Sermon for March 13, 2022
Luke
13:31-35
This week, we’ll mark a religious holiday
that few people will celebrate religiously: St. Patrick’s Day. Kansas City’s parade will make its comeback
on Thursday, and the Brookside St. Patrick’s Parade has been rescheduled for this
Saturday because of the bad weather at the end of last week.
Taking part in Brookside’s parade has been
a strong tradition here at St. Andrew’s, and I’m grateful to those who are
getting us ready to celebrate alongside our neighbors once again. We’ll put on a lawn party for families as they
gather for the parade, serving up hotdogs and offering a bouncy house. In addition, HJ’s will be the “green room” for
the parade’s leaders and special guests, and we’re honored to work with our friends
at the Brookside Business Association to make HJ’s available.
So, the parade is one way we’ll celebrate
St. Patrick. We’ll also gather at HJ’s next
Sunday for Irish Pub Night. We’ll begin
with a little prayer and Scripture in St. Patrick’s honor, and then we’ll
simply be together, along with friends from the neighborhood, I hope – raising
a glass and enjoying traditional Irish music with the Boys of the Prairie
Celtic Band.
Now, you may wonder, if we’re celebrating
St. Patrick, why aren’t we having a service in his honor? Well, that would be a fine thing to do – nothing
wrong with a good liturgy and the chance to sing “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” But you know, I think Patrick might prefer
that we honor him in the community rather than here in the church.
You may know him as the saint who drove
the snakes out of Ireland, but Patrick’s real story is even more interesting.1 It starts with him being kidnapped from his
native England and enslaved in Ireland, where he learned about the people there
and their way of life. Remarkably, his experience
left him not embittered but inspired – inspired to help people in Ireland find relationship
with God as he had found it there. So
Patrick escaped, guided by a divine dream of a boat ready to take him away.
He made his way to England eventually, where
he trained for the priesthood and served a parish. But then, another divine dream changed his
life, when he heard his former captors calling him back to Ireland. Interpreting it as a call from God to go and
share the Good News there, he proposed a missionary venture to his superiors. They affirmed his call and ordained him a
bishop but with no existing church to oversee, the first missionary bishop in
Christian history.
So, in 432, Patrick and his compatriots
arrived in Ireland and turned the Church’s assumptions about mission upside
down. Before Patrick, the Roman Church had
assumed its faith could only thrive in Roman culture. If the people hadn’t been taught to speak
Latin and live like Romans, the assumption was that Christianity couldn’t happen
there. That kind of thinking led to centuries
of really ugly Christian “mission,” with people killing the culture in order to
save it. But Patrick, centuries ahead of
his time, was trying to show the Church how to be truly mission-shaped. He would take a dozen or so assistants into a
village, get to know the people there, get involved in their day-to-day lives,
and live as Christians, narrating their faith stories and their trust in God. The result would be an indigenous church – one
that remained when the team moved on.
Estimates are that Patrick and his team raised up expressions of church
in 700 locations in Ireland over the 28 years he was there. More than anything else, Patrick took people
seriously. He knew their culture; he
knew their language; and he knew that building a relationship between them and God
would change their hearts as it had changed his. And it worked.
But back in Britain, the bishops who’d
sent Patrick generally condemned him and distanced the institutional church
from his methods. They disowned Patrick
because … wait for it … the Church had never done it that way before. The bishops didn’t know what to do with
someone who wanted the Church to engage with people as they were, rather than expecting
them to become something else first. So the
English bishops condemned Patrick for spending so much time with
barbarians. They would have preferred that
he spent his days in the office, so to speak, rather than out in the bars and
coffee shops with the pagans.
OK.
What do we make of all that, especially as we find ourselves two Sundays
into the season of Lent? I mean, celebrations
of St. Patrick seem about as contrary to Lenten self-discipline as you can
get. But I think there’s a tie between
Patrick’s approach to “doing church” and what we heard in today’s Gospel reading.
There, Jesus is seeing himself in the tradition
of the prophets, the people like Micah and Amos and Hosea and John the Baptist,
people who spoke truth that the religious and political establishment didn’t want
to hear. Speaking for God, the prophets said,
“[Your] rulers give judgment for a bribe, [your] priests teach for a price, [your]
prophets give oracles for money,” (Micah 3:11)
Speaking for God, the prophets said, “I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. Take away from me the noise of your songs.”
(Amos 5:21,23) Speaking for God, the prophets
said, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and love kindness,
and walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
The prophets saw a religious institution
that was mostly concerned with its own interests, ensuring that it held its power
while ignoring the lives of the people around it. So in today’s reading, Jesus is fulfilling the
prophets’ calls and saying to the leaders in Jerusalem: Look, God’s done with
you. “See, your house is left to you,” he
says (Luke 13:35) – the Temple that symbolizes the leaders’ focus on their own privilege. Following God’s way takes a transformation of
heart, and action, and character, not insisting that other people follow your
rules of worship and piety. And because
he’s speaking that truth, Jesus knows the same response awaits him that usually
comes to people, like Patrick, who tell God’s representatives what they don’t want
to hear.
Now, I’m not saying that the St. Patrick’s
parade or Irish Pub Night is an example of speaking truth to power. No. But
they are examples of us bending our heart, as a church, toward the neighbors God
has given us and coming alongside them living a life of faith. Our Trailside service at HJ’s is another
example of the same impulse. St. Patrick
helps us see that church is fundamentally about relationship – about asking, “Who
is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29); and then reaching out to them; and then being
open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in response. In fact, that focus on relationship guided
our Vestry retreat last month, where we looked at why we’re here as a congregation
and discerned a new purpose statement for our life together. More on that in the weeks ahead, but – I believe
St. Patrick would smile at the notion that Jesus’ Church is fundamentally about
the work of building relationships with the next people you don’t know.
I think that’s why we come out for a lawn party and a parade. I think that’s why we gather for Pub Night, just as we gathered with our neighbors for Oktoberfest a few months ago. The arc of the Church’s life must bend toward relationship. It’s by becoming invested in the people around us that we carry on the mission of the One who came to reconcile all people with each other and with God. When we follow in his footsteps out the doors of the church, then we can say with integrity, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 13:35).
1.
St.
Patrick’s story is summarized from: Hunter, George G. The
Celtic Way of Evangelism. Nashville:
Abingdon, 2000, 13-25.
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