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NOVEMBER SERMONS
Sermon for Nov. 8
I almost never reuse a sermon.
I
will reuse stories or illustrations... and certainly, main themes get reinforced over and over, but an actual sermon, almost
never.
Today, I'm going back to a sermon theme I've preached a couple of times.
It is one I have used usually
when I've been a guest preacher in a place where there was a lot of turmoil and conflict.
Once it was the Sunday
after a church warden had been arrested and the story covered the front page of the paper.
That had the congregation
reeling.
Another time I preached this for a friend's installation into a new ministry in a very difficult and struggling
church.
The theme is simple... it's from this morning's psalm:
“Unless the LORD builds the house,
* their labor is in vain who build it.”
The three lessons today all shine light on this core theme:
The
story of Ruth is a story about pedigrees.
Ruth was King David's great-grandmother on his father's side.
More
importantly, she was a Moabitess.
The Moabites were an unpopular group with the Israelites going back 400 years to
the time when they wandering in the desert seeking the Promised Land.
The feelings of modern day Israelis toward
Palestinians isn't much different from the feelings of ancient Israelites and Moabites for each other.
So for the
great King to have a Moabitess as an ancestor was pretty unsettling for a lot of people.
Had Fox news [sic] existed
in the 11th century BC, King David would have had birthers seeking to discredit the his royal legitimacy.
In fact,
the problem Obama has with his father being a Kenyan is very similar to what King David probably faced even without Fox news
[sic].
If you are a leader who doesn't have the right pedigree, people are going to use it to try and discredit you.
Heaven
knows we Episcopalians have a history of playing the pedigree game.
I mentioned two Sundays back that it was the
anniversary of my baptism.
I was baptized at the age of 11 weeks in the Cathedral of our diocese.
I married
an Episcopalian who was also baptized into this church.
Its really tempting sometimes for me to fall back on that
as a way of justifying or defending my opinions.
I've been around long enough to know that's a huge mistake.
There
are too many who think that because they've been Episcopalians since whenever... they have an inside track.
Remember
the pedigree problem haunted Jesus constantly.
“Oh he's Joe's boy, he grew up here, who does he think he is?”
“Hey
isn't he a Galilean? What good ever came out of Galilee?”
For guys with lousy pedigrees, King David and Jesus
did pretty well.
The future of the church is often in the people considered least likely, least important, strangest
and newest.
Pedigrees tend to lock us into our past and keep us from seeing the new things God is doing in our present
and for future our future.
Remember the psalm...
“Unless the LORD builds the house, *
their labor is in vain who build it.” ... and a good builder doesn't hire pedigrees, He hires those willing to work.
On
to the second lesson which reminds us that the church doesn't belong to the priests.
Hebrews speaks of all the “Holy
things” priests do constantly.
But sometimes all that “Holy work” leads to some pretty unholy
thinking.
Beware of the priest who speaks of “my” church and “my” ministry.
Beware
of the priest who wants the sign in the parking lot with his name on it.
Who wants his name on the sign out front
and his picture in the hallway.
I've spent 35 years convincing congregations not to hang my picture, but put up a picture
of Jesus instead.
Only once, did a church put my name on the sign out front and that was over my strong protest.
I
remember my rector growing up, his car parked in that first spot marked “reserved for rector”.
I've
worked to have signs put up that say “reserved for visitors”.
This isn't my church.
This is
God's Church.
“Unless the LORD builds the house, * their labor is in vain who build it.” ... even is
its Holy labor done by a priest.
Well if the first lesson warns against those who would run the church because they
have the right pedigree, and the second lesson warns against those who would run the church because they are THE PRIEST...
the
Gospel warns against those who would run the church because of their wealth.
The story of the widow's mite couldn't
be more obvious.
Jesus isn't impressed with anyone's money bags.
Isn't that what we call those people “Mr.
Money Bags”.
I remember going to my second parish and experiencing this.
It was a small and very marginal
church.
Before I interviewed there I was told the Bishop was deciding between closing it and sending a new priest.
So
I knew I was on thin ice.
The diocese accounted for 1/3 of the parish income.
One parish family accounted
for another 1/3 and the rest of the parish for the final third.
Well, pretty quickly word came to me through the
grape vine what this prominent family wanted done.
Along with it was a thinly veiled threat that if I didn't do things
to their liking they would leave.
The rest of the parish let me know in no uncertain terms that we couldn't afford
to alienate those folks.
I am a stubborn cuss and can really get my back up about being blackmailed.
So
I let that family know we wouldn't be dancing to their tune and if they didn't like it, they could leave.
They were
gone in a week or two.
General panic ensued.
But you know, we were there about 8 years, the parish grew
and thrived and did it without being held hostage by anyone's money bags.
By the way, that family that left, they
seemed to change churches again and again...
Beware of those who use money as a tool or a weapon in the church.
Giving
is just that. It is a gift.
Once given, you give up control over it.
If you can't give it in that spirit,
don't give it at all.
That might sound like a dumb thing to say since the cluster council is meeting this afternoon
to work on the budget and we're still receiving our 2010 pledges.
Dumb or not, it's the truth.
Church leadership
has to remember the psalm's words this morning...
“Unless the LORD builds the house, * their labor is in vain
who build it.” ... no matter how much money they can raise.
God provides for the church, not those who great
bags of money.
I've told this several times, but its one of my favorite stories.
We had a pair of men in
that small parish I was just talking about.
One was a corporate VP the other drove a garbage truck.
They
usually ushered together.
One in his coveralls and a ponytail, the other in a fancy suit.
They couldn't
have been more Mutt and Jeff.
A moments like that, that congregation was at its best because all were equal and treated
that way.
Well, the rich man occasionally went off message.
One time, we were putting on a funeral dinner
and had no meat for the main course.
Nancy, one my real prayer warriors, just gleefully said in words reminiscent
of today's psalm, The Lord will provide.
Well, sure enough, a few minutes later, in came the rich man with a beautiful
ham.
Nancy exclaimed, “Thanks be to God” and thanked God for what He had provided.
The rich
man took exception and said he had bought and brought the ham.
Nancy reminded him that God had only used him to do
the legwork and that it was God who provided the ham.
The look on his face told me he was struggling with that idea.
Honestly, I think we all struggle with that idea sometimes.
But it goes to the core of the psalm...
“Unless
the LORD builds the house, * their labor is in vain who build it.”
As you move forward keep the words of this
psalm close at hand and ready to mind.
You will know the pressures and uncertainties that a change in leadership
creates.
Those can cause any group to forget its core values.
Remember, this is God's house, God's congregation
and God will build and provide if you keep your trust in God and not pedigrees nor priests nor prosperity.
Unless
the LORD builds the house, * their labor is in vain who build it.
Sermon for All Saints' Day Nov. 1, 2009
I love the new
lessons we have for All Saints.
After 30+ years of preaching on the beatitudes year after year, I really like the
change of pace.
These are familiar readings.
In fact, these are ones I used for AD this week and for my
dad six months ago (memories of him are very strong today)
This readings, Isaiah and Revelation, are a vision of
heaven.
I think it was CS Lewis (maybe someone before him...) who envisioned it.
In heaven and hell everyone
sits at a banquet table, lined with myriads upon myriads on both sides, in the middle the richest fare one could imagine,
as described by Isaiah, and at each place is set long handled knives, forks and spoons
I mean long handled, like
2-3 feet long!
The difference between heaven and hell comes down to this...
In heaven, the people take
their silverware, and are busy feeding each other across the table.
They are sharing, serving, and feasting,
vs.
in hell where the myriads, who can see and smell the feast before them, starve, and moan and cry out in frustration, because
they can't get the food to their own mouths with that silverware.
The selfish starve.
I love the choice
of those first two lessons for All Saints' because they go so much to the heart of how I envision heaven.
The Gospel,
I find a bit odd.. even if it is a nice change from beatitudes
This too is a lesson often used at funerals.
At
a burial we end after the affirmation, Lord I believe... that seems more on target for me.
But here they've added
the raising of Lazarus.
A lot of folks on line were questioning the thinking behind this and I question it too.
When
we read about the raising of Lazarus, that is usually read just before Palm Sunday, because historically it happened
just before the first Palm Sunday.
But why include the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Mary's affirmation
of faith seems more appropriate to this day... So I can see why we'd use burial office lessons on All Sts.
But here's
another why not?
We've been wading through Hebrews, Melchizedek for weeks and for a couple more after this... So
why not read Hebrews here. Most of Hebrews is over our heads, we don't share the culture of 1st century Jews to whom
it was written and miss most of its points.
But in Chapter 11 it finally gets to a point where it can really speak
to us clearly. Oddly, the lessons this year end at the end of chapter 10. So why didn't they use chapter 11 and
12 on All Sts. As much as I like Revelation... Heb. 11 and 12 are magnificent.
Chapter 11 is the list of saints...
Hebrews
11
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
This is what the ancients were
commended for.
Abel ...Enoch ....Noah... Abraham, ... Sarah
All these people were still living by faith when they died.
They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they
were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they
had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for
a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for
them.
Doesn't that sound like All Saints? A vision of heaven form afar, like us who only see it by faith?
Isaac,,,Jacob
and Esau,,,Joseph's sons,,,Joseph
Moses' parents ,,,Moses,,,the people ,,,walls of Jericho fell,,,Rahab,,,Gideon, Barak,
Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets,
Then we get to Chapter 12 which opens with a thunderous acclamation
Therefore,
since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily
entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author
and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right
hand of the throne of God.
Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary
and lose heart.
This is the call to be a saint.
This is the call to hear the thundrous cheers of the crowd,
those who have gone before us, those who taught us.
I used the line at my father's sermon, but it bears repeating...,,
a man who loved God so much, not that he became a priest, but that he inspired his son to become one.
It is a thundrous
call to us too.
Our histories, yours and mine, have flowed together for 11 years and are about to divide and take
separate courses.
Yet each of us has a crowd cheering us to remain faithful...
You, to the saints who have
gone before, too many of whom have passed from this world this year... they have passed on to you a legacy of faith and it
is yours to pass onto another generation!
For me, it is a call to remain faithful, in a new way, a way yet to be
found and claimed and lived, but it is the faith encouraged by that cloud.
For all the saints who have passed the
faith to us and still encourage us, albeit from a distant shore, for the All the Saints, including us,
May the God of Saints
be praised.
OCTOBER SERMONS
Sermon for Oct. 25
Last week I preached about the importance of
regaining our Christian urgency to proclaim God as the “greatest”.
I got a real jolt first thing Monday
morning as I listened to NPR.
Public radio ran two stories on atheism.
Both really caught my attention
because they went to the heart of what I was warning about last week.
One in particular, the one about the changing
face of atheism in America, seemed eerily like a testament to the sermon last week.
The story was telling how
the leadership of the atheist camp has had for a long a kind of “go along, get along” mentality with people of
faith.
The story went on to talk about how that leadership has been forced out and replaced by a new and ( in their
words) “fundamentalist atheism” which is going after people of faith tooth and nail.
I don't know if
the topic in this sermon is going to end up in the morning news tomorrow, but I believe it is still a critical issue for those
of us who are people of faith.
In the Gospel Blind Bartimaeus seeks Jesus and in the process finally comes to “see”
him with his own eyes.
The lead up to this encounter, the healing of his blindness, his seeing Jesus, is that all
kinds of people get in the way, indeed block the way, acting like shield around Jesus.
These people, who should know
better, are Jesus Disciples.
They are the believers.
They are the ones who tell Bartimaeus to pipe down,
stay down and don't bother them or Jesus.
What went wrong?
Let me pick up from where I left off last week's
sermon.
I was talking about the need for Christians to find our voice again to proclaim that God is great, indeed,
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the Greatest.
Alleluia, Can I get an Amen?
So I imagine the disciples
doing that as Jesus passes along the road.
They are all into how great it is to be Jesus' followers, to be close
to the master.
What they are not into is wanting to share that with some blind beggar along the roadside.
They
are rapt in the moment, filled with themselves and their enthusiasm and expectation and hope for the coming messiah.
What
they are not filled with is enthusiasm for anyone else to share in what has become theirs.
Am I reading more into
the text than is there? Possibly.
But the reading that I am putting on this text comes from my book club discussion
this week.
I didn't read this month's book because I honestly thought I would not be able to attend the study.
When
plans changed, I decided to go anyway because the group is always interesting and challenging.
I am glad I did.
The
group had read “My Jesus Year” by Cohen.
Cohen is a Jewish name derived from Cohain which is Hebrew for
priest.
The author is Jewish. His wife is the daughter of a Methodist minister, but she converted to Judaism when
they got married.
Cohen, who is a writer by trade, decided to spend a year living the Christian experience and then
to write about it.
Hence the title, My Jesus Year.
Having not read the book, I found myself in the place
of interogater asking questions of the group for clarity and deeper meaning.
It seems Cohen went from church to church
around the greater Atlanta area for a year, experiencing the way Christians worship and live their faith.
He spent
time with Episcopalians (he liked us), and Mormons and Methodists and you name it...
My favorite story was when he
went to this large African American Church, thousands of people all caught up in the moment, throbbing music, and two huge
jumbotrons filled with images.
And then, in an instant, there he was, all 5 foot 2 inch of him, his distinctly white
Jewish looking face, singled out and plastered in megapixels for all the congregation to see.
I would imagine in
that instant that he felt like Bartimaeus. Odd man out!
Well, as I pressed my fellow readers, I kept asking about
Jesus.
The all agreed that the title of the book was misleading.
Cohen didn't have a “Jesus”
year, he had a “Church” year.
They all agreed that Jesus plays little or no role in the year.
The
book should have been called “My Church year” because it is really a travelog of visiting differing Christian
churches and experiencing their worship and life.
I kept asking, “what about Jesus? Didn't any of these churches
bring Cohen to a place of encountering Jesus?”
No matter how many times and ways I asked that, the answer from
the group was “no”.
They must have thought me addled to keep asking, but I was having a hard time believing
their conclusion.
How, in Jesus' Name, literally, how, in Jesus' Name, could anyone go to all those churches for
a year, and not encounter Jesus somewhere in the mix?
How indeed?
Maybe it is just what my friends concluded,
that it was My Church Year, that Christianity has become so wrapped up in being “church” and promoting church,
with the best programs for kids, the newest facilities, the biggest jumbotrons, the most heart pumping music, the most stirring
preaching, that somehow we've become just like the disciples following Jesus...
Oh we're all into Jesus, but we're
not into Bartimaeus.
And we sure aren't into doing what is necessary to bring Bartimaeus to Jesus.
How could
Cohen go through a year, a “Jesus” year, and never report meeting Jesus.
I would imagine the same way
Bartimaeus could sit by the roadside, cry out “Jesus Son of David, have mercy on me” and be told to shut up.
My
friends commented that the only reference Cohen really makes to Jesus is at the very end of the book.
In the end,
he makes a kind of one sentence conclusion that his Jesus year helped him become a better Jew.
Cohen's book, like
the story of Bartimaeus, is a stark reminder to those of us who are “church” that its not enough to follow Jesus.
Its
not enough to do what I said we must do in last week's sermon, that is to proclaim the Greatness of God with a boldness and
fervor we've long forgotten.
Doing that will only take us as far as the disciples in this morning's story.
No
we have to go another step beyond that.
We have to open our eyes, lose our blindness to the Cohens and Bartimaeuses
along our roadside.
When people come among us we are 10,000 times more likely to invite them to coffee after church
than we are to offer to tell them about the Jesus we know, and have touched and have seen.
If we are waiting for
Jesus to point everyone of these people out, redeem our failure, by stopping everything to call that person forward, and then
working a great miracle...
well if that's what we're waiting for, then Mr. Cohen could probably spend a Jesus Century
and still not encounter the living Christ Jesus.
The point of this Gospel story is to tell us, the church, to get
to the business of paying attention to the roadside.
People want to know Jesus, they want to encounter him as we've
been blessed to encounter him.
He is not ours, we are not here to act as his protective detail, we are to share him
with all the world.
Why else do I conclude every service with the last words Jesus said to his disciples,
go
into all the world, make disciples of all peoples, baptize in the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit, teach people to
observe all I have commanded you
Sermon for Oct. 18
Want to start and argument, I mean a real good, down
and dirty argument?
Just ask, or better yet, state boldly, who is (or was) the greatest at ... fill in the blank.
My
Heavens, are we ever obcessed with the idea of greatest.
Remember, Mohammad Ali, shouting "I am the greatest".
Well,
was he?
Seriously, who was the greatest boxer of all time?
Max Baer, how about the brown bomber Joe Louis,
or maybe one of the lighter weight fighters who pound for pound were tougher and certainly more entertaining than the heavy
weights... no wait, I've got it... Rocky!
Get my drift, if you want to get an argument started just ask who is number
one.
How many shows on TV are some kind of list of the greatest?
The greatest bloopers, the greatest commercials,
the greatest plays,
So what the greatest show of the greatest shows? Or is that question is an endless loop?
The
other night, I think on Sports Center, they devoted this long segment to a discussion of who was the greatest center fielder
of the 1950's.
Isn't that getting a little esoteric?
Well, actually, I watched. Maybe because I watched
the three guys they mentioned play when I was a kid.
I remember going to see the Dodgers play the Giants and Duke
Snider and Willie Mays alternating half innings in Center Field.
Meanwhile, I got to see Mickey Mantle only rarely,
but those three were all fantastic ball players.
And Sports center was trying to argue which was the greatest of
them all.
But seriously, a long segment arguing which of those three was the greatest? What's the point?
The fact that we can spend hour after hour on these shows says something
about the fact we have too many TV channels without enough TV content.
It is also a clear indication of the all too
human obcession of arguing about which or who is the greatest.
I can imagine the first cave persons, just developing
language and using their first words to debate who is the greatest hunter or where the best berries can be found to eat, or
maybe who is the best fire maker.
I suspect it is part of the so called human condition that we are programmed to
endlessly, and think mindlessly debate "the greatest".
So when the disciples get caught a couple Sunday's back arguing
about which of them is the greatest, well what can we say, They're just human.
Jesus doesn't say that, he doesn't
give them a pass on this.
He plops a child in their midst and says they must become like this little one.
Ah,
but human nature being what it is, here we are just a few days later and here we go again with the "greatest" question.
So
again, this morning's reading has Jesus trying to get through to them that "the greatest" is the wrong question for humans
to ask...
"You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their
great ones are tyrants over them. But it is
not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your
servant, ..."
We are not to argue about human greatness, but there is one area where we should be asking that question
instead.
It is in fact a question that dominates the whole Biblical narrative.
The Bible isn't interested
in establishing a pecking order of greatness among mortals.
Is Noah greater than Jacob; is Elijah greater than Elisha;
is Peter greater than Paul.
But the Bible from beginning to end is about proclaiming that the
God revealed to Noah, Jacob, Elijah, Elisha, Peter and Paul is the "greatest".
Over and over again, book after book,
century after century, the Biblical narrative is an affirmation that the God of the Bible is "the greatest".
The
contest is lived out as the people of this God confront all other claimants to the "greatest God" title... the Gods of the
Egyptians and specifically
the divine Pharoah, well the greatest question is pretty well settled there by the time we
get to the Red Sea isn't it?
The Baal gods, well the greatest question is pretty well settled there by the time we
get to Mt. Carmel and the rains start to fall after 3 1/2 years.
The gods of the Greeks, well the greatest question
is pretty well settled there by the time which is commemorated every year at Hannakah.
The gods of the Romans, well
the greatest question is pretty well settled there in the visions of John in Revelation.
The Biblical story is the
story of arguing who is the greatest, but the subject is always God.
This is the one debate we should be having.
When
is the last time you saw a TV show with a list of the ten greatest gods of all time? Never?!
But to read your Bible
is to read that very argument, as the people of God confront one challenger after another to the title of God, God who is
the
greatest.
So we humans tend to argue about the wrong things, like center fielders in the 1950's.
We
tend to argue about who among us, and what on this earth is the greatest when our focus should be on arguing the greatness
of God.
That's my first point.
And my second point closely follows that first one.
Most Christians
I observe are pretty inept at arguing for the greatness of God.
It is like the concept has gone out of our vocabularly.
The
Muslims shout Allah Aqbar, God is Great.
They have no problem with this concept.
What has happened in the
Christian world.
Have we become so syncretistic, so namby pamby about wanting to "share our feelings and not hurt
anyone else's" that we can't proclaim the
Greatness of our God?
I mean, the only time I hear a Christian use
language about God's greatness anymore is when someone sings "How Great Thou Art".
Now there's a hymn that captures
the fire and gusto of the way Christians used to be able to proclaim the Biblical truth that God is the greatest of all.
Where
has that gone?
And yet, beyond that, I perceive a threat that is even more subtle and more devastating.
It
occurred to me when, for some reason this week, I was thinking about Bernstein's gem of a book, Against the Gods.
This
is one of those must read books that few have read.
What Bernstein argues is that prior to the 17th century all humanity
essentially believed that gods/fates, whatever, controlled the outcomes of events.
So one might argue which of these
gods or fates were the most powerful and influential in human affairs.
With the development of risk theory in mathematics,
and specifically with new mathematics in the 17th and later centuries, we left all that behind.
All of a sudden the
outcome of human events depends on "chance".
For almost 4 centuries the argument has been whether we even need God
or any gods.
In the Western world, the greatness of God is fading fast as we trust more an more to our science, math,
technology, and brain science.
When Bp. Robinson pronounced "God is dead" in the 1960's he wasn't advocating atheism,
he was declaring the obvious.
The role and place of God in our world had been pushed out and replaced by our belief
in other things as "greater" or "greatest" in determining our present and future.
So humans don't argue about the
greatness of God because our world did away with the need for God.
And that leaves us to just argue which of us is
the greatest.
Oh my, what a come down.
It seems to me that there are three responses to this sorry state
of affairs.
One is fundamentalism.
It could be Christian fundamentalism, it could be Muslim fundamentalism.
Basically,
this is to deny the modern world; to proclaim the greatness of God against the modern world and to push back as hard as possible.
That
is what drives the fanaticism of the Taliban and al Quida.
They hate the modern world precisely because it leaves
no room for the greatness of Allah.
But lest we forget, Eric Rudolph, who bombed Birmingham and the Atlanta Olympics
did so because he was just as driven by a hatred of modernity and its
exclusion of what Rudolph (and I fear many others)
think is a horrible world that should be destroyed to make room for God's greatness.
Rudolf's own words were "the
war to end this holocaust" .
Let's just agree that this option is off the table for us.
There is an oppositve
extreme, that I also reject.
I just want to mention it in passing.
That is to just go with the floe. (not
misspelled, we are stuck on melting ice adrift in a warming sea of cultural atheism.)
It is to ignore the issue,
disengage from the God of the Bible, and just teach the stories to our kids, but not really believe them ourselves.
It
is to sell out to the culture.
If you do read your Bible you'll find lots of examples of this happening before...
the
Israelites who wanted to go back to egypt,
the Israelites who worshipped Baal to get their crops to grow,
the
Israelites who stayed in Babylon even after they were free to go back to Jerusalem,
the Israelites who sided with
the Greeks and later the Romans and followed their customs and forgot the ways of the ancestors...
Oh its a long
list and one to which a lot of our generation has added our names.
So I reject that because I don't want to make
the same mistake.
That leaves a third option which is to engage the debate with the culture.
That's
what Bishop Robinson was trying to do in the 60's.
It's what Bishop Spong has made his bread and butter in all the
years I've known him.
I think it's interesting that over those nearly 40 years, I am asked more often about Spong
than any other person in the Episcopal Church.
Love him or loathe him, Spong and others have hit on a nerve.
His
is a honest and serious attempt to find greatness for God in the midst of the modern god-excluding age.
Personally,
I don't like most of the answers Spong comes up with.
I think he gives in too much to the culture.
I am
more inclined to follow Bp. N.T. Wright who does the same kind of engagement with the culture, but more strongly argues that
God is the
greatest of all the forces we live with in our lives.
Is this issue the "greatest" issue facing the
church and God's people today?
Well after railing against making human lists about "what is the greatest?", I probably
had been not proclaim this the "greatest issue" out there.
But it is an issue that I believe all Christians in this
generation need to address.
What has become of our heartfelt proclamation "How Great Thou Art" and how do we proclaim
it again?
Sermon for Sunday, Oct. 11
I looked up on website where I go to get ideas from the lessons
Not
updated from 3 years ago
Aware of how out of date it is.
Talked theoretically about why Jesus mentions fraud,
defraud.
In last 3 years, do I have so say more than AIG and Bernie Madhoff
Do you really think they're
going to regulate wall st? REally?
Sort of like the way Congress sets ethics rules for itself. Right?
Jesus
words seem more timely today don't they??
I really don't want to go off on this.
Micheal Moore has done
that in Capitalism a Love Story.
BTW, I have a 6 degrees of separation with MM (expand?)
But the other point
in the article is about middle class being generous.
Millenium Development Goals, got it in budget
But then...
everyone started watching their finances circle the drain.
How many TV shows this week had some story plot element
about the economic crisis
Instinct is to pull back, hunker down.
Middle class is hanging on by a thread
10%
foreclosure
And tsunamis come in waves (like earthquakes)
This week an assault on Dollar as world's reserve
currency...
Worst isn't over yet folks.
Economists may be cheery about the end of the recession, but I tend
to side with the Cassandras on Marketline (NPR)
Sold Hummer to the Chinese this week.
Will the last person,
please turn out the lights?
Instinct is to dig in, hunker down, hold on...
contrast that with our national
myth about the great depression...
I say myth, because its the story we tell although individual facts and circumstances
varied widely...
story is how everyone worked together, supported each other...
Think about it not in moral
terms or Gospel terms, but just in terms of enlightened self interest.
What's the best strategy?
If each
of us is trying to hold onto the last rung on the ladder, clutching so tightly, lest we fall into economic abyss...
What
happens when one of us falls?
Are we going to look up and ask, hey could one of you throw me a line?
In
the long run, I'd rather live in a community that takes care of each other, than an every man for himself.
Give more
help and buy less guns.
Gospel demand to go sell all, speaks not to the wealthy, but to the threatened
Go
let go with one hand and give someone else a hand.
Just as hard, maybe harder to do.
But young man trusted
in his wealth.
We may not trust in our wealth, but our fear of letting go of it, can be just as spiritually stultifying.
This
is a Gospel addressed to us.
I wish they had updated the website, because three years ago, it would have been an
academic exercise, today its about the kind of people we choose to be in a difficult and threatening time.
Sermon for Oct. 4, St. Francis Day
Text is Jesus teaching on marriage
and divorce
Since, I was on vacation, I wrote the sermon, but didn't write it down. So this is just a summary.
I
want to start by talking about the experience I had in 1973 of being present as our church changed its policy on marriage
and divorce. I was at the dais of the General Convention watching the momentous change.
There were warnings that
we were violating scripture, that we would bring down the institution of marriage, etc.
On the other side were hopes
that by changing from the ancient tradition of treating divorce as sin and punishing the sinners, we would instead see it
as a pastoral concern and hope to bring healing where there is pain. (Something akin to what St. Francis said in his prayer...
Lord,
make us instruments of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let us sow love.
Where there is injury, let us sow pardon.
Where
there is discord, let us sow union.
Where there is doubt, let us sow faith.
Where there is despair, let us sow hope.
Where
there is darkness, let us sow light.
Where there is sadness, let us sow joy.
grant that we may never seek so much to
be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand
to be loved, as to love with all my soul.
It is in
pardoning that we are pardoned;
In giving to all men that we receive,
and in dying that we’re born to eternal
life.)
Well, here we are two generations later. That's a good long time to look back and ask so how did it work out?
In
11 years here, one thing that has been thoroughly impressed on me is the startling divorce rate... twice the state average
and highest in the state!
In the midst of that, I lay awake one night this week counting in my head how many divorces
we've had in this parish family (all three congregations, from very active members to very fringe people) total I came up
with was 9. 9 in 11 years. That's so far below the rate of the Co. around us its startling. Obviously, we're counter cultural.
A
day or so later, I started to count another number. America has a divorce rate of about 40% +/- 5% depending on whether you
count multiple divorces as one person, or as each separate divorce.
So I started counting how many persons in our
congregation have ever been divorced and realized pretty quickly that we are at about the national average. There are a lot
of folks in these parishes Sunday after Sunday who've experienced the pain and misery of a divorce at some time in their life.
Some
how those two figures did not compute, at first. A lot of divorced persons but a very low divorce rate.
Then it hit
me.
AHA... back to 1973.
We in fact got exactly what the proponents of the change from punishment to pastoring
had said...
We invited in people who needed healing, who did not want to be ostracized, criticized, beat up any more,
who wanted a church where they would find healing and a new beginning.
But, they didn't come just for that, they
also came because we still advocated strongly for the goodness of marriage, encouraged and supported them as they moved forward,
many into another marriage that was and is a life giving and holy estate.
Now I bring all this up because as you
seek a new rector, you are going to have to do what is called a parish self study. That is a really important piece of work.
You need to figure out who you are as a church before you can start talking about what kind of person you need to seek as
a new rector.
I urge you, to be very cognizant of your social surroundings. The statistics on divorce in this county
are only one marker, the head of DHR once said at our clergy meeting, that if this county were positioned geographically by
its social statistics (like divorce) it would be in the Blackbelt, next to Greene Co. This is a hurting community. There is
so much that needs healing all around us.
Conversely, in the case of marriage, as I've been trying to say this morning,
we offer a very special place within the Christian community. the fact is that most of the Christian community around us is
still very punitive and narrow in their approach to marriage and divorce (from evangelical to catholic). That means we have
something very much needed in this community.
I would urge you to think long and hard about what you experience here
in that regard and ask how do you make that even more powerful a witness as you move into the next stage of your parish life.
How do you find a leader who will both understand the urgency of the need around here and at the same time, claim and proclaim
the grace and healing which this church so profoundly believes is the core of the Gospel?
Sermon for Sept 27
11 years ago today, exactly to the day, I was
installed as rector of this church.
Today's Old Testament reading is one I deeply love.
It puts the
emphasis not on Moses, but on the 70.
Who are these 70?
Now that's another coincidence, since our average
attendance around here is 70 a week.
So who are the 70?
For this sermon, I want you to see yourself as
one of them.
And the other two, Eldad and Medad?
They are people not here this morning, or most mornings
for that matter, but they too have a gift of God intended to be used here among you.
They and you are the ones on
whom the spirit of God falls and to whom the work of God entrusted. <>
11 years ago, I chose not to have one
of those "big" installation of a rector celebrations.
Instead, I chose the Sunday the bishop was already scheduled
to be here.
I didn't bring in a guest preacher and invite everybody in the diocese.
In fact, I got some
blow back from folks around the diocese who asked why I didn't have a celebration like everyone else so they could attend.
But
there was a good reason why I wanted a very simple and small observation of my installation as your rector.
You see,
I'm not much on clergy installations.
They seem to contradict everything in this morning's story in Numbers.
An
installation is a service in which all these people come trooping down the aisle and presenting, water, wine, keys and all
manner of other symbols to the new rector.
It reminds me of my first parish.
I was barely 25 years old.
My
teachers had thoroughly steeped me in the theology of this Numbers passage.
They impressed upon me that my
role as priest was going to be to enable and empower the people of God to find, claim and exercise their ministries.
My
first parish taught me how far it is from theory to practice.
When I got to that first church, we all had a meeting.
I
remember one member in particular who was heading the Sunday school.
She promptly announced that she was so glad
they had a new priest and she was forthwith turning all that Sunday school leadership over to me.
It seemed to be
a popular sentiment and everyone was all too willing to hand me the reins to whatever they had been doing.
And there
I was, totally unprepared to be Moses.
The installation service in the prayer book, in my humble opinion, encourages
congregations to seek a Moses instead of seeking their own annointing with the Spirit.
It plays into the thinking
that “oh boy, we've got a rector, let's give him everything...”
So two months from today, I want to celebrate
an uninstallation.
I'd like to design a service for our final Sunday together to turn everything we did 11 years
ago today on its head.
I would like a Sunday in which I as rector, give back to you, what has always been yours,
is always yours, and that is the leadership of this church.
This leads me into the other thing that I want to talk
about today... our fall stewardship program.
We're going to do the same thing we did last year, a faith pledge.
Today,
you received a handout with a calendar on one side and instructions on the other.
It really is quite simple.
Take
day one, for example, let that be today.
Then take today's reading and think about it during the day.
Let
the Spirit speak to you about what callings, what ministries are yours in this congregation?
Where and how will you
exercise those in the year ahead?
You know, I find myself, going through the very same exercise right now.
I
think I already know what I'm going to write down on my faith pledge.
Lots of folks are offering me all kinds of
ideas for places to serve in retirement.
Almost all of them seem like great ideas and there's no way I can do them
all.
So for now, my answer to the question is to promise God that I will listen and as God shows me where to go,
I will go where God leads.
That's like giving God a blank check.
One of my friends did that and ended up
in Madagascar.
But this is a serious exercise.
It is about asking God to lead us to claim the ministries
to which God is calling us and for which God is empowering us.
I am seeking mine.
Will you join me in that
search for yourself?
Will you join me two months from now as we symbolically lay claim to your authority as the 70?
I
pray so.
In the meantime, today, we have important work to do in raising up those who will have ministries of leadership
on the vestry.
So let me end here and let us get on to that business.
Sermon for Sept 20
Then Jesus took a little child and put it among
them; and taking the child in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me."
This was a radical act.
While the Jewish people highly
valued children (as the psalm says, 'Blessed is the man who has a quiver full'), generally children were considered as of
less value than adults.
That is why in a similar story, we hear the disciples trying to shoo the children away from
Jesus.
“Go away kid, ya bodder me.”
So in those places, as indeed in this morning's Gospel,
Jesus embraces children, he is acting in a way that is truly “counter-cultural” and shocking to those who saw
and heard him.
This last week I had a lot of reasons to think about putting the children in the center of us.
It
started on Tuesday at Bishop's Day as we discussed the H1N1 virus and the ways in which we have to put the children in the
center.
I wrote in this week's cuttings
“My greatest concern is for the children. ... That has to
be a first concern always, about everything that affects our children.”
Generally, adults can be expected to
take care of themselves, but as adults it is our duty to be responsible for and to protect the children.
One unintended
consequence of this flu outbreak is that it is reinforcing that responsibility.
But the more I thought about it this
week, the more my mind wandered off into other ways in which we have to be responsible for the welfare of the children.
And
that took me in this rather unexpected direction...
You are launching out on the process to call your next rector.
At the annual meetings next week you will elect the vestries that will be in charge of that process.
Those
new vestries will start meeting with the Bishop's deputy on Oct. 18th the take the next step in the process.
Last
week I shared my thoughts about one key question I think any candidate ought to be asked.
This week, I want to share
my deep and heartfelt conviction of what this morning's Gospel says and what it means to “put the child in the center”
of your deliberations and decisions.
My thoughts were stimulated by a segment on NPR this week.
The subject
was juries and jury trials.
The guest was a judge who was talking about the problem of electronic devices in the
court rooms.
There is a growing problem with jury members taking their cell phones, using them to google the names
of defendents and to gather other information outside that presented in court as evidence.
Of course, this is totally
contrary to our legal system's way of operating, and indeed a cause for a mistrial.
So the question became, 'do we
just ban all such devices in court rooms?'
The judge shot back with an answer that surprised me.
He said
some judges do, but he thought it a bad idea.
He argued that for Gen X and Gen Y we already have a serious problem
getting them to take jury duty seriously.
Moreover, he argued that if you take away their cell devices, you cut these
younger people off from their social networks.
For them, that is a fate like being thrown into solitary confinement,
because their world is a world of twitter and face book.
Literally.
'On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me', one
of the answers to the news quiz a week ago was what a couple of kids lost and stuck and a sewer did...
Did you hear
the story?
For 7 hours, they posted updates on their facebook page.
“still lost in sewer”...
You
and I might have just called 911, but that's the difference.
There is a generational gap emerging in the very way
we operate as humans with each other.
Getting back to the judge, he argued that you can't ban the devices because
in the end the result will be that the young people will stay away from jury duty in droves and our legal system will suffer.
He
concluded, “we have to find a better way.”
“We have to find a better way in the church too”.
We
have the same problem as the courts with young people staying away in droves.
I was trying to think of an analogy
to this problem and three came readily to mind.
The first involves the 16th century.
Most of Europe had
been illiterate for centuries.
Generally only monks and the nobles could read.
Then came Guttenburg and
his Bible.
Luther, Calvin, Cramner and others captured the importance of that technological advance that we call
“movable type” and they launched the Reformation.
In the process, they spurred a massive change in European
culture; they promoted literacy.
The reformation was built on literacy.
People had to be able to read the
Bible for the Reformation to work.
It is argued that in one to two generations literacy in Europe exploded.
Now
imagine you are one of those born in the 15th century who has lived quite comfortably in a familiar world.
All of
a sudden stories of Columbus and a new world are everywhere.
Then the church begins to rock to its foundations as Luther
challenges the Pope.
Finally, your grandkids begin to live in a world where they can actually read the Bible.
How
do you feel?
Like a stranger in a strange land?
Or maybe you feel just like most of us my age and older
feel as we watch our children and children's children text messaging away with those thumbs in hyperdrive.
There
are a lot of parallels between that age and ours.
The only difference is the technology has gone from books to e-books.
Another
analogy that occurred to me was that of immigrants coming to America.
Unless your family came from England, they
probably didn't speak English when they got here.
There is a pattern that is well documented.
The first
immigrants don't speak or read English.
Maybe they learn a few words.
Their children will be bilingual.
Their
grandchildren will speak English and probably know about the same few words in their grandparents' language that their grandparents
know in English.
It usually takes three generations for this to happen.
Folks, you and I speak the old language,
we read from left to right, from top to bottom.
We barely speak the language of the youth today.
Conversely,
those two generations younger than us, can barely speak our language.
But, they are speaking the language of the
culture and of the future.
We are the ones being cut off.
Finally, one more analogy.
At the Comer
Library this week we had one of the most fascinating talks I've heard there.
It was about Alabama Rivers and it was
amazing.
One point that our speaker made was about the “fall line” in Alabama.
Across the state,
all our rivers have a fall line.
It occurs at the point that the old hard rock uplands give way to the lower ground.
On
every river in the state, there is a waterful at that geological point... “the fall line”.
And, he went
on to add, the explorers came up those rivers and when they reached the falls, they built a fort or a town.
To travel
any further one had to portage all the boats and equipment up the falls to get deeper into the inlands.
We're living
at the fall line.
The world as we older ones know it, is navigable to a certain point.
At that point we
build what is familiar, a fort, a town, a place to sit, trade, swap stories...
But to some more intrepid ones, our
fort or town is nothing but a jumping off point for the adventure above and beyond us.
They load up in our stores
and head up the hills to explore lands we can only imagine.
The young people of today are the ones heading up those
hills.
That's their future up there.
Our job is to make sure they are adequately supplied for a long journey
of discovery.
At least thrice before in history, the Christian Church seized on a technology and got out ahead of
the culture.
At least three times before, our forefathers and foremothers (see last week's sermon) made sure future
generations would move up and over their fall line.
They made choices that assured that generations, indeed centuries
to come, would be filled the the Good News of Jesus Christ.
It happened, as I've already alluded, in the Reformation
era.
Seizing on the printing press, the reformers, pushed the written word, promoted general literacy, all in service
to teaching people to read the Bible.
That one action still reverberates today anytime I hear someone say “I
read it in my Bible”.
That's an echo from the Reformation pushing up over the fall line.
A thousand
years earlier it was St. Jerome in the caves of Bethlehem translating the Bible into Latin, the common or vulgar language,
hence his Bible is called the Vulgate.
That translation is the one that allowed the Christian message to survive
the chaos of the Dark Ages.
Three centuries before that, our readings this morning from the New Testament come from
writers like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, John, James.
All of them wrote in gutter Greek, the common language
of the ancient world.
Someone has said that what everyone has in common today is that everyone speaks broken English.
Well
in the 1st century everyone spoke broken Greek.
The genius of the writers of the New Testament was that everyone
of them wrote in “broken Greek” and instantly made the Good News of Jesus accessible across most of the known
world.
Up and over another fall line and we're still reading their words today because of it.
Three analogies.
Analogies
to what?
Analogies to the world of our children, their children, and their children, are going to live in above the
fall line.
As you look to this church's future, I urge you to put the children and the children's children, and the
children's, children's, children in your midst, at your center.
Think first about them and not yourselves.
The
question is not 'what kind of rector do you need?'
The better question is 'what kind of rector do they need?'
You
already have your faith.
Will they have have theirs?
Who will do for them, what the Gospel did, what St.
Jerome did, what Martin Luther did?
Who will seize the changes in the way they communicate and connect and show them
Jesus in a language they speak.
They are going into the highlands, they are only here in our town at the fall line
for a short time.
We will tell them stories of our Jesus, but they are stories of life down here.
Unless
someone goes with them on their journey, someone who can help them craft the stories of Jesus with them in the uncharted territory,
they risk becoming like the ancient Jews who reached the promised land and promptly forgot the God who had brought them there.
The
temptation is always to choose a pastor who will sit in our town and tell us familiar stories with us.
Jesus didn't
do that.
His stories were unfamiliar and his ways unfamiliar.
He didn't coddle the believers.
He
told them to 'carry on', but that He was sent to those who did not believe.
And most importantly, he put the children
in the center and told those of us who are adults that we must become like them.
As you seek a new pastor, seek one
who will pastor your children, your children's children and your children's, children's, children.
That Jesus may
embrace them also and that they tell His story in their language in a new land.
Sermon for Sept. 13
I have 12 sermons left to preach or roughly 2
to 3 hours.
I am very aware that there are a lot of things I want to say and to emphasize in these final sermons.
Today's
lessons give me ample material to talk about a number of very important issues in the life of these churches.
I am
going to address two of those. You might think of this as two mini-sermons, sort of like a Krystal's sermon instead of a Big
Mac sermon.
James today is writing about the power of the tongue.
We saw an example of that power Tuesday
night during the President's speech to congress when Congressman Wilson blurted out his line "You Lie".
It was symptomatic
of something much more profound happening in our culture.
A couple of weeks ago, I preached a sermon based on the
last book by Ed Friedman and I talked about his perception that society in general is in a devolving stage.
This
is an age in which civility is giving way to incivility on a massive scale.
Congressman Wilson is not the exception,
he is merely a symptom of something much, much larger enveloping us all.
This rising incivility is accompanied by
rising levels of anxiety in the culture and the anxiety and the incivility feed off of each other.
Friedman's view
is that these risings and fallings of anxiety/civility are long term phenomenon.
As groups become anxious, they behave
with greater incivility and on top of that, usually make poorer and poorer decisions.
It becomes a self defeating
cycle.
In 1776, those we call "our fore-fathers" may have been at an exceptional point of civility to allow the founders
of this country to create the basis of our social order.
To read the debates of the founders, one is struck by their
civility, even in the midst of great anxiety.
Their civility allowed them to control that anxiety and one cannot
argue with the results of their decisions which gave rise to the greatest democracy in human history.
But their
civility of their generation gave way in suceeding generations to rising incivility and anxiety.
In a strange parallel
to this last week, another congressman from S. Carolina nearly beat a Senator to death in the halls of Congress.
That's
incivility by anyone's standard.
It was a but a few years after that, the whole country tried to beat each other
to death in what we so incorrectly call "the civil war".
There was nothing civil about that war.
We should
have named it the War of Incivility.
Since then the pendulum of the culture has swung back and forth several times.
Scott
Peck, famous author of the road less travelled, committed his later life work to promoting civility which he saw as the great
challenge to society.
I think I found two copies of his work, A World Waiting to Be Born, his thoughts on the importance
of civility, when I was packing my books.
Its one of those books I come back to again and again.
I say all
this to contrast the rising incivility around us with how I perceive these congregations.
I said two weeks
ago that one of the great advantages you have to offer a new priest is the love and support you've shown Beth and me.
I
want to elaborate some more on that.
The reason you have love and support to offer, is because there is a high level
of civility and a low level of anxiety in these congregations.
In other words, you are defying the trends of the
culture around us.
I think that is highly attractive not only to a perspective new rector, but also to people in
the community who would enjoy a church experience such as we enjoy here.
In the midst of an increasingly incivil
society, a civil congregation can seem like "the Kingdom of Heaven."
Indeed, isn't that what we're supposed to present
to people?
So this is my first admonition. Take the words of James this morning to heart.
Everything
I've learned from Peck, Friedman and others, all comes back to the 3rd chapter of James.
Work diligently to
preserve the civility with which we have worked together in recent years.
To do that means you have to work
against the pressures of the prevailing culture.
It means not following the bad examples we see splattered across
our evening news as one incivil act is topped by one that's even more incivil.
Its going to fell like swimming against
the current, its going to twice as much energy.
But, the value to you and to these congregations will be inestimable.
Civil
tongues keep anxiety in check and lead to much better decisions for everyone.
First Mini sermon, Krystal size...
ends
Second Mini sermon...
People have asked me my thoughts about what to look for in a new priest.
I
want to offer one thought on that question that comes straight from the Gospel today.
But first, let me say I have
a couple of unusual experiences for a priesg that have taught me something about this.
First, in 1984, a neighboring
parish became vacant.
They asked me to come over and meet with the search committee.
They wanted to practice
their interviewing skills and use me as a guinea pig.
I was glad to do that for them.
In the course of the
experience, I made suggestions for questions they might ask, or ask differently.
Some of what I have to say here,
comes out of that.
(Incidently, when it was all done, they decided about six months later that they wanted to call
me to be their priest and I spent 6 1/2 years there.)
My other experience is that in the Diocese of Michigan I headed
the church planting committee.
We actually served as the search committee to interview and call new church planters
for churches we were going to start in the diocese.
So I have served on a search committee, which is very unusual
thing for a priest to ever do.
Out of those two experiences, I draw this one observation...
Here's the
one question I think is worth asking any candidate to be your priest... more important than any other question.
It
comes from the Gospel this morning.
"Who do you say Jesus is?"
I don't think there is a single right answer
to that question.
But whatever the answer is, it should be one that speaks to your hearts.
Your priest is
going to have to speak to your heart from the pulpit, in classes, in hospital rooms, in public settings, and elsewhere.
The
ability to answer that question, "Who do you say Jesus is?" is essential to any priest's effectiveness.
The priest
has to convey that understanding in words you understand
and even more importantly in words which move your heart
towards Jesus.
Today's scripture, again from James, warns about wanting to be a teacher and warns of the risks for
those who seek that ministry.
This business of being a priest is all about knowing Christ and making Christ known.
That's
why I believe the most telling question to ask a priest is "Who do you say Jesus is?"
But its not just priests who
should answer that question.
It is a question Jesus asked all still standing with him.
It is a question
I'd like you to leave here this morning asking "Who do I say Jesus is?"
Then share that with others this week, maybe
in a word, maybe in an action, but in some way that others know that you know who Jesus is for you.
And that's all the
Krystal's I have in this bag.
September 6, Bishop Parsley preached...
Sermon for Aug. 30, 2009
Today is the 11th anniversary of my call to
be your rector and pastor. It is a very special day to me and annually I usually make note of it in my sermon. Over these
11 years, I have been blessed by these congregations in so many ways I can't begin to number them.
Nonetheless, you've
probably heard (I know I have) some speculations and some rumors that I am going to retire. So let me set the
record straight. I have decided to retire after 35 years of active ministry. I will retire as of the end of November this
year.
This raises certain inevitable questions and I am going to try and answer a number of those in the next few minutes.
Why
announce this now? Why not earlier or later?
The main reason to tell you this now is very pragmatic. September through
November are our planning months. These are the months we make budgets, plan stewardship, elect officers and plan the program
year for the year to come. These next 90 days are a critical period in our annual parish life cycle.
I can't expect you
or your leaders in this parish to effectively plan for the future without knowing my intentions to retire. In other words,
you need to know this now. You and your elected leaders need to factor in my departure as your make your budgets, plan your
programs and so that you can elect the people you want leading you in the interim and those who will elect your next rector.
All this planning work will begin this afternoon with the summer cluster council meeting to which all of you are invited.
That will give us more time to answer other questions or issues I don't cover in this sermon.
It is also very opportune
that the bishop will be here next week. I expect he will have some important things to say to all of you about this too.
So,
it really made sense to announce this today.
Next question... Why am I retiring now?
Be assured, (and I want to really
stress this next point): my decision to retire, IN NO WAY, SHAPE OR FORM reflects any unhappiness or dissatisfaction with
you or with the work of being your rector. I have been blessed beyond my wildest imagination by serving these parishes over
the last 11 years. This is absolutely the best “job” I have had in all my years as a parish priest and pastor.
I love you, each and every unique one of you.
The fact that Beth and I bought a house in this community is the most tangible
evidence that we really cherish this community and that we want to live among you even after my retirement.
Given that
we love this community and that I am still getting up every morning eager to go to work, my decision to retire might seem
oxymoronic (a 25 cent word for “does not compute.”)
So let me back up and take you through how I got from there
to here. I have been thinking about retirement for a very long time. Church Pension Group says I have gone to more of their
retirement planning conferences than any other priest they know of (The President of CPG said that to me over lunch last spring.)
Retirement
is something for which I have been planning deeply and prayerfully for years. Along the way, I have asked myself again
and again, “When will I know it is time?” In recent months, I began to sense I might be nearing that point. Actually,
sorting all that out was the hardest part of this discernment for me because this summer has been particularly traumatic and
turbulent for me. I wasn't off on some mountain peak lost deep in meditation, but working through complex discernment questions
while my life seemed to go from one stage of chaos to another.
I am blessed with wise friends and spiritual companions
who know me very well and speak honestly to me. Those friends and companions have been especially important and I am thankful
to God for them as they helped me along the way.
I am now convinced that I have made this decision independent of
recent events, including: injuries, illnesses, surgeries, temporary blindness, my father's death, the deaths of several others
whom I truly cherished and (let me emphasize this so there is no misunderstanding)... independent of the actions of this summer's
General Convention.
I remember my first parish, I'd been there 6 weeks, totally wet behind the ears and back to back we
had the Nixon resignation and the illegal ordination of 11 women in Philadelphia. If I was going to run away from conflict
and controversy, I would have quit in August of 74.
Those are all things I had to separate out from the decision process.
Strangely,
or so it seems to me, everything came to a head in the sermon I preached two weeks ago. That was the sermon about how we think
about time as linear, circular or infinite. Do you remember me saying in that sermon that I was being caught up short by the
very sermon I was preaching even as I spoke to you? ...that I was finding myself having to reconsider all kinds of plans
and decisions? I was alluding to this decision to retire. The spiritual work of writing that sermon blew a hole in all the
thinking I had been doing and sent me back to square one. It also cleared away all the distractions and allowed me to hear
the still small voice. So I can honestly say, that as of two weeks ago, this was still an unsettled and unsettling question
for me
God chooses funny ways to communicate. My call to the ordained ministry came during a phone call to friend. I remember
blurting out the words of my call and both she and I reacting with “What did you say?” And here, once again, it
was a phone call about two weeks ago that clinched the matter and assured me that this is the right decision for me, for you
and for now.
I was talking to a trusted friend and one of my recent teachers... he is a pastor and a practicing therapist
and we were talking about other things unrelated to this... As we spoke, I just kind of blurted out the following... which
made real sense to me, to him and I hope to you.
It seems to me that there are two halves to this question of retirement.
One half involves the priest personally, and one half involves the parish. It is not often that both of these factors
line up in such a way that they lead to the same conclusion at the same moment. There are clergy who retire long after they
should have, usually as the parish is sliding into chaos. There are too many times clergy retire before their personal planning
is ready and end up in serious financial straits. It seems from my observations of my clergy friends, that it isn't too often
that a priest gets personal and professional issues to coalesce at the same time around this life changing decision. But as
I said to my therapist friend, “when they do, wow! That's the time to retire.” With that he heartily agreed.
On
a personal level, this is not the first time we've been in a situation that suggested to us that we ought to consider retiring.
Five years ago today, we were in just such a place. In July of 2004 James got married and Matt moved away. We were instant
empty nesters. On top of that, as of Aug. 31, 2004, I reached full retirement eligibility in the Episcopal Church having
30 years of service and being at least 55 years of age. We went so far as to meet with the bishop and “as Maxwell Smart
used to say, 'missed it by that much'”... The Bishop actually told us to reconsider and by the time we had made our
way home, I was convinced that I really was called to a much longer time of service here. That much longer time has now turned
into five years.
The other half of the question, I think is much more important. This is the half that pulled me back from
retiring five years ago and with which I have wrestled all summer: Simply stated it is this question “Am I called by
God to continue leading these parishes.”
In the Old Testament this morning, Moses is saying farewell to the Israelites.
He knows he is not called to lead them across the Jordan. That task is to fall to Joshua. Good Christian leadership is always
about discerning when we are and when we are not called to lead the people of God on their pilgrimage.
We've had a heck
of a run in these 11 years. We took off like gangbusters, grew the cluster by over 60% in the first two to three years, settled
thorny budget questions and did some important healing work. We had all kinds of programs going, people coming and plans for
even more. Then we hit a ceiling and started to level out and drift along, feeling pretty happy with how well things were
going... Then came the decision in New Hampshire and we took a real hit following that. There was a lot of internal disruption
and confusion. Numbers sank and sank some more. We were in our own “great recession” years before the country
entered one. Still we soldiered through, bottomed out, dragged along and then within the last 12-24 months things have started
to really pick up again. I have been able to feel the energy and vitality, new ideas, new people, and the numbers started
to show growth again.
As good as that feels to me, here's the rub, I am not the one God is calling to lead you to the next
stage. As much as I want you to get there, as much as I want these 11 years to be important in your history as a people of
God and to be able to say these years provided a foundation block on which greater things were built, it isn't going to be
left for me to do that. On my ordination invitation were several passages of scripture, key to me then and now. One says “I
planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.” I have tried to live by that and it is time for another to do
some watering. God will remain constant, and God alone gives the increase. God save me lest I ever forget that.
So I find
myself at a crossroads where personal or parish considerations are both aligned and “wow! This is the moment.”
I've heard that small voice in my heart, this is the time.
Let me move on to another question...
What comes next? What
do we do now?
Let me answer this in three parts...
First... As for me, between now and November 30 my attention will
be focused on making sure I do everything I can to equip your leaders to continue quality of ministry here in the absence
of a full time priest. Key to that is getting all the elements of the fall planning process completed so you're ready to move
forward. After Nov. 30th, we will bow out of the lives of these parishes, but we certainly hope, not out of your lives. We
will keep to a strict “no meddling” policy when it comes to matters affecting the life and ministry of these three
churches. Who ever follows me doesn't need a ghost hanging around this place. Hence, we will make our church home outside
this community and I know from experience that we'll all be the better for that in the long run. Although I won't be your
priest nor your rector after November 30th, I hope to remain your friend. As long as we don't confuse who I am with what I
“used to do”, we'll be fine. Beth and I hope to spend many fine evenings having folks over to the house, and doing
the other things friends do together.
Second, as I noted the bishop will be here next week. Having his solid leadership
is going to be a great benefit to you. Bishop Parsley is one of those bishops people come to a diocese because they want to
work for him. That has a very positive effect on the quality of clergy available in the diocese. This is a matter that is
of more importance than I think people often realize. More directly you'll be working with Bishop Parsley's deputy, Pat Wingo.
Pat has really impressed me since he took over that position. The stability and strength of leadership at the Diocese will
be a great asset to you. Use it wisely. I came here in the midst of a change in bishops when there was no staff person for
deployment at the time. I remember, though you may not have been aware of it, the chaos that created in the search process.
Actually, the fact that I can turn over leadership when I know the support available to your from your Bishop and his staff
is one of the things that I allowed to influence my decision.
Third... I don't know who will follow me, but I know
this, my successor will come into a parish that is healthy, knows how to do some really amazing things with little more than
chewing gum, bailing wire and faith. Do NOT sell yourselves short and do NOT think that you can't call someone of real quality
to lead you on the next stage of this marvelous journey. If you provide a good home, well maintained and in attractive shape
along with a ministry situation where a priest knows there isn't a history of playing “pin the tail on the rector”,
believe me there are people who would give their eye teeth to work where they can love and be loved. The best thing you have
to offer another priest is what you have given Beth and me for 11 wonderful years -- that is your love and caring and support.
And if you need a letter of reference, I'll be glad to write you one.
Finally, this is not the first time I have said “goodbye”
to a parish, nor is it the first time most of you have said “goodbye” to a pastor. Its not the first time, I've
stayed near a parish where I have served. In one case I only moved 9 miles down the road. So I know something about “staying
in the neighborhood”.
The other thing I know is that taking care of the emotions that accompany leave taking is
probably as important or more important than the transition of information or planning. A good leave taking, done well, sets
people free to move forward on path God is calling them to follow next. So I do want to be very attentive to the emotions
we'll all be feeling in these weeks ahead. We can expect those emotions to run a wide gamut and all of them matter, need to
be honored and faced. I intend to do my very best to be as emotionally engaged as I can be and ask you to try and do the same.
There
is much more to be said, but I have a few more sermons to preach. So I'll not going to try and put it all in this one. Next
week the Bishop will preach and we'll be celebrating (baptism and confirmation), new growth and promises for new beginnings.
AMEN.
August 23 I was blind in one eye and preached from memory on the Spiritual
Armor.
Sermon Aug. 16
Strangeness of coming to Trinity for worship this morning
and Rosie not being there, vested, ready to lead down the aisle. How quickly, how suddenly...
Ephesians, make the most
of the time... seems like sage advice because time is short, fleeting.
I want to challenge that this morning...
That
is worldly conventional wisdom. Actually the translation is not a good one for us because the phrase “make the most
of the time” means other things in our cultural setting than the original word implies.
The verb used here is only
translated as “make the most” twice, in all other places it is translated as “redeem”. Redeem has
a very different quality to it, much vaster implications.
I'll come back to that later.
I wondered why, the translators
thought “make the most” fit here... I want to suggest that redeem fits the passage much better. We live in a world
of time. Like it or not, our concept of time governs and shapes everything we think and do. It is inescapable.
How
we view time becomes one of those foundational things that truly makes us the people we are.
So let's look at what we are
to make of time this morning. We live in a western world that views time as linear. That is the common and overwhelmingly
common belief. We are all shaped by that view.
Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives... Remember
that from the soap opera?
But it could be the opening to the introduction to life in the western world if it were a daily
soap opera starring all of us.
“We are dying from the day we are born.”... some one said that to me last week.
This
is the 40th anniversary of putting a man on the moon and Woodstock.
Also the summer in which I remember a massive influx
of eastern mysticism.
I remember my fraternity brothers going off to a Buddhist temple, to sit cross legged on the floor
and meditate and chant.
The massive influx of eastern religious thought has not abated since. Washed over us like a tidal
wave.
Who would have imagined 40 years ago that today, when modern children are asked who they admire most, the Dahli Lama
usually is in the top 10.
In my generation, I don't think we even knew what a Dhali was and a Lama was an animal in S.
America. But the Dahli Lama and eastern religious thought captured the imagination of our culture. Why? They have a different
view of time. That's the fundamental difference. Eastern time is cyclical, circular. And the big result of that translates
into how we live in time. Our linear time is always running out. We make bucket lists of things to do before we die.
We
hear this week that genetically 5% people only need 6 hours of sleep and immediately scientists talk of how to make something
so we can all live on 6 hours. Why? Because time is short. It is running out, We have to capture it, “make
the most of it.”
Allison quote... used him in sermon last week... “and time which is subject to human violence,
a time by means of which we seek our security, fortifying ourselves, grasping our existence in a struggle against the universal
tendency to pass away...time which must be grasped for survival.” (pp. 110-111)
That's why I don't like that translation.
It fits with our cultural mania about time, that hectic helter skelter pace at which we try to live.
Eastern time, especially
Hindu based thinking, sees time as going round and round.
So there's always going to be more.
I think the ability of
eastern religion to capture the imagination has to do with this one difference.
I think we've been hungering for an option
to the frantic pace of our lives which is a pace driven by a view of time as limited, fleeting, something to be grasped and
held on to for “dear life”, literally.
But, we didn't need to go to Tibet or any place in the East to find
a viable alternative to our prevailing western view of time.
As I write this final version, the radio is playing John Rutter's
version of Eccl. 3.. to everything there is a season, “ A time to... and a time to...”
How amazing...
If
we translate the passage with the more common English word “redeem”, it calls us to a different kind of time.
A
redeemed time goes with the Gospel this morning. Those who eat of the body will live forever.
Immediately time changes.
There's a prayer burial that I often use at burials...
“Death is only an horizon, and an horizon save the limit of
our sight. Lift us up Lord that we may see further.”
Effect of Jesus death and resurrection was to change the time
horizon so that time for the redeemed never runs out, it is never limited.
Therefore it is never is short supply, it never
needs to be grasped at, it never calls us to violence... for there is an infinite supply always available... in the eternity
of our King and Savior.
Here's how Allison puts it...
“The belief which Jesus inaugurated when he enabled us to
live as if death were not, also enables us to live as if there were no end. “That is, we can start here to construct
something, a life story, which has no end. “But this introduces into human history something quite extraordinary:
the possibility of a story which is only one of growth, of coming into existence, of development, and which is in no way shaded
by its contrary. “And this, logically enough, tends to relativize the time which we all know and live normally,
the ambiguous time where we grow and decay.”
Which view of time governs your life?
When I asked that question
this week, I caught myself up short. I realized how much of my thinking, both daily and long term planning is governed by
a subconscious but very powerful view that time is precious, I have to “make the most of it.”
It really tipped
my canoe over and threw myself into some very cold water. I found that plans and decisions I am making right now are being
made on the wrong basis. I have to be honest, it absolutely discombobulated me.
I found I had to go back and rethink a
whole slew of things. But here's what I found interesting, as I worked with these ideas this week. The more I embraced the
idea of redeemed time, the more I practiced what I am now preaching, the better the decisions and planning became.
The
plans and decisions formed around God's endless time are much more life giving, exciting and all without that “edge”
that I feel when thinking with worldly time as my reference point.
And certainly, and especially, when I thought about
Rosie...
I went from the worldly view of thinking about all that she had gotten done in one lifetime... sort of like reviewing
a score card after the clock runs out and the buzzer sounds.
I went from that to thinking about her in redeemed time...
as the Prayer Book says, going from strength to strength in the perfect life of the Kingdom.
I found that thought much
more exciting and delightful that the worldly way of thinking.
So I encourage you to take this passage to heart this week.
Think
on it, are you living in the time of the world or the redeemed time of the Kingdom.
I challenge you this week to think
carefully about how you make your plans and decisions, which view of time informs your thinking?
Try it, try thinking intentionally
what would I do if I had all the time and then more? How would I plan if I were lifted higher to see beyond the “time
horizon” this sorry world has used to limit my sight?
I am reading Ed Friedman's last book, he uses the example of
the 15th century explorers to talk about the same kind of idea.
He explains how everyone knew the equator was the end of
the earth.
That was the horizon. Indeed, the north star disappears as one crosses the equator and sailors lost their bearings,
no wonder they thought they were coming to edge of the world.
But the Portuguese king, Henry the Navigator crossed the
equator and began the era of exploration that would within a century discover the new world, the pacific ocean, indeed that
the world was oh so much more than anyone had every imagined!!
And as you cross the equator, it is no longer the north
star that guides, but the Southern CROSS.
Let us redeem the time, guided into worlds beyond our imagining and guided by
the Cross of Jesus. Amen.
Sermon notes for Sunday, August 9th
Did you know that in the entire Diocese of Alabama according to the latest
year for which statistics are published there were only 44 persons over age 16 baptized in any of our 90 congregations.
That's
less than ½ person per congregation per year.
This morning we will celebrate our second “adult baptism” this
year (in STEM) at St. Andrew's.
That's a pretty big deal, wouldn't you say. I would.
Maybe that's because I still
believe that bringing people to a knowledge and love of the Lord is the primary work of this body we call the church.
That's
why I end every service with the great commission, “Go into all the world, baptize,
Without apology, this week, I
have borrowed liberally from the website:
(details on my website where sermon is published)
http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/proper14b.htmboth for an extended illustration in the sermon and for a couple of other
ideas to flesh out my thoughts for this sermon.
I want to start with a hymn selected by Amber for her baptism this morning...
It
is an ideal hymn for baptism, maybe the best in all our music books for the occasion...
It is also perfect for the images
from Ephesians this morning, which as I said last week are from the greatest chapter on baptism in the Bible...
From the
website...
James Alison has a section on Ephesians called "Redeeming the Time" in The Joy of Being Wrong, pages 229-232.
(Eph
4:18). The gentiles, exactly in line with what we might expect, have futile minds and darkened understanding "alienated from
the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them"
(4:19-22). Because of this it is not surprising that they are
entirely run by the desires of the world and its old nature
(Eph. 4:23-42). However, those who have learnt the things
of Christ should be first "renewed in the spirit of your minds" and thus able to "put on the new man [self], the one created
according to [after the likeness of] God in the righteousness and holiness of truth"
{Which all leads to these changes
taking place in us...}
Instead of speaking falsehood to our neighbor (old self), we begin to speak the truth to them,
The
thief turns that desire which drove him to steal to its opposite, namely, to do honest work in order to be able to give to
those in need.
Talk is used for edifying, rather than destroying people, and all the anger and clamor and slander are
turned to forgiveness:
And jumping into next week's reading a bit,
(Eph. 5:11). By walking in the light, we are not
expected simply to shun the darkness, but actively to show it up for what it is: "Take no part in the works of darkness, but
instead expose them"
The conclusion to the passage today is "Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children,
and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (Eph. 5:1-2).
{Which
is probably my favorite offertory passage.}
Also very similar to “I want to walk as a child of the light.”
It
was that walking in the light, the website reminded me, that caused Christ to be turned into a sacrifice in the first place.
We draw from this the observation not that we should flee from the sacrifice that may cost us, but rather that we should
learn to walk in a Godly way so that the sacrifice might be of avail for God's purpose.
Learning how to live into God's
intent for us and the resulting reformation of our self is a difficult process requiring Holy wisdom (hence we are sealed
by the Holy Spirit appears in the very heart of this passage).
Guided by the Holy Spirit we come to be able to see by which
desires we are being drawn in any given situation: the heavenly or the worldly.
All that sounds so theoretical, and it
is.
But... from the site's webmaster: There is little I could add to Alison's fine reflections above... {then he adds this
gem of an illustration.
It is an illustration I want to borrow whole cloth because it so excellently makes the point of
what it means to walk in this new way...}
On the website he was describing a particular sermon he had once preached about
of his favorite movies
... the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.
For those familiar with
the plot , Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, is the only one who keeps endlessly repeating the Groundhog Day's celebration
in Punxsutawney, Pa., a repetition that is ripe for "imitation".
He writes, “ Let me repeat some of description in
the sermon, but more with an eye to how I think this movie fleshes out mimetic [imitation] theory in a delightful way.”
Trapped
in this endless repetition becomes hell for Phil as he seems trapped in a view of himself through others that he is self-centered
and unlikable.
He decides that, to make the best of this bad situation, he can at least use his advantage of being the
one most free to change his variable in the interactions to try to win over Andie MacDowell's character.
He can slowly
find out exactly what to say to her to have a successful conversation with her.
We see repeated conversations between
the two of them in which he finds out her likes and dislikes from day to day and puts them to use in the conversation the
next repeat of the day.
He finds out, for example, that she likes to toast to world peace, so the next time around in
that same repeated day he toasts for world peace.
He can manipulate the conversation to exactly what he should say in
order to win her over.
But even at the end of the day when the conversation has gone fabulously, because he’s had
so much practice, he’s still the same person to her.
She still trusts her previous assessments of who he is (confirmed
in the views of others such as the camera man on their TV crew).
When Phil finally gives up this route, and relaxes into
a sort of forgiving acceptance of himself as not measuring up to her kindness, he unwittingly begins to imitate the kind and
considerate person that he sees her as.
After many repeated days spent in self-growth and in truly reaching out to many
folks in town, he finally comes to the end of his repeated Groundhog's Day at the town celebration, where many of the townsfolk
laud him as a wonderful, caring person.
Rita is now more open to trusting who Phil has become through the eyes of
all these others.
She is open to revising her previous assessments on the basis of so many others.
Phil
and Rita now come together at the end of the day, no longer in an entanglement of Phil's attempted manipulations and controls,
but, through his more genuine, positive imitation of Rita.
It no longer matters as much what is said as how they are saying
it in their new relationship.
They fall asleep together just talking, and Phil finally wakes up Rita the next morning
at long last on February 3.
Is this the sort of opportunity we have as baptized children of God?
To awake each morning
with an ever new chance of transforming relationships, as we grow in loving service and partnership with one another?
Could
we not reimagine the text from Ephesians this morning as describing the life on Groundhog's Day in which we wake up day by
day, doing the same things but in only slightly different ways?
Trying to manipulate this situation and that person to
gain an ever so slight advantage on this “go around” before the alarm goes off again at 6 am on the perpetual
Feb. 2nd.
In this endless cycle, we are conscious both of the similarity of each day and the fact that we can and do tweak
each one only slightly... but still things always seem to come back to the same starting point, again and again, and again.
It
is not until we see ourselves in the eyes of the beloved (for Phil that is Rita, for us it is Jesus) that we finally relax...
...the
new day breaks, the new creation comes, and we are free to live new days in which we don't endlessly repeat, but instead days
in which we are truly free to create.
That's what it means to me to walk as a child of the light, that every day is indeed
new, and creative and set forth as one into which I can live with my beloved, my Jesus, as walk as he walks... in newness
of life,
and the calendar pages fall off at the end as each new day dawns...
Sermon for Aug. 2
There was a great article, I think it was in Time Magazine.
I read it
a week or two ago.
Top intelligence expert was talking about how the world has changed.
He was contrasting mysteries
with puzzles.
HE said that during the cold war every thing was a puzzle.
I love puzzles, I do puzzles daily, one sudoko
and one NYT crossword.
A puzzle he said has an answer.
There are 81 discreet numbers that fill a standard sudoko.
There
are just so many discreet letters that complete a NYT crossword puzzle.
A puzzle has an answer, all we have to do is figure
it out.
During the cold war, the russians had so many missles, that would fly so far and with so much accuracy. All we
had to do was figure that out. From spy planes to satelites to spies on the ground, like Bond, James Bond.
It is a puzzlement...
But
he said, life has changed.
He was trying to explain why professional intelligence people, why political leaders, why the
public is struggling to deal with terrorism.
Because it is a mystery.
I love mystery stories, have several of those
right next to my sudoko and NYT books.
A mystery he said, doesn't have "an answer", indeed we don't even know if it has
an answer at all or has many, many answers.
Going in, you are not just looking to fill in the boxes, but troding through
uncharted territory.
This change in thinking, he said, is critical for living in the next era for the great issues facing
us are mysteries not puzzles.
After centuries of thinking everything is a puzzle we can solve,
we are coming into
the age of mystery.
Well, here's another case of the more things change the more they seem the same...
In the ancient
world the Greeks and Romans were the great puzzle solvers...
From geometry of the Greeks to the engineering of the
Romans, they were people who loved puzzles and were extrodinarily adept at solving them, so much so that each conquered the
world with that ability.
But, Judaism and Christianity after it, both spring from a sense of mystery, the mystery
of God.
God is not something that will be solved, will bit into 81 discreet boxes in just one set of ways.
The
things we are here to think about, say and do are mysteries, we have no idea if they have any answer at all, or if they have
more answers than we can imagine... we simply are invited to enter into them, enter into the mystery and find out for outselves...
With
that prologue, let me share with the you some of the mystery in this mornings lessons...
A reading from the letter to the
Ephesians
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of
the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,
making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Here is the Christian Ethic, how we shall live.. in love, in unity
(of the Spirit) and in peace
A puzzle would have rules, defining every moment of how we shall live, from our rising
moment to our dying one, but a mystery only paints with broad strokes, llive in love, be at unity, abide in peace. It sounds
so simple, but the more you think on those words, the more you sense they are invitations to something deeper and more mysterious.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one
hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in
all.
Here is the opening of the baptismal service, the perfect love, unity
and peace come from the nature of God, God is ONE, and love, unity and peace are reflections of and extensions of the oneness
of the Three/One.'
The Three/One, that won't fit any box, can't put mroe than one number in a box, but God breaks
the boxes, That is why God is mystery. This invitation to the mystery opens the baptismal service. In Greek, in the NT, both
Baptism and Eucharist are called oi mysterio, the mysteries.
But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift.
Therefore it is said, "When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people." (When it
says, "He ascended," what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended
is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some
would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry,
for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.
Here is why God has called us (remember v. 1 starts with calling to
which you have been called...)
that calling is to be gifted ones to build up the body, building the unity
and to become
Christlike... Christians, little Christs.
It sounds like imitation. Be like Christ. But Paul is talking about ascending
into heaven and bringing things down from their to us. Hey that's all very mysterious. We kind of leap over that part in favor
of the more down to earth language of pastor and teachers. This sounds like a practical list we can sink our teeth into. But
the passage won't let us off that easily. Unless you wrestle with the mystery of words like "captivity captive", the rest
of the passage just becomes a laundry list, a honey do list from God. So pedestrian, so trite. No we are being told much greater
things here and we'll only begin to glimpse those when we embrace the mystery of this passage.
We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every
wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must
grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament
with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.
LIke a psalm which repeats a thought, this verse repeats the thought
again
contrasting it with the winds, tricks, craftiness, scheming.
Indeed the contrast is with making all this
into a puzzle. That's what the crafy tricksters do. They boil the passages down to some set of rules they want others to live
by and then sell their snake oil in the guise of religion.
Mystery leads us away from their charms and invites us
Growing
up into the head, growth comes through truth in love... mysterious phrase
when all works well, the body grows, by love.
Is
anything more mysterious than love?
Gospel is perfect companion,
for baptism is one sacrament, outward
and physical sign of inward and spiritual grace,
Eucharist is the other sacrament, the two are inseparable and in these
lessons they are correctly connected.
Here is the other half of the mysterion, the holy mysteriers.
... The Word of the Lord [4:1-16 ]
The Gospel according to St John
The next day, when the people who
remained after the feeding of the five thousand saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into
the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi,
when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs,
but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal
life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." Then they said to him, "What
must we do to perform the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has
sent."
What must we do? Jesus doesn't say they must be baptized, but that
they must believe.
Baptism is an act, anyone can do it. But it is not the answer here.
The answer here is believe on
the one God sent. This is to enter in mystery, to believe in one God sent. There is so much mysterious about that one simple
phrase I can't begin to describe it...
Unless this baptism today is based on belief, we are just acting. But what is belief?
Oh heavens, that is a mystery isn't it. We think we know, but so often find ourselves like the man in the Gospel who cries,
"Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief". Belief is a mystery. We simply enter into it, we never "have" it. It takes us, we
do not contain it.
And if belief is a mystery, what then of Communion.
That perfect act of ....all humility and gentleness,
with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
That
is surely a universe more than just swallowing a bit of bread and sip of wine this morning.
To get from the simple physical
act to transforming it into the fulfillment of the promise of Ephesians is the great mystery.
Somehow it is part of the
mystery of belief in what it is, the very presence of God among us.
So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we
may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written,
`He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you
the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes
down from heaven and gives life to the world." They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always." Jesus said to them, "I
am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."
Eat this bread and know the life of God prepared from the foundations
of all time for you, a life in Jesus, a life initiated in baptism and renewed at this altar rail. Come you who are hungry,
come and eat to your soul's relief, content and nourishment. Here the mystery becomes known in water, bread and wine.
So I am deeply indebted to that writer in Time Magazine of reminding me
again of what wondrous and mysterious things we do this morning, what awe and mystery surround us and that life is more than
a puzzle to be solved, in Christ, it is a mystery to be lived. Amen.
Sunday July 26 was at the DeSoto Caverns and was our finale for Bible School.
The sermon was designed for that purpose and not one that really can be written out here...
Sunday, July 19
I owe a debt of gratitude to Fr. Ron DelBene
Went
to him 11 years ago for spiritual direction
Probed and poked, my image of ministry after 25 years.
What
emerged was a church militant image (1940 hymnal)
Fr. Ron poked and prodded further, "Why?"
Since 3 wanted
to be a soldier, trained to be one, spent previous 32 years from ROTC to that day in uniform
Thought in terms of
battles, holding the ground,
Fr. Ron asked why? Was that appropriate?
Something powerful happened in that
exchange.
Looking back over 11 years, it has become clearer what a life changer that was for me.
Retired
from army (involuntarily) 3 mos later.
But, I retired from that bent of mind more slowly, but just as surely and
I don't think, involuntarily.
When I look at Gospel and Epistle today I can really see the effect.
In the
Gospel, Jesus is crossing boundaries. We lose that in the story because of the way its chopped up (notice middle is missing).
But
Jesus is crossing international waters, different countries, different cultures, different religions,
He comes to
Jews and Pagans.
Yet the people are all in need, and Jesus meets their needs
The Epistle summarizes it so
well,
For he is our peace;
made both groups into one
broken down the
dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.
that he might create in himself one new humanity in place
of the two,
making peace,
reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross,
putting to death that hostility through it.
he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace
to those who were near;
All this language is about making peace and bringing unity
That was the
one thing my military mindset never grasped.
That was why Fr. Ron's guidance was so helpful to me, it opened my eyes
to the Gospel in these verses.
No place is that clearer for me than in the recently completed General Convention.
Before
my encounter with Fr. Ron, I was a G.C. junkie I had been to 7
I have probably spent more time at G.C. than 99.99%
of all Episcopalians.
I went to work, to draw the lines, build the walls, to do battle and drive back the forces
of evil
I went to be a soldier of Christ for the "Right", for God.
Convention for me was a modern day Crusade.
Strange,
after that encounter with Ron, my interest in GC has waned.
Went to Minn. in 2003 for DOK,but didn't stay for GC.
Went
to Ohio 3 years ago, but just to see if Henry got elected or not.
I have almost totally ignored this most recent
Gen. Conv.
I remember being there in 1985, the last time Gen. Conv. Met in Anaheim.
It was when Bp Stough
nearly became PB.
I spent those two weeks in the trenches, tilting with the windmills of the church.
Strange,
24 years later, same issues, same windmills, but I've hung up my armor and lost interest.
I read a commentary this
week from a pastor who had been to the Holy Land in 2000. (I went in 96.)
His description is so right on!
He
was commenting on all the walls, built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt.
Human nature to build walls and defenses,
to keep that "other" out, to protect what is sacred within.
Its and endless cycle, producing what? Job security for
wall builders and wall destroyers and little else?
The Gospel offers the way out of this mindless cycle of building
and destroying walls, attacking, defending, counterattacking..
the way out is to recognize the truth, we're all alike
On
both sides of the Sea of Galilee, we are hungry, we are sick, we are tired and scared,
On both sides, Jesus comes
to meet our needs without asking us if we're the ones on His side
He comes to our side.
On both sides of
the lake, He meets us as we are and invites us to become as He is.
I have no regrets I missed Convention this year
nor that I essentially ignored it altogether.
No regrets that I skipped the usual battles, the lines drawn in the
sand, the distemper with those who don't see it the way I absolutely know God intends it to be.
No, I am much happier
to be here, preaching this Gospel message,
a clear call to be like our Lord, to be about reconciling, bringing peace
and seeking our essential unity in Him no matter which side of the Sea of Galilee we come from.
I surrender my certainty,
I open myself to the insecurity of being surrounded by “others” from other places around the lake,
and I look for the Lord in our midst who makes us one in Him.
JUNE SERMONS
Apologies... but somehow I hit a wrong button and several of my recent sermons
disappeared from my computer files. So there is a one month gap here.
Sermon for June 21
The book my clergy reading group is reading
and reviewing tomorrow is Everything Must Change by Brian McLaren.
We saw and heard Brian on a video Bishop Parsley
played for us at our Spring clergy conference.
He was one of the guest keynote speakers chosen to speak to all our
bishops at the Lambeth conference last year in England.
His is without doubt, one of the significant and influential
thinkers, speakers and writers on the future shape of Christianity.
What he says is challenging in the nth degree
and I want to throw that challenge at you this morning.
Frankly, I don't know how much I buy of his challenge. I
woke Saturday morning with thoughts of his book wrestling in my own head and I headed straight to the computer to write this.
Today's
Gospel provides a perfect opportunity to speak to McLaren's main points.
The disciples are in a boat and the boat
is being pummeled by a terrible storm.
Though they are fishermen and used to being out on the water, even they are
frightened and alarmed by the strength and ferocity of this storm.
In fact they are so alarmed they awaken Jesus,
asleep in the stern, and with desperation cry out, Master don't you care that we are perishing?
Perishing?
What
a great word. Perishing, about to be wiped out, about to be erased from the face of the earth, about to be human-was instead
of human being.
Perishing!
That is the perfect word for McLaren's description of our human condition.
He
seizes on a word that he heard some years ago to capture our human condition in this modern age.
He speaks of the
combination of factors that are driving our world-wide environment, economy, social order, indeed everything we have
assembled to make our modern world and reduces it to this phrase...
gSuicide Machine”.
He
carefully lays out the argument.
What he describes in detail chapter after chapter is how everything we've
done to build the world order, this machine that is supposed to bring us happiness, prosperity and security is instead running
at break neck speed to wipe us off the face of this planet.
Much of what he argues in these pages is stuff I have
read many times before in other books.
In fact, he cites a number of my favorite writers like Jared Diamond on whose
Pulitzer Prize winning book, Guns Germs and Steel, I have preached several times already.
McLaren is no flash in
the pan, no alarmist, no Cassandra.
He is a thoughtful, careful, and very well traveled man who needs to be heard.
In
fact, he needs to be heard because he has taken the time to hear others.
He talks in the book about the thousands
of meetings he has had with people living in some of the remotest and poorest parts of Africa and South America.
Places
where he went to listen to them talk about the world as they experience it. And equally important about how they understand
the Gospel of Jesus.
He talks about a chance meeting at a wedding reception where his table mates just happened to
be 7 of the best economists specializing in the subject of making the world economy more just.
He lays out the descriptions
of the problem of our survival as a species on this planet as no other book I've read does.
He has several pages
where he summarizes the lists of the chief threats to human existence as defined by a number of highly respected sources that
run the gamut from the UN to Pastor Rick Warren.
And in the end, shows that all the lists, no matter who makes them
up, are saying the same thing.
We humans are in the midst of a raging storm that and if we don't do something about
it, we are going to perish.
If you can read this book without getting that point...
Well then I guess you
would be like those 2.7 million people who watched their TV sets warning them month after month of the switch to digital TV
and never did a thing to prepare. Their screens are dark this morning.
That for me is the second scariest thing.
I
am terrified that the rest of the people in this boat with me aren't tuned in.
That as the boat fills with water
no one else seems alarmed or feels like we ought to be bailing like crazy.
McLaren takes due note of that problem.
I listen on TV as people blithely tell reporters that this recession has changed their habits forever. That they
will never shop the same way again.
I don't believe a word of it. I understand human nature too well.
As
the economy recovers we'll quickly forget.
I remember so well during the oil crisis in the 70's how concerned we
were for more fuel efficient cars.
But by the time Detroit built them, the oil embargo was a thing of the past and
everyone was back to buying gas guzzlers.
Now I said that's the second scariest thing to me, this scariest was this.
McLaren
cites a statistic that 44% of the population of this country believes that Jesus will return in the next 50 years.
Just
under half of us, in our religious faith believe in a Jesus who is going to rise up in the back of the boat and make it all
better again.
Well, at least all better for us who believe in him.
That is the most common interpretation
of this morning's Gospel story among the current Christian generation of which we are part.
And if its all going
to be better again when Jesus comes, why even worry about it?
Indeed, why bother at all with any of the threat?
McLaren
is a radical. There is no question about that.
His solution is radical.
He argues that we must reenvision
the Gospel.
We must see Jesus and his message in terms of a God (yes McLaren believes Jesus is the Son of the living
God, the second person of the Trinity, that he really rose from the dead) in terms of a God who comes to rescue us from the
Suicide Machine.
In his prescription, he argues that what is wrong with the world's systems is not the machinery
itself, not the economic system or the government systems, but the real problem is the story we tell to explain everything.
This
underlying story, called the metanarrative, is something every individual and every society has.
You may never hear
that word meat narrative outside this sermon, but I 100% absolutely guarantee you that your live by a metanarrative. All of
us humans do.
I learned that years ago in some of my other advanced studies in communication theory.
McLaren's
key argument is that the metanarrative of the Gospel of Jesus got hijacked by the culture and has no more to do with the real
Jesus and his real message than apples have to do with moon rocks.
The real Jesus and his real message were, in McLaren's
terms, a wake up call, or more accurately, a call to action to reject the dominate meta narratives of the society in which
Jesus and his followers lived.
He carefully goes through numerous stories and parables of Jesus and compares them
to the several meta-narratives of the Roman Empire, of the Pharisees, the Zionist-zealots, of the Sadduccees and even of the
tax collectors. McLaren argues strongly, and I think, convincingly that the real Gospel of Jesus was a real choice, a real
alternative to the options available.
Jesus provided a break out way of seeing the world about us and a radically
different way of living in it.
The clash of his alternative metanarrative with the existing ones, particularly of
the metanarrative of the Roman empire lead to his crucifixion.
Here we come to the resurrection. McLaren makes the
point that the resurrection is proof that Jesus had the right story, the right metanarrative, the God story that a loving
and creative and gracious God intended for us to live by.
That this metanarrative of Jesus is the only way to answer
the question in the boat...
As we watch the planet heading over the cliff driven by a suicide machine of our own
making... we cry out to God, “Don't you care?
God's answer is Jesus. Of course he cares, thats why he gave
us the answer to the problem.
McLaren makes the point that 1/3 of this planet's people claim Christianity as their
metanarrative.
In fact, most of the Christians live by the world's metanarrative.
If we could reach just
the Christian's with the real message of Christ, that would be enough to fundamentally change the course of the world,
...To
break the suicidal cycles that are threatening to end our species on this planet.
I still haven't decided where I
stand on this idea.
I agree with the diagnosis of the problem.
I think McLaren's description of the suicide
machine is the finest analysis I've read anywhere of why we are in peril of perishing.
I am convinced that Jesus
is God's answer to the cry of distress, “Don't you care we are perishing.”
What I still can't wrap my
head around is the radical change in the understanding of the message of the Gospel.
I've been preaching for months
now about the emergent church movement.
McLaren is way out in the forefront of that movement.
I guess his
book caught me up short because when I finally got down to it, I realized how “old school” I am.
I realized
how uncomfortable with change I have become.
I realized that I like my easy life and my comfortable images of Jesus
as my personal savior, and that McLaren's ideas threaten to swamp my boat.
But, maybe my personal little boat and
a lot of other little boats of people just like mine need to be swamped, in order for God to move us to finally hear deeper
truth in these lessons we read Sunday by Sunday.
So let me challenge you, get a copy of McLaren's everything must
change, I think it cost me 8.95 on Amazon, read it and then let's have a conversation about what it means to be perishing,
what it means to cry to God for help and what that help will look like when it comes.
Sermon for June 14
The shootings at the Holocaust Memorial this past
week demand a response from the pulpit. Indeed, the recent rise in violence of this type in our country demands some theological
reflection.
We are just reentering the readings which we discontinued last February. You probably don't remember what I
preached 17 weeks ago, but I made the point that Lent, Easter, Pentecost and Trinity were going to interrupt the flow of our
week by week readings. I said also that I doubted anyone would remember where we left off in February when we got to June.
Am I right?
So to start our reentry into these lessons, I'm going to share some ideas from one of my favorite Bible commentators
who was writing about this week's lessons.
Jesus began this series of agricultural parables by talking about a "house divided"
and " Satan casting out Satan". You need that in mind to put what we read this week in some context.
Second, he observes
that a good translation for "parable" in Mark would be "riddle."
Thus, the Parable of the Mustard Seed is a humorous riddle,
but we we don't get the joke.
It fits into that type, "I guess you had to be there."
You see the mustard is a
shrub, not a tree.
Second it is a weed in the garden
The commentator notes, "if we'd change that to something like
a man sowing dandelion seeds into his lawn, I think we'd finally realize that this is a joke."
It is a joke, but it has
a serious message behind it.
He goes on to write:
"The issue at stake is to either live by the power of Satan, which
is the power of accusation followed by casting out, or to live by the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the power of (to
use St. Paul's word) reconciliation.
And that's the punchline of St. Paul's passage this morning, except for some reason,
the lectionary cuts of the final verse, #18 ... "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave
us the ministry of reconciliation."
Its all about reconciliation.
What Jesus is presenting us with is a choice.
There
are two places we can live, His Father's Kingdom or the world's Kingdom which is ruled by Satan and his minions.
Jesus
is comparing His Father's Kingdom to a crazy quilt garden in which what the world deems weeds grow to amazing heights, so
great that the word shrub becomes "tree".
To the world this garden with its forgiveness and reconciliation seems an insane
place to live.
By contrast, the stern oaks of "an eye for an eye", vengeance and violence, exclusion and ostracism...
indeed "casting out", which dominate our worldly kingdom make our Father's garden seem a pathetic and laughable place.
Maybe
that's why Jesus told this parable as a joke, so people would grasp the irony of how amazing a transformation He was preaching
to them.
And that brings me to my subject this morning. I want to preach against TOLERANCE.
You heard me, I want to
preach against tolerance.
What's so bad about TOLERANCE?
In light of shooting at Holocaust Museum or gunning down of
a doctor in his church two weeks ago or even the President's speech in Cairo where he appealed for TOLERANCE in the middle
east, let's look at what's wrong with tolerance.
One my predecessors in this place, Fletcher Comer who was here back in
the 70's, has devoted years to this issue. He is a good friend and we often talk about his work. I owe him a great debt of
gratitude for convincing me of the significance of this issue. Tolerance just isn't good enough.
Fletcher has worked diligently
on reconciliation ministry trying to bridge the racial gaps that exist in the Kingdom of the world. His observation is that
it is very hard, slow work and only comes a bit at a time.
Tolerance on the other hand looks like a quick fix. It requires
far less effort and so being the path of least resistance is the option we usually choose.
I was reminded of this again
on Friday at Warren Hamby's funeral. Warren was Jan Piper's father. I got to know him though Jan and always liked him but
I never realized what a courageous man he was. At his funeral, the story was told more than once about how when he was pastor
of the largest Methodist church in Jackson MS in the 60s he publicly called the KKK and the rest of the pastors who chose
silence in the face of violence “cowards”. After the that the police had patrols watching his house afraid he'd
be the next bombing target.
Tolerance would have found an easier sermon to preach. Reconciliation means you speak the truth,
name the devil and stare him down. Its crazy, like someone who plants mustard weeds and expects trees. Its crazy like the
Kingdom of God.
The commentator to whom I referred earlier uses this simile: (English majors can correct me if this is
a metaphor, I always got those mixed up...)
"It is akin to the difference between birds who come roost in the branches
of a mustard bush and a farmer who sows it and cares for it. Without the intentionality, today's tolerance for some folks
may turn into tomorrow's intolerance for someone else; the bird may simply take flight and roost on someone else's branch
(namely, a branch under the care and nurturing of Satan)."
So what's so bad about tolerance?
Well, tolerance is just
fine as long as the playing field is equal. For a while, people will bide their time and play nicely together.
But when
something changes the balance of power, humans have a nasty habit of taking advantage...
“Ah ha! now is our moment
to do what we've always secretly felt ...”
Serbs Croats Bosnians... until Tito died and central power collapsed
Ethnic
cleansing, war, devastation...
Native tribes who used to live here
early history of Alabama their was amazing
tolerance and intermarriage
then balance of power changed, white settlers flooded the western frontier (aka Alabama),
need for more land, tolerance changed.
result was the trail of tears.
Funny how we have a monument to Andrew
Jackson 2 blocks from my house -- I see it as a monument to the failure of tolerance.
The icon of the Alamo
Interesting
to me to visit and read the official history of what happened to change tolerance into war.
As the story on the walls
of the visitor center goes, Texas was a huge empty expanse and at first Mexico welcomed settlers from the east (namely white
English speaking Europeans) to help fill the land.
Soon there were too many illegal aliens, (white English speaking Europeans)
flooding into Texas. The Government in Mexico City tried to control the immigration, indeed to stop any more illegals from
crossing the border. (Hey does that sound familiar?)
The illegals grew in number, some say as much as ten to one
to the native texicans and overwhelmed them, declared their independence and started a war with Mexico.
Remember
the Alamo. Indeed, remember it is another monument to the failure of tolerance. Where once English and Spanish speakers had
lived together, once one group grew large enough it just forced its will on the minority.
But that's the way it
goes in the Kingdom of the World. Might makes right.
Consider, Iraq under Sadam Suni, Shiite and to some extend the
Kurds tolerated each other.
Remove Sadam and his strong arm government and we've watched Suni killed Shiites and
Shiites kill Sunis and Kurds try to wrest as much of the north as they can from both.
I opposed that war from the
very beginning, in part, because I knew enough history to know we were going to destabilize the whole country. I not only
could find Iraq on a map. I understand that if you took the cork out of that bottle, you'd have the same ethnic cleansing
we'd seen in Bosnia. The tolerance that allowed Sunis and Shiites to live in the same neighborhoods couldn't hold together.
Here we are 6 years later and congress just voted the war appropriation bill last week. We're still paying billions and billions
for our mistake in believing in tolerance.
What's wrong with TOLERANCE? It never goes far enough.
The real difference
comes in intentionally caring for the bush; that's the difference between tolerance and a "ministry of reconciliation."
I
think we are called not to just come roost in this shrub's branches but to join with the sower in caring for it and seeing
to its spreading.
We are called to a ministry of reconciliation in a world based on conflict.
The shooting at the
Holocaust Museum is a symptom of the way of the Kingdom of the world. Pundits have made a great deal about the irony of a
shooting at a memorial to tolerance. Maybe that's just the point. Tolerance isn't good enough.
Until we grasp the Gospel's
ridiculous claim that we truly need to be reconciled and not just tolerate each other.
Reconciliation means we work hard
enough to become one, so that we are not biding our time until one or the other of us gains an advantage and can force the
other one “out”... to do what the Kingdom of the world and Satan do... to “cast out”.
Reconciliation
means that we are only biding our time until the peace we have found here on earth, is made perfect in the Kingdom of Heaven
where we can enjoy it forever.
The Kingdom of the world looks on those who accept the Gospel's call to reconciliation as
weeds, Like all weeds, the world deems it best that they be uprooted, and destroyed. If you check back in Mark's Gospel, this
is exactly what people were trying to do to Jesus when he started telling this series of parables.
sermon for May 3
" I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd."
On this Good
Shepherd Sunday, I'd like to consider the implications of this famous line in Jesus "Good Shepherd" passage from John chapter
10.
Again, I am going to put this in the context of the 500 year cycle theory. (NB: see previous sermons for explanation
and background)
Again if we look at the history of the faith as it has come down to us starting 3,000 years ago,
we see an amazing phenomenon that shows how indeed, this passage has been fulfilled and why we should expect it to be fulfilled
again...
1000 BC, the rise of the Kingdom (NB: see previous sermons for explanation and background)
What
was the effect of this, all the world flocked to Solomon's court to hear his wisdom and see his wealth and power and give
glory to His God.
"Then she said to the king: "It was a true report which I heard in my own land about your words
and your wisdom. However I did not believe the words until I came and saw with my own eyes; and indeed the half was not told
me. Your wisdom and prosperity exceed the fame of which I heard. Happy are your men and happy are these your servants, who
stand continually before you and hear your wisdom! Blessed be the Lord your God, who delighted in you, setting you on the
throne of Israel! Because the Lord has loved Israel forever, therefore He made you king, to do justice and righteousness."
The
Gentile nations praise the Lord God of Israel.
500 BC, the destruction of the Kingdom. (NB: see previous sermons
for explanation and background)
Now it would seem that this would be an impossible situation for the God to be praised
and glorified.
If however, you read Morning Prayer daily, as some of us do, you've been reading the story of Daniel
this week.
Yesterday we came to the climax of the story.
Though enslaved, their nation destroyed, their
temple in ruins, yet the Hebrew people rose to the top ranks of power including Nehemiah cupbearer to the emporer and even
more famously, Daniel. Yesterday was the story of Daniel in the lions' den which ends with these words.
"Then King
Darius wrote to all peoples and nations of every language throughout the whole world: "May you have abundant prosperity!
I make a decree, that in all my royal dominion people should tremble and fear before the God of Daniel: For he is the living
God, enduring forever. His kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end. He delivers and rescues, he works
signs and wonders in heaven and on earth; for he has saved Daniel from the power of the lions." So this Daniel prospered during
the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian."
Even in total destruction, the God of Israel made His Name
known and honored.
Forward 500 years to the next and the greatest of all the transitional times, the age of Christ.
With
the coming of Christ there is a significant change in God's plan. No longer is it enough to gain the attention and respect
of the Gentiles, now God seeks to win them to Himself.
The Great Transformation begins with Jesus himself, " I have
other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one
flock, one shepherd."
Although his own ministry among Gentiles is limited to a few encounters, it is when the Gentiles
(the Greeks) come seeking him saying "Sir, we would see Jesus"... that Jesus pronounces, "Now is the hour", this is what he
came into the world to do. This is the beginning of the great transformation. Now the Gentiles will hear and believe.
Of
course, this is exactly what happens starting at Jerusalem at Pentecost. The world gathers swelling the city to 10 to 20 times
its normal size, the Holy Spirit falls on the disciples and they preach in every language imaginable. The conversions start
that very day.
Soon, the church in Antioch is sending out missionaries, namely Paul and his companions all around
the Roman world and bringing many other sheep into the fold.
An important note here. This is something P. Tickle
(NB: see previous sermons for explanation and background) points out. The church in Jerusalem dealt with a lot of its own
inner conflict. Were they Jews or Christians or Christian Jews or what? This seems to have tied them up in knots. Meanwhile,
the church in Antioch, which is strongly Gentile oriented seems to have broken through those barriers and it is here that
the name "Christian" is first applied. The Jerusalem Church will disappear when the Romans raze the city in the early 2nd
century, but Antioch's mission work has already established Christianity around the empire by that time.
Fast forward
500 more years and the Roman empire collapses. There is a strong parallel here to what happened to the Jews 500 years earlier
in 500 BC. How can God work through such chaos and calamity?
How indeed. If you think what he did with Daniel and
Nehemiah was impressive consider that as the Germanic tribes swept across Italy and ravaged once proud Rome, the effect was
that the Christians converted those barbarians at the gates. The church, unable to reach or convert the Teutonic peoples while
Rome was imperial, successfully planted the faith of Jesus and of the God of Isreal in a people considered unreachable before
calamity struck.
Forward 500 more years to the great Schism. (NB: see previous sermons for explanation and background)
Here,
because of the sad division between Eastern and WEstern Christianity, we in the west often miss the incredible work done to
convert Russia to Christianity in 1000 AD. Does that have significance? I would suggest one of the prime reasons communism
couldn't finally succeed in Russia and collapsed, is that the Christian roots laid there 900 years earlier were constantly
growing and breaking through the concrete poured by the oppressive regimes in Moscow.
Forward another 500 years
to the Great Reformation. (NB: see previous sermons for explanation and background)
Now Catholic and Protestant split
and literally "duke it out", with real dukes and their real armies fighting wars names for their longevity in years. Through
chaos and bloodshed, none of which recommends the faith of Christ,
Still, God's purpose was not deterred. Though
humans claimed Christ and acted like the devil, yet God found a few with willing hearts to take the message to the New World
and these two continents in the Western Hemisphere are the Christian to this day.
Finally we come to this day and
age.
The headlines proclaim the rapid decline in faith and church practice. Here is the issue of Episcopal Life that
arrived in my mailbox a couple of days ago. The Pew report on religion in America came out this week touting the rapid decline
in church participation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Been there, see that, know how it comes out... don't we.
Every
500 years, it seems like everything comes apart at the seams and we wonder if Christianity will survive.
Well, I
don't worry about it. First because of what Jesus said today in the Gospel...
and second because history teaches
me that it is precisely in times like these that the message of the Gospel seems to break out in new forms and leap over barriers
that we consider insurmountable.
After all, there's a billion Chinese who we think we can't reach, a billion mostly
Hindu Indians we can't reach, and another billion streched from the great Steppes to Saharan Africa firmly locked into the
Moslem faith and forbidding even the slightest missionary efforts by Christians.
That's half the world's population.
Two
things I believe might be happening even now.
One, we are living in the Jerusalem church. THe church as we know it
is wrapped in its own inner identity crisis, struggling to figure out which way to go. Yet among us, live Christians who are
emerging into another way of being Christian, something akin to the way the church in Antioch just broke out of all the old
categories and went off and changed the world. The signs of that new emergent church are abundant, exciting and extremely
hopeful. It doesn't mean we don't have a real mission and ministry any more than one would say the church in Jerusalem lacked
mission and ministry. They just had different roles to play in God's great plan of salvation.
Two, As I look at the
map of the world and see half the globe "out of reach", indeed, half the people in our own community often feel "out of reach"
because they've been so turned off by organized religion, that I believe with all my heart, that God is stirring up a great
new work of reaching "the other sheep" of this day.
One can only imagine what barriers God is about to break down
in order to lift up millions upon millions of new voices to praise Him through the Name of his only Son, Jesus.
Sermon for Sunday, April 26, III Easter
We had a really good clergy conference
this past week.
Bishop Parsley brought us two videos
One was of an amazing talk given to the Anglican bishops at the
Lambeth conference last summer by the chief rabbi, Johnathan Sacks.
It is available on line and I've listed the link in
this week's cuttings.
The other video was by another speaker at Lambeth
Instead of his Lambeth speech, what we saw was
the interview he gave at the national cathedral on the same subject.
His name is Brian McLaren.
He is widely considered
as one of the best thinkers on what I have been preaching about three out of the last four Sundays... the Great Emergence.
A
long range view of the times in which we are living and the massive changes that are taking place everywhere we look.
It
is a way of looking at what is happening to all of us and what it all might mean about where we are going, by the grace of
God.
I've been focusing in on the religious implications of that change, but the religious changes are only a part of a
much larger set of changes affecting all of life.
In those three previous sermons, I have talked about how every 500 years
everything gets turned inside out, thoroughly shaken and a new order emerges.
I've noted that we have drawn the short straw,
we get to be that generation who goes through the heart of the transition.
Lucky us!
This morning I want to talk about
another of those great questions that arise in each of these transitional periods that seem to come, like clockwork, every
500 years.
The question this morning is “What is Scripture?”
Go back 3000 years, as we've done with the
other questions I've considered in this sermon series.
What was happening to Scripture 3000 years ago?
Well, it consisted
of the Torah, what we would call the first five books of the Bible as we know it today.
In those days it was mostly oral
tradition.
It isn't until 1000 BC, in the reign of King David that you have a stable central government and religious order
capable of writing this stuff down.
What we consider the “written text” is generally believed to have emerged
at this point in history.
It was a big change from oral to written tradition.
But, they didn't just write down those
five books, commonly referred to by Jesus and other Jews as “Moses” (shorthand for the books of Moses), but also
they started to write down the history of the kingdom itself.
Books like Judges, Ruth, I and II Samuel and I and II Kings
emerged.
The TV show Kings has the King giving instructions to an always nearby scribe to “strike that from the record”
or “make sure to record that”... and that is probably pretty much the way it happened.
Go forward 500 years,
the kingdom destroyed, the scrolls burned and Jews have to survive their exile without the written word.
I said in an
earlier sermon that the synagogue and oral tradition carried them through that.
But also at this time something new emerged.
Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were writing scrolls and a whole new section of our modern Bible was emerging...
the prophetic writings.
Many of them were written to the exiles to give them encouragement.
Go forward 500 years to
the Great Transformation. The age of Jesus.
Coming out of the exile Judaism emerged with three different strands of Holy
Writ.
In the 1st century the council of rabbis decided that only one should survive and they tried to eliminate the other
two.
Yup, that's right.
They were censuring the Bible text.
And what survived, is pretty much the version you
and I know at the Old Testament in our modern Bible.
At the same time, everything you and I know as the New Testament was
being written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter and others.
Are you seeing a pattern in this yet?
Go forward
500 years, the end of the Roman Empire.
One of the last things to happen before Rome fell was the great church councils
that codified and selected the writings that would be considered Christian Holy Scripture.
That meant doing what the Rabbis
had done.
Picking and choosing; some made it (like Revelation, by the skin of its teeth and some didn't and were
suppressed.)
Go forward 500 years to the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity.
In the West, our own
tradition, the Bible is essentially locked in the monasteries.
Good thing, they preserved it, but in so doing it was often
far from the people.
The people were fed a diet of religious myths and mystery stories and saints lives to sustain them.
They seldom heard the Bible itself and none of them could read it.
Go forward 500 years to the Great Reformation.
Luther
and the other reformers rebel and demand that the people have access to the Bible.
Of course, this is only possible thanks
to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press 50 years earlier.
But once the press is invented the Bible emerges as a
book for the people.
Literacy goes from near zero to a significant percentage in two generations. Why?
Because people
want to read the Bible and want to read what others are saying about it.
In the process, the reformers do a most interesting
thing.
They reopen the question of what books belong in the Bible and they throw out, you heard me right, they throw out
a whole bunch of Old Testament books.
That's why the Catholic Bible and your familiar King James Bible differ, the Catholics
kept all those books.
Being Anglicans, we kept those books, but put them in the appendix we call the apocrypha which (I'll
bet a dollar to a donut) most of you don't have in your Bible at home.
Come forward 500 years to the modern age.
All
the same questions are shaking things up again.
For 300 years the KJV was THE Bible.
I had a parishioner refer to it
as the Saint James Bible.
Sorry, but if you know anything about King James the First for whom it is named you know he
was NO saint.
There was a mild revision around 1900 and another after WW II called the RSV.
Then the floodgates opened.
Today if you go into a Bible book store you can get dizzy just looking at all the different translations.
A lot of
that has to do with the gold mine of discovery about ancient languages and older texts that have emerged in the last half
century.
Not only that, but we've found texts that we thought were lost forever.
Most people know about the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
Part of what they record is the strand of the Old Testament that the Rabbis wanted to suppress.
Now we have
access to pieces of that.
We've also discovered at least two lost Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas.
Both
of these have stirred considerable attention and several TV specials have been made about them.
All of a sudden the same
questions that have arisen every 500 years are back on the table.
What books belong in the Bible?
Except for the Great
Schism in 1000 AD, every age of transformation has come up with changes to that list.
I don't know if a consensus will
arise in this age of transformation that will change the list of what we know at the Books of the Bible, but consider...
1.The
list has changed in every 500 year transition before this except for the one in 1000 AD.
At a minimum, would it be a bad
thing if we and the Roman Catholics at least agreed about those books we call the apocrypha? That alone would constitute a
change in the list. After all, why do we assume that Luther and Calvin and the others had the right idea to throw out books
like Maccabees and Esther?
Even more challenging is what do we do with modern discoveries of what we thought were lost
books of the Bible? And what do we do with the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries and the new light they shed on books in both the
old and new testaments?
All I can assure you is that this isn't your grandmother's KJV anymore.
Of course, this is going
to scare the daylights out of a lot of us who think of Scripture as sacrosanct.
People who clutch their KJV so hard you
can almost hear it say “ouch” are not going to take kindly to this kind of change.
Even those of us who've
gotten used to more modern translations and even like them, may be appalled to think that things might be added to taken away
from the text itself.
I guess that would be a lot scarier except for the fact that the Bible has been changing on a regular
basis every 500 years for the last 3000 years.
How this will all play out, only God knows.
Let me return to Brian Mclarens
talk at the National Cathedral with his insight about Scripture.
He really didn't talk about changing the text.
He
talked about changing how we read it.
In the end, that will be far more important, because no matter what is printed on
the page, what matters is how we read what is there.
He focused on the Lord's Prayer.
He said the great change in this
period of transformation will be around that phrase...
Thy Kingdom Come...
He said, we don't pray thy kingdom come so
we can be up there in that kingdom where thy will gets done unlike down here where everything goes wrong...
He said the
prayer says, (as you well know), thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
Too long we have been reading scripture
to be about the there and then, getting away from the confusion and melee of life on earth waiting for God to evacuate us
to heaven...
Instead, McLaren says the change we are experiencing now will be about Christians changing their point of
view to seeing the main thrust of our faith to work with God to bring his Kingdom, Power and Glory to the earth.
The sorting
out of texts may take decades even centuries for this time of transition to resolve.
But to change our focus to praying
for God's Kingdom to come and to live our lives as agents of that Kingdom, that can start today! In each one of us.
Sermon for Sunday, April 19, II Easter
We're going to be reading the
first letter of John all the way through Easter season this year.
This morning we heard the opening chapter read to us.
I
got up this morning and read the whole thing (its only 5 chapters) just to put myself in mind of what it is I want to say
in this sermon.
This letter is really a marvelous work.
It traces for us how the disciples moved from the awe and fear
of encountering a man they knew to be dead, who as our Gospel tells us was now standing before them eating a piece of fish...
to
the greatest affirmation our Christian faith about the nature of God.
In the letter of John you can trace the flow of that
development...
that's why I read the letter again this morning, just to feel the flow of this letter...
I owe a great
deal of this sermon to James Alison, in his book Raising Abel.
Later in the letter, John refers to the Cain and
Abel story, and that might help explain the title of the book and its connection to the letter of John.
The first thing
the disciples had to realize as they confronted, or were confronted by the risen Lord was that...
"the resurrection begins
to dawn on them that God is totally about life.
Death is our thing, something that we are enthralled to.”[sic]
We
talk about being “pro life” but just look at how we politicize what should be a central theological affirmation.
Among
us, abortion opponents and death penalty opponents are often on opposite sides of the political spectrum, each claiming to
be “pro life” and each claiming to be the real representative of what God is all about.
Our deep and painful
political divisions tell me that we don't really grasp the fullness of what it means to say “God is totally about life.”
If
we could really grasp that, as did the disciples did...
Then Alison says the second step the disciples took, as reflected
in John's letter, is they grasped that
if God is not about death, then God is not about violence either.
Our experience
of God is being pruned of the violence.”
Yet, we still live in a world of blood lust.
In Generous Orthodoxy,
this week, Fleming Rutledge was ruing her own ambivalence about death of the pirates last Sunday... that was my own reaction
too.
That is our human nature.
We are for peace, but when you can take out a “pirate” with violence our
peaceful self melts before our blood lust.
God is not about violence, but...
Then what do we do with the death of Jesus.
John's
letter talks of Jesus' sacrifice.
Does that not reflect a God of “death and violence”?
It has often been
interpreted that way, especially in the middle ages.
But a more careful reading of the letter suggests a very different
interpretation.
If you remove death and violence from God's character, then in what sense is Jesus made a sacrifice.
The
sacrifice of Jesus is not to God for God neither desires death nor violence.
The Sacrifice of Jesus is to us.
In the
incarnation, God sends his only begotten into our hands, literally.
To be held, bathed, nursed, changed, ... he is totally
at our mercy.
Jesus is sacrificed to us by coming to us in the incarnation.
Even as a full grown adult, he is still
in our hands and at our mercy.
But we showed him no mercy...
We are the ones who demanded the sacrifice,
better
that one man die, ...
crucify him, ...”
we fashioned the cross ...
we nailed him to it.
It was our blood
lust, not God's that was satisfied on Good Friday.
Jesus was sacrificed to us.
Jesus death was not because of God
nor his character for
God neither desires death, nor sacrifice.
To end that, to bring about greatest revelation, he
is willing to allow the sacrifice of his son to US!
That opens the door for the third and greatest insight, the true marvel
revealed in this epistle of John.
God is love.
It will be a couple of weeks before we get to this passage, but it is
the climax of the epistle...
...for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, that God sent his only
begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)
Alison writes...
Here we have the element of the
discovery of the absolutely vivacious and effervescent nature of God leading to the realization that behind the death of Jesus
there was no violent God, but a loving God who was planning a way to get us out of our violent and sinful life. Not a human
sacrifice to God, but God's sacrifice to humans. (Raising Abel, pp. 44-46)"
So these first disciples moved from awe and
fear on that first Easter night to reinterpreting the entire nature of God as God is Love.
So in this Easter season we
are going to be following John's letter, growing along with the disciples in their grasping this amazing revelation that can
only come to us through the risen presence of Jesus in our midst.
So as homework this week, I encourage you to do what
I did this morning.
Take out your Bible, sit down and read the first letter of John. It won't take you 10 minutes to do.
But let the words flow over and through you.
Enter into the mystery as John traces how he and Peter and the James and the
others grew from that first encounter on Easter night to proclaiming forever after “God is Love!”
Easter Sermon
Those
of you who've been here the last couple of Sundays know I've been preaching about the changing of the age.
So let me briefly
summarize, since if you're really interested in what I said the last two weeks, you can always read my old sermons on the
church website.
Our society, its culture, seems to be on a cycle that is as regular as the cycle that brings us Spring
about this time every year.
The only difference is that instead of an annual cycle, in this case, we are talking about
a 500 year cycle.
Every 500 years everything gets turned on its head.
One generation in 25, as I said last week, draws
the short straw and gets the thrill of going through tumultuous, turbulent times like these.
(sorry, couldn't forego that
alliteration)
The Bible records the first three of these transformational eras.
One occurred at the rise of the Kingdom,
notably the glory years of King David.
The second came 500 years later with the destruction of the Kingdom and the Hebrew
slavery in Babylon.
The third and greatest transition is the subject of the entire New Testament --
the amazing
transformation as one age passed to another in the days of Jesus and his followers.
Last week, I tied all this to a central
question that always comes to the fore is such times of transition...
Who is in charge?
If you look for who had the
power going into the transition and who had it at the end of the transition, you can study the shape of what happened during
transition itself.
Last week, I looked at how the Palm Sunday story is filled with questions about who is in authority
and how it all changed because of Jesus.
This week, being Easter, I am going to look at another question that arises in
these transformational periods.
That question is “What does is mean to be human?”
Consider what Jesus did
to change the way we answer the question “What does it mean to be human?”
By his death and resurrection, he
completely changed our understanding of life and death, of our “life span”.
We aren't here for three score
and ten and then gone.
The whole meaning of being human here and now is now to be interpreted from the perspective our
future.
In light of that future, we define & determine how we shall live in the present.
As Martin Luther put it
so beautifully,
let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also, ... they body they may kill, God's truth abideth still,
His Kingdom is forever.”
Such faith is rooted in the future giving meaning to life in the present.
But let's return
to our central question.
What does it mean to be human?
Think you really know how to answer that question?
If you're
like me you probably think so.
Humans have reason,
humans have souls,
humans can imagine their own deaths,
humans
are the intelligent / rational animal,
humans use tools...
Most of those definitions, if you go back and look, came
to us from previous eras in which our culture went through such a transition and ended up redefining and refining the meaning
of “being human.”
But in this current transformation, the more we've tried to differentiate ourselves from
other life on this planet, the less difference we've found.
For example, the DNA match between us and the great apes is
in the 99% range.
We've found animals who can communicate with American sign language and, it appears, to reason
with it.
We found animals who are very able tool makers and users.
Most of what we've claimed as unique we're finding
isn't unique at all.
The message of Easter over the past centuries has been narrowed down to a message about your soul,
my soul going to heaven when we die.
That's really a very narrow reading of the Gospel.
Last week, I warned about guessing
where this transition is taking us all. I said,
Of course, God being in charge, we will all have to wait and see how His
Plan plays out. Whether we've guessed rightly or wrongly, it is more important that we have had our eyes open looking for
what He is doing in this age in which we live.”
I haven't changed my mind about that since last week and I think
it's important to repeat it before I say what comes next...
This is only a humble guess...
But it seems to me, the more
our science and technology knock down the distinctiveness of being human, the more we find ourselves as “a part of”
as opposed to being “apart from” the rest of the creation,
that we may be finally ready to read and hear the
fullness of the Gospel in a way that has been silenced for centuries and centuries. (except for St. Francis who seems to have
really grasped this.)
I did a Bible search yesterday on just the word “New”. It occurs 50 times in the NEW
Testament.
Second Peter 3 says
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth,
the home of righteousness.”
Revelation 21 says
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” [coming down out
of heaven]
Paul in the 8th chapter of his letter to the Romans talks of how the whole creation is kept in bondage until
the day our our “human” redemption.
My humble guess is that the transformation of this age is going to bring
us out from a very narrow definition of humanity that sees the resurrection as being just about our individual “souls”,
and explode that open, so that we see in the Resurrection the beginning of redemption for the entire creation of which we
are very much a part, not apart from, but very much a part of.
The part of creation that we are, the part we play, is to
be the channel through which God brings about redemption for everything he has made.
So instead of seeing the failure to
define ourselves as distinct, as apart from the rest of creation, I think that's a good thing.
Instead, I see great promise
in that we are not apart from, but indeed at a part of creation... a very holy part, a part through whom salvation comes to
all God has made.
You know I think that's a pretty “high” definition of humanity.
If this transition brings
us out with such a high vision of our humanity, then all this tumultuous turbulence through which we are living will be well
worth it.
Palm Sunday and Easter Sermons 2009
Easter Sermon
Those of you who've been here the last couple of Sundays
know I've been preaching about the changing of the age.
So let me briefly summarize, since if you're really interested
in what I said the last two weeks, you can always read my old sermons on the church website.
Our society, its culture,
seems to be on a cycle that is as regular as the cycle that brings us Spring about this time every year.
The only difference
is that instead of an annual cycle, in this case, we are talking about a 500 year cycle.
Every 500 years everything gets
turned on its head.
One generation in 25, as I said last week, draws the short straw and gets the thrill of going through
tumultuous, turbulent times like these.
(sorry, couldn't forego that alliteration)
The Bible records the first three
of these transformational eras.
One occurred at the rise of the Kingdom, notably the glory years of King David.
The
second came 500 years later with the destruction of the Kingdom and the Hebrew slavery in Babylon.
The third and greatest
transition is the subject of the entire New Testament --
the amazing transformation as one age passed to another
in the days of Jesus and his followers.
Last week, I tied all this to a central question that always comes to the fore
is such times of transition...
Who is in charge?
If you look for who had the power going into the transition and who
had it at the end of the transition, you can study the shape of what happened during transition itself.
Last week, I looked
at how the Palm Sunday story is filled with questions about who is in authority and how it all changed because of Jesus.
This
week, being Easter, I am going to look at another question that arises in these transformational periods.
That question
is “What does is mean to be human?”
Consider what Jesus did to change the way we answer the question “What
does it mean to be human?”
By his death and resurrection, he completely changed our understanding of life and death,
of our “life span”.
We aren't here for three score and ten and then gone.
The whole meaning of being human
here and now is now to be interpreted from the perspective our future.
In light of that future, we define & determine
how we shall live in the present.
As Martin Luther put it so beautifully,
glet goods and kindred go, this mortal
life also, ... they body they may kill, God's truth abideth still, His Kingdom is forever.”
Such faith is rooted
in the future giving meaning to life in the present.
But let's return to our central question.
What does it mean to
be human?
Think you really know how to answer that question?
If you're like me you probably think so.
Humans have
reason,
humans have souls,
humans can imagine their own deaths,
humans are the intelligent / rational animal,
humans use tools...
Most of those definitions, if you go back and look, came to us from previous eras in which our
culture went through such a transition and ended up redefining and refining the meaning of “being human.”
But
in this current transformation, the more we've tried to differentiate ourselves from other life on this planet, the less difference
we've found.
For example, the DNA match between us and the great apes is in the 99% range.
We've found animals who can
communicate with American sign language and, it appears, to reason with it.
We found animals who are very able tool
makers and users.
Most of what we've claimed as unique we're finding isn't unique at all.
The message of Easter over
the past centuries has been narrowed down to a message about your soul, my soul going to heaven when we die.
That's really
a very narrow reading of the Gospel.
Last week, I warned about guessing where this transition is taking us all. I said,
gOf
course, God being in charge, we will all have to wait and see how His Plan plays out. Whether we've guessed rightly or wrongly,
it is more important that we have had our eyes open looking for what He is doing in this age in which we live.”
I
haven't changed my mind about that since last week and I think it's important to repeat it before I say what comes next...
This
is only a humble guess...
But it seems to me, the more our science and technology knock down the distinctiveness of being
human, the more we find ourselves as “a part of” as opposed to being “apart from” the rest of the
creation,
that we may be finally ready to read and hear the fullness of the Gospel in a way that has been silenced for
centuries and centuries. (except for St. Francis who seems to have really grasped this.)
I did a Bible search yesterday
on just the word “New”. It occurs 50 times in the NEW Testament.
Second Peter 3 says
gBut in keeping
with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.”
Revelation 21
says
gThen I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” [coming down out of heaven]
Paul in the 8th chapter of
his letter to the Romans talks of how the whole creation is kept in bondage until the day our our “human” redemption.
My
humble guess is that the transformation of this age is going to bring us out from a very narrow definition of humanity that
sees the resurrection as being just about our individual “souls”, and explode that open, so that we see in the
Resurrection the beginning of redemption for the entire creation of which we are very much a part, not apart from, but very
much a part of.
The part of creation that we are, the part we play, is to be the channel through which God brings about
redemption for everything he has made.
So instead of seeing the failure to define ourselves as distinct, as apart from
the rest of creation, I think that's a good thing.
Instead, I see great promise in that we are not apart from, but indeed
at a part of creation... a very holy part, a part through whom salvation comes to all God has made.
You know I think that's
a pretty “high” definition of humanity.
If this transition brings us out with such a high vision of our humanity,
then all this tumultuous turbulence through which we are living will be well worth it.
Palm Sunday Sermon
Last Sunday, I preached about the great fruit basket
turnover that seems to occur every 500 years, going all the way back to the reign of King David in 1000 BC.
I received
a number of comments and questions following that sermon. I also had some people ask me for more information.
The ideas
for last week's sermon and this week's were spurred by the talks that Phyllis Tickle gave at our Diocesan Leadership Training
event a week ago.
Last week, I gave you an outline of the concept of this 500 year cycle of change and some of the ideas
of what that means for us as the church.
Today, I want to talk another thing Phyllis said... She was saying that in everyone
of these great transition times in history, there is a central question...
That question is “Who is in charge”,
the question of authority.
For example, in 1000 BC, we see the rise of the monarchy. For the first time, a king and not
a prophet or a judge is the one who guides the people of God.
This by the way, is at the heart of the story that NBC is
telling tonight in its series “Kings” based on King Saul and King David.
500 years later, the kingdom is in
ruins, the king is gone, the temple destroyed and its priests are slaves.
Now authority moves to the synagogue, an amazing
invention of the Jewish people to survive without political or religious authority. The community faith, gathered in small
groups to tell and retell the ancient stories maintains itself. The authority is in the self-organizing community around the
Word of God as retold by that community.
Skip forward 500 years and you come to the time of Jesus...
Today's readings
which record the events of that fateful week 2000 years ago, are rife with authority questions.
The authority, of course,
is Rome. Rome rules the world.
And here comes Jesus riding on a donkey in Jerusalem, the traditional way in which an ancient
king would have entered the city.
The people pick up palms to welcome him, reminiscent of the way they welcomed Judas
Macabbeus after he defeated the Greeks and reclaimed the city of Jerusalem for the Jews.
Anyone with half a brain
would have caught the meaning and recognized the seditious implications of Jesus' Palm Sunday entry.
The “authorities”,
those of the Jewish temple, told Jesus to break it up and stop the crowd from shouting.
Jesus clearly isn't subject to
their authority. He blows them off with a comment about how even the rocks would shout if the crowds did not. Wow, I bet that
went over like a lead balloon when the minions reported back to their masters, the authorities in the temple.
Jesus is
hauled before those authorities four days later. They puff up their chests and insist he recognize their authority and he
blows them off.
So they send him to Pilate, who likewise does his peacock dance about all his authority as governor and
how much authority he has, and Jesus says, “You have no authority over me except it were given you from above.”
He might have as well slapped Pilate's face.
So Pilate sends him over to Herod. Herod struts and fumes trying to get a
rise out of Jesus. Herod must have really been terrified of Jesus because his own authority was so tenuous and totally dependent
on being a Roman puppet ruler. And here this uneducated peasant won't even answer his questions. How dare he impugn his authority.
So
back to Pilate he goes and all are agreed, all those in authority, that this man who respects none of their authority must
die.
To ridicule him, they place a plaque over his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. A mockery of authority.
But
the irony backfired.
Pilate was recalled to Rome in disgrace,
Herod's life ended badly as Acts tells us.
The temple
officials probably mostly perished when the Romans destroyed the temple in 66 AD.
But by that time, tens of thousands were
calling Jesus, King Jesus. They recognized only his authority over them. So adamant were they about this, they willing went
to their deaths in purge after purge for 300 years as first one authority and then another insisted that cowtow, disown the
Kingship of Jesus and submit to the recognized authority of this or that emporer.
In the story today we see the pattern
for the first Christian centuries, centuries in which the authority question was well resolved in the one phrase, “Jesus
is Lord!”
500 years later, the Roman empire is in tatters and the only authority in Rome is the Pope. Popes Leo the
Great and Gregory the Great are remembered as great, because they really were the authority that preserved the church when
all else was collapsing. In the process, authority, decision making moved to the papacy.
500 years later, the authority
of the Church hit an iceberg when the Pope in Roman and the head of the Orthodox Christian church in Constantinople formally
excommunicated each other. Christianity became a divided religion.
Several results, including one of the ignominious chapters
in church history, the Crusades.
Second, most of us in the western world know next to nothing about the other “half”
of Christianity.
For example, Beth got me a book this week on Russian Orthodox monks and the problem of infinity in Mathematics.
IT has been fascinating to read how the religion of these monks became the key to unraveling one of the great mathematical
puzzles of the last century.
That's just not part of the story we know anything about thanks to the authority battles of
1000 years ago.
The next 500 year cycle brings us to the Reformation. This was obviously about authority. It was the break
down of the papal authority that gave rise to the Protestant movement.
It was Luther who set the framework for the next
500 years of authority with his words Sola Scriptura, Scpritura Sola. That is, Only Scripture and Scripture alone.
Phyllis
pointed out the consequences of that changes.
There are over 23,000 separate protestant denominations recognized by the
IRS in this country. World wide, there are something around 39,000 separate protestant bodies.
When authority moved to
the “Book”, it opened all the doors of splitting, and splitting again. Everyman became his own priest.
The
other consequence is that anything that conflicts with Scripture must be suppressed. Well, that hit a rock almost immediately
with Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. More recently we in America spend endless hours debating evolution and creationism. All
of which is a consequence of the way in which the authority question was answered in 500 years ago.
As Phyllis noted, we've
run that pony about as far as it will go. The whole thing is coming apart now. Just in time for the next battle over authority,
the one being sorted through right now, right here in our life times, as culture undergoes one these great transformations.
So
what comes next?
Who or what is going to be the next authority?
Remember last week I said that we Anglicans are well
positioned for the coming change in the ages?
Here's one reason for believing that.
We never bought Luther's idea of
Sola Scriptura, Scriptura, sola. Instead we took Scripture and said it must be transmitted by tradition and then interpreted
with reasonable reflection and insight.
One reason we were the only reformation age church not to split during the civil
war in this country was that our tradition and our reason held together though we disagreed deeply over what the scripture
taught about slavery.
That ability to stave off the forces of division and our own civil war are being sorely tested now
as the one age passes to another.
What are we fighting about in the Anglican communion? We are fighting over authority.
Does
the Archbishop of Canterbury set the rules for who is an Anglican and who is not. That's how we've done it until now. But
all that's very much in the headlines of the religious news in our denomination as we struggle over that question this very
day.
Good thing the age is passing, because even our Anglican equanimity is being pushed to the breaking point.
Its
time for something new to arise.
Phyllis offered a few guesses about what she thought might be just down the road for us
as the church.
She thinks, and I very much agree, that it will be something like our traditional three legged stool.
Scripture
is still going to be there. It is our touchstone.
To that she added (self organizing) community. As I thought about her
ideas, it seemed to me that what that would resemble would be the synagogue model that allowed the Jews to survive the destruction
and ensuing enslavement. We know that model is very powerful and certainly has allowed the Hebrews to survive exile in a strange
land without political authority or priests in a temple.
From FDD yesterday...
gDuring China's Cultural Revolution,
Christianity was banned. Worship was forbidden. Believers became exiles in their own land.
We are exiles, too. But, says
a Chinese friend, our exile is more subtle and seductive. Sunday is just another day. Many self-identify as spiritual but
not religious. .. In this now foreign land, following Christ requires intentionality- for our culture reinforces religion
no more. “
In the news, Catholic church objects to ball game to be played on Good Friday afternoon...for our culture
reinforces religion no more. “
The Masters will be played not only on Good Friday, but also Maundy Thursday and Easter!
... for our culture reinforces religion no more.
Welcome the exile. We are going to find passages in Jeremiah, Isaiah
and Ezekiel sound very familiar as we pass into this new age.
The coming church will be like the synagogue a self organizing
community, not one based on bishops and dioceses and other artificial constructs. Most of what we're fighting about right
now is going the way of the Do-Do bird.
Phyllis also suggested that there will be one or two more elements that will be
in the emerging mix. These are still emerging and quite conjectural at present.
Hint, Consider the fact that 100
years ago 0% of the world's Christians would have been identified as Pentecostal, Neopentecostal, charismatic, holy roller,
what ever you want to call it. Today the world wide number is 25%.
There is a Holy Spirit movement sweeping the Christian
world and the world in general. It is pretty likely that somehow the new synthesis about authority is going to somehow include
the direct and powerful leadership of the Holy Spirit in a way not seen since the first century.
Of course, God being in
charge, we will all have to wait and see how His Plan plays out. Whether we've guessed rightly or wrongly, it is more important
that we have had our eyes open looking for what He is doing in this age in which we live. Ready to respond to it.
Or as
FDD put it yesterday...
gAdvocating a creative return to core practices, Diana Butler Bass wonderfully reminds
us that we are not on the Titanic. Rather, we are on the Mayflower, heading to a new land-not to conquer, but to adapt and,
thereby, to thrive.”
(Phyllis specifically cited DBB as a important writer on this subject and she is someone I've
come to really respect from my reading of her books and articles.)
So we are pilgrims... what a great self image as we
enter this new age. Like our forebearers coming to this land, we are pilgrims, like those going up to Jerusalem at the festival,
we are pilgrims...
Our pilgrimmage's goal will be the same as it was at the beginning, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, it
is going to be people struggling to affirm the Kingship of Jesus in their, in our lives in this world.
Some affirm it
by waving palms, some by shouting hosanna, some by crossing themselves, some by coming to this altar rail and kneeling to
receive the body broken for you, and all of them, in all these and so many other ways crying out “Come King Jesus and
reign.”
Sermon for Feb. 22
Today we read the story of the transfiguration.
If
you're an "old Episcopa-lian" like me you probably remember when this was quinquegesima and the story of the transfiguration
wasn't read now, but on Aug. 6th .
All that's changed within the last few decades.
We as a church, along
with Roman Catholics, Lutherans and others have moved the story of the transfiguration from the middle of summer (literally
the middle of summer) to here at the end of the church season of Epiphany.
Its no light thing we do in making that
change.
August 6th is an odd date to read the transfiguration story.
It's a central Gospel story and
it got buried on what was usually a weekday and almost never read as a Sunday Gospel.
Personally, I liked it on Aug
6th because its right next to my birthday and so I had a kind of personal attachment to the story.
But unless
you and I have the same birth date, that probably doesn't work for you.
Second, it became the date that the first
Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
That conjures up other images that seem oddly inconsistent with this Gospel's
message.
But, that's not as odd as the real reason Aug. 6th was picked for the date of the transfiguration
on the church calendar.
It was chosen to commemorate a great military victory of the Christian armies over the Muslim
armies 800 years ago.
Now that's oddly out of sync with the Gospel message in a post 9/11 world.
In my
opinion, it sure makes a lot more sense to read this Gospel of the mountain top experience here at the end of Epiphany.
After
all, Epiphany literally means revealing and its root word in Greek has to do with letting light shine through.
The
story of the transfiguration surely is a story about light and revealing who Jesus is.
It is the perfect ending of
every Epiphany season.
Just as every Epiphany begins with the story of the three wise men seeking the light from
light, the end of Epiphany is three stunned men (Peter, James and John) overwhelmed by the light from light.
Second,
the way the Gospel narrative runs, the story of the Transfiguration is the hinge on which the whole Gospel narrative rotates
90 degrees.
Before this story, everything is about what we might call the "Gathering Christ."
That phrase was
the theme of our diocesan convention the last three days, ending yesterday.
The Gathering Christ draws people to
him, builds up huge throngs of followers.
His poll numbers rise and rise.
He does miracles and speaks words
of encouragement and hope.
Its easy to follow the gathering Christ, easy to love, follow, worship and adore Him.
(As did the Magi)
This Christ is the Christ of Carnival season, which is the secularization of Epiphany. Mardi Gras
is the secularization of the "fat" times in the Gospel
narrative when all was going well...
Just as Carnival
and Fat Tues. will give way to Ash Wed. and Lent this week,
so in the Gospel narrative, the good times with Jesus, the
gathering throngs, will give way as we enter Lent...
The story will turn dark, difficult and challenging to the point
of exhausting us.
Those following Jesus will begin to question him, doubt him, abandon him, deny him, and worse...
It starts almost immediately with Peter denouncing Jesus for talking about his death on a cross... "Lord, this must
never happen to you!"
To which Jesus replies, "Get behind me Satan".
From this point forward, the gathering
Christ becomes the challenging and difficult Christ.
It gets harder and harder to follow him.
People fall
off the bandwagon, they flee him in droves.
When he's preached the crowd down from 5000 to 12, he asks, those few
left,
"Well aren't you going to leave too?"
They will leave him, by the end, in Gethsemane, they will all
leave him.
The three who were stunned on this mountaintop of Transfiguration will leave him for a nap in Gethsemane...
As
I said, our diocesan convention was all about the gathering Christ.
But that leaves out the reality of the Gospel
which is the challenging Christ.
This is the road of Lent, the challenging road to those who claim they still want
to follow.
Lent is all about the part of the story that comes after the Transfiguration; we need this part of the
story.
We need Lent every year.
So this morning I want to challenge you with a vision for seeking a "good
Lent" for your spirit...
Let me use a simple analogy.
Most everyone at some time has done muscle training,
sit ups, push ups, pull ups, maybe a weight machine training...
The physiology is quite simple, you stretch and contract
a muscle multiple times using some form of weight or resistance until the muscle tires out, literally, the muscle fiber begins
to break down.
Then you give the muscle time to rest.
As it rebuilds, it rebuilds itself stronger and
stronger.
The more persistent you are in the training, the better muscle tone,strength and definition you achieve.
Lent
is spiritually the equivalent of a weight training program for the mind and soul.
It is a time to push against resistance,
repetitively, until we come to the point that the spirit begins to break down.
We come to a point where, like every
one of the disciples, even these three in the inner circle, we begin to waver and feel like we can't go one more step with
Jesus.
He has just pushed up too far this time.
At that failure point, we let up, enter in Easter joy and
give our souls time to recover and rebuild.
In the church's wisdom, the cycles of the church give us Advent and Lent
as times to do the heavy lifting, the pushing to the limit, to the
breaking point, and the seasons of Christmas and Easter
give us the times for the rebuilding of the faith core in our lives, building it back stronger and more resilient.
Its
a long process, never accomplished in one period of 40 days.
But repeated year and year, decade after decade, we
can find our spirit growing stronger.
The real challenge is to choose the spiritual disciplines and devotions that
will push your spiritual endurance.
In an ideal situation, the choice will be one that will exhaust you just about
Good Friday.
If you don't break down the spiritual muscle fiber by then, you're not using enough resistance.
If
you use too much resistance, like choosing to go on a mission trip to Dar-fur or Haiti this Lent, you'll probably get overwhelmed
on day 1 or 2 and similarly not get much if any benefit.
Finding the right fit of spiritual resistance is the trick
here
There is no "one size" fits all on this.
Everyone will be different.
Obviously, a serious
fasting discipline, reading of Scripture, regular meditation and prayer are all old standbys.
Do you read Morning
Prayer every day?
That one is simple and can even be done on line.
Just the 20 minutes to read the prayers
and the Scriptures for the day.
For many people that will be enough resistance.
Beyond that, I've found
that praying the Stations of the Cross has become a favorite Lenten habit.
Each year I search for new versions of
it that provoke me more deeply.
But if you're just beginning, I already have a file full of good ones I found in
years past.
For others it may be books, the ones I recommend this year are Three Cups of Tea and The Shack.
I
found over the last year they were the best at pushing back on my spirit.
Then there's our Lenten study which this
year has a lot of options for deeper spiritual challenge beyond the half hour (hour) we spend on it in our weekly sessions.
I'll
be introducing this year's study after the services on Ash Wednesday.
Speaking of which...
Ash Wednesday,
the Sundays in Lent, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, just being present, sounds easy enough.
But for some people
just showing up is going provide plenty of challenge.
Beyond all that our diocese offers a variety of other spiritual
resources. Studies, books, retreats... see the Apostle for some lists there.
Of course, our Lenten mission trip is
the kind of spiritual exercise typical of a Lenten decision to do something for others.
There are lots of ways one
can decide to spend Lent in Christian service.
Whatever you choose for yourself, remember that you want to seek something
that feels like you feet are trudging through mud, that you are having to work at to move forward.
The goal is to
experience what the disciples experienced in this part of the Gospel story, as they struggled to hang on to Jesus.
If
you can keep that concept in mind during Lent, I think you'll find it very helpful is finding the right devotions and disciplines
to stretch your soul and avoid the trivialization of this time with something like "I gave up candy this year." P--u---l---l--e--e--z--e!
Finally,
one of the resources I was going to highly recommend is the best selling Christian devotional book of all time... My Utmost
for His Highest.
Year in and year out, I have found it to be consistently the one that makes my feet feel like they
are trudging through wet cement.
So early this morning, I read today's daily devotion in there and it was wonderfully
apropos.
from My Utmost for His Highest: The Discipline Of Spiritual Tenacity
Be still, and know that I
am God." -- Psalm 46:10
Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall
off.
Tenacity is the supreme effort of a man refusing to believe that his hero is going to be conquered.
The
greatest fear a man has is not that he will be damned, but that Jesus Christ will be worsted, that the things He stood for
- love and justice and forgiveness and kindness among men - will not win out in the end; the things He stands for look like
will-o'-the-wisps.
Then comes the call to spiritual tenacity, not to hang on and do nothing, but to work deliberately
on the certainty that God is not going to be worsted....
Remain spiritually tenacious.”
A good Lenten
discipline builds tenacity because it challenges us with exactly the things that push us into struggling to follow Jesus despite
our fears and uncertainties.
May God guide you to your devotions and this disciplines this Lent that will do that
in you by the working of the Holy Spirit.
Sermon Feb. 15th.
We have a strange way of reading the scriptures on
Sunday.
Each January, as we begin Epiphany, we being reading through a new Gospel.
This year it is the Gospel of St.
Mark.
Anyway, we start reading through that Gospel story in sequence.
Then we suddenly stop and take a 16 week break...
for example... next week the story of the transfiguration, then six weeks of Lent, then seven weeks of Easter, followed
by Pentecost and
Trinity... 16 weeks in all..,.
Then in May or June, suddenly we pick up right where we left off on
this Sunday...
Usually, I wouldn't mention this, but this week I want to point it out because there is something going
on just at this point in Mark's gospel that
is easiest to see if you are reading in sequence.
Remember last week, Jesus
told his disciples that he had to leave Capernaum and go to the surrounding villages to preach the Gospel.
Strangely, Mark
tells of absolutely nothing about that trip or the places he went ...
except for this one Gospel story we have this morning.
The
next lesson, that you won't hear for another 17 weeks, Jesus is returning to Capernaum.
Mark tells us only this one story
and its not about villages or preaching... it seems oddly out of place.
It is not, it is the very core of the Gospel. Let
me explain.
In the story a leper comes to Jesus.
By now I shouldn't have to belabor the point about the place lepers
had in Jesus' day and age... most preachers have preached about that for
years.
It is also clear this is a story about
the leper coming to Jesus, suggestive of a private encounter.
Of course, being a leper that makes perfect sense since the
leper would have had to stay away from "normal" people.
So this meeting almost certainly took place outside of a village
in the countryside.
He seeks healing.
Jesus does something strange, he touches the leper.
Why? He doesn't need to
do that.
We know that because there are several stories where Jesus heals people, often at significant distances by just
His Say So.
This includes the story where he heals 10 lepers who stand a long way off and cry out to him for healing.
That
is the story where only one returns to say "thanks".
Similar to that story, Jesus tells this leper to go show himself to
the priests, to follow the religious ritual to certify his healing.
So why does Jesus touch the man?
Well, I'm guessing
here, but there is a story in my own history that suggests an answer.
I've told this one before, but not recently.
It
happened years ago when the AIDS epidemic was very new and everyone was scared and anxious because so little was known about
the
disease.
The response to AIDS in the 80's was very similar to the way Jesus society felt and dealt with lepers.
A
member of our church asked me to go to the hospital to see her son.
He had been cut off.
Not only were people avoiding
him like the plague (which in this case was more than a figure of speech)
He was at the time, sequestered in a far back
corner of the hospital in an isolation ward.
The isolation was because he was being tested for TB which was and is a very
opportunistic infection and there is a real risk of contracting it
for AIDS patients with weakened immune systems.
So
I got all gowned, gloved and masked and entered the room.'
The young man was on his bed. I greeted him and told him his
mother had asked me to come see him.
His mother had warned me that he didn't care much for clergy or the church and his
illness hadn't increased his sociability. She wasn't even sure if he'd see me. But he did. As I entered, he gave me a quick
once over, said tersely, "I can't relate to anyone whose face I can't see." "The TB tests were negative, take off your
mask
so I can see your face."
I had two nanoseconds to make a decision, because pausing too long would have the same effect
as refusing to remove the mask.
I took him at his word that he was TB negative and pulled down the mask.
That was the
beginning of a deep and moving friendship that ended with me officiating at his funeral in the church.
It was about "touching".
The
young man's problem was isolation, being cut off.
In this story, the touching involved a mask and his seeing my face.
It was symbolic.
In the story in the Gospel, what I read into that based on my history is that Jesus healed the leper,
and then touched him to heal his isolation,
his loneliness, his separation.
That makes this THE story of the Gospel.
It
has an immediate implication.
Because he has touched the leper, Jesus has taken on all the ritual impurity and taboos that
go with leprosy.
The leper broadcast far and wide what Jesus had done.
Thus, Mark's comment, Jesus could no longer enter
any town or village.
In other words, despite last week's goal of preaching all over the region, Jesus burns it all, on
this one man.
He does something that costs him his whole mission trip.
By the time we come back in 16 weeks, Jesus
is returning to his home base in Capernaum, kind of like hitting reset on the video game.
Jesus burned everything for this
one man, and this one man who was a lowly leper.
That my friends is THE GOSPEL.
Jesus comes into our world for each
and every one of us.
He is willing to exchange everything to touch us.
He doesn't have to touch us to heal us of our
illnesses.
No His touch is to heal something much more significant, our isolation, our ostracism, our loneliness...
The
exclusion we experience because we have been cut off from God, excluded from the Father's presence...
Jesus is willing
to burn everything to touch us so that we know, know beyond doubt that our ostracism is ended, our isolation is replaced with
a new fellowship with God the Father, by the touch of Jesus, that we experience in the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This
is the Gospel.
We live in a society that is in total denial of the problem of our separation
from God.
The core of the story in Genesis isn't about whether Mr. Darwin whose 200th birthday was last week was right
or wrong about how species arise.
The core of that Genesis story is about how we became separated from our true state of
oneness with our creator.
Thus cut off, we wander the countrysides a people without a home, and for the most part, totally
clueless to how lonely and outcast we are.
That is until someone touches us.
Jesus burned his whole mission to touch
this one leper...
Jesus burned everything, including his own life to touch all of us with the touch of God,
to let us
know that we are included, that our exile is ended, we can come home to the Father and thus to live in this world as people
who know where we belong.
This is THE GOSPEL.
We are included, welcomed, desired home.
Not only is the world in denial
about the great isolation of human existence.
But the church so often compounds the problem.
On Friday we remembered
on the church calendar... Absalom Jones
a black member of St. George's in Philadelphia who was told to go sit in the balcony.
Its
bad enough that we live in isolation from God, you would think the church he left behind would be more sensitive to not making
anyone feel left out.
Sadly, the church has a long and dark history of leaving all kinds of people out.
Thankfully,
the Jones story has a better ending than most...
Our first Presiding Bishop, William White, found Jones, and invited him
to read for Holy Orders.
Jones thus became the first African American priest and rector in our church.
Occasionally,
we do get it right. Occasionally, we do realize that the touch of Jesus is the touch God desires us to give to all his children
and if we get burned for doing that...
well that's just what Jesus did.
THAT TOO IS THE GOSPEL...
to give all that
all may know the holiness of inclusion into the Kingdom of our Father.
Amen.
Sermon for Feb. 8th
Today's lessons are familiar, especially that one from Isaiah.
Rise up
and have strength renewed...
I have at least one t-shirt with that on it, used to have more.
We have several hymns and
songs to sing...
eagles' wings, wait for the Lord
But its based on a condition..
Those who wait on the Lord will
have that...
Wait on the Lord...
In English the word has a double meaning...
to wait on... to be patient, stand still,
pause...
or two wait on... such as Peter's mother in law "waited" on Jesus and his followers after he healed her.
to
serve them a meal.. to be a wait person (pc word, don't you just hate those?)
But do you suppose that same double meaning
exists in the original Hebrew.
Surprising enough it does, and not only that, the root word has about 8 different meanings
including the two found in our own English.
But the underlying word, the root word in Hebrew means to twist
Such as
one would twist strands together to make a strong rope
Or you might think of braiding hair.. same idea.
That word
surely applies to our lives today doesn't it.
Do you feel like you're twisting in the wind, with everything that's happening
to us in this economy?
I'll bet most of you/ us do.
Or do you have twisted knots in your muscles here (neck) or here
(stomach), those tension knots...
Sure makes Isaish pertinent to our situation.
Well, I hear three teachings in this
passage that God gives to us...
In fact, Isaiah is a passage that is appropriate for the days in which we live.
I suggest
putting a book mark in at Isaiah 40 and spending some serious time reading and rereading these words...
Let me put that
in the context of Biblical history for you.
Chapters 1-39 are all about the downfall of Israel, from kingdom to destruction
and slavery.
Chapter 40-55 are what we read from today.
This is the section where God is speaking to those in slavery,
twisting in the wind, knowing the knots of anxiety about what their future will be, if they even have a future.
Then in
Chapters 56 to the end, we jump ahead another couple of generations and those in those days are struggling to see what this
new future looks like...
1st observation.
A lot of what is happening to people today is all about the twisting.
I
used to use a teaching series on marriage in which the speaker talked about how a married couple is supposed to "untie" each
other's knots.
but the passage he cited actually applies to all chrstians.
That got me to thinking that one of the great
things for us to be doing in these days is untying people's knots.
Gospel is about healing, and one form of healing every
christian can practice is the patient listening and caring that allows others to untie their knots.
All ittakes is a compassionate
heart, listening ear and time.
At our recent job fair where 1500 people showed up 1st baptist had a booth, and all they
did was listen and pray with people. It was a very effective ministry. I for one was very glad they were doing that ministry.
I
was really grateful for Tim Childers and his congregation, busy untying knots.
2nd observation, beyond the untying of knots
is another sense of twisting, that is binding together strands that work together to form a stronger rope.
A lot of people
are going to need some strong rope to pull them out of the ditch they have been thrown into.
Monday I was at a meeting
at SAFE coordinating a whole variety of community resources and churches and programs to tie us together.
This is not
the time for this is mine and to hell with you. That's the kind of thinking and acting that got us into this mess.
At its
extreme is produces the Bernie Made-offs of the world. Who wants to be like him?
This is time for the language of “Us,
we, together, ours, shared...”
In these times, this is one type of twisting I heartily endorse. the twisting together
of people in common purpose to help one another.
3rd observation.
At the Library this week we heard a great lecture
of Churchill during the war years.
When the speaker was talking about the fall of France in 5 weeks, I was reminded of
a great truism.... We always prepare to fight the last war.
The whole french defense was based on an expectation that
the Germans would attack as they did in WWI and so the French built the great Maginot line.
The Germans, however, simply
outflanked the defenses and overwhelmed the french army in no time at all.
One of the great dangers of these times is that
we think in terms of "when things get back to normal" or back to the way they used to be.
That's like the french defenses.
It
looks back and not ahead and that makes us vulnerable to being outflanked by circumstances we didn't anticipate.
Let me
give you another simple,albeit it might be painful example.
Think about a death in your family.
As you grieved did you
not have times when you expected that loved one to come home, to come through the door.
Sure, that's part of normal grief.
Our minds insist that we expect things to go back to the way they used to be.
But grief work and it is work, is letting
go of that past and to finally open ourselves to seeing the new future that is now ours.
In grief therapy, we try to help
people to let go of expecting the past to repeat itself and to look for the future that is still emerging.
So it is with
this time of turmoil.
Many of us will grieve for what we have lost, from jobs, to homes, to investments...
And we will
look back, waiting for the return of the way things used to be....
Maybe its time to start the grief work, to let go of
that history.
In Issiah 40-55, God prepares the Israelites for a future.
Some went home to Israel expecting to find
the glory of Israel, the glories they had heard about from their parents parents and form their parents parents parents,
back 4,5,6 generations...
but what they found was rubble and a subsistence level of life that had to be scratched out of
the barren earth.
Had they listened to God speaking through Isaiah they would have heard an invitation to a new future,
not to go back to what was...
Some heard that message, some like Ezra and Nehemiah, heard that promise and it was they
and those like them who did rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.
It was Ezra and Nehemiah who “got the memo” we've
been sent this morning... for them it was already over 100 years old, for us its 2500 years old... but its still true.
It
is a memo about our future.
It was those who weren't looking back, but looking forward who made the future that God had
promised them.
I have no idea what lies ahead of us, I don't know if the stimulus package is big enough or if it will even
work.
What I do know is
1. that in this time, some of the best work I can do, we can do, is to help people untie their
knots... We need to heal as Jesus healed and the simplest form of that is caring, listening, taking time with those who are
hurting to help them untie their knots.
2. that we need to twist ourselves with others, to make a strong rope to help those
in the greatest need. That we think less of “what's going to happen to me” and much more about how do we work
together for the good of all of us in these times...
3. that we need to read Isaiah over and over, listening to words spoken
to a generation like ours, a generation of uncertainty and questioning and to remember that things aren't going to be the
way they were... they are going to be something new, some God has planned for us and into which God is leading us, and that
we be prepared to live in that future even as God is weaving it together strand by strand...
And in the end, if we will
but wait on the Lord in these times, we too will find our strength renewed like an eagle's!
Sermon for February 1st.
This is going to be one of “those” sermons that raises a lot
more questions than it can answer.
But I am going to preach it nonetheless, but sometimes, the questions, even if unanswerable,
are worth pondering. Sometimes they help us frame the discussions we have internally and with each other.
If this sermon
can have that effect, to help us all to put certain things around us in a context for further reflection, then I shall consider
it worth the time to preach...
In today's Gospel, we are told Jesus taught as one with authority and not like the Scribes.
As
I thought about that, I was considering the levels at which authority exists and quickly three came to my mind.
First,
there is authority from above.
In the Old Testament today, we have the clearest example of this. “Above” is
God. That is as above as one can get and as much authority as one can be or have.
God gives this authority to the prophet
to speak and to the people to listen. It is a top down thing.
The penalty for disobedience is death. That I think makes
the seriousness of this authority very clear.
Second, there is a middle level authority. I use that title intentionally.
Middle level is a term of bureaucracy. This level of authority is very much bureaucratic.
This authority exists to keep
order, to prevent loose cannons. If you glance at the cartoon in today's bulletin it really captures the matter.
The Scribes
were a middle level authority. They were taught by their elders who in turn had been taught by their elders, etc. The idea
was a clear succession of approved teaching. Anyone outside this order, Jesus, for example, didn't have the proper credentials
and shouldn't be paid any mind, or even worse, should be silenced.
Finally, the third level of authority is one enshrined
in our declaration of independence. Maybe I wouldn't have been so aware of this one except I finished a mystery novel by Dick
Frances this week. At the end of the novel, his hero goes to Runnymead where there is a shrine to English law and freedom.
What
Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration was the concept that governments draw their authority from the “consent of the
governed”. It is authority from the bottom up.
Did the garbled oath of office make Mr. Obama our president? No. In
fact, his top down authority to appoint cabinet, to commission military officers, etc.... in fact all his authority,
comes from the consent of the governed. We gave him that authority as symbolized by the record crowds standing in the bitter
cold on the mall.
Ideally we'd like to see all these levels of authority mesh and work together seamlessly.
I am going
out on a limb here and using myself as an example.
I am very convinced in my heart of hearts that I have been called by
God to preach the Gospel. I have pieces of paper with big seals on them that say the institutional authority of the Episcopal
Church has made me a modern day “scribe”, one who have has properly taught and commissioned to preach. Finally,
the 70 of you who show up every Sunday give me the authority of your consent, your listening ears.
But, I dare say that
is a rarity. Most of the time, authority neither works so seamlessly.
First there is too much broken authority.
An example
of broken top down authority might be Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles. Given authority to place priests, a true top down authority,
we know he broke that authority, or as we are more wont to say, “abused” that authority. The news this week is
in spite of a 600,000,000 dollar pay out to victims of sexual misconduct by priests, Mahoney is being investigated on a conspiracy
charge ... in essence that he broke the authority he had.
Our own Episcopal church is rife with examples of broken middle
level authority. Do I have to say more than “Gene Robinson”? The whole purpose of middle authority is to keep
order, keep peace, prevent loose cannons. Before he became a bishop, Robinson was a canon, some would say a loose canon. Sorry,
its a bad pun. But, nothing in our system kept order and now the whole Anglican communion is in disarray because we just can't
seem to figure out how to get the Genie back in the bottle, or maybe, another bad pun, Gene back in the closet.
And as
for an example of broken bottom up authority, just consider how parishes run off clergy. Most every clergy person who has
been in this work very long, has been run out of at least one parish. As one who has experienced that, I can attest to how
much brokenness it involves for everyone in the situation.
But as bad a broken authority might be, a deeper concern is
a conflict of authority between the various types I have described.
I assert that almost every battle we have in the church
in the past and present is based on some clash of authority.
A brief history outline...
In the beginning, the church
based its teaching on prophets who spoke to the congregations in the very way the Old Testament describes this morning.
The
New Testament hadn't been written, so prophetic voices spoke God's Word to the people.
By the 2nd century this was dying
out. By the 4th century it was gone all together and replaced by the written word of what we now call the New Testament.
So
prophesy got locked down into a fixed form. To go with it, by the 4th century, the church had established top down authority
with patriarchs and bishops and a middle level authority of church laws and disciplines.
Much of the next three centuries
was spent defining that authority and stamping out all that didn't fit into it.
That structure would survive the fall of
the Roman Empire and it wouldn't be until Guttenburg that it would be seriously challenged.
Challenged not by a theologian,
but a printer. For now, the New Testament could be mass produced.
Almost immediately, a reformation erupted in Europe
lead by Martin Luther, John Calvin and in England Thomas Cramner.
The printed word began to upset the authority structure
of the previous millennium. People in the pews began to experience the beginnings of a bottom up authority, something
like what happened at Runnymead and the Magna Carta. Just as it would be a long journey from Runnymead to the Declaration
of Independence, it was a long journey from the early reformers to where we are today, but that's where it got started.
Immediately,
the Roman Catholic Church launched a counter reformation. The whole purpose of this was to keep the old authority structure
in place. To suppress all those challenging the authority. Remember the inquisition was an agency of the counter reformation.
Its purpose was to suppress the challenge.
I point that out just to remind you that when we Christians fight about authority,
the stakes are very high and there are no holds barred.
Right in the middle of this raging battle, enter two physicists,
Galileo and Copernicus. They threw a left handed monkey wrench into the gears.
Their claims about cosmology, such as the
earth rotating around the sun challenged all the authority on every side of the church fight. The spirit of the counter reformation
tried hard to suppress them too, as heretics.
But it is the first time science and religion clash. The viciousness of that
battle is often forgotten, and it is also forgotten that science worn.
Even among the most fundamental Bible believer today,
there is a general acceptance that the earth is round and goes around the sun.
The spread of bottom up authority continued
to enlarge in the next two centuries. While the original reformers like Luther, Calvin and Cramner had been opposed to top
down authority, all three created elaborate middle level authority structures.
By the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries these
began to give way to Methodists, Baptists and others who were increasingly bottom up authority systems.
Here's the irony,
the more you move toward a bottom up authority, the more the written word becomes THE authority. As long as Rome has a top
down authority that says, here's what the New Testament means, the centrality of the New Testament isn't very strong.
Even
among the reformed churches with strong middle level authority systems, the strict controls on the preachers to preach within
a very narrow doctrinal system, means that the New Testament still isn't the be all and end all.
But once the authority
is left wide open, people elect their own pastors, then the way to keep it together is to insist on the absolute authority
of Scripture, because there is nothing else to hold it all together.
That's what was happening on the frontiers of America
when on Feb. 12th, 1809, 200 years ago next week, two men were born on the same day.
One became a great American hero,
and would challenge the very political synthesis of this country. He was, of course, Abraham Lincoln.
The other born in
Shrewsbury England, would challenge the authority of the Christian world. His name was Charles Darwin.
Like Galileo and
Copernicus before him, he would raise scientific questions that would directly challenge the literal interpretation of Scripture.
By
now, the landscape was different. The top down authority of Catholicism and middle level authority of old Protestantism could
flex and adjust to changing science. The bottom up authority of the emerging free churches ran into Darwin and saw in him
the very devil himself.
The reaction to Darwin, especially, in the free churches, was much akin to the counter reformation.
Quick, fierce and no holds barred.
Our reading book for our clergy book club this month is the Devil as Dover. Its the
story of the trial in Pennsylvania over teaching Intelligent design. Its a fascinating book. The reporter who wrote it gets
very personal. Her father owns a fundamentalist radio station and she is a champion of freedom of press and religion. Her
own family conflict over this issue is deeply poignant and typical of the immense battle that still rages over authority.
Where
will it all lead...
Well, to quote Amos, I am not a prophet nor a prophet's son... but I do have an idea.
Remember I
talked about the power of Gutenberg's printing press to change everything.
That's happening again. This so called digital
age which we've entered has changed the world every bit as much.
With Gutenberg the printed word changed everything. IF
you are over 40, you were raised in a world where what was printed had power, conveyed truth.
If you are under 40, and
more under the more this is true, the printed word has no authority or power. It is being replaced by a digital world.
The
Encyclopedia Britannica that my wife and I sacrificed much to buy for our kids, is worthless except as an antique. Today Wikipedia
is instant, updated constantly and by far the best source of general information.
My personal guess is that many of the
battles over authority that have absorbed us for 500 years is going to pass away when those of at the end of the old age,
the age of the printed word, pass away.
But of this much I am equally confident, the battles of authority will take some
new shape or form.
Jesus came into this world to challenge all its authorities and to lay His claim to be its one authority.
In one form or another His claim keeps clashing with our human forms of authority and will keep doing so until that final
day, when all passes away, and every knee bows before the one, only and true authority.
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