Not Judges but Witnesses

[Sermon from Sunday, April 19, 2015]

Welcome to the second in our six-week sermon series, “A Critical Conversation: Exploring the Church’s Harsh Reviews.”  The idea is to take seriously the perspectives of people who find churches out of touch with the real world, opposed to science, overly political, hypocritical – and, this morning, people who find churches to be judgmental and self-righteous.  For many of the 43 percent of Americans who are staying away from church,¹ this describes the church they’re staying away from. 

And hearing today’s readings, you might see why some people associate “church” with judgment and self-righteousness.  I mean, the word “sin” comes up nine times in the Scriptures we just heard.  In the Acts reading, Peter lays it on the line to people of Jerusalem, telling them they rejected “the Holy and Righteous One,” Jesus, “and killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.”  He says, “Repent, therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.” (Acts 3:14-15,19)  The reading from the First Letter of John says, “No one who abides in Jesus sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him” (3:6).  I’m sure in many churches using the Common Lectionary, the folks are hearing a nice diatribe on specific sins in today’s world right about now.

If you’ve encountered churches as judgmental and self-righteous, I’m sorry.  There have been times in the Church’s history, and certainly ugly moments on the nightly news, when supposedly faithful people have been more than ready to point out the speck in someone else’s eye while avoiding the log in their own.  Some of it’s just hating – a disfigurement of Jesus’ message of love, beating up on other people out of bigotry and calling it “good news.”  If you see self-proclaimed “Christians” carrying protest signs saying that God hates some class of people – God’s own children, by the way, people God created – that’s all it takes for a lot of us to say, “No, thank you.” 

That’s easy to understand.  But most churches aren’t of the Fred Phelps variety, literally carrying signs of hate into the world.  I think the temptation for churches more often is to imagine themselves as open and accepting while unintentionally making some people feel excluded.  In the Episcopal Church, for example, that can sometimes manifest itself as the intolerance of the tolerant – the sense that, if you don’t meet the litmus test of having no litmus tests, this may not be the right community for you.

So for me, here’s the question.  If we reject the notion that God’s always looking for someone to condemn, how do we avoid going to the other extreme?  How do we keep from turning God into a whole lot of nothing and making Jesus into a bland poster boy for “It’s nice to be nice to the nice”?  We talk a lot about how the Episcopal Church is a “big tent,” a place where people who differ in background and perspective can come together, an image of the reconciled diversity of God’s good creation.  But, as Fr. Marcus and Mtr. Anne and I were discussing a few weeks ago, don’t even big tents have walls?  If the risen Jesus isn’t interested in seeing the Church, his body in the world, being an instrument of judgment for those who don’t toe the party line, then what does Jesus want the Church to be about?

I got a glimpse of at least one answer from an unlikely source this week.  Driving back from Springfield after visiting my parents, I was listening to All Things Considered on the radio.  And, in one of the rare moments when they weren’t doing the annual spring membership drive, there was a story about a new book from the columnist David Brooks.²  The book’s title is The Road to Character; and in it, Brooks is contrasting a past collective mindset of humility with what he calls our “culture of the Big Me,” a culture that celebrates the opinions and accomplishments of the self.  As a pundit and a “recovering secularist,” Brooks has come to see himself as the epitome of this cultural shift from humility to self-promotion.  He says, he’s “paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to … appear more confident … than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear … more authoritative than I really am.”  He’s come to see that he’s been on a slippery slope toward judgmentalism and self-righteousness – a slippery slope that churches would do well to watch for, too.

In contrast to a culture where he says we “present the world with a highlight reel” of our lives, Brooks’ new book tells the stories of historical figures who came to “the turning point in a life toward maturity,” asking themselves, “‘What's the weakness I have that leads to behavior I'm not proud of?’”  In the stories of people like the social activist Dorothy Day, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and President Dwight Eisenhower, Brooks says he found a common element:  that they each looked deeply into themselves, confronted some core place of brokenness, and found a way to heal it.  As Brooks said, “By the end of their lives, they became strong in their weakest places.”  They managed to build characters that helped change the world.  They avoided our more common temptation: staking out positions without doing the hard, introspective, transformative work of cultivating virtues – virtues like courage, honesty, and especially humility.  As Brooks says, “Character is a way of living. It's not a series of positions you take.”

So maybe that’s a lens to help us read Scripture like some of the readings we just heard.  In each of these readings, there’s that hard word, the “S” word, the word that nice people like us don’t like to use: Sin.  For all the people who are wired to point at others and wag their fingers and rail against things they don’t like – for everyone who’s wired like that, there are those of us who are wired to avoid the conflict entirely, nice people trying to be nice to the nice.  But still that word is there, with a big letter “S” – Sin.

And that big-letter-S kind of sin is what Jesus is concerned about, in Scripture and in the ongoing life of the Body of Christ, the Church – the sin of separating ourselves from relationship.  No matter our perspective – progressive, conservative, libertarian, whatever – no matter our perspective, it’s easy to draw lines between what we see as right and wrong and then find ourselves separated from each other instead.  Now, we can have great conversations about specific issues – why one person thinks it’s sinful to ignore carbon emissions and climate change, while another person thinks it’s sinful to limit the productive capacity of business and industry.  That’s a great conversation.  But we’re never going to move past the art of dueling statistics and snarky catch phrases unless those conversation partners come together in the virtues of honesty and humility, recognizing their common brokenness first and foremost.

And – even more important – recognizing their common redemption, too.  Much to the chagrin of political pundits and religious judges, we are not saved by getting the answers right.  We are not saved by pointing out how the other side misses the mark.  We are saved, in the end, by following the risen Christ who heals our sin.  We are saved by following Jesus, who comes to us with nail holes in his hands and feet, gaping wounds that mark an astonishingly strong, life-giving, resurrected body – a body real enough to eat a piece of fish but operating on a whole different plane than our small world, a body that walks though doors that everyone else finds to be locked. 

We are that body.  We, the Church.  We are the risen body of Christ in the world – wounded, yes, but able to show the world a reality just beyond our self-centeredness, able to practice the virtues that bring the kingdom of God to life. 

The sin, the brokenness, the locked doors in our relationships with God and each other – those don’t disappear either by condemning the other or by wishing our differences away.  We have to look at those shut doors with our eyes wide open and then do the hard work of picking the lock.  We have to remember that each one of us isn’t any more holy than the person with whom we disagree the most.  We have to look to the examples of the saints we’ve known to build the virtues through which we imitate Christ, to deepen within our hearts the well of love that gives itself away. 

And we who love the Church have to cultivate a faith community in which honesty and courage and humility guard us from the temptation to become the pundits of our own small worlds.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now” the First Letter of John says.  “What we will be has not been revealed.  What we do know is this: When Jesus is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)  In the meantime, as we come to see the risen Christ more and more clearly, our call is not to be judges but to be witnesses – witnesses of the power of “repentance and forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47), witnesses of the long, slow, hard work of characters built, hearts transformed, and lives made new. 

1.        Barna, George, and David Kinnaman.  Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them.  Tyndale, 2014.

2.        “Take It From David Brooks: Career Success ‘Doesn’t Make You Happy.’”  All Things Considered, April 13, 2015.  National Public Radio.  Available at: http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399391894/take-it-from-david-brooks-career-success-doesnt-make-you-happy.  Accessed April 16, 2015.

Changing How the Story Goes

[Sermon from Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015]

On this glorious morning, with flowers seeming to spring from every surface, I want to tell you three stories of new life, three stories of resurrection.  Now, for some of us who’ve heard the Easter story year after year, the idea of resurrection is something we almost take for granted, crazy as that is.  But others of us here today might be more than a little skeptical that Jesus died and then actually came back, physically alive.  If that skepticism describes you, you’re in good company.  Jesus’ own followers weren’t looking for him to rise from the dead either.  They thought they knew how the story had gone, the story of a movement that became just that much too threatening to the powers that be.  The Romans had won; the religious authorities had won; Jesus’ movement had been crushed like so many before and after.  Resurrection would have been the last thing on a reasonable person’s mind – certainly then; maybe now, too.

Well, here’s resurrection story number 1 – the classic we just heard.  Mary Magdalene comes to Jesus’ tomb, though John’s Gospel doesn’t say why.  Maybe she had more work to do in tending to the body; maybe she was simply tending to her own broken heart.  But what she finds is alarming:  The body is gone.  She probably fears grave robbers, someone wanting to intimidate Jesus’ followers by mutilating the corpse.  So she runs to get Peter and another disciple to help her find it.  The guys go into the tomb, the investigators on the scene, looking for answers.  Once they see the body is gone, at least one of them believes intellectually that Jesus must have been raised from the dead; but even his response is to go home and hide out.  The disciples thought they knew how this story would go, and they feared they’d be next on the authorities’ hit list.  Mary also looks into the tomb, but she isn’t so much looking for answers; she’s looking for Jesus himself.  She’s yearning for the connection she knew, with him and with God through him.  She’s aching for relationship.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Jesus shows up, but he looks like anybody else, passing for the guy who cuts the grass.  And with a single word, Jesus changes the story everyone “knew” to be true.  He speaks her name: “Mary!” (John 20:16).  That’s all it takes for Mary’s world to change.  In that moment of intimacy, in the single word that encapsulates her whole self, Mary knows Jesus is alive – and not just alive, but in charge.  “I have seen the Lord!” she exclaims to the other disciples (John 20:18).  Jesus is alive, and so is Mary – in a way she’s never known before.

OK, here’s resurrection story number 2 – a story of new life for an old faith.  We heard about it in the second reading this morning.  In the months after Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciple Peter had been taking this resurrection story on the road, sharing it with as many of his fellow Jews as he could.  The Jews were the people Jesus had been trying to reach, after all.  He was “the king of the Jews,” the one to fulfill the work of the greatest kings and prophets of Israel.  So Peter thinks he knows how this story should go:  He’s supposed to tell about Jesus, heal folks, and bring new life to the rest of the Jewish people.  But then Peter has a vision in which God tells him the rules have changed.  It’s not just the Jews that God’s trying to reach – it’s everybody.  God brings a Roman army officer named Cornelius to meet Peter – not exactly a friend to a Jewish insurrectionist.  But in his conversation with Cornelius, Peter comes to see that God has in mind for everybody to find new life – including the oppressors, including the pagans, including … well … everybody.  And that “everybody” includes Peter’s own community of faith, too.  God changes the story they “knew” to be true by showing Peter that these Jewish followers of Jesus, this infant “church,” needed rebirth every bit as much as the people they were trying to reach.  So from that intimate conversation with Cornelius, the infant Church finds just as much new life as any blind or lame person Peter ever healed. 

And here’s resurrection story number 3, a story that’s a little closer to home.  It’s about three women here at St. Andrew’s who are taking part in an intimate outreach ministry called Sister Berta’s Friendship Circles.  The idea came from Sister Berta Sailer at Operation Breakthrough, who spoke to us here last year.  Sister Berta suggested that faithful followers of Jesus could make a huge difference on a tiny scale by really getting to know a client at Operation Breakthrough – a mom simply trying to make her life work out.  So three women from St. Andrew’s took Sister Berta up on the suggestion and started getting together with a mom I’ll call Yolanda.  Yolanda barely made it out alive from an abusive relationship with her ex-husband.  She has two grown daughters, a teenaged son in a juvenile facility, two daughters in elementary school, and another daughter in preschool at Operation Breakthrough.  And she is deeply afraid of her former husband, for herself and for her kids; so she keeps as low a profile as she can, which leaves her pretty isolated.  She doesn’t have a strong education, and she’s struggled to find a job that pays her a living wage.  She has no car, no background in how to search for a decent job, and no connections to help her network with employers – or to intervene with KCP&L when they threaten to turn off her electricity.  And on top of all that, she has no community – no group of people she can trust.  Well, the three women from St. Andrew’s didn’t have an instruction book in how to do this, but they took some stumbling steps to get to know Yolanda, trying to offer friendship and presence to someone whose devastated life looks very different from theirs.  In a sense, the three St. Andrew’s ladies came to the tomb, which is not exactly a comfortable place to visit.  Now, I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine both partners in this awkward dance might have felt a little mistrust going in.  On some level, we all think we know how this story would go.  Deep down, Yolanda was probably looking for a car, or at least a consistent source for bus fare, right?  Deep down, the St. Andrew’s ladies were probably looking for a Band-Aid on the sore of white liberal guilt, right?  Well, instead, over the course of one intimate conversation after another, they found something else – because in those conversations, Jesus was up to something.  In fact, in those conversations, Jesus changed the story everyone “knew” to be true.  Yolanda told the ladies about her life.  The ladies listened.  They cried with her when she cried about her kids.  They helped her put a résumé together, helped her think about where to apply for work, and encouraged her to keep at it when nothing panned out.  And eventually, Yolanda told these ladies the most improbable of truths: that these three women are the only people with whom she feels safe enough to share what’s really going on in her life and in her heart.  And for these three ladies, the witness of Yolanda’s courage and perseverance, the witness of the depth of her heart – all that has changed their hearts and made them see life anew.

So why am I calling this a resurrection?  I mean, it would be nice if I could stand here and tell you some quick-and-easy Jesus story, where someone comes in, and gives someone else just what he needs, and turns a broken life around – badda bing.  We love stories like that.  Well, Yolanda’s life hasn’t been miraculously fixed.  She still struggles with everything she struggles with.  By the same token, the three women from St. Andrew’s haven’t had some dramatic conversion experience.  But still, I say this is a story of resurrection, a story of new life – not for just one of the parties involved, but for all of them.  Because when they came together in their difference, new life arose from the tomb of their expectations.  Everyone involved in that friendship circle thought she knew how the story would go – self-centered motives leading inevitably to disappointment.  But Jesus changed the story they all “knew” to be true.  Expecting smallness and self-interest to carry the day, they found the richness of relationship instead.

So it’s Easter morning – where’s Jesus in this story of new life?  Well, I’ll tell you:  We find the risen Christ in the places where differences meet and boundaries melt away.  It’s not that either Yolanda or the St. Andrew’s ladies represent Jesus, one ministering to the other.  No.  Both parties are broken, and both are blessed.  And in the new relationship that grows between them, in the holy reconciliation of people separated by culture and poverty and de-facto segregation – in that relationship, Jesus lives.  The risen Christ lives where our boundaries melt away.

Here’s an example on a slightly larger scale.  In about a month, on Wednesday, May 6, we’re going to gather with United Missionary Baptist Church, at 27^th Terrace and Campbell, for a joint service.  In case you’ve been napping and find yourself now startled awake – yes, you heard me right: a joint service between St. Andrew’s and United Missionary Baptist.  If we were in their church right now, we’d call this service a revival.  To minimize the heart attacks here this morning, we’ll call it “Evening Prayer plus.”  Really – we’ll gather to worship together, our prayers and their prayers, our choir and their choir.  And yours truly will be offering the sermon.  I’ll try hard to dial down my charisma to keep from knocking them out with fiery Episcopalian preaching.  The service should be fascinating, but something very important will happen before it, too.  We’ll gather for a time of fellowship, a social time where the bridging of difference can begin in the way God likes best – around good food:  as the prophet Isaiah said, a feast “for all peoples … a feast of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” (Isaiah 25:6).  Well, in this case, maybe not the wine.  I don’t know what will happen exactly, but I do know this:  It will be a little in-breaking of the kingdom of God.  We’ll gather for a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, and then our two congregations will stand before the throne, singing and praying to the risen Lord who rules us all.

Resurrection is risky work, in the sense that no outcomes are guaranteed.  When we sit down with the other, whoever that “other” is for you, we give up some control.  I can’t tell you what this service in May will look like exactly or how comfortable we’ll feel in it.  God doesn’t let us order up resurrected life from a vending machine.  But I can tell you this:  Our risen Lord calls us to this work, on scales large and small.  Jesus asks us to inhabit the space where he dwells, the place where differences meet.  Those differences come in every way imaginable – male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free, black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, native and immigrant, management and labor, churched and unchurched.  In every place of difference we can name, the risen Christ is there, waiting to resurrect both “us” and “them” – if we take the risk to engage the difference rather than wishing it away.

So listen for Jesus, as you stand outside whatever tomb you know best.  Listen for his voice, changing the story you “know” to be true.  Listen as he calls your name.  And listen to learn where he will send you to find a resurrection of your own.

Attempt Great Things for God

[Sermon from Sunday, March 22, 2015]

I know my sabbatical sermons are over, but I want to share one more trip story with you.  In my down time in London, I went to Westminster Abbey.  As it happened, the Abbey was celebrating the anniversary of its founding that weekend, and I walked into a stunning evensong on a Saturday afternoon.  Afterward, as the music and incense still hung in those heavenly vaulted ceilings, I came across something I hadn’t known was there, among all the monuments to famous men (and a few women).  What I found was a lectern, carved from hard English wood.  It was given in memory of the missionary William Carey, who worked in India in the early 1800s and translated the Bible into several different languages.  What struck me, other than the woodwork, was the quote from William Carey emblazoned across the front of the lectern:  “Attempt great things for God.¹

What made me stop short was the verb.  It doesn’t say, “Achieve great things for God.”  It doesn’t set the bar at success on our terms.  It says, “Attempt great things for God.”  There’s good theology in that:  After all, most outcomes ultimately are not in our hands; and what we perceive to be the outcome may be only a momentary glimpse of a very long process.

As we heard in the readings today, God plays the long game.  Millennia ago, as the Israelites sat in exile, God promised that their story had just begun.  The people had failed in keeping the covenant of Law, the covenant intended to make them a holy presence, a missional light drawing all the world to Israel’s God.  But even in the darkness of exile, God proclaims, “The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant” with my people.  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts … and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31,33,34)  This one wouldn’t be a covenant of law and obligation.  Nor would it be a covenant of worldly convenience by which we judge whether we’re getting what we want from our “relationship” with God.  Instead, God promises the New Covenant – a covenant of worldly risk and kingdom reward, the covenant of eternal life.   

In eternal life, both risk and reward are guarantees.  The reward is so clear, we may miss it, like fish who don’t notice the water in which they swim.  The reward of the New Covenant, as our catechism puts it, is Christ’s promise “to bring us into the kingdom of God and give us life in all its fullness” (BCP 851).  And our guaranteed risk?  It is the deeply risky work of remembering – remembering who we are and whose we are.  

Our part of the New Covenant is what Jesus commanded in the Last Supper, what we bring to life at this altar every week.  It’s the sacrifice of anamnesis.  That’s a ten-dollar Greek word used by theologians as well as physicians, for whom it has to do with taking a patient’s history.  In a church context, we usually say anamnesis means active remembering, remembering in the sense of bringing a past reality fully into the present moment – and that’s true.  But at Episcopal 101 last week, a faithful physician pointed out the word’s etymology:  Anamnesis actually means “not amnesia,” “not forgetting.”  It’s basically the same as “remembering,” but with a shade of defiance. 

When we remember Jesus – when we remember his sacrifice for us and our call to follow in his steps – we proclaim defiance to the forces that would tempt us to the covenant of convenience instead.  And in the Greek, we hear Jesus saying it defiantly, too:  “Do this for the not-forgetting of me.”

He says, “Don’t forget that I want you to attempt great things for God.  Don’t forget that I want you to be my body in the world, united in the love of washing each other’s feet.  Don’t forget that I want you to obey my commandments, which can be the opposite of convenience.  Don’t forget that those who love their life lose it; that whoever serves me must follow me; that where I am, there will my servant be also.”  This is risky remembering. 

But with it comes God’s side of the New Covenant:  the promise that we will abide, now and always, in eternal life – not just in the sweet by and by, but each and every day we rise in resurrection.

That’s definitely playing the long game.  But in the Gospel stories, and certainly for the people there 2,000 years ago, it can seem sometimes like Jesus was driving toward outcomes in the moment, outcomes on the world’s terms.  Just before the Gospel reading we heard today, we get some of the Bible’s very best drama, seeming to tell the story of Jesus’ rise to power:  He raises Lazarus from the dead.  That brings new followers out of the woodwork, and it makes Jesus a marked man as the religious authorities decide it’s time to kill him.  Meanwhile, more and more people come out to follow him, and Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph on what we call Palm Sunday.  As the Pharisees put it, “Look, the world has gone after him!” (John 12:19).  Even the “Greeks” (John 12:20) – the non-Jews crowding into Jerusalem for the Passover festival – even they want to find out what this miracle worker and would-be king is about to do.  You can almost hear the voices in the crowd:  “Jesus, now’s the time for you to mobilize us against the Romans!  Now’s the time for you to call down the armies of God against them!  Hosanna to our commander in chief!”

And the king’s response?  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  Whoever serves me must follow me, and wherever I am, there will my servant be also.” (John 12:24)  So much for the coup d’état.

The outcome isn’t about Jesus riding the wave of success.  It’s about the Body of Christ, his followers then and now, being sent to reach “the Greeks,” the people still on the outside of God’s beloved community.  The outcome is about Tim, whom I mentioned a couple of weeks ago – the young man I met outside a restaurant who loves Jesus but indicted the churches he knew as being sluggish and self-centered.  The outcome in the Gospel story is that Jesus gives himself away to die – not because he wants to, which he clearly doesn’t.  Jesus gives himself away because he’s playing the long game.  He knows his death will defeat death – and he knows that’s only the beginning of the work.  He knows it won’t be him, in historical reality, who will reach billions of people across time and space, who will “draw all people” to himself (John 12:32).  He knows he must be the seed that falls into the ground to rise as so much more.

And he asks us to follow suit.  We who call ourselves Christians must take his path of dying and rising, giving ourselves up to be made new.  We must be about anamnesis, defiantly not forgetting our part of the New Covenant.  We proclaim it at every baptism, and we’ll do so again in the half-light of the Easter Vigil:  We promise to be part of a community of blessing.  We promise to resist evil and return to God and each other when we fail.  We promise to proclaim Jesus’ good news in all we say and do.  We promise to serve Jesus in everyone, loving our neighbors as ourselves.  We promise to practice peace and justice in the hardest places, even the intimate spaces of our own lives.  And over time, we come to do what Jesus says is the ultimate holy work (John 6:29), believing in the one whom God has sent as the source of light and life and love.  Jesus calls us to belong, to become, and to believe – to play the long game.

That long game is what we’re playing as a church community, too, with the Gather & Grow initiative.  Like Jesus entering Jerusalem in triumph, Gather & Grow might seem like something driving toward a worldly outcome – buildings.  And given the way churches sometimes behave, a person like Tim, the church critic, could be forgiven for coming into the Jewell Room, looking at the architects’ renderings, and thinking, “That church just wants to build a monument to itself.”  Churches do commit that sin sometimes – pastors, too.  We’ve heard this week of the impossibly named pastor Creflo Dollar with World Changers Church, who’s apparently changing the world by having his followers buy him a $60 million private jet.²  That kind of thing makes people like Tim blow a gasket.  Me, too.  

But Gather & Grow is not about monuments or egos.  It’s about a seed that fell to the earth and died here in 1913, thereby bearing a century of fruit.  Our use of space new, old, or otherwise – and, by the way, everything else we do as the Church – must be about three things:  loving God, loving neighbor, loving each other.  And through that love, God sends us out to reach “the Greeks,” the people who aren’t yet part of God’s beloved community.  Working toward that mission brings us to a few Palm Sundays here and there, moments when we might be tempted to look for worldly triumph.  But the truth Jesus proclaims this morning is this:  Mission takes sacrifice.  It means grains of wheat falling to the earth.  It means Jesus’ followers taking costly steps.  In our very real lives in this very material world, it means keeping the New Covenant in ways that will stretch us – pledges of our hands and our hearts, but also pledges of financial commitment.  Gather & Grow is the most significant step in Christ’s mission we’ve taken since we built this nave in 1952.  As he did then, Jesus is asking us now to play the long game.  He’s asking us to choose against a covenant of law, church “because you have to.”  He’s asking us to choose against a covenant of convenience, church that’s there to meet my needs.  He’s asking us to choose the New Covenant and write it on our hearts, the covenant of worldly risk and kingdom reward.

And the outcome?  The outcome is literally inscribed on the other side of the lectern I saw in Westminster Abbey.  Like I said, one side reads, “Attempt great things for God.”  And the other side reads, “Expect great things from God.” 

Expect great things from God – not in terms of worldly success but in terms of our life as the body of Christ, bringing love to the people God asks us to serve.  Expect great things from God – not as a payoff for good works but as a consequence of “walk[ing] in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us” (Ephesians 5:2).  Expect great things from God because God is playing the long game.  Expect great things from God not despite the embarrassing fact that the grain of wheat dies and lies buried in the ground.  No.  Expect great things from God because of it.  Expect great things from God because we are being lifted up with Jesus into the magnificence of his abundant life – the exaltation of servanthood, the glory of sacrifice, the greatness of giving ourselves away.

1.  “William Carey.”  Westminster Abbey.  Available at: http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/william-carey.  Accessed March 19, 2015.

2.  Stringer, Sam.  “Minister Creflo Dollar asks for $60 million in donations for a new jet.”  CNN.  Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/13/living/creflo-dollar-jet-feat/.  Accessed March 19, 2015.

Opening Door After Door After Door

[Sermon from Sunday, March 8, 2015]

I’d like to introduce you to two people this morning.  They’re both composite characters, but their stories are very real, stories that represent many other people’s stories. 

First, let me introduce Tina.  Tina is half of a couple who’ve both grown up in a church.  The two of them recently moved to Brookside, and they’re looking for a church family.  So Tina comes to St. Andrew’s one Sunday morning on a recon mission.  She’s checking the landscape, seeing what life is like in this place.  Tina comes through those red doors; and in her visit, she finds love – the love of Christ himself.  She experiences the mystery of God’s intimately majestic presence as she worships in this glorious space.  The choir’s anthem stirs her heart.  Several people talk to her at the Peace and after the service.  And I find that, by the time I get to talk to her and ask her to stay for lunch at Episcopal 101, I’m the fifth person so far to extend the invitation.  Now, Tina may or may not discern that St. Andrew’s is the church for them, for any of a hundred reasons.  But she leaves that morning seeing the church as God’s loving family, ready to welcome them in.

So, that’s Tina.  Now let me introduce you to Tim.  I met Tim outside a restaurant earlier this week, actually.  I had on my clerical collar, so he took the opportunity to share his perspective on churches.  He started out this way:  “You know,” he said, “I love Jesus – he’s great.  But I don’t have much use for churches.” 

And why might that be?  Well, let me fill in some blanks in Tim’s attitudinal profile with the help of this book.  It’s called Churchless.  It’s from the Barna Group, an organization that studies people’s perceptions of faith and religion.  This book is all about people whose perceptions have led them to be “churchless.”  What’s that?  A churchless person falls into one of two subgoups:  people who’ve once been part of a church community but are no longer, and people who’ve never been part of a church.  Nationally, 43 percent of the population falls into one of these categories.¹  Forty-three percent.  Now, lest you think that’s all about blue states, those crazy people on the coasts who stay away from church in droves – well, it’s a reality for us, too.  The Kansas City area does have a higher percentage of people in church than, say, Portland or Seattle.  But still:  34 percent of Kansas City–area households are churchless.  That’s about 320,000 households right here.²  That’s a lot of people staying away from church here in the religious heartland. 

So what might be under that statement Tim made about loving Jesus but rejecting the church?  Here’s the really interesting thing:  Many churchless people are actually seeking God.  In the Barna study, two-thirds of churchless people report having done something to expand and deepen their faith in the past month.³  Nearly 60 percent say they pray to God regularly.⁴  Fifty-one percent say they’re seeking something better spiritually than what they’ve known before.⁵  These are not people who’ve checked out of a spiritual journey.  They’ve just decided that churches, as they know them, aren’t helpful as they make their way.  Why?  Because their experience of churches, personally or from the media, tells them churches are mostly all about themselves and judgmental, to boot.  Many of the people staying home on a Sunday morning see church as relationally shallow, morally restrictive, opposed to science, intolerant of other faiths, judgmental of LGBT people, and promoting a political agenda.⁶ 

So, just as an exercise in exploring different perspectives, I wonder how Tina and Tim might hear today’s readings.  The first one, from Exodus, is a classic – the 10 Commandments.  God descends from the mountain and declares these laws to the Israelites, the thunder and lightning and smoke and trumpets scaring the living daylights out of them.  This is serious business; as the Law is later fleshed out, breaking most of these commands is a capital crime.  But paradoxically, these commands are also signs of love, the “boundaries [that] enclose a pleasant land” in relationship with God (Psalms 16:6), the limits a parent sets to protect her children.  Of course, how you hear these laws depends on where you’re coming from.  For Tina, they might indeed mark those pleasant boundaries of our relationship with God who loves us each as children.  But for Tim, maybe they’re just the first in a long list of rules the church expects him to follow.  For Tim, the church is all about rules – and from the very start, apparently.

Then we have the reading from First Corinthians, which is all about mystery.  When the world seeks something to believe in, Paul says, it looks for signs of power.  It looks for logic and evidence, an iron-clad case.  It’s the Stephen Hawking approach to God, from The Theory of Everything:  Prove that God’s necessary, and then maybe I’ll believe.  For those who follow Jesus, the mystery is that believing actually isn’t about that kind of proof.  Instead, as we’ll see in Holy Week especially, it’s all about the cross.  It’s about giving ourselves in love just as Jesus gave himself in love, paradoxically defeating the powers of evil and death by choosing the path of apparent weakness and foolishness, saving us by intentionally not saving himself.  For Tina, a person who’s inhabited this mystery for years, it’s her story – so deeply true you can only begin to plumb its depths in any given moment.  But for Tim, hearing this reading out of context, I wonder whether it makes much sense at all – or does it just leave Tim shaking his head?  Instead of feeling loved into everlasting life, does he just see himself as one of the “Greeks” in the reading, someone who doesn’t have the insider knowledge you need about God for all this to make any sense?

Then there’s the Gospel reading.  Now, this one I imagine might resonate with Tim a little more directly.  In fact, this might be the Gospel story of choice for churchless people – Jesus saying to the religious authorities, “What the heck do you think you’re doing?  You have lost your way.  You’ve made religious life all about what ultimately doesn’t matter – exchanging money (at a profit) and selling sacrificial animals, all so you can bind people to following rules.”  As Jesus reminds religious people elsewhere, what the Lord fundamentally requires is not about religious rituals, not about a sacrificial system that orchestrates acts of worship.  It’s about the sacrifice of our hearts, doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).  So Tina might be a little uneasy with this Gospel reading that shines a stark light on bankrupt religious practice and makes us squirm.  But Tim loves this reading, because it calls the church to repent.

Not everybody “out there” is Tim.  Like many of us in this room today, there are lots and lots of Tinas, people who love the church despite its failings, people who are looking for the kind of loving embrace we see and know at St. Andrew’s.  But we also can’t ignore Tim.  As I said, here in the Kansas City area, 34 percent of our local population is Tim.  So we ignore them at the church’s peril. 

But that’s actually not the real the reason we can’t ignore Tim.  The real reason is that Tim wants and needs deeper connection with God, and humans do best on that journey when we take it with a group of fellow travelers.  Sure, we each need some solitary time in our pilgrimage; but, to paraphrase Dean Wormer in the movie Animal House:  Lost, alone, and wandering is no way to spend your life, son.  The reason the church should care about Tim is because Jesus wants to welcome him home.  Jesus wants him to find a place where he can live out the truth that we know deep in our bones, that you just can’t follow God so well by yourself.

Our Gather & Grow initiative is all about equipping us to welcome people home – both those who write off the church as irrelevant and those who love the church, warts and all.  Gather & Grow is about orienting our hearts, and our ministries, and our buildings to reach Tim as well as Tina.  It’s about opening multiple doors into the story of God and the life of this congregation.  It’s about parenting classes and the Friday noon Eucharist.  It’s about an incubator for social entrepreneurs and feeding hungry people downtown.  It’s about finding Jesus in a discussion of politics over a beer at the Well and finding Jesus in the bread and wine at this altar.  It’s about welcoming groups and families for parties and meetings and about welcoming Sunday-morning guests on into an angel’s embrace. 

This is why Gather & Grow is the most significant thing we’ve tried to do here in the last 50 years, why we’re frankly taking such a courageous step to begin our second century.  St. Andrew’s is a house of prayer for all – for Tina and for Tim.  We may have more experience embracing Tina, but we can’t leave Tim out on his own – especially when he’s actually looking for God.  Because St. Andrew’s is not the church as Tim imagines it – narrow, small-minded, political, and intolerant.  That’s not us.  We are God’s mustard tree, with roots deep enough to support branches that welcome all sorts and conditions of birds to nest here.  We are God’s house of prayer for all.  We’ve just got to open door after door after door to show Tim that God’s actually standing behind each one of them, arms wide open, welcoming him home.

1.  Barna, George, and David Kinnaman.  Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them.  Tyndale, 2014.

2.  Barna Group.  Kansas City KS-MO City Report 2015, With Comparative Data From the Midwest Region.  Available for purchase at: https://www.barna.org/dloads/barna-report-cities-2015-detail.  2014-2015.
3.  Barna and Kinnaman, 61.
4.  Barna and Kinnaman, 59.
5.  Barna and Kinnaman, 41.
6.  Barna and Kinnaman, 97-102.

Gathering the Churchless

My church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Kansas City, is in the midst of Gather & Grow, a campaign to build ministry with people in our community and steward our facilities (particularly our aging youth center and tired lower levels of the church).  We’ve heard God knocking on our doors, asking us both to tend what’s behind them and to open those doors wider to the people around us.

If we needed evidence for that call to mission, we can find it in a recent book from church researchers the Barna Group.  In Churchless,¹ George Barna and David Kinnaman document the fascinating spiritual state of a nation many consider Christian.  In a nutshell:  43 percent of the U.S. population is not part of a church community.  Thirty-three percent were once part of a church but have now chosen not to be, and 10 percent have never been (1).  In the Kansas City area – here in the heart of the Midwest, a bulwark of traditional values – the percentage is smaller.  Still, a remarkable 34 percent of the Kansas City area, about 320,000 households, is “churchless.”²

But even more remarkable is the rest of the story:  For many people in this group, God’s not the problem; the church is.  In fact, the Barna study reveals that clear majorities of the churchless are actually seeking God, just not with a group of other people on a Sunday morning.  Consider these findings:

• Two-thirds of the churchless say they’ve tried something to expand their faith understanding and maturity in the past month (61).
• 62% consider themselves to be Christian (41).
• 58% pray to God in a typical week (59).
• 52% desire a closer relationship with God (123).
• 51% are actively seeking something better spiritually than what they’ve known (41).
• 26% go so far as to characterize their spiritual seeking as a quest for spiritual truth (41).

As my business-oriented friends would say, this seems to be an “opportunity-rich environment” for churches … if it weren’t for the fact that they’re churches.  The Barna study confirms what we’ve heard before: that spiritual pilgrims, especially young adults, tend to see churches as restrictive and intolerant, relationally shallow, antagonistic to science, judgmental about sexuality, judgmental toward people of other faiths, and unfriendly toward people’s honest doubts (97-102).

I know I’m biased, but I don’t think those generalizations describe most congregations of the Episcopal Church, and I’m certain they don’t describe St. Andrew’s.  In a nutshell, this is why we’re undertaking Gather & Grow, our campaign to build ministry with people around us:  Because we know we have something to offer spiritual pilgrims. 

At St. Andrew’s, we’re seeking to reach people with multiple entry points as well as Sunday morning.  According to Churchless, the sorts of things most likely to connect with the needs and desires of spiritual pilgrims are ministries to serve the poor and alleviate poverty, to support and mentor young adults trying to figure out how to raise kids, to help parents instill character and values in their kids, and to provide safe places to explore real questions about how faith intersects with the rest of life and the world around us.  There’s our opportunity-rich environment – an opportunity to love people and meet real needs.

But we also have to remember each person in the Barna study is, first and foremost, a person, not a data point or a potential member.  So it might be helpful to think about real people’s questions and the answers we might provide.  Recently, a couple of real, live human beings raised a wonderful series of questions with me – questions that people of faith need to be able to answer with compassion and clarity. 

Just this week, I met a man named Tim outside a restaurant.  He saw me wearing a clerical collar, which can be a wonderful invitation to conversation.  Tim led with this comment:  “You know, actually I love Jesus – he’s great – but I don’t have much use for churches.”  What follows is not a transcript of our conversation but questions both from Tim and from other spiritual pilgrims.  I’ve also taken a shot at some answers.

• “The people of the church and the clergy don’t care about me or what I want.”  I’m sorry that’s been your experience.  It’s a sadly ironic truth that churches sometimes lose their focus on the people about whom Jesus was so concerned – those on the outside of religious boundaries.  Churches sometimes do get caught up in their own institutional lives, and points of view like yours remind us where the institution needs to focus – on those who aren’t members, as well as those who are.  In most churches (not all, but most), you’d definitely find that people care about you.
• “All that churches want is my money and one more body to sit and listen to their dogma.”  Again, if you’ve gotten this message from churches you’ve attended, I’m sorry.  It’s another example of putting the institution ahead of the people it’s there to serve.  We strive to remember and embody some core principles to guide us away from that mistake.  First, the church fundamentally is not an institution; it’s the gathering of the people God has brought there to be God’s living presence in that place (“the body of Christ”).  Second, we’re called to gratitude, first and foremost, for the blessings God has given us; so the church strives (imperfectly) to be thankful for the gifts of all the members of that body.  When someone makes the commitment to be part of the church family, we do ask for a pledge of time, talent, and treasure as a mark of one’s gratitude for God’s gifts; but the amount and nature of that pledge is strictly between you and God.  Third, many (perhaps most) Episcopalians would feel much the same way about dogma as you do.  We teach the historic claims that Christians have been making for nearly 2,000 years about the nature of God and Jesus’ role in God’s work of restoring all people to the wholeness God desires for them.  But we have no litmus test for being welcomed into our community.  On any given Sunday, you’d find people questioning any of the claims our worship makes.  It’s great fodder for conversation and growth in our understanding of God – and ourselves.
• “Church people are a bunch of hypocrites, and I don’t want to be like that.”  Neither do I.  But we’re all hypocrites, in the sense that the lives we live don’t quite match the principles and truths we’d claim.  The healing God desires for us has much to do with bringing our lives into alignment with the principles toward which we strive:  love God, love neighbor, love one another.  We’re all works in progress in making that a reality.
• “If a church really knew me, they wouldn’t want me.”  I’ll bet the vast majority of people in any church feel the same way.  We are our own worst critics, and we know our failings better than any other person.  But Christians would say God knows us even better than that, placing a higher priority on our inherent beauty and goodness, which reflects God’s own beauty and goodness.  Where there are shortcomings and failures, God forgives and helps us move past them.  The journey of developing a relationship with God is about healing our shortcomings and living as God’s creations constantly made new.
• “Church people have a holier-than-thou attitude; they’re pretentious.”  Yes, some are.  Cultivating the humility and servanthood that Jesus modeled is one of the most fundamental, and challenging, of God’s calls to us.  
• “I don’t believe their Bible, doctrine, and requirements.  Church people believe a lot of stuff that never happened.”  In the Episcopal tradition especially, we have a long history of holy disagreement.  We see the Bible as living and active, in the sense that not only does it guide how we strive to live and love, but human interpretation of it is always a work in progress.  Very, very few Episcopalians would claim that the Bible, as a document, is inerrently factual.  For us, there is a difference between truth and fact.  Is it a fact that God created the universe in six 24-hour Earth days?  Most of us would say probably not.  Does the creation story in Genesis speak deep truth about God’s extraordinary power, God’s desire for relationship, and the inherent goodness of creation?  Absolutely.
• “Church people reject the teachings of science and believe in things that are just plain not true.”  Again, for the vast majority of Episcopalians, there is no inherent disconnection between science and faith.  We do accept the teachings of science, and we share its investigational ethos.  We see God revealed in the astonishing diversity and beauty of creation; and we wonder and wrestle when the natural world and human acts call religious claims into question.  That wrestling, that conversation, expands our understanding of God rather than shutting the door to science.
• “Churches are too political.”  Yes, many are.  At St. Andrew’s, we don’t tell people how to vote or what political party is closer to “God’s side.”  We do believe our faith shapes our responses to policy issues.  Every time someone is baptized, we remind ourselves that we’re committed to loving our neighbors as ourselves and to striving for justice, peace, and respect for every human being.  But we’re also humble enough to know that no person, no party, and no news channel has the right answer to every question.  Again, we find God’s purposes and preferences emerging through dialogue and conversation.
• “Churches lack the courage to speak on important issues.”  Yes, that, too, is sometimes true.  For Episcopalians, it’s the shadow side of the last response.  Because we recognize that God doesn’t have a political party and that every voice around the table can offer insight into God’s purposes, we sometimes err on the side of being too quiet when taking a stand might alienate some of the people whose voices we want to keep hearing.  It’s part of the ongoing self-examination, and repentance, to which Jesus calls the church.

1.  Barna, George, and David Kinnaman.  Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them.  Tyndale, 2014.

2.  Barna Group.  Kansas City KS-MO City Report 2015, With Comparative Data From the Midwest Region.  Available for purchase from Barna.  2014-2015.

Being More of Who We Are

[Sermon from Sunday, Feb. 15.  Part 5, the final installment, in a sermon series, "Treasures Old and New," about my sabbatical in the fall of 2014.]

Hello, I’d like to introduce myself.  I’m Father John; nice to meet you.  And several years ago, that’s about the last way I would have imagined introducing myself – as a “father,” in either sense of that word. 

As a young man, I’d set rather limited boundaries around who I thought I was – a student, a writer and editor, someone who really valued having all his ducks in a row.  Until Ann and I got together, I couldn’t see myself ever having children because of how disruptive it would have been (it’s amazing how finding the right person can change things).  I believed I didn’t have the capacity to be a good parent – particularly, the ability to sacrifice in the way parenthood demands.  Every parent in this room knows what I’m talking about.  That baby comes, and all of a sudden, almost nothing’s about you anymore.

Similarly, as a young man, I had a rather narrow sense of what being a person of faith might mean for me.  I’d grown up as an Episcopalian; I went to church from time to time; I was basically a nice guy – I thought that pretty much covered it.  After Ann and I got married, I joined the choir at our church in Iowa City.  When we moved back to the Kansas City area, I got more involved, editing the newsletter, going to Bible study, being a lector, singing in that choir.  I even found myself on the stewardship committee – surely that’s enough, right God?  Pesky deity.  It seemed there was always more in me that God was trying to reveal.

So now, I find myself as “Father” John, in both senses of that word.  And it fits.  I know it fits.  It’s the identity God had in mind for me to live into.  All along the way, God kept asking me to be a little more of who I was.

Our readings this morning tell a similar story.  In the first one, the prophet Elijah gets the spotlight, with a chariot of fire taking him up to heaven.  But I think his deputy, Elisha, is the real focus of today’s reading.  As Elisha is about to take the mantle of prophetic leadership, his master asks him, “What can I do for you?”  And Elisha says, “Let me inherit a double share of your spirit” (2 Kings 2:9) – let me be even more of who I am. 

And in the Gospel reading, this incredible story of the Transfiguration, Jesus shows his followers who he truly is, God’s own Son, so they can begin to see who they might truly be.  To get this, you have to connect today’s story with what comes before it.  On the mountain of transfiguration, as Jesus talks with Moses and Elijah, and as Peter stumbles over himself to say something meaningful, suddenly the voice of God booms from the cloud, proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!”  Of course, Jesus hasn’t said anything, at least nothing we can hear.  But before this story, he has a lot to say.  Peter declares that Jesus is the messiah, and Jesus tells him, “Yes, that’s right” – and it does mean “glory,” but not the way you’re thinking.  It means sacrifice, and rejection, and death on a cross – and then it means rising again in glory to rule at God’s right hand.  And here’s the kicker, for disciples then and now:  That same path is yours, too.  I’m calling you to servant leadership, Jesus says.  I’m calling you to empty yourselves and give yourselves away.  You’ve left everything to follow me, Jesus says.  You’re answering the call, and that’s great – but it’s only the beginning.  To take your places with me in God’s kingdom, Jesus says, be more of who you are.

The reading from 1 Corinthians makes it clear:  We are not here to proclaim ourselves and our particular agendas.  We proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as servants for his sake.  And as we do, the light of Christ shines through us for the people around us.  We bear that light, sparked by the Spirit in baptism, fanned to flame through faith.  We bear Christ’s light for the purpose of letting it shine – for our families and friends, our city, and our world.  You may have trouble seeing yourself that way, as a bearer of divine light.  But you are.  We are.  And when we shine it, we become even more of who we are.

I saw that in stop after stop of my sabbatical journey, and I want to share one last example with you today, as this sabbatical sermon series comes to a close.  It ends where our journey began, in Boston – the first place Ann and I visited this fall.  The church I studied there is the Cathedral of St. Paul downtown, looking out on Boston Common.  If you’ve been there, you know it’s a busy area, with all sorts and conditions of people walking by, day in and day out. Business leaders and students, homeless people and professionals, people from every nation under the sun.  So it’s no surprise the cathedral calls itself “a house of prayer for all”  – and it’s been that way since 1912, when the cathedral intentionally opened its doors wide to poor people struggling in downtown Boston.

The cathedral has four worshiping communities.  The one I went to study, ostensibly, is called The Crossing.  It’s a community of mostly younger adults who live or work in downtown, people whom the existing cathedral wasn’t reaching so well.  It’s also church from the bottom up, following a model of community organizing rather than starting with cool, flashy worship and hoping people come.  The founders of The Crossing went into that work intentionally, building connections with spiritual pilgrims in downtown, getting to know them, connecting them into networks of folks with common interests.  They found common passions and a desire to make a difference in their city and their world.  They studied together and talked together and ate and drank together, meeting their hunger with Christian spirituality, community service, and margaritas.  Eventually, they began worshiping together, and now the weekly service involves about 30 or so.  The bottom-up nature of The Crossing is a huge part of its identity.  Isaac Everett, one of the founders, puts it like this: “The Crossing would rather have D+ prayers written by someone we know and love, rather than A+ prayers we got off the Internet.” 

The Crossing’s story is fascinating, but it’s even more so in the context of the larger cathedral community.  In addition to The Crossing, there’s a worshiping community of homeless people on Boston Common and a worshiping community of first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants.  And the “traditional” Sunday-morning community is itself a study in being “a house of prayer for all.”  Because the people are diverse, the cathedral has made Sunday-morning worship diverse, too, using music and prayers from around the world and across the Anglican Communion. 

But the dean, Jep Streit, realized there was one group of people the worship almost certainly wasn’t reaching so well:  traditional Episcopalians.  As it happened, God provided an opportunity to open that door, too.  A nearby Episcopal congregation was shrinking and really could no longer sustain itself – St. John’s, one of the few high-church, Anglo-Catholic parishes in Boston.  So the dean saw an opportunity:  Merge the congregations, sell St. John’s building, and incorporate some of its high-church richness into the cathedral’s worship.  Here’s how Jep explained it to me:  “The people of St. John’s are faithful, and they have things to teach us about liturgy.  What we all say is that the new community formed from our merger will be different from the cathedral and different from St. John’s – and it will be better.”

This kind of an approach to church – one that values the D+ prayers of The Crossing as highly as a precise Anglo-Catholic mass – this kind of a church could only happen because the DNA was there.  The cathedral already was “a house of prayer for all.”  As the congregation morphs and grows, that identity remains the same.  Only the sights and sounds (and smells) of the worship are different.

So, what does all this mean for us, as we come to the end of this Epiphany season and the end of this sermon series, to the beginning of Lent this Wednesday and the beginning of our Gather & Grow initiative?  In each of the parishes I’ve told you about from the sabbatical, we’ve seen congregations living in the “both/and” of inherited church and new expressions of church together.  But among the things common to all of them is this:  Their expressions of church, no matter the style, are true to their DNA.  If you looked at the glorious worship in the abbey in Tewkesbury, England, and its Celebrate! community in a housing project, you’d see the same church.  If you looked at the colonial parishes in Maryland with their box pews and the homey, intimate gathering of kids and grownups in an art studio, you’d see the same church.  Like individuals, churches can’t be something they’re not, and they should not try to be.  But just like individuals – and like a certain hesitant father you know – churches can be more than they currently are.  Not different, not foreign, but mature.  As we grow up, the Holy Spirit keeps working with us – thanks be to God – to help us be more of who we are.

For us as a congregation, that’s what Gather & Grow is all about – both in terms of ministry and in terms of improving our facilities.  And Lent is a good time for us to begin this walk together.  In Lent, we focus on our spiritual journey, looking within us and around us to, asking God to work on us and form us more and more into the full stature of Christ.  Typically, that journey takes a twisting path of self-discovery, leading us through the same territory the disciples traipsed, a land of self-giving and self-sacrifice.  It’s Jesus’ own path, of course, and we who would follow him shouldn’t be surprised that the path to the glory of the kingdom of God takes us up the hill of Calvary along the way.  Giving ourselves away – that’s how we come to the fullness of who God is making us to be.

Well, for us as St. Andrew’s, our journey is also Jesus’ own path.  We’re hearing his call to reach the people around us, to open our hearts and our doors to the spiritual pilgrims in our community.  It’s not a new call, and it’s one we’ve answered before – beginning in 1913 as a mission outpost in a brand-new neighborhood, building this glorious house of prayer for all, planting a new congregation in south Kansas City in 1957.  It’s true to our identity; it’s in our DNA.  And like each of those missional moments, like all our best moments of following our crucified Lord and King, this one will cost us something.  It will cost us investments that will return blessing upon blessing – many, many times over. 

From our own journeys, we know it’s true.  For moms and dads, that crying baby or absent teen costs them sleep, night after night; but the servant leadership of parenthood is the most deeply formative journey they’ll ever take.  And for us as disciples, the journey toward the glory of God that we see in the face of Jesus Christ – it’s a journey up rough and challenging terrain.  The path up the mountain of our transfiguration is marked by small crosses all along the way.  But that’s the way up the grandest mountain, the journey of our ultimate fulfillment – the path of becoming more and more of who we truly are.

Do Faith

[Sermon from Sunday, Feb. 1.  Part 4 in a sermon series, "Treasures Old and New," about my sabbatical in the fall of 2014.]

In case you couldn’t tell from all the people in uniforms in the procession … we’re celebrating Scout Sunday this morning.  I’m curious – how many of you were Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, that sort of thing?  Not that they’re all the same, but I think it’s fair to say they all develop leadership by planting and nurturing core values in young people, and then giving them the chance to live out those values in the world.  Leaders have to be guided by principles, and they put flesh and bones on those principles by the way they live.  As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. 

So, for you Scouts, I’m going to put you on the spot.  But don’t worry, you know this:  Stand up, all you Scouts, and please tell us the Scout Law:  “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”  Good job.  Now, how about the Scout Oath?  “On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty, to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” 

You Scouts are called to love and serve God, your country, and the people around you, without exception.  Now, you know that.  And you’d probably say you believe that.  And you do things that point to that – like earning merit badges and doing service projects, all the way up to Eagle projects.  But to be the example that a Scout should be – how you live, day to day, has to match what you know and what you say, right?  Because actions speak louder than words.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been preaching about the churches I studied on my sabbatical in the fall.  This week, in the category of “actions speak louder than words,” I want to highlight the congregation I visited in Portland, Oregon – St. Andrew’s.  St. Andrew’s in North Portland was founded in 1895, but in recent decades it fell on hard times.  By 2012, there were literally 15 to 20 people worshiping there on a Sunday, all of them folks who’d been there for decades.  More important, it had developed a reputation, frankly, as a weird little church; the music on Sunday morning was a parishioner playing his accordion for the other 15 people there.  Visitors tended not to stay.  So the bishop had to decide what to do with the place.  Rather than closing it, he sent a missioner with a background in planting a new kind of church, a gathering of spiritual pilgrims in their 20s and 30s.  Her name is Karen Ward, and she’d done that with success in Seattle, at a place called Church of the Apostles.  Karen came to Portland originally looking to plant the same kind of church, but – as often happens – God had other plans.  She found herself called to this weird little church with the accordion.

Well, after more than a century of having had one middle-aged white guy after another as the priest at St. Andrew’s, Karen was different.  She’s young, female, African American, and rarely wears a collar.  And she was known for starting this very unconventional kind of church in her last gig.  So, not surprisingly, the people at St. Andrew’s feared that all this was a sham – that, despite reassurances from her and from the bishop, Karen really just wanted to replace something old with something new. 

Instead, Karen and the parish are finding their way together.  She has gathered a group of young spiritual pilgrims, people from a variety of faith traditions and from no faith tradition – guys with long beards and ear gauges.  They worship with simple, accessible music; they have open space in the service for prayer stations; they make the sermon participatory – many of the same things you’ve heard me describe from the other places I’ve visited.  This “emerging” worship experience happens regularly on Sunday mornings. 

And for their first two years, so has their inherited form of church – minus the accordion.  There was a standard celebration of Holy Eucharist from the Prayer Book, with hymns from the Hymnal and a standard sermon.  That’s how it was when I visited in the fall.  I e-mailed with Karen recently, and apparently things have changed a bit, at least for now.  After two years of worshiping separately, the long-term members and newer members have chosen to worship together, at least for a time, using a blended approach.  But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they go back to the two-service model – especially since the congregation is growing, including people at both ends of the worship spectrum.

Why are they growing?  A big part of the reason is that Karen did what she said she’d do when she came.  She brought new life to both worshiping communities there.  Here’s how she described the situation to me.  The church – now called St. Andrew and All Souls, to recognize the new people who’ve come – this church is the only Episcopal presence in all of North Portland, an area of 11 neighborhoods with a lot more working-class folks than the hipster world of Portlandia.  Karen takes it seriously that this congregation is the Episcopal Church in North Portland.  She said, “I'm not against traditional masses.  I actually think we need to have a traditional mass.  We’re the only Episcopal Church for these 11 neighborhoods; so if there’s going to be traditional worship, it’s going to be us doing it.  To have a diverse parish, you have to have traditional worship, too.” 

But even more important, Karen has worked hard to bring church members together around core principles.  One is the principle that worship unites us, no matter how we might prefer it individually. 

But another core principle uniting these diverse groups is their commitment to share God’s love with the people around them.  For decades, St. Andrew’s has had a food pantry and a small community theater group performing in its basement.  So it’s deep in the congregation’s DNA to reach and serve people in their community.  So now, they’re building on that.  Rather than just hosting a theater group, they want to offer a series of arts programs, particularly to serve families and kids nearby – families that can’t afford cool, trendy arts camps.  They’re working to open a coffee shop in an old building the parish owns and use the proceeds to support the arts program and the food pantry.  And they want to expand the pantry to offer counseling and basic health services, too.  Loving people, serving people, extending the branches of God’s kingdom – that’s a big part of who St. Andrew’s has been forever and who it still is now.  People there were afraid that a different kind of priest and different sorts and conditions of members would kill the church they’d known and loved.  Instead, Karen has been committed to rejuvenating the heart that was already there.

Maybe most important, Karen is uniting the congregation by leading them to deepen their commitment to God, each other, and their church.  They’re developing a rule of life for their congregation – a statement of what it means, and what it looks like, to be a member.  It identifies the core values that unite them in their journey, values like relationship, welcome, hospitality, and feeding people.  And it describes spiritual practices that help them live out those values, practices like regular worship, prayer, giving, study, and service.  It’s about moving beyond knowing what a Christian is supposed to do, and into the practice of intentionally living a Christian life – the day-to-day practice of love for God, one another, and the people around us.  As St. Paul says in the reading this morning, “We know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’”  But that’s not enough, Paul would say.  “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1)  And not just any love, not just feeling warm and fuzzy about something, but the love of Jesus himself, agape – love that opens our hearts and our lives for the sake of others.

Here, at our St. Andrew’s, the scale may be different, and the context may be different; but the call for us is the same.  As I said last week, it’s about both deepening our roots and extending our branches.  God wants us to deepen our roots as a congregation by strengthening the ways of doing church that have been our foundation for decades, worshiping in a way that links us with Christians across time and space, this amazing entryway into the transcendent, majestic presence of God.  And it’s also about deepening our roots as individual disciples, committing ourselves to intentional faithfulness, to a rule of life.  It’s about committing ourselves to live the covenant of baptism, a relationship among ourselves, God, this faith community, and the world.  It’s about committing ourselves to worship and pray, to repent from sin, to proclaim good news, to love our neighbors, to strive for peace and justice – to work, pray, and give for the spread of the kingdom of God, as the Catechism puts it.  That’s what unifies us, what makes us one body gathered within this rich, crazy, diverse, big tent.

And with those deep roots, we can extend our branches to the community God asks us to love.  It’s what I was describing at the Annual Meeting last week, about the ministries of our Gather & Grow initiative.  We’ll strengthen worship and formation; we’ll connect with more young people, like these Scouts, and their families; we’ll support entrepreneurs whose work builds justice and peace; and we’ll open our facility more intentionally to people nearby and build relationships with them.  Through these manifestations of God’s mission, we can reach spiritual pilgrims around us and help bring God’s kingdom to life – which is what the Church is here for.

Like St. Andrew and All Souls in Portland, we can’t just ride a long and venerable history and hope that will carry us into a second century.  We’re called not only to be who we’ve been but to be more of who we’re becoming.  We’re called not just to know faith, not even just to talk faith, but to do faith.  Authentic faithfulness – living as Christians in ways that fit us and that change the world – that kind of authentic faithfulness speaks love in the most powerful way. 

As St. Francis said, “Proclaim the Good News at all times; use words when necessary.”  Know the call, and live it out loud.  Root yourself, and extend yourself.  Go deep, and go wide.