Ready or not, we are sent!

It is early in the Season after Pentecost and already we are hearing in the Gospel about Jesus sending out his disciples in pairs to preach, heal, confront evil, and proclaim Good News. A big job! Representing Jesus, to teach, preach, heal, and cast out evil. So, were they ready? Not in the least!

But this was more than on-the-job training, it is the first expression of the Church going out to the rest of society offering the Good News to a hurting and broken world.

These disciples had been learning from Jesus. Now they were going to go do the work of Jesus… all by themselves…or at least in teams of two!

But were they ready? No way! They often did not understand the fullness of what Jesus taught. Except for whatever they might have learned in their local synagogue or in their households, they were not learned men in the formal sense. They had set aside their regular jobs to follow Jesus and to learn from him. But now it was time for them to live what they learned.

Matthew’s Gospel is showing his community and us what Christian discipleship is all about. Notice the motivation for Jesus’ ministry and his sending: as he traveled around Palestine, he was moved by the people’s need for hope and healing. Matthew says that they were “harassed” and “helpless.”

Compassion means to “walk with someone.” It is something that can be taught, yeah, but it does not come out of one’s head but from the heart. The compassion Jesus felt what in his gut. And it is from this deepfelt concern that he called his disciples to him and sent them out in pairs to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign. He gave them everything they needed to heal, restore, cleanse, and liberate those to whom they were sent. He warned them that there would be resistance as well as welcome. Some people would be angry, even hate them, and chase them out of town. And yet, they were encouraged to endure all this with God’s help.

We’ve all been sent on a similar mission, you know! In our baptisms, and when as adults (or at least as older teens) we publicly affirmed our baptismal vows in front of the Church and a bishop at confirmation or reception… and every time we’ve renewed our baptismal covenant… we’ve promised to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ…,” “to seek and serve Christ loving our neighbors as ourselves…,” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being….” (p. 305, BCP)

So we’ve been sent, just like those first disciples!

But discipleship is not just a job filled with to-do lists and skill sets. It is a life of grace. And just as Jesus chose his twelve disciples, Christ calls us and we follow him. As the disciples were Jesus’ friends and his apprentices, so are we! We are also friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ!

Discipleship always begins with and is rooted in divine love. And we are being called out as the Church, as a community. We don’t walk alone, but we are sent out tougher! Indeed the Greek word for “Church” – “ecclesia” – is composed of the words “ek,” meaning “out,” and “kaleo,” meaning “called.” So to be the Church is to “be called out.”

Being a disciple is living a life, called out to minister in Jesus’ name as his friends and apprentices living under God’s grace and power.

Notice that the call to be a disciple is never about the disciples themselves. Christian discipleship is always about engaging with and living for others. We share what we have been given with others. William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during World War two, once noted that the Church is a unique institution, because it exists specifically for the ones who not already it’s members. The Church is a proclaiming community of disciples—friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ—who in our word and in our actions and in our ethics seek to make a practical, useful difference in the world.

This is why discipleship and mission go hand in hand. You can’t have one with the other. Like the disciples, we learn and we do the work of Jesus.

Of course, disciples don’t just go “out.” They return and share and tell what they have seen and heard and done. They will pray together and learn together and they will care for each other as they learn to  do Christs work both in community and in the world.

Today, in our first lesson, we heard about how this worked when Abram receiving the divine visitors into his home. While Abram generously and compassionately offered the three men food and drink, he also received, even if unexpectedly, blessings from them that would completely change his life—and the life of Sarah his wife, who, after all, did the actual work of hospitality!

This shows us that we cannot give without being open and humble to receive. The Christian life is a a life of offering to others what God has given us, and a life of receiving unfolding layers of grace. Because when we engage with others, Christ encourages us to receive as well. That’s why listen and learn from the people to whom we are sent. Discipleship—living as friends and apprentices of Jesus-- is a life of humility, openness, receiving, learning, listening, and genuine dialogue.

It can be risky to be a follower of Jesus sent into the world. That’s why we don’t do it alone. Jesus sent his students and friends out in pairs for a reason. We need each other. None of us has everything we need to do the work God has given us to do. . inally, our Lord also reminds the twelve that discipleship involves vulnerability. We can be proud of our calling as disciples, but we cannot forget that it is always a risk-taking business. Those who follow Jesus, because they strive for peace and justice, often find themselves in trouble with the powers of the world. Yet, we are never alone.

I heard a story that was told by the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It was the story of a mother who sent her son to the store to buy a loaf of bread and few basics for their lunch and dinner. She gave him some money, gave him a list, and sent him out the door. Well, morning turned into noon which turned into the afternoon and he did not appear. Finally, the boy returned with the groceries and the change from the purchases.

“Where were you?” she asked. “I was so worried!”

“Well,” he said, “as I was walking home, I saw Bobby and his bike was broken, so I helped him fix it.”

“I see,” said the mother, “but you don’t know anything about fixing bikes!”

“No, but I helped him cry about it.”

We are sent by Jesus in to a complex and complicated world. Are you ready? We are given the task of communicating the Gospel to friends and strangers, in familiar places and in new. Do you think we’re ready? I think that God thinks we are… we’re ready right now!

We are called, and given the power, to do everything that Jesus did. We have been given the tools to be present to others, to meet them at the point of their greatest need, to assist them in navigating tough moments, and most of all to simply love and support them. And when we do as Jesus did, even a little bit, we present Jesus’ face, Jesus’ presence, Jesus’ power, Jesus’ love, to a hurting and lonely world. It may only be a hug, or a meal, or ride to the doctor, or a listening moment over lunch or in the break room but these are the moments that communicate Jesus most deeply and most practically, in ways that make a real difference in the lives of harried, distracted, lonely people.

Jesus trusted his followers to do all this and more. They probably didn’t feel ready, but he gave them the power to change lives just the same. And as he did with the twelve, God does with us. God trusts us to learn, live, and do the work of Jesus.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, June 18, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, June 18, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 18, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 18, 2023.

Jesus show us the heart and mind of God

 “What are you, crazy? Are you out of your mind?”

That kind of astonishment just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?

This kind of question always comes when innovation happens. When people do stuff that we just don’t expect. You’ve heard the stories about what they used to say the Wright Brothers, right? “If God wanted man to fly, he’d have given us wings!”­

Or when television replaced radio? Who would want to watch that all day?

Or when someone suggested that we’d all be connected by a network of computers called the internet…that we access the sum of human knowledge—and cute cat pictures—on things that we carry around in our pockets?

If it is outside of our experience, or if we just can’t imagine it, then we automatically think it’s fantastic, impossible, and even a little crazy!

And that’s exactly what happened to Jesus…they thought he was out of his mind!

In today’s Gospel, Jesus has been on a roll. The Gospel of Mark says he's been driving demons and healing people right and left.  He says that God’s Kingdom is here right now! On the way, Jesus has become so wildly popular with the crowds that it was hard for him to enter the towns and, by today's passage, even to find time to grab a bite to eat.

Jesus is on a roll.

But is he also a little crazy? Has all this success gone to his head?

His family is worried, perhaps a little embarrassed, and afraid that Jesus might have gone over the top. They want to bring him home for some rest, some home cooking, and a little quiet.

Of course, there were detractors who said that Jesus is really doing the devil’s work! Some religious officials from the home office in Jerusalem pay a visit and conclude that Jesus is not simply crazy, he's possessed! They say that the only reason he can cast out demons is because—wait for it—he has one of the chief demons inside him!

So, which is it? Has Jesus gone over the edge? Is he evil disguised as good? How has Jesus' ministry of preaching, teaching and healing created such controversy?

The truth is that Jesus is so totally what the religious authorities don't expect that they have absolutely no idea what to make of him.

In today’s parlance, we might say Jesus was being a “disruptive innovator.” That he is disrupting the religious system the way that Uber was supposed to have disrupted the taxi business or that the PC disrupted the typewriter business. But the problem with disruption theory is that people think that if you break enough dishes someone will eventually invent the paper plate… they break things just because they can—and hope for the best!

That’s not what’s happening here. Sure, Jesus is announcing a new vision of God and introducing a new way of relating to God, but instead of simply replacing the old with something new, Jesus is calling us back to the heart of the whole divine enterprise in the first place!

At the heart of Jesus’ vision is the love of God. Jesus’ says God’s Kingdom rests on God’s desire for the health and healing of all God's creation, that God stands both with us and for us. Jesus is showing us that God’s love is there for all of us – no matter who we are or where we are from.

So, when Jesus heals and casts out demons and sits with people who are considered sinners, he shows us what God is doing. And when Jesus confronts unclean spirits; heals diseases of mind, body and spirit; reconciles people to their community; comforts the brokenhearted and the lost; and stands up to power that creates injustice, it feels like a bolt out of the blue because it’s like nothing that any of us expects.

That’s why when we first see Jesus—or we meet someone who has taken Jesus into their lives—our first impulse is to ask “What? Are you out of your mind?”

Why is that? Well, for one thing, we too often make religion into something that regulates our relationship with God, instead of it being our loving response to a loving God who loves us first.

Religion offers us a way to structure our thinking and relationship about God and how we make meaning out of the world we live in. Our liturgy and scripture and tradition all give us forms by which we express our grateful response to all of God's activity. These are all good things.

The trouble arises when we get it backwards: when our faith stops being a framework that facilitates our relationship, but instead becomes a way for us to manage and control God. This is the thing I hear over and over again from people who tell me that they are “spiritual but not religious.” They do not want their spirituality to become a strait jacket for themselves or God.

This is the predicament that the Scribes find themselves in today's story. It is not that their way of relating to God is wrong—they are, in fact, part of a rich tradition of faithful service to God and God’s people. It is just that Jesus wasn’t what they expected. They were so used to the way things are, that they forgot how things can be. And that can happen to any of us!

Jesus reminds them that the Law is there to help people love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as deeply. He reminds us that loving God is more than simply good behavior; it is abundant, joy-filled living. When Jesus heals, even on the Sabbath, when he welcomes everyone, banishes unclean spirits, and brings the sick back to health, Jesus points us to a God who is lavishly merciful, unpredictably generous, and uncontrollably gracious.

Jesus points us to God who is bringing together people who are bound not by family, tradition, or even religious or national affiliation, but who are bound together in seeking God and living in the fullness of life in Christ.

And while it might sound that way at first, it’s not crazy at all.

Some said Jesus was out of his mind; in reality, Jesus was then and is now showing us the mind and heart of God; inviting all of us to be of the same mind and same Spirit in a new family as his sisters and brothers.

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A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 5B-1), June 6, 2021

Given at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida

Here is a video of the sermon.

Here is a video of the entire liturgy.

The program may be found here.

Who are we that we might hinder God?

Peter meets Cornelius

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

Peter was in trouble. He was being called on the carpet. He had to report to the home office and they were not happy. He had a lot to answer for.

Actually, I suspect Peter was pretty clueless as to how much trouble he was in. I imagine that instead he was downright giddy with excitement when he went home to report to the church leaders in Jerusalem what had gone on in Joppa. He was probably feeling somewhat mystified but at the same time excited by what he had witnessed.

So, he was probably just a tad started when he walked into Jerusalem and was immediately met with condemnation.

So, you ask, what exactly had Peter done?

He went from Joppa to another city called Caesarea and he sat and ate with a big-time Roman official named Cornelius and his household. This was the crime: Peter, a Jew ate with Gentiles and they treated each other as equals.

It gets worse. He not only told them all about the crucified and risen Jesus and the Good News of the Gospel, but then he went and baptized them!

Yup. It’s that bad. Peter treated these Gentiles as equals and welcomed into the church uncircumcised people! Can you imagine?!?

News travels faster than travel itself, and so the Christians in Jerusalem—all of them Jews because at that moment in the Church’s life, Christianity was still a mainly Jewish phenomenon—had already heard about Peter’s transgression and they were not happy.

So, before Peter can say “Guys! You won’t believe what just happened!” they are in his face. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” they demanded.

Peter takes them through the whole story step by step.

Now before you start thinking that is really inside-baseball stuff, let me tell how important this is: Luke takes the time and the parchment to recount nearly word for word everything that he had written in the previous chapter of Acts. How Peter had a vision (three times!) of God spreading a bounty of non-kosher animals in front of him and telling him to eat. When Peter refuses to eat anything unclean, God says (three times!) “What God has made clean, you shall not call profane.”

Then Peter describes the knock on the door, and the three men at his door who said they had a vision and were sent to fetch him. Peter talks about how he and some other Christians—all Jews, remember—went to Cornelius’ home. There Peter preaches his famous “Truly, I see God shows no partiality” sermon that we hear every Easter morning. Then, to Peter’s complete surprise, these folks break into the same tongue-speaking ecstasy that he himself experienced on Pentecost. Without hesitation, he baptizes them on the spot.

That’s why he was called on the carpet! That's why he was in trouble!

Peter said to his friends “I remembered what Jesus said: ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’” He goes on: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

Who was I that I could hinder God?

Peter’s friends were silent. Then it dawns on them that God has given to Gentiles the same repentance, the same new life, and the same spiritual gifts that they themselves had known!

This changes everything! We would not be here now, sitting here as Jesus’ friends and apprentices around this altar, if it were not for what Peter did.

Peter is not like Paul. Peter is not an ideas kind of person. He runs on experience, and feelings, and he can be impulsive. He wants to do the right thing, and can be as brave as a lion, but he is also easily frightened…when he is confronted with contradiction, he usually folds under pressure.

But not today! 

Peter knows what it means to deny a friend. He did that once, on that awful night when Jesus was arrested before he was crucified, so he was not going there again! I’ll bet his knees were knocking when he started to tell his friends in Jerusalem what happened in Caesarea—but he did not fold and he did not deny his new friends!

God told me three times not to call profane what God made clean.

God told me to accept three visitors and not to make a distinction between “them and us.”

I saw that God gave them the same gift he gave to us!

Who was I, Peter asks, that I could hinder God?

Good question! We have a tendency to do that, don’t we? Hinder God. With our fear or our certainty...especially when the certainty is hiding the fear. Peter’s change of heart and mind was not the last time that we as a community would struggle with that what it means to draw all people into union with God and each other in Jesus Christ.

Church's like ours used to have separate seating for black and white people. Sundays are still the most segregated day of the week. Some traditions keep men and women apart. We used to veil women and tell them that their only ministries were in the kitchen or in the laundry or in the nursery.. We used to tell gay and lesbian Christians that they weren't Christian enough. And in many places we still do. And we have lots of new, creative ways to tell people how they can and cannot follow Jesus. We still find ways to call profane what God has made clean. 

But who are we that we could hinder God?

We are in a world that is as hungry for God as ever. We are in a world that is starving for justice. We are in a world that is desperate for peace and meaning. This is no time for a conditional, “yeah, but” gospel. Who are we that we could hinder God?

In today’s Gospel we hear how, at the last supper, Jesus gave us a new commandment. One that will re-frame and bring into focus all those other commandments. He said, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, that you love one another.”

This is how everyone will know that we are Jesus’ disciples: that we love one another.

How we love one another will tell people that we are Jesus’ friends and his apprentices.

That means that how we deal with each other when the chips are down is as much, or more important than how we are when things are going great.

That means that will welcome whomever God sends us.

We will choose to feed the hungry and care for the addicted and the poor.

We will stick with each other especially when things are hard and when we don’t agree.

We will give each other room and allow each other room to grow and to experience grace.

We will refrain from digging in our heels and give ourselves the right to be wrong.

We will share sacramental living through all of life’s ups and downs.

Who are we, after all, to hinder God? Instead we choose to love one another as Christ loved us—then we’ll discover along with Peter, his old and new friends learned that God, what St. John the Divine saw in Revelation, that God is making all things new!

A Sermon given on May 19, 2019 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, Pennsylvania

Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35

Jack Chick's mangled witness

Word has come that Jack Chick has died. Maybe you have heard of him, or perhaps read one of his tracts?

From 1964 on, Chick Publications produced little comic style tracts designed to lead a person to Christ in a fire-and-brimstone style. The tightly written and illustrated little vignettes portray a fundamentalist Gospel so stark that even Christianity Today and the Christian Booksellers Association shied away from them as being too harsh and over-simplified.

I first encountered these booklets when I was a teenager in the 1970's. Generally speaking, I found them to be a kind of theological car wreck. Too gruesome to watch, but strangely irresistible. 

They followed me around. Many hours of hospital ministry was spent scooping these (and other) tracts designed to scare the infirm and their loved ones into heaven. I used to keep a bulletin board in my office for such material under the banner "For THIS we had a Reformation?!?"

Every now and then, I will find them left around our parish's soup kitchen, or some kind soul will include them in an unsigned letter designed to correct the theological errors of my preaching or writing. 

My colleague on the Episcopal Cafe, Jon White wrote:

Chick was known for his Chick Tracts; controversial comics rooted in his own fundamentalist Protestant worldview.  His tracts were notoriously anti-Catholic and also attacked Freemasons, Muslims, Jews, and  other groups whose views he deemed contrary to his own evangelical brand of faith.

Chick fell for every religious conspiracy possible; rarely ever relying on actual history or fact...

Los Angeles Magazine reprised a 2003 profile on the news of Mr. Chick's death.

Chick’s most popular book, This Was Your Life!, was published in 1964. At 21 pages, it is a masterpiece of shorthand horror. By the second panel, the Scotch-swilling, ’Vette-driving protagonist has dropped dead of a heart attack. “Review his life!” the Lord commands, and an angel produces a massive CinemaScope screen in the night sky. The man watches scenes from his wasted life, in which he tells filthy stories, leers at blonds (“ummm nice!” he says to himself), and thinks about a ball game in the middle of church.This Was Your Life! created a template—sin, damnation, the possibility of redemption—for scores of future tracts.

The artist’s formula and drawing style have changed little in five decades. When an archivist at the Pasadena Playhouse began rooting through old boxes in the late ’90s, she discovered drawings that he had done in 1948. The single-panel cartoons revealed the same perspiring characters, pop-eyed faces, and 1940s Sunday-comics sensibilities of his current tracts. “He’s not worried about impressing other cartoonists, which is kind of what motivates a lot of cartoonists to pick up their chops a little bit,” says Clowes. “There’s something really interesting about seeing a cartoonist not develop at all.” Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, is less kind. “It makes me despair about America,” says Spiegelman, “that there are so many people who read these things.”

Chick’s choice of medium was not that odd—for the 17th and 18th centuries. He comes from a grand tradition of pamphleteers, writers like Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Paine, who exploited the new technology of movable type to reach the masses in previously unimaginable numbers. Starting in the 1640s, pamphlets about everything from religious reform and phrenology to the injustice of the Stamp Act were everywhere, their authors at the forefront of the world’s first true media boom. In many ways the pamphlets of that era functioned much like today’s Weblogs. Chick, however, has done bloggers one better, finding ways to get his message to places still untouched by the Internet. Missionaries regularly take his tracts into the world’s most isolated regions—and pay Chick for the privilege, at about 14 cents a tract.

Chick's work angered many people, as the comments downstream in The Episcopal Cafe piece illustrates. The Progressive Secular Humanist blog at Patheos was typically unsparing in its criticism of his work, saying: "The comics promoted an extreme conservative Christian message filled with hatred and justified with ignorance."

Anecdotally, at least, I know of as many people driven away from faith in Christ because of these booklets as those drawn towards Him, maybe more. At the very least, it portrays a theology and approach to evangelism as subtle as a sledge hammer breaking up concrete and about as compassionate. 

Christianity Today wrote:

Among comic artists, Chick rose to a level of fascination as one of the bestselling underground publishers in the world. Early news of his death on the site Boing Boing launched Chick’s name as a national trending topic on Twitter on Monday afternoon.

In the late 1990s, a media watchdog site described the secular fascination with Chick: “To some, Chick tracts are American folk art, or even a form of religious pornography, titillating and somewhat dangerous. Chick is the ultimate underground artist: single-minded and self-published, passionately committed to his message without regard for external social forces.”

Chick’s 150-plus tracts center around distinguishing the “saved” from the “lost,” the latter represented by various culture war targets over the years. 

The temptation to schadenfreude is almost irresistible. A lot of people have imagined that Chick has gone straight to hell without passing "Go." These imaginings have been often as cruel as they claimed his tracts were, masking the cruelty as cheap jokes. Like this one:

Over the years, a few Christians have attempted to take on Chick's theology and his narrow view of salvation. Given that the only English Bible he accepted was the King James and his view of the church excluded virtually all other Christian traditions but his how, this could only get one so far. 

It seems to me that maybe the best refutation might come in the form of a little comic book in the style of, well, a Chick Tract. Here is the musing I came up with for a comment I wrote in response to the story on The Episcopal Cafe (full disclosure: I am a member of the Cafe news team):

Personally, and perhaps in response to my own sense of schadenfreude, this is what I imagine might have happened to Jack Chick after his death:

Mr. Chick arrives in heaven and while walking around spots a little booklet on a table and picks it up. Simply drawn and simply written, he is drawn into the story and begins to read.

Titled “Surprise!” the little booklet tells the story of a very religious and zealous man named Jack who, after a lifetime of popularizing a fundamentalist vision of the Gospel, dies and is confronted by God.

In the booklet, we see Jack looking around a wondrous place filled with light. As he enters, he finds the place filled with Catholics who ate “Death Cookies” (along with Orthodox and Coptic Christians, who all look the same anyway), gay couples holding hands, Muslims, Jews, kids who bailed on Sunday school to play Dungeons and Dragons, and even run of the mill agnostics. He looks over and sees Mother Theresa and Ghandi chatting while elsewhere the Pope and Charles Darwin are taking a walk, admiring the view. 

Jack is startled and confused, and asks a passing angel if this is really heaven.Without a word, the angel accompanies Jack to God’s throne where he will receive final judgment.

In the next frame, we see a magnificent but faceless person sitting on the throne drenched in blinding life. The One on the throne begins to describe to Jack that Christ died once for all while we all sinners (Romans 5:6-8) and all along it was God’s will that all God’s sheep would come to the shepherd (John 10:16), even the ones who do not know God’s voice. God tells him that there is no law against a holy life but there are clear signs of holy living for all to see (Galatians 5:22-26). Jack will learn that God desires mercy not sacrifice (Matthew 12:7), love over judgment (Luke 6:37) and wants us do justice and walk with God (Micah 6:8). Finally, in a thunderous voice, God tells Jack that he will be judged according to how he met Christ in the hungry, the naked, the outcast, and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46).

As Jack falls to his knees, shocked at what he has learned, tormented by his failure to heed God’s word, and fearful that he might be cast into eternal torment, he looks up to find Jesus helping him to his feet and welcoming him into a Kingdom more glorious…and more populated…than Jack ever imagined.

In my imagination, I see Mr. Chick finishing the booklet, and looking around, as if for the first time, comprehending the love that drew him in the first place.

At least, that is my prayer.

For those who think that I am being too easy on a person who spewed such hatred and who so badly misrepresented the Gospel to so many, all I can say is that I am mindful of the various ways that I have mangled my own witness in my lifetime. The fact that Chick's reach has outstripped my own doesn't absolve me of the call to humility in the face of the call to serve at once as an messenger of the Good News and as an ambassador of reconciliation. 

Fish stories and other Gospel tales

My brother and me at Camp...at the helm of the trusty Evinrude. 

A sermon for Evensong on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at RSCMA King's College Course at St. Stephen's Pro-Cathedral in Wilkes Barre, PA. 

Updated. You know what a fish story is, right? Sure it's a story told by people who fish. But a lot goes into a good fish story. A good fish story has to be a little, well, tall (that fish was this big!…or maybe this big!). It has to be a little outlandish (like the time I once shot a bear in my pajamas…and what the bear was doing in my pajamas, I’ll never know). Above all, a good fish story has to be well told… and it does not really matter if the fish in the story got away or was caught. 

Like the time my dad caught a bass with a canoe. You mean “in a canoe,” right? No, with a canoe. “You can’t catch a bass with a canoe!” you say.

Well, my dad did.

My brother and sister-in-law share a place on a lake in Vermont which is owned by her extended family, and is called “Camp.” Once they invited my parents to come to Camp for a week, and during their stay my dad and my brother got in the canoe to go fishing. It is one of those long 10 foot aluminum jobbers with wood slats for a floor. And they were fishing off the point where the Camp is located. 

Pop snagged a small mouth bass. And it was beaut, lemme tell ya! And what a fighter! 

So Pop is reeling in this bass and the fish is going this way and that, and down to bottom and up out of the water. Pop shouts for David to bring him the net. So my six foot five inch brother, who was sitting in the stern, stands up and reaches Pop, who is up in the bow, the net. Well, you know the one you’re never supposed to do in a canoe, right? That’s right! Stand up! And so the canoe rocks this way, and then that way. And Pop is shouting for the net while reeling in this bass and my brother is saying “Here it is!” But his foot gets stuck in the slats and he can’t move and as he tries to free his foot to give Pop the canoe turns over. Now the canoe didn’t just tip, it rolled over, 360 degrees. Out into the water David goes. All the gear and the paddles are floating all around the canoe. 

But not Pop! 

He hung on and there he was, sitting in the bow, looking dazed, wet, and grumpy.

Of course, all this commotion got the attention of everyone on shore. And we run out to edge of the lake to see David swimming towards Camp towing the canoe—which is now a ten foot floating bathtub—with my Dad sitting in the bow. And when they came ashore, everyone was making a fuss. “Are you okay? What happened?” 

Now my Pop, was a Deacon of the Church and man of great dignity. And in the midst of all the chaos, he uttered these immortal words: “Forget about me. Net the fish!”

Because swimming around inside the canoe was a good sized small-mouth bass. 

And that is how my dad caught a fish with a canoe.

The Bible is full of fish stories. And perhaps the fishiest of them all is the story of Jonah and the whale. Okay. It wasn’t a whale. He was swallowed by a big fish.

Hearing that story again tonight, I wonder. If people have fish stories, I wonder if fish have people stories?

I can imagine a big fish one day talking to his buddies. Let’s call the fish Ichthys. That sounds like a good name, doesn't it? So Ichthys says “I remember the time I caught a man.

“There I was swimming along, and it must have been stormy up there because I see the bottom of this boat going up and down and all these boxes and crates and ropes and things are sinking to the bottom. And while I’m swimming along this man appears right in front of me, and before I knew it “gulp!” I swallowed him!”

“Eww!” his friends say. “Yuch! What did he taste like?”

“Well, not so good,” Icthys says. “And I have to say he didn’t sit well in my digestion. It moved around and fussed a lot in my stomach. (“Eewwww!”) And noisy! I mean not only did my stomach growl but from inside I could hear him…’Oh, God!’  and ‘I’m sorry! I should have gone to Nineveh instead of Tarshish!” I mean it was non-stop whine, whine, whine!”

“What did you do?”

“So this goes on for three whole days and I finally had enough, so I coughed him up on some beach.”

Alright. So maybe the story of Jonah is a fish story, and we don't really know what the big fish thought of all this. But just because it’s not history doesn’t make it untrue. 

Think about it. How often have you been called by God to do one thing, to be one way, and decided to do the opposite?

And how many times have you been busted and found yourself over your head because of the consequences of your choices … with no way out?

And when you’ve been over your head with no way out…have you ever experienced the most amazing, unexpected, and out-of-the-blue rescue possible?

You see Jonah’s story is not just a fish story. It is the story of God saving Jonah because God had something bigger in mind for him that Jonah himself could imagine.

The Bible is full of fish stories. There is the time Jesus called the disciples who were fishermen and told them they’d be fishing for people! And the time that Jesus calmed the storm from his boat. Or the time he walked on the water and invited Peter to do the same. When Mary Magdalene, whose feast day this is today, ran and told the disciples that she had seen and talked to the Crucified Jesus, raised from the dead, the apostles probably thought that was a fish story too. And it was...just not in the way they expected!
And there was the time, like in tonight’s Gospel, that the Crucified and Risen Jesus showed his friends that life, after meeting the Risen Christ, would never be the same again. They thought that life would go back to normal, but they are catching nothing until they listen to Jesus, put their nets over the other side, and then they have more fish than they can handle. Meeting the Risen Christ is one thing. Doing what he says is something else.

Even Jesus’ disciples had to be reminded that God had bigger things in mind than they could possibly imagine.

Which is why there are lots of fish stories in the Bible and why the most important ones may be closer to home than you think.

I have one more fish story for you. When I was a new priest in my second church, my parish had the habit of sometimes using real, baked bread for communion, but other times we’d use wafers. You know what I mean, the little round ones about the size of a quarter. And not the whole wheat ones. These were the white, very thin ones, with next to no taste. You know what I mean, right? These were the ones that manage to dissolve in wine if you intinct but stick to the roof of your mouth if you don’t.  

So before service one Sunday, one of the young people who was to be an acolyte asked me what kind of bread we would be using for the Eucharist that Sunday, because how we handled the fresh baked bread was a little different that how we handled the wafers. I said “wafers.”

He pulled a face and left the room. I overheard him report back to compadres, “It’s fish food!”

I never heard of communion wafer referred to that way…and clearly, they preferred the “real” bread to the wafers. But I had to laugh! What a great image! Communion as fish food! Imagine: we are fish being fed.

The earliest Christians used the sign of the fish as a secret symbol to identify themselves to each other. And the Greek word for fish “Ichthys” became an anagram that the early Christians used, too. In Greek the letters that make up that word for fish (Iota, Chi, Theta, Upsilon, and Sigma) were the first letters of the phrase: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.

We have been caught for God by Jesus and at the same time we are called to fish for people. We have been deposited on the shore for God’s work. We are fed with the “fish” food of Christ’s body and blood while at the same time we are called to feed and serve the lonely, the friendless, the needy, with God’s food of love, mercy, hope, cheerfulness, and compassion in what we do and how we are every day. When you find hungry people and feed them, or meet people outcast by society (or the church) and welcome them in the God’s family, when you bring comfort to people who are hurting, when you care for God’s creation, when you beauty and hope to where there had been desolation and fear, you are like the fishing apostles who gather God’s people to him.

In all these ways, as you live out your baptisms, you will discover over and over again that Jesus is calling you to be a miraculous messenger of grace, love, and hope. A person who shares the Good News of the Risen Christ, and shares in the renewal of God’s people and creation.

There are a lot of fish stories in the Bible. But the biggest and best fish story there ever will be is the one you live right now as you learn and do the work of Jesus.

Jonah 1:5a, 7-9, 11-12, 17 & John 21:1-11

Holy hearts in simple containers

A sermon at the Special Convention of the Diocese of Bethlehem, March 1, 2014

Cathedral Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem

2 Corinthians 4:1-10

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.

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[1] Morris West, Lazarus (1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York) p. 161-162