easter-5-2020-monroe.md

Easter 5 – Monroe

Before I say anything more, I want to acknowledge a major secular feast that is marked tomorrow. Mother’s Day. It is a day that has traditionally been observed in churches with a variety of special events. At my church in Hawai’i the equivalent of St. Paul’s “E-males” serenaded the women of the parish. For some time it has seemed to me important to acknowledge the huge range of emotions and memories that are conjured up when we say “Mother.”

There is nostalgia but also anguish. There is celebration as well as sadness. Not all women become or are able to be mothers. I tried my hand at “mothering” for a while in the 1980’s.

What has seemed to bind us all together is the notion that we all have or have had mothers. We pray for our mothers. We pray for Grace and favor. We pray for forgiveness. We give thanks for mothers past and present. Thank you.

The times they are a changin’

I know it evokes Bob Dylan and the 1960’s. But it feels more true to me today than did even then. I spent a good bit of time this past week – along with many many others in the church – reflecting on how the church is going to transition toward opening up our sanctuaries and meeting spaces, our food pantries and our schools.

It seems clear to me that, as in society in general, there will be no return to the way life used to be.

We are going to be changed

As a church, as a people, & as a society we will emerge from this time changed

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I think that there will be limitations on the numbers allowed into our spaces so that social distancing can be observed. I think communion is going to be different than we have known. I don’t know when the transition is going to happen, but I think it will begin soon.

If we focus on our natural resistance to change – you have heard I’m sure the old adage, “How many [ fill in the blank ] does it take to change a light bulb?” After you respond with, “How many?” the answer is, “Change?” If we focus on our resistance to change it is going to be difficult and painful.

Scripture today invites us to a different response. We can embrace the change because it is light and life.

A song

Once again this week I heard a song as I read these passages from the Bible. It was a song that I used to listen to over and over again, by John Michael Talbot. Today, so many years later, he looks the part of a biblical prophet, long flowing hair and a beard down to his waist, as if he has been alive for centuries. The song is “No longer strangers.” It evokes a vision of a people transformed by the grace of God:

Once you were strangers to the covenant
The promise of God
Born without hope, you were without God
In this world
We once were far off
We have now been brought near

No longer strangers
No longer aliens
Now we are citizens
With the saints
In the kingdom
Of God

Peter’s letter

In the 2nd reading today we hear similar words:
Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation …Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood

A people transformed.

You are a holy priesthood

"Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;

once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy."

called to model Jesus

Stephen

From the time I was an adolescent, at a time when this reading came around every year in the Sunday lectionary, I was hit upside the head with the awareness that Stephen was doing and saying what Jesus did and said.

When the time came for my ordination as a deacon, I was the last candidate from Colorado scheduled for ordination on June 2, 1982. There were 7 of us – the same as were ordained deacons that day with Stephen, so many centuries ago. My life changed that day. Some of it I can describe for you. Some of it is so intensely personal I don’t really have words for it. I joined the community that was originally formed by Stephen.

In today’s first reading we hear of the final moments of Stephen’s life. The first martyr for the faith. He took on the life of Jesus so thoroughly that he took on the death with some of the same responses that Jesus himself had shown.

Katie’s book

Mary Pat put into my hands this past week a book, Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful by Katie Davis Majors. The failures, the gaping holes, the woundedness of those who would follow Jesus – the trust required to take one step after another – the hope required to take on the garment of Christ in a broken world – these the author Katie freely acknowledges in her moving account of being a disciple, a missionary in today’s Uganda.

She is following in the footsteps of Stephen.

“Change” – conversion

I once made the claim in a gathering of the local clergy in Honolulu, that the fundamental experience of the Christian is conversion . I made that claim, knowing very well in my heart and head, that I meant something very much more than the conversion preached by many in the conservative evangelical church.

I meant, and intended to explain more fully, that what I meant was the basic process of moving from darkness to light, from futility to life in the fullness of God, that I think is quite explicitly taught in both the Old and New Testaments of our Bible.

I didn’t get the chance to do that, however, because one of my colleagues – a person who later became a good friend – took umbrage at my words. She was angry at what she took to be my faith stance. She didn’t know at the time that our positions were in fact very sympathetic.

I stick by my claim. To be a Christian is to change. We are called to become facsimiles of Jesus himself.

Sir, we would see Jesus

Philip speaks with such emotion and feeling in the 14th chapter of John. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” As if all the longings of his whole life were reduced to these few words. As if he were saying, “Nothing else much matters. All the riches and knowledge I might have accrued are nothing compared to just a glimpse of God. Let me see.”

And Jesus himself responds with poignance and tenderness – with the kind of patience a loving parent shows day in and day out – “You’ve been with me all this time and you still haven’t got your gimpse? Philip, open your eyes and see .”

The pulpit

I have heard lots of sermons in my life. I think most of you will identify with that statement. Maybe you’ll identify with this: “The vast majority of them were forgotten in a very short time.” Very few of them do I remember for some length of time. One I remember from 35 years ago.

The preacher was a Episcopal priest and Emeritus Professor from Notre Dame. His name was Gerhardt Niemeyer. In time I would recognize that his theology and his approach to life in the church was radically different from my own. Yet I can clearly remember to this day the sermon he preached at St. James Cathedral on today’s text from the gospel of John.

He began it with a story from when he had been invited to preach at an old Lutheran church in his native Germany. He described an elaborate pulpit, enclosed and perched high. One had to climb a circular staircase to enter the pulpit. The day he described in his story he climbed those steps and entered the pupit and immediately latched his eyes on a small card tacked to the inside. No one could see it but the preacher. There in large letters were printed the words: " show us the Father, and we will be satisfied ".

Gerhardt went on to preach the message that all of us are commissioned to reveal to those around us the God and Father of us all. And to none is it more directly commissioned than it is to those called to preach.

I have remembered that message through countless sermons that I have myself preached.

A changed church

As we transition in coming weeks toward a changed church, one thing is clear to me. There is much about what we have been that is of relatively little importance. There are a few things that are of ultimate importance. One of them is the responsibility to reflect the Father to the world around us.

What is it going to look like?

Such a question can serve to guide us as we make decisions on how to be the church in a new, emerging world. It should somehow reflect God the Father. So that people can see.

• radical hospitality
• generosity
• emphasis on abundance of grace, not scarcity. There is enough for all of us.
• delight in creativity
• readiness to restore, heal, and strengthen the most broken and vulnerable

And I could go on and on.

To reflect the Father

Created in the image of God

The first chapter of Genesis glories in a God who creates things, takes delight in what is created, and pronounces it “Good!”

(26) Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

What is required of us is that we cooperate with this creator God.

Ready to put on Christ

We shall be courageous enough to become: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

We must be humble enough to follow in the path that Stephen walked – to walk the walk and talk the talk – that Jesus himself trod.

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we 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 is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen .