We're on a Mission from God

In September of 2005 I was attending my first clergy conference in the Diocese of California, at Bishop’s Ranch in Sonoma County. I had graduated seminary in May and been ordained a deacon in June. For six months I had been all over that Diocese, trying to convince someone to give me a job. There had been one parish with a bona fide assistant priest position—my upstairs neighbor from seminary got it, and I was the runner up. With a wife and baby daughter at home I was getting desperate. On the first evening of the conference, after dinner, the Diocesan Executive whose duties included finding me a job came up to me and said, “I think I might have something for you. I got a call from All Saints in Carmel and they’re looking for an assistant. It’s a great church—good people, beautiful town. It is in El Camino Real—think of it like going down to the minor leagues for a little while.”

Some things never change, and the condescension of the Diocese of California may be one of them. But my wife and I took some comfort in that remark at the time. We had both moved to the San Francisco Bay area at the age of 22, and had lived there our whole adult lives. Carmel for us was a strange place, culturally and geographically unfamiliar, and we had no idea how we would be received. But it was my first job in the church, we reasoned, and those are temporary, anyway. This one seemed like it might be more temporary than most.

Of course we came to love this place, and since it became clear at the end of last year that it was time to move on, we have loved it most dearly. And yet we knew this day would come when we came here. Partly it has to do with the natural progression of a priest’s career, and partly with the ongoing dynamics of change in this congregation. But more importantly, it has to do with what God asks us to do and to be as disciples of Jesus. This morning’s reading from Luke reminds us that being a follower of Jesus means to be on a missionary journey. This isn’t just true of the specially ordained, but for all of us. I think that’s why after Luke tells us about the sending out of the 12 apostles, he adds this story of the 72 others. The implication seems pretty plain to me—no experience is needed, no professional training offered, no minimum qualifications required, except the desire to be a part of Jesus’ mission to the world.

There was a time in high school when I was in a circle of friends whose sacred text was the movie The Blues Brothers, and throughout the movie Jake and Elwood Blues would say, “We are on a mission from God.” This is true for all of us. Sometimes this mission asks us to move on geographically, but it can just as easily ask us to stay in the same place our whole lives. The point is to keep moving spiritually, and what keeps us on a mission is the work we have been given to do, and the message we have for the world.

It is not unlike the relationship Americans have with the Declaration of Independence. When those 56 white men decided to announce to the world that governments are established by the consent of the governed, in order to secure the rights and liberties with which all are equally endowed by God, and that they intended to found a new society on that principle, they couldn’t have foreseen the result. They didn’t know that ninety years later slavery would be abolished or that 60 years after that, women would win the right to vote. The impulse to extend the scope of equality and freedom, once set loose, has a life of its own, that keeps working away in our politics and society, even when power and prosperity urge us to complacency.

In an even more profound and urgent way, the mission of Jesus Christ keeps his church unsettled and on the move. That’s what the baptismal font is doing there by the front door, reminding us when we enter that we are a people reborn and signed with the cross of Christ, and when we depart it reminds us that we are sent in his name to be bearers of a message. We don’t need a lot of stuff for this mission—credentials, titles, carefully-constructed arguments, techniques for winning friends and influencing people. What is important is what is in us, what Christ has placed in us by his grace, which is the power to heal, and the news of God’s kingdom.

This message is peace, and we understand it as peace and deliver it in peace. It is not a claim to superior understanding, or an ultimatum of any kind. It is simply the offer of peace to a stranger, a suggestion to everyone we meet that God’s love is very near, that God blesses life, that God has infinite hope for everyone in the whole world. This message is an appeal for mutual recognition, an invitation to a meeting in which we acknowledge one another as God’s beloved. And this meeting is offered with the promise that, if we open ourselves to one another in the peace of Christ, he will come to be with us, to abide within and among us, and transform our life together into a new creation. This is what I was hoping for when I came to All Saints, Carmel, and we have not been entirely disappointed, have we? You have given me many such meetings, because you are Sons and Daughters of peace, and I hope that you have experienced some of Christ’s peace through me.

I go now to a new house, a place where peace has been broken. St. John’s, Petaluma (incidentally, in the Diocese of Northern California, also the “minor leagues”) is a place where people forgot somewhere along the way that the kingdom of God has come near for everyone. Somewhere along the way, some of the people at St. John’s forgot that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters for anything, but that the new creation in Christ is everything. So Meg and Risa and I are going there to do a little healing, God willing (please pray that Our Lord will give me the grace to do it), and to speak a word of peace. Something about the journey that congregation has made, about the years they spent doing worship out of a box in the social hall at the Lutheran church, tells me that they know that God has sent them on a mission. That, more than anything else, is what is calling me there, so I’m going. I’ll let the Blues Brothers have the last word— Elwood to Jake: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake to Elwood: Hit it.

Geezers and Whippersnappers

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a
Psalm 5:1-8

Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3

I attended a conference in Portland this weekend called the Episcopal Village Mission Event. To explain in detail who was there and what the conference was about would require a short course on the sociology of the church today and I don’t want to bore you with that. The simplest way I can explain it to say that there is a group of young Episcopal clergy and laypeople who see themselves as part of a larger movement of renewal in the church that transcends denominational, theological, and conceptual boundaries of the modern period. Representatives of this group, and, in particular, leaders of a community called Church of the Apostles, in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, were the hosts of the conference. And the guests were, for the most part, people like me, people in positions of leadership in parishes or dioceses of the mainstream Episcopal Church.

The conference got off to a rocky start. The new Bishop of Oregon had the opening address, and I think he sincerely wished to be welcoming and to begin a fruitful dialogue. But fairly quickly, almost in spite of himself, his remarks drifted toward the obstacles to change in the church, the lack of resources, and the cultural and technological divide between generations. I intend no disrespect when I say he reminded me a little of Simon, the Pharisee in the gospel story. And in that he was like all of us, whether post-modern Jesus-freaks or white-haired Episcopalians of the old school. All too often, our question to God is “how are you going to uphold my standards?” Whether your standards have to do with how hip you are to the use of African drums and electric guitars in worship, and how facile you are in texting tweets with your internet phone, or whether they have to do with the language of the Prayer Book, the old favorite hymns, and dutiful service on the altar guild and vestry, doesn’t make much difference. If I begin our conversation with a God in my pocket whose job it is to vindicate my standards, not only will I not meet you, I will not find the common ground between us that is the real dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit.

What saved this weekend’s conference was the question of the woman in the gospel story with the alabaster jar, the one who, weeping, wets Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and anoints them with perfume. The question she asks contains its own affirmation because it begins with her risk-taking response to an experience of the love of God. She puts her shame behind her to show her love for Jesus, and that shame dissolves in acceptance and forgiveness. The young adults who led the conference in Portland didn’t come to show us a “better way” to pray or sing, or run the church. What they shared with us was the risks they have taken, and the joy they have found, in loving Jesus Christ and one another. They shared their hope for a more authentic and transforming experience of spiritual community, and their longing to become agents of God’s reconciling and healing mission in the world.

“What can I do to show what a difference it makes for me to know that you love and accept me as I am?” When we make the shift to asking this question, when we embrace the God who runs to us with open arms and weeps for joy at our return, rather than the God who enforces our standards, at least two things happen.

First, we become open to our own shame and pain, to the ways we have injured ourselves and one another by our unwillingness to love as Christ loves. We can take a sustained look at the brokenness, injustice, and destruction in the world and know that it is not outside us but is of a piece with our own wounds. Into this opening comes the deep compassion that is born of facing the hard truth. There came a point in this weekend’s workshop when the white-haired Episcopalians rose up and held the youngsters accountable for stereotyping them as complacent and unimaginative. But the meeting did not devolve into a quarrel. Instead, our shared love for Christ stirred us to a lament for the fading promise of the church as it once was, a church that is dying. I have never been to a church gathering where that could be said so courageously and clearly. And it was remarkable that the most eloquent and anguished voices in this lament were men and women in their 20s and 30s.

There is a second thing that happens when we come to God with the question of the woman with the alabaster jar— we are reconciled. When we come to the party not to see who is worthy of our standards, but to show our gratitude to the one who loves us without conditions and without measure, we go away in peace. That’s what happened in Portland. We didn’t solve any problems. We didn’t even really “hash out our differences.” But we did come away feeling like we all need each other, white-haired geezers and tatooed whippersnappers alike. We drew strength just from being together and loving one another, having conversations and saying prayers, singing God’s praise and sharing Christ’s body and blood. And I think we all came away with a renewed hope. Nobody knows what the future of the church will be, but it has a future because God holds a future for us.

“What can I do to show what a difference it has made in my life to know that you love and accept me no matter what?” We may have to go to a party where we are not welcome. We may have to do something unseemly and extravagant. We may do it with tears streaming down our cheeks. But we will cast our shame behind us, and do something—how could we not?

Becoming adults

I delivered this sermon at a Confirmation service on the Eve of the Ascension at All Saints', Carmel

This service is about being an adult. Being an adult is does not depend so much on what age you are—truthfully it is something that we keep learning to do throughout our lives, just as a healthy person never completely loses some of the qualities of being a child. True adulthood is about having the maturity to make one’s own choices, and taking responsibility for the consequences. Oh, yes, and it’s about power.

When I was a child I couldn’t wait to grow up because I imagined that adults had more power. For one thing, they had more money. But they could also do things that, as a child, you aren’t able or aren’t allowed to do. The classic example of this is driving a car. In fact, driving a car may be the most important marker in our society of the transition from child to adult. As a child you dream of the day when you can drive, all by yourself, and go wherever you want to go whenever you want to go there. These fantasies of independence get more vivid and intoxicating as you get closer to that magic threshold, until that thrilling moment comes when you turn that key for the first time and hear the motor roar to life and you put the vehicle in gear and step on the gas pedal and feel the long-dreamed of power propelling you forward.

Then you become a drive and you find out certain things, things you didn’t think about before. For one thing you learn that driving a car doesn’t make you an adult. In fact, people seem to be at their most childish behind the wheel of a car. Normally polite citizens butt in front of each other. They curse at each other for going too slow, or too fast, or making minor errors of forgetfulness. Another thing you find out once you start driving is that the car doesn’t go anywhere without gas. Even if you drive a hybrid subcompact you have to stop on a regular basis to fill up with horrible toxic liquid. We may feel free and powerful, but actually we’re hooked, and can’t kick the habit. We might be concerned about global warming, or lament the fact that we have to hike twenty miles into the mountains to hear the music of God’s creation without the constant interference of traffic noise. Our hearts might break to hear of an enormous oil slick blanketing the ocean, or of wars waged on thin pretexts in countries rich with oil reserves, but also know that we have to get around, and our share of the guilt for these sins isthe price we have to pay for that power.

Our scriptures this evening are about a different kind of power. It is the power of true adulthood, true maturity. Unlike the power to drive, it is not bought at the price of sin. In fact it can’t be bought at all, because it’s not for sale. This kind of power always comes as a gift. The power of true adulthood is not something we use, like a tool, to get something we want. Rather it clothes us like a garment, or enters into us like a breath. It is the freedom to be who we truly are, not what the world tells us we should be. It is the power that comes to us from above.

Tonight we celebrate and give thanks to God that all we have been given that gift. It was given each of us at our baptism, when we were reborn as members of God’s family and brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. And tonight some of us are standing up to say publicly that we wish to receive that gift in its fullness and claim it as our own. Tom, Raul, Colin, Will, Michael, and Grace, as well as Lorrie and Vicki, are declaring their intention tonight to answer the call of God in Christ to grow into true adulthood.

There is a focal point in this service, an outward and visible sign of the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, empowering them to desire, to will, and to persevere in pursuing it. And that sign is the laying on of hands by Bishop Hughes.

Now it would be a mistake to think that in this action the Bishop is giving them something that belongs to him. He is just passing on a gift, a gift that he was given for the express purpose, and no other, of passing it along. In fact it was given to him by exactly the same sign, by the laying on of hands by bishops, who themselves had hands laid on them by bishops who had hands laid on them by bishops and so on all the way back to the disciples of Jesus, who received this gift of power from Christ himself so they could communicate it to the whole world. So that is what is still happening, and now it’s our turn.

We may not all become bishops, nor should we. We may not pass on the gift by laying hands on other people in church. But we may give them a hug, or a kind or forgiving word. The power of true adulthood is not a tool to get things for ourselves, but a power within us to be a gift for others, by what we say, by what we do, and simply by who we are. It is the power that comes from above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

A really good driver, a mature driver, is one who has learned to see the whole picture. She doesn’t focus attention only on the road or only on the car in front of her. She sees down the road, and off to the sides, so she can anticipate when something unexpected is going to happen, and can slow down or take evasive action to keep herself and others safe. This driver is a little like the first astronauts to orbit the Earth, who saw the Earth for the first time as a whole, and described it as a religious experience. From above we are all one. Up there you can see no borders, no nations, no races or religions, only a single, beautiful world, bathed in the glory of God’s sun.

From above we are all equal. There are no lower-class people down there and no higher class people up there, just people, going around together on the surface of the Earth. What the astronauts saw was a little taste of what Christ sees, and we need that kind of perspective, that kind of wisdom from above if we are going to achieve maturity as individuals and as a species. There is no way we can do it by ourselves. We need each other. We need the community of the body of Christ, with all its members and all their different gifts. God’s promise in Christ is to be present with us, in the Holy Spirit, to empower us to give our gifts, and in that giving, to finally, and fully, grow up.

The Joy of God

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

Why does the assembly in Jerusalem weep when they hear the reading of the book of the Law? Is it because they know how far they have been from keeping it, and how little they have understood about God’s way with them? Such awareness would feel to them like a judgment, and this is not an unusual response to the scriptures. We might be familiar with this kind of feeling, and if we accord the Bible any authority in our lives, it is often the authority of correction, of setting us straight because we have not been good and faithful followers of God’s decrees.

But this story has a surprise ending, and it proposes a different kind of response to the word of God, for “Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, "This day is holy to the LORD your God; do not mourn or weep… "Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our LORD; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”

“the joy of the LORD is your strength.”

Could this be the “take home message” of the Bible—that ours is a God of joy, who delights in us? Could it be that this message is given to us so that we might take strength from it to live fully and generously, with hope and courage and determination?

Jesus seems to think so. At least this is how Luke portrays him in the synagogue at Nazareth. This is the only scene in all the Gospels where we hear Jesus reading directly from the Scriptures. As Luke tells it, this is a familiar setting for Jesus—no doubt he has read here before, but this time will be different. For Jesus will not read the opening of the 61^st Chapter of Isaiah to elucidate some fine point of moral discipline, or to demonstrate any metaphysical thesis. Rather he will use the scriptures to authenticate and articulate his own identity and mission. And his identity and mission are to manifest, in his own life, God’s will to save and heal and free us. The joy of God is us and our world transformed by the power of shalom, of peace and wholeness, well-being and harmony, of right action and respectful relationship. The creative Spirit of God gave the imagination of this joy to the ancient prophet, along with the courage to announce its arrival. And in Jesus, the arrival is now. The shalom of God stands in the synagogue, and all the potential of this world to be a place of joy and not condemnation, of liberty and not bondage, of true seeing, and not blind folly, is a living, breathing reality.

So begins the public career of Jesus of Nazareth, and it’s important for us to remember this scene because of our inclination to think and act as if it never happened, as if the joy of God were still just a remote dream, some nice words on a dusty old scroll. Or worse, we like to imagine that God is not joyful, and never really was, that the gift of the only-begotten Son was just a momentary lapse. Our rejection of that gift at the Cross, some say, only served to confirm God’s low opinion of us and our world, and since then God has resumed his accustomed practice of toying with us cruelly before putting us out of our misery.

There has been a lot of that kind of thinking going on in response to the catastrophe in Haiti. I’m not referring to the cries of the Haitians themselves, who justly, and with solid biblical precedent, arraign God and bewail their seemingly endless suffering. I’m speaking rather of our co-religionists who sanctimoniously preach the Bad News, pronouncing punishment on Haiti for her sins. I’m speaking also of our secular intellectuals who would never let the name of God pass their lips in thanksgiving for the innumerable blessings of good fortune that they enjoy, and yet seize on this moment to wring their hands over the evidence of God’s indifference or non-existence.

I do not have answers for these people, but I do have some questions.

It is a profound and irreducible mystery that the Earth we inhabit is a living organism. Her astonishing fecundity is warmed and nourished by a pulsing heart, a remnant of the fireball from which the Sun was born. It is a world that shakes and erupts, that storms and surges, and yet it is this dynamism, which can be awesomely destructive in this or that place, that maintains on the whole a miraculous diversity and abundance of life. Is such a world the result of God’s malice or God’s providence? And the poverty that crippled Haiti before the earthquake and last year’s cyclones?; the greed and cruelty that created her as a giant slave plantation?; the savagery of her war of liberation?; the economic embargo of European powers determined to make a bad example of her?; the repeated invasions and despotic proxy rulers?; the extreme disparities of wealth?; the shoddy construction, the inadequate infrastructure, the weak and corrupt governance: are these also to be charged to God’s account?

Last week our diocese sent out an email with a link to a video clip on the Wall Street Journal website. Some of you may have seen it. It was about Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin of the Episcopal Church in Haiti. He now presides over a diocese that is physically destroyed. Its cathedral, nearly all of its churches, its schools and social service centers, its university—all have been reduced to rubble.

He and his surviving priests have taken refuge in one of their schools, where there is a cafeteria and a rapidly diminishing reserve of food and water. On the night after the earthquake the grounds of the school were opened to the newly homeless and the few tents that they had were given to the first arrivals. So began a camp that has sheltered as many as three thousand people. Now, before the bishop can even begin to think of rebuilding a church whose worldly substance has been lost in an instant, he has to find food and medicine and proper sanitation for a small town’s worth of people that have moved into his only remaining house and now have nowhere else to go. Yet, as I watched him describing the situation to the interviewer in the video I was impressed by his calmness and simplicity, his complete lack of self-pity --“That’s the way life is,” he says, “there are moments like this, moments of sadness. There are moments of celebration.” And then, incredibly, a smile comes across his face, the smile of someone who has considered all the possibilities and has chosen to proclaim good news to the poor. “What is important,” he says, “is to keep the faith. We must keep the faith, knowing that God is with us, in the good as well as in the bad days; we must keep the faith.”

This is the strength of one who knows of the joy of God. His proclamation is for us a gift of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit is a generous giver, endowing each of us with particular gifts, but what brings these gifts to perfection is that we are able to give and receive them in harmony with others in the body of Christ. And the life of that body is the joy of God manifest in Jesus Christ. The words of his Gospel and the grace of his sacraments are meant to communicate this joy to us, so that we might receive strength like that of Bishop Duracin. I am sure that the Bishop gives thanks for your gifts of money to relieve the emergency and for your prayers for him, his church, and his nation. But I venture to say that he is even more thankful to you for keeping the faith, for preserving the hope that this turbulent world is filled with God’s shalom. Just as we give thanks for the Bishop’s apostolic presence in a situation of extreme suffering, he would give thanks for the ways that your life bears witness to the living presence of the joy of God, in times of sadness and times of celebration, on good days and bad. “The joy of the LORD is your strength” is still news, and through Christ, in the Spirit, we have the freedom every day to believe it.