Pentecost 16B Balancing Faith and Works

Todays lessons remind us that for the last 2000 years we’ve been part of an ongoing, sometimes quite noisy and occasionally rather rude conversation about what Jesus and our tradition really mean when we talk about the ways that faith is related to works. 

It’s a conversation found throughout the Bible: in today’s Gospel lesson Peter talks of faith, but is not yet willing or able to go where faith will take him. You can say that he’s willing to talk the talk without walking the walk: Peter hasn’t worked that part out yet. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus says that those who get to heaven are not necessarily those who call him Lord, but those who do the will of his father;  clothing the naked, visiting the lonely, feeding the hungry, finding the lost and those in need, doing faithful works. 

But we need to remember it’s not just all about works. In another part of scripture, Jesus tells the story of the Pharisee praying out loud, touting up his good deeds, justifying himself nicely; but, according to Jesus, still not doing as well as a tax collector who’s towards the back of the room asking God to have mercy upon him; for the second is a sinner whose faithful call for mercy is heard, honored by God. So maybe there’s some kind of balancing act between faith and works.  

For St. Paul, on one hand, would say that it is all in having faith that God loves you, that God is reaching out a hand and  all we have to do is accept that love and we’re home free, for we are justified by faith. But St. James sees another side in todays Epistle, writing that your faith has to be evident in good work. So how do we balance these two viewpoints, how do we work out our faith? 

I want to talk about that balancing with a kind of mind map with four corners and two words in each corner (four words I've used in other places to define how a spiritual life might work, and four other words that Marcus Borg uses to define “faith”); and see if these eight words can open up some new ideas and insights  on how faith and work can balance out in our corporate lives and our common ministry.

One word Borg uses for faith is “Fiducia,” related to fiduciary, a place we can trust. He uses a wonderful image here, saying we must learn to trust in God in order to live in God just like a young child must trust in the water before they learn to swim: you have to relax into the possibility that the water, that God, will carry you.  

This relates to what I call “Formation” - taking the chance that we are formed in the image of God;  and that God’s heart, God’s hand, moves to create and recreate, redeem; encourage and sanctify us in all that we are and all that we do. that our dream of God is God’s dream for us: In formation we come to believe, in the heart of our hearts and deep down in the heart of everything, that the God of the Universe, the God we see in Christ, doesn’t build junk. 

Borg’s second word for faith is “Accensus,” related to what we assent to: how we formulate and figure out our faith; and my second word is “Education.” We learn who we are in our formation and then we have to work, to study, to find out where we come from, who we’re with, where we’re going,  and why there’s all this traveling; and that takes time and effort. 

I joke that no one would go to the gym for an hour and a half a week and expect to get fit (although I do just that!); but, in the same way no one would go to church for an hour and a half a week and expect to know much about the deepest wisdom, ethical, prophetic, political, poetic, compassionate, tradition that Western civilization has ever produced. Just like my infrequent visits to the YMCA won’t pay off until I crank up the discipline, so our understanding of God’s wisdom, God’s truth, God’s desire for us and our world,  remains immature until we find an ongoing educational path to see and search the deep wisdom of the tradition in which we stand.

Now remember the old one-liner that says, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach,!” My ministry in this system is mainly teaching, so I guess that lets you know where I might be. But I do find that, as I learn in order to teach, I get more and more excited about who we are and what we can do together. The more I realize I’m part of the company that offers such good news, works for mercy and justice, carries healing and compassion, brings the captives home, and has for over 2000 years, the more I find the faith to share it.

Both Accensus and education build our faith; and with all the new technologies --from audiotapes to DVDs, from photocopying to email and the internet -- there are so many riches of the Christian tradition freely available, so many resources to inform and enlighten our faith. 

The third word I use in my four cornered model is “Celebration.” In Jesus Christ, God comes to keep us company, and that’s good news, especially in times when life turns corners, takes us on a new road, when we get lonely and need company, for, to quote one playwright:

In a world  in a world where so many are alone it would be an unforgivable sin to be lonely by yourself 

This church, every church, stands as a sign that no one is alone. Jesus sees the lonely crowds and is moved by compassion: we, as his people, do the same.  The word for our worship ceremony today, We come together today to celebrate the Eucharist, that is how and where pray, that is what we do. But we come together to celebrate when a baby is born, when a couple marries, when life comes to an end: we set the space and fix the meals and tell the stories and gather the community in tragedy and triumph, in good times and bad, we honor the dignity of every human person, and we celebrate the gift of God in keeping faith, in celebrating and sharing that good news to all humankind.

The word Borg uses for this kind of faith is “Fidelitas,” like a faithful relationship with a partner, with family and friends, with strangers who need us -- and maybe everybody needs what we have to celebrate. I never forget one church’s slogan: “God is love, we deliver!”

Borg’s fourth and final word for faith is “Visio,’ related to Vision. How do we see, envision a way to live into this new possibility over time? I know this, that it comes as a gift, is taken up in hope and love, and leads us to a faith that works and changes.

So the fourth word I use is “transformation.”  When we realize how deeply God forms and calls us, when our ongoing education open us to see what a large company of faith wisdom and practice accompanies us, when we understand more and more how we are called to participate in, and celebrate God’s kingdom coming and God’s will being done; then we come to realize in doing our daily deeds and sharing our daily bread, that we’re slowly but surely changing the world.

This takes time and work and company and God’s good Grace; but we have more than enough!  One theologian says that our whole Christian life is “a marinade rather than a glaze; we are being transformed by being soaked in the gospel!” But over time, and by letting God’s love, God’s home ground, God’s faith, soak into our hearts and lives, we come to see the world the way God sees it, soaked in Christ’s Gospel, as we come to participate in God’s love for the world, God’s dream for creation. 

So, Formation and Fiducio,  Education and Assensus,  Celebration and Fidelitas,  Transformation and Visio.  all big concepts, all big words (and keep remembering those who can do, and those who can’t teach). But I do believe that this is the heart of our tradition, at the heart of our tradition is the heart of God’s love for the world, and this can give us great hope..

We are turning a funny corner in the church. Our ages are up, our numbers are down, we’re not sure what the future will hold. But we’ve turned these corners in past, God will not leave the world comfortless. For over two thousand years the church has been constantly resurrected beyond our expectations and this time is no different.

But it is a time when we might be called to take up our ministry in a new  way,  in a new world. To do a careful preparation for harvest we might not live to see. For that is how faith works.

 Amen.

What if God were one of us? Pentecost 15B, St Luke's Yea

Let me start with a story this morning (and I have this sneaking fear that I've told this in this congregation several years ago, but bear with me).

 In 1986 I was  going from San Francisco to my seminary in Berkeley to report to my field education professor on some work I was doing.  I felt really proud with the work, satisfied with what it said about my ability to minister, my compassion  as well as competence. After so many years of getting it wrong, taking detours, goofing off, I was finally getting together. 

So I was waiting in the San Francisco BART station at Civic Center; which is right at the edge of a fairly “iffy” neighborhood. There weren't too many people on the platform  that stood between two train train tracks and I noticed an older black man walking slowly towards me. I turned slightly and looked into the distance, but he came right up to me. 

“Which side do I go to for the train for Oakland?”

“I think you'll find it over there” I said, glancing to the right.

He raised his voice a bit, “I don't want to know what you think, I want to know what you know.”

I looked down. “The train for Oakland's on the right.” I said.

His voice was low and steady. “Look at me.”

I took a slow breath and raised my head. He was a man a bit older than I was; in working clothes and with strong eyes;  I have a sense that he might've had some scars but I don't really remember. When I will never forget is that he had  a sense of dignity I hadn't expected, an authority I would never have looked for. I looked at him face-to-face and said, “the train for Oakland comes on this side,” and pointed with my right arm to the tracks on the right.

He held my eyes for a second longer, and then said, “Thank you,” and i turned to watch him as he walked away.

And I saw something big about how little I saw, how little I looked for, how pitifully small I was: I was nowhere near to any kind of real confidence, compassion, completeness, either in my ministry or in my whole life. And he had broken me open so that I could see that. I was surprised to be so immediately thankful for the gift he had given me. 

A few years later, in the mid- 1990s, Joan Osborn had a hit that touches this in some ways. She sang: 

What if God was one of us…

just a stranger on the bus

trying to make his way home

So let’s keep all that as background music as we look at today’s Gospel.

So far in Mark, up to the section we just heard, Jesus has been having a hard time of it; but it’s been even tougher for his fans and followers. He’s pushing some boundaries, taking it lightly with traditional purity laws and cherished sacred customs. People are getting worried: his family fears for his health while some others think he thinks he's simply lost it! 

Yes, he tells compelling and enlightening stories, he heals people, he exorcises demons, Mark reports he even lords it over nature; but he’s making people uneasy. Yes, when he presides over a gathering in a field, a few fishes and loaves turn into a major feast, and that’s great; but he also plucks the grain in the field during the Sabbath, which is forbidden, he eats with sinners and tax collectors, even worse, and he even forgives sins, a task that belongs to God and the ordained temple priesthood. He’s doing  dangerous things! 

And Jesus is saying over and over that the kingdom of God has come into the world, right here and now, and that God’s kingdom is something beyond custom, beyond etiquette, beyond the commonly accepted traditions and patterns we share with family and friends. And, as you might guess, that is not easy for most people to take: they are saying, there have to be some rules to follow, some customs to uphold, things to hold together!

So when he heads out of Gennesaret  and into Tyre (which is not an neighborhood you'd want to visit late at night), He might be a bit tired from working with all the good and wholesome religious people, and just want to get away to rest and recuperate in the middle of nowhere. But I would bet there were still a few of those good and proper people around, just watching Jesus, when that foreign mother, that outsider, came in to make her very improper request. 

We need to focus there, to see how surprising, how shocking it is for a Syro-Phoenician woman, with no man to speak for her, speaking up, daring to ask for something from a Jew. It is almost unspeakable; but here is this outsider making an outlandish claim: “Please heal my daughter!” 

To use an old saying, “the silence must have been deafening!” And those religious people listening must have been reassured when her courageous prayer from the heart receives an appropriately heartless response from Jesus: “Let the children be fed first," he says, "for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” The good religious folks listening must have felt relief that some cultural customs were finally being upheld; that Jesus wasn’t going to go too far! 

But for that single mother, who must've had incredible courage, love, dedication, to reach out to speak to this stranger: that response must have almost knocked her off her feet.

Yet she still stands there, and she still says, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.”

I imagine it got even quieter then! What did people do and,more importantly, what did Jesus think? Here he has been talking about a widening understanding and participation in the open heart, the open hand of God; and suddenly there is a call for mercy that breaks all the stereotypical boundaries, coming from one of the last places any good Israelite would ever want to look. 

Out of love for a lost daughter, this outlsider challenges the inside of Jesus’ heart saying, “Please be open to find, to call for God's good work, saving action, all-encompassing embrace, in people you are still willing to overlook. Be willing to look at me and see the glory of God opening, please look at me and see  redemptive action ready to take place, please look at me and feel the wind of the Spirit calling you to be reconciled to your lost sister. Please look at me and announce God's mercy, God's action, God's kingdom. Please, here and now, heal my daughter!”

Just a few chapters before in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has been shocked by  “good” peoples unbelief: but here he is astonished at  the power of a “bad” woman’s  faith in him. And Jesus changes his mind. He turns to look at the outsider in a new way and, even though his response is not especially gracious, ““For saying that,” he says, “you may go—the demon has left your daughter,” and the Samaritan woman's daughter is healed.

And people started talking then, and they would talk more, and their eventual and considered response would be deadly. 

Then Jesus heads back home, to more respectable regions, and on the way he is presented with yet one more broken person who needs healing; a deaf man with a speech impediment.  So he takes him aside, put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touches his tongue and looking up to heaven, sighs and says to him, “Be opened.” “And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” 

And that ends the account of today’s  Gospel: two fairly big miracles; the broken daughter of a woman marginalized by gender, ethnicity and geography is made whole, and a man unable to hear and speak can now do both clearly. But I think there is a third miracle hidden in there as well.  

Jesus had said “Be opened” to the crippled man; but the foreign woman told Jesus, “Be open” - and he heard her! Maybe this is not such a shocker; the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “Jesus was tested in every way as we are, yet did not sin.“ So maybe the Samaritan woman help him pass that test, maybe she opens him up to a largess of a God he could never find in that inner circle: and maybe the surprise of it stayed with him for a long time. Like the man on the subway stays with me after all those years.

So the question I live with lately, that I offer to you today, is this: “What if God’s word of mercy and compassion and justice is announced outside of our institutional norms? What if God’s kingdom comes from someone we would rather overlook? What if God in Christ is willing and ready to be found as:

a stranger on the bus

Trying to make his way home.

How can we come to live with that, even love that? How can we respond to that Good News, how can we make our hearts and our ministries big enough to bring that person to this community, to this table, so that we can learn and learn to love together, how can we make room to share in this hope?

In the name of Christ. Amen.

On the Martyrs of New Guinea

The word for today is “Theodicy.” and the question it poses is this: “Why does God allow good people to suffer, and why does God, so often, seem to let evil win the day?”

The question of theodicy comes fresh with the heartbreaking news this week of five Australian soldiers murdered in Afghanistan; it come in the moments when you sob for the young mother who dies too soon with a malignant cancer; or are touched in the ongoing sadness as an old friend lingers too long in the tightening grip of Alzheimer's. The question of theodicy wonders: “if God creates a good world, then why does this evil exist, why does evil seem to win so often?”

The question of theodicy comes when we see people, working to live with all their hearts, all their purpose and passion, sharing their hope, their life, their faith in all they believe to be good and true and beautiful; who end up suffering, dying for their witness, their beliefs, losing it all in the end. And the question of theodicy comes most poignantly today, when remember and honor those Christians martyred in New Guinea in September 1942.

Martyrs have always been part of the world, of the church.  Some would say it starts with the massacre of the Holy Innocents by Herod in the Gospel of Matthew;  others would say, after the crucifixion, when Stephen, the first deacon, is murdered in Jerusalem sharing his belief in the crucified and resurrected Christ. Paul, witnessing this death, will be converted to a new life in the church and will end up beheaded as a martyr in Rome. Peter will be crucified upside down, after telling his murderers he was not worthy to die on the same kind of cross as his master. In the end, ten of the twelve apostles will be martyred, killed for their beliefs, in those very early years. In the second century Tertullian writes that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

So others will follow: Justin, Perpetua and her companions, Ignatius of Antioch, Thecla, St Alban, St. Sebastian; the list goes on through the centuries. Sometimes kings and emperors do the dirty work, other times the church makes her own martyrs: we think of Thomas a Becket, Thomas Campion and Thomas More, of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer.  

It happens all over the world. There have been martyrs of Uganda, of India, of the Spanish Civil War; martyrs like Maximillian Kolbe and Edith Stein in Auschwitz; Dietrich Bonhoeffer murdered in Germany at the same time; even the Roman Catholic Trappists martyred in North Africa in 1996, the Anglican Melanesian brothers martyred in the Solomon Islands in 2003, and that’s still a very small beginning in a very long list. 

But, at least for me, for many years, they all seemed so far from my life, perhaps because I could look away from these painful sacrifices. But then I came to Australia in 2001 and spent most of a decade at St. Peter's Eastern Hill, working in chaplaincy and university ministry as part of the ministry team, spending many Sunday mornings sitting in the sanctuary facing the three stained glass windows that Napier Wailer designed in1946 and dedicated to the New Guinea Martyrs who had died 4 years before that.

Looking at the windows and seeing the teachers, the nurses, the workers and priests, all murdered by the invading Japanese in early September 1942 - now 70 years ago - knowing in that congregation there were people who knew the people who had died, who still held pain in their hearts and still wondering why this great tragedy had taken place: there the martyrs blood, the growing seeds, the living stories, were closer than I had known. I could no longer look away, for the witness of the martyrs calls us to see.

This Diocese and this Cathedral are closely related to these events as well. Archbishop Sir Philip Strong, the Bishop of New Guinea during the war, retired to this Cathedral Close, would be remembered by some here today as a worshiping member of this community, was buried from this place.

In an 1981 sermon, he talked about those martyred in PNG: remembering when he suggested to one that she move to a safer  inland station, she asked to stay, saying, “what will the children do if I go?” He remembered another missionary, who, when asked what she would do if the Japanese came, replied, “We are in God's hands, ready to suffer… if he so wills:” just two of many stories concerning those ten martyrs. 

As Bishop Phillip said, “I felt humbled indeed after their deaths to realize I had seen in them the true martyr spirit of selfless devotion and I felt indeed that immediately they had passed through the transient sufferings, terrible though they may have been… [To a] glory [that] must've been unspeakable.” 

For the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. 

So, with such witnesses in our institutional memory and in our very midst, what can we say? How can we respond to such a costly witness of good over evil, even when evil appears to win, when we are so small, our faith so fragile, our witness so weak? How can we even begin? Perhaps we can only wait with empty hands for a good word, a comforting grace, to begin to renew us. For, as TS Eliot writes, “The only thing we can hope to acquire is humility, humility is endless.’ And as for being small, Sr Joan Chittister writes this:

“Small is not nothing and empty is not bereft. To be small is to need, to depend on the other. Smallness bonds us to the rest of the human race and frees us from the arrogant isolation that kills both the body and the soul. To be empty is to be available inside to attend to something other than the self. We become full of the blessings of life.

The witness of these saints and martyrs, their loving lives in the face of death, can enable our witness and help us to find the grace to accept ourselves as we are, help us to move forward as we can; to witness, to take pains, to act out and witness God’s love in the larger world, according to our ability, according to our call. Again, as Chittister writes: 

“Then, emptied out by the awareness of our own smallness, we may have the heart to identify with those whose emptiness, whose poverty of spirit and paucity of life is involuntary. Then, we may be able to become full human beings ourselves, full of compassion and full of consciousness.” 

For we stand on common ground with these martyrs in the light of the great hope we have been given, as witnessing members of the community that journeys together in the belief that Jesus Christ is true; that what he said, and where he walked, and what he, did all point to a reality that is almost good beyond belief. 

We spend our lives living up to this truth: that the God who creates the whole universe is willing to be found in the midst of the very fragility of human being, in the life of Jesus; and in the work and witness, the suffering and resurrection of our lives and in those we love as well; willing to be known in the intimacy of the Holy Spirit; in the beating of our hearts, in the rhythm of our breath, and the seasons of our growing and waning and rising, where we witness as they did, as we can.

So we gather here this morning, sharing with them in the hope of an unspeakable glory, in the light of a faith that, in the end, all wounds are healed, all hearts made whole, and all hopes will finally come home. We stand with them and witness that God's will will be done, in the faith that love will finally win at the last.

Dear and Holy Martyrs of New Guinea:

Margery Brenchley

John Duffill

Leslie Gariadi

May Hayman

Henry Holland

Lilla Lashmar

Henry Matthews

Mavis Parkinson

Vivian Redlich

Lucian Tapedi

And all you who stand near God in that eternal light;

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen

Diving into Dangerous Truths - Pentecost 13B

In the summer of 1959, when I was 13 years old, I practiced diving almost religiously at the L-shaped pool at the back of the small tennis club three blocks from where my parents lived in Sacramento, California. It was a great summer! Looking back, all that practice, that discipline, may have had to do with making sense, making peace, with the body that was growing too fast, in ways that surprised me; trying to master and make peace with that growing mystery. Part of it also might have been learning to be a teenaged pack animal – most of my friends at the tennis club that summer were doing the same thing. But at any rate, alongside of some tennis, a good part of my days were spent practicing a swan dive, a jackknife, and a cannonball (which I was quite proud of). I decided against trying a cutaway dive when a friend's attempt ended up with knocking out four front teeth on the diving board. Instead I worked to master, in increasing order of difficulty; the half gainer, the backflip, and the full forward somersault.

Learning the half gainer wasn't too hard after I reconciled myself to the fact that I would often land painfully flat on my back, leaving a large red mark, until I got to the point where my feet finally hit the water first. I used my height to make the backflip work; flailing in a way that, if not elegant, was effective in turning me over in the middle of the air and generally completing a full backwards somersault. But the forward somersault was a different matter. I couldn't just jump forward and let the momentum of the dive carry me over: instead, I had to jump and rise as if I were going into a jackknife, then tuck my arms and head into a ball and propel myself quickly enough so that I could turn over in time to meet the water fingers first. It was not easy at all.

And I kept coming back to this memory, this teenage liturgy from over 50 years ago, when I was reading and rereading John's Gospel for this morning. What is Jesus trying to tell us in this reading? What is the center, what was the destination, why is it such a difficult teaching, how do we dive into the living water here?

But John's Gospel constantly points to this hard-to-grasp possibility, that Jesus points to as an actuality, that the very word of God - there from the beginning, creating, ordering, redeeming the universe  - has come to dwell with us, literally pitching his tent with us, in the middle of human being. And that we are called to incorporate him into our being by partaking of him, by eating his very flesh and blood.

This teaching was not easy at all for his disciples, or for any Jews of the time. Cannibalism was forbidden, and for someone to be touched by human blood was to be defiled, and here was Jesus calling his friends and followers to, literally, drink his blood, to gnaw on his very flesh.

These tough teachings are typical of John’s Gospel. In many ways this conversations resonates with an earlier one with Nicodemus in Chapter three; “Unless a man be born again he cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven” When Nicodemus protests at physical impossibility, Jesus points to a spiritual reality where the "wind blows where it blows" and where the spirit comes where it will, where God's will will be done. And that confounds Nicodemus, “how can these things happen?.” And I think it confounds us as well.

So while we’re chewing on this improbable possibility, no less than Nicodemus wondering about being born again, Jesus goes on beyond us. “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that were spoken to you are spirit and life.”

But what if learning to take in the substance and spirit of Jesus's life, the body and blood of his teaching, is a little like the way I learned to tuck my body into a very small place in order to turnover : this momentary conversion, so that I could move quickly in the middle of the air and complete that difficult dive; ending up as I would with a regular jackknife, but with this wonderful revolution in the middle.

There was a song popular in the middle 1950s that began, “Pretend you're happy when you are blue, it isn’t very hard to do, and you will find happiness without an end whenever you pretend.”

Sacraments are not like this: the water of baptism, the rings at a wedding, laying on of hands at confirmation or ordination, the oils of healing or unction, the very bread and wine we gather ‘round today, have nothing of pretense or magic about them. But they are actions which open us to be aware of the reality of life and death and resurrection in Christ's world. They are occasions, times when we move carefully and take heed, where we take in the possibility that all life is holy because God is here and he has pitched his tent in our very midst and has come to be our friend.

In the late 1960s, some 10 years after my disciplined diving summer, I was baptized in the Episcopal Church, the American Anglicans. The poet Philip Larkin says we come to church to “take ourselves more seriously” and there was a bit of that. But there was also a great hope opening in me, responding to a half heard, half hoped-for call, that the universe might mean more, might be leading me in love, in a way that I could not quite believe, but could almost reach out and touch, and wanted to dive into; and three passes of water on my forehead began that journey

Jesus says we must be born again of water and the Spirit. Jesus says we must incorporate his body and blood into our lives, Jesus says we are called to be his friends: and that is what we are here for; to act that out here, so that we can live that out everywhere.

Going back to the diving board: what I learned there was something about discipline and dedication, a willingness to learn, a growing sense of commitment to seeing it through, to moving towards the right action, so that I could  take a jump, turn around in time and come home at the last. In that way the forward somersault was a kind of sacramental preparation for the waters of life.

It is a bit of a dangerous opportunity,like those sacramental moments: the refreshing water, the bread and wine, the hands on the head, the rings shared, the blessings given, the journey begun. And we can be forgiven for sometimes forgetting that these moments of refreshment and renewal all point outward to remind us of our larger life, our deeper ministry in the world.

But what we do here moves us in that direction, towards that revolution, for Christ has said he will be here, in his self-giving, in sharing his body and blood, substance and spirit, in imparting his purpose and passion, that we may be members of his body,; a body of belief, of action, of compassion, people brought together by the spirit in love to be love: to be a city on a Hill, to be the salt of the earth, to be the light of the world.  Amen.

Jesus want to know...

Here’s a question to start: Have you ever been to a gathering, a meeting, a party on your way to somewhere else and met someone who decided they really wanted to know you and you think, “this is going to take longer than I expected.”?

Perhaps Jesus is like this, particularly in John’s Gospel: here is a picture of the word of God, who has been here from the beginning pitching his tent  in the middle of our living room, somewhere between the TV, the couch, the door to the kitchen. It can be difficult.

But in each of the Gospels he tends to be demanding: it is no accident that the two words that occur most in the gospel of Mark are “immediately” and “astonished”: because things change when Jesus is around! Luke stretches us out by making inconvenient and important connections with people we might rather overlook; and Matthew weaves the story of this irregular Messiah, Saviour, God-with-us, using images and stories which seem as old as the creation.

And Jesus shows up in John’s Gospel and says, “I am the bread of life,” and sometimes we can be forgiven for thinking that actually we might  be satisfied by a drink, some dip, and maybe peanuts before we go on somewhere else, to the rest of our life; But this Jesus is still saying something like he is the center of everything. And how do we get around that?

Here’s a little one-liner; “No matter where you are, it is not always easy being here.” But we live in a culture that is increasingly well designed to make us want to be somewhere else, someone else, and fairly quickly at that.

Ann Wilson Sheaf writes that we are addicted to the 3 ifs: “what if”, “as if”, and “if only”: They’re a seductive trio that make almost everything a threat, or a promise or a vague possibility: but while we stand paralyzed at these wide crossroads Jesus comes and says: “You are light, a city, salt. Whose silence are you? Whose hopes are you? Who are you?" And Jesus comes to say that he is bread for the world, living water, wine for the banquet, a celebration that culminates in the present moment and lasts forever. 

And we face him in Scripture, through the tradition, in our churches, at our gatherings, in the friend and the stranger, in the surprising emergencies and opportunities of our lives, the places were we pause and pass on, where he surprises and threatens and renews us. And it isn't easy to get our heads around what a relationship with Jesus looks like, especially with the Gospel of John where he calls us to come and see, to look at him and ourselves like we've never seen anything before; as if this meeting might be more real than we ever could have asked or imagined.

Most of us are not used to meeting people like this, in this world where those three ‘if”s: “what if”, “as if”, “if only”, live. He can be a threat here, where that living death burns up in the face of his dying life, his vivid reality, his real hope

Some years ago I was the senior chaplain at RMIT University in Melbourne, and I will never forget a young student, single mother, daughter of immigrants, dealing with deep depression, sitting in my office and saying, “I go to the mall, and I look on the web, and I don't see anyone who looks like me, and I don't know what is wrong with me.”

What was wrong was her answer needed to be larger than question she was asking; what was wrong was that the mall and web couldn't allow the conversation that needed to take place so that she could remember, be reminded, be renewed, in who she was and where she came from and why all the traveling. 

But when Jesus meets us in the middle of our lives and tells us who he is and asks us who we are, then suddenly the whole world becomes present in a new way and we realize we have to become brand new people. And to get there from here we have to have faith in Jesus, we have to have a new choreography of belief and action; we have to learn to live and move and have our being in this new possibility of relationship and reality

Marcus Borg, in a book called “The Heart of Christianity,” breaks the word “faith” into four dimensions, images and actions which can build a body of belief, understanding and practice. He uses four Latin words to define what biblical, theological, critical, real faith, in Jesus might mean for us today.

The first is, “Accensus,” what we assent to: not just signing on the dotted line, but the formulations of faith, that delineate our desires and dedications, our values and priorities, our dilemma and our diagnosis. Anyone here remember the 4 spiritual laws? Four simple questions, four easy answers, sign on the dotted line and your place in heaven is assured. Maybe add the Nicene Creed or the 39 articles; they both can be valuable - though neither is a particularly good party piece. Better possibilities might be the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, the places where Jesus assures us we will meet him in the hungry, the lonely, the lame and the lost: or these wonderful one-liners in the Gospel of John where he calls us to participate in the presence, in the dance, of the spirit as we join him in returning to the Father. So, not just sign on that dotted line, but live into that long journey!

The second word for faith is “Fiducia” related to fiduciary, a place where we can find trust. About twenty five years ago I was teaching a class on meditation at our Cathedral in San Francisco and suddenly remembered sitting on my grandfather's lap as a young boy, resting back on his ample belly and feeling safe and held. The image of God as a fat old man doesn't work for everyone, (though the farther I go, the more I like it) but finding the place where we can sit and trust being, where we can just let being be, is incredibly valuable  -- although it is not easy, because it can remind us of our noisy allegiances to those 3 ifs as well as the call of the Mall and the web. But the truth is that a meditative practice, a dedication to simple silence, can show so much noise in your life

A few nights ago I was having a meditative moment in my hotel room after walking out to that very interesting “Art Gallery and Museum of the Northern Territory.”  I was simply using a phrase and following my breathing to find the silence under everything, when I heard a very small sound and surprised myself by thinking that there was almost no likelihood that the son of Sweetheart, that very large crocodile, had found its way to the adjoining bathroom. To learn to lean into God's dependable silence is to come to know how noisy, how crazy, our lives can be if we’re not careful.

The third word Borg uses for faith is “Fidelitas” as a faithful relationship -- with a partner, friend, with a stranger at the party, with the very glory of God. For, in John's Gospel, Jesus calls us to a conversation, a dancing with God  with all the distinctive disabilities and detritus and desires of our lives while making room for absolutely everything and everyone in that dance. It makes the world very big and extremely intimate.

But This relates to today’s other lessons; the relentless egoism of King David taking another man's life, another man's wife, and not seeing a world that is larger than his own needs or ambitions. Relates to the vision in the letter of the Ephesians: the ecology of the faithful family or village, the community of faith, where gifts are shared, where compassion and companionship are held in common.

The fourth phrase is “Visio’ related to Vision. Finally Borg asks us how we see, envision, move to live out into this new possibility in these four dimensions of faith, with the given texts and contexts of our times, learning to lean deep into the dependability of God and the mystery of the present moment, committing to this lively wrestling with God in the context of each and all of our relationships; stepping into this in each and every moment of our lives in God's great dance right in the middle of humankind

That is what this liturgy is about, to turn us around to see today anew: that Christ is here, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. These four dimensions of life that come to us right here in the middle of our lives: the chance for a conversation with the God who has pitched his tent in the middle of all these gathering opportunities, beginning now and lasting forever.

Assensus, Fiducia, Fidelitas, Visio. “Life, Death, Resurrection, Return!” "Quick, now, here, now, aways", Jesus comes to the middle of our lives and asks us who we are. And we turn around like people newly born and say to him, you are the bread of life! 

Amen.

Teaching and Evangelism in Post-popular times.

We all know that Marks gospel moves around a lot: if it were a movie there would be quick cuts, close-ups, special effects, lots of sounds; all those miracles, all those stories, it turns out that the two words that show up most often in Marks gospel are ‘immediately’ and ‘astonished.’ If the Gospel of Mark were a Youtube video you might see a quick close-up of someone turning around to see what they never expected, their eyes opening wide, their mouth exclaiming in wonder that something very new and very wonderful is happening here.

Except not today - at least not at the start of today's gospel. For today Jesus returns to his hometown with his disciples after all these miracles, signs and wonders, and everyone in the home town is saying: “Where did he get all this, because we're pretty sure we've figured this kid out.”

Jesus says that a prophet is without honor in his own hometown and the Gospel tells us he could no deeds of power there except to lay his hands on a few sick people. So maybe the moral for the day is that not a lot happens when people think they know you too well in your own hometown. And to me that’s where the Gospel  meets us today: in a world where people think they already know Jesus and his church all too well.

In a way it is our own fault. In the last 2000 years we Christians have told our story, have done our work, proclaiming Jesus in word and deed; sometimes with great success, other times in some real disasters but mostly carrying on, with God's grace, the greatest wisdom, ethical, spiritual, politic, prophetic, religious practice and tradition in Western civilization.

In fact, in all that time, we have shared the Gospel so well in word and deed that the world – at least in the west – has become our own home town and, in a strange way, people now know us so well they no longer see us! That may be one of the things that's  particularly happened to the church in the last  - let's say- fifty years, simply because we've done our work so well.

Look at the advances; how we treat one another:  in caring for the poor and meek, in working for justice, freedom and peace, in speaking for and serving those in any kind of trouble. Yes, we might have a lot farther to go, but over the last 2000 years we have learned and shared a lot about loving our neighbors. The mission of the church has made the world a better place. So maybe, paradoxically, we've done such a good  job, now that the younger generation now tends to see our face and our faith everywhere, and at the same time, they really don’t see us anywhere; because they think they know us far too well. And that's the problem.

If we look around in almost all of the churches of the diocese, we find, for the most part very few people over 15 and under 50. We just are not interesting to them anymore. And the question I work with, pray with, live with (and I bet you do too) is what do we have to say to them, how do we speak the Good News to people who don’t even know they need to hear it?

So, if that question speaks to you, today's gospel arrives like a hand-delivered gift of God. For Jesus meets this moment in Mark’s Gospel, with people who think there’s nothing new they can hear from Him and his disciples; and if we look carefully at that lesson we can see that God tells Jesus and his disciples, and that means us, to do two simple (and not easy) things: get teaching and go talk to people.

First, Jesus goes among the villages teaching, and that’s one half of it. Teaching, and therefore learning, has to come first.  We have to learn to teach this eternal good news of Christ in a new way. In so much of our Church it seems like we are trying to speak to a 21st century world with the vocabulary of a 19th century theology and it doesn’t work that well. So we need to take time and effort to “read, mark and inwardly digest” our faith so that we can feed a famished world with the true bread of Christ in ways that can nourish anew.

I know that education is already important in this congregation, but elsewhere in the Diocese we’ve started classes and programs that are building learning skills for Christians who seriously want to teach and share their faith.

More than a half-dozen parishes in the diocese have people enrolled in the Bishop’s Certificate, a multiyear program that covers, scripture, history, theology, liturgy, pastoral care and evangelism in a comprehensive program.
Education for Ministry is another multi-year program that other Anglicans find fuels their faith and teaches them to share in new ways. Cursillo is doing great things in this area as well.

 We're also starting two new education and outreach programs this year to speak to Christians and non christians who might have overlooked the Anglican tradition. One is a book study on Marcus Borg’s “The Heart of Christianity,” which is very helpful resource  for reaching people who think they might be a bit too liberal for the Anglican Church. The other book, “Love Wins”, by a popular young evangelical named Rob Bell, works to reach out to people who fear that the Anglican church might be too liberal for them. That's why Anglicanism is often called the “Via Media,” the middle way, so in the work we’re doing, we're reaching out to meet people where they are and help them see the eternal riches  of Christ in a new way.

We’re also starting to build some gatherings on ways of getting better in the ways we each out in the larger community. This spring we’re starting a program called Pastoral Partners to offers some new skills and methods in making our ministry of caring more careful. It will take some time, mean some sacrifice and time working together, but it also means we'll be able to offer better pastoral care in our parishes, nursing homes, hospital ministry; learning and teaching ways to make a better ministry in our communities for Christ’s sake. To quote the motto of a growing contemporary English parish; God is love, we deliver!

And that take us to the other point in the Gospel today where Jesus sends the disciples out, giving them authority, telling them to proclaim that all should repent, turn around and see that the man they thought they knew so well, this Jesus, is the way to see, live and love life anew; is the grace and gift of God willing to meet us face to face, here and now, and open us all up to larger life.

This is not an easy ministry, it wasn’t then and it isn’t now. But I am convinced that this is still the good news for today. We live in a world in which the Church has done such a good job that people take us for granted, that they  no longer see who we are and what we can offer; that we’re just seen as yesterdays hope looking sadly out of date in terms of tomorrow promise.

 And we need to take that into consideration, so we just need to make sure our message can speak to the concerns, hopes, fears of the people with whom we seek to share this good news. So we need to pray, we need to study, we need to teach and we need to learn to reach people where they are so that we can show them the true hope we offer.

For we are called as disciples, to take that message of Jesus to the world, even while facing the same facts he faced in his own home town: that people felt they had nothing to learn from Him. We can live with that, and we must learn from that too; to take the chance  to tell people the good news that God’s love, God’s living life and ministry, has come to their home, is facing them face to face, and looks a lot  like someone they thought they already knew well; like an old friend or even like a member of the family. Because the simple fact is that, we are the body of  Christ, and the good news of God just might look just like you and me. That is our call, our ministry and the Gospel we share today, in the name of Christ. Amen.

Marcus Borg in Christian Formation and Education

I have a warning for you before I start. Have you ever turned on your television in the morning, maybe on a weekend morning, seen people talking, and thought, OK, talk show format, and then you see that they seem to be very excited about a particular product: it can be for building muscle or losing fat or learning a certain way, but they are so enthused, and then it hits you, this is not real entertainment, this is a paid commercial program! Now I want to warn you, I have an agenda, this is not a real sermon, just remember, you have been warned. 

Some 35 years ago, towards the end of a fairly noisy party, a friend, a man I had known for a few years, leaned over to tell me that when I had said a certain thing to him (actually quoted a verse from the twelfth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews), it had been a great help getting him through a particularly tough time. I thanked him, punched him on the right shoulder, and realized, as I wasn’t a real big Bible quoter, that I actually hadn’t said that. Doing campus ministry in the 1990s, I had a student come to me and thank me for giving her such valuable advice that I am now prepared to swear that I never offered, but I believe that she heard it from me anyway. And often now, in sermons, people thank me for something they heard from someone else’s sermon while I happened to be preaching. I smile and say, “That’s all right” and it is. It’s even more than all right, because it says something about how God sows his word in the world.

John’s Gospel speaks of Jesus as the word of God, and certainly Christ is the definitive statement, but the truth is that each of us, is, carries that seed, casts out God’s love and God’s life in our lives and in our ministries, sowing seeds of connection and compassion and courage and truth in all we say or do (even if we don’t remember) in all of our meaning and our ministry. That’s one of the reasons we’re here as the baptized body of Christ, to hear the good word, the Gospel, so that we can be good news, so that we can remind and renew the whole creation with the Good news of Christ Jesus.

But for the last half century or so, we haven’t done it real well. (Even early in the last century, I think it was Bertrand Russell who sarcastically pitied “poor talkative Christianity.”) so sometime it seems like the whole party has moved to another corner and we’ve gotten harder to hear and less to say, with all the background sounds and now it’s more difficult to speak out and act out the word, the truth, of God’s love in our lives to our friends, family, neighbors, in our whole world.

So maybe the question is what I said here some six months ago:

How do we witness and work to reignite our church in a world that's fast moving in another direction, What do we say and do where slick slogans and quick answers are shouted at every corner? [certainly]... we don't stay quiet as the greatest ethical, spiritual, wisdom tradition within Western civilization moves slowly towards the sunset… we don't let the last person standing turn the lights out fold up the tent,  but what do we do?

Let me get a little personal here. I was ordained about two and a half years ago but before that I spent almost twenty years as a layperson in University ministry, chaplaincy, with some part-time teaching on the side. I had never planned for that. Actually, when I got to seminary in the 1980s I had no concrete plans, I just wanted to be there. I remember one staff member saying he felt that my most creative ministry in the church might be to go outside the church (and I thought, hmm), and in the late 1980s I worked part-time for Lauren Artress, who some of you know, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. When the bishop said he wasn’t ready to ordain me, Lauren asked if I had ever thought of University Chaplaincy, ministry in education, and I said I “think it would be too easy for me.” She looked at me and said, “Well, that’s interesting”, and it was.

But it wasn’t that easy. When I started campus ministry in 1991. it wasn’t that easy to try to speak simple, honest words to 19, 20, 21 year old undergraduates, to sow those seeds, to tell of Christ, after all that seminary education, and too many years in graduate school. So I tried to make new sense, to sow new seeds, to speak some new words on the road and in the dining commons and at the cafe and the gym and in hallways and wandering wherever the spirit led, even eventually in classrooms; and I listened a lot and learned to love more  and also found sometimes when I opened my mouth wide, God said, and people heard, things that were better than I knew. But I also found that the more I worked at It, the better it became, and the more real it got.

There’s the paradox, the gift gets better the more you give it. Ben Hogan was once asked how he became one of the greatest golfers in the world, and he said it was just luck. A reporter said, “But, Ben, you practice for eight hours every day”, and Hogan said, “Well, It just seems the more I practice, the luckier I get”.

And so several years ago, almost twenty years later, I got ordained and now one of my tasks in diocesan lay formation and education is the flip side of what I used to do: where I used to tell the world about the riches of the church, now I am trying to help the church share our truth with the world, because that’s where our hope is to be found.

So how do we come to sow our seeds? How do we live out our baptism vows to embody the word of God in our own lives? The simple truth is this; the more you practice the better you get.

For the last several years in the diocese, with St Columb’s Fair and some other offerings, we’ve worked at building places for people to learn more of the heritage we hold; the riches of Christ, the ebullient breath of the Holy Spirit, God’s loving creativity in the world we share. We’ve talked prayer and pastoral care and archiving our records and publicizing our events, and a lot in between. With this plus the Bishop’s Certificate and Education for Ministry (which you do so well here), people are growing mightily in faith, heart and mind, encouraged and encouraging each other in the ministry of  Christ, and now we are going farther to grow our faith and practice.

And here’s what I am selling. For the next six Thursday nights, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm here at St Augustine’s, I am offering a series of two hour gatherings with a systematic overview of Christian belief based on a book called “The Heart of Christianity” by Marcus Borg, Some would say Borg’s a serious scholar and theologian, others would say he’s too damn liberal, and I would say he’s very interesting, and offers a valuable way to see and question and work with  issues of faith and practice anew.

So for six weeks we’ll look at what belief and scripture, and God and Jesus and the community of the Holy Spirit might mean for us today. There will be a small charge for copies of each chapter, while the books are on the way and we can loan you one if that would help; but what we’re doing, and why this is important, is offering a systematic overview into understanding what God in Christ might mean in todays world and how we can get better in sharing this new creation. By the way, if there is any interest after that, we could consider a second  six week series on Christian practices, but that is very much up to you.

But I would bet that each of you, every Sunday, pray for people who are not here. They may be family, friends, neighbors, even strangers; and the very simple truth is that you just may be God’s word for them, and that call needs to be taken seriously, exercised, allowed to be graced (because so much of our ministry is Grace, and so much can be made better by regular practice). So, if you are interested in extending your understanding and ministry in Christ, you might bring them along, or you might carry them carefully and prayerfully in your heart; in either case, I commend this series to you. If you you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me after our Eucharist.

We will now return to our regular programming. In the name of Christ, Amen

For the Diocesan Celebration of Anglican Women of Australia. St Antony of Padua

1 Kings, 18:20-39
Matthew 5:17-19

To start, I need to confess two things; first, that I made a mistake for the first lesson, and so if you think it sounds like the first lesson for yesterday, you are right! The second confession will come later in the sermon.

But my mistake makes it clear that there are even more reasons to celebrate the witness and life of St Antony of Padua, known as the Saint of the things that get lost.

There are some real lost causes in the two readings for today.

In the Hebrew Scripture, the Prophet Elijah asks a widow on the edge of starvation to fix one more company meal and assures her it will last for a long time. And then Jesus says that our righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees, that unless we fulfill the law and the prophets, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And if that  demand does not - at least on some days -  seems a bit of a lost cause, then at least it can give us pause,

Because when we look at the church, and the memories of fuller happier days -- still with a hope of the future, but still keenly aware of our losing numbers, our aging communities, the increasing numbers of friends, neighbors, family members who don’t see what we know to be at the heart of the church, the heart of God’s love for the world we see in Christ -- then we might feel we have lost at least some of our hope. So with all of that we have good and timely reasons to turn to St Antony of Padua.

He was born in Lisbon of prominent parents in 1195  - he’s in the same era as St. Francis. At the age of 15 he joins the religious order of St. Augustine and ends up spending nine years at the Convent of Santa Croce. To quote: “Gifted with an excellent understanding and a prodigious memory, he soon gathered from the Sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Holy Fathers a treasure of theological knowledge”. Before long he’s ordained as a priest and it looks he’s found his place, a teacher of theology; doing well, Antony, go to the head of the class.

But then he meets some Franciscans brothers, off to convert the Islamic people of Morocco ,and sees their lives and ministry moving, not from the head, not from mere  knowledge, but from the heart, giving their hearts away to, not just remind, but encourage others in the life of Christ.

In Morocco they are martyred, lose their lives, and when Antony witnesses this, he decides to joins the Franciscans; to leave behind the matters of the head, all that straw-dry theology, and give his heart away. He decides that he will offer his life as a martyr to convert the world to Christ.

But things change, it doesn’t happen. He does join the Franciscans but  he gets sick on the way to Africa and an unplanned wind blows his boat off to Italy. He ends up in Tuscany, working in the kitchen of a hospice without time for either prayer and study, a slightly marginal member of the community, not quite fitting in, a bit of a duck in the chicken coop, and maybe he has found a happiness and a simplicity beyond his expectations.

But again, it doesn’t last long. Antony happens to be around one day, when a number of Franciscan and Dominican friars are brought together for an ordination and there’s no one to preach. They turn to the Dominicans then to the Franciscans but everyone declines, saying they’re just not prepared. In desperation they choose Antony, “whom they thought only able to read the Missal and Breviary”, and they command him “to speak whatever the spirit of God might put into his mouth and Anthony, ‘compelled by obedience, spoke at first slowly and timidly, but soon enkindled with fervour, began to explain the most hidden sense of Holy Scripture with such profound erudition and sublime doctrine that all were struck with astonishment.”

Things change: a few weeks later, in 1224, Antony gets a letter from headquarters. “Brother Francis sends his greetings. It is my pleasure that you teach theology to the brethren, provided, however, that as the Rule prescribes, the spirit of prayer and devotion may not be extinguished. Farewell.”

Theology, prayer and devotion. A trinity of ingredients that balance and compliment our lives together, the makings for food from heaven, that can make a feast, that can feed a starving family, giving hope to a widow and child with some left over for a wandering prophet; food for a time when the old recipes seem to have dried out and left us hungry and without a lot of hope.

 Theology, prayer and  devotion: ingredients that grace us with a righteousness that can feed ourselves, our friends, families, neighbors, nations, and even passing strangers, the bread of heaven, the cup of salvation, the food of a full and balanced faith, the riches of Christ, The gift we are given in order to to give it away.

Now that second confession: In the 1970s I used to joke that I was raised by feminists; the truth was that I learned then and still learn now how most women have a greater facility, a deeper gift than men do, of combining head and heart; integrating theology, prayer and dovotion. Perhaps one of the reasons so many men were against the ordination of women to the churches priesthood was that women do so much better in the priesthood of all believers: lifting the world, the pain and glory, the sadness and sanctity, the head and heart and wholeness of people and places and all of life back to God, with a natural grace that does not come too easily to most males. And we all need this whole priesthood to share in the priesthood of Christ. Especially now, when theology has gotten so cerebral, so heady, so… can I say, blokey?

An American theologian and writer, Diana Butler Bass, who we are hoping to bring to the diocese in 2013, has a good way of looking at this. BTW, we have some copies of her book “Christianity for the rest of us” at the Registry Library,  so if you want to borrow one, come on by.

Butler Bass comes at theology prayer and devotion with three simple questions which she finds at the heart of a spiritually vibrant Christianity -- old questions of believing, behaving, and belonging. But she says we are changing the way we ask those questions, changing in ways that enlarge and embolden the faith, ways that just might give us hope and vision, help us even exceed the righteousness of those dried out Pharisees in the old boys network.

Believing, behaving, and belonging. Now over the centuries, Butler Bass says Christianity has engaged these 3B's in different ways, with different interrogators and emphases and for the last 300 years or so, the questions were asked as follows:

1) What do I believe? (What does my church say I should think about God?)
2) How should I behave? (What are the rules my church asks me to follow?)
3) Who am I? (What does it mean to be a faithful church member?)

But now the questions have changed as the world has changed.  Butler Bass writes that contemporary people care less about what to believe than how they might believe; less about rules for behavior than in what they should do with their lives; and less about church membership than in those whose company they find themselves.

So, for Butler Bass, the questions have become:
How do I believe? (How do I understand and live with faith in my daily world
2) What should I do? (How can my actions make a difference in the world?)
3) Whose am I? (How do my relationships shape my self-understanding,my self-giving?)

So believing, behaving, and belonging still matter. But the ways in which we engage each area have undergone a revolution… For her “The old faith formulations were externally based, questions that could be answered by appealing to a book, authority, creed, or code. The new spiritual longings are internally derived, questions of engagement, authenticity, meaning, and relationship. The old questions required submission and obedience; the new questions require the transformation of our souls.”

As Francis writes to Antony, so I say to you.  “It is my pleasure that you teach theology... Provided... that, the spirit of prayer and devotion may not be extinguished. Farewell.”

Francis said one other thing: Preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary, and you already know that!

Dear Anglican Women of Australia in the Diocese of Wangaratta. I look around this morning and I see so many lives as sound theological texts, sermons in flesh and blood, in lives given over, served out in offering wholeness, hospitality, health, hope and home; combining head and heart, exceeding the righteousness of all those macho scribes. While those macho Pharisees argue about their their desiccated commandments and their dried up meals, you have been singing the songs of praise and providing the bread of heaven. The heart of Christ’s ministry, that eternal priesthood, is found in your hands, blooms in your  very lives.

And as God is blessed in your ministry, may you continue to be blessed, may you continue to give blessings; today and always.  Amen

Towards a Theology of the Cloud

Today’s Gospel focuses on a time when Jesus’ family thinks he’s  really lost it. He’s doing things everyone knows you can’t do, and he’s going well beyond the local rules: so his family, his mother and brothers (Luke adds his sisters as well), are trying to bring back him home because he’s simply getting too big for his boots.

Astonished is the word that shows up a lot in Mark’s Gospel; Jesus, the disciples, the crowds, everybody gets astonished by what’s happening here; the local boy making good way beyond expectation: teaching with authority, casting out demons, healing the sick, preaching good news, even pardoning sinners! It’s almost unbelievable, and the people who know him best, his own family and the home town folk, are saying, this boy is getting above himself.

But what happens when you get above yourself? What happens when you see the horizon is higher, that life goes farther, that love comes closer than you ever knew?

This is a universal question. Some years ago a teacher in the Zen Buddhist tradition was asked if he could encapsulate his wisdom in two words, He was quiet for a moment, and then he answered, “Things change!” There’s a lot there, things do change.

Do you remember when computers were really big? In 1965, when I was in University, a friend used to spend one night a week playing chess with a computer that was as big as a room. Now I have a computer I can lift with one hand and an iPad that I can carry with three or four fingers and a phone that may very well be smarter than I am, but, as long as I remember the passwords, I am all right with that.

But things do change, and technology’s gone so far in such a short time! From the 1930s to the 1980s my father was a printer and typographer in California. He used to give tours of our small printing business to school kids, asking their names, tapping the keys and letting them watch as the machine manufactured a line of type with their name flashing in silver metal which he would proudly present to them.

And when computer typesetting came in the late 1970s he told me they could never match a well trained typographer and a fast linotype. Now when I play with my laptop, carefully adjusting the relationship between letter and word and page, between dark ink and light space, I think he would be very happy to see how wrong he was.

For finally he was able to see that the future would be bigger than the past, that what was coming might contain more  possibilities than what has been before. This is both a material and a spiritual reality, but it does takes a certain kind of faith to let the future be different than the past, to rest in the hope that God’s word and God's world, can be bigger then you know, and it’s often not easy.

For the crowd around Nazareth, and Jesus’ family too, figured that God was to be found in a certain way, following a certain direction, the tried and true traditional path, and, for the most part, they were right: but they were starting to see some things, right in front of their faces, that astonished them even more, that told them God and God’s word, God’s life in their sight might come to look like nothing they had ever seen before, and it scared them.

So their temptation was to split the world into two parts: on one side, “what we know, what we’re used to”, was good; and on the other side, what was new, surprising, “beyond us” was bad, damaged or demonic. But Jesus tells them that the world might be bigger, might be better, than they had thought; that the new answers might be larger, have more largesse, than those old questions. For Jesus tells us, as surely as he has loosened the yokes of those under oppression, he has also bound the adversary, he has also saddled sin and he has set us free.

Now, I will freely admit that it may take some time to see the fruits flower in this new creation, but it looks like God’s truth is that if Christ is risen from the grave and we are raised with Christ, then by the grace of God Jesus’ way has already won, and so have we. And then the question comes, how can we live with, how can we live out of this new truth?

St Paul gives us some of the answer in his Second letter to the Corinthians;

“the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus... so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day… preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

And how do we get our heads around this?

Let’s go back to technology for a that. In the last few years there is this new thing called “The Cloud” where individual computers users can store documents and records offsite, in a central location, sometimes quite a ways away. And now we can put programs and plans and letters and documents on this remote cloud and share them more easily and access and edit them from various locations and with different devices at different times, and it ends up we’re working better together to store and share and keep our work and our life in the cloud, and that sounds, if not a little like heaven, then at least like something, once again, bigger, different than the world I thought I lived in.

So I am not saying God is like a computer: but I am saying that we, right now, in our very deepest ecology, are building an heavenly glory (somewhere beyond the clouds) in the realm of God’s eternal now.

But before we get too happy, lets realize that can be a tricky truth to live into, because there's a danger that we get so “spiritual,” that we end up caring less for our earthly ministry. I remember, in the early 70s, when I was a youth group leader, a young woman telling me that she hoped her father accepted the Lord before the rapture came (which for her was somewhere like Wednesday) and I wanted to say, “Listen, God’s family might be bigger than that; God’s love might be bigger we know, we might want a bit more time to work on this.” I didn’t say that, instead I tried to follow the old bumper sticker wisdom, “Be patient, God isn’t finished yet!”

But now I’d quote Henry Thoreau; "If you have built castles in the air.. that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." For I am convinced that what we build in our ministry here, day by day, just in time, is foundational for always, for what lasts forever.

So maybe the plain truth is that we just need to keep looking at Jesus, who gives and lives his life right here in sight of heaven: living with sinners and saints, healing those broken hearts, sharing bread and wine and tears and hope,and always reminding us that the family is this big, the world is this large, the victory is this sure; for our lives even now are hidden in Christ, and nothing can ever separate us from that eternal love.

St. John Chrystostom preached this one Easter some 1600 years ago, it’s still true:

“Rejoice today for the Table is richly laden...
Let no one go away hungry. 
Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,

for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; 
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, 
for the Death of our Savior has set us free...




Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!

Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!

Christ is Risen, and life is liberated...




To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!