In the Moment

Grace Episcopal Church, 6 October 2019 

We have all seen or heard or read the story: Someone—typically a completely ordinary person—does something heroic and then is surprised when treated like a hero. Here’s one I remember, minus some details I don’t remember, like the kid’s name and where it happened.

There was a flood. A woman is in a car that is sinking as it is being swept away by a river where no river was supposed to be. Some people see it and race after the sinking car in a boat.

A young man jumps out of the boat, grabs onto the car and pulls the struggling woman out through the driver-side window. But instead of praising God and thanking him, she begins screaming, “MY DOG! MY DOG!”

The young man looks back at the car and sees the face of the dog in the last bubble of air trapped behind the rear window of the convertible, which is now rapidly sinking. With the superhuman strength that often comes in a moment like that, the young man hangs onto the sinking car with one hand, beats a hole with the other, presumably by ripping a seam between the window and the ragtop, scoops out the dog and gets back to the surface gasping for air.

Later on, when he is rightly honored as a hero and profusely thanked by the woman and his community, he says, ‘I’m not a hero. I just did what I had to do in the moment,’ or words to that effect.

And so say the “worthless servants” in today’s Gospel parable: No need to thank us, we have done only what we ought to have done. 

That, my friends, is faith in action: Being in the moment, doing what needs to be done.

In the Moment, by Bette J. Kauffman

Perhaps if Jesus had known convertibles and floods and precious pets like we do, he might have used beating a hole in a sinking car to save one… as his example in this teaching! I say, transplanting a mulberry tree into the sea pales in comparison.

We are so often like the disciples in this story. We think of faith as a kind of elixir, a miracle cure, or maybe a steroid, and we long for someone—well, Jesus, of course—to inject us with a bunch of it. Or open up our skull and dump some in, because we really think it is a mental thing, a thing of belief—of believing all the right things and never questioning or doubting.

Once a number of years ago, I was struggling with questions of belief and sort of bouncing between moments of great faith, at least as I understood faith then, and moments of great doubt.

And so I said to a priest friend one day, I can’t decide whether Christianity makes no sense whatsoever, or if it’s the only thing that makes any sense at all. Actually, I said to him, I really think both are true.

I’m sure I expected to be admonished, or at least instructed in how Christianity is “the answer” to all questions. Instead he just chuckled and said, “Yup, that about sums it up.”

Believing “the right stuff” is not faith. Believing all the “right things” and never questioning or doubting is more like magical thinking. And the more certain we are in our “right beliefs,” the more magical our thinking.

In the small Iowa town where we grew up, a couple of my siblings got involved in a small, charismatic, non-denominational church. They became very devout and very “certain” in their faith.

Then the beloved pastor of that church was diagnosed with cancer. The congregation took this passage we are talking about today (and a few others) to mean that if they just had enough faith and asked God to heal their pastor, their pastor would be physically cured of the cancer.

And so they prayed mightily, and often and loudly proclaimed their “faith” that the pastor was being healed, it was just a matter of time. Sadly, the pastor died of the cancer.

Not too surprisingly, the congregation was thrown into a crisis of faith. Had they not had “enough faith”? Was there one among them who doubted? How could this be? It was “faith” as magical thinking and it almost destroyed that little church.

Jesus does not equate faith with what we think or believe. In this teaching as in others, he likens it to a seed, the tiniest of seeds. Oh, the lessons that can be drawn from a seed!

Live Oak on Highway 65 South, by Bette J. Kauffman.

Here’s one: I stand on my deck and gaze in wonder and consternation at the live oak tee in the middle of my back yard. Wonder, because I know it grew from an acorn smaller than the tip of my thumb. Consternation, because the limbs are down to the ground again! I have just retained a tree man to come and trim it, again, at no small fee.

Likewise, heroic achievements hide in small acts of faith, in moments of being present, aware, vulnerable… to people, to creation, to the world around you. Pay attention! And respond. You are the home of the Spirit. God is within you. And that is all you need. Respond out of that indwelling Love with a capital L and you will do what needs to be done in the moment.

And never underestimate the ripple effect—the intensity, the reach, the consequences—of small acts of faithfulness. Consider Anne Frank, faithfully writing in her diary, having no idea her words would be read by and inspire millions. 

Greta Thunberg

One more thing about seeds: They die in order to be resurrected as a live oak tree, as a head of grain, as a gorgeous orchid that grows from a microscopic seed.

Thankfully we don’t have to physically die—at least not most of the time—in order to respond out of faith and do what needs to be done. But we must hold our own wants and needs, our egos and occasionally our very lives somewhat loosely in order to be vulnerable and available to the needs of the moment, the people and the situation in front of us.

If we are caught up in doing a cost-benefit analysis, or assessing potential legal liability, or risk, or protecting our own ego from possible rejection or embarrassment or failure or whatever, if we are fearful and anxious, we cannot be fully present to others and respond out of faith and love.

In short, we must get out of our heads to do what needs to be done in the moment.

In her book Practicing Resurrection, Nora Gallagher observes that we “spend so much time in church ‘believing’…or ‘not believing’ (six impossible things before breakfast) that we…lose the point.” Regarding the resurrection appearances of Jesus, what matters, she says, is what we do with them. Do we turn them into exotic beliefs? Or use them as stepping stones to new life and new growth in our relationships with God and others.

And finally, Sarah Dylan Breuer wrote this for her online blog:

The word 'faith'…is often spoken about as if it meant trying to talk ourselves into intellectual assent to something, with "increasing our faith" meaning that we are successfully persuading ourselves that we have adopted an idea we think is ridiculous. That's not faith; it's self-deception, and usually a pretty unsuccessful kind of self-deception that results in our feeling a little guilty and hypocritical, as we know that we don't actually believe what we say.

But faith is not about intellectual projection and assessment... Faith is relationship -- a relationship of trust, of allegiance. When Jesus talks about "faith," he's not talking about what you do in your head; he's talking about what you do with your hands and your feet, your wallet and your privilege, your power and your time. Faith in Jesus is not shown by saying or thinking things about him, but by following him.

In the name of God, father, son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

“Perverse Sword of the Kingdom”

Christ Episcopal Church, Bastrop, 18 August 2019

So last week I preached about “stuff and treasure,” a fun sermon to write because I knew many would identify with the problems of having too much stuff and how to sort out the treasure from the dust collectors. Moreover, that sermon enabled me to talk about a couple of my treasures, specifically “Rock with a Heart” and the glass ibis given to me by my sister.

 

"I Don't Sell Jesus," by Bette J. Kauffman

I made the point that true treasure is our relationship with God, manifested through our relationships with each other, that the artifacts in our homes and hands and pockets represent. And I mentioned, kind of in passing, that although family relationships come pretty naturally to us, we are called to more than that, even to the possibility of leaving our family behind.

In fact, here’s a direct quote from that sermon: But Jesus told us, you have to be willing to leave your family behind. Jesus modeled for us a different way, a way contrary to our instincts…

Please know that when I said that last Sunday, I had NOT YET read the lessons for today! Imagine what went through my mind when I sat down last Sunday afternoon to read the lessons for today and begin thinking about today’s sermon! If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was God’s revenge on the preacher for having mentioned something so important “in passing”!

So… what are we to make of this? Surely this is one of Jesus’ most difficult teachings. He sounds downright un-Jesusy. He sounds harsh, strident. He sounds like he wants to burn the place down: I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

The next sentence is a clue to at least part of what is going on here. Jesus says, I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! So Jesus is kind of strung out because he knows what’s coming.

But there’s more to it than that. Jesus is warning his followers that his way, the way of love of God and neighbor is going to get them in trouble. He is saying that the revolutionary message of unconditional love that puts God and neighbor even above self and nation, the selfless Love that he, Jesus, not only teaches, but lives and breathes and IS in his very being…

That Love is counter to every norm of civil society. It upsets the apple cart. It turns things inside out. It shows the superficiality of everything else, including the cherished “family values” on which our political system loves to base appeals for our support and vote.

So often that term, “family values,” becomes code for generating warm, fuzzy feelings of identifying with families that look and act like ours, but also for excluding those who do family differently or whose families don’t look like and act like ours.

Every time I hear that appeal, whether a politician or a salesperson or an acquaintance on social media, I immediately want to ask: What do you mean by that? What are “family values” to you? That’s a hollow term until you tell me what you mean by it.

So many aspects of our political and economic and social and cultural systems–all of which I mean when I say “civil society”–so much of that is designed precisely to create “in groups” and “out groups,” to divide the human family into categories based on wealth, status, political opinions, cultural practices, religion, and more.

And then to pit those groups against each other to determine who wins and who loses, who merits help and who doesn’t, whose labor is worth a living wage and whose isn’t, who gets to “rule the roost’ for what period of time.

Love that contradicts and flies in the face of all of that is subversive. And civil society will strike back, as it did against Jesus.

Jesus told us more than once using a variety of parables and teachings that signing on to the subversive Love he lived and breathed and WAS in his very being would cause problems, indeed even in families.

I am reminded of the story of the prodigal son. Author Timothy Keller says we really should call it “The Prodigal God,” and he’s written a book with that title. It is the generosity, the over-the-top prodigious love of the father in forgiving and welcoming home the younger son that drives a wedge into that family. Because the older son, the moral, upstanding older son who had followed all the social norms and honored the family values of the day, cannot accept the unconditional, selfless Love, the forgiving, gracious and merciful Love of the father.

Another author, Suzanne Guthrie, calls this subversive Love that overturns societal norms “the perverse sword of the kingdom.” In her reflection on this Gospel lesson, she features the story of Edith Stein, a story I did not know before last week, but find compelling, powerful and worthy of our attention.

Edith Stein was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, most likely on August 9 of 1932. She had a Ph.D. in Philosophy, but was also known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Carmelite nun, writer and theologian.

Stein’s intellectual curiosity lead her at an early age from Judaism to atheism to psychology and philosophy. Many of her friends were Christians, but it was the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, a Carmelite nun, that captured her heart. She later recalled that upon finishing the book, she said to herself, “This is the truth.” Shortly thereafter she was baptized into the Roman Catholic church.

 

Sr. Benedicta of the Cross

But Edith Stein was also the youngest daughter of a devout Jewish mother. The two loved each other deeply, and Edith’s Christianity tore her mother’s heart.

For a time, Edith continued to go to synagogue with her mother when visiting. On one occasion at the synagogue together while saying the Sh’ma, the Judaic statement of faith, Edith’s mother turned to her and said, Do you hear that? The Lord our God, He is ONE!

On another occasion, Edith’s mother said to her, He (Jesus) was a good man – I’m not saying anything against him. But why did he have to go and make himself God?

Indeed, Edith understood that dilemma. She knew it from her own intellectual travel from Judaism through atheism to philosophy. Yet her heart had been captured by the story of a Carmelite nun, and she felt the call to become one.

Here’s where Suzanne Guthrie asks: What kind of perverse sword of the kingdom sets a devout mother against daughter and daughter against mother?

I can’t answer that question, but I’ll come back to it in a moment. Edith Stein became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. When she moved to Carmel and made her final vows there, her mother died at that very hour. At least she did not live to see her daughter gassed by the Nazis!

Suzanne Guthrie concludes her reflection with these words: When I pray with Edith Stein, I include her mother. For what kind of “peace” can there be, one without the other?

Now back to Guthrie’s question: What kind of perverse sword of the kingdom sets a devout mother against daughter and daughter against mother?I not only can’t answer that question, but I have more like it. What kind of perverse sword of the kingdom leads people of good faith, devout people, people of prayer, Bible-reading people… to exactly opposite conclusions on so many “hot button” issues of our lives today?

From economic concerns like taxes and minimum wage to questions about access to healthcare and all the way to big moral issues like gun violence, abortion and human sexuality. You would think that God who is Love would lead us all to the same conclusion, right? So we could just love each other and not have to contend with each other over these divisive questions!

But, of course, like I said last week, it’s not that hard to love people who are like us in appearance, beliefs, opinions, all of that. But Jesus calls us to more. Jesus calls us to love even our enemies. Jesus calls us to the Way of Love. Period. Full stop.

In the name of God, father, son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Stuff & Treasure

On the window sill over the sink in my kitchen is a treasure. It’s a little brown rock, about the size of a meatball—the kind you see in chafing dishes at receptions. It’s a pretty ordinary looking rock, except…  It has a heart! 

I don’t know how it came to be, but this plain brown rock has one kind of flat side and there on the flat side, if you tilt it at just the right angle, is a perfectly heart-shaped opening. A friend who knows that I collect treasures gave me “Rock with a Heart.” She found it lying on the ground, “in plain sight,” she said.

But… on the window sill, right next to Rock with a Heart, is… well, a bunch of stuff: A pill bottle with one or two expired pills in it. One of those joke half-mugs that cleverly declares, “You asked for half a cup of coffee.” That was a treasure—briefly. Now it’s a dust collector.

On a shelf above the TV is a couple of inches of armadillo tail, picked clean of tissue such that its intricate bony architecture is clearly revealed. Why so homely a critter requires such an extraordinary tail structure I don’t know. To me it’s an exuberant, over-the-top expression of its Creator—here just for the glory of it. A treasure.

But right next to it? More dust collectors: Things you thought you couldn’t live without.. for some brief moment in the distant past. Today? Meh.

We could continue. My house is strewn with treasures. Among the rocks, bones and shells, you will also find human-made treasures, like the glass ibis figurine my sister gave me when I admired it in her home.

But for every treasure... an equal or larger portion of stuff. How did I come to have… All. This. Stuff? Lately, my house full of stuff has come to feel burdensome, stifling, a huge distraction from the things that really matter. And so I am in the process of down-sizing! I got rid of stuff this summer, but, alas, I have far to go….

One of the things that struck me about the many people from New Orleans I spoke with post-Katrina is how losing everything made them leery of collecting stuff. One woman I interviewed told me that before the storm she had every kitchen device you could imagine. She loved to cook, and she had all the equipment and gadgets the world had to offer.

But she lived in the Upper 9^th Ward, and it allll ended up in a huge, smelly pile at the curb. Now, she said, I have one saucepan and one skillet and I don’t want any more. Now, she takes pleasure in figuring out how to cook whatever she wants with one skillet and one saucepan.

Many people take today’s Gospel lesson to be about long-term planning. There’s that reference to “laying up treasures in heaven,” and so we want to make this teaching an evacuation plan for that next place we’ll go to someday after we die. ‘Be good now—moral, pious—and go to heaven later.’

I beg to disagree. Jesus tells us over and over throughout his ministry on earth: The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom is within and among you.

And today’s lesson: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. 

The glass ibis.

 That’s all present tense! I’m reminded of how my sister gave me that glass ibis. I was visiting her and noticed it sitting on her windowsill. And I told her the story of waking up one morning to a flock of ibises in my back yard feasting on crawfish brought up by a heavy rain.

And my sister insisted on giving me the figurine. Right then. On the spot. She didn’t put it in her will, she picked it up and put it in my hands. And when I protested she said much the same thing Jesus says on this occasion: It is my pleasure to give it to you.

But here’s the tricky part. Yes, the glass ibis is a sort of treasure. But it’s not.. the real.. treasure. The glass ibis could get knocked off my windowsill to shatter on the floor today, and I’d still have the real treasure—my relationship with my sister and an act of solidarity between us that carried that relationship forward.

We humans easily confuse things, mementos, STUFF… with the real treasure—namely our relationships with each other, and with Creation, and thereby.. with God.

That’s what I think today’s lesson is all about: Recognizing and cultivating the real treasure, our relationship with God manifested in the here and now in our relationships with people and God’s Creation.

How, indeed, would we treat people if, at every moment, we were awake to the presence of God in them and viewed them as the Master coming to fasten his belt and have [us] sit down to eat? And, indeed, to serve us?

How’s that for a reversal! Let me say it again in a slightly different way. Our relationships with people are the real treasures. Our relationships are the Kingdom here and now. Relationships with each other are the purses that will last. They are the result and the medium of our relationship with God!

Now that is somewhat easy to see when it comes to family, as the story about the glass ibis and my sister illustrates. We don’t need to be admonished to be ready and awake to accept the gift of family relationships. That kind of comes naturally.

Other folks, not so much. Other folks often appear to us as one more burdensome issue or problem we must deal with. And the more different from us they are, in terms of skin color, religion, social class, work ethic, values, ways of being in the world… the less likely we are to be ready and open to the fact that a relationship with them just might be a feast served by the Master himself.

But Jesus told us, you have to be willing to leave your family behind. Jesus modeled for us a different way, a way contrary to our instincts, a reversal of our “natural attitude,” by inviting relationships with everyone he encountered.

My friends, we all have a God-shaped hole in the side of our heart. And that is the true treasure, the true treasure that makes all of the other treasures—the treasure of relationship with God, self and neighbor—possible.

But the God-shaped hole in the side of our heart often gets… well, full of dirt. Stuff falls in! Sometimes we literally cover it over with whatever we can! We wall over the God-shaped hole in our heart, and we do it for a variety of reasons.

One really big, important reason we do it is fear. We fear those who are different from us. And sometimes our fears are fanned by hateful language on social media and from people in power who ought to know and act better.  

Who remembers Pogo? I love cartoons. They so often express things we find hard to say straight up. And perhaps my favorite of all time is Pogo saying, We have met the enemy, and he is us!

But we are and can be bigger than our fears. Or our hurt. Or our anger, which often goes hand in hand with both fear and hurt. These are the things that build walls around human hearts.

But the treasure is inside us. It is a God-shaped, Love-shaped hole in the side of our hearts. And how we tend to that hole in our heart matters.

One of my favorite poets is Emily Dickinson, and she has addressed precisely this thing. Here’s her poem, “To Fill a Gap.”

To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and ’twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air.

Brothers and Sisters, we must fill the hole in our hearts with God, which is to say with Love. Because if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.

God wants to give us the Kingdom. Here. Now. Are we ready?

It’s the anxiety, people!

Christ Episcopal Church, Bastrop, La., July 21, 2019

For those who don’t know or might not remember, in a former pre-retirement life, I was a professor of communication at the University of Louisiana Monroe. I taught public relations, writing and visual communication, graphic design and occasionally photography.

And one of the things I incorporated in several of those courses was how to make a Power Point to enhance your spoken presentation. I have to admit that I’m one of those rather tiresome people who think most oral presentations could be improved by a good Power Point!

Now I would never want the Episcopal Church to turn into one of those churches with a stage, and several video cameras, and gigantic screens… basically, where the sanctuary has become a TV studio where many of my former students did their media production internships! But I have to admit that occasionally I have felt the lack of a way to make a sermon visually interesting.

 

The Mary & Martha window over the altar at Christ Church, Bastrop, La.

 So… all that is by way of directing your attention to the beautiful window at the front of this church—a perfect Power Point slide for today’s sermon about Mary and Martha!

This story of Mary and Martha and Jesus’ visit in their home is very familiar to us. I have no idea how many sermons based on this text I have heard, but at this point in a lifetime of going to church virtually every Sunday, it has to be dozens. Does that sound reasonable? Anyone else?

And I would say most of those sermons made this story a sort of competition between Christian service, like that of Martha, and Christian study, meditation, prayer, etc., like that of Mary.

And many of those sermons make this story a reminder that we contemporary Christians have filled our lives with many, many things. More than ever before. We are busier than ever. With modern media and such, we have more demands on our time and attention than any of our ancestors, and we really need to develop the discipline to spend more time in prayer and meditation and study of the word of God.

At the very least, the preacher is going to come down on the side of “balance.” We need a better balance between service and prayer in our lives. Sound familiar? And that’s not a bad sermon! We DO need balance between service and prayer in our lives.

But today I want to direct our attention to an aspect of this story that can get lost or overlooked in that approach. Look again with me at how Jesus rebukes Martha—and it is a rebuke. A gentle one, for sure, but a rebuke.

He says to her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.

“You are worried and distracted by many things.” Is that not the very definition of “anxiety”? He might as well have said, “Mary, you are anxious. Calm down!”

Nothing is more contagious in human society than anxiety. Did you ever notice that? An anxious person can make a roomful of anxious people in a heartbeat!

One of the things I had to do under Bishop Bruce’s process for becoming a deacon was to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, “CPE” for short. The Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had an excellent program, and so I spent a summer mostly in Pine Bluff, coming home to Monroe to spend the weekends I was not on call with my son.

And…, I can only think because I was older and more mature than my peers in the program, and generally speaking, a relatively non-anxious person, I got assigned to… wait for it… the hospice unit and the emergency room.

Now families with a loved one in a hospice unit have typically had some time to begin preparing themselves for what’s coming. That doesn’t mean the hospice unit is anxiety free, just that… it’s not much like the emergency room.

The emergency room is Anxiety Central! Some of you might have been there and know firsthand what I’m talking about. Bad things, terrible things, scary things, tragic things, end up in hospital emergency rooms. And so I learned a lot that summer about being what we call “a non-anxious presence” in the midst of over-the-top anxiety.

Martha’s anxiety in today’s Gospel story is not of that order, but… she is “worried and distracted” by many things. Clearly, Jesus is not rebuking her for serving. Jesus viewed himself as a server.

He said that many times in different ways: I came not to be served, but to serve. I am among you as one who serves. And he taught his followers to serve: As I have done to you, do to each other and to the least of these. So he’s not rebuking her for serving.

But why, we might ask, does Jesus care about Martha’s anxiety? Because riddled with anxiety, where is the joy of serving the Lord? Where is the peace that passes understanding of being in the Lord’s presence? Where is the gratitude for the gift of food to prepare for the table?

Riddled with anxiety, we lose sight of the knowledge that God is with us no matter the struggle of the day. Indeed, the very definition of “anxiety” is loss of confidence that regardless of what is happening in this time and place at this moment, our hearts, our souls, our lives are in the hands of the Living God.

Now, one more thing about this story gives me pause today. One more lesson I want to draw from it, and that lesson is, “Own your own stuff.” Right? You’ve heard that before, too, probably with a different word in place of “stuff”… but we’re in church today, so we’ll just say “stuff.” Own your own stuff!

Here’s what I mean. Look back at what Martha actually says: Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself.

Notice that she is not complaining about the task of preparing food. Or setting the table, or whatever else she was “worried and distracted” about. She is busy blaming her sister, Mary, for the choice she, Martha, has made. Martha is being a bit of a self-righteous martyr in this story.

Now…, the choice Martha made was not free of social pressure! It was customary, and even a principle of Jewish hospitality, that food be prepared for the table when a guest is in the house—especially a beloved guest like Jesus.

And rarely are the choices we must make on a daily basis free of conflicting pressures: social pressures, economic pressures, political pressures. That’s real. And it’s often not easy to negotiate those pressures. Many of our choices are fraught with equally good reasons to go any of several directions.

But we have choices. As I look around this room, I indeed see people of relative privilege. Our choices might be challenging, but rarely is a roof over our heads at bedtime tonight, or food for the dinner table, at stake in the choices we must make.

ALICE = Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In 2014, on average, over half of Ouachita Parish families either live in poverty or fall below the ALICE threshold, which means they are not making ends meet in spite of being employed.

Well…, in my case, food for the dinner table is a bit of a problem. But that’s not because I lack money to buy food or transportation to the grocery store or… whatever! It’s because of the series of choices I made in organizing my week.

It would be easy to say, “I didn’t have time.” I am a busy person; I do many good—and fun—things. This week I went to visit an elderly friend who relies on me for essential companionship and help with various tasks. Good on me, right! But truth be told, I didn’t make it to the grocery store because of a series of choices I made, a set of priorities I enacted.

Most of the time there’s far more at stake than an empty refrigerator in the life choices we must make, so don’t let the homeliness of that example obscure the point.

And here’s the point: Jesus speaks to us through this story. Dear people of God, he says, your anxiety is sucking the joy and gratitude and confidence of my presence from your very life. Choose the better part; make me the center, make me the first priority, and whatever else you choose to do, my love for you and for all of my children will permeate and shine through.

In the name of God, Father, son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Does God's Mission Have Us?

5 Easter, 19 May 2019, Grace Episcopal Church

It is not that God’s Church has a mission, but that God’s Mission has a church.

I wish I could put that statement out there and just let you all think that I came up with it. But, in fact, I didn’t. The Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Maryland made that statement, and you can find his sermon based on it on the Web at a site called “Sermons That Work.”

I think it is a great insight, and one particularly important to consider at times of transition in our lives and in the life of a church, like when beginning a new assignment or searching for a new rector. So hear it again:

It is not that God’s church has a mission, but that God’s mission has a church.

     

We church folks have a tendency to get such things reversed. We tend to talk about “the church’s mission” in and to the world.

And, yes, of course, it is in part just an easier way to talk about things. After all, the church is structured and organized to do certain things: to serve the spiritual needs of people, to spread the Gospel, to do various kinds of outreach, like disaster relief, soup kitchens, and so forth.

One could even argue that talking about these things as “the church’s mission” is a healthy way of taking responsibility and claiming ownership of the things we are called to do as the body of Jesus Christ in the world.

I would not deny or reject any of that. At the same time, it is also the case that the church has, throughout history, tended to get confused on this point. And when the church loses sight of its subordination to God’s Mission, when the church starts thinking it is pursuing its own mission, bad things tend to happen.

For one clear historical example, consider the Roman church’s shake-down of believers by putting a price on forgiveness. That was the practice known as the selling of indulgences, and it was the impetus and inspiration for the 95 theses Luther probably did not actually nail to a church door, but did present to his Bishop along with a letter calling for open debate on the matter, and thereby kicked off the Protestant Reformation.

But we needn’t go so deep into history to find examples of religious institutions acting arrogantly, and taking over the role of God in seeking to make the world over in their own limited, exclusionary image. In recent years, we have seen a seemingly endless stream of religious fanaticism, Muslim and Christian especially, blowing up, gunning down, burning worship spaces… from the Middle East to New Zealand to Pittsburgh to St. Landry Parish, Louisiana.

Those are extreme examples, so let’s bring the point closer to home. If indeed we agree that God’s mission has a church, in general, then it’s not a huge step to recognize that the same is true for all of the church’s constituent parts: God’s mission has an Episcopal Church, God’s mission has a St. Alban’s and a St. Thomas’ and a Grace Episcopal Church and School, and on and on.

How does it re-orient our thinking to say that Grace Episcopal does not have a mission, but that God’s mission has us? What would count as evidence?

What do people see when they look at us? God’s mission at work in this community? Or… people focused on, distracted by… preserving a beautiful edifice, balancing the budget, how tall the fountain should be, the leaky roof, who’s on the search committee, the one “right” way to do liturgy… and myriad other things.

It even seems to me there’s some struggle of late about who Grace Episcopal belongs to: the people who pledge? the ones who have been here the longest? a simple majority of members… or of who was at a particular meeting? the vestry? the Bishop?

Here’s my answer: If Grace doesn’t belong to God’s mission, it has no business taking up prime real estate on this corner in this neighborhood in this community.

Do we think WE have a mission in the world? Or do we understand, accept and practice our faith in ways that make perfectly clear that God’s mission in the world has us?

Here’s another way to pose the question: If God’s mission were illegal in Monroe, La., would there be enough evidence to convict Grace Episcopal?

And now, one more step, even closer to home. Consider this: It is not that Bette Kauffman has a mission, but that God’s mission has a Bette Kauffman.

I thought about standing up here and naming names, but.. you can put your own name in the sentence. How does that distill your thinking? How might it adjust priorities for each of us?

We have lots of practice and experience in seeking to carry out our own mission in the world. Indeed, that is the primary job, for each of us, of our own precious, fragile ego.

I am reminded of a lesson I learned many years ago from a more experienced leader of people. I had just come to Monroe to be an academic department head at what was then Northeast Louisiana University. A senior administrator was giving me some insights into the various personalities of the faculty I was about to become the head of. (And, BTW, being an academic department head is The Original “herding cats” kind of job!)

At some point, in speaking about a particularly difficult personality, he said this: When you’re handed a 2x6, don’t waste time wishing it was a 2x4 or a 4x4, even if that’s what you really need. Instead, figure out what you can do with a 2x6.

Thank goodness, God is The Master at figuring out what to do with a bunch of odd-sized pieces of lumber… because that’s what we are… and not only odd-sized but rigid and stiff-necked, just like lumber!

Brothers and sisters, I have invited us to a moment of profound humility. I have asked us to recognize that The Mission is God’s and that we are called–individually and as a church–to belong to God’s mission. I have invited us to consider that the biggest obstacle to our belonging fully to God’s mission is our investment in our own pet projects and opinions, and need to be right, and need for control.

And all that must die. We must relinquish our death grip on all that stuff of the ego… for God’s mission to truly HAVE US. Something always must die to make way for something new to be born. That’s the central story of our faith.

Let us be clear. Death and rebirth are never easy or pain free. But they are the way of the cross. They are the way of following Jesus.

The Gospel is always good news, and today’s Gospel lesson reminds us that love is the way—not only the way of life for us, the way of being church, but also the way others will know that we belong to God’s mission.

But the bit of good news I especially want to highlight this morning is the Revelation to John that was read as our Epistle lesson: See, the home of God is among mortals. What a glorious thought! Maybe a little terrifying, too, but… wow! This revelation is not only about some distant future, but about now, for the home of God is among us.

Then following that astonishing thought comes the line: And the one who is seated on the throne says, "See, I am making all things new." 

That’s the hope and the promise I claim for us this morning. "See, I am making all things new." 

Grace is still kind of in the painful, “feels like dying” part right now. But new life is coming and is already here. To paraphrase an old familiar song: New life is busting out all over. We are an Easter people.

And what do we do with that? Here’s how Br. David Vryhof of the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist puts it: 

God’s mission is to radically transform the world. Our task, then, is to discern how we can be a radically transforming community in the world, embodying God’s values and giving the world a glimpse of God’s…vision [for humankind].

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Radical Community

Maundy Thursday, 2019, Grace Episcopal Church

Our lessons begin this evening with the story of the first Passover. God has heard the cry of the Israelites and is going to bring them out of bondage in the land of Egypt.

  

We know from Hebrew Scripture that the Israelites had multiplied and were about to surpass their oppressors in terms of population. But numbers alone had not prepared them for the great escape.

Moses had even taken matters into his own hands and killed an Egyptian overseer who was abusing an Israelite. But that act of individual courage—or foolhardiness, depending on your point of view—had consequences primarily for Moses himself. He had to flee into the desert.

For God’s plan to work, the Israelites were going to have to act in unison.

For a people to rise up and walk out of bondage, they must overcome personal fears and anxieties. They must throw off those feelings of isolation and helplessness and apathy that often overtake people in dire circumstances.

For any group of people to march into an unknown future, to go where God’s mission calls them to go, they must give up individual preferences, and set aside their own coping mechanisms and adaptations to the current situation. They must relinquish ways of thinking and practices tied to the past. Indeed, they must yield their very natural desire for control, their very egos, to the future of the community.

And so God planned for the Israelites a feast to be prepared and shared in a particular way that required people to come together and to work together as they never had before.

Each household had to secure a lamb, but smaller households had to join with a neighboring household. The lamb was to be male and 1 year old. It had to be apportioned exactly to the number of people who would eat it.

It had to be kept until the 14^th day of the month. Then the entire congregation of Israelites had to come together to slaughter those lambs at twilight. Not at dawn or noon or whatever the traditional time for slaughtering livestock might have been, but at twilight.

The lamb had to be eaten that very night, and everyone, everyone, had to prepare and share the feast in the same way. The lamb was to be roasted, not boiled, with head, legs and inner organs intact. No place here for that plaintif cry, “But, dad, I don’t like roasted lamb!”

The Israelites were to be dressed to march…  loins girded, sandals on their feet, staffs in hand. Can you imagine the problem if some had insisted on wearing their Sunday best for this feast, then had to flee into the desert wearing, say, high heels?!

 (I can hear my mother in there somewhere: No, you will not wear your sneakers to the dinner table.)

God even dictated, through Moses and Aaron, that they were to eat standing up.

The first Passover was a radical act of community.. to prepare the people of Israel to rise up together and march off into the unknown. The first Passover was an answer to the need for cohesion among the Israelites, cohesion and the courage and faith to rise up, yield their own individual egos and preferences and dearly held practices—perhaps even strongly held views that they’d all be better off staying in Egypt!

They had to yield all of that, and more, in order to leave their homes, risk everything, and march into the dark and unknown desert. And God, in great wisdom, understood that radical acts of community can’t be a one-time thing.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you, God said. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

Fast forward a few thousand years. The followers of Jesus are about to enter into a different kind of wilderness—the wilderness of betrayal and grief and loss. Jesus has been telling them what is coming. But they don’t get it.

I am not being at all critical of the disciples here. I’m pretty sure, in their shoes, I would not have gotten it either. I suspect their incomprehension was part denial, and part, well, incomprehension. After all, no human had ever risen from the dead…

But wait. What about Lazarus? They witnessed that! So maybe it was all denial, which is an amazing thing. Denial can blind us to things in ourselves that are unbelievably obvious to others.

Whatever the reason the disciples are clueless, but Jesus knows what’s coming. Notice how concerned John is with “knowing” in tonight’s Gospel lesson, and not in the sense of knowing facts, but in the sense of understanding.

“Jesus knew that his hour had come,” John writes. “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands” got up, took a basin and washed their feet.

Jesus knew also that the disciples did not understand. He acknowledges as much when Peter challenges him, and after he has washed their feet, he explain again in simple terms so that they might begin to understand.

But most of all, Jesus knows that the events about to happen had the power to shatter the little community of believers gathered around him, to tear them apart and scatter them to the four winds.

And so, on this night of remembrance of God’s radical act of community that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, through the wilderness, through hunger and rebelliousness against God and deadly disputes among themselves, and, yes, even moments of wishing they were back in Egypt, slaves but with food and a roof over their heads---

On this holy night of remembrance, Jesus institutes a new radical act of community. Very soon, we will consecrate bread and wine, and we will share, once again, our communal feast of Christ’s body and blood, our own radical act of community.

 

So I’ve just drawn a bridge between God’s institution of the first Passover, and Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion, and that connection is real and appropriate. At the same time, it is important to note that the first Passover was designed to separate the Israelites from the Egyptians, and to form them as a people and a nation, God’s own people and nation.

Jesus came to proclaim a new covenant. The Gospel according to Jesus Christ is a message of love and reconciliation and inclusion. Notice that as Jesus institutes our most holy act of sharing his body and blood, and models for us the servanthood of love by washing feet, he includes even his betrayer.

We are called by Jesus the Christ into an ever more radical form of community. Yes, it is a community of people who love one another and uphold one another in prayer and fellowship.

But like Jesus the Christ on the cross, his community faces outward. It spreads its arms to the world. It transforms evil by loving it to death. It practices community by inviting everyone to the table.

Radical community takes the table—the holy feast of love and forgiveness and reconciliation—to the hungry, the isolated, the stranger. It is community that carries the light of Christ into the world.

Soon we will strip the altar bare and begin our own march into the darkness of Good Friday, following Jesus the Christ. We will do it fortified by our communal feast, our radical act of community, and the knowledge that the blazing light of Easter awaits on the other side.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN

This Sibling of Yours

Lent 4, 31 March 2019, Grace Episcopal Church

My 7th Graders at Grace Episcopal Middle School did a research paper as one of their 3^rd Quarter requirements. They are studying the New Testament, so the list of topics they could choose from included a number of parables.

I received several papers on The Prodigal Son, but one stood out. Indeed, if only I hadn’t handed that paper back to Brandon a week and a half ago, with a nice big “100” and smiley face on, I could read it to you today, sit down, and know that you had heard a perfectly good sermon.

I encourage the 7^th Graders to not just review and summarize for their papers, but to question and to reflect on what they have studied and researched. And it was Brandon’s last paragraph of reflection that made his paper stand out. It went like this….

When I first read this story, Brandon said, I didn’t like it. It upset me. It did not seem fair to the older son who had stayed home and worked and helped his father. That would be me. I’m the older son, Brandon said, and I thought he was right to be upset at his father for being so generous toward the sinful younger son.

But the more I thought about it, Brandon went on, the more I realized the father was right to forgive the younger son. The father gave the younger son a second chance, and everyone should get a second chance. We all make mistakes.

Prodigal Son by Kristi Valiant

Not bad for a 7^th Grader, huh? And I’m right there with Brandon when I read this story. And I venture to guess I’m not the only one who really wants the older son to be the hero of the story!

Where I would push Brandon a little bit is on his numbering of chances. I am confident someday he will recognize that with God, we all get unlimited chances. Each and every moment, and when we draw our last breath, God is waiting with one more chance.

But Jesus was unrelenting in his criticism of self-righteousness, which is what we have on display in the older son.

Timothy Keller is a Presbyterian pastor who has written a quite good little book on this parable. It’s called “The Prodigal God,” his point being that it is the father who is “recklessly extravagant” in love and forgiveness and willing to spend everything to welcome home his lost son.

Keller also points out that in patriarchal society, which was the context of the telling of this story, the older son’s insolence in chastising his father is at least as disrespectful—perhaps more—than the younger son in asking for his inheritance and then spending it on wine, women and song.

But there’s something else in this story that really popped when I read it again—for the umpteenth time—in beginning to prepare for this sermon. Isn’t that what draws us to Holy Scripture over and over again? No matter how often we have read a story or a passage, something new can grab us…. just when we are finally ready or, perhaps, most need to hear it.

So I’m reading the dialogue between older son and father, and suddenly…. my own voice is ringing in my ears. Look at this with me. The older son has discovered the party and is standing outside, angry and resentful. The father comes out to reason with him.

Now that in itself is more evidence of the prodigal love and grace of the father. The patriarch of the family is not obligated to try to reason with a petulant child, to leave his guests, the side of the son who has miraculously returned to life, to go outside to deal with a temper tantrum.., but he does.

The older son reminds his father of his hard work, his obedience, and he criticizes his father for not showing his gratitude. Then he says, But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him! 

“This son of yours.” Can’t you just hear the contempt dripping from those words!

And the father comes back, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. 

“This brother of yours.” What a different spin that puts on things.

You see, I think, in this contentious age, we have gotten quite good at righteous language that distances us from each other.

Here’s how I heard my own voice in that exchange between the father and the son.

Not so long ago, sometime in the past year or two, I was having a conversation with someone about a person whose manner of life is extremely distasteful to me. Indeed, I see that person as lacking a moral compass altogether.

But at some point in the conversation, I began to feel kind of bad about my criticism, like I was being rather unchristian, if you will. And so I said, by way of ending the conversation, “But he is a child of God, a lost child of God, but a child of God nevertheless.”

And I remember feeling some satisfaction that I had remembered my Good Christian manners and said that.

But it was distancing language. And confronting the fact that the very person I was being critical of is my brother in the family of God is a whole ‘nother matter.

Yes, we are all children of God. But that makes us brothers and sisters with and in Jesus the Christ. Siblings.

What difference does that make? How is it different, down in the gut where we measure such things, to say that the person I am at cross purposes with, or whose lifestyle or decisions or views or behavior or whatever I find problematic… is not merely another child of God, but my brother or my sister in Christ?

I’m not sure I can answer that for myself; I certainly can’t answer it for you. So I’m going to leave this sermon up in the air , just like Jesus left this story up in the air.

Each of us must decide. Will we stand outside, the disgruntled older son or daughter, wearing our righteousness like armor? Being right at the expense of being in community? Or will we go in to the party, embrace our brothers and sisters in Christ, even those, especially those with whom we most disagree?

The door is open. God knows who we are.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.