Sunday, May 20, 2018

The Jesus Movement Crashes the Royal Wedding

Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-11
May 20, 2018

There aren’t many times when literally millions of people get up stupidly early in the morning to watch a church service.  But yesterday was one of them – the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  Americans love the British royals.  It’s part fairy tale, part soap opera, and part the special relationship between Britain and the U.S.  But for us, as Episcopalians, there’s an even deeper connection, of course.  We’re the American expression of the Church of England, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion – so, in a real sense, it’s our church service that millions of people got up stupidly early to watch.
But in this royal wedding, the connection didn’t stop there.  Not only did we witness a marriage very much like one that happened at this altar a few hours later.  We also heard our Episcopal presiding bishop preach to the royal couple – and to the world.  Michael Curry was a surprise choice as the preacher.  I don’t think an American has ever been invited to preach at a royal worship event.  But if you’ve heard Michael Curry preach, you know why he was chosen: He pretty much puts every other Anglican preacher to shame.
Perhaps coincidentally – or perhaps not – all this happened on the eve of Pentecost.  This is when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ followers, letting them speak in different languages and empowering them to be apostles, which means those sent to bring Jesus’ good news to people who don’t know it.  If you’ve been a Christian a while, you may have heard Pentecost described as the birthday of the Church, and that’s true.  Because Jesus’ followers received the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit, they were able to turn a story about a resurrected Jewish leader into a global movement.
So, listening to Michael Curry preach at the royal wedding, one might have forgiven him for taking a moment to mention his Episcopal Church, on the eve of the birthday of the whole Church.  How many opportunities does he get to talk directly to millions of Americans who have never even heard of us?  It was a public-relations dream come true.
But, if you’ve heard our presiding bishop preach – say, when he was here in Kansas City last year – you know he has a very specific way of talking about this denomination of ours.  Michael Curry almost never talks about “The Episcopal Church,” the institution he leads.  Michael Curry talks about a movement – the Jesus Movement.  And he calls this entity he leads “the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement.” 
So, there he was, at the center of the institutional Anglican Church.  He was in the royal chapel at Windsor Castle, for God’s sake – at the wedding of a prince, sharing the liturgical duties with the archbishop of Canterbury, representing the American expression of the worldwide Anglican Communion.  His role as presiding bishop doesn’t get much more institutional than that.
But because words matter, Michael Curry never even mentioned The Episcopal Church in this homily that reached millions of Americans.  Instead, he talked about the Jesus Movement.  He said, “Jesus began the most revolutionary movement in all of human history.  A movement grounded in the unconditional love of God for the world, and a movement mandating people to live that love.  And in so doing, to change not only their lives but the life of the world itself.”1  That’s the Jesus Movement.
So, what difference does that make for us, here at St. Andrew’s?  And what difference does it make for you? 
First, let me ask: How many of you are inspired by the idea of being part of an institution?  That’s what I thought.  Oh, boy – bureaucracies, and entrenched cultures, and personal fiefdoms – and paperwork!  Sign me up. 
I think Jesus feels the same way.  That’s why he never said anything about creating an institutional church.  In the Gospels, Jesus mentions the word we translate as “church” a grand total of three times, so it’s not exactly a priority.  And even more important, the word he uses actually doesn’t mean what we hear in the English word “church.”  In Greek, the word is ecclesia, which means an assembly, a gathered community.  Here at St. Andrew’s, we often refer to the same thing as a “family.”  The church Jesus has in mind, and the kind of churches the apostles went out and gathered – they were not institutions with Vestries and committees and budgets … or buildings.  They were communities, households of the family of God.  They were nimble and responsive to the problems and needs and passions and dreams of the places where they rose up.  They were outposts of the Jesus Movement in their times and places.  They spoke and lived the good news of life and liberation and love for the people around them.  Now that’s something I’d like to be part of.
How about you?  What difference does any of this make for you?  Well, as we celebrate Pentecost, I would say what happened to those followers of Jesus in the upper room 2,000 years ago matters deeply for you – including the seven new members of the family we’re about to baptize today.  The power of the Holy Spirit that God poured out on the disciples then is the same power of the Holy Spirit that God pours out on you. 
At every baptism, we ask God to bless and inspire those who are coming into the family – and we trust that God hears us and gives us what we ask in Christ’s name:  delivering us from the way of sin and death, filling us with God’s holy and life-giving Spirit, loving others in the power of that Spirit, sending us into the world in witness to God’s love, and bringing us into the fullness of God’s peace and glory (Book of Common Prayer 305-306).  That’s our birthright as God’s children.  When we come through the waters of baptism, dying to sin and rising again in the power of resurrection, the Holy Spirit fills us with everything we’ll need to be part of this Jesus Movement – and change the world. 
Just as all politics is local, so is all transformation.  We’ve received the gifts of the Holy Spirit to bring the kingdom to life in this time and place that God has given us.  You hold that power.  You have everything you need to heal and bless and renew your corner of God’s kingdom.  For you’ve been baptized into the death and life of Jesus Christ.  You’ve joined the family of God.  And you’ve been sent out as a witness of these things.
As the presiding bishop said at the royal wedding yesterday, so he says to you:  “Love is the way” – unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love.  And it’s not just God’s way but our way of life.  “When love is the way,” Michael Curry said, “people treat each other as if they actually were family.”  And when we re-discover that fire of love – as the apostles did on the first Pentecost – when we re-discover the fire of love, Michael Curry said, “we will make of this old world a new world.”1  Sign me up.  Now.
Though the service at Windsor Castle yesterday was beautiful, and though the service here today is beautiful, too, the service of God’s people actually begins the moment we walk out those red doors.  Today is not the birthday of an institution but the spark of a movement.  We know what that movement was – a network of communities that spread from Palestine to the ends of the earth.  But even more important is what that movement is:  A movement of the Spirit in your own heart.  A movement spreading the balm of Gilead to make this old world a new world.  A movement empowering you to be the mouth and hands and feet and heart of Jesus to bless God’s people – today.

1. Associated Press.  “Love and fire: Text of Michael Curry’s royal wedding address.” Available at:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/celebrities/love-and-fire-text-of-michael-currys-royal-wedding-address/2018/05/19/67acf904-5b80-11e8-9889-07bcc1327f4b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.df7b2f29f415.  Accessed May 19, 2018.

Parenthood: Life Lived Outward

Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension (transferred) and Mother's Day
Acts 1:1-12; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
May 13, 2018


I think it’s a bit awkward preaching Mother’s Day sermons because, very quickly, high praise for mothers can slip into implicit and unintended contrasts with fathers.  I have to tell you – and this is something of an article of faith for me – I believe both men and women are capable of equal depths of love, and I don’t believe it’s true that a mother is necessarily a better parent than a father.  But that being said, we do often find truth in popular expressions; and when you’re looking for a way to describe someone who loves with fierce loyalty and protection, what do you call that person?  Is it “papa bear”?  Nope, it’s “mama bear.”  So, I’ll have to grant you that, generally speaking, moms deserve that reputation of being the unswerving, undying champions of their children.  And if you want to test that hypothesis, just insult a kid in her mother’s presence … but wait until I’m out of the room.
Being a parent, and especially being a mother – how does that change you?  I remember a moment of parental transition for Ann and me, one of those times from which you can never quite go back.  Ann was in relatively early labor with Kathryn.  And coming from the next delivery suite, we heard screaming – not the mom but the newborn baby.  The fact that we could hear that tiny person’s voice so clearly through the wall made me wonder just how loud it must have been inside their room.  I looked at Ann and said something intended to be romantic and reassuring about how we’d have one of those little voices with us before too long.  But the look on her face made me think she was imagining the sleepless nights to come.  Like many of you, we soon found out out just how much our lives would change with a baby and just how much the experience of parenting would change us.  For parents, everyone’s path is different as we stumble blindly into the unknown, but this much every parent learns: The practice of love is the practice of sacrifice.  And if you take parenthood seriously, that sacrifice changes you.  You don’t just make sacrifices for your children.  Your life becomes sacrifice.  Parenthood changes your direction.  Parenthood makes you live outward.
So today, as we celebrate the love of those who’ve been mothers to us, the liturgical calendar deals the preacher a wild card among the flush of hearts.  Today, we’re also celebrating the feast of the Ascension, which was last Thursday, 40 days after Easter.  Ascension reminds us of what we would politely call a mystery but what people in other faith traditions would call a scandal: We claim that the God who became human in Jesus of Nazareth also returned, as the human Jesus, back into the divine relationship of the Trinity.  Having returned into the fullness of heavenly glory, God the Son now rules all creation, what we call heaven and what we call earth, awaiting the day when Jesus returns at last, and heaven and earth are reunited into God’s new creation.  Like I said, this claim is pretty scandalous, compared with other religions: We don’t say that a spiritual God inhabited a human body and left it behind.  We say that the God we call Trinity, who exists as relationship, came to dwell as a human and took that humanity back into divinity. 
And though it may sound radical – even crazy – to say it, I believe that action changed God, in the same way learning changes us.  God chose to embrace the love of sacrifice – taking on a lesser form, living as an inferior being, experiencing our brokenness, and dying our death, all in order to heal that brokenness, and overcome sin and death, and bring the experience of being human into God’s own life.  That crazy choice to shed divine perfection helped God know even better the creatures God created and redeemed and still sustains. 
And in the meantime, as we await Jesus’ return, God’s love for us humans only grows.  Why?  Because the Trinity itself now knows what it’s really like to be a person.  It’s like being a parent, in a sense.  If you’re a parent, it’s one thing to be aware that you love your child as you watch him playing at a distance, across the room.  It’s something else to get down on the floor and wrestle with him.  And it’s something even more to hold him close when he cries.  And it’s something even more to give up things that you want, to give parts of your life away, so you can give your child loving presence he wouldn’t have had otherwise.  That’s life that becomes a sacrifice.  That’s parenthood – life lived outward.
There’s a theological catch phrase that might help make sense of this.  Centuries ago, Gregory of Nazianzus was writing about the Incarnation, the doctrine that Christ brought the fullness of humanity and divinity into one.  Gregory wrote, “What is not assumed is not healed.”  What that means is that any part of human experience Jesus didn’t take on, by definition, wasn’t redeemed – so he must have taken it all on in order to heal us completely.  Well, by the same token, I think it’s true that what is assumed – what is taken on – also changes the one who enters into someone else’s experience.  Sacrifice molds the heart and grows its capacity for love – even God’s heart.
Mothering is like that, I think.  We enter into the experience of another who has literally nothing to offer in return.  There is no payoff for the exhausted mom who gets up to nurse a screaming baby in the middle of the night.  We can romanticize it all we want, but at 3 a.m., it just stinks.  It’s just sacrifice.  So is cleaning up the bed after another bout of stomach flu.  So is holding the little boy who’s crying because the kids at school pick on him.  So is holding the daughter who’s crying because her boyfriend treats her like dirt.  So is lying in bed and crying to yourself because you fear the grown kid’s depression will get the better of him.  It’s all sacrifice – and that is love, in the flesh.
That sacrifice changes us forever, growing the capacity of our hearts.  If you’ve mothered someone, you probably get that.  But what we may forget, and what the Ascension might help us remember, is that God experienced something similar – and that God’s love is even deeper, even fuller, even more all-encompassing because of that human experience.  Oddly enough, this combination of Ascension and Mother’s Day is not just a time to remember that Jesus rules in heavenly glory, nor just a time to remember your mother’s love.  It’s a time to remember something fundamental about yourself – your first and foremost identity, regardless of whatever you may have become.  And here it is: You are God’s beloved child. 
Now, you may have heard people say that so often that it’s lost its meaning.  Or maybe you hear it only as a metaphor, a poetic turn of phrase.  But I want to push on this just a little bit.  I want you to try on the idea that this isn’t just a nice sentiment but an objective reality – in fact, that it’s the fundamental reality of your life, the starting point for everything else that matters.  You are God’s beloved child.  You matter as much to the creator of the universe as a baby matters to the mother who brought it into the world.  And that’s true not despite the sacrifice God made for us, becoming human and dying on the Cross, but because of it – because the creator of the world experienced the brokenness of life as we live it, letting that direct experience of humanity grow God’s heart. 
There may be times when you fear that no one understands you.  There may be times when you fear that you have no one to help carry your burdens.  There may be times when you fear that, at the end of the day, you’re on your own.  I think that’s our deepest fear.  And you know what?  That’s precisely why God came to experience life as we know it: So that what we have been through, God has been through.  Every time you hurt, every time you grieve, the sovereign Lord who shared your life also hurts and grieves.  Just as a mother feels her child’s pain, so does God.  Just as a mother’s heart grows watching her child’s suffering steps, so does God’s.  So, the promise of the Ascension is this: Like the best mother you could ever imagine, God will never forget you.  And you need never walk alone.