From Glory into Glory

I wrote this as a call and response for the sermon at our HipHop Mass on May 10, 2008 (the Eve of Pentecost).

The Spirit of God on the Streets of God
Ubuntu
We are all together in this life
Everyone deserves to live
Ubuntu
The Spirit of God makes us one
All people are one human family
Ubuntu
We are persons through other persons
Who we are is who we are with
Ubuntu
Each got the back of each
Caring, generosity is our creed
Ubuntu
The Spirit of God on the Streets of God

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York on Trinity Sunday: Genesis 1:1--2:4a

Once again, Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible called The Message comes through with a fresh sound to a familiar text—the Creation story.

Let us make human beings in our image, making them reflect our nature, so they can be responsible…[so] he created them godlike, reflecting God’s nature.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Many things—it is like a multi-faceted diamond, this reality. Peterson gives us two things it means: reflecting God’s nature and to be “godlike.”

The latter may stun us. It is one thing to say we are made in the image of God, quite another, perhaps, to say we are “godlike.” Isn’t that a sin, to think we are like God? Isn’t that what gets Adam and Eve into trouble in the story that follows this one?

I think there is a difference—a fine line perhaps, but still a difference—between being God and being godlike. Being God makes us equal to God—in charge of things. Being godlike makes us not God but like God, not in charge of things, but, as Peterson translates, responsible for them.

So the word “responsible” is a check on any power that being “godlike” seems to give us. There’s another check on this power, a bit more subtle, and something we Christians bring to the equation—the Trinity.

We are made to reflect the nature of God. What is God’s nature? The primary answer for Christians is “the Trinity.” It is God’s nature to be one-in-three, three-in-one.

The concept of the Trinity is a difficult one to grasp—always has been and always will be. Preachers traditionally dislike this Sunday because of the seemingly impossible task of “explaining” the Trinity. I don’t mind it so much myself, partially because I accept the fact that there is nothing to explain. I can no more “explain” the nature of God than I can “explain” my own nature, or yours.

The Trinity does not so much “explain” or “define” God as lead us more deeply into God’s mystery. God is One—that is fundamental—but when we peer deeply into the mystery of God we see something we do not quite expect. We see community.

If the Trinity tells us anything about the nature of God it is this—that community is at the very heart of God’s nature.

Therefore if we are to reflect this nature, we too must have community at our very heart. We are not made to be alone. We are made to be in relationship. Our very personhood depends upon other persons, some of our choosing, many not of our choosing.

I was well into my twenties before my adolescent rebellion toned down. I spent many years trying not to be like my parents. That is not an unusual thing, to test out and assert one’s autonomy. But there came a day when it suddenly dawned on me that the person I was depended on the persons my parents were and there was nothing I could do about that. “Son of Willi and Patti Hopkins” is a fundamental part of my identity. Of course, other relationships are constantly affecting my identity: spouse of John Bradley, priest of this parish, friend of this person and that person, uncle and one and on. Every person with whom I am in relationship deeply affects who I am.

I am made for community. You are made for community. And in that we are godlike.

The word “community” alone is not quite enough. Peterson gives us the right adjective to put with it. We are made for responsible community, community that has a particular way of being and doing. Community of responsibility, community of stewardship, community of generosity, community of hospitality, community of mutual, ever growing and ever changing identity.

There is a word for community like this in South Africa. The word is ubuntu. Ubuntu is an ancient African concept popularized by Desmond Tutu. It doesn’t translate into English very well. It is another multi-faceted diamond. It means all those things I just said: mutual identity and responsibility, stewardship, hospitality, generosity. It means living in solidarity—community—with all that is.

Ubuntu is what we were made for, and it is another way of expressing what we mean by the Trinity, the very nature of God.

We Christians believe not only that God is by nature Trinity but that all creation is as well. All creation is by nature community, responsible community, ubuntu.

Where’s the Trinity in our relationships? It’s pretty simple really. There is me and there is you and there is our relationship, the community we make, that is not just me and not just you, but a mysterious third thing that depends upon both of us to make it.

St. Augustine said long ago that the Trinity was the Lover and the Beloved and the Love between them.

Now what difference does this make in our lives?

It makes a difference that we are made for community and not for autonomy. Who each one of us is and what we do affects everyone and everything with whom we are in relationship. There is no such thing as a solitary self. “No man is an island,” as the poet and priest John Donne once said.

We are responsible for one another and in the biblical vision this “one another” is wider than we can possibly imagine. It is those we like and those we do not like. It is those known to us, and those who are strangers. Our lives are dependent upon one another, in as wide a circle as can possibly be.

That means when lives are damaged in the community around us, we are damaged. When a life is taken, like 16 year-old Daniel Davis’ life this past week, a piece of our life is taken. Our identities as members of this community we call Rochester are affected. We cannot pretend otherwise and be true to our biblical story.

So when another young life is taken on our streets we must ask, what is the response of responsible community? Sometimes the answer to that question comes very hard. But it begins by knowing that we absolutely have to ask it. We cannot let the murder of anyone, much less a child, drive us into a greater sense of autonomy where we have the illusion of safety. We cannot say, “That’s a tragedy but it really doesn’t affect me.” The first and most important step is to say, “This does affect me and calls me to greater responsible community.” That is Trinitarian acting, ubuntu.

On a brighter note, the renovations we are dedicating today are an act of Trinity, of responsible community, of ubuntu. We as individuals gave to this parish community and a need is being met, a need for deeper accessibility and hospitality. Our identity is changed by what we have done. We have been generous, we have cared for one another, and whenever we do that, God calls it “good.”

The good news today is that deep in the heart of God is community, and this means it is deep in our hearts as well. We are made for it, ever deepening, responsible community.

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the Day of Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21, John 7:37-39

How do we know when the Spirit shows up?

It’s an honest question, and an important one if this Spirit is God at work among us in the present time.

How do we know when the Spirit shows up?

We have a tendency in the church to claim that the Holy Spirit has shown up when things have gone our way, when God seems to be supplying our needs and clearing our path to something that we want.

But can the criteria for knowing when the Holy Spirit has been at work simply that we feel good about what has happened?

Being an Episcopalian I want to be a bit more rational about it than that. I have a suspicion of religious experience that is simply “feel good.” I want a bit more meat on the bones of the answer to the question.

How do we know when the Spirit shows up?

The images we use for the Holy Spirit are not very helpful to answer the question—they are at least confusing. On the one hand we have images of wind and fire, both things that move and change and shake up. On the other hand we have the image of the dove, all soft and, well, “coo-ey.” And then there is the image this morning of a spring of water within us and elsewhere John’s titles for the Spirit: Advocate and Comforter.

So which is it? Fire or dove? Wind or Comforter?

The answer must be both. But how? I want to propose that there is a kind of “cycle of the Holy Spirit”: the way the Spirit works using these contrasting images. The way we can tell that the Spirit has shown up in our lives.

The Holy Spirit is indeed the great mover and shaker of the people of God, and indeed the world. We can see this truth in the Acts reading this morning, the story of the day of Pentecost.

As the story goes, the disciples had been waiting in Jerusalem together for this promised Spirit after Jesus had taken leave of them. We are told they spent much time in “the upper room” together in prayer.

When the Day of Pentecost had come they were again together in that place of waiting and safety and calm. Then there came “a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” This was no soft summer breeze, but a hurricane. Suddenly things were anything but calm and safe. And what happened?

Among other things, they became exposed. They could no longer wait in that upper room. The Spirit “outed” them. And people took notice on the streets because these people were acting crazy, like they were drunk or something.

The Spirit always drives us out of our comfort zone, blows off the doors of our safe places and out into the streets. The most misnamed church I ever heard of was “the Ark of Safety.” I don’t think so. Not if the Holy Spirit is around.

We know the Spirit has shown up when we are not content just to be the Church in our safe and beautiful building dutifully at prayer. We know the Spirit has shown up when we feel literally shoved out the doors that have been blown off their hinges. Like those first disciples, the Spirit sends us onto the streets.

And then the Spirit sends us into community. That was the second sign of the Spirit in the Acts reading. First, the violent wind and the tongues of fire, and then the phenomenon of suddenly being given the gift of speaking in other languages, and being understood by the greatly diverse crowd that had gathered in pilgrimage for the festival. A new and wondrous community formed, but one so unlikely and so crazy looking that many bystanders suppose that a lot of people here began their latest binge with breakfast.

So the Spirit always drives us out the doors and into community. The Spirit forms unlikely, weird community—people together who don’t belong together.

This weird community into which we are called is, of course, the human family, the family of the streets. The Church as a community is meant to be a microcosm of that larger community. It is to its shame that it is often not.

The current Archbishop of Canterbury once said, “Baptism catches us up in solidarities not of our choosing.” We have a tendency to think of the church as a chosen community, because we do, by and large, choose which church we go to, and it is, naturally, one in which we feel comfortable. But Archbishop Rowan is quite right. The church is also a place of discomfort as we are put next to folks to whom we wouldn’t necessarily be attracted.

This ought to be true of the church at all levels. Despite the fact that we call a church like this one a “family,” I don’t think that all of you would actually choose all the rest of you to be members of your family. There is, and ought to be, irony in the air when we call one another sister and brother. It is why passing the Peace is such an important and profound act. We are wishing peace to all those around us, even those to whom we would not naturally wish peace—some of them our brothers and sisters that we wish God would give a swift kick in the rear.

But it is also why it is so important for us to be part of a diocese, and a worldwide fellowship of churches, because then the differences get very large and very stark. Yet the Spirit calls us into community with these very different people. It is why schism has always been seen to be perhaps the greatest sin in the church—it denies the work of the Spirit in bringing disparate peoples together.

So we know the Spirit shows up when we are driven out of our comfort zones and onto the streets and into community not entirely of our choosing.

But once there we find the Spirit to be Advocate and Comforter. In community we are upheld and given consolation. We need to seek this kind of community in all our communities, even the general civil society to which we all belong—the human family. We ought to be one another’s advocates and comforters. The Spirit seeks to empower us to be these things for one another.

This too is radical, because the world around us is deeply competitive and harsh. Instead of being one another’s advocates, we are encouraged to be one another’s accusers, and instead of being comforters we are encouraged to be autonomous. “The fewer people I depend on the better.”

Sadly the church can act this way as well, but we are called to a better way, the way of the Spirit, where we are all seen as deserving of this wellspring within and worthy of advocacy and comfort.

So there is a sense, at least for us in the church, that we are constantly being blown onto the streets and then being led back into community. That is the cycle of the Holy Spirit to which I referred earlier. We are sent into the world and called into community, made uncomfortable and given comfort.

Now this is not necessarily good news. It can seem like a never-ending roller coaster ride. It is no wonder that many churches seek to shut the roller coaster down and seek to be simply “arks of safety.” In this world of ours, after all, can we get enough comfort?

If we are truly to go deeper into union with God, deeper into our true selves, and deeper into relationship with the world around us, the answer is “yes.” We can get too much comfort. Held in ceaseless comfort we become increasingly self-centered and even greedy. The world becomes increasingly all about us and we lose any sense of justice. Our spirit, the Spirit, withers and dies.

But likewise we can see too much action and get lost in our own self-righteousness, pouring out our spirit so much that the well dries up because it is never replenished.

The cycle of the Holy Spirit that I have described is literally vital to our lives. Discomfort and comfort, action and rest, passion of the spirit and replenishment of the spirit. Both are necessary for the church and each one of us to live whole and full lives.

Let us thank God today for the gift of the Holy Spirit: Discomforter and Comforter, vibrant life of the world and the church, of you and of me.

Sermon preached on May 4, 2008, the 7th Sunday of Easter at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11

“Witness” is not a word we Episcopalians like to use much. We have largely given it to our more evangelical friends along with the whole notion of testimony or testifying. In truth, I think, the average Episcopalians actually spends time thanking God that he or she does not have to give his or her “testimony.”

Yet Jesus says that the job of his disciples—and us by extension—is to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. So my question today is, “Can I get a witness?” Yes, Episcopalians, “Can I get a witness?”

What does it mean to be a witness? There are some clues available to us this morning.

First off, to be a witness does not mean staring up into heaven. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Some Christians are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” Jesus, I believe, would have agreed. The very point of following Jesus is to do earthly good. Why else would Jesus’ most predominant image have been the kingdom of God? And why else did he teach us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as in heaven”?

Yet when we think of witnessing—because we have given the word away—we think of testifying to our relationship with God, how we know we are saved and getting into heaven rather than the alternative. This is not, however, the testimony Jesus had in mind when he commanded us to be witnesses.

He had in mind our carrying on his work. When he left the disciples they were now his body on earth. We are the eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet and heart of Jesus. We are called to witness in that we are called to continue his ministry: his compassion and help for those among us who are sick or oppressed, his prophetic cry for justice and peace on the earth, and his courageous confidence that relationship with God was possible for all people. Those are the things we are to continue to do in his name. Doing them is being a witness.

Can I get a witness? In this regard the question means, “Can I get a minister?” Can I get someone who is willing to continue to do the work Jesus began?

We don’t need witnesses to tell people how to get into heaven. We need witnesses to tell the story of compassion, justice and love that is the story of Jesus that we have taken as our own story.

This kind of witness is costly, a notion that is buried in the Greek word translated “witness” itself. It is the word μαρτυς (martus), from whence we get the word “martyr.” A witness is one who is willing to give his or her life away.

Few if any of us are called to die a martyr’s death, but all of us are called to give our life away for the sake of God’s kingdom and Jesus’ witness to compassion, justice and love. If nothing else giving our life away means risking our popularity.

It is not popular to stick up for those among us who are poor. The world wants us to believe that they are simply lazy because, of course, our great myth is that anyone can succeed if they really try hard enough.

It is not popular to be critical of the injustices of our culture. We are supposed to be only proud to be Americans. Criticism is not patriotic.

It was not popular for our church to side with the civil rights movement in the 1960’s, or begin to ordain women, or openly include gay and lesbian people among us. Since we have begun doing those things we have lost something like half our members. People don’t like their sense of superiority questioned.

It is not popular to witness to the compassion, justice and love of Jesus. To do so is to be a “martyr,” risking one’s life, one’s reputation and success.

Can I get a witness?

I have seemed to mock what we have come to think of as “testimony,” but I only mean to be critical of the kind of testimony that is little more than “staring up toward heaven.” I mean to say that our testimony is primarily in our doing. On the other hand I do want to also say that we have to get better at the telling as well. We need to be able to tell why we do what we do, especially since it just does not make sense to many in the world around us.

We need to be able to tell the story of Jesus’ ministry—his compassion, justice and love, his courageous commitment to these things that got him killed, and God’s vindication of his ministry—and ours—in the resurrection.

We need to be able to tell why we do some of the seemingly crazy things we do—our acting to show we are all one human family: rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, foreign born and American. We believe these are expressions of the unity for which Jesus prays and to which Jesus calls us as a human family and church.

We need to be able to tell about how following Jesus makes a difference in our lives—really affects the way we live our lives. We need to be able to tell how our lives would not be the same if it were not for Jesus.

Can I get a witness?

Perhaps the hardest—and, for most of us, riskiest—thing we have to do is to talk about Jesus. We have to get over the fear that if we do so we will be painted with the same brush as our more evangelical and fundamentalist brothers and sisters. We need to claim Jesus for our own. We need to claim following his life and teaching as something we gladly do because it changes life. We need to claim that in serving him we are serving others and making a difference in the world around us.

To be witnesses of Jesus is to be tellers and doers of good news. Episcopalians may be communally the most introverted people on the planet when it comes to their own faith. We act as if we have nothing to tell.

There’s a joke about another denomination that might as well be about us. What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness and an Episcopalian? Someone who knocks on doors for no apparent reason. We act as if we have nothing to tell.

We do church, we do have something to tell. And we need to start telling it. There are many out there, I believe, who have a hunger for spiritual meaning and who are not attracted to a fundamentalist way of believing. We need not to be afraid to tell about our way of believing and practicing Christian faith for their sakes, and for our own, because we will never grow like we need to grow without them.

I should practice what I preach, so here’s a piece of my personal witness.

I am a Christian because the biblical story in general and Jesus in particular helps me make sense of life. Jesus teaches me and empowers me to be a person of compassion, a doer of justice and a lover of all people, even those very different from me. Following Jesus and living in the church has changed my life for ever. It has given me the strength I need to get through many things life has thrown at me, and it is constantly challenging me to be a better person.

I find Jesus is present with me in his working through other people in my life, both friends and strangers, and in those things we in the church call “sacraments.” One of these, the weekly celebration of Communion, is at the center of my life because in the simple meal of bread and wine shared with my sisters and brothers I experience myself to be fed by God in a way I could ever do on my own.

That’s the beginning of my witness. For the rest you have to join me in living life as I struggle to live as God would have me live—sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. The good news is that God is with me whether I succeed or fail.

Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

I challenge you to go home and write two paragraphs about why you are a Christian and how it makes a difference in your life. It will help to have done it that next time you are given an opportunity to tell. And, once again, if we don’t get better at telling, we can’t blame anyone but ourselves that nobody knows who we are.

Can I get a witness?

Sermon preached on April 27, 2008, the 6th Sunday of Easter, at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Acts 17:22-31

“Rogation” is not a word in anyone’s normal vocabulary, and the “Rogation Days” are not much celebrated in the Church anymore. They belong to a day when farmers were what most people were and farming perhaps the most honorable of industries.

You wouldn’t know it now, but this parish was founded by farmers and those who depended on farming for their livelihood, given the flour mills that had sprung up along the Genesee in these parts. Agriculture was at the center of life then, the only hint of that truth being the agricultural symbols that frame the windows of this building.

The rogation days were a special time of prayer in the spring as the earth awoke from its winter slumber and new planting was beginning to be done. At the beginning of the growth cycle it was a time to stop and give God thanks for the land, remembering just whose creation it was to begin with.

We live in a different world. We are still dependent on the land and those who work it, mind you. Our food comes from somewhere, we just don’t think about it very much and those who produce it are mostly far removed from us. By and large they are not our neighbors, as they would have been two hundred years ago.

Yet we still need to stop ourselves and remember the gift of the land and our dependence upon it and its Creator. This is all the more urgent given the ecological crisis which now almost everyone agrees we are in. Our abuse of the land—of all creation—has gone about as far as it can go—further actually—without doing us and those who come after us significant harm.

So the basic message of these “rogation days” remains vital: the gift of the creation and our stewardship of it.

At first glance none of the readings seem to jive with this theme of creation, but if you look closely at the first reading from Acts you’ll find it.

Paul quotes an ancient Greek philosopher, “We are the God-created,” or in the more familiar language, “In God we live and move and have our being.” That’s a bottom-line for we people of faith—creation is God’s handiwork. However it works, God’s hand supports all creating and all creation, so that everything that lives, lives and moves and has its being in God.

That includes us. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I think we lose touch—real touch—with this truth all the time. Our being and all other beings seem very much to be in our control, ours to use as we please.

We often act as if we literally do “have our being;” it is ours to possess, and if our being is ours than it is ours to possess everything else is as well.

But one of the things the life of faith calls us to wrestle with the most is the whole notion of possession and ownership. We are called to struggle with our fundamental stance toward the creation. We are not to think of ourselves as possessers. We are not to think of the creation—even our own lives—as something we can possess.

The life of faith tells us that everything is a gift. We only possess in that we are given stewardship over parts of the creation, including our own bodies. We only have our being in God. Nothing is ours alone.

The consequence of this alternative reality is that in relation to the creation we can only be grateful. All is a gift and it is our primary job to say thank you and then to treat everything with the dignity a precious gift deserves.

The Church is just as much to blame as anyone else in our current ecological crisis. We spent generations supporting unquestioningly the notion of ownership and the creation as given to us as something over which we have dominion, which meant it was ours to use as we needed to use it. We lost for centuries the true nature of that word “dominion” from the Creation Story in Genesis. Dominion means stewardship, something given to us not to use but to care for.

It is an imperative for us as people of faith, as they are saying these days, to “reduce our carbon footprint.” The waste and abuse of creation is a sin, pure and simple, a sin that infects our lives perhaps more thoroughly and perniciously than any other. Rooting out this sin takes a great deal of commitment and even courage.

I say courage because the resistance of the waste and abuse of creation means saying “no” to some things that are still highly valued in our culture, including things like cheap produce and other commodities and unthinking additions to our landfills. Cheap produce is sustained largely by unsustainable use of the land. Mountains of garbage continues to be created because we value disposable goods.

If it is true that everything belongs to God and we are stewards of the whole creation, than taking out the garbage is an act of faith. It has real, moral consequences.

So do all our purchasing decisions. It’s a real pain in the rear end, actually, but not a single one of us can afford not to face this pain head on and do whatever we can even if it hurts a little bit. It is a moral and faith imperative.

In God we live and move and have our being. That means we are responsible for life, for our actions, for our very being. We are to be driven only be our gratefulness. And the planet desperately needs for us to get with God’s gratitude program.

Once again the message is simple but unsettling to the way we tend to live: let the thanks in which we center our worship also be the way we center our life.

Sermon preached at St. Stephen's Church, Rochester, NY on the Fifth Sunday of Easter: Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

It is quite convenient—what one would call serendipity—for me to be here this morning and to have these particular readings. My biggest project with you currently is working with a Vision Team on a renewed sense of identity and mission for the congregation. We are asking the simple yet profound and vital questions: Who are we? Why are we here? It is “the Vision Thing.”

It happens that the readings today are all about “the Vision Thing” as well.

First off we have our patron Stephen being stoned to death. As this excruciating thing is happening to him he has a vision of heaven, of God’s glory and of Jesus’ presence at the place of honor. There are two important things to note in relation to this vision.

First of all, the stoning was being done by religious people. This tells me that the answer to “the vision thing” is not necessarily to get more religious (by that, I mean mostly “more pious”). Parish Mission Statements or Vision Statements are fairly useless when they simply exude piety. I’m talking about things like “to know Christ and to make him known.” Not that it is not a worthy thing to know Christ and to make him known, but what does it really mean in practical terms? It does not answer the question, “how?” for instance. This parish, given our patron, ought to be cautious about an overemphasis on piety. Stephen was stoned to death by it.

Second of all, Stephen’s vision leads to something very particular: his plea to God that those who are stoning him be forgiven. That may seem like simply the “right thing to do,” and it is certainly that. But in saying it, Stephen has actually changed his mind about these people. One of the reasons they are stoning him is that he has just accused them of being hypocrites since the days of Moses, ending up with murdering God’s Messiah. “You are forever opposing the Holy Spirit…” he says, “you have not kept [the law].” Stephen’s vision turns this condemnation into forgiveness.

Now we move on to the passage from the First Letter of Peter. In it the apostle piles up the images, culminating with the grand and glorious vision

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Notice again that the vision has consequences. We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, God’s own people, for what? In order that we proclaim the mighty acts of God that have brought us out of darkness into light. And Peter goes on to say a bit more. These mighty acts, this journey from darkness to light, is a journey from not belonging to belonging, from not experiencing a life of mercy to receiving it.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

This vision is kind of the bottom line for us. Any vision we have for ourselves has to have this vision as a base. This means that any vision we have of ourselves has to come out of our own sense of who we are as God’s people as opposed to those who hold any other allegiance or are defined by their relationship to someone or something other than God.

Finally there is this morning’s Gospel reading. There are really two distinct visions in this passage. The first, God’s heavenly home where there are many rooms, where each of us has a place to dwell prepared by Jesus himself. Then there is the image of Jesus as “the way, the truth and the life,” through whom we have access to God.

They may seem like contradictory images: heaven with room for many, if not all, a very inclusive image, but then a narrow, exclusive way to that inclusiveness. But does it have to be an exclusive way? After all, it is Jesus who says he is the way, the Jesus who prepares a place for us in the home of God where there is much room. This is Jesus who hung out with the disrespected and outcast, who had compassion for all, and who, in this same Gospel, says that if he is lifted up he will draw all to himself. Perhaps this way is not a narrow, exclusive path, but a wide, inclusive “super highway.”

And the truth about Jesus is a big truth, bigger than we can ever comprehend, bigger than our way of following him. Again, it is Jesus who is this way and truth, not us, not the church.

This vision has consequences as well. We are inviting people on a path that must be deliberately chosen and the choices we must make “exclude” us from other ways of being in the world. Look at the promises of the Baptismal Covenant and you will see a commitment to particular choices that form a particular way of life.

No vision is worth the paper it is printed on if it does not call a person to make choices, which means one of the realities we face—contrary to our instincts—is that some people would choose not to take this path.

What does this passage have to say to us as we discern our vision? I think it says we have to walk the fine line between on the one hand wanting to seem embracing of the culture around us—be inclusive—and on the other hand not being afraid of what makes us distinctive—as Christians and as Episcopalians. Whether or not we know the precise way, truth and life is up for debate. But we do know a way, a truth and a life that we unashamedly offer to others.

So what have we learned about vision?

· It leads to real consequences that sometimes change us. It does not rely on religious platitudes.
· It grows out of our own clear sense that we are God’s people in this place and at this time. As such we are called to do something to proclaim the way to the light.
· It seeks both to embrace the world and define ourselves as distinctive from it, to offer people choices to make to follow a particular path.

Beyond these things I want to say a bit about why we need to do this vision work in the first place. It is really quite simple. If a community such as this wants to do more than survive it must, at the very least, be very clear about who it is and why it is—fundamental questions of identity. That identity, moreover, must be a truly communal one. It cannot come from any one person—clergy or lay—or small group.

Why this emphasis on identity? Because you cannot invite people into something that you know not what it is. It is not enough to just think of yourselves as a friendly church that any right-thinking person would belong to if they were just thinking clearly enough. Every church that exists on the face of the planet thinks that about itself.

And you cannot do mission if you do not know out of which you are doing. Who we are is the true shaper of what we do.

Now I have no doubt that part of what we discover on this “vision quest” will be things we already know, and some of the things this community already does are strong indications of its identity. We are not so much trying to create an identity but uncover it. That’s why we shouldn’t be afraid of this process—it is simply discerning who God has already made us.

And that’s why it is good news, real gospel. God has made us something together and, as the old saying goes, God don’t make junk.

Sermon preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY: Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-10

There seems to be much bad news for what is often referred to as “mainline Christianity.” That’s folk like us. We seem to be somewhat of an endangered species, particularly those of us in the city. By and large we are aging and shrinking congregations left with enormous monuments of past grandeur. What can we possibly do to survive much less thrive?

We just heard Jesus promise us abundant life. Are our days of abundant life over?

The reality is sobering even for those of us who seem to be holding on, attracting a few people here and there, generally feeling good about ourselves, trying to be open to a new future.

So what’s the answer?

One of the impulses is to look at those churches that are being successful these days and ask what we can do to emulate them. New research shows that would be the wrong impulse for us because those churches live in a different universe from us and we can no more make ourselves like them than the sun can make itself the moon.

So that’s the bad news of this “new research.” Is there any good news?

There is, and it resonates with the readings this morning, particularly the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

The good news is that there are actually a significant number of old mainline, progressive churches out there who are making a comeback and beginning to thrive again. Generally speaking, they are doing so by becoming more of who they are than what someone else is. The path to thriving is something like rediscovering our roots and claiming and practicing those things that we do well, things that are largely gifts of our tradition.

Tradition had a bad name in our churches for a generation or so. It was something from which we needed to get unstuck. “Contemporary” was the word of the day, and it seems to have worked for some, but for almost all of them it has meant casting off or radically downplaying their denominational history. I remember well going to a church growth conference for Episcopalians in the early 1990’s and being told that the one thing we absolutely had to do was downplay that we were Episcopalians. Denominational affiliation just doesn’t play anymore, we were told.

Something felt wrong about that to me back then and now I’m glad I’ve got actual, solid research done by some very capable people that says my instinct was right. We don’t need to cast off who we are, we need to claim it.

Not in a “better than everybody else” kind of way. Snobbery—something we Episcopalians were especially good at in the past—will not serve us. But being unafraid to be who we are will serve us well.

A woman named Diana Butler Bass (Christianity for the Rest of Us) is the principal researcher to whom I am referring. She happens herself to be an Episcopalian, but her research crossed denominational boundaries. What she found was that old mainline progressive churches that were thriving had certain practices in common.

They are for the most part not new-fangled tricks, but old Christian practices, revived for a new day. Three of the main ones are so old that they are present in this oldest description of a Christian community that we have: the first reading this morning.

The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers…all who believed were together and had all things in common...they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts…and day by day the Lord added to their number…

The three ancient Christian practices are hospitality that is a radical openness, generosity that is a radical act of thanksgiving, and a spirituality that is radically communal.

Just that this early community was open and growing is a sign of its hospitality, as well as its strong sense of the common good. In fact, the evidence elsewhere in Acts was that this openness was so culturally unique, so total across all the boundaries of the day that this community became known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”

I would submit that to be a true community of diversity, radical diversity, is still as unique culturally as it once was. Much can be said about the diversity of our culture which would be true, but within that culture we tend to live in sub-cultures with very clearly defined boundaries—back/white, gay/straight, Latino/Anglo, rich/poor, politically conservative/liberal. People’s natural impulse is to be with those who are like them.

Interestingly enough that same Church Growth conference that I mentioned earlier advocated giving in to this impulse. Create like-minded community was its advice. Find a niche population and be what that population needs.

That’s not what we do. Our vision is different. We want to bring disparate people together. That’s our appeal, it is something we highly value, that in order for human community to thrive it needs to be diverse. We are better off together than we are separated.

Not everyone is attracted to this way of living. It can be hard work, and it requires some sacrifice of our own agendas to build a larger one. But this is one thing we have to make clear to the world around us, confidently, boldly: we believe God calls us into community that crosses all boundaries.

And that community is above all things generous in its outlook on life. For the community described in the Acts of the Apostles, that generosity was radical: “they…had all things in common.” That sounds suspiciously like a cult to us or politically and economically something like communism. We’re probably not going to go all the way there.

But what about being a community that is known for its generosity, whose members have a deep sense of gratitude for life and give not as little to the common good as they can get away with, but as much as they can bear and then a little bit more. Stinginess is unknown in such a community. Individuals share their resources for the common life of the community. For us that sometimes means giving to very attractive things that obviously benefit either ourselves or others in need. Most of the time, however, it means giving just as generously to the mundane parts of our common life: the steam heat bill, the sexton’s salary, supplies for the Sunday School. We give generously to these things because we are convinced that we are mutually responsible for them: they are part of our “common good.”

Moreover in a community such as this one, generosity is proclaimed as a way to practice life itself, with radical gratitude for life itself, which is a deliberate turning away from the dominant cultural practices that emphasize the acquiring of more and more things, success measured by wealth, and just good old-fashioned greed. We need to proclaim confidently and boldly that these things are not our way of life. Our way of life is gratitude and generosity.

And lastly there is radical, communal spirituality, centered in the breaking of the bread. The vision is of individuals who gather together week by week because their very lives depend on it. Without the bread they are not whole people. That is why we do it. We do not do it to entertain ourselves or as some spiritual gimmick or fad. We do it because Jesus taught us to and our ancestors have been doing it for two thousand years and it is our experience that it keeps us whole and alive.

“The breaking of bread and the prayers,” the description says. That refers to the community’s commitment to daily prayer, the wisdom of at least a little time in the morning and a little time in the evening to say to God “I love you,” and to hear from God, “I love you too,” to remember those in need, including ourselves, and to feed our imaginations with the stories of our ancestors.

Our spirituality is unabashedly, unashamedly communal. And in that communalism it is both very different from the rampant individualism of the world around us and the spirituality of personal salvation practiced by many of our fellow Christians. We believe that none of us is saved as individuals; we are saved as a community. Our individual relationship with God and our participation in community are so intertwined that we cannot imagine one without the other.

I am describing a community like that first one described in Acts, which wants to know God and the love that is at the heart of God together.

Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, and communal spirituality are our primary values. Those were the practices of the community that emerged following the death and resurrection of Jesus. They are our practices as well and we need to be committed to strengthening them, being able to articulate them to a world that doesn’t really know who we are and what we stand for. In two simple words this can all be summed up using a word Jesus’ uses in the Gospel reading this morning: we are about “abundant community.”

Why do I go to Church? Or the better question, why am I part of a Christian community and this kind of Christian community in particular?

I think there are three simple answers we can give:

Because my life is abundant when I am surrounded both by people who are like me and by people who are different from me.

Because my life is abundant when I am grateful for life and give of myself generously.

Because my life is abundant when I pray in community as people have prayed for thousands of years.

Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, communal spirituality. Abundant community. Let it be, church, let it be. It’s the only way to throw off the bad news and embrace who we are and who we are called to be.

Sermon preached on Easter 2: John 20:19-31

Part of why the resurrection is a dilemma for Christians is that we have to be witnesses to something that nobody saw happen. Nobody saw the actual resurrection event. Now, of course, the Gospel records do relate that the disciples and other followers of Jesus saw him after the resurrection, stories like the ones we have this morning. But even then, only followers of Jesus saw him. He did not appear to the general populace.

I’ve always found that a curious fact. Why didn’t Jesus appear to Pilate and Caiaphas, in a kind of “in your face” kind of way? Why not a general appearance, say, in the Temple? Certainly appearances like these would have lent enormously to the credibility of the resurrection. As it is, it is easy for critics to charge that the disciples simply made up these appearances out of their own wishful thinking.

I think if there is an answer it is this: Jesus did not want to depend on the miracle of resurrection for the faith of his followers. Miracles are like money, you give people some, and they always want more. Jesus knew that the future of his followers could not depend on the continued existence of miracles; that was not to be the basis for people to continue to follow his way. Faith was, hope was, and love was.

Our readings this morning bring these three things to the fore.

First, love. The first part of the Gospel reading is all about love, in the guise of forgiveness. Jesus appears to the disciples—with Thomas missing. He says to them not, “What happened?” or “Why did you betray and abandon me?” but “Peace be with you.” He does not say, “Obviously you cannot be trusted.” He says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Given what these disciples had done—all of them cutting and running, one of them going so far as to deny that he even knew Jesus—Jesus’ response to them is remarkable, amazing, astounding. The depth of forgives—love—is simply breathtaking.

Furthermore, their mission is to do exactly the same thing, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven,” and I take the next part as a warning, not a commandment, “if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Jesus gives his disciples the same power of forgiveness and love that he has exercised with them.

Notice as well something he does not tell the disciples to do: tell people about the resurrection itself. The implication is that people will only believe in the resurrection if the disciples act on the message, spreading love and forgiveness to all.

Second of all there is hope. The word “hope” occurs in the first two readings and the psalm. The first reading’s mention is actually a quote from this morning’s psalm (16), “Moreover my flesh shall rest in hope.” And 1 Peter speaks about a “new birth into a living hope.”

For Peter in particular this hope is in spite of any present suffering, something the community to which he writes is experiencing much. “In this [hope] you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.”

The resurrection itself is an act of hope; hope that suffering and even death are not the last word in our lives, that there is something beyond these realities, a reality that is unseen.

This brings us to the biggest concept related to the resurrection: faith. There is no resurrection without faith, pure and simple. This is the whole point of the Thomas story.

The writer tells the Thomas story in order, I believe, to get to his main point: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He is speaking out of the future, as he is writing his Gospel, as the generation of those who did see the resurrected Jesus are rapidly dying off, and the community must increasingly depend upon its faith, rather than its eyewitness.

Peter makes the same point in his letter:

Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

There are two great points of faith in the biblical story, points that require pure faith, because there is no way to prove them. The first is at the very beginning, the very existence of a creator. “In the beginning God.” That is a pure faith statement.

The second is the resurrection. Jesus would be the first to say, and does so by strong implication in the Gospel reading this morning, that you cannot believe based on my appearances after the resurrection. You must have faith, and that faith includes what Peter says is the outcome of faith in the resurrection, “the salvation of our souls.”

We are used to thinking that it was the cross that effected our salvation. Jesus died to save us. That is not an untrue statement, but Jesus’ death, as noble as it was, was not enough. Without the resurrection, Jesus’ death is just the death of another hero. Heroes have their followers, but the following always fades over time. There are always new heroes to replace old ones. We call them in our tradition “saints.” Some of them keep being remembered over time; most of the don’t.

The resurrection, however, once believed in, changes everything. It means that Jesus lives in spite of death, that Jesus has conquered the last enemy, which St. Paul rightly says is death (1 Corinthians 15:26). And in that defeat of death lays our salvation, our liberation from fear.

The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of sin; Jesus comes to us with forgiveness. That’s the first part of the Gospel reading. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of suffering, as Peter says in his letter. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of our doubt, as the story of Thomas tells us. And finally, the resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of death, because Jesus has finally and definitively conquered it.

But all this we only get by faith, not by sight. It is not always easy to have this faith, especially in the face of sin and suffering and doubt and death. But that is why we are given the church, an idea that we have to admit has its down side. Jesus, however, gives us the church precisely to keep this love, this hope and this faith together. A community can believe these things and hold on to them even when individuals within that community struggle with them. Any sight we have of the existence of God and the reality of the resurrection is in this community we call the church. And that has been true from the very beginning. Jesus did not appear to Thomas until he rejoined the other disciples, an important detail of the story.

So one definition of the Church, something we could put on a banner and hang outside is “the Unseeing who Believe.” That is who we are, and that is what Jesus means us to be.

Now we do not see. One day we shall. In the meantime we have faith, hope, and love to sustain us.

Sermon preached on Good Friday at the Church of St. Luke 7 St. Simon Cyrene, ROchester, New York: John 18:1--19:42

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
LEVAS II 37

So asks the traditional Negro spiritual, and it is, of course, meant to be a rhetorical question. Yes, we were there.

But how? The hymn doesn’t pretend to answer the question and may even imply that we were there as passive observers, part of the curious crowd.

But the Gospel writers certainly want us “to be there” in the person of the characters that inhabit the story. We were there in them and through their actions.

We were there in Judas the betrayer, finally, grimly, convinced that Jesus has gone too far, that his teaching ultimately cannot lead to any good, perhaps disenchanted that Jesus was not ending up to be the political savior for which he had hoped. Perhaps he believed what the religious leaders were saying, that it was better for one man to die for the people. It had been the people and their freedom from Rome that had been his passion and he had thought it was Jesus’ passion as well. That his passion was “not of this world” was a crushing disappointment. What earthly good was this heavenly minded man?

We were there in Peter the denier, the other betrayer, scared to death, acting on the impulse to save his own skin, unwilling in the end to follow Jesus down this road, perhaps himself horrified by it. Ever since Jesus had insisted that Jesus wash Peter’s feet, it had felt like something was wrong. The risk of his own life was asking too much. How much did this Jesus really expect from him?

We were there with Caiaphus and the other religious authorities, concerned first and foremost with appeasing the empire and protecting the security of the people, willing to set aside any sense of their own values, willing to sacrifice a human life in order to feel safe. What is one life if it means our own security?

We were there with Pilate, cynical Pilate. “What is truth?” he asks, neither expecting an answer nor desiring one. And willing to use his power to assuage the masses. You can also here him say a twenty-first century, “Whatever?” Who really cares? This doesn’t actually effect me, so why bother getting worked up about it?

We were there in all four of these “villains” of the story, either actively encouraging the injustice or passively accepting it, either way out of our own fears and insecurities.

But we were also there in the beloved disciple and Jesus’ mother and the other women at the foot of the cross, being formed into the church, that family beyond biology wherein we are trusted to one another’s care. And we are in grief over this injustice, this enormous loss, the blinding pain of it all. And we cannot for a moment understand why Jesus did not save himself, why did this have to be?

And we were there in Jesus himself, courageously offering himself indeed to die for the people, willing to risk or even give our life for the sake of those we love, acting the part of a servant to the very end.

We were there. For ill or for good, we were there.

But more importantly, God was there, the servant God, not demanding our obedience and subjection, but offering himself to be our very liberation and life freeing us from all the tyrannies that hold sway over us, either from without or from within. And freeing us as well from the tyranny of our image of the angry, wrathful God, the moral bean counter in the sky. In Jesus on the cross, dying for us, we are free from that God, free instead to worship the Servant God, who values us as his children, so much to give up all his power to us and for us.

This day is only “good” because of the God whom this day is revealed to us, the God who really is love, pure and unconditional, despite the fact that “we were there.”