Not a New Normal but a Heavenly Next

State-of-the-Parish Address
Mark 1:14-20
January 24, 2021

Welcome to an Annual Meeting Sunday like never before.  All through this year’s Annual Report, one ministry after another notes the strangeness, challenges, or difficulties of 2020.  And they’re right.  To me, 2020 seems like the experience of your first heartbreak: We all made it through, and we may be stronger for it; but few of us would choose to go through it again.

I think many of us wish we could rewind the clock and go back to the time before last February, when things were “normal.”  I’ve heard that longing from many of you who are aching to get together with family and friends, to come back to worship in person, to have a parish party … to say nothing of going to see a movie or taking a trip.  We can’t wait for things to get back to “normal.”

By the same token, we’ve heard countless people tell us to get ready for the “new normal” – a phrase many of us will be happy if we never hear again.  Of course, the problem is that we aren’t “there” yet – and once we are “there,” at the new normal, the goalposts will probably keep moving.  That new normal will be out of date a few months later – or less.

Through 2020 at St. Andrew’s, we did the best we could to be present and responsive to the “normal now,” whatever that was in a given moment.  The Annual Report gives us great examples of people’s creativity and heart as they looked around and said, “A pandemic isn’t going to shut down our worship.  A pandemic isn’t going to cut us off from each other.  A pandemic isn’t going to keep us from loving and serving God and the people around us.”

I am overwhelmingly grateful for the resilience, inspiration, sacrifice, and love you’ve shown this year in ministry, in generosity, and simply in showing up.  As hard as it’s been, 2020 has been one of those times St. Andrew’s will remember and say, “You know, God didn’t just bring us through that; God made us stronger.”

Well, part of growing stronger is living out this truth: We aren’t going back to what we knew as normal, and we shouldn’t be satisfied just coping with the “normal now.”  Instead, God is calling us to create the heavenly next. 

How?  A few years ago, I wrote a book called Beating the Boundaries. If you actually read it, you’re part of a very exclusive club, so feel good about that.  It was about nine congregations that were stepping beyond what had been normal for them, combining their inherited approach to being church with new expressions of ministry to the people and the world around them. 

In their own ways, each of those congregations was responding to the call Andrew and Peter heard in today’s Gospel reading: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” (Mark 1:17).  Andrew and Peter understood their work of fishing in a particular way.  They’d been fishing like that for years, thank you very much; and it had worked for them just fine.  But Jesus came by, in that pesky way he has of upending our conventional wisdom; and he said, “Yes, the fishing you’ve been doing is great.  And … let’s fish differently.”  Jesus was beating a boundary, and it changed Andrew’s and Peter’s lives – not to mention changing the world.

We need to apply this same kind of thinking to the question, “How will we be church after the pandemic?”  The beauty of the congregations I profiled in my book was that they never abandoned who they’d been; they just expressed their DNA in new ways for new times and contexts.  That’s our call now.  It’s time for us to move past responding to the pandemic and start beating the boundaries that separate us from the heavenly next that God wants us to find.

So, what boundaries shall we beat?  Well, there are five that rise to the top for me, priorities for this year that will help us express what’s always made us St. Andrew’s but in a world that will never be the same.

First, we need to beat the boundaries of worship in a post-pandemic world.  Though we wouldn’t have asked for it, we’ve had opportunity this year to learn a lot about making virtual worship meaningful and connective for people at home.  The fact that we had livestreaming capacity, and that we could work on improving it in 2020, meant worship was less of a pandemic boundary for us than it was for many congregations.  But still, we’ve got work to do to provide a worship experience in which people encounter Jesus fully in Word and Sacrament, whether they’re in a pew or on the couch.  For example, think about our worship in the summer and fall, before we had to suspend in-person services a second time.  If you were at home, you got to see visuals on the screen as part of our sermons, but you received Communion only spiritually.  If you were in the nave, you received Jesus’ Body in your hands, but you couldn’t see what people at home were seeing during the sermon.  We need to move toward making the worship experience as complete as we can, regardless of whether you’re sitting on your couch or in a pew.

Second, we need to beat the boundaries of parish life in a post-pandemic world.  In 2020, we learned that people can come together virtually for meaningful fun, fellowship, and learning. Of course, we’re all looking forward to the next Haiti Dinner or Trivia Night or Discovery class where we can actually sit next to someone and enjoy a conversation.  But even once we can come back together, we’ll still need to share parish life with people who can’t or don’t want to return to it in person.  With activities like coffee hour, Sunday school, youth gatherings, newcomer classes, and other learning opportunities, we’ll have to figure out how to bring people together so that physical separation doesn’t stop fellowship. With both worship and parish life, we’ll have to learn how to inhabit a new reality, what a market-research firm calls “phygital reality” – a hybrid of the physical and digital worlds.¹

Third, we need to beat the boundaries of pastoral care.  2020 has reminded us how deeply we need connection with God and each other.  It mattered that, twice last year, Vestry members, Parish Care volunteers, clergy, and staff called members just to check in.  It mattered that we brought Christmas Communion to homebound members’ front doors.  It mattered that the Order of St. Luke was praying for people every week.  But 2020 showed us that we need to continue building our capacity to provide the care you need.  We still have work to do to beat the boundary of our expectation that pastoral care is something only “holy” people with clerical collars do.  And we need to beat the boundary that regular checking-in by trained parishioners might seem just too hard for us to pull off.  It can’t be.  So, in 2021, we’ll keep at it: equipping more people to check in and show God’s love, doing a better job of systematizing contacts with you, and continuing to improve our use of data to care for you.

Fourth, we need to beat the boundaries of our church walls.  Before the pandemic, we’d been making solid progress with this.  The church and HJ’s Youth and Community Center were busy nearly all the time, both with St. Andrew’s people and folks from our neighborhoods.  Some of that community use we sponsored as part of our mission, and some of it helped with our bottom line.  We’d realistically planned that event revenue at HJ’s would cover the cost of the building’s operation in 2020 … until March came.  We’d also planned to launch a new worship experience at HJ’s called Trailside, a less-formal service with more accessible music to tap into the spiritual longing of our Brookside and Waldo neighbors we aren’t reaching otherwise.  Now, we have to get Trailside launched this year, once it’s safe and reasonable to have a service in the friendly confines of HJ’s.  I hope that can happen at back-to-school time.  In the ways we offer worship and engage with people around us, we need to help them see that the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement offers grace and hope, even if they aren’t so interested in reading from the Prayer Book among stained-glass windows.

Finally, we need to beat the boundaries of difference and learn to love people who aren’t like us.  COVID certainly wasn’t the only challenge our country faced in 2020.  Protests in our streets and a divided election have shown clearly how much we struggle to listen to each other and to hear godly intent in people with whom we differ.  In 2020, we began trying to listen to our neighbors of color.  We prayed with neighbors on Troost.  We gathered folks from St. Andrew’s and folks from St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church on the east side to experience art together and talk about what they saw.  We had plans for more gatherings like that, until COVID got in the way.  Once the pandemic allows, we’ll start that up again, as well as offering opportunities for book and film discussions here.  At the same time, we learned how differently people in our own parish view the world and how hard it can be for us to talk about our passions, hopes, and dreams for ourselves and our nation.  And, with our baptismal promises to love all people, respect all people’s dignity, and strive for justice and peace, we heard calls from parishioners for the church to proclaim more publicly what we stand for as Episcopalians.  All these situations point to the reality that, whoever we are, we need to grow in loving our neighbors who aren’t like us.  So, we’ll try to understand each other better by beating the boundaries of race and worldview, learning how to hear each other’s passions, hopes, and dreams for God’s world.

Clearly, we’ve got our work cut out for us.  But you know, we serve a Savior who’s already beat the ultimate boundary.  It was the boundary of death, with three crosses as its fenceposts and a tomb as its guardhouse.  On Good Friday afternoon, it looked like death had won.  On Holy Saturday, experience showed that sin held even the best of us bound.  But then came Easter morning, and the ultimate boundary was beat. 

Jesus has already done the hard work of resurrection for us.  All he’s asking us to do is this: to look at fishing differently and then hit the road, loving one another and the people we meet along the way.  We can do that.  What we can’t do is say that journey is too hard.  What we can’t do is say we’ve never fished like that before.  Instead, we’ve got to follow Jesus and beat our boundaries: the boundaries of worship, the boundaries of parish life, the boundaries of pastoral care, the boundaries of our church walls, and the boundaries of our differences.  If we’re faithful in that, I believe Jesus will be there helping us clear the path, leading us not simply to endure a new normal but to move down the road toward the heavenly next.

1.      “Top 10 Global Consumer Trends 2021.” Euromonitor International. January 2021. Available at: https://www.euromonitor.com/top-10-global-consumer-trends-2021/report. Accessed Jan. 20, 2021.

Hitting Bottom

Sermon for Sunday, Jan. 10, 2021

Mark 1:4-11

Last Monday, I went to see my mother in Jefferson City.  She’s in a senior living community there, just down the street from the state capitol building.  Many of you know I used to work in Jefferson City; I was speech writer and deputy press secretary for Gov. John Ashcroft in the late 1980s.  I worked in the capitol, in an office the size of a closet.  It may have been small, but it sure had a view, looking out over the Missouri River.  The view wasn’t just beautiful; it was inspiring, as was the view inside the building.  Every day, I got to see the stunning architecture and paintings and stained glass in that shrine of democracy.  Every day, I also walked by an inscription in the rotunda, a verse from the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18).  And every day, I saw the Great Seal of the State of Missouri, which of course is everywhere in that building, even on the doorknobs.  On that seal is the state motto: “Salus populi suprema lex esto”; let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.  It was an inspiring place to serve.  So, on Monday, after I saw my mother, I took a few minutes to go to the capitol, and park there in the circle drive, and look up to my old office window. 

All kinds of memories came back.  I remembered late nights at the end of the legislative session and the pasta feast from Rigazzi’s in St. Louis, served in the House Lounge among the Thomas Hart Benton murals.  I remembered friends I worked with, people kind enough not to dismiss me for how young I was and how little I knew.  I remembered working hard to dig up positive stories and deflect negative ones.  I remembered a meeting about the governor’s reelection campaign in which a brilliant senior staff member talked about the possibility that our opponent, Betty Hearnes, might capitalize on one particularly negative story about the governor, and the staffer vowed that we’d “tear her to shreds” if she did.  It was one of many less-than-holy moments of working in that office, and it helped me discern that doing press and speeches for a political leader probably wasn’t my calling.  I remembered looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, “I can’t go on like this.”  But thankfully, as I sat in the car last Monday and looked up at my old office window, what stayed with me was the beauty and the aspiration that Missouri’s stunning capitol building embodies.

I can’t imagine what it was like then, on Wednesday, for the staffers in our nation’s capitol in Washington as they looked out their windows and saw a mob tearing down the fences and climbing the walls.  I can’t imagine how they felt as they went out into the halls to see what was happening and heard glass shattering and breathed teargas.  There they were, watching the cathedral of democracy being desecrated and fearing for their lives.  They must have wondered, where are all the police we saw at the protests this summer?  How can it be that a mob has breached democracy’s cathedral?

At this point, we know the story of Wednesday, so I won’t retell it – other than to note that the mob didn’t win.  Violence didn’t win.  Our representatives and their staff did what they needed to do, risking themselves to ensure democracy won instead.  

Let me also say this.  I think there’s a connection between Wednesday’s events and today’s Gospel story, and here’s the connection I see: Sometimes, it’s good to hit bottom.  Sometimes, we need to hit bottom.  Sometimes, until we hit bottom, we can’t see our sin.

Now, you’re thinking, “Uh-oh.  Just how judgy is he going to get?”  Well, when I put Wednesday’s insurrection in the category of sin, let me be clear what I mean.  Sin is separation from God, turning away from God’s purposes and desires for us.  I believe God has purposes and desires in mind for each of us, and I believe God has purposes and desires in mind for our nation, too.  We say as much when we offer the collect “For the Nation” every Independence Day.  We ask God to “give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will” (BCP 258).  That’s absolutely an aspirational prayer.  We aspire to justice, and we aspire to forbearance.  But we struggle to reach our holy aspirations.  We fall short.  We fail, sometimes by what we do and sometimes by what we don’t do.  That’s sin.

But over the course of the past several years – certainly more than just four of them, I might add – we’ve been aspiring less and sinning more.  We’ve been forgetting what’s in God’s heart and mind for ourselves, our country, and our world.  Our sins have been of the most pernicious type: slow in their growth, hidden in plain sight.  We’ve allowed ourselves to think we don’t need people who aren’t like us.  If the insurrection at the capitol embodied nothing else, it embodied this lie: “Because I know I’m right, I don’t have to honor people I think are wrong.”  That represents our fundamental sin, our original sin: the sin of self-idolatry, the sin of placing ourselves ahead of God and ahead of God’s other children.

That’s the background not just for the events of last Wednesday but for our Gospel reading today.  The story’s spotlight shines on John the Baptist, but behind that is the reality John saw – a great need among the people to acknowledge their sin and choose to turn from it.  The reading doesn’t name specific sins, but it does indicate that the problem, like the Jordan River, ran deep and wide:  “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John], and were baptized by him…, confessing their sins” (Mark 1:5).  Jesus joins in with the people as they seek to get right with God – not because Jesus needed it but because he wanted to be in it with them.  And as he enters into this experience with the people he came to save, the fullness of God’s glory shines forth.  The heavens are torn open, and the Spirit descends on Jesus, and God’s voice proclaims, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased” (1:11). 

It’s no accident that the revelation of the Father’s great love for Jesus, and for each one of us, comes in the context of people turning from their sins.  When people recognize how they’ve missed the mark, how they’ve denied God’s purposes and desires for them, that’s when the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit come together to sanctify our longing to get right with God.  When we come to the river and confess our sins, God joins us there, wading into the water with us and empowering us to turn in a new direction.

So, here’s a question Scripture never answers: What led all those people to go down to the river for “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (1:4)?  Although each one had his or her own story, I’ll bet you most of the people in that crowd were going through the same thing.  Something had happened, and they’d hit bottom.  Many of us can point to a similar moment in our lives, a time when we looked ourselves in the mirror and said, “I can’t go on like this.”  That’s what leads us to the water’s edge, where God shows up to meet us.

I believe Wednesday’s insurrection was our national moment of hitting bottom.  Ugly strains of self-idolatry have been festering within us and among us for a long time now.  More and more, it’s become acceptable to turn sisters and brothers into others, puffing ourselves up by talking someone else down.  After a while, the power of evil takes that negativity and turns it into toxicity.  And eventually, some of us, at least, decide it’s OK to break the law and destroy property and threaten others … because, after all, I’m right, and they’re not.  We’ve been in that downward spiral for a while now, and finally the capitol was breached.  So, I would say we’ve hit bottom.  We’ve come to our national moment of looking in the mirror and saying, “We can’t go on like this.”

What can the Church do about that?  What’s Jesus’ call to us as we come to the river separated from God and one another?

Well, the Church is about healing and reconciliation.  The prayer book tells us the Church’s mission “is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” (BCP 855).  And the only way to do that is to start with ourselves and the people around us.

This Lent at St. Andrew’s, we’ll be offering an opportunity to get better at civil discourse.  The new Advocacy Discernment Committee has been talking about this over the past month, well before Wednesday’s insurrection, but we certainly see the need for it now.  Here in our congregation, we are blessed with a rich diversity in point of view on just about any topic you can name.  Our shorthand for this is “the Big Tent” – that just as the Episcopal tradition has prayed for all sorts and conditions of people, it holds in tension all sorts and conditions of perspectives.  What we haven’t done so well is to deal with that tension.  Here in Kansas City, we’re very good at “Midwest nice.”  That’s great, in that we don’t have to worry about people storming the church to replace the rector.  But it’s not so great in that we don’t know how to deal with our differences and divisions beyond politely ignoring them.  So, this Lent, as we take the opportunity to get right with God and each other, I hope you’ll consider wading in the water of civil discourse as a way to see how people you disagree with are beloved in God’s eyes.

But our national moment of hitting bottom is about more than needing civil discourse.  It’s about our identity, too.  What this week reminds us is that we always have to hold in living memory who we are.  As a nation, we like to think of ourselves as a people of special purpose, a people who choose to live in the creative tension of democracy because it’s what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.”¹  But as followers of Jesus, gathered under this Big Tent, we are more than inheritors of democracy.  We are apostles of love.  We are God’s beloved children, empowered by the Holy Spirit to follow in Jesus’ resurrected footsteps.  We are people who strive to resist evil and who come to the river to confess it when we come up short.  We are people who live Good News in word and deed.  We are people who seek and serve Jesus in all people, loving those who disagree with us as much as we love ourselves.  We are people who strive for justice and peace by respecting the dignity of everyone – no exceptions, even the folks we understand least. 

As we walk that path, sometimes we hit bottom.  But Jesus is there, reaching out his hand, pulling us up, reminding us who we are, and empowering us to try again.

1.      Lincoln, Abraham. “Annual Message to Congress – Concluding Remarks.”  Abraham Lincoln Online.  Available at: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm.  Accessed Jan. 8, 2021.