Sunday, October 4, 2009
Introduction and welcome to Jane Jeuland, our new Director of Children's and Youth Ministries
With great pleasure and wonder at God’s providence, I introduced to our congregation last Sunday Jane Jeuland, our new Director of Children’s and Youth Ministries. Jane is a wonderfully qualified and down-right exuberant addition to our staff. She is well experienced in coordinating volunteers, so our Godly Play program for younger children will only grow stronger as she works to support our faithful and skilled volunteer teachers. The particular new gift Jane brings to our parish is her experience with and enthusiasm for working with teenagers and youth. In the weeks to come as Jane begins her work with our Church School staff, she will also be contacting our teens and their families about developing opportunities for our youth at Trinity. Please give her a warm welcome and join in as we start this new emphasis at Trinity.
Fr. Scott
SERMON Easter VI
May 17, 2009 Trinity Church
Acts 11.19-30
Psalm 33 [1-8.18-22]
1 John 4.7-21
John 15.19-17
Jesus says to his disciples – and to us – this morning,”If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,” and at first, to me at least, that doesn’t’ entirely sound like good news. You know I get suspicious when talk about love begins with the word “if.” ’‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” What does that really mean?
It sure looks like what philosophers and logicians would call an “if/then” statement, a “conditional” statement; and it is that word “conditional” that begins to worry me, because love that has conditions attached to it isn’t really love. Love that has conditions attached to it is bargaining and manipulating, maybe even threatening or blackmailing – and I am absolutely certain God does not mean for our relationship with God to have about it any of those things whatsoever.
God does NOT, I repeat NOT say to us, “I will love you if you do this or that;” or “I will love you if you believe this or that.” What God says to us in his Word-made-flesh, Jesus our Lord, is this: “I love you. I love you unconditionally. I love you no matter what. I love you whatever may come. I love you.”
That is the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that we celebrate throughout this 50-day Easter season and, indeed, every Sunday.
So what about this conditional business, “’‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love”?
First let’s look at the meaning, as Jesus used it, of the word “Love.” This word was quite the topic of our Wednesday Bible study in which it was pretty easy for everyone to agree that love was a feeling of affection or attraction or longing or respect that one person feels toward another. We even went to the dictionary to find out what the linguistic experts had to say about the meaning of love – and we found there similar information, that love is a feeling of some sort.
But then we began to pull that notion apart: The question arose, “Do you always feel the same about your children or your friends, even, perhaps, when they disappoint or anger you?” “Well, no,” we agreed, “sometimes you can feel very angry our disappointed – maybe even enraged – at those you love.” Where are your warm, cozy feeling of affection then? They have, momentarily at least, gone away. The feelings toward your child or friend have changed, but your love for them has not. It is quite possible to love someone and have a whole range of feelings toward him or her, only a few of which, if any, at any given time are warm and cozy. Love, it seems, therefore, is not a feeling – is not, in fact, what the dictionary says it is.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Feelings are very, very important indeed. For many, many reasons – among them is that they point us toward what is important within us. That which stirs up strong feelings within us deserves our attention, deserves acknowledging and listening to – because it is in all likelihood God’s Spirit drawing our attention to something important in our past and our present that we need to know for our future. Feelings are critically important, but they are not love.
Love, as Jesus presents it to us, is a way of behaving, a way of acting, a way of doing things.
I asked our Wednesday group how they behaved toward those they love, and I got wonderful answers like, “You respect them.” “You forgive them.” “You spend time with them.” “You protect them.” “You do what is good for them.” “Sometime you do what is good for them even in spite of what they may say they want.” The list we created was a lovely – pun intended – description of how Jesus treated his followers. He treated them, as we also heard this morning, like “friends.” Treated them like friends because that is what it means to love – to behave in ways that serve your friends’ best interests insofar as you know how to and are able. God is very practical about all this: our feelings come and our feelings go, but love remains if indeed it is love. As Shakespeare says, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever fixéd mark that looks on tempests and is not shaken.”
So, now, back to this “if/then statement.”
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” It turns out, using Jesus’s definition of love as behavior and action, that it isn’t a conditional statement at all. It is a statement of fact.
Let me restate it using the definition of love our Bible class arrived at:
“If you keep my commandments,” – that is, if you do the things I teach and ask you to do, “you will be treating each other the way that is best for you and for each other.”
“If you do the things I teach and ask you to, you will treat each other with respect, forgiveness, and treat each other in all the other ways that add up to love.” Love is a way of acting – not just, or even primarily, a feeling.
So where do we look, you and I, to find more information about this way of treating others that adds up to love.
I suggest, as I always do, that you look at the promises you made in baptism. Each time we renew those promises we made, we hear and say these words: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving (that is, treating) your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
The answer, of course, for us who are trying to learn and do what Jesus would have us do is, “I will, with God’s help.”
It is that easy – and that hard. But with God’s help nothing is impossible. Treat all persons as friends – with respect, with forgiveness, with doing what is best for them.
And remember, Jesus tells us this morning that we are his friends, which means, I am absolutely certain, that he has always and always will treat you and me with respect and
forgiveness, always doing, and doing perfectly, what is best for us, for that is what it means that he love us. He treats us as his friends.
SERMON
February 15, 2009 Trinity Church
Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Psalm 30
We hear this morning of two healings, first the healing of Naaman the Aremean; and second, Jesus’s healing a leper. That should demonstrate to us that this kind of healing was somewhat taken for granted in Jesus’s day. It was just the way things were done. Some people then, as today, had the gift of healing. Our earliest ancestors in the faith called them prophets; today, we would tend to call them therapists, nurses and doctors.
For all their being similar, the stories aren’t exactly the same, and the primary difference is that after Jesus directs the healed man to show himself the officials so he can be certified as healed and return to his family, he is also sternly commands the newly healed man to see that he says nothing at all about this to anyone else.
Mark’s gospel has two more stories like this with Jesus warning people not to spread around news about his mysterious authority. There is the healing of a child over in chapter five, and the other is Peter’s recognition in Jesus is the Messiah (8.29f). Tell no one. Tell no one. Tell no one? What a curious thing.
And this is not even to mention how from the very beginning, “evil spirits” recognize who he is and are also sternly commanded to say nothing. The Bible scholars have a name for this command to keep quiet: they call it the "Messiah Secret” or the “Messianic Secret," and they suggest all kinds of reasons why Jesus insists on this secrecy. The one that has always made sense to me is that Jesus didn’t want people misrepresenting him. He hoped they would come to share in his understanding of God and God’s love for God’s whole creation. It would be too easy and oh so typical for him to have been thought of as just one more great healer, a kind of magical superstar who could dole out favors but never really be listened to or appreciated at the depth of mind and spirit Jesus knew it was important to reach. That’s what I make of the notion of the Messianic Secret: he wanted people to have the more of the whole picture before they went around advertising for him.
But it isn’t really that secret I want us to focus on this morning. I want to focus on a secret of our own.
My fellow priest, friend and mentor Lane Denson reminded me recently that the early 20th-century evangelist Billy Sunday called the Episcopal Church the "Sleeping Giant of Christianity." A giant because of all we have to offer the world – and with how much Spirit – but sleeping, nonetheless. And it doesn't stop there. No less a figure than Billy Graham said that the model for his evangelistic ministry was the same as that of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Evangelism. Billy Graham, perhaps the best known preacher in the world, modeled his own ministry after a part of our own!
Further still: At Coretta Scott King's funeral, one of our former presidents said that he is an Episcopalian and so not all used to talking to 10,000 people gathered in one church. Another
former president followed and said, that was no wonder – Episcopalians aren’t called the "Frozen Chosen" for nothing.
What is true for the Episcopal Church, that it is a too well kept secret, is also true of our congregation.
We have here a tremendous amount to offer to God’s people in our neighborhood. One of the finest and most excellently run children’s programs in the world, for instance. Godly Play is
a miracle of grace and wisdom that we shower on our children Sunday after Sunday. Who around us knows? How well do you even know? Why is that?
We have an Outreach Committee that, in spite of having an official budget of absolutely nothing, I mean zero dollars, manages through your generosity and their ingenuity, cleverness and hard work to provide food and clothing and books and acts of loving kindness to thousands, yes thousands, of God’s poor, lonely, hungry and almost forgotten children.
We have the chance Sunday after Sunday and Wednesday after Wednesday, week after week and month after month to gather and discuss our scriptures, our tradition, our faith and our lives in a context that honors the experience, the intelligence, the doubt, faith and puzzlement of adults trying to enter more deeply into what it means to be alive. Yet, who knows? Who cares? Why is this a secret?
And there is more:
Among other things, we in our tradition and in this place have opportunity to know the difference between being faithful and being rigid and superstitious, between spreading the values of the Kingdom of God and submitting to mind-numbing conformity with a world now long past, between being loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church and being driven by one’s religious fears, between the wisdom of the Bible and the absolutely silly notion of biblical verbal inerrancy.
Get the point? Unlike the leper who was told to keep quiet, WE know a lot about the whole picture. We know - or have had every opportunity to know – what Jesus wants us to do: To spread the Good News about God’s love for us and about how that love is active, alive and strong right here in this place at this very moment.
The Churches’ days of “tell no one” are over. Any parish’s days of sharing our gifts mostly among ourselves are also over if we are to continue to live up to our calling. It is time that we acted like adults. Time we have learned to name and claim the gift of faith and community we have been given. Time to acknowledged the wisdom and the power that are called together here by God. Time to acknowledge, appreciate and give thanks for it – and then, by God, to go tell it on the mountain – or wherever else you find to opportunity to spread the Good News of God’s love.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
SERMON
Epiphany IV
February 1, 2009RCL
Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 1-13
Mk 1:21-28
I am reading a book by a writer whose unlikely name is Phyllis Tickle. Others in our congregation have decided to read books by the likes of Douglas John Hall, a Canadian Congregational pastor; and Martin Marty a Lutheran pastor; and Diana Butler Bass an Episcopal layperson; and Alice Mann; and Roy Oswald; and Loren Mead; and Verna Dozier each of whom is a faithful, active, involved member of the Christian Church. Each one of them is also a prophet. We hear in our Old Testament reading this morning that God promises God’s people that he shall continue to raise up prophets among them; and the list of names I shared with you are overwhelming evidence that God has honored that promise.
Each of these writers is a prophet because each one of them has taken a careful, prayerful, faithful look at the Church in America and has made a diagnosis of where we are and where we are headed. What is remarkable and, as far as I am concerned, what demonstrates that these persons are indeed prophets, is that each of them has come to almost identical conclusions about what God is doing in, to and through the Church – the worldwide church, the American denominations, the Episcopal Church and individual congregations like our own.
Each of them says in their various books what each of us already knows – at least intuitively and experientially if not completely consciously: the church in our time and the church that will endure past our time is vastly different from the church of the previous century.
Now before we go any further, let me say that there is much about the Church that will never change. At its center will always be its Lord, Jesus Christ. Christ’s Church will always be a living community of children and men and women whose unchanging calling is to love God and one another. It will always be that body in the world whose essential values are gratitude, forgiveness, generosity, service to its neighbors and a fearless embracing of the truth as the truth continues to be revealed. At its best and fullest it will always seek out and bring into its embrace the last, the least, the lost and those whom others would cast aside or assign to the margins of society. Where those things are present, the Church and its Lord will be present; and where those things are not to be found, the Church has a message to carry into that place. Those things will never change. But much else already has and will continue to.
The book by Phyllis Tickle (dontcha just love that name!) argues, convincingly to me, that every 500 years or so the Western Church – that’s us – has undergone a massive upheaval, redefinition and refinement. This should not surprise us – we were promised that God’s Spirit would guide and protect the Church. Only the very naïve would expect that the Spirit that moved over the waters of chaos bringing creation out of nothingness and that set the disciples on fire with the message of the risen Christ would come to a stop – or would allow us to. The Spirit has always been moving within the Church, and, according to all those thinkers I mentioned at first, every once in a while that Spirit flames white-hot and brings about enormous transition in a short amount of time. You and I happen to be living in such a time of enormous change.
The change that you and I are witnessing began, for the Christian Church, that day in Capernaum when Jesus entered the synagogue and taught, as Mark tell us, “with authority.” I believe that same authority exists within the Church today, and that that authority is evident everywhere that Jesus’s message is proclaimed. I believe that those thinkers I have named who are being read and discussed within this congregation are speaking with that same authority.
And I think the result of their writing, their speaking, if you will, will be the same as Jesus’s speaking. It will cast out demons.
Jesus came proclaiming change – change in the way those who heard him should think about and understand God. Change in the way those around him should treat each other. Change in the way they understood their past and their future. He does no less today. Jesus the Christ is present in our world and our congregation to continue to cast out demons and to move forward the love-centered change he has always been about.
But what kind of demons could he be casting out among us? Certainly, as from the beginning, he is present to cast out fear and hatred and loneliness and all else that keeps us from being truly ourselves. But there is more. I believe Jesus is also among us to cast out the things that keep his community, the Church, from accomplishing its mission in God’s world.
That is, the Spirit of God pulses through the Church to call us to a vitality and relevance in our own day. This means that any sentimental idealizing of the past has to go. The Church of the 1950's when the baby-boom swelled its membership is over. It does no good for the Church’s future, to wish it were not so. The days when members of denomination could be expected to show up in the neighborhood parish just because it is there are over. It does no good for the congregation’s future, to wish it were not so. The days when congregations could focus more on themselves and their members than on their surrounding community are over. It does no good for the congregation’s future, to wish it were not so. In fact the attitudes based on the former reality of a former day hinder the church’s work in fulfilling its calling – to bring all persons to know that they are loved by God and are eternally safe in God’s care. The days when attendance and support of one’s community of faith could be lackadaisical or indifferent because others could be expected to pick up the slack are over. There are no passengers on this ship. We are all crew. We in the Episcopal Church have a legacy of fearlessly embracing the truth: scientific truth as well as theological truth. We have an openness to the dignity of every human being: those who are historically like us and those whose way of life has in centuries past been misunderstood and condemned. We have an appreciation and reverence for the imagination: for music and painting, for poetry and drama, for art in all its forms. We have a respect for human reason: for knowing the difference between the truth of myth and sacred story and the truth of mere reporting and description. We have a great gift to share as one part of God’s one church. But how to share it. How to be faithful to our calling?
On of the many writers I have named says to us that in our day every congregation must ask three essential questions. “Who are we now?” (Not “Who did we used to be?”); and “Who now is our neighbor?” (Not just who are our members?” or as I like to remind us in the words of Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, “The church is the only society that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members . . . “) And the third question “What are we here for?”
The answers to these questions change with the times. They always have. To remain faithful to its calling – that is to continue to be prospered by God – any congregation must wrestle with all three of them.
Who are we now?
Who now is our neighbor?
What are we here for?
Not to ask them allows the Church to slip into decline.
We have in our presence this morning the Voice of several prophets. They speak with authority.
Will we truly hear them? Will we allow the demons to be cast out?
As always, with the freedom that God grants us, the choice is ours.
Updated 2/18/09