Sunday, January 21, 2018

State of the Parish Address: Pull Someone Out of the Boat

Sermon for Jan. 21, 2018
Mark 1:14-20

I want to start this State of the Parish address with a story from our mission trip to Haiti last year.  You may remember hearing about a ride on what came to be called “the Adventure Boat.”  We were going to an island off the Haitian coast to visit a school and hospital for disabled children, and to spend the afternoon at the beach.  But as it turned out, getting there was the real adventure. 
We thought we were taking a tour boat, like something you’d see at Lake of the Ozarks.  Instead, we ended up with two aging wooden longboats, and we were in them a couple of hours. Finally, the pilots guided the boats carefully toward the dock, deftly moving us into place.  Some of us were seasick; some of us were aching; all of us were drenched.  Then, onto the dock stepped a young man who pulled the boats in, tied off the line, and reached out his long, strong arm to help us up.  We each stumbled out of the boat and up onto the dock, deeply grateful for solid footing and a helping hand.
All that may seem unrelated to the state of St. Andrew’s parish as we begin another year together.  But remember the Gospel reading we just heard, one of two versions of Jesus calling our patron saint; and his brother, Peter; and their colleagues James and John.  Jesus calls Andrew and Peter as they’re out in their boat, “for they were fishermen” (Mark 1:16).  He says to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” – certainly the appropriate way to phrase it, even if it does destroy the poetry of the King James, which made these fishermen “become fishers of men.” 
So now, you’re expecting a sermon about fishing.  I imagine you’ve heard that sermon before, and I know I’ve preached that sermon before.  But you know, the metaphor of Jesus calling us to evangelistic fishing has always felt a little creepy to me.  I mean, what does a fisherman do with the fish he catches?  He sells them, or eats them, or hangs them on a wall.  None of those actions seems quite right for a church as it fishes for new members.  I don’t think we’re supposed to be about profiting from people, or eating them up, or patting ourselves on the back for having caught them.  Too often, of course, we err that way, seeing people as resources to build up the church.  It’s actually just the opposite:  A church is a resource to build up people. 
And that’s what Jesus is doing in this reading, I think.  He isn’t building an institution.  He’s noticing Andrew and Peter and James and John, and he’s inviting them into deeper relationship with God and each other than they’ve ever known before.  He’s reaching out to take their hands and pull them out of the boat and onto dry land.
So, as we consider the state of our parish, I hope you’ll hold onto this image of how Jesus calls us to fish for people.  It turns fishing upside down – not for the benefit of the fisherman but for the benefit of the fish.
What’s the state of our parish?  Let me share a few observations that really are thank-yous – thank-yous for your immense generosity.  In the past decade or so, you have renewed the physical infrastructure of our church building with not one, not even two, but three capital campaigns – though the last two weren’t exactly planned.  First, you gave $1.6 million toward the Rebuild, Restore, Renew effort that replaced the slate roof on the nave, replaced part of our HVAC system, and updated spaces around the church.  Then, in the past two years – when we had to replace the rest of the HVAC system and respond to a series of rains that turned the church into a rainforest – you gave another $506,000 in total, far surpassing the amounts we needed to obtain two matching gifts.  In addition, parishioners Charlie and Mary Kay Horner gifted us with beautiful new restrooms right next to the nave.  Our Junior Warden and King of the Rainforest Morgan Olander will give you more detail during the annual meeting, but I want to say this: Thank you for your overwhelming generosity.  All told, you’ve given $2.2 million in the past decade for work on this side of the street to make our capacity for ministry simply excellent.
And then, on top of that, there’s Gather & Grow, our capital ministry campaign begun in 2015.  Since this summer, we’ve seen the icon of this effort, the new HJ’s youth and community center, rising from a giant hole across the street.  In addition to housing our growing youth and Scout ministry, HJ’s will host group meetings, classes, concerts and exhibits, community events, and private parties – as well as being a place of welcome for people on the Trolley Trail.  In fact, even before the building is open, we’re offering classes on personal finance and the spirituality of money, as well as the first of what I hope will be several offerings on communication skills for couples.  We’re also having a book drive in Lent to link with the mayor’s early-childhood-literacy initiative and hosting community forums with the superintendent of schools.  The new HJ’s, and improvements to the Wornall Road entrance to the church, are budgeted to cost $3.6 million, and that work is on budget.  Because of your tremendous generosity, and the support of the William T. Kemper Foundation, pledges and gifts toward Gather & Grow now stand at $4 million – leaving about $400,000 to support ministry and operations in the new facility. 
All that generosity is making St. Andrew’s truly an inviting place for this family to do its work: gathering, worshiping God, loving one another, and blessing the world.  We’re seeing progress there, too.  At a time when half of Episcopal congregations are declining in membership and attendance,1 we can report increases in both over the past year, in part because of gifts that enable us to livestream worship on our website every week.  We’re also seeing more participation in youth activities and adult learning opportunities.  You may not know there are more than a dozen different ongoing classes and groups here to help adults grow in their faith.  We’re also making a difference in the world, giving more than $160,000 to outreach ministries last year and serving people in need in downtown, in midtown, at local schools, and at a school in Haiti that’s doubled in size in the past couple of years.  Through time, talent, and treasure, you are living into our family’s mission: to proclaim the grace of Jesus Christ, empower people for ministry, and serve people within and beyond our church.
All that is wonderful.  And now – ironically, maybe counter-intuitively – now is the time to think smaller.  By that, I don’t mean scaling back anything.  In fact, God is calling us to reach many more people than we’ve been blessed to reach this year.  God wants to see St. Andrew’s live into its potential as a force for revealing the Kingdom, transforming lives, and changing the world.  But the key to doing that is to think smaller.  The end of the book I wrote a couple of years ago puts it like this:  People are the new program.  People are the new program.  That doesn’t mean churches don’t need programs.  It means we need to focus our energy on people first.  And that’s true both in our work to reach folks who aren’t yet part of a church family and in our life together here. 
You know, the experts talk about the best practice for newcomer ministry being a model of “invite, welcome, and connect.”  It’s not enough to see ourselves as a church where everyone’s welcome.  That’s certainly true, but it’s the rough equivalent to unlocking the doors – a good start, but hardly enough.  Instead, congregations have to keep improving how they invite people, welcome them once they come, and connect them with the life of the congregation.  All that’s true.  And I’d like to make two points about it.
First, that pattern of inviting, welcoming, and connecting applies not just to the people out there but to the people in here, too.  The Vestry and other ministry leaders have been working hard to sharpen our focus on engaging and involving members of this church family more deeply.  We’ve expanded “stewardship” beyond a pledge campaign, rejuvenated the SweeneyCare calling ministry, grown lay pastoral care, asked you to sign in on Sunday mornings, and heard your voice through the parish survey.  We have 1,688 members on the rolls, as of Friday; and our average Sunday attendance is 325.  That’s a pretty common proportion across the Episcopal Church – attendance from about 20 percent of the membership.  It’s the 80/20 rule, at church as in the rest of life.  But you know, we can do better.  We are St. Andrew’s, and we can do better.  We need to keep being more intentional about inviting, welcoming, and connecting with members of the family we don’t see as often as we’d like.
Second, this work of inviting, welcoming, and connecting applies not just to ordained people and staff.  It’s the call of every spiritual descendent of St. Andrew in this place.  “Come,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fish for people.”  It’s your strong arm and your welcoming hand that reaches out to pull people up from their boats and join us here on the dock, where the waters aren’t quite so troubled.  A few hands are not enough to reach out and connect with the people Jesus wants us to bring along.  When Jesus called disciples to follow him, he didn’t say, “I will make clergy fish for people,” or “I will make Vestry members fish for people,” or “I will make staff members fish for people.”  He said, “I will make you fish for people” – each one of us, in whatever way we’re involved. 
If you come on Sunday mornings, invite someone else to come next Sunday morning.  If you’re part of a book study, invite someone else to share in the blessing of your book study.  If you’re part of an outreach ministry, invite someone else to serve Christ in the least of his brothers and sisters.  If you’re part of a group that helps lead worship, or bakes bread, or cleans up the garden, or oversees building repairs, or whatever – whatever you’re part of, I want to ask you to see your role in it growing just a bit this year.  I would like us all to expand the expectations for every role of ministry to include inviting, or welcoming, or connecting someone else into it – not just doing our own work but bringing new hands on board.  I believe that would be the single most important thing this church family could do this year, the single most valuable commitment we could make – to understand that we are each called to bring someone to the table.
You know, Jesus isn’t looking for us just to get the work done at church, and contribute our unique talents, and pay the bills – as important as all of that is.  Jesus is looking for us to reach out from this safe and secure dock at the edge of troubled waters, and extend our hands to the people trying to navigate life in their own small boats, and pull those people in.  After all, Jesus’ first call to his first followers wasn’t to serve on the synagogue’s building committee.  His first call to his first followers was to fish for other people – not because Jesus needs them to build an institution but because they need him to shape their hearts and souls.  People first – those outside and those inside.  People first – those clearly in need and those who hold their own needs close.  People first – because everyone needs a hand to get out of the small, rickety boat we’re trying to pilot on our own and stand on solid ground instead.

1.       Episcopal Church Domestic Fast Facts: 2016.  Available at: https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/19543.  Accessed Jan. 19, 2018.

My Neighbors Across the Sea – A Reflection on President Trump’s Comments on Haiti and Africa

I’m not in the habit of reacting to things that come out of our political leaders’ mouths. If I were, there would be plenty of content, from both sides of the aisle, to fill a weekly column. But our president’s comments about Haiti, as well as other nations, go beyond the boundaries of Shakespeare’s observation, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” We all say things we’d like to un-say. But the president’s consigning of African nations to the category of “s---hole countries” and questioning why the U.S. would want immigrants from Haiti – it begs for the light of the Good News to shine upon it.
Of course, the language is appalling, but that’s not what I think Jesus mourns about these comments. It’s the disconnect, thousands of miles wide, between the president’s observations and Christian theology and practice. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to reconcile the president’s words with Jesus’ core teachings: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). “Just as you did it to [or said it about] one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
The president’s comments give us the opportunity to live as the contrast presence we are, as followers of Jesus Christ. As you know, St. Andrew’s has a partnership of more than 25 years with St. Augustin’s Episcopal Church and School in Maniche, Haiti. Right now, in fact, parishioner Kathy Shaffer is overcoming a broken wrist to travel there to develop our relationship with our new partner priest, Pere Abiade Lozama. Earlier this year, we said farewell (a tearful farewell, for some of us) to Pere Colbert Estil, our partner priest for 12 years. The point is this: For us at St. Andrew’s, Haiti is not an abstraction of poverty, difference, and secondary status. For us, Haiti is people – children of God who embody precisely the same gifts and failings as we do. On my several trips to Haiti in the past 12 years, I have met people with an astonishing work ethic, far stronger than mine. I have met people with an entrepreneurial drive to rival that of Ewing Kauffman or Steve Jobs. I have met people, lay and ordained, who pour out their hearts and souls to teach the hundreds of children God gives them to serve. I would love the opportunity to take the president there and introduce him to the reality that is Haiti. Because the nation of Haiti includes my partners and friends.
The timing of the president’s comments only highlights the tragedy of the gap between his words and the Good News (not to mention our nation’s ideals). On Monday, our country will honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., our national prophet. Dr. King once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” That is a human truth, but it’s particularly a Christian truth. We are bound together, like it or not. As Jesus prayed to his Father, “The glory that you have given me, I have given [my followers], so that they may be one as we are one – I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one…” (John 17:22-23). We are bound to our neighbors, across town and across the sea.
I hope you’ll come this Sunday as we baptize two new children of God and reaffirm our Baptismal Covenant, which ends with these words: “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” Sometimes showing up and affirming Jesus’ Good News is not simply an act of faith but an act of resistance – resistance to the darkness that God’s Light overcomes.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Offer the Gift You Need to Lose

Sermon for Jan. 7, Celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14; Matthew 2:1-12

Who were those giant puppets who just brought their gifts to the baby King and now are making their way back home again?  In the Gospel reading this morning, they’re called “wise men” or magi in Greek – court officials who studied astrology and practiced magic.  To our ears, that probably puts them right up there with palm readers in terms of their credibility, but that’s not fair.  Astrology and what we would call “magic” were the science of their day, so these magi were intellectuals and members of the court.  Now, over the centuries, Christian tradition conflated their royal role with Biblical writings anticipating foreign kings coming to honor Israel’s monarch and Israel’s God, so these royal visitors came to be described as kings themselves.  It’s a powerful image – a would-be king recognizing the true King, worldly power humbling itself before the humble throne of God.  Whether our visitors this morning were kings or court officials, the same message comes through loud and clear: “All kings shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service,” as we prayed in this morning’s psalm (72:11 BCP).
And what about those gifts they brought?  Now we come to a detail the Gospel writer names quite specifically and whose meaning matters, I think.  It certainly mattered to the writer of the carol “We Three Kings”; three of the verses of that song explain what the gifts mean.  First, there’s gold, maybe the ultimate symbol of kingship and the wealth that goes with it.  Even today, when people go to England and visit the Tower of London, what do they stand in line to see?  The crown jewels, regal wealth on display.  Second, there’s frankincense, like the incense we’re offering in our worship this morning.  The ancient smoke wafts to heaven with the prayers of God’s people, honoring the deity who alone has the power to “form light and create darkness, [to] make weal and create woe,” as the prophet Isaiah said (45:7).  And third, there’s myrrh, the gift furthest from our experience.  The carol tells us that myrrh is about being “sealed in the stone-cold tomb,” and indeed it was among the preparations used with royal mummies, an extremely expensive resin for anointing and embalming bodies for burial.  So those very specific gifts carry great weight:  Gold symbolizing royal wealth, frankincense symbolizing divine power, and myrrh symbolizing our best human attempts to stave off the power of death.
 Here’s another detail in today’s Gospel story that matters, at least to me: the last line.  It’s the very best kind of last line, one that gives the story a satisfying ending while it turns the page to the next chapter.  So, the magi have made their way from a foreign land, and they’ve gone to see the earthly king, Herod.  They assume he’ll be rejoicing over the birth of a male successor and that he’ll help them find the baby.  Herod, of course, is more like Tony Soprano than King David, and he’s looking out solely for his own interests.  So Herod enlists the magi as his unknown agents, asking them to report back once they find this baby who might show Herod to be the fraud he is.  And the magi head off, following the star to Bethlehem and entering the most unlikely royal palace ever: a peasant’s shack, the kind of house we might visit on a mission trip to Haiti.  But the magi know they’ve found the real deal.  Their hearts know the truth that appearance denies.  These kings or court officials kneel down before this peasant baby and pay him homage.  And they open up their treasure chests to give him gifts fit for a King: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Then comes the great ending: The God who’s led them all this way spoils Herod’s ugly plans and warns the magi to head home “by another road” (Matthew 2:12).  They get on their camels and ride off into the sunset, the stage set for their next chapter.
Unfortunately, Scripture doesn’t give us that next chapter.  It’s left for us to write in our imaginations and in our own lives.  First, some imagination.  What do you suppose happened to these three kings or court officials?  Well, maybe nothing; maybe they just played their parts in Jesus’ story and went back to their regular lives.  But what if they couldn’t get their experience out of their heads?  What if the ugliness they found in Herod and the humility they found in the baby King changed their hearts?  Maybe, as they went about their work in the royal court, they came to see their own world with a different perspective.  Maybe, when a poor suppliant would come to the court, the last resort for an oppressed person seeking justice, maybe the king would listen a little more deeply and put the poor person’s interest first.  Maybe, when they found themselves tempted to build up their own power and wealth, maybe they heard a small voice reminding them of the King who put the well-being of his people ahead of his own life.  Maybe, when they began taking themselves too seriously and letting the burden of their responsibility weigh upon them so heavily it would begin to crush their hearts, maybe they heard a small voice assuring them they actually weren’t the one in charge after all.  Maybe, when they began to grow older and saw that the road ahead was so much shorter then the road they’d traveled, maybe they heard a small voice comforting them with the possibility that this life might not be all there is.
Here’s what I’m thinking.  These kings or court officials or whomever they were – they might be a model for us.  I doubt any of us will be driving camels across the desert anytime soon or holding audiences with a sociopathic puppet ruler who’s willing to kill babies to advance his career.  But think about what the magi do in this story.  They track the movement of the stars, and travel all that distance, and put themselves at risk – all for what?  To bring gifts and pay homage to “the child who has been born king” (Matthew 2:2). 
That’s still our call, too, of course.  But we often get tripped up by thinking that what we have to bring doesn’t count.  What have I got to offer Jesus, God’s anointed King?  Well, strangely enough, maybe you have the same gifts that those magi brought 2,000 years ago. 
Gold is the symbol of wealth, something with which we’re all blessed, to different degrees.  Wealth can build capacity and drive innovation and serve people and change lives.  But wealth can also be a heavy idol hanging around our necks, dragging us down and keeping us from focusing on much of anything else.  Then there’s frankincense, the symbol of divine power.  We are blessed by God to share in this power, made in God’s image and likeness to be co-creators of our lives and our world.  But that power can also delude us into imagining that it’s ours instead of God’s and that, like Herod, we can wield it for our own advantage.  And then there’s myrrh, the embalming resin, the symbol of our mortality.  From ancient times onward, we’ve done all we could to preserve youth and stave off the natural changes of growing older.  But our fear of death can also keep us from being fully present in the place in life where God has put us, spurring us into mid-life crises or deceiving us into extending life at all costs.
I’d like to encourage you to bring these gifts to the baby King – your gold and frankincense and myrrh, your wealth and your power and your fear of mortality.  The holy irony is that these same gifts that honor the truth of Jesus’ lordship over us are also some of the greatest burdens we carry.  Jesus does want us to bring them as a reminder that God is God, and we are not; but Jesus also wants us to bring those gifts to him because he wants nothing more than to shoulder our weightiest burdens for us.  “Come to me,” he says, “all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls,” he says.  “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
What do you have to offer the baby King?  The blessings and curses of wealth, and power, and mortality.  Jesus would like nothing more than for you to come to him, and lay down those burdens you carry, and let God take you home by another way.