Holiness, Virginity, and Texas Football

The gospel lesson for this coming Sunday - Easter 7 - contains this marvelous phrase from Jesus' prayer to his Father: "Sanctify them in the truth."  The words imagine a fundamental unity between the life of holiness and truth so that - as Newbigin, Hauerwas, and others have long contended - there is no such thing as truth that is not embodied truth.  This is not novel, only easily forgotten.  Sanctification - the life of holiness - is necessarily embodied for Christians, realized in the Body of Christ, the Church, whose head is the Incarnate Son of God.  Truth is this Son with whom God's People are in living relationship.  The Truth has a name and makes claims on our embodied lives as Christians.

So Hauerwas, in his book entitled Sanctify Them in the Truth, cites Bruce Marshall in the following footnote:
"Bruce Marshall rightly argues that believes which identify Jesus and the Triune God cannot be held as true except by engagement in worship and prayer in the name of the Trinity.  As he puts it, holding such beliefs as true 'changes your life and unless it changes your life, you are holding true some other beliefs'" (p5).

All of which leads to the following hilarious introduction to Hauerwas' chapter, "Gay Friendship: A Thought Experiment in Catholic Moral Theology."  What I particularly appreciate about the humor in the introduction is the way Hauerwas borders on irreverent with respect to Mary in a way that is not intended to be disrespectful, I think, so much as highlight the greater irreverence that occurs when Christians do not faithfully embody what we say we profess.  Our beliefs are not static, but represent claims of the Triune God on us.  Anyway, here it is:

"'Do you believe in the virgin birth?' That was the question we were asked in Texas in order to test whether we were really 'Christian.'  At least that was the way the challenge was issued during the time I was growing up in Texas.  I confess I was never particularly concerned with how that question should be answered.  I was not raised a fundamentalist, but I believed in the virgin birth.  The problem for me was not believing in it but what difference it might make one way or the other whether I did or did not believe in it.  My preoccupation was not with Mary's virginity, but with my virginity and how I could lose it.  In the meantime, of course, we Texans had football to keep us from being too torn up by any anxieties that might come from questioning the virgin birth" (p105).

On What Grounds Do We Preach One Flock?

Sermon excerpts from Easter 4, April 29, 2012

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Today is the 4th Sunday of Easter - we’re going on a full month of Easter now, good practice in becoming an Easter people - and the 4th Sunday of Easter sometimes goes by the nickname “Good Shepherd Sunday.”  We call it Good Shepherd Sunday on account of the prayer assigned to this day and the readings, especially Psalm 23 - “the Lord is my shepherd” - and our lesson from John’s gospel - “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says.

On a personal level, I love these readings.  But if I am honest, I don’t at all know what to do with these readings.  In particular, I don’t know what to do with a gospel that tells us that there will be one flock and one shepherd because, this morning, I am preaching to two services at one church.  Two services for somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five combined worshipers.  If statistics prove true, fewer than half of us this morning will be among the seventy-five worshipers who show up next week, which means that our church is really made up of at least three congregations: the two that are here this morning and the one that will be here next week, plus the half of us who will join them.  One flock, one shepherd, three separate assemblies.  Moreover, I am preaching the news that there will be one flock and one shepherd in a town with no fewer than twenty-one churches.

Tell me: can you think of any other business, non-profit, or other public entity that the good citizens of Portland, Texas, have decided we need twenty-one of?  I mean, can we get somebody as excited about bringing in some really good restaurants as our town is excited about founding new churches?

Even this number, though, gets dwarfed when one does a quick search for churches in the Corpus Christi area via the online yellow pages; such a search yields results for some four-hundred churches.

Please note that I am not saying that any of this a good thing or a bad thing; it’s simply the thing.  And the thing makes me wonder on what grounds I stand before you and preach one flock and one shepherd.

Importantly, I do not think that these things necessarily mean that we Christians have missed the point of the Gospel.  I cannot say for sure that we have missed the point of the Gospel because I know that each and every one of you, and me, and all of us together have very dear friends in every one of those twenty-one churches - and even at our other service (that’s a joke).  Friends whom we love, friends with whom you have worked and laughed and served closely.

Still, it is a strange thing that on the morning we gather to worship the God who has made it possible for us to be friends of God and one another, we worship without many of our dear, neighborhood friends, a good number of whom are worshiping in separate buildings just down the road, even as I speak.

I know better, but - at least on the surface - rather than God making our friendships possible, it sometimes looks like Jesus gets in the way of our friendships.  Like we get along better - Monday through Saturday - when we just don’t go there.  And I wonder: what does it tell us about the nature of our friendships when we discover that Jesus is getting in the way of them?

Many times, as Christians, we find friendship with others as we rally together around shared causes.  Causes like breast cancer, poverty, addiction, justice and wealth - and we are right, I believe, to hear God’s call to action in all of these things.  We tell ourselves that it is enough that we do these things because of Jesus.  We collect our friendships around these causes or lesser ones, like our children’s soccer and gymnastics practice schedules, our common love or hate of take-your-pick Texas universities, golf, biking, ceramics, whatever.  And again, here we are exactly right to imagine friendships in such a way that allow us to partner with people of all types and persuasions...

And yet, I wonder if even a small part of our souls is still bold enough to hope for the possibility of friendships centered on Jesus.

....


Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - mean to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.

The grounds for our preaching one flock and one shepherd is Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, who calls his sheep by name.  Because he calls them to himself, he also calls them together, and he becomes their center.  The flock is one because the Shepherd is one.  The unity of the Church becomes a mirror of the oneness of God.  This is the vision of St John’s gospel.

I do not think this vision of Christ-centered friendship means that everybody in a given church must or should be soul-mates.  But I do think that all Christians should set as our goal friendships with Christ at the center.  And so I feel the gentle but persuasive nudge to ask myself these questions:

Am I willing to ask my brothers and sisters here: “How is your spiritual life?” as often as I ask, “How are you?”  Am I willing to listen charitably when they answer?  I think of the question Cursillo small groups ask each time they gather: “When in this past week did you feel closest to Christ?”  Do I offer to pray with people as often as I commit to pray for them?  Do our leaders - do I as a leader - take time in the midst of our planning to ask the question out loud, “How does this plan connect to what we know about the God of Jesus Christ?” or “What image from Scripture inspires our understanding in this moment?”   Do I talk to my children - whatever their age - about my own life’s direction and how I understand it in relation to God’s call?  And even with folks I haven’t seen in some time, perhaps this is the question: “What has God revealed to you about who God is since last we sat down and spoke?”

I put these questions out there to hold myself accountable in asking them to you.  I hope they can be questions that rescue daily life from the stale, safe, default settings.  I believe they are questions of the living Kingdom and an Easter people.  I hope they are questions you can use not just at St Christopher’s, but with friends in the other twenty-one churches and even in our other service.

Because Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - means to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.  Christ-at-the-center friendships.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

Amen.

The Original Occupy Movement

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Abide in me, Jesus says.  What does Jesus mean when he says that, I wonder?  The picture Jesus gives his disciples to help us understand is a vine with branches.  We are the branches, and that is what Jesus says abiding looks like: branches on a vine.  So one grape says to the other grape: “You know, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be in this jam.”  The other grape replies: “You know I’ve about had it with you.  All day long with you it’s wine, wine, wine.”  (I know, I know...I'm 'pressing.')

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. 

That we are the branches tells us that Jesus is our source and our center - and we talked about friendships centered on Jesus last week.  But the image of branches is also somewhat confusing because branches do not decide to be centered on a vine - that branches are at all rests solely on the action of the vine - the vine acts and makes it so.

If a branch could un-choose her connection to the vine, not only would that branch not be a branch, the branch wouldn’t be anything else, either.  She simply would not be.  Everything it means to be a branch comes from being grown out of and connected to the vine - the good work of the vine.  Branches are not independent agents apart from this work.

So instead of “What does it mean to abide?” maybe the question is “If we are like branches, and branches are automatically dependents of the vine - always abiding - why is abiding something Jesus has to tell us to do?”  And maybe the most honest question behind both of the others is, “What is the point of abiding?”

As a beginning of the answer to that last question especially, we need to back up a bit to the chapter just before this morning’s lesson, where there’s an important back-story that today’s lesson picks up.

In chapter 14 of John’s gospel, we find Jesus telling his disciples that he is about to leave his disciples.  Jesus is about to die.  Jesus explains that, by the departure he will achieve through his death, he goes to prepare a dwelling place for his friends - “in my Father’s house there are many mansions (we might also use the word “rooms” or “dwelling places” here)” and the word used for dwelling places shares a root-word with our word “abide” in John 15. 

Jesus goes on in chapter 14 to explain that the “room” he is preparing for his friends - which again is a twin for our word “abide” - is the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus leaves them in order to send his Holy Spirit.  To those who love and obey Jesus’ teaching, we’re told, Jesus promises his Holy Spirit to the end that “my Father will love him, and we will come to him and  make our home with him.”  So “dwelling place” - which, to beat home the point, shares a root-word with “abide” - is about receiving the Spirit and having the fullness of God come make a home in the life of the one who receives it.  The dwelling place made possible by the Spirit is also about our being made able to find our home in God.

It’s important, I think, that after saying all this Jesus gives his disciples his peace and tells them that, knowing these things, they do not need to be afraid.

So in chapter 14 we learn that Jesus goes to prepare a dwelling place for us, and just because he goes off to prepare it does not mean we have to go off to find it.  Jesus isn’t just talking about heavenly rewards when we die.  Jesus will send his Spirit to his friends, and God will make his home with them.  The word for what’s being prepared is dwelling places, but the effect here is a mutual indwelling.  God’s home with us and our home with God.  In chapter 14, abiding is about the mutual indwelling of God and God’s friends.

And we’ve heard this kind of talk before.  We hear it in our eucharistic prayers, when we pray that “he may dwell in us, and we in him.”  Holy Communion is meant to be a living picture of God in us and we in God.  And this is what it means to abide.

Among other things, abiding is a great relief.  If abiding is about God in us and we in him, then when we abide, we are free to give up our repeated, lame, and tiring attempts to impress God, as if we could do anything good apart from him.  If we do as we’ve been told to do in the gospel this morning - if we keep our home with him, abide in him - we will not have anything with which to impress God for which we will not also be moved to thank God.

And again, we’ve heard this before: in the words we say each week at the early service: “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”

And abiding like this makes a certain kind of intuitive sense.  When we welcome someone into our house, for example, and tell them to “make themselves at home” - a crude picture of what we’re calling “abiding” this morning - we are giving both parties a mutual permission not to impress one another.  So I tell you to help yourself to the fridge, by which you understand that I won’t be serving you - if you want it, you get it - and also that I forego the right to complain when you take the last of my favorite beer.

There’s a tender side to this, too.  Rebekah has long counted it the sign of a true friendship when a friend says, “Sure, come on over.  There will be laundry on the sofa but what the heck, you’re family.”

When God pitched his tent and made himself at home with us, he certainly did not come to impress us.  Isaiah tells us he was despised and rejected, that we esteemed him not.  Christ’s coming among us was the beginning of the oblation - the pouring out - of himself, stooping in love, in the end washing the feet of his friends, like a slave, before his betrayal, rejection, and death.

Still, it is one thing to know this and another to live it, to enjoy freedom from the temptation - almost like instinct - to continue putting on a good show for God.  “Lord, did you see that?  Huh?  Huh?  Not so shabby - I mean, you know, for me, all things considered, if I do say so myself.”

But the mistake of our attempts to impress God is that we imagine a distance between ourselves and God that God in Christ has bridged.  God is not simply interested in you; God lives inside you!  Animates you!  Makes his home in you.  Not perfectly, certainly, but that’s the opportunity.  But so often we’re all: “Yo God, did you see how I edged and manicured the lawn?  Those vacuum marks are fresh.”  And God is all: “mi casa es su casa.”

Now, hold on here.  Does this mean that how we live our lives with God is unimportant?  This question is not unlike St Paul’s question to the Romans: Should we therefore sin that grace may abound?  Knowing that God doesn’t care about my laundry, should I just wear the dirty underpants?  And the answer is the same as St Paul’s:  Heck no!

But do you see - can you appreciate - the miracle that has been opened?

The conversation now when it happens, you and God at the table, will not be about dirty dishes or all the chores you’ve complete or smudges on the windows; it will be about the things that dear friends who have given up impressing one another talk about.  Matters that matter.  Come on over, appearances be darned, because there are things beneath appearances that I long to share with you.  So we knock on the door or call too late.  God answers the door with a yawn and a stretch.  And we say, “Your presence does not simply comfort me; your presence is a challenge to me in all the best ways and toward the very best of who I had hoped to become.”  Like Simon Peter, we say “You alone have the words of eternal life.”  And he says to us in reply: “Make yourself at home.”
The Spirit of God making it possible for him to dwell in us and we in him.

Long before Occupy Wall Street, there was what might be called the original Occupy movement.  It went something like this: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  The Word became flesh and literally “pitched his tent” in our camp.  God made a home with humankind.  We are blessed by God’s presence.

God’s abiding presence, his Holy Spirit, poured out on his people, we people, the People of God.

The lessons today teach us that, just as Easter came along unexpectedly and shouted, “Wait, wait, the cross looks like the end but this is not the end,” now we pick up the scent of Pentecost, just a few weeks off now, and it, too, is shouting: “Wait, wait, Easter looks like the end, but Easter is not the end!  The power and life you saw in the risen Lord is power and life meant for you, too!  Jesus himself will breathe his Spirit in you and God will make his home with you.

In your life, in my life, in the life of our church: if the Good News is that God wants to bunk up, then out, out! with everything else that gets in the way.  Out with the idea that we’ve got to do this by ourselves or it doesn’t count.  Out with shame.  Out with fear.  Out with backup plans and safety nets, like stockpiles of wealth and closets full of things we might need someday.  Give them to the ones who need them now, because they need them now, and we need room.

And in this way we offer up our hands, our feet, our work, our lives, our bodies, souls, our minds, our strength, with the expectation that God in us will move them, move us, shape them, shape us, through the great and unexpected fact that God has made his home with us. 

It is because this indwelling is God’s delight, purpose, and stated goal that we too seek to live lives whose delight, purpose, and stated goal is no less than this: that he abide in us, and we in him. 

Amen.

Sermon preached at St C's for Easter 5, May 6, 2012.