A Vision for St. John's

First published in The Beloved Disciple, the monthly newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church, Petaluma: http://www.saintjohnsepiscopalpetaluma.org/page/newsletter

People sometimes ask me what my vision is for St. John’s.  It’s been a hard question to answer because a vision takes time to develop, and time to communicate.  It is not a plan of action, but a description of where we hope our actions will take us.  It isn’t about what we will do so much as about who we will be.  As priest and pastor, it is part of my job do articulate a vision, but it can’t be just something I think up on my own—it has to be something I listen for, in what others are saying, in my own heart, and in the conversations between us.  During the four years I’ve been here we’ve had a lot of conversations about what matters most, and what we hope we are becoming.  I have tried to listen carefully to what’s been said.  And during this year’s season of discernment, I’ve made time for conversations with trusted friends about what I’ve learned and what inspires me to want to make a new commitment to the work of this congregation.  I’ve also done some listening to what is being said in the wider Episcopal Church about its challenges and opportunities for the future.

What follows is the fruit of these conversations.  It is a personal statement, and I don’t claim to speak for everyone at St. John’s.  But I offer it to you in the hope that some part or parts of it will speak to you, and illuminate your vision for the parish. 

St. John’s is a place where people are drawn by the love of God, called to seek the divine image in themselves and one another; uniting in praise and thanksgiving at Christ’s table, in contemplation and discernment, and in active works of wisdom, justice, beauty, and truth, we share here on earth in the joys of heaven.  It is a place from which each of us is sent to find the unique vocation that grows from our responsibilities and gifts, and to play our part in the mission of Christ to the world.  We are a circle from which no one who is not a danger to others is excluded, in which every voice is heard, and every truth respected, where no one is above criticism, and no one is beyond hope.

We foster a religious culture devoted to the maturation of our spiritual gifts and the satisfaction of our deepest needs by the grace of God—through taking creative risks, telling the truth, making repentance, seeking reconciliation, and empowering one another for servant-leadership in the world.  We take nourishment from the testimony of the Hebrew prophets and sages and the Apostolic communities; from the teaching and example of holy women and men of the past and present; from the riches of Christian tradition in music and the arts, mysticism, theology, and social action; from our membership in a worldwide communion of Anglican brothers and sisters, and the ecumenical body of Christ; from the rhythms of the hours and the church year, and the sacramental elements of grace.  

We are a place for joyous worship, with strong participation by people of all ages, representing the cultural diversity of our community, and bringing the talents of many leaders together in stirring, centering, prayerful, and purposeful celebrations of the Holy Spirit.  We are a learning community practicing the arts of peace—compassionate dialogue, open inquiry, and courageous discipleship.  We seek personal encounter across social, political, and religious barriers, in the shared pursuit of mutual understanding and the common good.  We offer space for a deeper and kindlier look at the world in which we live, where simplicity and faith allow us to hear the voice of the earth, of our bodies, and of the heart, and to take reverent and practical steps to restore the balance of the world.

We are wise and loving stewards of the goods we receive, cherishing the past and preparing for the future without illusions about either, but placing our trust in God’s covenant faithfulness, the truth of the Gospel, and the resilience of creation.

Renewing the Covenant

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

When Joshua gathers Israel together after their conquest of Canaan is complete, he talks to them about their ancestor Abraham.  He reminds them of how God came to Abraham in the land of his ancestors beyond the Euphrates River, and led him away from there, away from the gods of that land, and brought him here --to Canaan.  Joshua tells the people this story because he wants them to understand the real significance of the moment.  He is not only a great governor and military leader; he is also a prophet, one who speaks for God.   And he wants the Israelites to know that this is not just a great event in the history of their nation.  It is also a moment in the story of God.

For just as it was God who led Abraham on his great migration, and God who gave offspring to him and to Sarah, so also it is God who is bringing the story of his descendants to this new climax.  It was God who visited the plagues upon Egypt, and brought Israel out of slavery and into the wilderness.  It was God who spoke to them through Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai and said, “If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all the peoples,… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”  And the people all answered together and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” 

After that generation of Israelites had passed away, and Moses himself was about to die, he called together their children in Moab on the other side of the Jordan.  He reminded them of their story, of all that God had done for their fathers and mothers, and Moses gave them a choice, a choice between life and death, blessing and curse, and he urged them to choose life, for themselves and their descendants.  And now it is Joshua’s turn to speak to their children, on behalf of the God who brought them across the Jordan, who defeated kings and armies and delivered walled cities into their hand, so that they might live in houses they didn’t build, and eat the fruit of vineyards they didn’t plant. 

And Joshua also gives them a choice.    They can serve the gods of Mesopotamia, or the gods of Egypt, or the gods of the Amorites, of the people of the land where they have come to dwell.  Or they can renew their covenant with the God of Israel, whose story is their story.  They have a choice, because God wants partners and co-workers, not slaves.  It’s a choice that every generation of Israel has to make for itself, in the light of its own risks and rewards, its own prospects for renewal of the faith community, and its own fateful consequences of failure.   

Most scholars agree that this story was written down in its current form long after the events that it describes, in a time when the people of Israel had been conquered and taken away to exile in Babylon.  So there is a bitter irony in that part of the story where Joshua warns them about what will happen if they forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods.  The people insist that they know what they are getting into, and that they will be faithful.  But the people who wrote this story, and the people who read it, knew that they hadn’t been, and that Joshua’s warnings had come true.  In this context they returned again to the stories of their covenant with God, looking for meaning in the disaster that had come upon them, and for a way out of their sense of guilt, and failure, and despair.  They sought to remember who they were, the sacred purpose for which God had called them into covenant.  In that remembering they found their freedom.  They saw that they still had a choice.

Some of us here at St. John’s had an experience of the power of remembering our story just the other night.  At the urging of the vestry I’ve called together a group of four people from our 8 o’clock service and four from the 10 o’clock, to work together on a vision for liturgy and music in our parish.  We gathered last Tuesday night, and I decided that a good place to begin would be to remember the story of how we got to where we are today.  I put a time-line up on the wall, and we began to fill it in with what we could remember of how we used to worship in the past.  We called forth a few sketchy details of times long ago, but mainly we focused on the journey that began in early January 2007 with the rebirth of the Episcopal Church in Petaluma from the ashes of schism. 

Now nothing gets Christians into a lather like their opinions about what music to sing in church, or what words to say.  The fact that our two Sunday services have settled into patterns that are fairly distinct in tone and style makes some people worry that we are two different congregations working at cross purposes.  Others think that the way these services are now is the way they will always be, which can be good news or bad, depending on their point of view.  But going back and remembering the turning points that got us to where we are, the circumstances and persons who shaped the choices that we made, helped our Worship Committee see that our context is always changing.  It reminded us that we have to revisit those choices frequently, and continually make them again.   It also helped us remember that we are one people with one story, and that underlying our differences of liturgy and music is our common effort to be faithful to the mission for which God called this parish back to life. 

That is what it means to be in a covenant.  And at the heart of a covenant is a story.  The story of the rebirth of St. John’s, Petaluma is a powerful one, and like many of you, it attracted me and moved me to become part of it.   And because it is a covenant story, God has enabled us to accomplish a great deal together.  We re-established communion with the Diocese of Northern California and the Episcopal Church.  We reclaimed the historic parish property on its behalf.  We showed that this congregation could include gays and lesbians, affirming their full personhood, and their gifts for leadership in the church.  We grew in numbers and in strength to the point where we now can stand on our own as a parish, and we have discerned God’s call to me to become the Rector.

And as I have considered whether to accept that call, it has become clear that there is a real choice for me to make.  What is at stake is not merely the question of what’s best for me and my family, or even what’s best for the parish.  This moment is about making a new commitment to being in covenant with God.  It means recommitting to the story of the resurrection of St. John’s, not as something we did and can now sit back and enjoy, but as something God did so we could remember who we are.  What has happened here is a sign that we belong, not just in this building, or to this denomination, but to the covenant people of Jesus Christ.  Our life together is a sign of his death and resurrection, and it is as his body that we are sent on the mission of his Gospel. 

So I had to ask whether I was ready to renew my commitment to that mission, as God is renewing it in this community.  Could I take new risks for the sake of inclusion, to welcome our neighbors who are still kept out of this church by barriers of language or culture or physical disability?  Could I embrace a broader vision of renewal, going to work with other churches and faith communities and partners in Petaluma to recover our common story and do what we can in our modest way to rebuild a covenant society?  These were questions I had to put not only to myself but to the Discernment Committee and the Vestry.  And now I put them to you.   As for me and my house, we will stay here at St. John’s, Petaluma and serve the Lord, as long, and as well, as we are able.

         

Happy to be here

Genesis 32:22-31

Psalm 17: 1-7, 16

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:13-21

I was on the phone last week with an old friend talking about the possibility of being called as the next Rector of St. John’s, Petaluma, and he said I am in the very privileged position of being a second “Founding Father” of the parish.  “Founding Father”—I liked the sound of that, but I also immediately thought about all of you.  The project of renewing this congregation is only in its eighth year, and still has a long way to go, so all of us here today, even those who are newly arrived, can consider ourselves part of the founding generation.  I also thought about how many of our Founding Fathers are Mothers.  I read an interview recently with Philip Jenkins, the leading academic on global  Christianity.  Asked about the role of women in the church in Africa, where, barring an unimaginable catastrophe, there will be a billion Christians by 2050, he said “Even if they are not ordained, women are key among the lay leaders.  Women bring their menfolk in as converts.  If a church doesn’t have a very strong female base and constituency, it is going nowhere.”

The same is true here, of course, and I saw a beautiful illustration of this a week ago yesterday.  I officiated at the marriage of one of our members at her home outside of Santa Rosa, and many of the wedding guests were from St. John’s.  Theresa Peter was the DJ for the event, and after dinner she cranked up the dance tunes.  Jason Klein and I were sitting at a table on the patio outside and we looked up and saw that eight or ten of the Founding Mothers of our church had formed a circle and were dancing together on the other side of the pool.  Now I’m not going to name names, but I can tell you that the church ladies were getting down, and taking turns strutting their stuff into the center of the ring.  And to me that was a vision of what I love about the spirit of the Episcopal Church, and why we have gone to such an effort to keep it alive here in Petaluma.

Because while we prize our formal liturgical worship, and we commit ourselves in baptism to live disciplined lives of prayer and service, and although we value hard work, and intellectual rigor, and the patient endurance of suffering as much as anyone, and while we do not underestimate the gravity of sin and the destructiveness of its consequences, or our great need for forgiveness and the unmerited gift of Christ’s righteousness, we also affirm the basic goodness of life.  We find a lot to celebrate in the common things of the created world, and those ordinary human experiences of love and pleasure, of beauty and belonging, that speak to us of God.  Another one of our members summed it up for me very simply at that same wedding reception last weekend when he said to me, “we really are meant to be happy, aren’t we?”

I think this experience of simply being happy, of being among friends and enjoying life, was central to the mission of Jesus.  When he heard about the murder of John the Baptist he decided to get out of town and lay low for a while, but there were a lot of people, a huge crowd, in fact, who went after him.  They were desperate for some relief of the suffering and hopelessness of their lives and they saw him take off in his boat and followed, walking along the edge of the lake until he came ashore.  When he landed they were waiting for him, and he felt compassion for their misery; so he healed the ones who were sick, and next thing you know it was suppertime.  

His disciples wanted to send the crowd away, but Jesus decided instead to have a picnic.  Everyone sat down together on the grass, and ate their fill of bread and fish, looking out over the lake as the sun was going down.  The young men and women flirted with each other.  The air was full of the laughter of children at play.  No one had to pay, or to cook or clean up.  And Jesus didn’t make a speech to that crowd.  He didn’t announce a new liberation movement to solve all their problems.  He didn’t hold a religious revival meeting for the salvation of their souls.  But for a couple of hours that evening, Jesus helped everyone remember what it was like to be happy.

You wouldn’t think this was such a controversial thing to have done.  But the fact is that one of things that Jesus’ enemies found so threatening about him was that he made people happy.  They were happy around in a way they hadn’t been in a long, long time, and he seemed to enjoy them, too.  “This fellow is a glutton and a drunkard,” grumbled the other religious leaders, “who welcomes tax collectors and sinners and eats with them.”  And these critics were actually pretty astute, because they recognized that nothing is as revolutionary as happiness.  When people experience it, they quite naturally understand that this is their birthright.  They remember how simple it really is, and that it shouldn’t be too much to ask. 

This leads them to some really uncomfortable questions about themselves, but also about the rules and rationales that dominate their lives.  They wonder why they spend so much time and energy struggling to stave off disaster, or avoid punishment, or compensate for their obligatory shame and unworthiness, and so little doing things that make them truly happy.  They question the dogma that happiness is only for the fortunate few, and ask whether anyone really can be happy when the person across the street, across town, or across the border is in misery.  And just as Jesus was not shy about sharing his happiness, he was also willing to raise the questions it provoked, and to press them as far as they took him, which, as we know, ended up being the cross. 

As founding Mothers and Fathers of the new and continuing St. John’s Episcopal Church, we’ve been trying to articulate something about why we’re here.  More and more people are making do without any religion at all, and for those who do need it, there is no shortage of trendy and user-friendly options.  So why go to all the trouble of renewing and rebuilding this parish, when the tides of cultural change seem to be flowing in the other direction?  To answer that question we’ve had Vestry Retreats, and come up with a mission statement, and held Vision Conversations, and Discernment Conversations, and done a lot of speaking and listening by way of trying to say something clear, and compelling, and true. 

And we have been very careful to frame these conversations so it is clear that we are not being selfish, but that we are all about what God is calling us to do, and how we can serve Christ, and love our neighbor.  And maybe we really mean that in all sincerity, yet I also suspect that there is at least a little part of us that believes that this is what we’re supposed to say.  But true spiritual discernment is about letting go of what we think is supposed to be and becoming open to what is, as we see in the living light of the Spirit.  So today I’m saying there may be no shame in admitting that we come to church because it makes us happy, or because we still hope to be, or want to remember what it was like, and because we know that happiness multiplies and deepens when it is shared.  

In a world grown deeply cynical about human beings, that reduces happiness to power and possessions, to entertainment and aggression and sex, we hold on to the happiness of Jesus.  It was the cause he suffered and died for, and that should be enough to tell us that it is not something sentimental or superficial.  It is what he was raised again for, so that his revolutionary happiness would not die, but would be universal and eternal.  We come to church because we insist on believing his promise of being happy, and to listen to his teaching about how to hope and to work, to give and to love, to suffer and to pray, for a truly happy world.

Scribes for the Kingdom

Genesis 29:15-28

Psalm 105:1-11, 45b

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

When you think about it, the Kingdom of Heaven is a funny idea.  Clearly it is not like kingdoms on a map, where Heaven is this pink country, over here between the green and the purple ones.  It is not like the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom.  Heaven, which is Matthew’s way of saying “God” because, as a good Jew, he is shy about using the divine name, has to include all countries, all plants and animals.  Because God created everything, and sustains it, and his sovereignty over it is unlimited and eternal.  That is elementary biblical monotheism.

The Hebrew scriptures say that it really is that simple.  But they also tell us, and our own experience confirms this, that from the human point of view, the picture is more complicated.  And it is that complicated human situation that Jesus is addressing with his parables.  Jesus isn’t a theologian, he’s a preacher.  So the purpose behind his parables is not to convince people to get new ideas about God.  It is to train them for the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is to give them a way to follow that leads through the tangle of human complications to the simplicity of life in God, with God.  It is to help to see how God really is present and active and working in the world around them, in their lives.  The parables are meant to show people how to align themselves with the flow of God’s power, to go with it, and to let it carry them where God wants to go.

But when we hear parables one after another the way Matthew’s Gospel presents them, it seems that they are not all saying the same thing.  For example, there are those that compare the Kingdom of Heaven to a person who discovers something unique and particular: a pearl of great price, or a field with a buried treasure.  That person then goes and sells everything else that he has in order to purchase that one precious thing.  But others say it is like something extremely common, a mustard seed or yeast in dough, that grows and accomplishes its purpose easily and naturally.  Is it like the dragnet that catches every kind of fish in the sea, so that they can be sorted into good or bad, or like the one we had last week about the field where the wheat and the weeds are growing up together, and it does more harm than good to try separate them?  If you were trying to turn these sayings into a consistent doctrine of what the Kingdom of Heaven is and how it operates, you’d have to conclude that Jesus is a pretty poor theologian.

But, again, that would be to misunderstand what the parables are trying to do.  As we’ve said, they are not aimed at getting people to understand a concept, but to go in a different direction with their lives.  I think it helps to see how this works if we imagine that Jesus spoke each of these parables on a different occasion.  Each time, there were people in the audience who hadn’t been there before.  Each time, the setting was a little different—a market town, a fishing village, or a farming community—and the situation was different—the news from the capital, the questions people asked, the things that had been going on in their lives.  The parables seem to say different things because each circumstance and audience called for something different.

And, in particular, every person and every crowd that Jesus spoke to had its own form of resistance to his message.  We all have our habitual, unexamined ways of thinking, which are a way of keeping God at a distance.  So if you inviting people to get involved in their lives in a different way, to be a part of what God is doing in the world right now, you need words that take them where they don’t expect, and maybe don’t want, to go.  The author of Matthew understands this, and he uses Jesus’ parables in a way that he thinks will have the most impact on his audience, and will speak to their situation.  For his community of marginalized Jewish Christians, the parables manifest the unique importance of Jesus as a prophet and teacher.  They speak to the mystery of why it is that so many of their brothers and sisters not only fail to understand his significance, but strenuously, even violently oppose it.  Matthew makes the parables, with their unexpected reversals of meaning, a metaphor for the Gospel as a whole.  He turns the drama of understanding or not understanding the parables into the prelude to the final judgment of the world.   Matthew sharpens the parables into a sword, to cut through fear, confusion, and indecision and show how high the stakes are in this fight and to say that it is time to take sides.

And, just so we understand what he is doing, Matthew concludes this section on the parables in the following way:  Jesus asks, "’Have you understood all this?’” and the crowd all answered, ‘Yes.’"  (Again, the focus of the passage is that the people should grasp what they are hearing and decide about it for themselves.)  And he said to them, "’Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’"  This could be a reference to Jesus, who quotes the law and the prophets, when it helps to get his point across, but also feels free to create surprising new teachings.  But it could just as easily refer to Matthew himself, who has the audacity to write a new book of holy scripture for the sake of his community.  He works creatively with all kinds of old material—the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, different collections of the sayings of Jesus, many would say the Gospel of Mark—and shapes them into a new story that he hopes will wake people up to see what they could not see and do what they fear to do.

This process didn’t stop with the writing of the Gospel of Matthew.  The Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t frozen in that moment, like an insect in a lump of amber.  It has kept growing, like the seed of a mustard plant, so the process of trying to communicate it hasn’t stopped either.  And if we want to perceive the working of God in the world in our own day, to align our lives with it, and to help others to get into that flow, the question of what language to use looms large.  What treasures can we bring out of the storehouse, both old and new, with the power to change the way we see, and the way we walk?  Of course, as a preacher, I wrestle with this question almost every day.  But I don’t think this is just my work, or just my responsibility.  I’ve been trying to introduce it into the discernment conversation that is happening in formal and informal ways in our congregation right now—as we seek to clarify our shared understanding of who we are and what we need and what we are called to become, I keep wondering “what are the images and stories from our tradition that speak most powerfully to our circumstances?” 

And this needn’t apply only to our life together in the parish.  For our personal faith to come alive, and for us to become effective Christians in the world, we all need some training as scribes for the Kingdom of Heaven.  I think some regular reflection on the scriptures, in private reading or familiar conversation, even if it is just to take the little lectionary insert from the bulletin home after church, to read again and think about it during the week can be really important.  Not in order to construct a theological system, or to be able to quote verses for the sake of argument, but to rummage in the storehouse of our own imagination, to wonder about what those ancient people said, and why it was important to them and how it might be important to us.  And if you are already doing this you know what kinds of surprising treasures you bring out of it, some of them old, and some of them new.