A sermon at the Special Convention of the Diocese of Bethlehem, March 1, 2014
Cathedral Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
I was reading blogs on the internet a few weeks ago when I
ran across a post by the Rev. Susan Brown Snook, the rector of the Church of
the Nativity in Scottsdale, Arizona and a member of the Episcopal Church’s
Executive Council—the interim executive body that meets between General
Conventions much like your vestries and our diocesan council. She was blogging
about her experience at the last meeting of that group.
She says,
Each morning at an Executive Council meeting, we begin with prayers and meditation on a Bible passage. At my table last week, during our discussion of one passage, a member said that every time he stands up to preach, or to lead a church group or meeting, he says to himself, “I hope this is about Jesus.”
She tells this story before launching into a description of
all the wonky stuff about process and decisions to help us think about what people
like us are doing at this convention and all the committees and boards that
busy church leaders like you go to. She
says “All the minutiae of budgets, by-laws, and boards – tiresome as [they] can
be, I hope it’s about Jesus. And surely it is. The way we use
our resources, organize ourselves to make decisions, and argue and advocate for
different positions, may be complex. But in the end, if all that politics
helps us to advance the mission of Jesus, it’s all worth it. I
hope....”
One can imagine the Apostle Paul muttering “I hope this is
about Jesus” as he dictated yet one more communique to his troubled and
rancorous congregation in Corinth. After struggling with issues of inclusion in
the body, morality, divisiveness and squabbling, spiritual gifts in a community
where people questioned his authority and his motives, one can almost picture
him throwing up his arms in despair saying “what now?!?” And yet out of this,
he has this truly startling idea that this imperfect, divided, hurting body is
precisely, precisely, the
group of people God has raised up to incarnate and communicate the Gospel of
Jesus Christ in that time and place.
He says that we carry around the glory of the face of God in
Jesus Christ and that we have within us the light that can cast away
darkness…and that we store this glory in simple, ordinary clay jars.
I love that image. Ever been to an antique store? My wife
and I love to go around to find really good antique stores. And when I hear
this passage I have this image of a variety of things that not only look cool
and are fun to hold but also have stories and memories and history that are
both unknown and tangible.And sometimes you will find fine china and sometimes
mug collections with the eighth mug missing a handle. There might be playful cookie
jars that look like cats sitting next to fine crystal. You get the idea. Here
we have the power and light of God that spoke the world into being and changes
hearts…carried around in the most amazing variety of containers, some gorgeous
works of art and some of them cartoon jelly jars.
Paul’s image teaches us that God intentionally chooses to communicates
the salvation of the world and the healing of creation through every day clay
jars likes us. Containers that are easily chipped and easily soiled.
This is completely consistent with what God does in Jesus
Christ, isn’t it? In Jesus we see the fullness of God and the fullness of
humanity brought together in one glorious, ordinary, life-changing, and
everyday package!
So if God knows that God’s glory and light will reside in
such an ordinary package like you and me and the rest of the Church, then how
does God’s expect revealing light, transforming power and healing grace to
reach the rest of humanity? I mean, if we don’t look perfect and grand and have
it together all the time, then how
will God’s saving power possibly become known?
It will require a change of heart. This is what I have
learned, along with the rest of the Standing Committee, over these past seven
months.
We have a lot of work to do, my friends.
We have clergy and laity in deep pain, and at the same time the
towns and cities where we live are filled with people also in deep pain and are
every bit as hungry—craving!—the Gospel we carry around inside of us, we
imperfect crockery of many shapes, styles and sizes.
We are a community with a memory of growth and success and,
yes, with a complicated history. And we are wondering where God is taking us
next.
And we are working out our faith in a culture that is
changing fast and among people are looking for the direction, purpose and
meaning that we hold tantalizingly nearby right here in our hearts, in these
sacraments, in this gathering.
We are a people who yearn for justice and welcome, and we
have been made new by the cross of Christ and adopted into God’s family. We Christians
experience that newness of life in a world that is also experimenting with (and
rebelling against) the possibilities of freedom, inclusion and opportunity from
the Ukraine to Uganda to Arizona to wherever you live. This struggle for
freedom and dignity and hope continues. And everywhere you look Christians are
on both sides of the experiment—some at the forefront of inclusion and others
manning the barricades saying “whoa!”—because we are all, we people of light,
figuring out what it means to be holy, ordinary jars of clay.
We have a lot of work to do.
Bishop Sean is a great guy. I am so grateful that the
Presiding Bishop’s office called Sean and called us on the Standing Committee and
put us together. But I gotta tell ya, when the idea of having a provisional
bishop who would remain a diocesan bishop was first floated, I remember
thinking (if not saying) “what? Are you nuts?”
But when we looked at the wish list that the Standing
Committee created from the input you brought to us last October and that the
clergy helped us created last November… a bishop who would lead
collaboratively, who could help us heal our injuries and rebuild a sense of
trust, who thinks about the church in different ways… I found myself, and I
believe the rest of the Standing Committee, began to say “yeah. Yeah! This
might work!”
When the Rev. Adam Trambley, rector of St. John’s Episcopal
Church way over in Sharon, Pennsylvania heard about what was proposed for his
bishop he said “I thought it was a kind of challenge that was just out of left
field enough and just hard enough that it was probably of God.”
Left field? You think?
What kind of God works like this? Oh, yeah! The kind of God
who puts the eternal glory of the creator of the cosmos into cookie jars.
And he’s right. It won’t be easy. I know that some of you
are tempted to confuse Bishop Sean for a magic bullet. And it is tempting to
kick all of our problems down the road and say “let him fix it.” Well, my
friends, the truth is that with any pastoral leader in community from country
mission to the diocese of Bethlehem, there are many more forces working on him
to become like us than he can, alone, bring to bear on us to become like him.
So we have some things to do. We must get this audit done in
as competent, as expeditious and as transparent a way as we can possibly
muster. We have had a wake-up call and we are not letting up.
And we must work on personnel policies and how we structure
our common life.
We must do the hard, essential pastoral work of listening to
each other, bringing justice and reconciliation to reality in our diocese. We
must hear the truth of our pain and injury and loss, and we must hear the truth
of our giftedness, accomplishments and capacity to heal.
We have an incredible opportunity to heal, to change and to
grow. We are the vessels of God’s grace and love and light and power for our
communities. God has put us where God needs us at the time God needs us.
But for all the skills, tools, technology and processes
available to us. For all the knowledge about organizations and psychology and
liturgy and theology we possess, we chipped coffee cups lack one thing. A
change of heart.
What will get us through this transition will not be the
application of technique by itself….good process is essential, don’t get me
wrong!...but what we need is change of heart.
Now metanoia is
not for wimps. A changed heart requires courage and risk and a big dose of
honesty.
When I was a brand-new priest, I read a novel which has
stayed with me ever since because it illustrates the power of God to change
hearts and the power of a changed heart. The book was Lazarus by Morris West, the third of his so-called ‘Papal Trilogy’.
In this story, an old-fashioned, rigid and legalistic Pope Leo XIV experiences
a conversion. He is converted from seeing his faith as a rule-book and his job
as one who utters pronouncements for the purpose of establishing order to the
realization that the Gospel of Christ is communicated and transforms lives
through love. The drama of the novel is to watch his change of heart and see
how the structures he helped build resist the implications of his insight. As
he recovers from open-heart surgery, he looks over a farm that is also a
community for disabled children at harvest-time:
Suddenly here he was, on a hillside
in Castelli, watching the grape pickers moving up and down the vine-rows,
tossing the fruit into baskets, emptying the baskets into the cart hitched to
the yellow tractor that would haul them to the crushing vats…. The scene was so
lively, so full of human detail, that the Pontiff stood for a long while
contemplating the simple wonder of it—and the bleak futility of much of his own existence. This was where
the people of God were to be found. This was how they were to be found, doing
everyday things to rhythms of a workaday world.[1]
In the novel, the character of the Pope stands in for the
Church. Whenever we are distracted into thinking that our evangelism is only
about improving attendance; when outreach is designed to make us feel better
rather than allow us to be changed by the poor and those we meet; when we use
our resources and time to look inward rather than to give us the tools to
represent Christ in the world, then we have made the mistake of thinking that
our job is to survive and preserve the Church in the world. And when we do this, we are nothing more than empty jars.
Except that God takes empty jars and changes them into arks
of the holy to transform the world.
And so my fellow coffee mugs, as we enter Lent, the season of changing hearts, take a moment to hear again the words in the Ash Wednesday liturgy that remind us that God "desires not the death of sinners but rather that they may turn from their wickedness and live."
Turn and live.
Changed hearts.
Holy hearts,
In simple containers living the love of God every day.
Turn and live.
Changed hearts.
Holy hearts,
In simple containers living the love of God every day.
1 comment:
Beautiful, Andrew. This is a wonderful posting. Thank you!
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