Guest Preacher, July 4, 2010

The following is a sermon preached this past Sunday at St. Christopher's by guest preacher Anders Litzell, a candidate for Holy Orders in the Church of England and good friend.


Readings:

Isaiah 66:10-14 ;

Psalm 66:1-8 ;

Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16 ;

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20


I read an article in the New York Times on Friday, with the title “You Say God Is Dead? There’s an App for That” the occasion was several new iPhone apps that promise to provide cookie-cutter answers against any argument made by a Christian, or contrariwise for that matter, Bible verses for the Christian put on the spot.

While this new media is mushrooming with the God question, a recent study of young people’s religious habits, as reported by the Dallas Morning News in April, shows that while young people’s desire and searching for God is as high as it has ever been, they are “unplugging from religious institutions at a rate unprecedented in U.S. history” Does that sound strange to you? It may or it may not, you’ll have to ask yourselves.

We are all aware of the church’s shortcomings – both on a local level, national and global. There’s enough faults to go around. But before we lose heart, let’s remember that this was also the case with the disciples Jesus called. Still he declared them worthy and sent them out, first the 12, then the 70 as we read today, and eventually everyone, with the charge to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near.

That means today the charge is the same as it ever was, to proclaim the Kingdom of God. And the Church is the first-fruits, a sampler if you would, of His Kingdom, of God living among us. Do we see ourselves this way? Do we live as though it were true, as if the Church really were the body of Christ? If we ourselves don’t, why should young people take us seriously when they go looking for God.

I’ll tell you this though, some 18 months ago there was an article in the London Times; Matthew Parris, a UK Parliamentarian, journalist and prolific travel writer states after evaluating various social transformation efforts on a tour through Africa: “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God” – that’s the headline. In the article he elaborates:
It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. [ ... ] Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

Let me tell you, you are seeing Jesus’ prophesy from when he rode into Jerusalem on his donkey coming true. We, the church, his children, have gone too quiet singing his praises, and now the rocks are crying out, telling of people being set free in Christ to become who they were created to be.

So I ask you, are those the words you would use to describe people in the church? As having “a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world, a directness in dealing with others” When the church has those characteristics, it’s attractive. More to the point: when God’s people have those characteristics, they are attractive. Do those words describe you? Would you like them to? Tell God and tell a friend you trust, and invite God to get working in you.

Sometimes it’s easier to believe in our inability to do God’s work than to believe in God’s ability to work through us. We heard Jesus’ call: The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

Well, y’all are the start of the answer to that prayer. Allow me to drive home that point – I really mean it: you are the answer to Jesus’ prayer; he prayed that you would come and help. For, as Paul says, we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

So how do we get started? Well we read earlier: Whatever you sow, you will reap. So what do we sow, and how do we sow to the Spirit, so that we may reap eternal life from the Spirit? Let’s look at our dreams, for dreams are the seeds of action.
* What do you dream the impact of St Christopher’s could be in this community?
* What would it feel like to bring your friends who don’t go to church here – and find that they enjoy themselves?
* What would it be like to give of yourself and discover gifts you never knew you had?

If your answer isn’t ready at hand, then ask God to give you His vision for you and of this church. In fact, even if you have an answer, ask God to clarify it, to flesh it out, and to let you see yourself and this church through His eyes, and ask Him what He wants you to do to make His Kingdom come.

He has created you, and given you talents, and gifts, and friends to support you, and a unique task: to be yourself, and to make your everlasting contribution to his Kingdom. All God wants to do, is make us more ourselves, more who He created us to be. How would it be, to feel right in our element, knowing that we’re doing what we were born to do, being who we were born to be?

I believe, firmly, that self-realisation is only to be found in the service of others. Now I want to invite you to ask God, and to ask your friends as well, what your God-given gifts are – what is not clear to yourself might be obvious to others. And always remember that the purpose is to serve each other, and together to serve the rest of the world.

As St Paul put it:
Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

Amen

the fruit of the Spirit and Starbucks

Sermon preached June 27, 2010 at St. Christopher's by-the-Sea, Portland, Texas.

Where do you go to hang out? Spend time with friends? Spend time alone? Maybe with God? For the past seven months, I’ve been trying to figure out Portland, hotspots, and hubs. There’s no real town center, but there’s the community center, the high school, public library; the movie theater, awkwardly standing alone in the field, like its waiting to make a new friend. Hoping a better restaurant will saunter on over its way. Just down our street, at the edge of the water, is the number two kite-boarding park in the country. When it’s a little bit cooler, I take my lunch to the point, cheer on the wave tamers. It’s a beautiful spot for a beautiful sport, though I suspect you need a little bit of “crazy” in you to do it.

Across the bridge, well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? Having to go cross the bridge; but just the other side is the ballpark; the aquarium even before one hits Harbor Bridge. A favorite spot of mine is the stretch alone Ocean - the bronze, sea-embracing statue of Jesus just beyond the now almost dismantled Memorial Coliseum....

Where do you go to hang out?

So I’m sitting at Starbucks. One of the places where I like to hang out. I spend some time every Monday -- usually between 9:30 and 10, 10:30, at the Portland Starbucks, having already spent the earliest part of Monday morning here in this sanctuary, praying through the scriptures for the upcoming week. (By the way, you’re forever more than welcome to crash my routine with your company.) I’m sitting at Starbucks, nestled into a book, grande decaf mocha in hand, when a man who had just left the counter comes back to the counter. The barista asks what she can do for the man. He says, “Nothing. It’s already ruined.” A promising start. Says he had specified three quarters tea to one quarter lemonade. The ratio was clearly off; he can taste it; the man does not want reparations, only for the barista to know how thoroughly disappointed, disgusted, he is -- hadn’t she been paying attention?? -- and that the woman had failed him in her service to the man.

No, she couldn’t make him another one. He turned his back to the counter and walked out. The young woman was visibly disheartened.

Another barista came from the back to comfort the first woman behind the counter, the first woman explained that, while she was hurt, she had come to expect as much from the man. Some people are just always unhappy, she said. The two women proceeded to swap stories about other routinely unhappy customers. The woman, for example, who always custom orders an inch of caramel at the bottom, expecting no extra charge -- never fully satisfied that the caramel at the bottom is exactly an inch. On and on it went.

I wanted it to stop; I wanted to intervene; I wanted to protect them from the routinely unhappy people. We all know routinely unhappy people. People for whom unhappy is just the way they are.

But the more I thought about it, I got confused. I remembered a person who had come in about the same time that I had, maybe twenty minutes earlier. She’d held the door open for at least a couple of us; had greeted the barista warmly before ordering her drink. By all appearances, was nothing but pleasant, the very opposite of unhappy. But when the next drink hit the counter and she tasted it, she turned in a flash into the lemonade man. “I ordered WHITE chocolate!” she demanded. “This isn’t what I ordered!” “I know,” said the barista, “that’s what he ordered” (she was pointing to me). “You picked up his drink.” “I’m so, so sorry,” she said. And she was back to her pleasant, if now slightly embarrassed, self.

I had wanted to protect the baristas from the regularly unhappy people, but the white chocolate woman was a reminder that things are seldom so simple. Yes, some people make predictable routines of unhappiness. But most of us, I suspect, are more like the white chocolate woman, our lives spent teetering somewhere on the edge of a perilous cliff: polite, if not kind; kind, if not joyful, still precipitously near an impromptu change of character, one that might happen at any moment, the next moment; ready in an instant to act as if the next grievance felt is a sin against our being. Or consider our anger at telemarketers. Outrage in a closed up bottle. An atmosphere that, sustained among others over time, replaces truth-telling with face-saving and friendship with unsteady fear.

I share all of this because, like I said at the outset, my Mondays begin with prayerful reading of the coming Sunday’s lessons. So while lemonade man and white chocolate woman played the scene out before me, the reading that guided my thoughts and filled up my prayers for them and for me was St. Paul’s message from Galatians. Here is what I had just read, and what you have just heard:

“For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”

The picture is graphic, tragic, familiar. A tragic picture replayed a million times across a day, a thousand times across a life. As far back as Galatia - to whom Paul wrote the letter. As near as the corner Starbucks.

Maybe nearer.

But to start, let’s take the step back. As far back as Galatia, what was the problem? The problem was that non-Jewish Christians were feeling pressure at the hands of Jewish converts to the Christian faith to look the part of a faithful God follower. Guess what Jewish converts to the Christian faith thought faithful God followers looked like -- them! Specifically, Jewish Christians wanted non-Jewish Christians to keep the Law, most centrally through the practice of male circumcision. That’s why the whole letter runs poor Abraham in and out of the text like a thread. Circumcision was the sign begun with Abraham to represent the covenant promise between Abraham and God; the promise that began, that gave birth, to the Jewish people.

The big question then is whether the promise of God has been kept if the old signs aren’t visible in the new people around them, the people they’re learning to call friends. So they find themselves frustrated by the people around them.

You know, the teacher, or lawyer, or priest who says, “I love my job; it’s the people that get in the way.”

The challenge that happens when I let Jesus into my heart, only to learn that he’s bringing his friends.

Fear that God’s promise might escape us if the new people don’t wear the old clothes. And so, in a bizarre turn of events, the people of promise, the Christians in Galatia, turn to violence in order to remember the promised love of God:

“You’re messing it up. You’re not teaching it right. Are you sure you’re even saved? I wish you weren’t here. Get out.” Like lemonade man and white chocolate woman and sometimes me. Outrage in a closed up bottle.

This is the Church in Galatia, where the people are consuming one another with anger, jealousy, strife, enmity, factions. They can’t reach agreement on what is the distinguishing mark of a Christian, how you know a real one, because they’ve forgotten that the distinguishing mark of a Christian is the very Spirit of Christ, the love of God, and a gift.

To look for any other mark, says St. Paul, on the soul of another is to insist on the Law and to pass up the gift.

Saint Jerome follows Saint Paul in connecting life under the rule of the Law with an absence of love. Here’s what he says: “If you read the whole Old Testament and understand it according to the text an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth...what appears as justice will eat you away, not avenging anything but consuming everything.”

Of course, this is true not just in the Church (through it’s certainly true in the Church). One of the jokes of the present age is that for all of society’s depicting of Christians as hypocrites, law-makers and breakers, you will not find a harder, more litigious, setting than the society in which we live.

The question for us, whether in here or out there is “What can it mean to live otherwise?”

To live without fear of making mistakes; not because you never make them, but because forgiveness and patience and peace can be found among friends in abundance; to live without the red-hot burden of self-righteous anger, not because you’re never wronged, but because generosity, gentleness, self-control had grown richly in you; to live without the need to keep up appearances, not because you don’t care, but exactly because you do care: because love, joy, and faithfulness have become the lifeblood of your friendships; to live as if love might not ever run out not because we know ourselves to be so loving but because God in Christ Jesus has overwhelmed us with love.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. This fruit is how God in Christ Jesus has chosen to be in his dealings toward us. And His love is an invitation to share the fruit. Do not eat each other, He says; but here, take this bread. Do not despise friend or stranger, but come, drink the wine of this fruit. Partake of me. Be consumed not with anger but with the Spirit and life and love of the Son of the Living God.

That which we receive, may we in Christ’s mercy be.

Amen.

a prayer book family tree

A little random maybe, but good history, and a visual map of communion (in at least one sense). A picture of interdependence, the faithful proclamation of the Gospel, and the centrality of worship to the People of God.

Scripture and Christians

I've recently been reading a book called "The Art of Reading Scripture," which is a collection of essays about, you guessed it, how to read Scripture. As I read the first chapter, I remembered a story (maybe true) about how a young Billy Graham visited the famous theologian Karl Barth on Barth's deathbed in Germany. Barth thanked Graham for his visit and indicated that he had heard the young preacher on the radio the day before. "You really mastered the text," he said to Graham. A flattered Graham responded, "Thank you, sir," to which Barth replied, "No. I had hoped you would let the text master you." I confess that allowing myself to be mastered by the text is a hard thing for me to know how to do. But I'm grateful for those moments when it happens. In that spirit, here are a few highlights from my reading on how to read Scripture.

Peace to you.
Jonathan+

From The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen Davis:

A cartoon in the New Yorker shows a man making inquiry at the information counter of a large bookstore. The clerk, tapping on his keyboard and peering intently into the computer screen, replies, "The Bible?...That would be under self-help."

As the cartoon suggests, in postmodern culture the Bible has no definite place, and citizens in a pluralistic, secular culture have trouble knowing what to make of it. If they pay any attention to it at all, they treat it as a consumer product, one more therapeutic option for rootless selves engaged in an endless quest of self-invention and self-improvement. Not surprisingly, this approach does not yield a very satisfactory reading of the Bible, for the Bible is not, in fact, about 'self-help'; it is about God's action to rescue a lost and broken world.

***

The Bible confronts us with facts that are peculiar in this way: the better we understand them, the more we wonder about them. So teaching the Bible confessionally means enabling people to wonder wisely and deeply. Wondering is the business of scholars and preachers, just as it is of Sunday school children.

***

Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, "That's just what I thought," we are probably in trouble. The technical term for that kind of reading is "proof-texting." Using the text to confirm our presuppositions is sinful; it is an act of resistance against God's fresh speaking to us, an effective denial that the Bible is the word of the living God. The only alternative to proof-texting is reading with a view of what the New Testament calls metanoia, "repentance" -- literally, "change of mind."

***

We have been saved through grace -- this is often the first affirmation we make as Christians awakening to the wonder of the life we share in God. But if the fruits of salvation are to be evidenced in the world, then the affirmation of salvation needs to be followed by the question, What form of obedience does Christian discipleship now require?

abundant life

*From Horizons, the weekly snippets of what I'm reading, finding helpful, shared with St. C's Vestry and leaders.*

Grace and peace! My shared learnings this week come from the Trinity News, a magazine of Trinity Wall Street. This particular article (viewable here, at Abundant Life) examines a farming project of the Episcopal Church, which seeks "to engage young people in caring for the earth, making a meaning contribution to the community, and listening to God in the midst of all of it." Specifically, young people enroll in year-round internships.

Here are some highlights from the article:

Q: Katerina, when your friends from college or your friends from childhood say, "So what are you doing now?" what do you tell them?

Katerina Friesen: I tell them that I am working on a farm, living in an intentional community, learning about agriculture in the United States, and a little bit about the food systems from a different way of growing food.

Q: What made you join?

KF: I think that what brought me to this place was its focus on the transformation of itself, of myself, and of the surrounding community. It's really a project about forming connections where there are disconnects.

This community was really about thinking about where our food comes from, having a sense of gratitude for the hands that have worked to prepare it, and forming new relationships with the ground and with the people who are going to consume it.

Q: What have you learned about compassion, what does that word mean to you, in light of this experience?

KF: I started going to a church in Oxnard, to a Spanish service so that I could actually know and share communion with people who don't have enough to eat on a day-to-day basis. And I think some of that desire has come out of this project. Gratitude for our abundance has made me long to be in community and share Christ's supper with people who don't have that kind of abundance, who are living out of scarcity.

Q: You mentioned gratitude as a reason for being here. What has the Abundant Table Project taught you about gratitude?

KF: What the land gives you is such a joy and a surprise. It's like a miracle in a way. Part of the gratitude I think is for our own ability to work and to see the fruits of our labor right before us. Everything that comes out of here is a gift. We came here and we didn't really didn't know much about farming. It was obviously something beyond us: the good soil, the sun, all these things that come together and are really all gifts of God.


Peace.
Jonathan+

Can you sue your pastor for malpractice?

This Thursday, April 22, 7 - 8 p.m, St. Christopher's by-the-Sea is hosting a conversation around the first of three weeks' questions. This week, we ask the question, 'Can you sue your pastor for malpractice?' The conversation that comes with this question considers why our expectations are (generally) much higher for our doctors than they are for our clergy.

My prayer is that everyone in the congregation would make at least one of these evening conversations. These sessions are opportunities for you (and me) to be challenged and encouraged by voices from within the Christian Church, especially as we consider what it means to live in our lives the things we profess on our lips.

I pray this finds you well. See you Thursday night.

Peace.
Jonathan+

a Good Friday meditation

Once upon a time there was a forest full of trees, and it wasn’t so much the trees but the one tree that caused the trouble. You know the story. The woman; the fruit; and the man. Serpentine transgressions. Was it gluttony, lust, or pride, I wonder. Peek a boo with God. Selective hearing, maybe. Exile, swords of fire.

A friend of mine said, “avocado.” Avocado? Yes, he said, the fruit that marked the sin. He was probably projecting, but I wonder sometimes what fruit would be shiny enough, just ripe enough, enticing enough that I would dismiss God’s voice to me.

Before too long, the man and the woman were fruitful, found with child, but that had long stopped being an obvious good thing. And it’s fruit again, the parent’s sin, the cry of Abel’s blood. And Abel’s blood’s still crying. Good God, is Abel’s blood still crying.

And every night on channels one through nine, you can see him, hear him, they call him different names, but you can still hear Abel’s blood.

And it’s Abram and Sarai, Moses, Elijah, David, Elisha, Jonah, God bless him, and Nahum and all of God’s prophets, his judges and kings, the high priests of the people, trying to give God back his blood.

Sometimes I pray when I hear it, and sometimes I laugh when I hear it; other times, when I hear it, I sink into my sofa and drip through to the ground, the weight of the sadness slaying my tears and as heavy -- oh, as heavy -- as the flickering light is blue against the wall.

They sprinkled blood, not Abel’s, on their beaten, wooden, doorposts that first, black night called Passover; that first last night in Egypt, just as God commanded. Prefigured Lamb of God. The Egyptians were howling; God, he was faithful, and the Hebrews walked out on dry land. Pillars of cloud. Columns of fire. And the Hebrews walked out on dry land.

But college freshman everywhere will tell you, when they’re talking to you at all, that unexpected freedoms are the hardest kind to handle. And the people who walked free from their mud bricks in Egypt had a hard time believing that the One who had freed them from their mud bricks in Egypt, would keep them, could keep them, from their mud bricks in Egypt. That they would be cared for. That God would bring them home.

And so, in an ironic twist, somewhere along the wandering road, somewhere among the endless, numbered, days that followed, the people who wandered and followed griped one time too many, and God brought back the snake. You know, the one that started the whole mess in the first place. He brought him back. With friends. Satan had been busy. Snakes to bite their heels. Some were even dying.

Moses said, “What the heck, God?” and God had Moses fashion a separate snake, this one made of bronze, and put it on a pole; the people were told to look on the pole in order to be saved. And the ones who did were saved. And some millennia later, the disciple Jesus loved, the one called John, he saw that snake, and called it Christ.

Which brings me to a second tree that caused the trouble. One tree from the forest. You know the story. A man. With some women. And some men. They found him in a garden, with their torches, flaming swords. Sound familiar? Exiled Son of God. Or at least that was the goal.

The disciples had swords, too, but there would be no battle here. No second spill of Abel’s blood. The cup first drunk at Passover, now come before the Lamb. And Peter, who would have fought for him, would not, will not, die with him, and the cock crow names the hour.

They gave the man a trial, the people did. Or close enough to one for their intentions on that day. And they dressed him like a king, and pranced before the powers, and the powers lost their power to the madness of the night. The night as dark as blood. The day that looked like night. And they crucified our Lord.

Once upon a time, this mother, she could smile. But darkness knows no friend.

Two trees by which to see the grief, to hear the cries and taste the blood of wars that will not cease. The rivers flowing blood. Infernal blue light flickering. But eyes to see and ears to hear pick out a pin-prick hope against the darkness, amidst the blood, if faint, if far off, flickering. And this is the pin-prick hope -- God’s own happy sadness -- the moment despair loses hope, becomes futile -- this is God’s secret: the two trees are one tree and his wounds heal the first.

The flaming sword extinguished now, Life’s tree holds high its fruit; and Christ himself, pressed, crushed, for us, becomes the very wine of heaven.

And heaven prepares the song.

Amen.