Let's Dance

[Sermon from Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015]

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only principal feast of the Church that’s devoted to a theological doctrine rather than the life of Jesus and his followers.  As your three priests talked about this coming feast day and how we would manage it homiletically, Fr. Marcus looked at me and said, “Don’t we have a seminarian somewhere we could make preach that Sunday?”  It’s a notoriously awful day to draw the short straw as the preacher because, frankly, you’re set up to fail from the start.  The whole point of the Trinity as a model for understanding God is that God can’t be understood in human terms.  So, Mr. Preacher, good luck with that.

Our readings this morning do a great job of illustrating God’s incomprehensible reality.  This God is the transcendent, majestic sovereign of the universe, attended by flying serpents and towering above the holy Temple, filling the whole place with just the outer hem of a regal robe.  This God’s voice thunders, breaking the cedar trees and making the giant oak trees writhe.  And – not “but,” but “and” – this God adopts us as beloved children, the Holy Spirit joining with our own spirits in an eternal bond, giving us the love of a parent from which nothing can separate us.  And, unbelievably, that love comes to dwell among us in Jesus, spending time with everyone from criminals to doctors of the law like Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading.  In his interview with Jesus, we hear Nicodemus, a brilliant man, mystified by the paradox that we must be born not just once but twice, not just of human parents but of God – the God who loves us deeply enough to die that we may live, defeating death so that we “may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). 

Frankly, all this makes little sense from a human perspective.  Everything about God is paradoxical.  As the theologian and church pioneer Ian Mobsby says, we know “God through mystical encounter rather than knowing God as a set of objectified facts.”¹  A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Marcus was preaching about dogma and its tendency to undercut the mystery that is God; and he lamented that we often try to explain rather than encounter the divine, that we rely on prose rather than poetry to know God.  We face that temptation especially on this Sunday, when the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can quickly deteriorate into a nonsensical numbers game – “three in one and one in three” and all that.  It doesn’t usually work too well to say “I love you” with an equation.

Well, the ancient Greek theologians knew how to talk about the triune God in appropriately mysterious terms.  To describe how the three separate persons of the Trinity interrelate, they used the term perichoresis.  If you break that word down, it means distinguishable parts making up a whole, and relating to each other dynamically and in close proximity.²  OK, picture that: distinguishable parts making up a whole, and relating to each other dynamically and in close proximity. In other words, it means a dance.  As Ian Mobsby says, perichoresis tries to capture the reality that “the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer are interpenetrative, embracing and permeating each other” in a “profound sense of fellowship.”³ 

Well, if that doesn’t make things immediately clear for you, try this:  Experiencing the Trinity is sort of like watching an old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie.  You know you’re seeing something more than simply two individuals taking predetermined steps at a predetermined pace.  It isn’t just scripted movement; it’s dancing – partners knowing where each other plans to go but making the steps new each time.  By the same token, the Holy Trinity isn’t a mathematical formula for God, some complex equation to explain everything.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a poem, a poem that narrates a dance. 

So, this morning, I want to preach you a poem.  You’ll find it in the bulletin this morning, and you can follow along if you’re someone who likes to see words on paper along with hearing words out loud.  Or just close your eyes and listen – whatever works best for you. 

Now, for those of you who think you don’t like poetry, please hang in there and at least give me a minute or two before you check out.  I used to think I didn’t like poetry either.  For those of us who are wired to be practically minded, people who like to get things done – we may see poetry at best as a nice diversion, or at worst as an incomprehensible jumble.  Maybe I’ll be guilty of a jumble, too, but at least hear me out.  If nothing else, it means the sermon is shorter than usual – two Sundays in a row!  That’s worth something.

Anyway, here you go, in honor of this Trinity Sunday. 

The Dance

God strode across time and space together

And said, “Let’s dance.”  Light and darkness

Split as Trinity cut a rug, planets spinning,

Cells dividing, fish swimming, bugs creeping,

Birds flying, cattle grazing.  Then God said,

“Let’s change the steps and make one more

Like Us.”  So dust and clay coalesced.  And

Whispering into Adam’s ear, God took his

Hand in theirs and said, “Dance with us.”

For no point but love, God then looked to

The lost and said, “Who will go for us?”

Maybe wandering and dancing aren’t so different

After all.  So Israel went forth on stumbling feet,

Learning steps as they took them, love on the

Hoof.  Some steps were true, God’s own;

Some they squandered, cheapened to

Base marches soaked in blood, or trampling

Those who’d fallen down, or traipsing off

In exile.  Shackles don’t allow much

Dancing; and far away, you forget the steps.

So God said, “Let’s go home, and try again.”

But the dance floor was no longer theirs, and

Foreign feet got tangled in the mix.  So

God said, “Let’s dance Redemption’s

Steps.  We’ll squirm cold in a manger,

Slice strong hands on chisels and knives,

Wander the countryside and drink with

Outcasts, high-tail it from the cops until

The time is right.  And all the while,” God said,

“We will hold you.  You have to hug a child

A hundred times for every tear she sheds.  So

We will sweep you up in open arms, even though

You nail them down.  No matter.  In morning’s

Light, we’ll dance again and welcome you

Back in our circle, too, trampling Satan down

With the Spirit’s soft shoe.”  So Redeeming God

Stepped aside as Sustainer took the lead.  This

Dance gets a little crazy sometimes – twists

And turns above the ground, fire juggling fire.

“Come on in,” Sustainer says, “the water’s

Fine” – and from baptism’s pool we emerge,

Born of water and of Spirit, bound in light embrace

That lets us improvise our steps yet never

Lets us go.  We are dancers, every one,

Called to trip the light fantastic with the

One and One and One who loves us best.

© John Spicer

1.  Mobsby, Ian.  God Unknown: The Trinity in Contemporary Spirituality and Mission.  London: Canterbury Press Norwich, 2012.  27.
2.  Mobsby, 26.
3.  Mobsby, 27.

The Holy Spirit's Playground

[Sermon from Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015.]

Here’s my holiday-weekend present to you:  A short sermon.  This morning, we’ll baptize 10 new Christians, young people and adults, which is a fabulous time-management challenge to face.  So we all get to benefit from tight preaching this morning.

First, let me say, Happy Memorial Day weekend.  Every year at this time, we honor those who’ve gone before us, traditionally visiting the cemetery to decorate the graves of those we love but see no longer.  Particularly we remember those who died having served this nation, their lives a living sacrifice and sometimes a final gift to their fellow citizens.  The flowers on the graves this Decoration Day remind us, and the world around us, that “life is changed, not ended” (BCP 382) when we die – that those we remember are continuing to live their eternal lives empowered by the same Holy Spirit that empowered the apostles and that empowers our witness to God’s love and Christ’s kingship. 

For we who are the Church, this weekend also brings a different holiday this year, one of the seven most holy days on the Church’s calendar.  Today is Pentecost – the feast 50 days from Easter and 10 days after Jesus’ ascension.  That gap between Ascension and Pentecost always puts me in the shoes of the apostles, that dubious leadership group, who had 10 long days to stare at each other and wonder, “Now what the heck do we do?”  The Book of Acts tells us they took that time to replace the traitor Judas with Matthias and that they were “constantly devoting themselves to prayer” (1:14).  I’ll just bet they were.  I mean, Jesus had promised the disciples he would send the “Advocate,” the “Spirit of truth” that comes from the Father, the one “who will guide you into all truth” (John 15:26;16:13), as we heard in today’s Gospel.  But my hunch is that by about day 3 or 4, the disciples were getting a little nervous about what was next for them.  By day 10, no wonder they were all in a room hiding out from everybody else.

Then came the Jewish festival of Pentecost, with faithful Jews from across the Roman world gathered in Jerusalem.  And as the disciples prayed together, that Holy Spirit literally blew into the room, literally set the disciples on fire like burning bushes with flame that did not consume, and empowered them to speak in other languages – the tongues of the people gathered there in Jerusalem and living throughout the rest of Caesar’s empire.  The disciples had been equipped and inspired to be apostles, which means those who are sent – sent to speak “about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11); sent to tell a story they themselves had lived, the story of resurrection and hope and the vanquishing of the power of sin and death.  They were sent to make God’s kingdom a living, breathing contrast to the kingdom that Caesar thought he ran.

It’s pretty crazy stuff.  For the baptismal candidates and baptismal families, about to celebrate the joy of coming into this movement known as Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church:  Did you know what you were getting yourselves into?  Violent wind rushing through the house, fire resting on you, the Holy Spirit filling you to reveal God’s deeds of power in languages you didn’t know you knew.  All this, and it’s only your first day of being a Christian.  Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Well, I’d like to hazard a guess at what tomorrow may bring – and the next day, and the next.  It is the stunning opportunity for you to be the living, breathing, on-fire presence of God in the world God loves.  Among the many amazing realities wrapped up in the mystery of baptism is this one:  that God chooses to continue incarnating God’s presence in the world, through you.  And me.  And all of us. 

In baptism, we receive that flame and that in-Spiriting breath of God; and thus literally inspired, we can reveal the fruits of the Holy Spirit.  You’ve probably heard these before – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).  All those are great, but another fruit of the Spirit strikes me today, one you don’t find in that list but one that truly makes the kingdom of God come to life.  And that fruit of the Spirit is passion. 

From this glorious, crazy, holy holiday weekend, here’s what I hope you’ll take away:  Your passion can make all the difference.  And it doesn’t matter whether that passion seems more secular than sacred.  Maybe it’s writing poetry; maybe it’s playing golf; maybe it’s reading to children; maybe it’s throwing a great party.  Passion doesn’t have to seem particularly “holy.”  You just have to use it that way.

Memorial Day tells this story of holy passion in its own language, too.  When you think about those who’ve gone before, when you place that flower to decorate that grave, what do you remember?  Well, the person’s passion and how it made life better, how it furthered the purposes of God.  Bring to mind someone you love but see no longer:  “When I think of ________, what I remember is his or her _________.”  If it were my wife’s grandmother I was remembering, I’d fill in that blank with cinnamon rolls.  It’s not that homemade cinnamon rolls are inherently holy (though I could make an argument for that).  But with those homemade cinnamon rolls, Ann’s grandmother poured out the love of God on all kinds of people – saints and scoundrels, within her own family and beyond – regardless of whether they deserved that delicious love, or not.  Cooking for people was her passion because it was her best way to say, “I love you”; and that’s what God had sent her into the world to do.

You, too, are an apostle, sent into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with passion for something.  Use that passion to put your own flesh and bones on the love of God.  Use it to evoke the kingdom of heaven in the corner of the world you’re given to touch.  Use it speak and enact the power of Jesus Christ in a world that still listens to Caesar all too easily.  Your passion is the Holy Spirit’s playground.  Give the Spirit legs, and let it run.

Skin in the Game

[Sermon from May 3, 2015.]

So, we're in the midst of a sermon series titled, “A Critical Conversation: Exploring the Church’s Harsh Reviews.”  And the topic today has sort of a “ripped from the headlines” feel to it, given the events of this week.  Today’s critique is this:  “Churches are either too political or too quiet about real issues.”  In some churches, you end up feeling like you’re hearing a baptized version of a political speech.  In other churches, everyone’s trying so hard not to offend that the proclamation gets watered down to Rodney King’s lament, “Can’t we all just get along?”  From my perspective, neither extreme is helpful – and especially not in a week like this one, when frightening, heartbreaking violence in Baltimore cries out for healing Good News.

You know the story – from this week, but also from too many weeks before.  A young black man dies at the hands of police.  Days of protest ensue.  After the funeral, angry people gather in the streets.  Peaceful exercise of the freedom to assemble for a redress of grievances turns into violence, burning, and looting.  Police officers are injured; people on the streets are arrested; businesses go up in flames in the neighborhoods that can least afford the devastation.  On these facts, probably most people can agree.

Now, let’s hit the “pause” button and step outside this sermon for a moment.  I can almost hear the voice of the color commentator from the booth, reporting on the action here at St. Andrew’s this morning.  “So, Jim, which direction will Fr. John go?  Will he turn this sermon political, or will he go for, ‘Can’t we all just get along?’” 

We’ve watched enough news to know there are a couple of competing narratives for incidents like this.  On one side are the commentators who see Freddie Gray’s death as the most recent in a series of events showing that, in this culture, black lives don’t matter.  This side will describe police treatment of African Americans as the voting rights of this decade, the next great arena in the struggle for freedom that’s been waged for 400 years now.  For this side, the narrative extends to the deepest issues of poor communities – failing schools, deadly violence, absent opportunity.  That’s how one side sees it.  On the other side are the commentators who see Freddie Gray’s death as another in a series of tragic but unrelated events being used by political agitators looking for a fight, as well as “thugs” looking for an excuse to loot and burn drug stores.  For this side, at least part of the narrative is honest confusion: “What do these protestors want, anyway?  We can’t know what happened to Freddie Gray until an investigation takes place.  You can’t just burn buildings and throw bricks at police because of one awful, isolated incident.”

So, which side is Fr. John going to take?  Who’s he going to alienate this morning?

Well, let me share a little of my own story with you.  I’m old enough to have begun my career at a time just before a couple of big changes took place in arenas I cared about deeply.  As a young man, I believed American democracy, aided by a free press, represented our society’s best hope.  I came out of college intending to be a journalist, and I worked briefly as a copy editor.  But I got the opportunity to get into government, working as a speech writer for John Ashcroft when he was governor of Missouri.  I could have seen myself as one of those young staffers on The West Wing, fast-walking through the halls of power to improve people’s lives.  But through my own experience in the governor’s office, and having watched the institutions of journalism and politics change drastically over the last few decades, I see little remaining of what I once believed in.  If there ever was a grand narrative of objectivity in journalism, or a grand narrative of the common good in politics, they’re gone, at least for now.  And frankly, I don’t see them coming back anytime soon.

So, since I don’t really trust either journalism or politics much, I’m hesitant to claim the narrative of “one side or the other,” which is the narrative those institutions want to sell us.  And as Fr. Marcus pointed out in a blog post earlier this week, I’m skeptical of religious folks who want to take their particular side in our racial conflict and baptize it with Gospel sound bites.  That’s especially unhelpful when the language they use undermines the one thing about which we can be certain when it comes to the Church – that church is about drawing together, not driving apart.  Church is about healing.  Church is about reconciling.  So when the proclamation of religious people divides us – whether it’s about race and violence, or about economics, or about marriage equality, or about any public policy – then church people have to ask whether we’re speaking for Christ or speaking for ourselves.  Now, I want to be careful to say that speaking about these issues can absolutely be speaking for Christ, if it aligns with the narrative of Jesus and if we approach it with humility.  Where I think we may mistranslate our risen Lord is when we presume that our particular take on the question must be his take on the question.  In my limited experience, I seem to find that just when I think I know what’s “right” in God’s eyes, God tends to sneak around and speak from the other “side,” too.

So, I’m not going to tell you what to think about Freddie Gray’s death, or the violence in Baltimore, or the travesty of Kansas City’s public schools, or the disproportionate rates of incarceration of young black men, or the occurrences of black men dying at the hands of police.  The Holy Spirit will do that work.  What I am asking you to do is to take the risk to enter the conversation and engage with people who are different from you.  I’m asking us to put some skin in the game.

Why?  Because skin in the game is God’s M.O.  Remember what we heard from the First Letter of John:  “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. …  Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. …  [I]f we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” (4:9-12)  Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation; and remember, that word, incarnation, shares the same root as “carnivore.”  Ours is the faith of flesh and bones.  Jesus didn’t just talk about God.  He didn’t just urge people to behave better.  He got into the mess of our world, into relationships with real, broken human beings who were different from him.  He had deep theological conversations with Samaritans, who were out of bounds for Jews.  He hung out with perpetrators of violence and oppression, tax collectors and other criminals.  And he gave himself up to die in order to defeat sin and death – for them.  In Christ, God was love itself, sent to give itself away for those who clearly didn’t deserve it any more than you and I do.  In Christ, God put skin in the game.

“Since God loved us so much,” says First John, “we also ought to love one another” the same way (4:11).  We, too, are sent.  We are sent to put our own skin in the game of reconciliation, healing divisions we see right here in our community.  To accomplish that, I don’t have a program to sell you.  I don’t have a particular piece of legislation I want you to support.  I want you to listen to the Holy Spirit leading your head and your heart and your hands to love someone on the other side of some divide.  And I want you to let that experience change you.  Maybe it’s getting to know a mom from Operation Breakthrough as part of Sister Berta’s Friendship Circles.  Maybe it’s volunteering at Southwest High School, refusing to give up on the kids of this city whose only choice is public school.  Maybe it’s having lunch with homeless and working poor people at the Free Store at Christmastime, hearing their stories and telling them yours.  Maybe it’s volunteering at Gordon Parks School or Benjamin Banneker School.  Maybe it’s not just serving lunch at the Kansas City Community Kitchen but talking and praying with people there.  Maybe it’s hearing local African American leaders speak in our undercroft about The New Jim Crow of incarceration.  Maybe it’s working with our social entrepreneur, Natasha Kirsch, as she builds a new venture to break generational poverty among real, suffering moms and kids in our city.  Here’s an idea: Maybe it’s starting a business on the east side of Troost – how about opening a decent grocery store in a food desert?  Maybe it’s simply coming to United Missionary Baptist Church with Dr. Tom and the choir and Mtr. Anne and me this Wednesday night to worship and celebrate the unity they and we share in Christ.   

My point is this:  The deepest healing will come to the divisions in our city and our nation, not through the eloquence of preachers or the arguments of talking heads or the blaming of every side for its failures and sins.  Our deepest healing will come when our hearts are transformed by being sent to love, being sent to be God’s love in the flesh.

All this is not just a good idea; it’s the promise we make every time we renew our baptismal covenant.  The presider asks, “Will you strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being?”  And we each look God in the eye and say, “I will, with God’s help.”  I don’t know about you, but I find that a very difficult promise to keep.  Because if I’m going to keep it, I have to see injustice.  And I have to be willing to “strive” – actually to do something about racism, for example, rather than throw up my hands and lament the divisions that have been with us ever since people started enslaving other people on these shores.

I will admit to you that crossing boundaries and being sent to love someone you perceive to be different – that can be scary.  Years ago, when I first heard God’s call to serve people in need, I found a time to work at the local food pantry when I could be there by all by myself, stocking shelves, never seeing a client.  It was scary when I went to the Kansas City Community Kitchen to serve lunch for the first time.  It was scary going to Haiti for the first time.  It was scary walking through the metal detectors and into Southwest High School for the first time.  It’s going to be scary preaching on Wednesday at a black Baptist church for the first time.  And you know what?  God sends us anyway, because we bear God’s love, and “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).  Not my love, which is absolutely not perfect, but the love of God.  Agapé.  The love that takes flesh and dwells among us and invests itself fearlessly.

I’ll conclude with a truism:  All politics is local.  That quote is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill, former speaker of the House; but I’ll bet you anything that Jesus Christ said it first.  Because to Jesus, the point isn’t which side shouts the loudest.  To Jesus, the point isn’t winning the argument about who’s to blame.  To Jesus, the point is to love the person in front of you.  To Jesus, the point is stepping into the messiness and the beauty of that person’s world, precisely because it’s different from yours.  To Jesus, the point is having skin in the game God’s given you to play.  Because that deep investment of one faithful heart – your faithful heart – will bring more change than a hundred sermons ever could.

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.