Maundy Thursday
April 5, 2012
Trinity Church
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
The greatest archetype, the greatest image or symbol, for conscious human life and experience is the idea of the journey.
You have heard me speak often of “the spiritual journey” precisely because I think that is the best, clearest, and most universal way of naming what our life as Christians is all about. Everyone of us has come from somewhere to be here now. Everyone of us has changed from who we once were to who we now are. If that is not true, then those for whom it is not true are the walking dead who have come from nowhere and are going nowhere. It we are conscious and if we are followers of Jesus, then we are on a journey. None of us have yet arrived at where we are ultimately going. None of us have become what we shall ultimately be. We are on the way. You cannot follow without going somewhere. We have a destination. As Christians, our journey is God-ward, that is that we are heading from where we are to the ever deepening presence and knowledge of God. Not only is the direction of our journey God-ward, but according to Paul, it is much more specifically a journey toward our becoming like Christ. He says that our journey is toward “maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. (Eph 4:13
So each of us is on a journey. As Christians we are asked to be on that journey consciously, intentionally, and in the company of others.
For some the journey of life has been hard much of the time; and for all of us it has been – or will be – hard some of the time. Each of us, when all is said and done will bear the wounds and scars of mistakes made, missteps taken, paths we have followed that left us worse off than when we began. Perhaps some of us can identify with Dante who begins his great poem by saying,
“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost . . . I cannot say clearly how I entered there, So drowsy with sleep had I grown at that hour when first I wandered off from the true way.”
He has journeyed down the wrong road and isn’t even sure when he began to stray or how he wound up such a lost human being.
Maybe you too have known that moment. When did the relationship start to go bad? When did the career turn out to be such a dead end? When did your spiritual life become so dry or shallow, so “of no real use” in guiding your heart and your mind and your strength? When did the lostness begin? And -- much more importantly -- how do you find again the right path for your journey?
Tonight Jesus gives us help along our way. Tonight he gives us food to strengthen us for our travels – our trials and travails. Tonight we are given the gift of the Bread and Wine we need to refresh us from the struggle that has brought us this far, the Bread and Wine we need to feed our pilgrim spirits for the path ahead. And it is not just any Bread and Wine, but the Bread and Wine that causes us to remember him and his unshakeable, unalterable, uncompromising, unconditional love for each of us. Tonight we receive the gift of Bread and Wine that allow us to re-member him, that is to make his very human body present to us. We get to re-collect him, to collect him again, gathering him up into our arms – and then take him into our selves, so that taking him into ourselves we become what he is – God’s eternal presence in the world. God present within our own bodies so that we may be God’s presence within the body of the world.
But that is not all. Tonight Jesus strips off his robe and, in an act of breat-taking humility, he kneels before his friends and washes their feet. I am sure it made them even more uncomfortable that it clearly makes most of us since so few are likely to be courageous or trusting or perceptive enough to receive that same service at the hands of our brothers and sisters in Christ when, in just a few minutes I and others will kneel before you and offer to be your servants.
Be that as it may, the gift is given. And what it says is true: Jesus knows where your feet have been. He knows the journey you have been on. He knows the blisters and scars your travels have left on your wounded, frightened, and too often exhausted souls. And to him it is all acceptable. Tonight he kneels before you, bathes your feet with soothing water and fragrant oil, blessing the path you have taken, wherever it has taken you; blesses and honors the choices you have made that have led you here to him tonight; blesses and honors all the missteps and lost hours of your entire life. All of this is acceptable, and tonight he washes and honors and blesses it all. Making it all the source of wisdom gained through often painful experience – so that, as the 12-step tradition puts it, “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it,” We may even “see how our experience can benefit others.” (Big Book of AA)
As we continue our journey to the cross and beyond we can now do so knowing that God knows our path, God has always been and always will be our companion. God has not ever, does not now, and never will do anything other than honor who we are and where we have been, even as he is ever ready to be our guide toward a path that is right.
I was recently stunned into inner silence by the signature phrase someone included on an e-mail message to me. Every message he sends, in fact, has these as his final words: "Always be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." We all need to know that these words are true. “Always be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Tonight we can luxuriate in the assurance that Jesus knows the battle each of us is waging. And, kneeling before us because he loves us, he will ultimately and always be kind. As you hear me say almost every Sunday, quoting Psalm 145, “The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.”
Thanks be to God.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Exercise and Diet. Oh, that again!
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany:
12 February 20121994
Trinity Church
2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Psalm 30
Naaman was a mighty general, The Second Book of the Kings has told us. He was not an Israelite but a gentile, and the commander of the Syrian army; He had won many victories for his king. He was successful in every way a soldier wants to be. But he had a problem. He had a disease the Hebrew Bible calls leprosy. It’s not that same thing that we know as leprosy today, but it was obviously a serious and debilitating disease that resisted cure by ordinary means.
Naaman gets some advice from an unusual place, from a slave girl who doesn’t even have a name in the story. Humble and, in the eyes of the world, as insignificant as she is, she is able to guide Naaman toward healing. She is able to guide Naaman -- through his wife, that is, in case you didn’t get it the first time: great wisdom often comes from the women in our biblical story!
She guides Naaman toward Elisha the prophet in Israel. In those days to be a prophet meant to be a wise man, a person who knew and understood great things, a person others looked to for wisdom and guidance, even for healing.
So Naaman sets off to see if this wise one of Israel can heal him. The prophet doesn’t even come down to see Naaman. He just tells Naaman to go and wash in the River Jordan. Naaman is disappointed, even angry.
He says, "I thought that for me [Elisha the prophet] would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand and cure me." Naaman is unable to believe that any prophet worth his salt and any God worth his incense would use such simple stuff--the water of a river as insignificant as the Jordan--to heal and restore. After all, there are mightier rivers back in Damascus.
Naaman is rather like, well me, for one, and maybe like you too. I have a doctor, or should I say I have some doctors who actually say they know how I can be healed, or at least made more whole. They claim to have a way for my heart and my arteries and my mind and my mood and my memory to be stronger and healthier. Their secret will work for you too, I bet. They tell me that this miracle of healing can be accomplished if I will pay careful attention to what and how much I eat and to how much and how often I get exercise.
Oh, that again! Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise. Surely it can’t be that simple. But we all know it is. That simple combination is shown over and over and over and over again to be the key to a healthier body and mind.
So simple. And yet so hard.
We are just like Naaman. The answer is close at hand and, for me at least, it just doesn’t seem like the thing to do. There must be another way.
Naaman, unlike me, finally does what the doctor – I mean the prophet orders – and indeed he is made well.
The story of Naaman is an interesting folk tale, but like all most folk tales it has been preserved for a reason, for some lesson it teaches.
In this case, the lesson, I think is that wonderful things are often available to us if we will take the obvious, not usually very glamorous steps to help make them possible.
What is true for individual people is true also for groups of people. Like congregations.
I pray you are aware by now that the future of this congregation, like the future of the majority of congregations in this diocese, indeed in this country is going to be very different from its past. I also hope that by now you have begun to understand that in many, many ways God is behind these changes. The Church has not been abandoned. It is not disappearing. It will never cease to be, but, as it always has, it will undergo periods of adjustment and change. Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence is right, I believe and so do many, if not most, theologians and church historians, that she is right when she says that every 500 years or so the Western Church – that’s us – has undergone a massive upheaval, redefinition and refinement. That time is upon us again. It is what we are currently living through.
So what to do?
Well, one thing, at least, is to do what Naaman finally did, pay attention to what the prophets are saying and do what they suggest even if there advice is to do the painfully obvious. The church’s future, including our parish’s future depends on you. What our parish needs is for those who are its members to develop their own spiritual lives, to attend to their growth in faith, their growth in the knowledge and aloe of the Lord. That means gathering together regularly for worship – not just when it’s merely convenient or only when it isn’t June, July or August. It means reading and studying the scriptures – not by yourself, but in the company of others who are also learning what it means to be shaped and molded into the image and likeness of Christ. It means seeking, truly seeking your own vocation – listening for what God is calling you to be and do – and to do that also in the company of others who are asking the same question. The Spirit seems to work best when there is a group gathered together seeking the Spirit’s wisdom and guidance. It means giving generously, even sacrificially, for the spread of God’s kingdom. It means all the things you already know you are encourager by your church to do.
It isn’t glamorous; it isn’t grand and spectacular.
It’s just the way it is.
This parish can be whatever you are willing to work for it to be and whatever you are willing to provide the support for it to be.
It isn’t a mystery and it isn’t a secret. It is the diet and exercise of our corporate life.
With God all things are possible. Without God nothing is.
12 February 20121994
Trinity Church
2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Psalm 30
Naaman was a mighty general, The Second Book of the Kings has told us. He was not an Israelite but a gentile, and the commander of the Syrian army; He had won many victories for his king. He was successful in every way a soldier wants to be. But he had a problem. He had a disease the Hebrew Bible calls leprosy. It’s not that same thing that we know as leprosy today, but it was obviously a serious and debilitating disease that resisted cure by ordinary means.
Naaman gets some advice from an unusual place, from a slave girl who doesn’t even have a name in the story. Humble and, in the eyes of the world, as insignificant as she is, she is able to guide Naaman toward healing. She is able to guide Naaman -- through his wife, that is, in case you didn’t get it the first time: great wisdom often comes from the women in our biblical story!
She guides Naaman toward Elisha the prophet in Israel. In those days to be a prophet meant to be a wise man, a person who knew and understood great things, a person others looked to for wisdom and guidance, even for healing.
So Naaman sets off to see if this wise one of Israel can heal him. The prophet doesn’t even come down to see Naaman. He just tells Naaman to go and wash in the River Jordan. Naaman is disappointed, even angry.
He says, "I thought that for me [Elisha the prophet] would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand and cure me." Naaman is unable to believe that any prophet worth his salt and any God worth his incense would use such simple stuff--the water of a river as insignificant as the Jordan--to heal and restore. After all, there are mightier rivers back in Damascus.
Naaman is rather like, well me, for one, and maybe like you too. I have a doctor, or should I say I have some doctors who actually say they know how I can be healed, or at least made more whole. They claim to have a way for my heart and my arteries and my mind and my mood and my memory to be stronger and healthier. Their secret will work for you too, I bet. They tell me that this miracle of healing can be accomplished if I will pay careful attention to what and how much I eat and to how much and how often I get exercise.
Oh, that again! Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise. Surely it can’t be that simple. But we all know it is. That simple combination is shown over and over and over and over again to be the key to a healthier body and mind.
So simple. And yet so hard.
We are just like Naaman. The answer is close at hand and, for me at least, it just doesn’t seem like the thing to do. There must be another way.
Naaman, unlike me, finally does what the doctor – I mean the prophet orders – and indeed he is made well.
The story of Naaman is an interesting folk tale, but like all most folk tales it has been preserved for a reason, for some lesson it teaches.
In this case, the lesson, I think is that wonderful things are often available to us if we will take the obvious, not usually very glamorous steps to help make them possible.
What is true for individual people is true also for groups of people. Like congregations.
I pray you are aware by now that the future of this congregation, like the future of the majority of congregations in this diocese, indeed in this country is going to be very different from its past. I also hope that by now you have begun to understand that in many, many ways God is behind these changes. The Church has not been abandoned. It is not disappearing. It will never cease to be, but, as it always has, it will undergo periods of adjustment and change. Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence is right, I believe and so do many, if not most, theologians and church historians, that she is right when she says that every 500 years or so the Western Church – that’s us – has undergone a massive upheaval, redefinition and refinement. That time is upon us again. It is what we are currently living through.
So what to do?
Well, one thing, at least, is to do what Naaman finally did, pay attention to what the prophets are saying and do what they suggest even if there advice is to do the painfully obvious. The church’s future, including our parish’s future depends on you. What our parish needs is for those who are its members to develop their own spiritual lives, to attend to their growth in faith, their growth in the knowledge and aloe of the Lord. That means gathering together regularly for worship – not just when it’s merely convenient or only when it isn’t June, July or August. It means reading and studying the scriptures – not by yourself, but in the company of others who are also learning what it means to be shaped and molded into the image and likeness of Christ. It means seeking, truly seeking your own vocation – listening for what God is calling you to be and do – and to do that also in the company of others who are asking the same question. The Spirit seems to work best when there is a group gathered together seeking the Spirit’s wisdom and guidance. It means giving generously, even sacrificially, for the spread of God’s kingdom. It means all the things you already know you are encourager by your church to do.
It isn’t glamorous; it isn’t grand and spectacular.
It’s just the way it is.
This parish can be whatever you are willing to work for it to be and whatever you are willing to provide the support for it to be.
It isn’t a mystery and it isn’t a secret. It is the diet and exercise of our corporate life.
With God all things are possible. Without God nothing is.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Coins and Creatures
Sermon: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 16, 2011
Trinity Church
Proper 24
Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13)
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22
The Pharisees are not such bad guys. They are just being true to what they really believe. They believe you've got to be very careful in what you do when God is watching. You need to keep your hands clean and not associate with the wrong kind of people and not eat things that good people shouldn't have put before them. They are not so different from each of us some of the time. It's very hard for us not to the think that our religion is primarily a code of behavior, a list of do's and don't's. It is very hard for us not to think that our religion is somehow about being proper as "proper" was understood by our parents and our grandparents. Some people are still offended by flip-flops or short pants in church. There are millions of people starving to death, whose children are starving before their eyes, and there are millions of people who go to bed – or should I say “go to sleep” because they have no bed – go to sleep not knowing whether or not they will be kidnapped or murdered in their sleep, and they need our help – and yet we find time to worry about whose shoes are polished and whose are not. That's what the Pharisees are like.
And the Herodians. They must be doing something right, because they and their friends are in charge. They only want things to keep going along as they are. The Church – the Temple that is – is beautiful and strong. It has plenty of money. It has plenty of programs and plenty of members who show up regularly to do what good religious people are supposed to do. The Herodians don’t want anything to shake the foundations; they don’t want any new ideas that challenge – not so much what they are doing – but the basis on which they are doing it. They keep order, that is for sure, but they do it by supporting a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Not to make too fine a point of it, it is conservatively estimated that in our own country 10% of the people control 90% of the wealth. You and I are the beneficiaries of that system. In that sense, we are the Herodians. Not bad people, just people acting according to what they have come to believe.
But Jesus presents a challenge to all of that. And they want to embarrass him. They want to see if they can get him to say something publicly that will get him in so much trouble that he will either be silenced or – if they play their cards right – get in so much trouble that he can be arrested and removed as a public figure.
So they ask him a loaded question – one they think that he cannot answer without falling into their trap: one answer will get him in trouble with the authorities, the other answer will discredit him among his friends and followers.
They ask him about taxes. You only have to turn on the TV or radio to know that even today this is a hot topic – and opposing factions are still using the topic of taxes to stir up the public – and try to win votes.
“What do you think about paying taxes,” they ask him. But Jesus knows taxes are not the real issue. They are not the real issue in our day and time either.
The issue there and then, just as it is here and now, is what should human beings be doing with what they have and who they are? What should governments and businesses be doing with the money and power and influence they have?
The Herodians and the Pharisees ask Jesus about money, and he asks them about themselves. The question isn’t really about money, it’s about what it means to be a human being.
“Show me a coin,” he says. And here our translation fails us. What we heard was “Whose head is on the coin,” but that isn’t what it says. What it says is “Whose IMAGE is on the coin.” Not “head” but “image.” The word is important.
“It is the emperor’s image”, they say. Then let the emperor have it – as long as you also let God have everything that has his image on it.
And that is where the bottom falls out of the Herodian's and the Pharisees' clever trap. The moment they hear the word “image,” they know their clever argument is in trouble. The are good Bible-reading people, and they would know what it says at the very beginning of that sacred book. They would know that right there at the very beginning of the human story are these words:
God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air . . . 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Gen 1:25-27 (NRSV)
If the money part is about Caesar, then the human being part is about God.
Jesus is saying that before you can worry about taxes and power and government and business you need to know who you are. He said it then; he says it now.
Before you write a check, before you cast a vote, before you make a business decision, before you exercise the freedom you have been given, you need to be sure you understand who you are and whose you are.
You are made in the image of God, he says.
You are made – you did not make yourself. That you exist at all is a gift to you, and everything you have is a gift to you, he says.
Our prayer book has been telling us this Biblical message for a long, long time. There is a moment in the Great Thanksgiving in one of our Eucharistic prayers that says this:
And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, whereby we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies. [BCP, 336 & 342]
Hear that again, “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.” Not part of who we are, not part of what we have, not some of what we do – but our entire selves.
In his response to the Herodians and the Pharisees Jesus raises the stakes. And, of course, it makes them angry. From this point forward they will look for a more permanent way to shut him up.
It is that time of year when the leaders of our congregation will speak to us about financial stewardship. And I am going to say something bold that I hope you will take to heart.
I am very, very well aware that a common criticism of clergy and of churches in general is that they talk about money too much. I’ve even – and too often – heard of people leaving congregations because there was too much talk of money. Let me say point blank that I have never known anyone make such a complaint who felt good about their own generosity and willingness to give. Those whose conscience is clear about this issue rarely, if ever, complain, because they are at peace with themselves and with God.
As Jesus points out, money is not an issue separate from our spiritual life. Quite the contrary, it is an integral part of who we are. It is why we place our offering of money on the altar – because in a real sense it represents our lives – and the amount of ourselves we are willing to share with others.
Only you know if what you share with God and with the world God has committed to your care “yourself, your soul and body,” or just some token amount, some part of who you are.
God calls us to give to God what is God’s. And what is God's is everything in all creation, including "ourselves, our souls and bodies."
October 16, 2011
Trinity Church
Proper 24
Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13)
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22
The Pharisees are not such bad guys. They are just being true to what they really believe. They believe you've got to be very careful in what you do when God is watching. You need to keep your hands clean and not associate with the wrong kind of people and not eat things that good people shouldn't have put before them. They are not so different from each of us some of the time. It's very hard for us not to the think that our religion is primarily a code of behavior, a list of do's and don't's. It is very hard for us not to think that our religion is somehow about being proper as "proper" was understood by our parents and our grandparents. Some people are still offended by flip-flops or short pants in church. There are millions of people starving to death, whose children are starving before their eyes, and there are millions of people who go to bed – or should I say “go to sleep” because they have no bed – go to sleep not knowing whether or not they will be kidnapped or murdered in their sleep, and they need our help – and yet we find time to worry about whose shoes are polished and whose are not. That's what the Pharisees are like.
And the Herodians. They must be doing something right, because they and their friends are in charge. They only want things to keep going along as they are. The Church – the Temple that is – is beautiful and strong. It has plenty of money. It has plenty of programs and plenty of members who show up regularly to do what good religious people are supposed to do. The Herodians don’t want anything to shake the foundations; they don’t want any new ideas that challenge – not so much what they are doing – but the basis on which they are doing it. They keep order, that is for sure, but they do it by supporting a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Not to make too fine a point of it, it is conservatively estimated that in our own country 10% of the people control 90% of the wealth. You and I are the beneficiaries of that system. In that sense, we are the Herodians. Not bad people, just people acting according to what they have come to believe.
But Jesus presents a challenge to all of that. And they want to embarrass him. They want to see if they can get him to say something publicly that will get him in so much trouble that he will either be silenced or – if they play their cards right – get in so much trouble that he can be arrested and removed as a public figure.
So they ask him a loaded question – one they think that he cannot answer without falling into their trap: one answer will get him in trouble with the authorities, the other answer will discredit him among his friends and followers.
They ask him about taxes. You only have to turn on the TV or radio to know that even today this is a hot topic – and opposing factions are still using the topic of taxes to stir up the public – and try to win votes.
“What do you think about paying taxes,” they ask him. But Jesus knows taxes are not the real issue. They are not the real issue in our day and time either.
The issue there and then, just as it is here and now, is what should human beings be doing with what they have and who they are? What should governments and businesses be doing with the money and power and influence they have?
The Herodians and the Pharisees ask Jesus about money, and he asks them about themselves. The question isn’t really about money, it’s about what it means to be a human being.
“Show me a coin,” he says. And here our translation fails us. What we heard was “Whose head is on the coin,” but that isn’t what it says. What it says is “Whose IMAGE is on the coin.” Not “head” but “image.” The word is important.
“It is the emperor’s image”, they say. Then let the emperor have it – as long as you also let God have everything that has his image on it.
And that is where the bottom falls out of the Herodian's and the Pharisees' clever trap. The moment they hear the word “image,” they know their clever argument is in trouble. The are good Bible-reading people, and they would know what it says at the very beginning of that sacred book. They would know that right there at the very beginning of the human story are these words:
God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air . . . 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Gen 1:25-27 (NRSV)
If the money part is about Caesar, then the human being part is about God.
Jesus is saying that before you can worry about taxes and power and government and business you need to know who you are. He said it then; he says it now.
Before you write a check, before you cast a vote, before you make a business decision, before you exercise the freedom you have been given, you need to be sure you understand who you are and whose you are.
You are made in the image of God, he says.
You are made – you did not make yourself. That you exist at all is a gift to you, and everything you have is a gift to you, he says.
Our prayer book has been telling us this Biblical message for a long, long time. There is a moment in the Great Thanksgiving in one of our Eucharistic prayers that says this:
And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, whereby we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies. [BCP, 336 & 342]
Hear that again, “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.” Not part of who we are, not part of what we have, not some of what we do – but our entire selves.
In his response to the Herodians and the Pharisees Jesus raises the stakes. And, of course, it makes them angry. From this point forward they will look for a more permanent way to shut him up.
It is that time of year when the leaders of our congregation will speak to us about financial stewardship. And I am going to say something bold that I hope you will take to heart.
I am very, very well aware that a common criticism of clergy and of churches in general is that they talk about money too much. I’ve even – and too often – heard of people leaving congregations because there was too much talk of money. Let me say point blank that I have never known anyone make such a complaint who felt good about their own generosity and willingness to give. Those whose conscience is clear about this issue rarely, if ever, complain, because they are at peace with themselves and with God.
As Jesus points out, money is not an issue separate from our spiritual life. Quite the contrary, it is an integral part of who we are. It is why we place our offering of money on the altar – because in a real sense it represents our lives – and the amount of ourselves we are willing to share with others.
Only you know if what you share with God and with the world God has committed to your care “yourself, your soul and body,” or just some token amount, some part of who you are.
God calls us to give to God what is God’s. And what is God's is everything in all creation, including "ourselves, our souls and bodies."
Thursday, June 9, 2011
EfM Graduation Sermon -- Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, June 5, 2011
Zechariah 1:7–11
Psalm 31:19-24
Revelation 14:13–16
Matthew 8:5–13
Alan Jones is a priest and was for a long time Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Phyllis Tickle lives on a farm in Millington, Tennessee. She is an editor and writer. She is a lector in her parish church and a Eucharistic Minister – and she is the mother of seven children. Ini Kopuria, whom our Church remembers this evening, was, for a large part of his life, a cop.
Twenty-seven years ago Alan wrote a splendid and prophetic book called Soulmaking in which he talks about the inner life of the human spirit and about the psychology of the spiritual journey we are on as followers of Jesus. He also says a bit about the shape our church is in in our time. He was an early voice, now joined by a whole chorus others, insisting that the church we all know and love is in for changes of a magnitude only rarely seen before. He says our times in particular will require of us a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest.” He means to imply, I am sure, that there is much about faith that can be not passionate, but lukewarm; not intelligent but over-simplified and intellectually shallow; not honest but fearful, willfully duplicitous and ignorant: A fortress of denial not an outpost of the Gospel.
Alan compares our situation to that of the English residents of Victorian India in the days of the Raj – when Brittan’ia ruled the waves. There is a story that when those English colonials had to flee quickly because of uprisings of the indigenous Indian population, the road out of town was “strewn with such things as stuffed owls and Victorian bric-a-brac,” – those decorative but otherwise useless things the ruling class had gathered about them. Jones says he has no idea what our church’s equivalent of “stuffed owls” will be in the coming era, but that he is sure, because of the changes God is making in God’s church, that our paths will be just as littered. He says that having faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest” means that, “we Christians will need to travel light,” wisely choosing what we take forward with us.
For Phyllis Tickle, it isn’t that there will be road littered with once valued and now useless things. She says In her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why that from time to time the Church has “a great collective rummage sale”: a time when things once useful, but now no longer so, are discarded. What I like about what Phyllis says is that, though our times are extraordinary, and can be extraordinarily difficult, they are not unprecedented. She demonstrates most convincingly – and somewhat consolingly – that every five-hundred years or so this Great Collective Rummage sale takes place – and you and I happen to be living during just such a cleaning-out of the attic.
So, what are the stuffed owls we must leave behind? What is being shuffled off to the great rummage sale?
We are so much in the middle of it all, it’s not always easy to say, but there are some things that we can be pretty sure of.
One thing that will be left behind is the notion that only those who are ordained deacon, priest or bishop are ministers of the Gospel. There was a celebrated Bishop of New York who, fresh from his ordination as bishop in the great Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, was sharing with his wife how wonderful and moving and glorious the day had been. “I suppose so,” was her laconic reply, “but I hope you don’t think anything that happened today was more important that your baptism.”
And so it is: the church is leaving behind the ideas that the ordained are there only to minister to the un-ordained, that clergy are providers and laity are consumers. The truth being rediscovered is that we all minister to each other with equal authority and equal integrity – and that our ministries are not confined to “churchy” things and emergency situations. Oh yes, being an acolyte and a lector and an usher are important and valuable, but they are not, in the emerging model, “ministries” in the most profound and beautiful sense of the word. Those churchy things are the things we do around the family table so that we can go out into the world where our real ministries are – and, once out there, serve the world in God’s name. It may well be, and probably is, that the old hierarchical structure of the institutional church is a stuffed owl just waiting to be left on the roadside of the spiritual journey.
You certainly know that while EfM – Education for MINISTRY – may indeed make you a better lector and eucharistic minister, usher or member of the altar guild, that is side-effect and not the main purpose of all the reading and learning and praying and worshiping-together you have done over the past four years.
The goal of EfM has been to prepare us for ministry in the world.
“You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads,” says St. Francis. As I look around at what passes for Christianity in contemporary culture – exclusivity; political polarization, national arrogance and denominational elitism, a retreat to fearful and fearsome fundamentalism – I am convinced that the Gospel of which St. Francis speaks, is more critically important than ever. The world needs the living Gospel, visible in us followers of Jesus, as we go about our lives following his example – his kindness, his compassion, his honesty, his faith and his hope. EfM seeks to empower us to be that Gospel – in the check-out line, at the stop-light, in schools and hospitals and shops and offices and restaurants and on busses and trains and everywhere else we live our lives.
EfM calls us to be theologians of the ordinary.
As conscious followers of Jesus Christ, ministry is what we do and who we are all the time. Any other, rarified, specialized, esoteric understanding of ministry is a rummage-sale item we can hope and pray that nobody buys.
Which brings me to Ini Kopuria – remember him? Ini Kopuria was a cop. Well actually he was that and some other things too; but what he was not is ordained. True, he eventually founded an organization called The Melanesian Brotherhood, a kind of semi-monastic fellowship of men; but even then, the members of the Brotherhood were laymen, not ordained, and their vows were temporary, with the expectation that each brother would eventually return to customary community life, most likely marry and be followers of Jesus in their daily lives.
Early on as a student, Ini Kopuria showed a profound interest in things religious; and his friends and associates fairly assumed his life would be about churchy things as a profession. But Ini Koipuria chose to become a cop. That, I am sure, is why we had that interesting reading from Zechariah about those who “patrolled the earth, and lo, the whole earth remains at peace.”
Though he would eventually dedicate his life to the Brotherhood, the truth is he spent more of his life outside the Brotherhood than in it. And, again I say, he was never ordained – other that most important ordination we all share, the ordination of baptism.
One of his biographers choose five particular characteristic to describe him:
First . . his spirituality: prayer was a very real thing with Ini: God was in all his thoughts. Second, his joyousness, he was almost always in high spirits, full of fun, full of the joy of being alive, it was good to live with him. Third, his deep understanding of the thoughts of Melanesians. Fourth, his common sense, he always knew what was practicable and kept discussions to that which was reverent, joyful, sympathetic [and] wise. (Charles E. Fox. From Southern Cross Log (New Zealand Edition), June 1, 1946, pages 21-24.
Prayerful, joyful, perceptive-of and sensitive-to those around him, and a man of common sense. Four virtues anyone of us could claim if we will. In the case of Ini Kopuria these ordinary virtues were the path to the exemplary life that we celebrate today – ordinary human virtues were his path, entering into the hierarchy of the church was not.
Those are four virtues, but I mentioned a fifth. Ini was said not be “popular with the White staff who thought him conceited.” His very English biographer goes on to say that there was indeed some “truth in this, for he felt his own gifts.” “For he felt his own gifts” – and so the British colonials found him conceited. It seems that in Ini’s time-and-place the stuffed owl of racism had not yet been set out on the curb for pick-up. Would that all God’s children would feel – and claim – their own gifts.
I pray that your experiences in EfM have set you on the path to feeling and claiming your gifts as ministers of the Gospel, as Christ’s ambassadors to the world. I pray that it has helped you to a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest,” a faith that will help you help us all find the wisdom and the courage to leave the stuffed owls behind.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for the earth. “Now that they’ve heard and seen and experienced how much I love them and love the world,” he says, “I’m just going to leave the world in their care. It will be their job to trust that I am always with them, and to carry that message to the world, and to keep that love alive.” The angels sort of chuckled at God’s optimistic regard for the human race. “And if that doesn’t work,” they said, “what other plan do you have?”
“NO other plan,” said Jesus. “No other plan at all.”
As I look around this room today, I have to say there is every reason to think Jesus’s plan was and is a good one.
Psalm 31:19-24
Revelation 14:13–16
Matthew 8:5–13
Alan Jones is a priest and was for a long time Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Phyllis Tickle lives on a farm in Millington, Tennessee. She is an editor and writer. She is a lector in her parish church and a Eucharistic Minister – and she is the mother of seven children. Ini Kopuria, whom our Church remembers this evening, was, for a large part of his life, a cop.
Twenty-seven years ago Alan wrote a splendid and prophetic book called Soulmaking in which he talks about the inner life of the human spirit and about the psychology of the spiritual journey we are on as followers of Jesus. He also says a bit about the shape our church is in in our time. He was an early voice, now joined by a whole chorus others, insisting that the church we all know and love is in for changes of a magnitude only rarely seen before. He says our times in particular will require of us a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest.” He means to imply, I am sure, that there is much about faith that can be not passionate, but lukewarm; not intelligent but over-simplified and intellectually shallow; not honest but fearful, willfully duplicitous and ignorant: A fortress of denial not an outpost of the Gospel.
Alan compares our situation to that of the English residents of Victorian India in the days of the Raj – when Brittan’ia ruled the waves. There is a story that when those English colonials had to flee quickly because of uprisings of the indigenous Indian population, the road out of town was “strewn with such things as stuffed owls and Victorian bric-a-brac,” – those decorative but otherwise useless things the ruling class had gathered about them. Jones says he has no idea what our church’s equivalent of “stuffed owls” will be in the coming era, but that he is sure, because of the changes God is making in God’s church, that our paths will be just as littered. He says that having faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest” means that, “we Christians will need to travel light,” wisely choosing what we take forward with us.
For Phyllis Tickle, it isn’t that there will be road littered with once valued and now useless things. She says In her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why that from time to time the Church has “a great collective rummage sale”: a time when things once useful, but now no longer so, are discarded. What I like about what Phyllis says is that, though our times are extraordinary, and can be extraordinarily difficult, they are not unprecedented. She demonstrates most convincingly – and somewhat consolingly – that every five-hundred years or so this Great Collective Rummage sale takes place – and you and I happen to be living during just such a cleaning-out of the attic.
So, what are the stuffed owls we must leave behind? What is being shuffled off to the great rummage sale?
We are so much in the middle of it all, it’s not always easy to say, but there are some things that we can be pretty sure of.
One thing that will be left behind is the notion that only those who are ordained deacon, priest or bishop are ministers of the Gospel. There was a celebrated Bishop of New York who, fresh from his ordination as bishop in the great Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, was sharing with his wife how wonderful and moving and glorious the day had been. “I suppose so,” was her laconic reply, “but I hope you don’t think anything that happened today was more important that your baptism.”
And so it is: the church is leaving behind the ideas that the ordained are there only to minister to the un-ordained, that clergy are providers and laity are consumers. The truth being rediscovered is that we all minister to each other with equal authority and equal integrity – and that our ministries are not confined to “churchy” things and emergency situations. Oh yes, being an acolyte and a lector and an usher are important and valuable, but they are not, in the emerging model, “ministries” in the most profound and beautiful sense of the word. Those churchy things are the things we do around the family table so that we can go out into the world where our real ministries are – and, once out there, serve the world in God’s name. It may well be, and probably is, that the old hierarchical structure of the institutional church is a stuffed owl just waiting to be left on the roadside of the spiritual journey.
You certainly know that while EfM – Education for MINISTRY – may indeed make you a better lector and eucharistic minister, usher or member of the altar guild, that is side-effect and not the main purpose of all the reading and learning and praying and worshiping-together you have done over the past four years.
The goal of EfM has been to prepare us for ministry in the world.
“You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads,” says St. Francis. As I look around at what passes for Christianity in contemporary culture – exclusivity; political polarization, national arrogance and denominational elitism, a retreat to fearful and fearsome fundamentalism – I am convinced that the Gospel of which St. Francis speaks, is more critically important than ever. The world needs the living Gospel, visible in us followers of Jesus, as we go about our lives following his example – his kindness, his compassion, his honesty, his faith and his hope. EfM seeks to empower us to be that Gospel – in the check-out line, at the stop-light, in schools and hospitals and shops and offices and restaurants and on busses and trains and everywhere else we live our lives.
EfM calls us to be theologians of the ordinary.
As conscious followers of Jesus Christ, ministry is what we do and who we are all the time. Any other, rarified, specialized, esoteric understanding of ministry is a rummage-sale item we can hope and pray that nobody buys.
Which brings me to Ini Kopuria – remember him? Ini Kopuria was a cop. Well actually he was that and some other things too; but what he was not is ordained. True, he eventually founded an organization called The Melanesian Brotherhood, a kind of semi-monastic fellowship of men; but even then, the members of the Brotherhood were laymen, not ordained, and their vows were temporary, with the expectation that each brother would eventually return to customary community life, most likely marry and be followers of Jesus in their daily lives.
Early on as a student, Ini Kopuria showed a profound interest in things religious; and his friends and associates fairly assumed his life would be about churchy things as a profession. But Ini Koipuria chose to become a cop. That, I am sure, is why we had that interesting reading from Zechariah about those who “patrolled the earth, and lo, the whole earth remains at peace.”
Though he would eventually dedicate his life to the Brotherhood, the truth is he spent more of his life outside the Brotherhood than in it. And, again I say, he was never ordained – other that most important ordination we all share, the ordination of baptism.
One of his biographers choose five particular characteristic to describe him:
First . . his spirituality: prayer was a very real thing with Ini: God was in all his thoughts. Second, his joyousness, he was almost always in high spirits, full of fun, full of the joy of being alive, it was good to live with him. Third, his deep understanding of the thoughts of Melanesians. Fourth, his common sense, he always knew what was practicable and kept discussions to that which was reverent, joyful, sympathetic [and] wise. (Charles E. Fox. From Southern Cross Log (New Zealand Edition), June 1, 1946, pages 21-24.
Prayerful, joyful, perceptive-of and sensitive-to those around him, and a man of common sense. Four virtues anyone of us could claim if we will. In the case of Ini Kopuria these ordinary virtues were the path to the exemplary life that we celebrate today – ordinary human virtues were his path, entering into the hierarchy of the church was not.
Those are four virtues, but I mentioned a fifth. Ini was said not be “popular with the White staff who thought him conceited.” His very English biographer goes on to say that there was indeed some “truth in this, for he felt his own gifts.” “For he felt his own gifts” – and so the British colonials found him conceited. It seems that in Ini’s time-and-place the stuffed owl of racism had not yet been set out on the curb for pick-up. Would that all God’s children would feel – and claim – their own gifts.
I pray that your experiences in EfM have set you on the path to feeling and claiming your gifts as ministers of the Gospel, as Christ’s ambassadors to the world. I pray that it has helped you to a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest,” a faith that will help you help us all find the wisdom and the courage to leave the stuffed owls behind.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for the earth. “Now that they’ve heard and seen and experienced how much I love them and love the world,” he says, “I’m just going to leave the world in their care. It will be their job to trust that I am always with them, and to carry that message to the world, and to keep that love alive.” The angels sort of chuckled at God’s optimistic regard for the human race. “And if that doesn’t work,” they said, “what other plan do you have?”
“NO other plan,” said Jesus. “No other plan at all.”
As I look around this room today, I have to say there is every reason to think Jesus’s plan was and is a good one.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 22, 2011
Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends. And goodbyes are hard. Their faces reveal the trouble in their hearts. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says, looking around at them gathered there in the dim light of the oil lamps in that upper room. But they are afraid. Why is he going? Where is he going? Can’t they come too?
This Gospel lesson is, I believe, the one most used at Episcopal funerals. It is about goodbye’s and about the pain of goodbyes. And it is also about hope and reassurance in the face of loss, separation, and death.
I once had a conversation with a fellow clergyman who recounted to me his experience of helping the surviving member of a couple plan a funeral.. Reviewing the options, the priest suggested that the Gospel lesson be this one -- the one where Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” “Dwelling places?”the partner said. “Dwelling places?” “You knew John. How gracious and tasteful he was. John would not want just a ‘dwelling place! John would want a mansion. Can’t we give him a mansion – like it said in the older Bible?” And so they did.
When it came time to read the Gospel at the funeral, my friend read from the translation we heard this morning, but, looking warmly at John’s partner as he read, he proudly proclaimed, “In my Fathers’ house are many ‘mansions’. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.”
Jesus is taking the part of the servant of a nomadic tribe who strikes out ahead of his companions, who rushes ahead to the oasis to set up the tents, to draw the cool water, light the lamps, lay the carpets, and fluff up the pillows. That work done, he will return to the caravan to accompany them, to usher them toward the familiar comfort of their now awaiting home.
And this is his promise to us, too. To go ahead and prepare a place, a dwelling place, a mansion, for each of us.
What do you imagine that home, that dwelling place, that mansion will be like for you and those you love? For desert nomads, it would have been just what I described. A tent set firmly in the sand, providing refuge from the cold desert winds and shade from parching desert sun. Ornate rugs unrolled on the ground, great pillows all plumped up and shaken free of sand, oil lamps lighting the way to the life-giving water of the oasis.
That’s probably not your picture of your mansion in the sky. For you and me, maybe there are rich oriental rugs on the floor, and maybe there are chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. For me, those chandeliers would be full of real candles blazing in hospitable welcome. And they would never burn low or need replacing – or drip wax on the floor! There would be books and books and books. And a great big leather chair with the biggest ottoman in the heavenly furniture store. And a reading light that knows just how to focus itself so that even without my glasses, every word would leap off the page.
And there are pictures on the wall, pictures of beloved memories, pictures of Hawaii – and Rome pictures which, when you looked at them, would be full of the sound of crashing waves, and the smell of frangiapanne or the smell of pizza and the “honk, honk” of Vespas. What pictures will hang on the wall of your mansion in heaven?
But there will be no need of pictures of the people you love. Because all of them, ALL of them, will be coming for dinner. The dining room in that house will be big enough to hold them all, and they will all be there, and there will always be enough time to tell them all the things you ever wanted to. And to hear them tell you in return all the wonderful adventures of their lives. And you will never forget to tell them how much you love them. And they will never forget to tell you the same thing. And you will hear it. And know that it is true. And the food will be fabulous. And the desert tray will never be empty. Now that’s a mansion I could move into. A mansion worth dying to inherit.
But will it really be that way? Well, yes and no.
Jesus has indeed gone before us to that other land to prepare a place for us, and it will not be just a dwelling place. It will be the mansion of your dreams. Will it have comfortable furniture and leather-bound books? I do not know. But Jesus promises it will have all the good things we ever really longed for or needed.
It will be place with the doors flung wide open in welcome. A place in which you are truly known and truly loved. It will be the place you belong. There will be no shame there. No nagging sense that you are not what you ought to be. There will be no condemnation there, no accusing voice finding fault. Only acceptance, understanding, and love. There will be no regret there, because all sins are forgiven and wiped away. No sense that you’ve got to do more than you can, only sincere gratitude and thanksgiving that you have done what you could. And there will certainly be a banquet, where you can wear whatever you want, and stay as long as you need, and share in meal that fills your deepest hunger.
But wait. It seems we’ve stopped talking about furniture and photographs. And started talking about the fruits of God’s love for us. Acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, encouragement, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, love so comfortable you can feel it wrap around you and hold you up. This is the furniture of the Kingdom of God. This is the nature of the place Jesus has gone ahead to prepare for us.
And, dear friends, there is no reasons that place should be just there and then. It is the place we are called to live in right here and right now. If we are not busy furnishing this place, this world with those things, then we’ve got it all wrong. A church, a parish church, must be that place where acceptance, and forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, may be found. Insofar as it is, then we really are that community Jesus calls us to be. Insofar as it is not, then we’ve got work to do.
Churches do not exist to build real mansions on earth, but to build on earth our very best attempt at that heavenly place where God would have us live. A place where all God’s children learn and know that they are forgiven, are accepted, and are loved. A place where we do not fear condemnation and judgment because we learn and know that in God’s eyes all is forgiven, every debt has all been paid. A place where each one’s gifts are celebrated and shared to the good of everyone else. A place where we can truly, deeply, passionately be at home. That is what we need to be building here. The furniture of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and mutual support are the stuff we need to be setting about us in this place. Anything else is a waste of our time.
And what about that banquet, what about that great dinner party at which all those we love, those whom we see no longer, are gathered together? The tears wiped from their eyes and ours? Just what about that circle that will “be unbroken? “
Dear friends, that too is here. Right here and right now. Gathered around us at this table are all those we love and who love us. This table only appears to be limited to time and space. In reality, only one end of this table is here. The other end stretches to the skies; and gathered around it is the whole company of Saints basking in the light of a million candles -- a million candles which all together do not burn nearly as brightly as God’s love lighting every face in that fabulous company. The bread there never runs out, and the wine is always flowing. That bread, that wine, that table are right here. Right now. There is indeed a mansion prepared for us, a dwelling place in God’s Kingdom. Open your eyes and see it. In our Father’s house are many, many mansions, and this place is called to be one of them. That doorway flung wide open in welcome to all God’s children must be right here.
And the party has indeed already begun, right now. And all goodbyes were only temporary. Everyone is here already. Even those we see no longer. They are here, and we are with them and they are with us.
Come, let us keep the feast.
Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends. And goodbyes are hard. Their faces reveal the trouble in their hearts. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says, looking around at them gathered there in the dim light of the oil lamps in that upper room. But they are afraid. Why is he going? Where is he going? Can’t they come too?
This Gospel lesson is, I believe, the one most used at Episcopal funerals. It is about goodbye’s and about the pain of goodbyes. And it is also about hope and reassurance in the face of loss, separation, and death.
I once had a conversation with a fellow clergyman who recounted to me his experience of helping the surviving member of a couple plan a funeral.. Reviewing the options, the priest suggested that the Gospel lesson be this one -- the one where Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” “Dwelling places?”the partner said. “Dwelling places?” “You knew John. How gracious and tasteful he was. John would not want just a ‘dwelling place! John would want a mansion. Can’t we give him a mansion – like it said in the older Bible?” And so they did.
When it came time to read the Gospel at the funeral, my friend read from the translation we heard this morning, but, looking warmly at John’s partner as he read, he proudly proclaimed, “In my Fathers’ house are many ‘mansions’. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.”
Jesus is taking the part of the servant of a nomadic tribe who strikes out ahead of his companions, who rushes ahead to the oasis to set up the tents, to draw the cool water, light the lamps, lay the carpets, and fluff up the pillows. That work done, he will return to the caravan to accompany them, to usher them toward the familiar comfort of their now awaiting home.
And this is his promise to us, too. To go ahead and prepare a place, a dwelling place, a mansion, for each of us.
What do you imagine that home, that dwelling place, that mansion will be like for you and those you love? For desert nomads, it would have been just what I described. A tent set firmly in the sand, providing refuge from the cold desert winds and shade from parching desert sun. Ornate rugs unrolled on the ground, great pillows all plumped up and shaken free of sand, oil lamps lighting the way to the life-giving water of the oasis.
That’s probably not your picture of your mansion in the sky. For you and me, maybe there are rich oriental rugs on the floor, and maybe there are chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. For me, those chandeliers would be full of real candles blazing in hospitable welcome. And they would never burn low or need replacing – or drip wax on the floor! There would be books and books and books. And a great big leather chair with the biggest ottoman in the heavenly furniture store. And a reading light that knows just how to focus itself so that even without my glasses, every word would leap off the page.
And there are pictures on the wall, pictures of beloved memories, pictures of Hawaii – and Rome pictures which, when you looked at them, would be full of the sound of crashing waves, and the smell of frangiapanne or the smell of pizza and the “honk, honk” of Vespas. What pictures will hang on the wall of your mansion in heaven?
But there will be no need of pictures of the people you love. Because all of them, ALL of them, will be coming for dinner. The dining room in that house will be big enough to hold them all, and they will all be there, and there will always be enough time to tell them all the things you ever wanted to. And to hear them tell you in return all the wonderful adventures of their lives. And you will never forget to tell them how much you love them. And they will never forget to tell you the same thing. And you will hear it. And know that it is true. And the food will be fabulous. And the desert tray will never be empty. Now that’s a mansion I could move into. A mansion worth dying to inherit.
But will it really be that way? Well, yes and no.
Jesus has indeed gone before us to that other land to prepare a place for us, and it will not be just a dwelling place. It will be the mansion of your dreams. Will it have comfortable furniture and leather-bound books? I do not know. But Jesus promises it will have all the good things we ever really longed for or needed.
It will be place with the doors flung wide open in welcome. A place in which you are truly known and truly loved. It will be the place you belong. There will be no shame there. No nagging sense that you are not what you ought to be. There will be no condemnation there, no accusing voice finding fault. Only acceptance, understanding, and love. There will be no regret there, because all sins are forgiven and wiped away. No sense that you’ve got to do more than you can, only sincere gratitude and thanksgiving that you have done what you could. And there will certainly be a banquet, where you can wear whatever you want, and stay as long as you need, and share in meal that fills your deepest hunger.
But wait. It seems we’ve stopped talking about furniture and photographs. And started talking about the fruits of God’s love for us. Acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, encouragement, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, love so comfortable you can feel it wrap around you and hold you up. This is the furniture of the Kingdom of God. This is the nature of the place Jesus has gone ahead to prepare for us.
And, dear friends, there is no reasons that place should be just there and then. It is the place we are called to live in right here and right now. If we are not busy furnishing this place, this world with those things, then we’ve got it all wrong. A church, a parish church, must be that place where acceptance, and forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, may be found. Insofar as it is, then we really are that community Jesus calls us to be. Insofar as it is not, then we’ve got work to do.
Churches do not exist to build real mansions on earth, but to build on earth our very best attempt at that heavenly place where God would have us live. A place where all God’s children learn and know that they are forgiven, are accepted, and are loved. A place where we do not fear condemnation and judgment because we learn and know that in God’s eyes all is forgiven, every debt has all been paid. A place where each one’s gifts are celebrated and shared to the good of everyone else. A place where we can truly, deeply, passionately be at home. That is what we need to be building here. The furniture of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and mutual support are the stuff we need to be setting about us in this place. Anything else is a waste of our time.
And what about that banquet, what about that great dinner party at which all those we love, those whom we see no longer, are gathered together? The tears wiped from their eyes and ours? Just what about that circle that will “be unbroken? “
Dear friends, that too is here. Right here and right now. Gathered around us at this table are all those we love and who love us. This table only appears to be limited to time and space. In reality, only one end of this table is here. The other end stretches to the skies; and gathered around it is the whole company of Saints basking in the light of a million candles -- a million candles which all together do not burn nearly as brightly as God’s love lighting every face in that fabulous company. The bread there never runs out, and the wine is always flowing. That bread, that wine, that table are right here. Right now. There is indeed a mansion prepared for us, a dwelling place in God’s Kingdom. Open your eyes and see it. In our Father’s house are many, many mansions, and this place is called to be one of them. That doorway flung wide open in welcome to all God’s children must be right here.
And the party has indeed already begun, right now. And all goodbyes were only temporary. Everyone is here already. Even those we see no longer. They are here, and we are with them and they are with us.
Come, let us keep the feast.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter
Trinity Church
May 8, 2011
Acts 2:14a,36-41May 8, 2011
Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35
Cleopas and his companion were walking home, back to what was familiar. So much of what had happened to them in the last three days was not familiar, was not the world they wanted to live in. They were taking a walk in which it was painful and hard to put one foot in front of the other. They were coming from Jerusalem on a Sunday afternoon heavy with the memory of all that had happened there. They had seen the crowd go wild as Jesus rode in on donkey. They had heard him hailed as king and messiah. They had felt their hope and the hope of their people well up in their hearts as this gentle teacher moved into the holy city as a hero.
And then it had all fallen apart. He had been tried and brutally killed. And hope had died in their hearts. And so now they turn toward home, walking together, remembering and regretting, wondering how it had all gone so disastrously bad so terrifyingly fast.
Their world is falling apart, and it always does when worlds fall apart, it appears that it can never be put back together again.
But that is not God’s way – merely for worlds to crumble and nothing more.
For Cleopas and his companion, the new world that is about to emerge for them is more wonderful than anything their old world had to offer. In their old world, dead is dead. In their new world, the awareness is beginning to dawn that love conquers all things – even death.
The stories we hear in our Scriptures are paradigms – that is they reveal the great, overarching patterns at work in the universe. That is to say, the stories in our scriptures reveal what kind of God God is. And if that is true, then the story about Cleopas and his companion reveals God to us.
How is that so, and how does it matter?
What I have in mind, of course, is all the times our lives seem to be coming apart at the seams. Times of illness, times of death, times when careers or relationships go bad.
If we take the story Cleopas and his companion as our paradigm, what do we learn?
First we learn that they grieve and that they do it together. They were “talking with each other about all these things that had happened;” and when the encounter a stranger “They stood still looking sad.” [LK 14 ff] They are not pretending. They are not sugar-coating it. Though they can make no sense of what has happened, of what is happening, they do not deny it or say it isn’t so or that their pain isn’t real. I am never as deeply concerned for the psychological health of someone who cries as I am for someone who is never, ever known to do so. Grief is real, and like all feelings it must be expressed not suppressed. Cleopas and his companion grieve. And they share their grief. We, none of us, is ever meant to bear our grief alone.
But they do not shut down and give up. Though it may look like the end, they are still willing to engage a stranger whom it would have been just as easy to ignore or to shut out because their grief was too private, too personal. Nothing is too private or personal to share with those who genuinely are your companions. Nothing.
And now take a careful look at what the stranger says to them, “Oh how foolish you are.” [LK 24.25] Not exactly the gentlest thing he could have said to them. But it is the truth. Even though it is a harsh truth, they are willing to hear it.
This is a story I’ve never told from the pulpit before. Some weeks after my mother died, my friend and mentor Sam Lloyd, asked me how I was doing. I told him the past weeks had been very rough. That the grief and the memories sometimes overwhelmed me. And then I began to recount in vivid detail how difficult her last hours had been for her and for me. I was telling the story with all the immediacy of feeling it had had when it was occuring. Sam gently placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Scott, that is over. It is not happening now.” I was shocked back into the reality of the present – the only place we can really live. Some might think his words were harsh, but I can tell you they were exactly the dose of reality I needed to take stock of myself and my faith and begin to put parts of my life back together and get on with my life.
Cleopas and his companion receive a similar jolt from the stranger – and they do not rebuke him or claim some kind of wounded pride or hurt feelings. They recognize the truth – and the truth can only bring healing. Not only do they embrace the hard truth – that they are being foolish, that there is so much they have misunderstood – they embrace the one who brings it to them. It is so much easier to shoot the messenger. It is so much easier to blame others for our situation.
And then the good news breaks forth – Jesus, the world they thought has vanished, is right there before them. He is not dead, but alive. Their world is not over, it is just sustaining a new beginning. Love, grief, truth have brought them to this moment.
Let’s apply this to our own situation. You have heard for over four years now that the church as we have know it – that means the WHOLE church and this parish church are changing. They will never be the way they were.
Our first response needs to be to accept the reality of that and to grieve – honestly, deeply, truly grieve; but then be willing to hear hard truths – hard truths rooted in our Scriptures. Truths like, “the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” Rev 21:5 (NRSV) Truths like, “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” Rev 21:5 (NRSV) And truths like “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, 3 for you have [already] died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Col 3:2-3 (NRSV) And truths not so hard to hear, like, “Jesus said, ‘. . . I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.’” Matt 16:18 (NRSV)
If we would come together and read and listen deeply to our Scriptures like Cleopas and his companion did, I am sure our way forward would become clearer and clearer. And we too would know Jesus in the breaking of the bread.
Notice that phrase, “in the breaking of the bread.” Not in the bread, but in its breaking. The great paradigm of the universe is that all things, ALL things break and are transcended, but that the God we know in Jesus Christ is present and active throughout it all and can be counted on to be present forever.
Think of that when you see that whole, unbroken piece of bread lifted up. Whole, unstained, undamaged and pure. That is not the world I live in. I don’t think it is the world you live in either. Watch as that bread is broken, broken into many pieces and then given to each of us who share in the broken-ness of this world.
Look and hope with all your heart, soul and with all your mind – and I promise you, you will see Jesus. He will be known to you in the breaking of the bread. He will be known to you as the world around us breaks, as it must and always has.
Sermon for Easter Day
Trinity Church
April 24, 2011
Acts 10:34-43April 24, 2011
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10
Life and death. Life and death.
These two have been the church’s theme throughout last week, Holy Week. We have walked the way of the cross. Followed Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, filling the city with hope as a lively, adoring crowd ran along beside him, a crowd overflowing with joy and life. But then we watched with horror as the crowds that had praised him so, the crowd in whom he had inspired such jubilant life, turned on him and demanded his death. Life and Death.
On Thursday we gathered with Jesus and his friends as, once more, he shared a meal with them. He gave them bread and wine as a way to keep his life ever present to them, not just as a memory, but as sound and taste and touch and sight and smell. We shared a meal together here that night and we heard the words “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe. You bring forth bread from the earth; and on this night you have given us the bread of life.” You have given us the Bread of Life and a way to have you always with us even after your death. Life and Death.
And on Friday, Good Friday, we stood at the foot of the cross as he said, "It is finished. My work is done. "Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit . . . They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths . . . and in the garden there was a new tomb . . . they laid Jesus there.” [JN 19.30 ff.] A life too good for governments and religions and ordinary people to bear, dead on a cross. Laid in a tomb. Life and death. And life and death. And life and death.
And then comes today. Easter Day. Today Mary Magdalene and another Mary, two women Jesus had made feel so alive, have come to a place of death, a tomb, to do appropriate honor to one whom they loved who has died. To honor one who had brought such life to them and now was dead.
And they hear news too incredible and confusing to believe. “He has been raised from the dead.”[Mt. 28.7]
So maybe it isn’t just life and death. Maybe it is life and death and life again.
Life and death and life again. That is the message of Easter Day. That is God’s message to each of us, to each of you, this day.
Somewhere along the way Christianity got sidetracked. It got to be about a transaction between us and God. A “we-do-something-and-God-does-something-back” kind of arrangement: We are good and God rewards us. We are bad and God punishes us. And if we’re really, really bad, God punishes us forever. A message about the gift of life became a message about rules and fears and threats and obligations.
But that is not what Christianity is about. Christianity is about learning what life is all about, about how all creation is put together and who’s in charge of it and how we fit into all of that. And, while it is very important that Jesus’s friends saw and believed that though he was dead yet he lived, that is only part of it. That Jesus was dead and yet he lives is a message, it is a revelation – it is the revealing to you and me of the nature of creation. Easter Day reveals to us the truth about our existence – that the ultimate rule and pattern of the universe is not Life and Death, but Life and Death and Life again.
Those two Marys saw Jesus right before their eyes. “ Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."
“Now You have seen me alive,” he says, “now go tell the others that too shall see me.”
They saw Jesus. If only you and I could have that experience too. Maybe then we could have more faith that the message of Easter is true. That the pattern and meaning of it all is “Life and death and life again.”
But where should we look? And would we know him if we saw him? That is the challenge life offers us: Where and how to see the living Jesus.
It is a cliché, of course, to invite you to look at spring time bursting out all around us – but in my experience, clichés got to be clichés because the keep being true over and over and over. Winter gives way to spring, again and again and again. It is a glimpse of the way God has created the universe to work. Life and death and life again.
Yes, spring and summer do go down to winter again, and life can be looked at that way if we choose. But “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” [JN 12.24-25] Grain does not live so that it may die, it dies so that it may have even greater life. But you know that instinctively, don’t you? That the emerging life and beauty of spring are truer to God’s ultimate purpose than the death that is winter. You know it because that is the way God made you – to value life and to know that it is meant to be yours. Life and death and life again.
But that, of course, is not our only clue. Far from it – If we have eyes to see.
Have you ever experienced forgiveness? Have you ever been a part of a relationship that was caught up in the deadly cords of hurt and resentment and anger? Of course you have – and I truly, deeply hope that at some point in your life you have also known the mending of the broken relationship –the healing of the hurt, the letting go of the resentment, the subsiding of the anger. If you have, and I pray you have, you know that the anger and the resentment are deadly. They weigh you down to the earth. And the reconciliation, the forgiveness, the healing brings joy and hope and strength and peace. Once-deadly relationships can be restored to life. Life and death and life again. To know that experience is to know Jesus, to glimpse the power of his reconciling love. Love that brings life to dead relationships can only be expected to bring life to us. That is where we must look to see Jesus – in the healing of division, in the forgiving and being forgiven that free us from the cords of deadly resentment and fear.
Anger and resentment and fear have no life to offer us. Forgiveness and reconciliation – person to person, race to race, nation to nation – there is where Jesus is to be found. It is where he has gone ahead of us and waits to see us there.
Life and death and life again.
Today we have the privilege and the joy of baptizing two young children. In a few moments they shall be baptized as all Christians have been.
A their baptisms, as at our own, they will approach waters of chaos and death. “In [the waters of Baptism] we are buried with Christ in his death.”[BCP] Those threatening, deadly waters will wash over them. And then they shall, as we once did, emerge on the other side of that water, full of new life. Born again into a Life that can never be taken away. We will receive them unconditionally into God’s family, God’s household, the Church, just as God receives us unconditionally into everlasting life with him. In Baptism, we all have died, and now our life is hidden with Christ in God. [COL 3.3]
Life and death and life again. It is the deep, enduring, unchangeable truth at the heart of creation. A truth that you already know because nature and your own experience tell you so. A truth that we reenact and recreate here today. You have only to look at these children and at that font to see Jesus. He has gone there ahead of us, and there we can see him, if we will.
That is the message of Easter Day. The message of every moment of our lives. In Christ we have already died. That is behind us now. And we have been raised to the new, unending life God has always intended for us.
Christ is risen, and so, in the power of his love shall we all also be.
Alleuia, Christ is risen. The lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
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