The Cross of Love

As winner of the Preaching Prize for 2008, I was asked to preach at the commencement Eucharist on graduation day, Wednesday, May 14, 2008 in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at General Theological Seminary. This sermon is based on the BCP propers For the Ministry III: Exodus 19:3-8; Psalm 15; 1 Peter 4:7-11; Matthew 16:24-27

I was on retreat several years ago, very early in the discernment process that would eventually lead me here to General Seminary. Several of us had gathered at a monastic outpost for a five day silent retreat. We were not a group, just individuals who for our various reasons, had come to seek silence and prayer in the woods of northern Massachusetts.

The silence was to begin after Compline, so our first evening meal was a speaking meal. I learned that one of the retreatants at my table was heading back to seminary after a course in clinical pastoral education. She told us how, on the first day of the course at a hospital in Boston, the nun who was to be their supervisor had asked the incoming CPE class why they were there. A variety of answers were given: To be of support to the sick, to learn how best to comfort those in need of comfort, to help people -- my bishop made me do it! As they spoke, the incoming students began to notice that each reason seemed to garner a somewhat qualified acceptance from the good sister. The students begin to sense that there was a right answer as to why they were there, and that none of them had yet given it. Finally, their supervisor looked these new chaplains in the eye and told them the truth which perhaps none of them had yet come to know.

She leveled her gaze upon them and told them, “You are here, every one of you, because you are wounded. Each of you, in some way, bears a wound in your heart and soul. It may be a childhood wound, or a spiritual wound or a long healed physical wound, but you each have one. And God has called you out of that woundedness, to be with others in their woundedness, and to show forth God’s healing love.”

Some few years ago, many of us took up everything we owned, our loved ones, and the good wishes of our parishes and dioceses, to follow the call of Christ -- and to come here to General Seminary; to this Close, to this Chapel, to this altar. We came with tremendous hopes and great faith. We brought all our life experience, be it long or short. We brought all our gifts and over three years I have come to know that among us there are myriad gifts, gifts of creativity, and inspiration, gifts of music and song, gifts of leadership (like when Arianne tells me what to do) and gifts of followership (like when I do what Arianne tells me to do!), gifts of tenacity, gifts of humor, gifts of compassion and understanding.

And we took up our own woundedness as well. We brought our shadow sides with us to seminary. We came with our egos and jealousies and pettiness. We came with our narrowness of mind. We came with our past hurts and our ability to cause hurt. We are the survivors of dysfunctional families, we are the sometimes broken hearted and the oft lame of spirit. We are all of us flawed, all of us wounded, and we are all of us in great, great need of God’s grace.

All of our great gifts -- and all of wounds came with us here to General. Each of us have taken up our cross, and brought it to this place, planted it firmly in the soil of this Close, and we have done so in order to do what God has called us to do -- to follow Christ.

And now, as our epistle says, the end of all things is near. We are poised to move from this seminary into the outside world. We go out of this place with much learning, more experience, but also with the realization that we can’t and won’t cure all the world’s ills, or all the church’s ills, and knowing that the healing that we offer is bounded by the properties of God’s creation.

So, what is it we will offer the church? What can we, as gifted yet flawed followers of Christ, do for the people that we are being sent to serve?

We can love them.

Our epistle today tells us to maintain constant love for one another, that love covers a multitude of sins. To love those we are called to serve in ministry is the one thing we can do that calls upon both our giftedness and our woundedness. It is through our own pain that we can truly see and feel the pain of others. It is in recognition of our own brokenness that we can come to love the brokenness of others. In loving, we serve our God wholly, because it is in loving we deny our false selves, and we bring to bear all sides of our true selves, our full humanity, the same humanity that was sanctified by God in our creation, in the Incarnation, and by our baptism.

In loving the children of God entrusted to us in ministry, and loving them out of our own life’s pain, our wounds are redeemed, and become the means of a further Incarnation, a conduit through which more of God’s love enters the world.

Love covers a multitude of sins, and sins are something we are sure to encounter and sure to commit on our journeys. Whether as lay or ordained ministers, our vocations will bring us into contact with our own sinfulness, and with the sinfulness and brokenness that are always part of Christian community.

I have some bad news: I don’t know how to tell you this, but: The church is not a hot-bed of mental and emotional health. Parishes and church institutions are where very many people bring their giftedness, yes, but also their hurts and fears, their narcissism and passive-aggression, their grief, their loneliness, and their pride -- and then there are the parishioners themselves!

In our ministries, I know that we will meet all manner and type of God’s children: And through it all, I think there is only one thing that we must always do -- and that is to love those God has called us to serve.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich tells us that Love is without beginning, is and shall be without ending; that God wills that we be like God in wholeness of love to ourselves and to our even-Christians, our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We go out from this place to preach and to teach and to participate in the sacraments, we are to form children in the faith, we are to work for justice, we will celebrate baptisms, deaths, marriages, conversions. We will preside over vestry meetings, and meet with committees. We will anoint the newborn and the dying; we will weep with the sorrowful and shout in celebration with the joyous. We will do many things, and undertake many tasks, and do all manner of good to the glory of God. And we will fail in many things; we will be humbled, and on some days, I expect, be brought quite low. We will be admired, despised, beatified and vilified. And I don’t think that much of that matters, in the end.

I think that the only thing we must do, and must do in every situation is love.

We have taken up our crosses to come to this place, and take them up again we must as we leave. Our own crosses, our own woundedness, our burdens and shortcomings and our own pain will be crucial to our ministering to the woundedness and pain of others and to our witness to a broken, wounded world. Our many talents and gifts and our learning will serve us well, that is most certainly true. But it is the wounds we bear that will serve us most when we seek to comfort the wounded, when we attempt to bring healing to a broken world.

So, we take up our own crosses now to follow Christ even further and in so doing we take up the Cross of Christ as well; the cross on which Jesus was wounded, the cross by which the whole world was redeemed. For can there be, was there ever, a greater icon of unending love than the cross upon which Christ offered himself as a most loving sacrifice. The cross of Christ is the unequivocal evidence of the endless, unconditional love that God bears for all humanity.

Of God’s grace, Jesus was given for us, to be human, to share our life, to give himself for us, a holy and fragrant offering. All that was done for us: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection and ascension was done for love.

Many years after her first mystical experiences, Julian of Norwich was again visited with visions. She wrote, “From that time… I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Thus was I learned that our Lord’s meaning was Love.”

We have come, bearing our crosses, to this place to be fed, to be formed, to be fortified in faith, and to be sent forth. Later today we cross that Chapel step that reads “through the gates and into the city” and today, we will take those words literally, and go out from this place to serve God’s people in God’s holy church. We won’t go out like the disciples, two by two, but single file (or we will if we were paying attention at rehearsal yesterday!) We won’t be carrying staffs, but we will be wearing some cool new academic hoods. We won’t be in sandals I don’t guess, but I know that whatever shoes Julie wears will be red!

We go from this place, having again taken up our crosses and with them the cross of Christ. And as we go, we lift high that cross, so that the love of Christ may be proclaimed wherever we go, in whatever we do for the people that God calls us to love and to serve.

Yes, the end of all things is near. And as Julian proclaimed, in the end all shall be love.

~ Amen.

© The Rev. Deacon Mark R. Collins

The Bishop of Newark Preaching Prize

I'm very proud and gratified -- and deeply humbled -- to let you know that I have won the Bishop of Newark Preaching Prize here at General Seminary. The prize comes with a small cash stipend, and with the rather daunting responsibility of preaching at the commencement Eucharist on the morning of my graduation from seminary. So, pray that the Spirit enlightens my mind and heart -- and gives me the voice to proclaim God's word on May 14th.

The sermon I preached for the judges can be found here.

Update: I found out on Sunday that my field ed supervisor and mentor, the Rev. Tobias S. Haller, BSG also won the preaching prize in his senior year here at General. Good tutelage, obviously; and perhaps the heavenly intercession of St. James the Less!

Sermon for Year A, Easter 4: "Holy Listening"

Preached on the fourth Sunday of Easter, April 13, 2008 at St. James Episcopal Church Fordham Manor. Scripture readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

+ In the name of Christ Jesus, Amen.

My father’s farm is in the hill country of West Tennessee, where the landscape begins to hint at the existence of the Great Smokey Mountains further eastward. The gentle rolling hills are thickly wooded in most parts, so pasturelands are often separated from one another; and are usually bounded by hills and forests.

A significant part of my father’s working day is about ‘going to check on the cows’. He loads a sack of feed into the back of the pick-up truck. Dogs and people pile into the cab of the truck and we drive sometimes a mile or two over gravel roads to get to one of his pastures where his cattle are grazing.

After the gate is safely closed behind us, my father blows the horn of the pick-up three times. Now, after years of driving over rutted gravel roads, the horn on the pick-up truck is woefully out of tune. It gives off more of a bleat, than a honk. But in a few minutes of that out-of-tune bleat, over the hill or through the woods, come my father’s cows.

My father takes out his pocket knife and opens the sack of feed, something called “Ranch Cubes” which are considered quite the bovine delicacy. He tilts the sack over his shoulder and spreads the feed in a line -- about 20 feet long or so -- on the ground.

The cows all gather along this makeshift manger, and begin to feed. My dad walks through the group of heifers and calves, counting, checking ears and eyes for infection. He notes the progression of those heifers that will bear calves in a few weeks or a month. And he looks to the health of the nursing mothers, and the development of their young. As he does so, the cows will gently move aside, some will nuzzle his gloved hand, and he’ll scratch their heads were new horns may be coming in.

His cattle know him; they know his voice, and the off-pitch bleat of his truck horn. They are mistrustful of a stranger; they do not know my voice or my smell. They shy away from me, but under his hand they are calm, and are at peace.

The Gospel of John from which our reading today is taken is not a gospel of calm or of peace. It is a gospel of conflict, and of division. The term “The Jews” appears 70 times in the gospel of John compared to twice in Matthew, and not at all in Mark or Luke. And it is meant to carry the disapproval and condemnation that so grates on our post-Holocaust ears. It is in John’s gospel that Jesus is seen as one with the Father. The gospel begins with the astonishing claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the Word made flesh, a claim that seems to deny the monotheism that was a the defining element of Judaism -- a claim that would have grated on the ears of first century Jews.

And there is a new word in John that appears no where else in the New Testament, and no where else in all of the Jewish literature of the time: aposynagogos. To be cast out, or put out, from the synagogue.

Most scholars agree that the Gospel of John is the last of the gospel accounts to be written. It is a biography of Jesus like Matthew, Mark and Luke, but it is also an autobiography of the community that gathered around John, the beloved disciple --that developed along different lines from the Apostolic that grew up around James and Peter in Jerusalem and the churches Paul founded in Corinth, Ephesus, and Galatia and throughout the Roman empire. As an autobiography of a specific community of believers, the Gospel of John gives evidence of the rough and tumble period of early Christianity when there were many churches struggling to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus, in different places and in different ways.

This John community accepted the membership of Samaritans, as the account of the Woman at the Well tells us. The John community has experienced conflict with the religious establishment -- “The Jews” -- and had been cast out of their houses of worship. The Gospel of John’s very exalted view of Jesus as the Word made flesh that existed before the creation of the world, would have sounded like blasphemy to most Jews and many Jewish Christians in that time.

So this community of the Beloved Disciple is one that is no stranger to conflict. It has been cast out of the synagogues where most Christian initially worshipped. It has accepted the hated Samaritans as fellow believers. It has come to believe that Jesus is son of God, and very God himself.

Our gospel reading today from John comes just after the healing of the man born blind, an event that caused much consternation for the Pharisees and that led the man born blind’s parents to fear being forced aposynagogos, out of the synagogue.

So, when Jesus says in today’s reading that there are those who are thieves and bandits it is the Pharisees and the other religious forces in the community to which he refers, who would drive out the John community for reveling in the revelation of Jesus as God Incarnate and who have doubtlessly caused the John church so much pain.

There is no doubt that we live in times just as contentious as those we hear about in our readings today. These are times of contention in our church, in our communities, and in our nation. We are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is unrest in Nigeria, Tibet, Columbia. Some of these conflicts are as old as are our national issues around race, they seem never to come to resolution or reconciliation.

What are we to do in situations such as these? Where are we to turn in times of religious conflict like those found in John, or in our reading from Acts this morning where an argument about the different treatment afforded the Hebrew and Greek widows erupts -- and in which Stephen -- the first deacon -- is taken from the synagogue and stoned to death?

Where do we turn in times of different understandings and interpretations of the faith? Who is it that we are supposed to follow? Who do we look to for guidance when war breaks out, and when tempers flare on street corners, in political debates and in parish meeting rooms?

There are often loud and angry voices in situations such as these. Lots of people have lots of opinions. You can find all kinds of opinions on cable news channels and all over the Internet. There can be real confusion, and real difference of opinion. And hearing so many different opinions and so much criticism -- and to hear so few voices calling for understanding and reconciliation -- all this noise can make us fearful, anxious, even angry.

Noisy, confusing times such as these are times that call for a holy listening. Jesus assures us, we will know his voice when we hear it. It is he who will call us by name. It is he who will lead us through the gate to the pastures of peace, and will not cast us aside. Through him, the good shepherd, the gateway to salvation, we will find the word of truth and pastures of calm and of peace.

In times of conflict, sometimes it is not best to add our voices and opinions to the fray, perhaps we are to engage in holy listening for the sound of what our ears and our hearts will tell us is the voice of our Savior calling to us to follow.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe in speaking up and speaking out. I think that all too often, we are silent when the truth of our lives -- our own gospel truths -- is exactly what the world needs to hear. And after we’ve said our piece, then we should do our best to hear what our brothers and sisters are saying.

When there is conflict over how we will relate to each other as Anglicans, or how we can better relate to each other as black folks and white folks or how we here at St. James are to be one body of Christ, though we are West Indians and West Africans and African Americans with different faith traditions and customs.

We are brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus -- and we are always that, no matter what -- we are many sheep of one flock, with one shepherd whether we are Hellenists or Hebrews, as one body in Christ Jesus, one flock, we need to listen to each other with very great care.

Because when we listen with the ears of our hearts, we will hear the truth, we will hear the voice of the Savior calling to us, guiding us forward, showing us the path of righteousness and the way of peace.

We may hear our shepherd’s voice in the words of a sermon, or in the stories we share at coffee hour, in the hymns we sing, or the voices of our children reciting the psalms like they did just a few Sundays ago.

We may hear Christ’s voice in the account of the veteran returned from war, in the cries for freedom from the Buddhist monks of Tibet, in the silence of the poor and the oppressed.

We’ll know it’s our Savior’s voice when it calls us to act with mercy and forgiveness, when it calls us to work for justice and for peace, when we are urged to take on new challenges, to be reconciled with our enemies, to live in love with one another to forgive, to love and to serve.

For the one we are seeking to hear is no ordinary shepherd, the King of Love our shepherd is, and it is in love that he seeks us, and on his shoulder gently laid, home, rejoicing he leads us….

+ Amen.

Sermon for Year A, Lent 4: "Seen and Sent"

Preached on the fourth Sunday of Lent, March 2, 2008 at St. James Episcopal Church Fordham Manor. Scripture readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

+ May only your word be spoken, O God; only your word heard, through Christ Jesus, out Lord. Amen.

A few weeks ago in our Lenten cycle of readings, Abraham set out from Haran to the Land of Canaan. Last week was all about water; Moses brought water from the rock at Meribah and Massah, and Jesus gave the woman at the well living water that would quench her spiritual thirst for ever.

This week, in our readings, we are talking about seeing, about being chosen and sent out to do God’s work in the world. Today we hear a bit about fear, and about faith in God’s plan for our lives and our world.

As our reading today begins, Samuel is pretty downtrodden over King Saul’s failure as the first king of Israel. But God tells Samuel to get over it and to get on the road. God sends Samuel to Bethlehem where he will find Jesse, and his sons, and it is from this relatively unknown and undistinguished family that God has chosen Israel’s next king.

As theologian Rick Marshall points out, Samuel and the Bethlehemites are wary. They are fearful of retaliation by a jealous Saul. This is a kingdom in decline, a fearful people fraught with anxiety. There’s been a failure of leadership, and there is fear about the future.

Samuel takes a heifer to sacrifice at Bethlehem so that Saul won’t suspect anything, and there he asks Jesse and his sons to join in his sacrificial banquet. The first of Jesse’s sons to come before Samuel is Eliab. Samuel immediately thinks, “Oh, this must be him.” Eliab is apparently tall, dark and handsome, just as Saul was. But God tells Samuel no, it is not Eliab.

And then comes one of those scripture passages that ring down the ages, one of those verses that helps us in our own day understand ourselves and God, and what God’s values are, as opposed to our own. First Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7 says, “For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

Samuel looks for the most photogenic of Jesse’s sons to be God’s obvious choice. But God is not quite so obvious as that. As all of Jesse’s sons pass before him, God tells Samuel that all of these have been rejected. Samuel has to ask Jesse, “Is this all of them?” That’s when we find out that the youngest, the runt of the litter, is out in the fields tending the sheep. He is sent for, and when this youngest son appears, Samuel notices right away, that he too is handsome, but in a ruddy, hardworking kind of way, not at all like Saul and Eliab.

God tells Samuel, “Rise and anoint him for this is the one.” Samuel does so, and it is not until just this point in the story, after 13 verses and 7 older brothers, that the scripture finally reveals the identity of this new king. “The Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.” Ah, yes. David, the fabled king of the united nations of Israel and Judah. This unexpected, youngest son of the obscure Jesse, this shepherd boy, is the one chosen by God to lead the people; he is the one Samuel has been sent to find.

Samuel needed to look with the eyes of God on Jesse’s sons before he could really see the one God had chosen. And it is God who has seen David, has looked into his heart. In the very first verse of the reading, God says to Samuel, “I have provided for myself a king” from among the sons of Jesse. The word that we translate as ‘provided’ is actually a form of the verb “ra’ a” meaning literally ‘to see’ in Hebrew. God is telling Samuel that he has seen among Jesse’s sons the one that will become Israel’s legendary yet flawed king.

And this is a beginning of a long, complicated and beautiful love story. The love story of God for David, and of David for his God. You can hear its beginnings in the description of David’s rough beauty. God sees David’s good points and bad. God loves him totally, and God anoints David to do his work in the world. David’s failings do not prevent him from being chosen to lead, and they do not prevent God from loving David unconditionally. And this unconditional love affair will David’s own life and be translated down the generations to David’s eventual heir, Jesus -- and by our baptism into the very body of Christ, unto us.

+++++++++++++++

In our gospel reading, seeing and being sent figure prominently as well. Jesus sends the man born blind to wash in the pool of Siloam which means ‘sent’ and gives him the gift of sight. The man born blind is then able to bear witness to God’s grace in his life, though neither his neighbors, nor the religious authorities thank him for it.

Throughout our gospel story today, there is a tension. There is an air of anxiety. Just as with Samuel and the Bethlehemites, the people of Jesus’ time are anxious; they know well the strife of living under Roman occupation. The Pharisees and the blind man’s family are also anxious in part about the nature of the miracle Jesus has performed, and about what it can mean, what impact it will have on them. There are many anxieties, and they are apparent to everyone.

And then there is God’s truth that in some ways justifies all the anxiety. God has a new plan. God is doing a new thing. God is calling new leaders. God is sending his people out to do his work. David -- and then Jesus -- have been chosen, and sent by God to refocus and recreate the relationship between God and humanity. David will serve as proof of God’s unending love for us. And Jesus will prove that God’s love for us extends through the love God bears for the only begotten son. Jesus’ death and resurrection will show the world that God’s plans for us extend beyond the grave, and unto everlasting life.

+++

I think that each of us here this morning can find our own stories in the scriptures we have read this Lent. Many of us like Abraham have journeyed away from our homes -- in search of what might be God’s will for us, God’s plan for our lives. We have traveled from the West Indies and from West Africa, even from West Tennessee. We have, some of us, come like Samuel, seeking new opportunities in places of peace, free from strife and the anxiety of life in unsettled political situations. And we have all found our way to St. James where we bear our own witness to God’s grace in our lives -- and where later this morning at our Annual Meeting we will choose new leaders to guide our parish into the future.

I too was sent to St. James. I came here to learn about parish ministry from Fr. Haller, Br. James, Mr. Green, Ms. Stewart -- from all of you. And soon, I will be sent somewhere else, to shepherd God’s children in another place. Like the man born blind, I have tried to bear witness to God’s grace in preaching from this pulpit and in serving near this altar. Like David, I am the least likely to be called, and yet called I am.

Through my duties here, I have been challenged to make Christ and his redemptive love known. I have learned something about the needs, and concerns of this community and our hopes for the world. I have had the chance to assist in public worship and in the preaching of God’s word, and the ministration of the Sacraments. Each of these is the particular duty of a deacon.

Like Samuel, you have seen me in this new role: at the altar, at the communion rail, in this pulpit -- at coffee hour, in bible study and at parish meetings. And by seeing me in these various roles, you have helped me see myself as a minister to God’s people. You have been minister to me. Yyou have helped me see as God sees. You have helped me to see into my own heart.

This is an anxious time for me. My ordination as a deacon will be two weeks from yesterday, on March 15th at 10:30 in the morning in our Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. I hope as many of you as can be there will be there. It will be a celebration of your ministry to me as much as an ordination of my ministry.

God is doing a new thing in my life. And yet I am anxious. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a couple of weeks now. I’m forgetful of assignments at school and appointments with friends.

Perhaps you know how I feel. You know the anxieties of raising children, working for the best life that you can provide for them. You anoint them with your love, and then let them go to make their own mistakes and triumphs. You know the anxieties of life in our time -- economic fears, fears of violence around the world and here at home. And yet, in the face of these anxieties, we can all be sure of two things. God loves us unconditionally, and God has called each of us. Perhaps it is our sensitivity to the anxieties around us that testifies to the fact that God is calling us to lives of mission, and of service to God and God’s people.

It is clear to me that God has called you to be like Samuel to me, to help me come to understand my duties as a deacon, and one day as a priest. You are called like Samuel to anoint new parish leaders at today’s election. Perhaps some of you will be called as I am to ordained ministry. Someone among you may be the next Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton, chosen like David to lead a great nation. Some of you may be sent, like the man born blind, to bear witness to -- and in fact to administer -- God’s miraculous power to heal.

There is no doubt that there is anxiety in our lives. And there is no doubt that God sees the way forward. And that if we can look into our own hearts and into the hearts of one another, we too will see what God sees. We can come to perceive God’s will for ourselves and for the world. And with God’s grace and with the support of one another, we can do what God calls us to do. We can serve God’s people in whatever ways we are called. We can do justice and love mercy. We can be prophets and priests, and faithful members of the Bishop’s Committee. We can make Christ’s redemptive love known. We can bear witness to the needs, hopes and concerns of our communities and of the world. We can give glory to God in all that we do.

During this Lent, I encourage you all to look within, to see your own role in God’s plan for the salvation of the world, and to take heed of God’s call in your own lives -- and in your own hearts.

Let us pray:

O God, you anointed your servant David to become the shepherd of your people. Prepare our hearts and minds and spirits to do the work you have given us to do. Open our eyes to see within ourselves and others the challenges you call us to, and the gifts you have given us to meet those challenges. Grant us the wisdom to discern your call to us, and the courage to heed it. Amen.

Sermon for Year A, Advent 2: "Prophets & Promises"

Preached on the second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007 at St. James Episcopal Church Fordham Manor. Scripture readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

+ May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.

This weekend Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton are out on the road, campaigning for their favorite Presidential candidates. Oprah Winfrey is heading to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina on a campaign swing for Illinois Senator Barak Obama. Bill Clinton is in many of the same places campaigning for his wife and our Senator, Hillary Clinton. Each of these public figures will be making predictions and campaign promises on behalf of the candidates that they think should be our next president. We’re being told that change is needed, that experience is called for, that an end to the war in Iraq is on the horizon. Prophesies of justice and promises of righteousness are all over CNN this weekend. These promises like others we have heard from public figures may or may not be kept. I think most of us have come to view the promises of politicians with some skepticism. It is rare when the Utopia promised us during campaign season is indeed the land we come to live in after the votes are counted in November, and our choice of leader is anointed on inauguration day.

Advent is kind of like a campaign season. We hear from the prophet Isaiah all through Advent, with predictions of the one who is to come and descriptions of the bounty and equity of the coming kingdom. Today as well, in our gospel reading, we hear from John the Baptist who tells us that the one who is coming is bringing wrath and judgment. Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, Isaiah and John the Baptist are all doing the same thing -- making promises and predictions of what is to come. I think that like good Christians and good citizens, we need to examine these predictions with care.

Isaiah tells us that a new leader is going to rise up. He will be a shoot from the tree of Jesse, the same family tree that brought Israel Kings David, Solomon, and Hezekiah. This new king will be wise and understanding. He will be a mighty judge. He will slay the wicked and protect the meek. He will be faithful and he will be righteous. The one to come, according to Isaiah, will bring peace the likes of which we can only imagine, wolves shall lie down with lambs. The ferocious man-eating lion shall become a vegetarian. There will be an era of peace and righteousness that will encompass every aspect of creation. This new royal heir will bring about a period of peace and prosperity which Israel has not seen in many, many years -- and it is not only Israel that will know his benevolence. All nations shall be drawn into peaceful concord -- and enemies of every stripe, predators and prey, will live in harmony. With a platform like that, he’s got my vote!

You’ve heard the expression, “Clothes make the man.” Well, we’re meant to know that John the Baptist is a true prophet, that he means business, by the description of his outfit in today’s gospel. The Bible doesn’t often give us an account of the latest fashion trends in the ancient Middle East, so when it does, you know it means something. In today’s gospel, Matthew tells us that John is wearing camel’s hair and a leather belt. This is the same sort of ‘prophet’s uniform’ worn by Elijah, the prophet that was most associated with the coming of the Messiah. Scripture had predicted that Elijah would return as the forerunner of the Messiah. If John the Baptist is in fact the returning Elijah, then what he says if of great importance and who he points to is even more important

John’s candidate for the coming one, the Messiah, seems altogether different from Isaiah’s candidate. This coming Messiah will be an awesome and terrible judge, come to separate the wheat from the chaff -- and the chaff he will burn in an unquenchable fire. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is bound for the same fire. According to John there is a Messiah coming who is to coming to baptize not with water as John himself does, but with the fire of the Holy Spirit.

If Isaiah’s candidate is running on the peace and prosperity platform, then I think John’s candidate is running on a law-and-order platform. Isaiah is promising that his candidate will put a chicken in every pot. John is promising that his candidate is going to run the rascals out of Albany or Washington or Jerusalem -- or all three.

Both of these prophetic visions of the reign of the hoped for Messiah are pretty incredible, in their own ways. It is inconceivable that the lions of the savannah are suddenly going to give up killing and eating other animals. One cannot imagine that such a overturning of nature can happen. And indeed it cannot happen in this world. It is a vision of the world to come, of the eschatological reality that will come to be at the end of time, when God’s plan for the salvation of all creation is fulfilled. Likewise, John promises a winnowing of the just and unjust, and a punishment of the wicked that too seems to go against what we know of the world we live in. We know that the wicked often get away with it, don’t we? The Pharisees and Sadducees of our day often repent of wrong-doing, but they don’t always appear to come to Jesus or be brought to justice.

Both of these visions presented by Isaiah and John the Baptist might seem to us to be, as yet, unfulfilled. There is a lot that’s been promised, that has been predicted, that has yet to come about.

But Paul, I think, feels a bit more optimistic about it all. Paul tells us in today’s reading from his letter to the Romans that at least some of the campaign promises that have been made on behalf of God are being kept, and have come to fruition in his own day. He quotes from the chapter of Isaiah that we read this morning, telling the community of believers at Rome that the root of the tree of Jesse has brought salvation to the nations, to the Gentiles.

Through Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, the salvation once promised to the Jews has been extended to all humanity. The Gentiles may now indeed rejoice as Deuteronomy says, because God in Jesus Christ has made all people heirs of the promises made to Abraham and his descendents. John the Baptist tells the Pharisees and Sadducees that God could raise up children to Abraham from the stones of the ground. Paul says that in Jesus, God has raised up heirs to the promises made to Abraham from every nation of the earth. In the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has confirmed the promises given to the patriarchs, so that as Paul says, the Gentiles too might glorify the one God.

For Paul, the promised one of Isaiah and of John the Baptist is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one to bring judgment and mercy, to separate the good and bad fruits, and to bring together all nations. And he tells us that these prophecies recorded in Scripture have become a source of strength for believers. “By the encouragement of the Scriptures we may have hope,” he tells the Romans. Because the God who has kept his promise in extending salvation to the Gentiles -- we can be sure -- will keep all the promises he has made to our ancestors in faith, and to us.

It is clear from many of Paul’s writings that he and his contemporaries believed the return of the Jesus would be very soon. The end was near. The fulfillment of all things was soon to occur. As far as we can tell, Paul would have been surprised to find us here nearly 2,000 years later still waiting for the second coming of the Lord, and for the full manifestation of the kingdom of God.

Paul’s generation saw the first Advent of the incarnation of Jesus. The apostles walked with and talked with Jesus while he was on earth. They met him in the upper room after he had risen again. They came to believe that truly this was the Son of God. They saw him ascend to heaven with a promise to return and, in time, to bring all things in heaven and earth to their culmination in his kingdom.

And we are waiting still. In our own generation we, like Paul, are awaiting a second Advent, the second coming of the Lord. We too expect that some day all of the prophecies will be fulfilled and that the earth will be, as Isaiah says, “full of the knowledge of the Lord.”

We can sit and wait for this to happen, I suppose. We can make predictions of our own and head to Jerusalem on New Year’s Eve and wait for something to appear in the skies as some folks have done. Or we can watch the weather report, and predict that floods here or hurricanes there are surely the signs that it’s all about to come to an end. We can do that if we like, but it seems a waste of a life. It seems an awfully flat footed response to the gospel of peace and justice that has been declared to us. The message of Scripture can often seem to be about a time yet to come, but it’s also about a time that has already come, and it’s also about the time now. There’s not much you and I can do about the future, and less we can do about the past. But there is something we can do now. We have been given a span of days on this earth, and thanks to God’s gift of free will, those days are ours to live as we choose.

I think that while we wait for Christ to come again, we can help God out a little bit. We can help make our own world, in our own day, at least a small reflection of the reign of God that we expect in the fulfillment of God’s kingdom at the end of time. We can try to make manifest some of the miraculous peace and justice that the prophecies talk about.

We are, after all, the Body of Christ in the world, we are, in a few moments, to be feed with his holy and sacred food. We are nourished by our Lord and savior with his body and blood to be his body, his agents in our own day. As the incarnation was born in Jesus, so his kingdom can become incarnate in us, when we do God’s will. There is much to do and much to hope for. We cannot do it all. But we can make a beginning; we can do homage to our incarnate Lord, by seeking to live by the values of God’s kingdom come in the here and now.

There is great enmity in our church, and in our world. There is strife among Jews and Gentile and Muslims and Christians, among Conservatives and Progressives in our Anglican Communion. Wars and rumors of war continue; there is injustice almost every where we turn. Our mission as Christians is to be Christ in this world, and to be what Isaiah calls the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord, in our own day. We will not bring about the awesome visions of Isaiah or of John the Baptist, but we can do what we can do. And we can, as does Paul, abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Preachers should practice what they preach. I should follow what Mr. Brown calls ‘my rhetoric’. Mr. Longsworth, there’s a turkey in your future. It will be my contribution to the St. James Christmas eve dinner. I can’t make the wolf and the lamb to lie down together, but I can provide a little turkey for those who will sit down together on Christmas Eve in this church to celebrate the nativity of our Lord.

During this Advent season, I invite you to look for the ways, either great or small, in which you can help to bring the peace and the justice that we hope for at the end of time into the world that we live in today.

Our king is coming, and yet there is so much of his kingdom yet to come. Prepare your hearts for great joyfulness. Prepare your souls for the judgment of God. And make ready to serve your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, by serving the needs of one another. As we prayed our in Collect this morning, make ready to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.

Amen

The Feast of St. Matthew

In keeping with long established custom, seniors are invited by the dean to preach a sermon in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Mine was on Friday, 21 September 2007, the Feast of St. Matthew. Readings for this sermon can be found here.

My mom tells a story about one of her early lessons in parenting, which came from, not surprisingly, another more experienced mother. It came about in a neighbor’s back yard one summer afternoon at a pool party.

Now, when I was a kid, in my neighborhood, the above-ground, backyard pool was a new luxury. Their crimped metal sides and easy-to-puncture blue plastic linings were cumbersome to assemble. And they left a perfect yellow circle of dead Bermuda grass on the lawn when they were disassembled in the fall. But like dutiful wannabe suburbanites, my parents acquired one of these new luxuries, and so did a few other parents in our neighborhood.

Keeping up with the Joneses was impossible though, because just up the street from us was the family of Walter and Pat Jones, and their three kids: Cora, Luke and Sally, and the Joneses had an honest-to-God, concrete sided, aqua bottomed, below ground swimming pool -- with, I might add, that irresistible-to-kids feature: a real diving board which soared above the surface of the water at the dizzying height of about a foot and a half. This was an astonishing amenity in our working class neighborhood, something that could usually only be experienced in the rarified confines of a Holiday Inn.

Our above-ground pool paled in comparison. Thankfully, the Joneses were good neighbors and often invited any and all to cool off in their pool and ‘cannonball’ off their diving board on summer afternoons. One such afternoon found a bunch of neighborhood kids splashing about in the pool and a few moms gathered nearby under a shade tree in green-webbed aluminum lawn chairs with their big glasses of sweet tea and cigarettes…

As was often the case, my brother and I managed to stay in a fairly constant state of conflict throughout the afternoon over whose turn it was to be Marco and whose turn it was to be Polo, or who would go next on the diving board. My mom would call out on occasion or at times get up from her lawn chair to make peace between us. Finally, Pat Jones said to her, “Leave the kids alone. Let them fight it out on their own. You should get to enjoy the afternoon too, you know.” As my mom tells it, that’s when she learned to let my brother and I argue if we were in disagreement, and come to whatever uneasy peace we could manage to negotiate on our own.

And this contentiousness has remained a part of my relationship with my brother to this day. We joke and tease, and argue about politics. He likes to remind me that he has quite a bit more hair than I do, and I like to point out that his waist size now starts with a 4 -- as in size 40 or even 42 inches -- while mine is still in the very high 30s… It makes some people anxious, like my step-mother, who didn’t watch us grow up with our contentious form of affection. But it has become an identifying part of our relationship.

This past Christmas, my father took to calling my brother “The Major” and me “The Reverend”. My brother is in fact a Major in the reserves and is now on active duty with the US Army at a Forward Operational Base outside Gardez, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan -- a region long known for its lawlessness, now an area of a great deal of Taliban and Al Qaeda activity.

In terms of my new nickname, I’ve tried to explain to my father that I have not yet undergone the ontological change that will occur when, God willing and the people consenting, I am ordained by a bishop who stands squarely in the historic, Apostolic succession descended from St. Matthew and the other disciples. He is a Baptist after all, and he thinks it’s funny to have two sons with ‘ranks’ that he can tease us about. So, the Major and the Reverend we are…

After this past Christmas, I began to think about this Major and Reverend stuff. Even though The Episcopal Church and the US Army would appear to most people to be fairly distinct, divergent organizations, they have a bit in common. Both are hierarchical, with well defined ‘orders’ within them. Both my brother and I recognize a chain of command as he would say, and are bound to respect a kind of episcopal authority, as I would put it. We both serve in organizations, and ‘serve’ is how we both would characterize it, that are mission driven and that work toward what they believe to be a greater good. We aren’t so different after all. There’s not so much difference between being a Major and a Reverend on a certain level and I think my father, with his teasing, is gently pointing this out to us.

And because my brother and I have freely contended over the justice and efficacy of war, especially the War in Iraq, and over all manner of politics and the US foreign policy, always from opposite ends of the political spectrum -- I know what my brother is about; I know what he believes in his heart. I don’t often agree with him on most things -- and I expect not many of you would either -- but I know clearly what it is that he holds dear, what are his core values and beliefs. And if, God forbid, my brother should become a casualty of the war he is fighting in Afghanistan, I will be consoled by the fact that, for my brother, such a death would have great meaning. For him, it would be a ‘good death’, one in which he was serving his highest values. And I know that because contention and conflict, and the knowledge that it brings us about the other, has always been a part of our relationship.

To be a tax-collector in Jesus’s day like Matthew in today’s gospel was to be in conflict with a large part of the Jewish community. Taxes for the largely agrarian first century Palestinian were oppressive and unfair. Jewish citizens already paid religious taxes of about 20% of their income. When Palestine was made a Roman “protectorate,” the taxation system doubled, and the taxes paid by the average family rose to 35 or 40%. Many people paid additional rent for the lands they farmed but did not own outright, bringing the total of rents and taxes up to one-half to two-thirds of the family’s income.

Being a tax collector made Matthew a collaborator with Rome, the pagan oppressors and occupiers -- it made him ritually unclean as well as what many considered a traitor to his own people.

Let’s leave Matthew for a moment and concentrate on another apostle: Simon the Zealot, as he is called by Luke. Now, scholars disagree about what exactly is meant by this nickname: The Zealot. It may well have meant that Simon was a member of the political faction known as the Zealots that arose in Galilee about the year 6. These Zealots were enraged by the plan to increase taxation based upon the census of Quirinius of Syria. You’ve heard about this event in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus… “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” In response to this tax initiative, the Zealots took up arms but their short-lived rebellion was quickly put down, and they fade into the background for a bit, then appear again in Josephus’s history of the Jewish Wars as the faction responsible for the Jewish Revolt sixty years later which resulted in the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem by Rome.

So imagine for a moment if you will Matthew the tax-collector and Simon the tax resister, the tax rebel. Would you invite these two fellows to your intimate little dinner party for 12? Would you sit them next to each other at your Last Supper???

It seems as if in calling Matthew the Tax Collector and Simon the Tax Rebel to become his apostles, Jesus is ensuring conflict, inviting discord into his inner circle. This is no way to put together a management team. How is this group going to coalesce, how are they going to manage to follow Jesus without tearing each other apart? How is this ill-matched assemblage, that includes the Tax Collector and the Tax Rebel, going to get along at all? This little grouping might be the Lord’s doing, but I doubt if they all saw it as marvelous.

In his book, “Conflict and a Christian Life” Sam Portaro writes, “Conflict can actually be a force for good… Conflict is not just a problem to be resolved…”(1) Portaro points out that “the gospel of Matthew is set in the midst of controversy… and that at many points in Matthew’s gospel the teaching of Jesus is deliberately set against the prevailing practice of the time. When Jesus invites Matthew into his circle and immediately accompanies (him) to dinner with (his) tax collector friends and colleagues” (30) conflict and controversy ensues. Portaro writes, “Matthew was one of twelve very different disciples. At the very least, the call of Matthew and the other eleven reminds us that Jesus obviously tolerated, even embraced” (31) the controversy and conflict that real diversity often brings.

So, here we are, then with a collection of people from the same faith group but with some very different theologies of how best to live out that faith in their context. Each is trying to follow Jesus, to understand what Jesus is teaching, and how that teaching is meant to be applied to the world they find themselves in. There are real differences of interpretation of the scripture and traditions they have inherited; and real questions about just where Jesus and the Spirit are leading them.

Sounds like quite a contentious group, doesn’t it? Sounds like an early version of the Anglican Communion, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be funny if, finally, after more than 450 years of Anglicanism, now, as we are at one of our most conflicted places, we are finally getting it right, if we are now truly living out the Apostolic faith -- not by making nice, but by engaging in conflict that is very real, often heart-rending, AND illuminating???

Bishop Gene Robinson was recently among us at the Tutu Center conference on reconciliation. He recounted how at a meeting of Anglicans from around the world, someone said to him, “For us, Bishop, there is not that much difference between George Bush and Gene Robinson.” Bp. Robinson said, “That may be the worst things anyone has ever said about me.” And I’ll bet George Bush might say the same thing. But from some points of view, Bush’s foreign policy and its consequences seem just as unilateral and ill-considered as does Bp. Robinson’s consecration. I don’t like hearing that, and I don’t agree, and maybe you don’t either. But hearing that, and knowing that, I am a little closer to understanding those who so vehemently disagree with our church’s actions regarding human sexuality. Out of dispute, as the conflict has come to fruition, I have learned something about how the rest of our communion sees us. From that point of view the Episcopal Church and US foreign policy aren’t that different. They see a similarity between the president of the United States and the bishop of New Hampshire; just like my dad sees some similarities in my brother the Major and me, the someday Reverend.

Sam Portaro writes, “The trouble with Jesus was -- and is -- that he stands in the midst of conflict, (and) allows that conflict” to occur. “The trouble with Jesus was -- and is -- that he invites us to follow where he has led.” (53).

Conflict is upsetting, frightening, and illuminating. Knowledge comes from telling our truths without self-censorship -- and from listening to the sometimes contradictory truths of others. I have no doubt that it was part of the everyday life of the apostles, as the Acts of the Apostles so often recounts. But out of that conflict, there was forged a faith that has come down to us today, a faith that we pledge to continue in our baptismal covenant when we are asked, “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” and we reply “I will, with God’s help.”

So, continue we must, and by continuing as a Communion in conflict, we might forge a new way of being in communion that truly reflects the apostolic faith that was forged out of a similar atmosphere of conflict.

One quick caveat: I’m talking about being in communion, not covenant. In Matthew’s day there was a covenant design team that was headed up by this guy, what was his name? Oh, yeah, Jesus Christ. And it took him just one draft to establish -- in his blood, no less -- something he called the New Covenant. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just about enough covenant for me.

I want to leave you with an image. I recently visited an exhibition of the work of the sculptor Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art. One of the sculptures in the exhibition is entitled ‘Prop’. It consists of a lead plate of about five feet by five feet and weighing hundreds of pounds that lies flat against the wall, several feet above the floor. This lead plate is held in place by another lead plate that has been rolled into a column and propped against the piece on the wall. The only thing holding the piece of lead on the wall up is the column of lead propped against it. It’s a small wonder, really. It is beautiful and delicate even though it’s hundreds of pounds of gray lead -- the same material in different shapes, held in balance by tension.

As the Anglican Communion and as Christians, this should be our goal. To find a balance through tension and conflict, to continue in the sometimes contentious fellowship of the apostles -- not to allow our different theologies to obscure the fact that we are made of the same material -- we are one body, we are sisters and brothers, and we are called, like Matthew, into communion with those who may see things quite differently than we do. There’s no denying that this communion will encounter conflict from time to time. And there is no denying that it is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. ~~ Amen.

Sermon for Year C, Proper 22: "Mustard Seeds & Mulberry Trees"

Workshopped on Thursday, June 7, 2007 as part of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation's Preaching Excellence Program -- preached on Sunday, October 7, 2007 at St. James - Fordham Manor. Lectionary readings that this sermon is based on can be found here.

Update: I preached this sermon on May 2, 2008 for the judges -- and was awarded General Theological Seminary's Bishop of Newark Preaching Prize.

In the name of Christ + Amen.

Mama Robbins was my city grandmother and Mama Collins was my country grandmother. In these two, I had the best of both worlds: I had a grandmother near by in the city where I grew up with a candy dish that never failed us: Hershey’s kisses and Bazooka bubble gum, and gumdrops at Christmas. And I had a grandmother off in the country with a barn full of hay to play in, fields of cotton and corn to chase cousins through and a grey zinc ladle - a ‘dipper’ we called it -- hanging by the sink. The clear cool well water always had a slightly sweet metallic tang when we gulped it from that dipper, gasping for breath, cheeks red from running, before we dashed out again into the green expanse of those fields.

Both women were paragons of the Christian faith -- in quite different ways. Mama Robbins was a Methodist and never missed church. There was always a copy of ‘The Upper Room,’ a sort of Methodist ‘Forward Day by Day’ in her sewing basket. Mama Robbins felt and feared all the anxieties of the city, it seemed. She would sit for hours sewing in a chair by the window. The sun would wax and wane through the Cape Cod curtains as the afternoon wore on. The ticking clock would mark the hours and periodically she would part the curtains and say to the sun drenched street, “Lord, I’m just so nervous!” or “Oh! I’ve got the swimmy head today!” and then return to her silent stitching. She seemed always to be worrying, most often about her loved ones, most of whom gave her good reason. Alcoholism was part of the family legacy and it caused my grandmother no small amount of worry. But her faith buttressed her against the strife her husband, children and grandchildren caused her. She never doubted that God would support her and would find a way to repair her oft-broken heart. Like Paul in today’s epistle, she knew the one in whom she had put her trust, and she knew that he would guard all that she had entrusted to him.

Mama Collins was a Baptist, and played the upright piano at Concord Baptist Church. Concord sat atop a red dirt hill which was hard to navigate in the pick-up truck on rainy spring days when we’d had what my grandfather called ‘a gully washer.’ The church was probably no more than 20 feet wide by 30 feet long. The piano was jammed against the wall just beyond the front pew. Mama Collins would crash out the first few bars of the hymn posted on the hymn board, and then she would turn to us over her right shoulder -- eyes wide, mouth wider -- and with a sharp, audible gasp of breath, and a nod of her head, give us our cue to begin singing. Mama Collins might miss a Sunday if there was cooking to do or the fruits of her garden to be ‘put up’ for the winter. If she wasn’t there on a particular Sunday another grandmother with a late Victorian girl’s education (which, of course, included piano lessons) would play the piano or the congregation would sing the so well known hymns a capella. Her life was tied to the seasons, and her faith was mingled with the red dirt of the earth. It had always and would always sustain her and it would always live in her, and in her children, and now lives in me.

How is it that faith comes to us? How does it grow in us? Who plants the seed? How is it nurtured and brought to fruition? For me, faith was drunk in from a zinc dipper of cool well water. It was prayed for in prayers that accompanied tens of thousands of stitches. I am so lucky, so blessed, for like Paul in our epistle, I am able “to worship God with a clear conscience,” in no small part because “my ancestors did.” And so, I think, are we all. When we gather around the pulpit to hear the Word of God proclaimed, when we come to the table that is set for us to feed of the fruits of the earth that will soon be sanctified for us, we join the throngs of believers that have gone before us.

We share the faith of millions and millions of Christians. We share the faith of martyrs and prophets and apostles. We share the faith of Peter and Paul, and of Timothy and his grandmother Lois, and his mother Eunice as we heard in today’s epistle. We share the faith of Billy Graham and Pope Benedict the 16th, of Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori and Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria. We share the faith of Mama Collins and Mama Robbins.

But we know, each of us, in different ways and in different times, what it is like to cry aloud like Habakkuk: “Why do you make me to look upon trouble and wrong-doing? O, Lord, how long shall I cry: Help -- and you will not listen? Violence -- and you will not save?”

Sometimes our faith is very much like the mustard seed. A mustard seed is the smallest of seeds, it is so tiny. I helped Mama Collins plant them in her garden and I was amazed that anything so small could survive in the mud and muck. She would warn me, “Just two or three now! They’ll come up, don’t worry!” And sure enough, they would -- yielding huge bushes of the bitter greens that she would stew for hours on the stove with a bit of pork and serve with a little hot pepper vinegar. So tiny, the mustard seed, in dim light -- or in hard times -- you might not even be able to see it at all. But small amounts of faith, even the tiniest dot of it, can, as our gospel says, “uproot the tall and mighty mulberry tree and hurl it into the sea.”

According to Jesus, the faith that can move mountains and mulberry trees comes in the smallest, tiniest grains. And that goes against the grain of our capitalistic, consumerist culture in which more is better and bigger is better and too much is not enough. It is in smallness that the miraculous is found. The smallest seed can contain a forest of faith. But it can be so difficult to know it at times. It can be so difficult to access it. For me, it can be so difficult to look into my own troubled heart and worried mind and find the mustard seed of faith amidst the fears and unfulfilled hopes, among the doubts and disappointments, alongside the hurts and the losses.

But even at such times -- maybe especially at such times -- I know that I am not alone. And neither are you. I am “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” -- and so are you. I am part of a long, long history of belief, contentious as it has been -- and still is. Nonetheless, it has survived in the hearts of millions of Christians-- Mama Robbins and Mama Collins to name but two.

That is why I come to church, that’s why I cling to a community of believers. Others may be able to go it alone like the desert fathers and mothers, casting themselves adrift in a sea of sand to live alone in mystic communication with the risen Christ. Not me. I need you. I need you and all your grandmothers and grandfathers. I need a communion tied together by word and sacrament and common prayer. I need every one of our ancestors in faith -- martyrs, prophets and apostles, sinners and saints alike. It is when I see you uprooting mulberry trees that I remember that there’s a mustard seed there somewhere in my heart. That is just as powerful, just as mighty as the faith of millions of Christians on earth and in heaven -- Mama Collins and Mama Robbins, to name but two.

~Amen.

Sermon on Reconciliation

Preached on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 as part of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation's (http://www.tepf.net/) Preaching Excellence Program.

Reconciliation is hot these days -- very trendy, very of the moment. You can hear people speaking in favor of it in churches and schools and in politics. Reconciliation has become much more than a word. It’s now a buzz word; one of those terms that seem to come into the collective consciousness, get used and overused almost before you’re aware of it. Buzz words like ‘reconciliation’ often have their meanings morph during their periods of popularity and sometimes they come to be understood in less complex ways as they become mundane and banal through everyday overuse.

According to the Merriam-Webster College Dictionary, “reconciliation” has several meanings. Usually it means the restoration of a friendship or of harmony between two parties. A secondary meaning is to accept something, usually something that one finds unpleasant; to be reconciled with some situation that we cannot change, but must live with. Sometimes, I believe, we mistake the two meanings. Sometimes it seems that we seek the restoration of harmony where there may have never been such harmony in the first place; and we come to hope for hugs and tearful embraces, when what we really should expect is to come to a point of acceptance of that which we might not like very much.

Buzz words like reconciliation can loose their true meanings altogether, and change from being words with a set of meanings, into something like signposts that seem to point to or point out something, rather than mean what they once were thought to mean.

My favorite signpost word these days is ‘controversial’. Controversial used to mean, “Here’s something that has caused a great deal of discussion pro and con;” or “here’s something that thoughtful people are considering and thinking about and are arriving at differing opinions about.” Nowadays you’re most likely to hear “controversial” used in a teaser for this evening’s local news broadcast, and in that setting it seems to mean “It’s sweeps month and we’re going for our highest ratings of the year. Therefore, we’ve found two loudmouths, neither of which has any particular credibility, who will disagree with each other at very high decibel levels, and with a plethora of bombast. You won’t be able to look away, sort of like when you see an accident on the highway, but that’ll mean our ratings are up, and so are ad revenues; so stay tuned for the controversy!!!!!!!” Controversial has come to be a signpost that indicates a manipulated disagreement for the sake of the spectacle.

Likewise, reconciliation can mean, “I hate you and everything you stand for, but I’m so conflict-averse, I cannot stand to have you not like me. Therefore, I’m going to compromise a lot of what I believe in in order to be seen as in agreement with you.” Or it can mean, “I cannot handle too much complexity, because for me, complexity creates anxiety. Therefore, even if there are legitimate differences between two sides, I must force them into compliance with one another so that I can make them fit into an uniform intellectual box that doesn’t create anxiety for me.”

Reconciliation, the buzz word, seems to point to anxiety -- about conflict and about difference. Sometimes when we seek reconciliation, it seems what we seek is to collapse divergent forces or impulses into a kind of harmony that we believe will end our anxiety. We want a resolution, and the sooner the better. Dr. Phil and Oprah can pull it all together in about 48 minutes less the commercials, so why can’t we? We want the plot wrapped up, we want good to win and evil to lose, we want the marriage to be saved, the hyperactive kids made manageable, the miracle diet to succeed, and the warring couple, or estranged family members to hug and make-up while the credits roll over their tearstained, reconciled faces.

An end to conflict and complexity, a simple and serene harmony; they seem like desirable goals, don’t they? They seem, dare I say it, almost Christian, don’t they?

Well, perhaps. But there is more to reconciliation than an end to anxiety and divergence. Perhaps there is that second meaning that we can explore. There may be a reconciliation that exists that does not cost us our integrity. There may be a reconciliation that does not pave over our differences with a thin veneer of consistency. There may be a reconciliation that enlarges rather than collapses; that encompasses a diverse and complex reality, rather than recreates a dying past.

I’m reminded of how a friend of mine who is also a recovering alcoholic in Alcoholics Anonymous describes ‘acceptance.’ Acceptance is a pretty big topic around AA. There’s that whole “accept the things we cannot change” thing from what AA calls the Serenity Prayer -- and which we seminary educated theologians recognize as classic Niebuhrian Neo-Orthodox Realism. My friend describes acceptance this way; she says, “To accept something does not mean that I must whole heartedly embrace it and claim it to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me; not does it mean that I should only begrudgingly and bitterly admit something with as much resentment and repulsion as I can muster. Rather, acceptance means that I merely acknowledge the reality of what is before me; that I accept people and circumstances for what they are, and not try to change their reality; nor my own, in light of the new realities I am encountering.”

Here is not false harmony or unity. Here is not a bitterness or repulsion. Here is merely acceptance of a reality that is bigger than oneself, a reality that is beyond my control.

Jesus gives us an example of this kind of reconciliation in his experience in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his trial and execution. The scene appears in all the synoptic gospels, and it carries a profound weight in each. It is amazing, really, when you think about it. One way to look at Jesus’ struggle to accept his fate in Gethsemane is to see it as a moment of weakness. Does this struggling, anguishing Jesus look like a King-Messiah? Is this the same Jesus that was with God in the beginning and is shortly returning to the realm of the Supreme Being? Down south we would say about this Jesus, “He tow (torn) up!” He is distressed, agitated and grieved. He throws himself on the ground, and prays fervently to God, “Father, if it is at all possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet, not what I want but what you want.” Or as the King James Version translates Luke, “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”

In the agonizing moments in Gethsemane, Jesus is clearly not reconciled to his fate. He wants to escape the trial and torture he knows awaits him. Yet, he comes to a place of acceptance, a place of reconciliation… He comes to accept what lies before him, and he comes to accept it as a reflection of God’s will. Indeed, as we look back through our theological lenses, we see that the fate Jesus momentarily sought to escape was that which was to prove to be the reconciliation of the whole world to God through Jesus. What a loss it would have been if Jesus had balked -- if he had chosen to turn his back on the horrible reality that awaited him.

If Jesus can accept death on a cross, what then can I not accept? If Jesus can become reconciled to crucifixion, what is it that I will be unwilling to endure? If Jesus can forgive those who tortured, humiliated, and executed him, who is it that I cannot forgive? Who can I not be reconciled with?

One of our bishops tells the story of meeting with some of her counterparts in the Anglican Communion from Africa. In talking about the troubles that now face our communion, the bishop confessed that she did indeed know and respect many gay and lesbian couples. She was asked, “When the men live together, just the two of them, who cooks for them?” She replied, “Well, they usually share the cooking or if one or the other particularly enjoys it, he will do most of the cooking.” Men doing the cooking! Her African colleagues were shocked! Nothing like that goes on where they are from, they said, nor should it.

This story helps me to realize that though we are all one in Christ Jesus, we are often from very different places, and even from very different times. The 21st century in North America is quite different from the 21st century in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. We live in the world in different ways, and we encounter the gospel of Christ in different ways.

It seems impossible for me to embrace a reality that would restrict women to household chores regardless of their desires or gifts. Likewise, it must seem impossible for others to be forced to acknowledge that gay and lesbian people are full and equal partners in society and in ministry when they have no direct experience of gay folks, or worse yet, have been filled with inaccurate, defamatory propaganda about gay people.

But can I be reconciled to those with more traditional views of gender roles? Yes, I can. I may not like it, and it may seem to me to contradict the essence of the Christian gospel but I can accept there are places in the world that are much like America and The Episcopal Church of just a few decades ago.

And that seems an important aspect of our current debate: where are we right now in history, and where have we been? There is something uniquely American about our forward looking, justice seeking mindset. Americans are always essentially optimistic. We seek to right wrongs and to build a better nation and society almost as a matter of course. We have never known a national reality that we were completely powerless to change. No king has ever forced his will upon us and remained in lordship over us. No cadre of oligarchs has ever established a permanent junta here. We tend to move forward convinced of our right to do so and assured of the resources we need to make progress. We tend to become enamored of our successes and forget the struggles that have been fought to bring about those successes. The fight for women’s suffrage lasted nearly 100 years in this country. Suffragists were threatened, harassed, beaten, and imprisoned. It was ugly and bloody at times, and it went on for a very long time. The fight for civil rights for African Americans was long -- and it was deadly. The modern gay and lesbian rights movement began almost 30 years ago, and still the US Army and the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain can fire you merely for being gay.

How is it that we can be so disdainful of those who are not where we are yet, when we have only very recently (and I would add ‘incompletely’) gotten here? The righteous indignation of those on one side of the current debate is misplaced. We might do well to remember that we are very recently redeemed from our own sinfulness, and should go gently when pointing out what we believe to the sinfulness of others. We need to remember our own history, and to recognize our own limitations.

And by a similar token, others involved in our current debate might need to remember their own limitations. The sexual orientation of the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire is as relevant to the life of the church in Nigeria as the sexual orientation of the Governor of the State of New Hampshire is to government of Nigeria.

We live in a wide world, with great disparities. There are differences in education, healthcare, infrastructure, economic opportunity, not to mention social and political equality, that divide much of the world. There are differences in theologies, understandings of authority, and interpretation of Scripture that divide the church.

However, though we are many, and encompass many differences, we are one in Christ Jesus. We are reconciled to God by the birth, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet we are not reconciled to one another. Perhaps because we are not seeking the right kind of reconciliation. We are not one in terms of social roles, economic wealth, access to political power, education. It is likely that we will not be uniform in very many aspects of our theologies. A survey of recent or ancient church history would show that we have never had one uniform response to the gospel of Christ. It is vanity to think that we will find such uniformity now, when we have never known it before. We are not one in and of our selves. We are one in Christ Jesus, and we can be one only in Christ Jesus.

Others may try to establish covenants that harmonize theological interpretations of scripture, or that curtail any innovations on the part of one province or another of Christ’s church. But the New Covenant established by Jesus himself is the covenant that draws us together as nothing else can. Christ died for each of us -- and more importantly rose again to reconcile each of us to God, to restore all of us to a life forever in him.

In our feeble, failing way, we seek to experience some of the glory of that reconciliation in the reconciliations we seek with each other. We want the church to be like an episode of Oprah, where we’re all hugging and crying as the credits roll.
Well, I’m not sure that that’s what we’re likely to create here on this earth. But I believe we can find a reconciliation that is more like the acceptance that my AA friend describes. We can and should accept each other’s realities, even if we believe there to be inequalities or theological errors inherent in those realities. We can accept one another; we can be reconciled to one another, because Christ has reconciled us all by his cross and resurrection. What, really, is there left for us to argue about?