That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: First John (Page 4 of 4)

Grow My Church! – Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter – May 20, 2012

May 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Sunday after the Ascension): Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1; 1 John 5:9-13; and John 17:6-19.

This graphic is the work of Matthew Todd Spiel and is used under the terms of a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.The story from the Acts of the Apostles this morning tells us that the apostles, in choosing a replacement for Judas Iscariot, relied on a game of chance. They couldn’t decide between two candidates so, rather than voting, they “cast lots”, drew straws, rolled the dice. Matthias got the short straw. As I was contemplating these lessons, and particularly this story, this week, I was also assaulted by radio and television advertisements for the new Horseshoe Casino in downtown Cleveland. And just like the lessons of the past few weeks, this coincidence of events triggered a memory of childhood. But this week, the memory was not of summers spent with my grandparents, it was of Saturdays spent with my father.

My father, R. York Funston, was a Certified Public Accountant in Las Vegas, Nevada. During the 1940s and 1950s one of the ways the authorities kept tabs on the gaming industry was through weekly audits of the casino records conducted by state-appointed CPAs, of which my dad was one. For some reason, the Gaming Control Board thought Saturday mornings would be the best time for the books to be collected, so that was when he would make the rounds of the five casinos he was responsible for. It was also the day my mother did her housekeeping and she didn’t want me underfoot, so I would accompany my dad as he drove through Las Vegas visiting the casinos.

The Las Vegas of the early 1950s was rather different from the city one visits today. In those days, Las Vegas as about the size of current-day Medina, Ohio. A permanent population of right around 30,000 people, a downtown like that of any other city with a Sears-Roebuck, a Rexall drug store, a locally owned department store called Ronzone’s, a movie theatre that showed double-features, and half-a-dozen or so casinos. We lived near the south edge of town in a post-war housing development called Huntridge. Just a couple blocks south of us was Sahara Boulevard, south of which was the desert and a collection of horse ranches called Paradise Valley.

Dad and I would get up and leave the house at about 6 a.m. on Saturday mornings and drive through Paradise Valley headed for the Tropicana Hotel & Casino to pick up the first set of books. Then we’d hit three other places on the strip and finish up downtown at Binny Binion’s Horseshoe, the casino which eventually became the big publicly-traded corporation now running a casino in Cleveland.

This was not, in terms of miles traveled, a very long trip, but it would take about four or five hours because at each stop my dad would have a cup of coffee and a conversation with the casino managers. At each place, I would get to spend time with a change girl or a cocktail waitress while Dad conducted his business, and sometimes I’d get to meet other people. For example, I met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and all the rest of the Rat Pack when I was four years old. But when we got to Binion’s, I got to do something else.

The Horseshoe was on the corner of Fremont, the downtown main street of Las Vegas, and Third Street, and the whole corner of the building was open to the street. Right at the corner, visible for everyone passing by to see, was a big glass box in which, it was said, there was $1,000,000 in U.S. currency in bills of various denominations. On either side of the box stood a uniformed guard carrying a shotgun. Casino patrons could get inside that box with all that money and large fan would blow a whirlwind around them and lift those bills so they were flying all around the person. I’m not sure how long the patron had, maybe a minute, but whatever it was, the idea was that during that period of time whatever bills the person could catch and hold on to, they got to keep. My dad would leave me there at the entrance to Binion’s Horseshoe and let me watch those people trying to catch money while he went inside and got the books. I never saw anybody catch very many bills – that’s really hard to do.

So when the Bible describes a game of chance as the means by which the apostles chose a successor to Judas, and the radio is broadcasting ads for a new casino in Cleveland, I remember those childhood visits to Binion’s Horseshoe and those silly people grabbing at those flying bills.

Luke does not tell us whether Matthias was commissioned in any way for his ministry as Judas’s replacement, but I think we can be fairly certain that he was. Elsewhere in Acts Luke describes acts of laying of hands and prayer to commission people for special ministries, and church historians assure us that from the very earliest days of the church this was the regular practice. Today we are commissioning a group of St. Paul’s members to perform a special ministry as part of what is called a Grow My Church Task Force. The “my” in “Grow My Church” refers to Christ; this title is a paraphrase of Jesus’ “Great Commission” to the Apostles, the commandment given them just before his ascension into heaven. St. Matthew reports it in these words:

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always , even to the end of the age. (Matt. 28:19-20)

Jesus refers to his intention to do this in today’s gospel from John, in what is called his “high priestly prayer” offered to God on the night of the Last Supper. In fact, this prayer is the Apostles’ commissioning by Jesus for the ministry they will be given:

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth. (John 17:17-19)

The word for sending here in the original Greek of the New Testament is apostello and it is from this word that we get our word apostle – an apostle is one who is sent.

In a few minutes, we will formally commission the Task Force, we will make them apostles sent to do a job, but before we do, I want to tell you what the Vestry, our parish governing board, has charged them to do. At its last meeting, the Vestry adopted this resolution:

We, the Vestry of St Paul’s Episcopal Church formally charge the members of the newly formed Grow My Church! Team, which includes Barbara Baird, Shelley Triebsch, Mark Hansen, Joe Mahn, David Muffet, Steve Rucinski, and Ray Sizemore, to help us learn more about our congregation. We commend to you the Grow My Church! course and ask that you exercise all diligence in prayer and study, and return to us with recommendations. Therefore, in the course of your study we formally charge you to develop a Congregational Growth Plan to help reinvigorate our church and better live out our role in The Great Commission. We pledge to review your recommendations, intending to fruitfully apply your work as the Holy Spirit guides us. We expect to hear back from you in four months and pledge to keep everyone involved in our prayers

The Task Force will be meeting on Monday evenings for twelve weeks. Each meeting will address a particular topic:

  1. Organization
  2. Landscape (What are the societal and community factors influencing our church?)
  3. Leadership (How does our governance structure work? How could it be improved?)
  4. Purpose (What is our mission? How well is it known to our members and to non-members?)
  5. Worship (Why we gather on Sunday? What do we do? What should we do?)
  6. Spirituality (What is our church’s relationship with God?)
  7. Service (What are our community outreach ministries? Are there others we should be doing?)
  8. Fellowship (What about the social time we spend together? Can it be improved?)
  9. Generosity (How do we talk about money? How do we raise it, use it, steward it?)
  10. Hospitality (How are we at welcoming the visitor and incorporating the newcomer?)
  11. Invitation (How well do we do at asking others to join us? What can we do to make our invitations more frequent and more effective?)
  12. Growth Plan (Putting it all together with action recommendations reported to the Vestry.)

OK … so that’s who they are, what they’ve been commissioned to do, and how they’re going to go about doing it.

Here’s what I hope they (and we) won’t do.

First, I hope they won’t be like those people in the glass box at Binion’s Horseshoe grabbing at the flying money. I sometimes feel that that is what the church has been doing for the past three or four decades. We have known that church membership has been declining, that Average Sunday Attendance has been going down, but we haven’t known what to do about it, so we stand in the whirlwind and grab at anything that flies by. We’ve had program after program that was supposed to reinvigorate the church and make us grow. We’ve had canned studies called Edge of Adventure, Living the Adventure, Faith Alive, Acts 29, and on and on. We’ve had spiritual experiences like Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, the charismatic movement, and the so-called contemporary worship craze. We’ve done Natural Church Development and we’ve done Unbinding the Gospel.
Some of these things have worked for while; some of these things have taught us lessons we ought to remember; some of these things actually have done harm. But much of it has been “like chaff which the wind blows away” or like the dollar bills flying around in that glass box. I hope this Task Force doesn’t repeat that experience but will be solidly grounded and take from the things we’ve tried and the things they study some good, reliable insights on which to make recommendations to the Vestry and to all of us. I hope that in this study this Task Force will be “like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season.”

Second, I hope they won’t feel constrained by the past. I hope they won’t use (or even hear) two sentences. One is “We’ve never done it that way before” and the other is “We’ve always done it that way before.” There are lots of things that we (throughout the church not just in this parish) have not done that we clearly ought to be doing; and there are plenty of things that we’ve done for years that we need to abandon. Someone recently reminded me of an observation made back in the 1990s by Father Robert Farrar Capon, one of the great writers of our church. Fr. Capon, in a book entitled The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-and-Found of Church History, wrote:

The church can’t rise because it refuses to drop dead. The fact that it’s dying is of no use whatsoever: dying is simply the world’s most uncomfortable way of remaining alive. If you are to be raised from the dead, the only thing that can make you a candidate is to go all the way into death. Death, not life, is God’s recipe for fixing up the world.

As John wrote in today’s epistle, God intends for us to have eternal life, “and this life is in his Son,” and his Son said:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24-25)

I believe that is as true for the church as a community as it is for each of us as individuals, but just as individuals must die to self in order to be born again, the church must die to all the things, the practices, the ways-we’ve-always-done-it that may have worked in the past but that are now holding us back.

Third, I hope that you won’t ignore their work. I hope you will participate in this process. As the Task Force works through these twelve weeks of study, they will be seeking your input. This white board over here will be in the hallway each week with a question or maybe two. There will be inserts in your bulletin for your answers. Please give them and put them on the board with those colored magnets you see. And sign them! The Task Force cannot respond to anonymity – they may want to get more information from you and they will want to respond to you. So give them your thoughts and take ownership of them. Have the courage of your convictions and let the Task Force have your testimony about your church.

Finally, after we commission them, we will hold them responsible for producing an action plan to report to the Vestry within four months pursuant to that resolution. I hope that they won’t just walk away from it. I hope that they, in turn, will hold us responsible to do the things in that plan. They are a Task Force and when their task is done, they will be discharged and their team disbanded, but I hope they will continue to be active in our pursuit of the Great Commission making sure that we do what they determine in this study we need to do.

The liturgy of commissioning the members of the Grow My Church! Task Force is in your bulletins. Would you please pull that out while I ask the members of the Task Force to step forward….

Dancing for Joy – Sermon for Easter 6B – May 13, 2012

May 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B: Acts 10:44-48, Psalm 98, 1 John 5:1-6, and John 15:9-17.

Are you a music fan? A classical music fan? I am. I love the great symphonies – Beethoven’s Fifth, his Ninth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Dvorak’s From the New World, and many others – they just bowl me over. I can sit down in a concert venue and no matter what emotional state I may be in, a good symphony or concerto can overcome it – cynicism, depression, grumpiness, whatever my condition may be it will be conquered by the music and I will be uplifted. It doesn’t even have to be live in a concert hall. Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit out of sorts, I’ll put on a CD and just let great music lift me up. In fact, even badly played band music can have that effect.

When we first moved from Nevada to Kansas in 1993, Evelyn was unable to accompany the children and me. We had been unable to sell our home and she was unable to transfer her job for several more months. So she stayed in Las Vegas while in August the kids and I moved into an A-Frame farmhouse on 40 acres just outside the town of Bucyrus, Kansas. The kids enrolled in Circle Grove Elementary School and Patrick decided he wanted to learn to play a musical instrument in the band. So he started instruction on the clarinet. Three weeks into the semester, the Fifth Grade Band had its first concert. Believe me that I am being inordinately charitable when I describe it as abysmal – it was SO bad!

Several weeks later Evelyn was able to join us for a few days at Thanksgiving and it just happened that the band was giving its second concert, a holiday offering, while she was with us. Well . . . to be honest, once again, with still only three months of instruction, the band was terrible. But they were so much better, by orders of magnitude better, than they had been at the end of September that I just couldn’t shut up about how good they were. Evelyn looked at me like I had lost my mind; four months in Kansas had clearly unhinged me! But I just had to get down to the stage to tell the band instructor what a marvelous job she had done! I was simply gushing with excited praise for what she had accomplished.

This is precisely what is happening in John’s First Letter. He is so excited about the love of God, so effusive that words just keep flowing across his page: I can see him sitting with his stylus scribbling away, trying to find new ways to write about this wonderful new Christian faith. The way he repeats things, the way his ideas tumble over one another, you can tell he’s just bubbling over with enthusiasm and eagerness.

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.

In fact, John’s vision of the Christian faith is just like my experience of sitting in a symphony hall. The way my mood, whatever it may be, is overcome by the music is the way John envisions the world being conquered by our faith. Jesus calls us to love our God and our neighbor in such a way that the world can’t help but be won over. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” And John assures us that this call is not burdensome.

It may not be burdensome . . . but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take some effort, does it?

There is a story of a young sailor on a small ship sailing through the night. The captain instructed him to take the helm while the captain went below for a brief nap. “All you need to do,” explained the captain, “is follow the North Star,” which he carefully pointed out to the sailor. “Do you think you can do it?”
“Yes, sir!” the sailor replied. “You can count on me” as he took the wheel and the captain disappeared below.

Several hours later the captain woke from his nap and came up on deck. One look at the sky he knew immediately that the ship was off course. “Sailor,” he said. “What have you been doing? Why aren’t we headed toward the North Star?”

“Oh,” said the sailor. “We passed that an hour ago!”

Keeping one’s eye on the Pole Star and staying on a heading for it . . . it’s not burdensome, but it takes effort.

In theology there is a concept called adiaphora. It means “things indifferent” and refers to matters which are debatable or spiritually neutral. There are essentials of the Christian faith such as the deity of Christ, Jesus’ physical resurrection, the centrality of the Sacraments in worship, and so forth. But there are also lots of things that we get exorcised about which are non-essentials, things that are neither commanded nor forbidden in Scripture. These include such things as whether to use candles or not, whether to furnish a worship space with chairs or pews, what time of day our services should be held, what sort of music to sing, and so forth. The adiaphora, some would argue, might also include the very important but nonetheless secondary issues that we grapple with, such as war and peace, abortion, marriage equality, healthcare and welfare, and a host of current issues. All of which can, and frequently do, command our attention and distract us from keeping our eye on the Pole Star of our faith, which is Jesus!

As business coach Steven Covey might put it, we forget that “the main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.” The main thing, Jesus said, is this: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” That is not a burden, but it does take effort because of all the distractions turning around us in this world. This is what T.S. Elliot wrote about in the poem Burnt Norton one of his Four Quartets, in which we find these lines:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I love that image, “At the still point of the turning world . . . .” For a Christian, that “still point” is Jesus. “At the still point of the turning world . . . there is only the dance.”

If I’d thought about it, before putting this sermon to bed last night, I’d have included “The Lord of the Dance” in today’s hymns:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun.
I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth;
At Bethlehem, I had my birth.
Dance, then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance, said he,
And I lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I lead you all in the dance, said he.

Wonderful, joyful piece of music. The tune is based on the Shaker melody, ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple and Aaron Copland used it in Appalachian Spring, which is another of those orchestral pieces of music that can pull me right up out of any funky attitude into happiness.

Have you ever heard the term “dance for joy”? Did you know that’s from the Bible? The Prophet Jeremiah wrote that God will come and gather his people like a shepherd gathers his flock, that there will be an abundance of crops, of grain, of oil, of herds, and that “the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in.” (Jer. 31:13, Common English Bible)

Jesus said in today’s gospel lesson that joy is the very purpose of his not-terribly-burdensome command: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” That’s where the whole gospel is headed, where the whole arc of salvation history is taking us, where God wants us to be. Our Christian faith is taking us – to joy, to the kind of joy that lifts and us completely fills us like a good symphony, to the kind of joy that makes us dance. And that is why our faith is “the victory that conquers the world” at the still point of which there is only the Lord of the dance.

From time to time, we need to be reminded of this. The goal of the Christian faith is not purity; it’s not morality; it’s not bringing world peace or world dominion; it’s not the right to life or the right of reproductive choice; it’s not the sanctity of marriage or marriage equality. The goal of the Christian faith is none of those nor any other secondary thing we can imagine or get distracted by. The goal of the Christian faith is nothing less than joy, a joy that fills us completely and fulfills itself in love.

We . . . each one of us individually, and all of us together . . . need to keep our eye on the Pole Star of our faith, on Jesus, on the Lord of the dance, and remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Amen.

Know – Go – Show: Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B – May 6, 2012

May 6, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary for the 5th Sunday in Easter, Year B: Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:24-30, 1 John 4:7-21, and John 15:1-8

On Thursday of this past week, a client of the food pantry of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, shot and killed the parish secretary, Brenda Brewington; shot and critically wounded one of the parish priests, the Rev. Dr. Mary-Marguerite Kohn; and then shot and killed himself. His name was Douglas Jones. The cutting short of those lives is not the sort of pruning about which Jesus speaks in today’s gospel lesson, but I could not let go of that image as I thought about and prayed about what happened in Maryland. As you all know, we here at St. Paul’s have our own regular food pantry ministry – the Free Farmers’ Market – and, on occasion, volunteers, including me although I don’t work the Market as often as I used to, have been threatened with violence by clients who have clearly had some cognitive dysfunction. The same has happened on weekdays when needy persons have come to the office seeking assistance; we have had uncomfortable and sometimes scary incidents in the office. I have never taken them very seriously. Perhaps I should. But I do not believe that the murder of church workers, lay or ordained, is the sort of “pruning” Jesus is here talking about. On the other hand, I have no doubt that from this tragedy in Maryland there will come much fruit. I have no doubt because I have heard the resolve in the voice of the bishop of Maryland, in the words of the parish and diocesan spokespeople who have interfaced with the media, in the reactions of clergy and laity throughout the church, and especially in the words of the parish’s rector, Fr. Kirk Kubicek. There will be growth from this horrible event because, while this is not the sort of pruning our Lord describes in this gospel lessons, the determination with which those most affected are facing this heartbreak, is the fruit of the Vine which is Christ, the Vine of which we are also branches. Today, in our prayers, we will pray for repose for those who died and for strength for those left behind.

Well . . . .

I hadn’t really planned to do a sermon series about my childhood summers spent with Edgar and Edna Funston, but these “I am” statements of Jesus from the Fourth Gospel keep taking me back there, so once again . . . a story from Winfield, Kansas, fifty years ago.

It was the summer of 1961, that was the second summer my cousins were there as well. Bob – two years old then me, Randy – 20 months younger, and I decided we wanted to build a tree house. So we asked Granddad if we could do that and he said, “Yes.” He didn’t ask which tree we were thinking of using, and he didn’t give us any direction . . . he just said, “OK.” So we proceeded to build our tree house in his prize pie cherry tree.

My grandmother made wonderful cherry pies from that trees fruit. I think those cherry pies are the reason that’s my favorite kind of pie . . . and why I’m usually disappointed when I order my favorite kind of pie in a restaurant. They were my grandfather’s favorite pies, too.

That’s probably why he got so angry when he saw what we’d done. I’m sure he thought he’d never see another cherry pie from that tree again. Back in 1961 grandfathers could still spank their grandsons . . . and he did. Fifty years later and I still remember it. He also tore down the tree house we’d worked so hard to build.

Fast forward several months to June, 1962. Back in those days the Los Angeles Unified School District ended classes on the last school before Memorial Day (which wasn’t always on a Monday like it is now) and started them on the Tuesday after Labor Day (which always was the first Monday of September). My mom would always arrange to take a week of vacation the second week of June so she could drive me to Kansas, so I’d usually arrive at my grandparents sometime between the 5th and the 10th of June. That just happens to be cherry picking season in southeast Kansas. I usually looked forward to that . . . but not in 1962. Like my granddad, I was sure there would be no cherry harvest, and I was sure that he would again make his displeasure known.

Well, contrary to all expectations, not only was there a cherry harvest, it was the largest harvest from that tree in several years. My grandfather’s first words to me that summer were, “I owe you an apology. I guess that tree needed pruning.” It wasn’t the most attractive and artful job of pruning that Bob and Randy and I had done, but it was effective. We enjoyed more cherry pies that summer than you could imagine! And Grammy canned cherries for weeks.

I learned two things from that episode. One was that an honorable person apologizes when he’s proven wrong. My grandfather was nothing if not honorable. The second was the value of pruning. I’m a terrible gardener. I don’t enjoy it and I usually produce next to nothing useful when I try, but I know (because of that cherry tree) the purpose and value of pruning.

So when Jesus, in this the seventh and last of the great “I am” statements in John’s Gospel, talks about pruning, I know exactly what he is saying. I know what pruning is, I know that pruning can be painful, and I know that pruning produces results.

Last week, you’ll remember, we heard another of the “I am” statements: “I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus said then. These metaphors that Jesus uses, these agricultural pictures that Jesus paints for us last Sunday and today are graphic reminders of our total dependence upon God, our pitiful inability to flourish with his nurturing. Sheep without a shepherd who (unlike the hired hand) remains with them in danger, even at the cost of his life, stray to solitary deaths. Vines without a a skilled vineyard keeper to prune away superfluous, misguided, and barren branches bear little or no fruit. Jesus didn’t say as much last week, but flocks like vines need to be cut back.

Where I was living in Ireland last summer was a livestock producing area. My cottage was on a cattle farm, not a ranch … they don’t have ranches in Ireland! Anyway, my landlords, John and Marion, would by a dozen or so steer calves each year, fatten them for some several months, and then sell them to be slaughtered for beef. One evening over a beer, John told me that one gets to know the cows; they each have a personality and as one moves them from field to field you get to know them. So when slaughter time comes, it is sort of sad. “But,” he said, “I don’t know how my neighbour does it.” His neighbour had a lambing operation. He was there for the birth of each lamb. His children would name them. The lambs were practically members of the family! And, yet, at various times the neighbouring shepherd would have to make a decision: which lambs to cull, to send for slaughter, which to keep for breeding stock, which to sell to someone else as breeding stock. “I don’t know how you do that,” John said.

Every day I would take a long walk down that road accompanied by the farm dog Buddy and on some days I would see the shepherd out with the sheep and the lambs. One day I could tell by his demeanor that it was that day, that he was selecting among the lambs those who would be taken away for slaughter and those that would be kept for breeding. This was not a large industrial operation; this was a small family-run farm and I am sure that, as Jesus said in last week’s gospel, he knew each of those lambs. But what had to be done had to be done, sad though it might have made that shepherd.

Culling the flock or cutting the vine in the right place are exacting, necessary tasks which the skilled shepherd or vine grower must do. Unpruned, vines grow in wild, unruly ways, exploding with new branches and great leafy cascades, but few grapes. Unwatched, sheep scatter and lose their way, wandering heedlessly into danger; unculled, a flock weakens and all of the sheep suffer.

Flocks of sheep are disorderly and topsy-turvy crowds. Vines and their branches are similarly tangled and messy. With either, it’s just too hard to know what is what. Not only are we dependent on Jesus the Shepherd, on God the Vinedresser, but our lives are uncomfortably tangled up together. The Christian life is a flock-y, vine-y, branch-y, mixed-up mess of us and Jesus and others.

I think only one or two of us may have culled a flock, but I know that all of us have, at one time or another, pruned our suburban hedges or shrubs. You may have experienced, as I have, a feeling of hesitation, that unwillingness to strip away what have been thriving branches for a greater and unseen future good. But what, with all that tangle of branches, are the alternatives?

Over the past several years there has been much hand wringing over the state of the church, its decline in membership, its loss of congregations, the shrinking of parish budgets, and so forth. We’ve looked at statistical graphs, at flow charts, at columns upon columns of figures, and we’ve pointed fingers at one another, at those who left, at the secular world around us, and at all sorts of other things seeking someone or something to blame for it all. In the Episcopal Church, we’ve blamed our loss of membership on new prayer books or on old prayer books, on women in Holy Orders or on failure to receive women in the clergy, on the acceptance (or the lack of acceptance) of gays and lesbians, on old style music or on new kinds of music, never noticing that the same statistical declines were happening in all the mainline denominations where none of those things were issues. We have wrung our hands and cried out to one another, “We’re dying on the vine here!”

I believe that today’s gospel lesson gives us a different way to look at things. We on the Vine, that’s for sure! But we ain’t dying on it. I believe these past several years have been a time of cutting back, that we are the branches that remain after the Vinedresser has done his pruning, the flock that is now smaller after the Shepherd has done his culling. And I believe that means we are on the verge of a time of new and exciting growth, a productive time of bearing fruit, a time of expanding the flock. We have all that we need to do that because we have the promise of the gospel: “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

We know this! These are the most important words in epistle lesson from First John today: “We know that we abide in him.” Right there in your lesson insert; find those words and read them with me . . . “We know that we abide in him.” Again – “We know that we abide in him.” One more time – “We know that we abide in him.” With feeling! “We KNOW that we abide in him.”

We know that we abide in him. We know that we are loved by God, and so we also must love.

The most important words in the reading from the Book of Acts today are right at the beginning lesson: “An angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go’.” All the rest there, that story about the Ethiopian Eunuch, that’s just an example; it’s window dressing. The important words are “Get up and go!” Can you say those words with me? “Get up and go!” I want you to turn to the person next to you; I want you to be an angel to that person; I want you to say to that person, “Get up and go!” Go on, now! Say to that person next to you, “Get up and go!”

Get up and go! God’s love, our love must send us out, out of the church, out of our comfort zone, into the uncomfortable and unlovable circumstances around us. We must get up and go into places where love is absent; we must get up and go to people to whom love is simply unknown. To abide in Jesus, to be loved by God is to be given a mission, a mission to get up and go with what we know to those who cannot accept it, to the destitute, the broken, the lost, the hopeless; a mission to get up and go, not to tell them what we know, but to show them what we know, through our lives and by our actions. That is how and when we will bear fruit; that is how and when we will grow. Not merely to know that we abide in him, but to show that we abide in him!

We know … so get up and go … and show. Know, go, show! That is how we shall bear fruit and grow.

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, you know our world is broken, sinful, and shameful, filled with hate and with pain. Because of that brokenness and pain Brenda, and Mary-Marguerite, and Douglas died. Because of that brokenness and pain your Son our Savior Jesus Christ died. But in him you showed us that your love and your life know no bounds, are held back by no obstacles, not even death. Give us the faith to know that we abide in him, the faith to get up and go, the faith to show love even to the least lovable of people, in the least lovable of places, at the least lovable of times; Lord, give us the faith to know, to go, and to show, that we may bear fruit and grow, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lord Is My Shepherd: I HATE that! – Sermon for Easter 4 – April 29, 2012

April 30, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary for the Fourth Sunday in Easter, Year B: Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; and John 10:11-18.

Jesus the Good ShepherdMy father died in an automobile accident when I was five years old. Two things important to my religious life resulted from that. First, my mother and I stopped attending the Baptist church which she and my brother and I had gone to up to that point. Second, I started spending every summer with my paternal grandparents, Charles Edgar and Edna Earle Funston, in the town of Winfield, Kansas, and thus began attending the Methodist church during those summer vacations.

My grandparents were staunch Methodists. In those days that denomination was known simply as the Methodist Church, but as I remember the cornerstone of Grace Church identified it as having been established as a congregation of “the Methodist Episcopal Church (South)” which means that it was started as rather (shall we say) conservative parish. That certainly would have described my grandfather. (I’m named for my grandfather, but I thank my parents every day for deciding to change the middle name from “Edgar” to “Eric”. I don’t think I would have liked having the name “Edgar” – I’m not sure he did, either. The only person I ever heard call him “Edgar” was Edna! Everyone, including his grandchildren, called him “C.E.”)

My grandfather was a Sunday School teacher. When Edna and C.E. relocated to Winfield from Dodge City, Kansas, in 1919, the immediately joined Grace Church and almost as immediately my grandfather became a kindergarten Sunday School instructor. And he continued to teach that class for the next fifty years. I don’t mean that he continued to teach kindergarten. I mean that he continued to teach that class of individuals for the next five decades. The next year he was their First Grade teacher, and then their Second Grade teacher, and so on up until they were in their 50s and my granddad was in his late 70s! In that tradition, you went to Sunday School every week, regardless of your age; infants, children, youth, adults, everybody went to Sunday School.

As a result, my grandfather was well-versed in the Bible and in Wesleyan theology (probably as well as if not better than a lot of Methodist clergy), and he took it upon himself to make sure that his grandchildren were also well-instructed. So during those summer months, I not only went to Sunday School at Grace Methodist Church (where Sunday School was a year-round program; none of this “summer off” nonsense), I also received daily religious instruction at home. And one of the absolute requirements of that was that I learn the 23rd Psalm by heart (the King James Version, of course) and recite it every night at bedtime.

I hate the 23rd Psalm!

Eight years of saying it every night of every summer will do that to you! I tried to get him to change that. “Granddad, couldn’t we learn another psalm now? Say Psalm 117?” (I was being pretty cagey with that suggestion – the 117th Psalm is the shortest in the book – only two verses.) But, no, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” . . . every night!

After two years, my three cousins started also spending summers with our grandparents and I started sharing a room with my nine-month younger cousin Randy. In the room we shared, there was a picture of a nice looking young man (I suppose it was supposed to be Jesus), well-groomed with longish brown hair and neatly trimmed beard, wearing a long white robe, carrying an adorable (and clearly adoring) little lamb. That picture became the victim of our dislike of the 23rd Psalm. Every night after we’d said the psalm and bid our grandparents “Good Night”, Randy and I would throw spit-wads at that picture! (They say confession is good for the soul . . . I hope so – this is the first time I’ve ever told anyone about our late-night target practice with Jesus as the target!) Of course, that meant that we’d have to get out of bed early to clean off the picture for Grammy got a look at it!

So fast forward several years and here I am, now ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, and every year on the Fourth Sunday of the Easter Season I find myself confronted by the 23rd Psalm and Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year, it’s the same thing, the same lesson from the Gospel of John: “I am the Good Shepherd.” Every year, “The Lord is my shepherd.” (Of course, since the 1979 Prayer Book and its new translation of the Psalms, that long-engrained memorization of the KJV means that I get tongue-tied when we recite the gradual.) And every year I try to find something nice, something pleasant, something up-lifting to say about this metaphor that not only means very little to an urban, city boy like me, but one that I really actively dislike.

I suspect that the metaphor of shepherd and sheep doesn’t really work for most modern Americans. If Jesus is the shepherd that means we are the sheep and that’s not a terribly flattering thing to say. I know that a few of us in this congregation have some experience with sheep, but most of us just have vaguely sentimental fuzzy notions of cuddly little lambs, notions that are wrong because sheep really aren’t very loveable animals . . . so what does this metaphor really say about us and about our Lord? And this is a metaphor, make no mistake about that. Jesus wasn’t really a shepherd and his followers not really sheep. But metaphors are supposed to aid our understanding; they use the qualities of the one element to illustrate the qualities in the other. So Jesus as shepherd sort of works; followers as sheep, on the other hand, doesn’t work for me at all and probably not for some of you, either.

If you, like me, spend some time each day surfing the internet or checking out your Facebook page or using the web for research, you’ve probably learned that there are dozens if not hundreds of compilations of quotations, some famous, some not so well-known, from poets, playwrights, philosophers, holy books, and so on. You can search through these collections for pithy remarks on just about any topic imaginable. I tried doing that several times earlier this week . . . . Do you know that there are no positive comments about sheep!?!

I think that’s where and why the Good Shepherd metaphor breaks down for me. Yes, it says wonderful things about Jesus and his dedication to the flock . . . . But it doesn’t say much about the flock and what it says doesn’t really fit with what Jesus expects of the flock! Jesus expects the sheep to become shepherds . . . .

In the 21st Chapter of the Gospel of John there is a story familiar to all of us, a story one of those post-resurrection appearances Jesus made during the fifty days before he ascended into heaven. The story is that some of the disciples were fishing on the Sea of Galilee and from their boat they see someone grilling fish on the shore. At first, they are not sure who it is but eventually one of them realizes that it is Jesus, at which point Peter, impulsive Peter, jumps out of the boat and swims to the beach. The others bring the boat in and Jesus invites them to have breakfast. As they are eating the grilled fish, Jesus asks Peter “Do you love me?” Three times he asks this; Peter’s feelings are hurt because he asks three times. Each time Peter answers, “Yes, Lord. You know I love you!” And each time Jesus responds in some fashion commissioning Peter, who here represents all of us, “Feed my sheep. Tend my flock. Take care of my lambs.” Jesus expects the sheep to become shepherds . . . .

St. Paul put it this way: we are called, he said, “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;” we “must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13,15) In the real world, sheep don’t do that! They do not grow up into shepherds! One of those quotations I found said, “You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs.” (Max Beerbohm) It just doesn’t happen. So the metaphor breaks down, as all metaphors do. Jesus’ expectation, that the sheep become shepherds, nonetheless remains.

When I was in British Isles this past summer, I saw a lot of sheep. All over southern Scotland and northern England and throughout Ireland, one sees these lovely vistas of rolling hills, green pastures, and huge flocks of sheep. Sheep are lovely at a distance; not so pretty up close – they’re really quite dirty up close. But at a distance, they look like these lovely, fluffy white balls ambling across the beautiful, rolling, green pasture, mirroring the fluffy white clouds in the sky above . . . except in Ireland and Scotland. There, that pastoral scene is sort of marred by spray paint! Each sheep is marked with this splotches of bright red or bright blue spray paint! Sometimes both! First time I saw that, I wondered, “What’s that all about?”

Jesus says in today’s gospel lesson, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me,” but how is someone else supposed to know whose sheep are whose? By those markings! Those splotches of paint are the way the shepherds, who mix their flocks in the common fields, identify ownership of the sheep. I got to thinking about that in terms of our identity as members of Christ’s flock, because we are marked as well.

In the liturgy of baptism or of confirmation, a follower of Jesus Christ in the Episcopal Church and in a few other traditions is marked just as surely as those painted sheep are marked. We call it “chrismation”. Some specially blessed oil is taken and with it a cross is made upon the forehead of the newly baptized person or the person being confirmed; the person is marked! In the baptismal rite we say, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit is baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” (BCP 1979, pg. 308) We are marked just as surely as those painted sheep are marked! The problem, of course, is that our outward mark is made with clear oil which no one else can see. How is that mark to be made known to others?

There was a news story recently about a woman who was arrested for car theft. Apparently, another driver did something she found annoying and she hit the roof, and the horn, screaming in frustration, cussing a blue streak, making certain hand gestures. As a result of this conduct a police officer who witnessed it approached her vehicle and ordered her to get out with her hands up. He took her to the police station where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a cell. A couple of hours later she was released and the arresting officer apologized. He said, “I’m very sorry for this mistake. You see; I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the guy in front of you, and cussing a blue streak at him. I noticed the ‘Honk if you love Jesus’ bumper sticker, the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ bumper sticker, the ‘Follow Me to Sunday School’ bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk. Naturally, I assumed you had stolen the car.”

How do others know we marked as Christ’s own? In the absence of big splotches of red or blue paint, how does anyone know whose sheep I am? St. John said it in that bit we heard from this first general letter to day: our identity is made known “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” St. James put it another way, “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” (James 2:18) It is through our actions that our mark is made apparent to all. It is through truth and action, through faith shown in works of mercy and justice that we the sheep become shepherds, that we grow up into the fullness of Christ, that our mark is seen.

This is the question the 23rd Psalm (as much as I dislike it) and the Good Shepherd gospel raise for me. Am I like that woman arrested for car theft, who had a lot of words about Jesus on the back of her car but whose mark was not made visible in truth and action? Is my mark apparent to those around me? Can anyone else tell that I am “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever”?

“The Lord is my shepherd . . . .” Is that apparent to anyone else around me?

Amen.

Have You Anything Here to Eat? – Sermon for Easter 3B – April 22, 2012

April 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary for the Third Sunday of Easter, Year B: Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; and Luke 24:36b-48

From the Gospel according to Luke:

While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. (Luke 24:41)

Jesus Appears to the Disciples Behind Closed Doors, Duccio di BuoninsegnaI have to admit that I would be hard-pressed to choose one of the many post-resurrection appearances of Christ as my favorite. Each one recorded in Scripture is so full of vivid imagery and meaning that it would be nearly impossible to put one above another … having said that, however, I also have to admit an especial fondness for the one described here by Luke.

There are two things about this one that I really like. First is Luke’s comment that the disciples “in their joy … were disbelieving.” It’s such a great description of what their amazement must have been; it calls to my mind some of the great, little-used emotional descriptors of our language: consternation, bewilderment, perplexity, astonishment, and (my favorite) stupefaction. I think that’s what Luke is saying in this delightful turn of phrase, that the disciples were stupefied! It’s also Luke’s way of describing something that is handled somewhat more harshly in Mark’s telling of the story, which just happens to be the gospel lesson for the Daily Office today.
Mark, with typical economy of expression, describes the scene this way:

Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. (Mark 16:14)

In one ancient manuscript of Mark’s gospel that is not accepted in the received version the text continues by describing the apostles’ reply:

And they excused themselves, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits. Therefore reveal your righteousness now” – thus they spoke to Christ. (Codex Washingtonensis or Freer Logion)

I like this recorded post-resurrection appearance, apocryphal though it may be, nearly as much as the one in today’s reading from Luke’s gospel. The fact that “they excused themselves” and that they demanded of Jesus “reveal your righteousness now”. It’s nearly as good as Luke’s description of “joyful disbelief”! I absolutely love this! It’s so darned modern . . . or maybe even post-modern. You can almost hear the eleven saying something like, “Well, Jesus, that resurrection stuff may be true for you, but it’s not true for us!” When we read these to texts together, Luke and Mark, describing this scene in their different ways, we get such a wonderful picture of the apostles. Astonished but still making excuses, perplexed but still making demands, stupefied but still relativizing the situation . . . these men aren’t just First Century Palestinian Jewish fisherman; they are 21st Century Americans; they are us!

The second thing I find absolutely delightful about Luke’s telling of the story is Jesus’ question: “Have you anything here to eat?” If this scene were set in a modern home, I think we could envision it happening in the kitchen, the apostles sitting around the kitchen table, Jesus showing up, saying “Hey!” then going to the refrigerator, opening the door, and looking in like a teenager getting home from school, “Anything here to eat?” They do, as this version of Luke tells us, have that broiled fish handy, and in the King James Version (supported by some ancient manuscripts) Luke also reports that they gave him a piece of honey-comb.

There is a long line of biblical scholarship that tells us that Jesus’ asking for something to eat, and then actually eating it, is his way of proving to the stupefied disciples that he’s not a phantom. The idea is that by consuming it in front of them, Jesus proves that he has not returned as a spirit, or a ghost, or some sort of apparition; a ghost, after all, could not be touched, or have an appetite, or eat things. Lutheran pastor Doug Schmirler put it this way: “It may be Luke’s way of saying: ‘Ghost? Did you ever see a ghost chew? Did you ever see a ghost swallow? Did you ever see a ghost digest? Well, did you?'” That’s certainly a good way to look at this, but this story seen from the combined perspectives of Luke and the Freer Logion addition to Mark speaks to me in a different way.

I prefer the versions that include the honey-comb because that makes Jesus’ eating much more than a mere demonstration of non-ghost-ness; it makes it a meal. Something savory, and something sweet; an entree and a dessert. This is not just a “Look; see, I’m not a spirit”. This is Jesus once again sitting down at the dinner table with his friends, just like he had done in the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, just like he did once before in this upper room, just like he did with Cleopas and his companion in the inn on the road to Emmaus. This is the community once again sitting together at the kitchen table.

And just like every family, every community at every dinner table, they are talking and discussing and maybe even getting a little cross with one another if that additional bit to Mark’s Gospel is trustworthy.

There is a restaurant in San Francisco called Credo, which I’m sure you know is simply the Latin word for “creed”. On their walls are painted quotations from all sorts of philosophers, writers, politicians, and so forth. On their menus they have their business credo written out:

At Credo, we believe in nourishing both the body and the mind. Our walls depict the universality of ideas, the clash of conflicting viewpoints and the democratic nature of discussion and debate. We believe that good food and good company go hand-in-hand. We believe in the time-honored tradition of the dinner table debate and the value of impassioned points of view. We believe simple things can be wonderful, like authentic ingredients, genuine creativity and gracious hospitality.

This is what is happening here: dinner table debate, impassioned points of view, genuine creativity, and gracious hospitality. This is the glory and power of Christ’s Resurrection; the creation of community, a new community.

This is why I like this story that Luke and Mark tell from different perspectives so much; it is such a clear vision of the resurrected community. In the very human act eating of a meal, in very human condition perplexity and befuddlement, in the very human process of making excuses and making demands, these eleven, once a dispirited and possibly dying community, are resurrected. These are not simply individuals on a personal spiritual quest; they are joined together into a new community in Christ, crucified with him, now risen with him, given new life and new purpose and new mission because of his resurrection.

This new community is an on-going one, a growing one, a maturing one. As John says in the reading from his first letter this morning:

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. … What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. (1 John 3:1-2)

We do know this: that his eating the fish and the honey-comb revealed him to be a real human being and that that is what we are called to be – real human beings. Carroll Simcox, who edited the Episcopal Church magazine The Living Church for many years, put it this way:

You and I shall be our real, complete selves for the first time ever. We think of ourselves now as human beings. We really aren’t that?not yet. We are human becomings. The fetus conceived only yesterday is a human becoming. If you are living in Christ, believing in him and trying to follow and obey him as the master of your life, you are by his grace, becoming ever more and more like him. (Quoted by Guy Sayle, infra)

But John does not mean that God is making us into clones or exact replicas of Jesus of Nazareth. The wonderful paradox of the Christian faith is that the more we become like Jesus, the more we become our truest selves. The hope of the Christian faith is that we can become as truly human as the Resurrected Christ. Dr. Guy Sayles, a Cooperative Baptist preacher, put it this way:

As we discover deeper dimensions of Christ-likeness, we uncover more and more of our honest-to-God selves.

Jesus is the pattern and the power, the model and the source, of authentic human life. We are meant to have what he had and has:

  • a radical and liberating faith in God;
  • a childlike trust in the grace of God;
  • a trembling wonder before the mystery of life;
  • a durable hope that, because we are in God’s hands, death and sorrow and pain and tears are not the end, but joy and wholeness and laughter are;
  • an astonishing confidence that we and the world are headed, not toward midnight, but toward sunrise; and
  • an undimmed awareness that the heart of all things is unconditional and compassionate love.

Those eleven disciples sitting around that dinner table, confronted by what they at first thought was an apparition, were astonished but still making excuses, perplexed but still making demands, stupefied but still relativizing the situation. They were just like us, but as church history and the Book of Acts shows, in stories like the one we heard today, they became like him, they became their truest selves, and so shall we all. That is the power and promise of the Resurrection.

Alleluia and amen!

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