On the move, at the door.

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Friday afternoon at 3:30 I had a rendezvous here at the church with two older guys from Indiana named Ron and Dan.  They drove a twenty-foot box van full of sleeping bags and duffels and bicycle repair equipment into the parking lot behind Cram Hall, and they wore matching t-shirts with a logo that said DeCycles West Coast 2016.  According to the email I got in April requesting to stay overnight at our church, DeCycles (like “disciples”—get it?) is an ecumenical Christian youth program, sponsored by churches, businesses, service organizations and individuals in Indiana, that has been taking teenagers on summer bicycle trips since 1969, and giving them the opportunity to practice kindness, caring, service, and other principles of a Christ-centered life.   This year’s group is riding down the coast from Seattle to Los Angeles and Ron and Dan were the advance men, who go to the overnight site ahead of the pack of riders, to get the lay of the land. 

I showed them the parish hall, the library and the nursery as potential sleeping areas, the kitchen and the bathrooms, the courtyard and the supply closet, and we discussed the deployment of chairs and tables, and dining arrangements, and where to lock up seventy-five bicycles.  They asked me for the passcode for the wireless network, assuring me that only selected adults would be using it.  While I was at it, I gave them my cell phone number, in case anything came up after I left.  We finished the tour, and they’d asked me all the questions they could think of, and no one else had arrived so I invited them to see the church. 

Needless to say, they were greatly impressed, especially with the front door and the stained-glass windows, and Dan kept lamenting that the craft of making such beautiful things seems to be passing away.  We were just coming out, when another, smaller truck pulled up, with the DeCycles logo on the side of the cargo box.  Ron directed the driver to parking lot, and another smiling older man got out, and a woman named Liz with a charming accent I soon found out was Welsh.  This truck was loaded with cooking gear and food.  Liz was in charge of meals, and I led her inside to the kitchen, and when she saw our refrigerator, she practically squealed with delight. 

It was just about this time that the first wave of what would eventually be 60 bicycle riders, aged 13 to 20, and 15 adult staff, all in matching black and white DeCycles West Coast 2016 jerseys, rounded the corner from 5^th street onto C, looking for their vans.  And for the next hour or so I stood around, answering questions, giving directions, solving problems, and watching with amusement as order gradually emerged from chaos.  Kids rolled the serving carts from kitchen down the wheelchair ramp to the food van and brought them back, piled with ice chests.  Someone else found the fans in the chair storage closet and set them up at either end of the hall.  Bowls of trail mix appeared on the coffee hour food table, and on the other table where we serve the drinks, I piled the letters and care packages that the mailman had been dropping off in my office all week. 

At one point Ron had to ask me where the supply closet was again—in all the confusion, he’d forgotten where that was.  One young man asked me if there was Wi-Fi available, and I told him there was, but that only the adults would be using it.  “That’s cool,” he said, as if both the question and the answer were of complete indifference to him.  “It’s like a three-ring circus,” Liz cracked to me at one point, “with no ringmaster,” and I laughed, because she had it about right.   Still, by the time two-thirds or so of the kids pedaled off again to the Petaluma Swim Center for the showers and the pool, and the others rolled out their sleeping bags and lay down for a rest, they’d sorted out who was sleeping where, and how they would lock up the bikes for the night, and what would be for dinner.  And when I dropped by the church yesterday afternoon, there was a window open in the men’s bathroom, and a garbage barrel that is usually in the kitchen in the parish hall—but other than that, there was no sign that they’d ever been here.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of how Jesus sent his twelve disciples out, to heal and cast out demons, and announce the Kingdom of God.  But only Luke tells about a “second wave” of 70 or 72 (the ancient manuscripts differ) whom Jesus sends out later on the same kind of mission.  Luke is also the only one who says that Jesus sent them on ahead, like Ron and Dan, to the places where he himself was about to go.  Luke gives other details about the ministry of Jesus as he makes his way through Galilee and Samaria and Judea that are not found in the other gospels.  A few weeks ago, for instance, we heard about the women, like Mary Magdalene, who went along with the other disciples, and provided for their material needs.  And, unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke ties his episodes loosely together into a single story of continuous and purposeful movement.  They are encounters and teachings that happen on the road to Jerusalem.

Luke’s version also describes a movement in another sense of the word.  All the gospels speak about the twelve men who form the inner circle around Jesus, who are his conversation partners, and foils for his teachings, who do what he tells them, and follow where he goes.  They also speak of a much larger group of followers, known only as “the crowd.”  The size and composition of this group is left undefined, but one has the impression that the crowd shrinks and swells as new people are drawn to Jesus by need or curiosity, and others decide they’ve seen enough, or have better things to do, and drift away.  But only Luke describes a second, larger circle of committed disciples, like the women I referred to a moment ago, or the seventy-two Rons and Dans Jesus sends out in advance of his journey.  If we believe Luke, Jesus was not just drifting, with his little company of twelve, from one random encounter to another, but was methodically and purposefully building a movement.      

This fits with Luke’s over-arching purpose as an evangelist.  He (or she) is also the author of the book of Acts, which tells how this movement continued and spread and became The Church.  When we say “the church” we think of something firmly established, with deep foundations of doctrine and tradition that change only slowly, if they ever change at all.  But experiences like my encounter with the DeCycles, and stories like the one from Luke today, remind us that at its heart the church is less an institution than what it was at the beginning—a movement.  The new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Reverend Michael Curry, is fond of point out this fact, calling us to membership in the “Jesus Movement” as the defining core of who we are. 

Luke says this movement signals the beginning of the end for the powers of evil and death, and the beginning of the new creation of the kingdom of God.  But the movement is not itself the kingdom; rather, it exists to point to it, to spread the news that it is coming near.  This communication cannot take place in a casual encounter on the road—the gospel doesn’t fit on a bumper-sticker or a tri-fold brochure.  Neither does it spread by armies on the march or demonstrations in the streets.  It moves, instead, by the formation of new relationships that begin with a greeting at the door.  The news of the kingdom travels through the world through countless risky overtures of peace, and equally vulnerable responses of hospitality.  Everyone in this room today, from the person who is here for the very first time to the one who’s been here for sixty years, had at one point to walk up to that big arched door that impressed Ron from Indiana so much, and come in, hoping to find the desire for Christ’s peace she carried in her heart in some way reciprocated.  And I hope it was, and is, and will be, because that’s how we know we’re still part of the Jesus movement.

Loving every body

1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3

Along with some other members of St. John’s I spent last week up at the Bishop’s Ranch, near Healdsburg, at an educational program of our diocese called the College for Congregational Development.  The purpose of the vestry in sending us there was to move our parish closer to one of our strategic goals, which is to strengthen the capacity of all of our leaders, to help our various ministries, groups and committees, and the whole parish organization, to work together more effectively so that we can become more and more of what God is calling us to be. 

The week was the beginning of a two-year program, which commits the participants to a substantial reading list of books, a second residential intensive a year from now, and projects to design and carry out, complete with written reports, and a final exam.  We followed an intensive schedule of reading, presentations, small group learning labs, and project planning that began with Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m. and ended with compline at 9 o’clock at night.  We worked on facilitation and group process skills and conceptual models of organizational structures, and of change, conflict, and even spiritual transformation within congregations.  We even learned models for human mental functions and how they operate differently according to personality type.  We had completed in advance a personality assessment tool that is widely used in universities and in corporate America, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and on Tuesday we received the results, which identified us with one of 16 different personality types, and told us how we prefer to interact with others, and what are our areas of strength, in what perceive, and how we make decisions and deal with conflict.

There’s a whole theory of mental functioning, that lies behind this system, and it was while one of the workshop trainers was trying to explain some of that to us, that one of my clergy colleagues in the diocese asked a question that had also been nagging at me.  In the course of her presentation, the trainer had said that these were the modes of “normal” mental functioning, and the types of “normal” personality, and so on.  So when it came time for questions, this priest, who happens to be a woman, pointed this out and asked “but what if you’re not normal?”   The trainer gave a sort of an answer and then quickly moved on, but the question is not a frivolous one.  It points to something essentially important about human beings, and also about the church.  

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to borrow ideas and approaches from the business world and the social sciences to help us do the work of the church more effectively.  It is okay to talk about forces and dynamics, about data and feedback, about structures and systems and normal functioning.   But the Christian understanding of human beings is that our mental functioning, and our church organizations, are grounded in bodies.  And bodies can get out whack in all kinds of ways: from congenital conditions to senile dementia, from brain tumors and head injuries to autism and schizophrenia, from post-traumatic stress to clinical depression to alcoholism, things happen to our bodies that affect our minds, and even change our personalities. 

In the business world, if a person has a body that does not function as the organization needs it to, because he or she cannot effectively count beans, or produce widgets, or what have you, the manager will “let” that person “go” or never invite him or her to work there in the first place.  But as Christians we don’t have that option.  Not if we are sincere about following Jesus.  Because the gospels tell us stories, again and again, about people whose bodies, or minds and behavior, were not normal in the eyes of their neighbors.  These people came to Jesus looking for help and he welcomed them.  He told them that their faith in him had made them well, and sent them away in peace. 

Today’s story from the Gospel of Luke reminds us that this brought Jesus into conflict with his religious contemporaries.  When Simon the Pharisee decides that Jesus must not really be a prophet, it is not because he disagrees with him about theological ideas, or ethical principles.  Simon has second thoughts about Jesus because he lets a woman touch him.  It wasn’t normal for Jesus, a devout Jewish man, to let a woman who was not his wife or a close female relative touch his body, let alone to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.  What makes it worse is that this woman is notorious for her sins, presumably sins of a sexual nature, which made her body a doubly potent source of contamination.  But instead of pushing her away, refusing to admit her into his company, Jesus accepts her lavishly inappropriate gestures of repentance and gratitude and love.  He repays her with words of respect and forgiveness, the forgiveness that makes her body touchable again.

Now Jesus didn’t always just heal people and then send them away.  Sometimes he called them to be a part of his mission.  In his classic text, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following:

“A truth, a doctrine, or a religion needs no space for itself.  They are disembodied entities.  They are heard, learned, and apprehended, and that is all.  But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living people who will follow him.  That is why he called his disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with them a visible reality.”

We are used to thinking of the calling of disciples as a manly sort of business.  Peter and Andrew and James and John are by the Sea of Galilee mending their nets, when Jesus walks by and says “Come, follow me,” and they unhesitatingly drop everything and go after him.  They go to be leaders, apostles of the kingdom and fishers of men.  But today’s passage in Luke reminds us that sometimes the calling of a disciple is not recruitment for a brave and noble mission.  Sometimes it begins as a desperate plea for relief from torment.  Mary Magdalene must have been seriously deranged, for Jesus to have cast out seven demons from her.  Still, in its own way, coming out of the shadows of disgrace and untouchability to seek healing and restoration to community is just as heroic, takes just as much courage, and faith, as that other kind of following.  

And Luke wants us to see, with Bonhoeffer that, from the beginning, our fellowship with the Incarnate Son of God has been embodied in a visible reality, a community.  In the Episcopal Church, the core of our identity is continuity with the first community of those that Jesus of Nazareth called to follow him.  Every time we add a new member to the church in baptism, the priest or bishop asks “will you continue in the apostles’ fellowship?” and the congregation says, “I will with God’s help.”  After the rite is complete, the congregation greets the newly baptized, saying “we receive you into the household of God.”  Like any other household this visible reality requires managing.  It needs leadership.  But sometimes leadership looks less like having great ideas and telling others what to do and more like noticing what other people need, what are the broken pieces that need mending and the loose ends that need tying.  According to Luke it was the women, who followed because they had been sick and became well, who first exercised this leadership in the church.  We can’t forget that it was they who obtained the spices needed to prepare a body for burial, they whose sorrow and need for a final, physical demonstration of love led them to Jesus’ tomb. 

And if this it is a household its members are a family.  But a new kind of family, one united not by of genetic inheritance or even by their natural love for each other, but by the grace of God.  Just as we don’t get to choose who we will have as our parents, or our brothers or sisters, we don’t get to choose the people whom the incarnate Son of God Christ calls into fellowship with us.  We don’t get to set criteria of eligibility, or send away the family members who don’t meet our standard of past history, education, or experience.  And there is no right kind of body, no “normal” height or weight or sex or color of the skin, but one body, crucified and raised in glory, into which all are called by the grace and mercy of God.  

Raising the widow's son

1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24)
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

Maybe it was because I knew that later this morning I would be preaching in Spanish at the 12 o’clock service here at St. Paul’s, but reading these stories again about widows who lost their only sons, I remembered a woman I met in Guatemala, in the summer of 2009.  I was on my way to Xela, also known as Quetzaltenango, the largest city in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, to study at a Spanish language school, and I stopped over at the popular tourist destination of Lake Atitlán.  I crossed the lake to Santiago, the largest and most traditional of the towns around the shores of that lake, where I would spend the night.  The next morning I left the guesthouse and found that the streets around the central square were lined with venders who’d come in from the countryside, and I went shopping for a souvenir to bring home to my wife.  And that was how I came upon a woman sitting on the ground on a blanket, on which she had spread the things she had for sale.  They included some baskets of tomatoes and other summer vegetables, but also huipiles, the traditional blouses of the indigenous women of southern Mexico and Guatemala. 

She had made them from cloth woven in the violet and lavender striped pattern that is distinctive of that region, and there was one in particular that caught my eye.  It was lavishly embroidered with roses around the collar, and down both the front and back were embroidered birds.  The colorful markings and different beaks of various species were detailed precisely, like illustrations from a birdwatcher’s field guide, and I recognized several whose range extends north.  And I looked over this amazing garment with admiration and smiled at her and complimented her work, but I was sure it would cost more than the maximum I’d decided to allow myself to spend, and moved on down the street.  But, while I saw some other nice things here and there, including some other beautiful huipiles, I kept thinking about that one with the birds, and eventually I went back to look at it again.  The woman named me a price, and while it was more than fair, it was, as I’d feared it would be, more than I could afford.  So I made a counter-offer and we haggled a bit until she finally agreed. 

It was an amount that we both knew was far too low for an object of such singular beauty.  As I handed her the money, and folded my prize away in my backpack I felt glad at having been able to get what I’d really wanted, but I also guilty at having pressed the advantage of my abundant choices over her lack of them.  And the look on her face when I named my answering price has never left me; it spoke of her desperation to make a sale and, at the same time, of the pain of parting with something she’d made with so much love and labor for so little money.  But the thing that really affected me about that pain, even more than having a part in causing it, was that I could see that it was only a ripple across the face of a sorrow that was unfathomably deep.  Grief and loss streamed out toward me from her eyes, and had overflowed from them so much, and for so long, that they had carved deep furrows in her cheeks.

Of course I never heard that woman’s story.  I never learned of the afflictions that filled her life with so much pain that no one with a heart of flesh could fail to see it.  But I do know that Santiago de Atitlán was home to a base of the Guatemalan Army during the height of that country’s dirty war of the 1980s.  From there the soldiers carried out a genocidal campaign of terror in the Mayan villages of the surrounding countryside.  This culminated in a notorious massacre in the streets of Santiago itself in December 1990, when the army opened fire on a peaceful protest for human rights.  So I have always wondered whom that woman might have lost to that violence, or if not to the violence, then to the grinding poverty the violence was meant to hold in place—a father? A husband? A son, or daughter, or more than one?  Maybe all of the above.

And the pain of parting with a beautiful handcrafted object at a price far too cheap is nothing compared to the pain of losing a child.  My wife and I have only one, a beautiful, talented daughter who just completed the sixth grade on Friday.  As all of you who are parents know, your children are your life’s most important creation.  They are the works of priceless value into which you pour countless hours of costly, painstaking, often thankless toil.  But as we parents also know, we have to give them away to the world.  We hope it will be slowly, and by degrees, and the payment we receive will be the rich one of seeing them happy, and doing good work, surrounded by a loving family of their own, maturing into the fullness of their powers as our own begin to falter in the advent of old age.   But we have to live with the knowledge that the world may buy them from us cheaply, sometimes as if their lives were worth next to nothing at all.

It is in response to such a loss that Elijah cried out to God, on behalf of the widow with whom he had been staying, demanding to know if the Lord would really deprive of her of her only son.  He prayed that God would let the child’s life come into him again, and the Lord answered, and the boy lived.  The Gospel story from Luke is very similar, of course, but there are some differences that are worth noting.  The first is that Elijah prays in secret, in the privacy of his own upper room, while Jesus’ is travelling at the head of a large crowd when he meets another crowd, the funeral procession following the body out to the burial, and it is there, in public, at the city gates, that he raises the widow’s son of Nain.  And while Elijah acts on behalf of someone he knows well, in repayment for her kindness, Jesus meets the widow of Nain as a stranger on the road.  He is moved to act on her behalf by nothing more than compassion for the suffering of another human being.

These stories tell us that the heart of the message of the great prophets is God’s desire that his people should have a full share in of life.  That is why there is no difference between the prophets demand for religious faithfulness and their outcry out against violence and poverty and social injustice—because depriving the creatures of God of the full flourishing of their lives is a blasphemous offense to their creator.  For the prophets, this message has to be more than simply empty words—it must be demonstrated and made effective through actions.  And what more powerful demonstration could anyone make of God’s desire to give us the fullness of life than raising the dead?  Jesus takes that prophetic action out into public, and does it for a stranger, to show how far the life-giving compassion of God extends.  It is but a short journey from there to his own death and resurrection, the eternal and universal sign that nothing in heaven or earth can deprive us of the love of God.

It is our faith in Christ’s resurrection that gives us the authority to try our own demonstrations of God’s life-giving compassion.  We may not be able to raise the dead, but there are actions we can take to show people who have lost what is most beautiful and precious that death does not have the last word.   There are things we can do to show those who are trapped in the darkness of powerlessness and despair that they can still rise.  When it actually works it’s a miracle, so needless to say we don’t even dare attempt it without asking for God’s help.  But one of the things that has consistently impressed me about what I’ve been able to observe over the years of this church of St. Paul in Healdsburg, and now I’m speaking as the Dean of the Russian River Deanery, is how, despite many false steps and wrong turns, you are a congregation that keeps trying.   You keep trying to do the things that say to your neighbors that miracles are possible, and God can even raise the dead.