Christ Has No Hands But Yours

Sermon and State-of-the-Parish Address for Jan. 23, 2022

Welcome to Annual Meeting Sunday and the State-of-the-Parish Address.  Hearing that Gospel reading this morning, I marvel at Jesus, as always; but this time not just for what he says but how he says it.  In Luke’s Gospel, this is the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, his inaugural address.  He stands up in worship, reads the appointed Scripture, and gives the shortest sermon of all time: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21).  I’m afraid this address will be just a bit longer than his.

But about the content rather than the form: Jesus reads these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)  That’s the vocation Isaiah saw for God’s chosen people, the people of Israel; and Jesus says now God has given that calling to him and the beloved community he’s gathering.  It's a calling to take up God’s mission of empowering and freeing the poor and oppressed, and opening our blinded eyes, and bringing God’s reign and rule into our everyday, lived reality.

That’s our calling, too – bringing God’s reign and rule into lived reality.  At the top of the bulletin each week, we frame it as loving God, loving neighbor, and loving one another.  On the signs over at HJ’s, we frame it this way: “God loves all.  All means all.  Pass the peace.”  Let the love of God be life’s paradigm – for yourself and for your world.

            We know that.  But sometimes it’s really hard to see how it’s supposed to look on the ground – especially through these past two years.  Since early 2020, we’ve been making our way in a foggy landscape.  I’ve often felt that I could see only a few yards into the future.  But early on in the
pandemic, I shared an image that our bishop had shared, which he got from Episcopal Relief and Development – the “emotional lifecycle of a disaster” (and you’ll find it in this morning’s bulletin).  It shows how communities react when they endure an earthquake or hurricane – there’s a heroic moment of initial response, followed by a honeymoon of community cohesion … which then trails off into disillusionment, and coming to terms with reality, and finally reconstructing a new normal.

            I don’t know that we’ve come fully into the “new normal” yet with COVID, but here’s an indication we may have entered into it at St. Andrew’s.  There’s a second image, also in the bulletin – our average Sunday attendance, measured across the months of 2020 and 2021.  Look at the shape of the two curves.  The attendance graph doesn’t have the same labels as the disaster-response graph, but it might as well.

So, at least the attendance numbers would suggest that, in 2021, we were finding that “new normal,” reconstructing reality and making peace with it.  Last January, I spoke about our new “phygital” world, and the Vestry spent 2021 focusing on beating boundaries related to the ways “we’ve always done” worship, and parish life, and pastoral care, and connecting with our community, and loving people who differ from us.  We’ve improved our livestreamed worship, created a new worship experience, made parish life a hybrid of in-person and online, broadened our care for one another, and reached out to people whose lives differ from ours to bring good news both in terms of help and in terms of relationship.  I hope you’ll read the annual report, which you can take home from this morning’s parish meeting, because it tells those stories of seeking to bring good news, and open blind eyes, and make our reality more like God’s reality.

I give thanks for all that work.  And, at the same time, I think it’s tempting, as we make our way through uncertainty, to let our focus settle on … us.  Some of that has been, and will be, right and good. COVID has not only kept us on our ecclesial toes; it’s also revealed how deeply we need each other and how much work we need to put into caring for each other.  But passing the peace isn’t limited to the people in the pews (or on the livestream).  In the words of William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, a time when the Church might have been completely concerned with survival: “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

Deep down, we know that.  Even in COVID, we’ve lived that.  And in 2022, as we continue along the foggy path toward our post-pandemic world, we have an opportunity to take the next steps in passing the peace with those beyond our walls.

You’ll hear a lot in the next 12 months about “community ministry.”  What is that?  Is it the work of the Outreach Commission?  Yes.  Is it the work of our Community Connections Commission?  Yes.  Is it the work of ad-hoc, parishioner-led efforts to pass the peace to people who differ from us?  Yes.  Is it reflected in worship at Trailside?  Yes.  To me, the idea of “community ministry” is a way to gather several blessed missional impulses and see them as facets of the same diamond.

Each year, we support more than a dozen Outreach partners with gifts topping $100,000 (the majority of which comes from your pledges).  Each year, we show up with those partners, giving thousands of hours of service.  Each year, we work with individuals and groups to bless our Brookside and Waldo neighbors, with HJ’s at the core of that work.  This year, we developed, launched, and honed a new expression of worship, Trailside, to gather and serve neighbors who aren’t wired for traditional worship in a traditional space.  Our organizational charts and commission assignments tend to represent all this work in silos, so we’re tempted to think of them that way.  But these missional efforts have much more in common than not.  In all of it, we’re following in the footsteps of Archbishop William Temple, passing the peace to those who are not our members.  That’s community ministry.

And in the year ahead, God is calling us – together and individually – to step up our game in community ministry.  I’m asking the people leading those efforts to discern a common purpose, set objectives, come together regularly to build collaboration, assess our work, and thereby increase our impact.  What would that look like?  Well, wouldn’t it be great if kids from Banneker Elementary took part in an art exhibition at HJ’s?  Wouldn’t it be great if recovery groups meeting at HJ’s served at Welcome House?  Wouldn’t it be great if people at Trailside went out to serve with one of our Outreach partners after worship?  Wouldn’t it be great if we could help lead the Brookside and Waldo business associations to figure out how to respond to people who come by needing housing and assistance?

So, there are some ways we can build community ministry through greater collaboration among people doing that work.  But Jesus didn’t come to call committees to follow him.  He came to call you.  At the end of the day, all ministry comes down to individuals living out the reality we experience every time we share Holy Communion.  In the bread and wine, Jesus doesn’t just give us a ticket to heaven someday.  Jesus empowers us to be his Body in the world now, being Jesus for one another and for those who aren’t yet here, bringing his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.  Eternal life is now, not just later; and we are the ones the Spirit is presently anointing to proclaim and live that good news.

So, here’s my hope and my challenge to you.  I’d like us each to commit to taking at least one action in the year ahead to bless the community around us.  We already had a foretaste of this in the fall pledge campaign, with those cards on the wall by the door to the parking lot.  We asked people to share how they pass the peace in day-to-day life.  Now, I hope you’ll commit to the same thing in the year ahead.  In the same way a financial pledge can be just a dollar and still signal your heart’s commitment to God’s work in this parish family, so a pledge of a single act can signal your heart’s commitment to passing the peace among people in our community.  You could serve coffee at HJ’s and talk with shoppers at the Farmer’s Market.  You could fill seed packets to help low-income families grow their own food.  You could serve hungry people at the Kansas City Community Kitchen or St. Paul’s Pantry.  You could represent the church at a community gathering like Strutt With Your Mutt, or Pridefest, or the St. Patrick’s Parade.  You could invite someone to Trailside and join them for worship there.  You could help welcome a refugee family.  You could walk and pray for racial reconciliation, or serve alongside people from a church east of Troost.  So, here’s my not-so-challenging challenge: Just do it once this year.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a story from every one of us about passing the peace to someone beyond our pews?

Here’s another challenge I’d like us to take up in 2022.  You are an amazingly generous parish family.  In a time of deep uncertainty and divisiveness, you’ve opened your hearts to support the work of St. Andrew’s financially like never before, as you’ll hear at the annual meeting.  And financial giving is a tremendously important way we pass the peace – both empowering ministry here and supporting the work of our ministry partners.  Now, we have an opportunity to build that empowering work of generosity.  I’d like us to open our hearts and wallets this year in addition to the fall pledge campaign, making gifts in a “pass the peace” campaign to create a community-ministry fund.  That fund would be a quasi-endowment whose income would support the salary of a staff position to lead community ministry and perhaps increase the support we could give our Outreach partners each year, too.  

Blessedly, we have a head start on that community-ministry fund already.  Many of you will remember Don Giffin, a longtime St. Andrew’s member with one of the largest hearts for the community I’ve ever known.  In his estate, Don made a generous gift to St. Andrew’s, and it will be the lead gift in building this community-ministry fund.  I’m so grateful to Don and his family for this opportunity to honor his passion for Jesus’ work of bringing good news to people who are poor, and captive, and oppressed, and blind in so many different ways, tangibly and spiritually.

Don understood that the way Jesus does his work today is through us.  More to the point, the way Jesus does his work today is through you.  We are the body of Christ in this time and place, and a body does its work through its members – the eyes and ears and hands and feet that actually bring about the changes Jesus longs to see in the world.  St. Teresa of Avila put it this way, and I’ll leave you with her words: 

Christ has no body now but yours.  No hands, no feet on earth but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which he looks [with] compassion on this world.  Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.  Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.  Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes; you are his body.  Christ has no body now on earth but yours.