proper13-august-5.md

August 5:Ordinary Time, Proper 13: Supply St. Paul’s, Ft. Mill

Introduction

Sometimes the Episcopal Church makes the craziest decisions. I’ve been serving in it long enough I feel like I have been serving in it long enough I can poke fun.

Like you know how there are introductory words to various parts of the liturgy that kind of rattle off the lips without thinking? Who was it who thought it would be a good idea to have two different sets? One for Rite 1 and one for Rite 2.

When I say, “The Lord be with you.” Do you say “And with thy spirit” or do you say “And also with you.” And if we’re in a mixed audience and I hear someone next to me responding – the other way – I think to myself, “Oh, you’re one of those!”

I know the liturgical reformers in the 60’s and 70’s had good intentions. But …

The opening of the Eucharist is almost the same – except for the Lenten response. Some of us are supposed to remember that it is “Bless the Lord who forgiveth all our sins” rather than “Bless the Lord who forgives …” One group of us has a lisp and the other doesn’t – I’m not sure which is which.

Then there’s the Gospel acclamations for Rite 1 and Rite 2. They are totally different. And for those of us who go to 8 o’clock and 10:30 service – well, I hardly ever get it right 2 times in a row.

Here’s an interesting thing, though. All the new liturgies only have contemporary language. We can’t get them confused. Things like “Holy Baptism”.

Baptism

You would be justified in saying to me, “But wait, Dale. Baptism isn’t a new service. It’s an ancient one. The church has for a long time called it one of the 2 original sacraments!”

And you would be right. But here’s the thing. The main thing that changed between a prayer book from 1928 – or even 1662 – and the one that came out in the 1970’s, is precisely the understanding of baptism. Many have argued that the most important change in the church for centuries is in a new understanding of baptism.

It drove our understanding of:

• prayer
• ministry
• church administration

So the opening of that part of the Prayer Book is new. And it only comes in contemporary language.

after the introductory words of the Eucharist, because Baptism is assumed to be part of a Eucharist, – and that’s important, we get

	There is one Body and one Spirit;
People	There is one hope in God’s call to us;
Celebrant	One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
People	One God and Father of all.
Celebrant	The Lord be with you.
People	And also with you.
Celebrant	Let us pray.

These words, you may recognize come from today’s second reading from the letter to the Ephesians. So I’m getting to the sermon part of the sermon.

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Paul says he’s a prisoner … how? Literally prisoner? Traditionally taken that way. Prisoner because of the Lord I would have anticipated, but here he is prisoner in Christ.

To be caught so you can’t escape. To be so caught up in the calling that it is perfectly natural that you would live in humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another, maintaining the unity of the Spirit, the bond of peace

That’s a heck of a prison! But that’s what Paul’s talking about. And he understands that to be a description of what Christians are called to do and be. He understands that as a description of what it means to be baptized.

Gifts

“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

It turns out that this reading today from Ephesians is an absolutely central text for understanding the new understanding of baptism. It has to do with gifts, spiritual gifts, being given by God to the Body of Christ for the purpose of building up the body.

Some of you are called to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers. Altar guild, warden, sexton, choir member, – all the things we think of the church doing – Paul wants us to understand in terms of spiritual gifts not practical abilities.

And it is all to be measured against a single over-riding purpose: Building up the body.

I heard a story on NPR this week that is the perfect illustration for what Paul has in mind here.

The interviewer was talking with 2 of the 3 women graduates of Annapolis who are running for Congress this year. Listen closely. That’s really remarkable. These are women graduates of the naval academy. They are veterans, having at least served the minimum years required of graduates of the academies. And they have then gone on with serving their country – our country – in various ways. And now they want to serve as representatives in Congress.

The two women who spoke both identified as part of the reason they want to run is that the current leadership in Washington is obsessed with victory of party rather than service to country. They both observed the deep-seated impulse to divide between this that and the other. Democrats/Republicans, liberal/conservative, white/ black, english/hispanic, men/women – all the ways we have to divide ourselves against one another.

One of the women gave this illustration from her experience as a Navy pilot. She said, "When our crew went up in the helicopter assigned a mission, it never occurred to us to only take a particular set of folks. We didn’t say, ‘We’re going to do this mission only with … fill in the blank …’ No, all of us together worked to fulfill the mission we had been sent on.

She went on to say that she had helped the Navy discover – as a woman in a man’s world – that with diversity the mission was accomplished more efficiently and more completely than if it had been done with a homogeneous group. Diversity is better than the opposite!

It is in that spirit that Paul talks to his communities. He is saying it takes all of us to accomplish the mission of the Body of Christ. It takes all of us working together. We don’t ask if we agree with everybody or if we like everybody – we are all assigned the mission of the church.

And the mission as he puts it here is:

equip the saints for the building up of the church.

Equipping the saints as a meme

I realized in preparation for today’s message that the phrase “equipping the saints” had become a meme in today’s church. Now partly I’m trying to self-consciously show off. I don’t really know what the word meme means. Mary Pat and I have asked one another a number of times. It’s a term that is contemporary and connecting with the digital world we live in.

“an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.”

It’s become a watchword, catchword, catch-all, hot-button. I can think back 20-30 years of reading and hearing teachers and speakers plead for the church to begin equipping for ministry. For too many centuries ministry was conceived as something one person did to or for another person. If you were a minister you ministered. If you weren’t you had it done unto you. The church was conceived as a building full of folks who hired a clergy person to do ministry for them. But that model is dying and in many places is gone.

There is broad consensus, as I read it, throughout the church, that what we are to be about is working together, as the Body of Christ, to equip all the people of God to build up Christ’s Body. We are all ministers of one kind or another. And we are all to be about the work of building up the body of saints.

It is not for 20% to do the work and 80% to support the workers. When we were baptized, we were commissioned to work for the mission of the church. All of us. For that work, each of us needs to be equipped with the resources we need.

Closing

One of the resources (listed below) summarizes much of what has become commonplace in the contemporary church. That we are failing to work together to further the mission of the church. We may not be clear what the mission is. We may have failed to see that we have to do it together. Eric McKiddie ¹ summarizes this way:

3 reasons pastors fail to equip the saints

1. The Pastor doesn’t equip the saints to do the work, because he/she is doing it …
2. The Pastor isn’t teaching the people how to join the work of the ministry. …
3. The Pastor is patronizing the people, rather than shepherding them. …

3 reasons the saints fail to be equipped

2. They expect the pastors to do all the work instead of joining in. …
3. They don’t see their pastors as gifts from Jesus for their equipping, but rather as nags always asking for volunteers. …
4. They don’t realize they are signing up for work. …

…

“Get to work” Eric says. “Now it’s time to do Ephesians 4, for the sake of Christ’s glory in the church as his body matures into him, her head.”

We must all of us say together and mean it when we say it (please turn to p. 833 in the Prayer Book):

Lord make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
And where there is sadness, joy
O divine master grant that I may
not so much seek to be consoled as to console
to be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love
For it is in giving that we receive
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it’s in dying that we are born to eternal life
Amen

Appendix

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• August 6:The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

lectionary

• Nathan speaking to David in parable
• contrast doing in secret vs. doing it in the light
• Paul opening para. is summary of baptism, including opening versicles
• presentation re. gifts, some should be …
• … equipping the body …
• Jesus: Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves …
• “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Additional resources

• Equipping the saints: practical stuff
  practical outline
• A 16 page reflection, bible study on the passage:
  bible study
• Episcopal training for ordination
  episcopal church
• sample sermon
  sermon
• Vestry papers: many of these resources are from a conservative, traditional persepctive
  2007 Vestry Paper
• Overview from Dioc. NC
  NC
• Equipping the saints has entered the lexicon of the contemporary church as a description of what the church is supposed to be. What ministry is supposed to be. What we are all supposed to be about because we are the baptized faithful – the saints of God.

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1. (these are from the blog of The Rev. Eric McKiddie, Chapel Hill, NC) ↩︎