Does God's Mission Have You? A Sermon for 21 August 2011

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La.

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. As usual, I began sermon preparation by casting about on the Internet to see what others were saying about today’s lessons.

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 brilliant insight, but plan to have my own way with it. So allow me to repeat:

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.

I am currently taking a course at the Diocesan School on Anglican Theology, and we began yesterday with a lecture on things that led up to the Protestant Reformation, things like 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 nail to a church door, but did present to his Bishop along with a letter of 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 churches acting arrogantly, and taking over the role of God in sorting the good sheep from the bad. In recent months we have seen religious fanatics, Muslim and Christian alike, blowing up, gunning down, burning holy books, sabotaging the construction of worship spaces… from the Middle East to Tennessee and Florida, and from New York City to Norway, of all places.

And then there’s the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas spreading its anti-gay hatred across the country. The churches behind the “pray away the gay” movement. Even our own church’s civil war over doctrine and the interpretation of Scripture.

These are surely examples of religious institutions—churches, mosques, synagogues—pursuing their own mission in the world rather than God’s.

But let us 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 a St. Andrew’s, and a St. Thomas’ and a St. Alban’s. God’s Mission has a Diocese of Western Louisiana, an Episcopal Church… and on and on.

How does it re-orient our thinking to say that these units of church do not have a mission, rather God’s Mission has them? Indeed, perhaps we should pose it as a question: Does God’s Mission have them?

This might be an especially useful and important question for St. Andrew’s to consider as you embark upon the task of preparing a parish profile as part of your search for a new rector!

Likewise, it is an extremely important question for this Diocese as we prepare a profile in search of our next Bishop.

Saint Teresa church window, Convento de Sta Teresa,
Ávila de los Caballeros, Spain.

                                
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?

Our Bishop has been known to pose the question this way: “If Christianity were illegal,” he asks, “would there be enough evidence to convict us?”

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 was going to stand here and name names, but.. you can put your own name in the sentence. Now 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 ego.

But what can we do with and in response to this moment of profound humility? For as we recognize that the Mission is God’s, and that we are called to belong to God’s Mission, we must also recognize—in gratitude and with fear and trembling—that we are, at one and the same time, wholly inadequate but selected and formed by God precisely for that purpose.

The 16th Century nun, Teresa of Avila, said it like this:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ's compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which he is to bless...

AMEN.

Practicing Resurrection: A Sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter, 23 April 2011

Note: This sermon was preached at Trinity Episcopal Church, Natchitoches, La. To listen to a digital recording of the sermon, visit the church's website.

When it comes to resurrection scenarios, Matthew (28:1-10 NRSV) seems to have taken a page out of the book of epic filmmaker Cecile B. DeMille.

You might recall that in Mark’s resurrection story, the stone is already out of the way when the women arrive. A young man in white seated quietly inside the tomb tells them Jesus is not there. The scene ends in dumbstruck silence with the women running away, afraid to tell anyone what they had seen.

But Matthew is all high drama. An angel in blazing white descends from heaven before their very eyes, single-handedly rolls a mighty stone out of the way… and triumphantly sits on it. The men—not the women—the men on guard duty swoon at the sight.

Then the angel makes his magnificent proclamation, the women turn to go—according to Matthew, in fear and great joy, and suddenly Jesus himself stands before them. And the women fall at his feet and worship him.
                    

                
But I left out a very important detail. Matthew puts his high drama in motion with nothing less than.. an earthquake.

Can it escape our notice that just yesterday, at high noon, an earthquake punctuated the last breath of Jesus the Christ.. on a cross.. in a place of death called Golgotha?

Can it escape our notice that just a few weeks ago, an earthquake rocked Japan, then sent a giant tsunami wave of destruction crashing into the same shores, killing thousands and leaving utter devastation in its wake?

Can it escape our notice that just over a year ago, an earthquake leveled the capital city of Haiti, killing thousands and leaving millions homeless?

We are all too familiar with earthquakes, and the human tragedy they cause. So what in heaven’s name is one doing, here, right in the middle of our resurrection story?

Nora Gallagher is a novelist who has also written several books about her own spiritual journey. One of them is called Practicing Resurrection. It is an account of how the loss of a beloved brother throws her life into a tailspin, and of her return from walking straight down a wrong vocational path, dragging a failing marriage.

Gallagher’s struggle back requires her to re-examine everything: her call, her work, her marriage. It leads her finally to an exploration of nothing less than life after death. She finds that “experiences of resurrection are not believing six impossible things before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything else, needs to be practiced.”

We have all been there, in one way or another. Human existence is a series of earthquakes, large and small. Some are beyond our control. I have never experienced an earthquake of the natural kind, but I imagine that little can be more terrifying than to feel the very earth move under our feet. It is the ultimate loss of control.

Other earthquakes are of our very own making. We march resolutely into dead ends and struggle to find a way back out again.

And as Matthew illustrates by putting an earthquake smack dab in the middle of the resurrection story, joyful events can also create upheaval in our lives. A baby is born, and mom and dad must create a new marriage out of the ashes of the honeymoon, a marriage in which gazing into each others’ eyes is replaced by advanced skill in “keeping an eye on” 16 different things at once, from the shrinking pile of disposable diapers to the toddler about to stick its finger in the puppy’s eye.

We don’t have to be control freaks to long for some control, some ability to maintain our balance as we face big challenges and small ones of daily life. But we have so very little. Fr. Richard Rohr defines human suffering precisely in these terms. “When are humans suffering?” he asks. “When they have no control.”

It often seems to me that it is precisely when we think we finally have it together, that we are finally on top of our game, that life hands us the most deadly, life-destroying blows. And we suffer.

Someone we love dies. A spouse or lover leaves us. A friend betrays us. We are downsized by our employer. Our company fails. An economic downturn takes most of our nest egg. Our politics turn nasty. Our children and grandchildren are sent half way around the world to fight a war that we are just not sure is worth the sacrifice of young, beautiful lives.

We aren’t in control, and much of the time it looks like God isn’t either.

But God chose to become human, to suffer and die on a cross in order to rise again in power over death. How do we understand that? As a one-time event? An economic transaction in which Jesus "paid a price” to God--or, was it to the devil?--so that we can live happily ever after, some day in some glorious future?

That kind of thinking certainly creeps into our religion through the words of hymns, sermons, meditation guides, and so forth. But it is wrong-headed. It diminishes the meaning of resurrection by making it a mechanical transaction trapped in history, and our lives something to be “gotten through” for some period of time while we await the coming of Glory.

As Fr. Richard observes, it makes our religion a mere “evacuation plan for the next world.”

The fundamental story of our faith is that something always must die before something new, bigger, better can be born. And the thing that must die is our own beloved ego.

Earthquakes are destructive, but the human ego even more so. It is the human ego that leads us to destroy others in myriad ways, physically and emotionally, individually and as nations. The human ego destroys others with its need to be right, to save face, to feel secure, to judge, to divide the world into black vs. white, good and evil, us vs. them. The human ego is destructive in its need to take sides and to believe that God is on ours.

In Matthew’s resurrection story, the women fall down and worship Jesus. But in fact Jesus never once asked us to worship him. What he asks is that we follow him. And to follow Jesus the Christ, rather than merely believe in him or worship him, although those are good things, we must practice dying so that we can practice resurrection. Might this be what Paul means when he says we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ?

To let go of our prideful clinging to being right, being in control, being safe and secure… feels like dying. But if we can do that, and if we can follow Christ through the suffering and through the ashes of our hurts and losses and failures, the earthquakes of our lives become the very path to living our faith and sharing God’s love with a hurting world, which is to say, the very path to practicing resurrection.

AMEN.