Child's Play

Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

On Friday I performed a wedding on the beach at the foot of Montara Mountain between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay.  The parents of the groom are members of this congregation, and the couple had met me a few times on Sundays and at a family memorial service I’d done, and around the beginning of this year they approached me about officiating.  I agreed to do it gladly, for the sake of the parents, and I started meeting with them once a month or so for pre-marital counseling.   They impressed me as individuals and as a couple, with their sincerity and maturity and evident love for each other.  So it was a real joy to stand with them as they made their marriage vows.  Plus, they are surfers, so doing it by the ocean felt especially appropriate, and that is a place I also love to be.  My family came down for the ceremony and we made a little weekend of it, and it was like the old days, when my daughter was small and we lived five blocks from the beach in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

All that said, I was surprised last week as I was looking ahead to the wedding, to find myself having some misgivings about it.  The form of service that we used was a “Non-theistic Judeo-Christian Ceremony” adapted from the Book of Common Prayer.  There was no Eucharist, no mention of Christ or the Holy Trinity, no Lord’s Prayer.  There was a reading from the Scriptures, from the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible.  I am generally an accepting and open-minded person, and I’d done this kind of thing before, so as I say, it came as a surprise to me, but I found myself wondering what I was doing.  I am a Christian priest, after all, so why was I officiating at such a questionably Christian wedding?  Was there more I should have done in our counseling sessions to impress upon this couple their need for Jesus?  Was I failing in some way to uphold the integrity of my ministry?

As I wrestled with these thoughts, I found encouragement in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark.  In this story we hear how Jesus’ disciples tried to discourage people from bringing their children to him, to place his hands on them and bless them.  The Gospel doesn’t say exactly why they did this—maybe the disciples thought that Jesus’ time was too valuable to waste on small children, who, after all, were unable to really understand who Jesus was, or to make a conscious choice to follow him as their teacher and Lord.  But we can say that in some way the disciples looked down on the children as being beside the point of the real, important ministry that they and Jesus were engaged in. 

Of course, we know that Jesus took that dim view of the little children and turned it around.  He said we need to receive them, and to bless them, not for their sake, but for ours.  Because the children are like little emissaries in our midst of the Kingdom of God.   If we want to know that Kingdom, says Jesus, and how we can enter it, we mustn’t relegate the children to a marginal place in the community, or make them an afterthought in our ministry, but put them right at the center of it. 

Adults seem to need a religion of distinctions and definitions, of qualifications and regulations.  But children need a religion that is more than a set of rules, or a dumbed-down version of the grown-ups’ ideas about God.  They need a religion based on relationships of love and trust.   Their need to love and trust others is as innate as their need to be loved and protected, and this is as true of their relationship with God as it is of their relationships with the adults in their lives.  They rely completely on a world that is beyond their understanding, the world of adults, and their natural inclination is to love us, and to believe in our world, to want to learn what they can about it and to express what they are learning.  The way they learn best is with rituals in which they can participate, with pictures and stories that feed their imaginations, and by taking those imaginations into play.

Jesus respected the rules, but he taught a religion that was about more than rules, it was about love and trust; love and trust of the one he called “Abba”—which means “Daddy.”  He taught people that they were to be like God in the way they treated each other, to be fearless and compassionate and resourceful, creative, forgiving and generous, because the wisdom of God is vindicated by her children.  And he taught them that the world they thought they knew was really embraced and pervaded by a much greater world that was beyond their understanding.  It was a world Jesus could not describe, or define, or explain to them, but he could tell them stories and parables so that they could imagine what it was like.   

We have an expression in English, “child’s play,” that describes an activity so easy as to be frivolous.  But that’s not fair.  That doesn’t do justice to the real play that children do, which is often full of laughter and fun, but can also be gravely serious.  Left to play freely, children will make up games about work and struggles for power, about war and peace, and crime and punishment, and illness and sorrow and death.  Likewise, Jesus’ appeal to our imaginations is not a sentimental indulgence in whimsy—it’s not just a nice story he tells, it is a drama he plays out, with total commitment, all the way to the cross.

The Gospels are very clear that the passion and crucifixion of Jesus was something that had to happen.  And Christians have tended to take this to mean that it was something God needed—it had to happen so God could win his wager with the Devil on the human soul, or because God needed a sacrifice to satisfy the just demands of his righteous anger at us.  But there is another, minority, view in the Christian tradition that says that the passion is something we needed.  It had to happen, you might say, to complete the story God is telling us in Jesus Christ.  It is partly a story about the tragic depths of our wickedness, our propensity to make scapegoats and victimize the innocent with murderous violence, a story proved true again on Thursday in Roseburg, Oregon, as it is in countless places every day around the world.  Christ’s place in that drama is, as always, with the victims.

But it is also a drama that has to play out so that God can tell the rest of the story, in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, in the gift of the Holy Spirit and the community of saints, and the consummation of the kingdom that still is coming.  The cross is necessary so we can have the whole Christian story, which is not only about how we are wicked children, but also about how we can grow up into the full stature of Christ, and inherit our share of his kingdom.  In this light we can see our whole tradition as a single work of the imagination, as play, in which each successive generation, beginning in childhood, does its part to keep the story going. 

So John of Patmos could tell of the persecution of the early church as a great cosmic drama with angels warring in heaven and a dragon loose on the earth, and the fall of Babylon the great, and the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem.  So Francis of Assisi could enter so fully into his imitation of Jesus, that he received the wounds of the crucifixion in his hands, and feet, and side.  So that same Francis could imagine a world in which sun and moon and stars, wind, water and fire, the earth and all that grows upon it, and even the death of his body, are beloved brothers and sisters, all joining with him in a song of praise to the creator God.  So we, also, are called out to play, to enter the story, imagine it fully, and live it out in our own way.  And if that sounds like too much effort, or you think that you are getting too old for such games, I can only repeat the advice that Jesus gave—let the little children show you how.

Drinking the deep water

Sermon for the Renewal of Ministry and Welcoming of a New Rector

Epiphany Episcopal Church, Vacaville,  January 26, 2013

 

Jeremiah 17:7-8

Psalm 16:5-11

Romans 6:3-11

Mark 10:35-45

When I came back from vacation last summer, Mack and I met to check in about how things were going in his job search.  We discussed various openings that sounded promising, assisting clergy positions or combined parish-and-university positions in places as far-flung as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Canada.  And then, somewhat shyly, he let me know that he was thinking of putting his name in for Epiphany Church in Vacaville.  He’d been there a couple of times recently as a Sunday supply priest and he said he felt a strong connection with the people there.  He liked their priorities, their commitment to hospitality and service.  He had a feeling that they liked him, too.   He’d learned that ever since his last visit the children of the parish had been asking “when is Father Mack coming back?” 

But he was also hesitant to apply and he wanted to know what I thought.  Would he, a newly-ordained priest with no professional parish ministry experience, even be considered to be rector of a congregation?  Or would people think he was being too big for his britches, ridiculous, out-of-touch?  As someone who came to ordained ministry by my own somewhat unorthodox route, I understood very well how he felt.  But I also felt he had people around him he could trust.  I suggested he contact Canon Britt at the Diocese, and tell her what he’d told me, because I trusted her to tell him honestly and directly whether he was over-reaching, and not to judge him harshly just for asking.

And I told him that I thought there was a time, maybe not all that long ago, when his application would not have been seriously considered.  But the church is in the midst of rapid and tumultuous change, and nothing is changing as fundamentally as our understanding of leadership.  For a long time the culture of leadership in the church was focused on the clergy, and it was a status-conscious culture.  I’ll never forget the first diocesan clergy conference I attended after I was ordained (not in this diocese, by the way), and the atmosphere of competitiveness, the subtle jockeying for position and prestige, was so thick you could cut it with a knife.  But as aware as the clergy in our church have been of their status relative to each other, that was nothing compared to the sensitivity that pervaded the whole church of the clergy’s prerogatives where the lay people were concerned.

But as I said to Mack last summer, and I say it again to all of us this evening, that is changing—it is changing fast.  The spiritual crisis of our times requires a different kind of leadership.  We need leaders who are decisive and courageous, resolute and inspired, but who are also vulnerable.  We need leaders who are not afraid to have emotions, and not just in the pulpit.  We need leaders who can listen, who can say that they don’t know the answer, who are willing to admit they’ve been wrong.  We need leaders who are willing to use all their gifts in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ, including the gifts of their limitations.

And you, the people of Epiphany Church, have chosen that kind of leader.  In doing so, you are being true to the mission of your parish, a mission that begins with your name.  An epiphany is an experience of seeing the light, and the light that we celebrate tonight is not the reflected glory of your new rector.  It is the light of Christ, the light that each one of us receives through our baptism.   It is a light that shines in the face of an infant whose parents are bringing her to the font, to receive the Holy Spirit and be marked as Christ’s own forever, and the same light is in the eyes of an elder whose has spent the journey of a lifetime learning what it means to walk in newness of life.   It is a light that reveals the beauty of every person, a beauty that is not superficial attractiveness or charisma, but the deep beauty that flows from the precious and irreplaceable individuality that God gives to us all.

James and John come to Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and they ask to be given a special favor, to be exalted with Jesus to a place of glory and power.  But what they don’t understand is that the glory that they seek is not in some high and lofty place where only special people get to go.  If they really want to share in Christ’s glory, they will have to find it where Jesus did, in the world God made, with the people God loves.  Jesus came to reveal God’s glory and power, and the people who thought they had special access to it, the religious and political leaders, could not see it.  It was the fishermen, the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the sick and the blind, the ones who suffered and the ones who sinned, who saw the light.

They say that the river you can see is only a small part of the whole river, and that, in the gravels and rock formations underneath and beside the surface river there flows an even larger body of water.  Jeremiah says that the one who trusts in the Lord is like a tree planted by the river, and it is that deep underground water of God’s faithfulness that such a person drinks.  Jesus came to baptize us in that river, and a church that is true to the mission of Jesus is a church that drinks from the deep river of God’s faithfulness that flows through the whole world.

I know that Mack understands this.  He will be good leader for you because he will encourage and support you to trust in that river, and to be in service to that world.  He will help you to share the light of Christ with others.  But you will not share it because it is a precious commodity that you own, that you are willing, because you are such holy and virtuous people, to dole out to a world sunk in darkness.  You will share it the way a tree shares the abundance of the sunlight that sparkles on the surface of the river, dancing in it, passing it through your leaves, turning it into flowers, and fragrance, and fruit.   

You can be that kind of church, or I should say “we,” because all our churches face the same challenges, and we all face them together, but the key, as Jeremiah said, is trust.  Mack trusted you enough to ask to be your rector.  You trusted him enough to call him, and that is a very good beginning.  But it is only the beginning of your new, shared ministry, a ministry that can be fruitful if there is trust. 

We need to trust our own gifts and our own authority.  Here again, Mack can help you, because he has had to struggle over many years to trust his.  He had to overcome the internal and external voice of prejudice that said he was not qualified for Christ’s ministry because of his sexual orientation, so he can help you to learn that the gifts that God has entrusted to you are meant to be shared, no matter what obstacles stand in your way. 

We also must trust each other.  We have to trust each other enough to speak the truth of what is in our hearts, even when it makes us vulnerable.  We need to trust enough to listen to what the other has to say, even when it makes us uncomfortable.  We have to trust enough to allow each other to take risks, and make mistakes, and to ask for and offer forgiveness.

And above all we must trust God.  We need to trust that God speaks, and to be disciplined about learning to listen; to trust in our shared mission, and know that God has not called the church into being for no purpose.  We have to trust that God has a plan and a direction for us to follow, even when we feel lost, and uncertain which way we should go.  We have to trust that the deep river of God’s faithfulness will be there to sustain us even when the surface has dried to a trickle.  We are baptized into a ministry of trust, and this trust is itself the fruit the world hungers for more than ever.  It is the light we see, it is the light we are, it is the light we are meant to share.