In the wonderful new movie "42", there is a scene where Jackie Robinson is walking to the field in Florida on his first day of try outs for the minor leagues. A black reporter is walking with him, there to cover the first black athlete to cross the color line and play in major league sports. Jackie was just a young man at the time, nervous about performing, as young men are. The reporter says to him, "what is it like to be a hero?" The young Jackie says, "I'm not a hero. I'm just a baseball player." The reporter says back to him, "tell that to all the black kids across Florida playing baseball today." It is a sobering reminder that the path to substantive character is taken one step at a time, most of them when no one is much looking. Perhaps no one much ever will pay attention or perhaps the exigencies of history track us down and those ordinary steps become the gateway to a new era and a beacon of light for the new generation to follow. In this season when mother nature has most of us confined to our dens to hibernate, I hope you will remember that even the small things of your life are building substance in your character and in your significant relationships. The Rabbis of yesteryear were right that filling those small things with meaning is how we make our lives holy or godly in the good sense of those terms. You are creating dignity around you.
    
  This week, we lift up the virtue of questioning. So many people at Christ Church grew up in a spiritual tradition that they had to finally transcend in order to find grounding. It usually fills us with a good deal of guilt because we are breaking with the hallowed mores of our family. But the only genuine spirituality we develop in our lives comes through us cultivating it and owning it for ourselves. How wonderful when we finally do because we can start to become real. When you look at so many of the hot spots around the world, the fundamental issues that they are wrestling with are a result of not having seriously made accommodation with the modern world. Alas, the depth of their discontent will not be really resolved until they go through the same evolution that we went through from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, the challenges that we faced over several centuries are being compressed in places like Lebanon and Syria into a single generation and the result is wanton violence and civil unrest. Sober judgment suggests that we will see several more decades like this around the world as we all enter a common discourse through the advent of technology like the internet that unites even remote countries that thought change was only optional until it became obvious that it is not.

Seeing the fires in Kiev, reminds me of visiting Moscow in March in 1990. I was there with Ernest Gordon, the Dean of the Chapel at Princeton and we naturally asked to go to Church on Sunday morning. Our Russian hosts took us to the largest Protestant Church and introduced us to the pastor. He was very happy to meet us as few Americans had yet ventured to support the churches there, since Christianity was all but outlawed during the 70 years of Communism. I was delightfully surprised to see the Church overfilled, every window jammed with people sitting, all the aisles filled, the balcony jammed, even huge front doors open so that people could watch from out in the street. The pastor insisted that we accompany him on the processional hymn, with the choir  having to literally squeeze through the packed center aisle. At the front, he turned and pulled my arm to sit next to them in the front of the service. I was somewhat stunned but Dr. Gordon nodded to me to follow. I was looking over a thousand people that were full of expectation, having been spiritually starved for decades. The pastor got up and spoke in Russian telling the congregation that I had come from America to give them a word of inspiration and support in their time of struggle. I remember being light headed and faint because I knew in the moment that I was part of history and that this was so much bigger than me and I remembered that line from the gospels where Jesus tells the disciples not to worry about what they will say in moments like that because the Holy Spirit will be with them. And I stood up with almost no idea of what to say, my translator looked at me. I opened my arms and I said in English "Peace be with You". Before the translator could speak, several hundred people responded as one in Russian saying "And also with you." It hit me like a spiritual wave of blessing and gravitas. I can't remember much after that, except that I wanted them to know that millions of people were praying for them and that they were on the path to a new and better future, bleak as it was at the moment. Prayer does change things, sometimes altering history. I hope you can meditate on things that need healing and strength in your family, your community, and for our neighbors far away in the chilled air of Ukraine. Collectively, may we all open the power of a new consciousness that goodness and God might course through out lives.

The Rev.