thing found, a party. Luke chapter fifteen is simple enough, but it might hold everything we need to know about God. When we are lost, God goes after us. When we are lost, God seeks us until we are found. But here’s today’s question: will the older brother go to the party? Can he bear to celebrate? Jesus spins these fabulous little tales and we’re still thinking of them two thousand years later. We see ourselves in the younger brother. We see ourselves in the older brother. We even see ourselves in the father, watching his sons hurt and be hurt by each other and the world. We know this story is telling us something about ourselves. We intuitively know that we fit within this story. And two thousand years later, this story is still about us, getting lost, and God running out to greet us.
In the Meantime, III : I Long for Thee Alway!
December 11, 2022 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Isaiah 9:6
Music transports us, moves us, carries us into the future, and lets us equally feel homesick for days past, even as we hold dear this very moment, here, exactly where we are. What I love about this piece Lisa Bond chose for us today is that, it unites us across so many centuries and so many cultures, and helps us to remember that, in every time and place we have been people, who long for God and who long for God’s way. Today’s text is influenced by the most ancient promises from Isaiah on which we hang our Christmas hopes, six, seven, eight centuries before Christ. The people of Isaiah’s day had their own struggles—wars and rumors of wars, illness, infighting, injustice—their story can so easily be our story when we open our ears to it.
99% Invisible
November 6, 2022 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Revelation 21:1–6
And social scientists would suggest that behind and within every human interaction is a deeper psycho-social dynamic that can only ever be partially unpacked. We go about our daily lives forgetting and not knowing: forgetting that beneath our feet, or just beyond what the eye can see is an entire world that is 99% invisible. Today we celebrate All Saints’ Sunday. All Saints’ Day was established in 835, centuries before Protestant churches existed, at about that moment in church history where it seems, there were just too many “official” saints to keep track of. Now every saint could be highlighted on a single day, November 1, without cluttering up the calendar with multiple celebrations every day of the year. In our tradition, this makes room for a kind of democratizing of the saints. No one person is lifted up as more “saintly” than another in the Protestant church. All are part of the great cloud of witnesses, the saints of light who are just beyond the veil, 99% invisible to us, and yet present nonetheless. The saints are all those who were faithful in their own day, and who accompany us now, surrounding us like a cloud.