Proper 5, year B
Christ Church, Lancaster June 6, 2021
Introduce myself
Opening
From practically the beginning of our life here in South Carolina 7 years ago I have met with the local clergy, which included your priest Gordon. It makes it feel like I know you as a faith community, but in fact this really is the first we have met.
So now begins a new chapter in your life together. You deserve to know something about me since I do know something about you.
Raised in west
I was born in Arizona and raised in Colorado. I've spent stretches of time in Wisconsin, Indiana and Hawaii.
I was ordained in 1982. From before I went to seminary I had conceived of my ministry as being a combination of pastoral work with small congregations or neglected groups. I remember telling my bishop at the time that I imagined paying for that sort of ministry by having some other outside employment, most likely teaching. For the most part I have pursued that through the course of 40 years.
I retired from parish ministry in 2013. Mary Pat and I have 7 children who are scattered across the U.S. from coast to coast. We have a grandchild who expects to graduate from college next year. And we have a grandchild who just started kindergarten this year. I have been enormously blessed in my life.
Hawaii
One of the greatest privileges was being asked to do ministry in Hawaii. I had never imagined such a thing, and at best had a very shallow stereotyped image of what Hawaii was and is. Unless you have lived there my guess is that that’s about your impression also.
About two months after I arrived in Hawaii I looked out the window one day to see the ocean to one side and mountains to the other, and deep inside I had a sense that I had found my home. That sense was based not only on the awesome beauty of the place but even more especially on the people. It sounds a little like the opening chapter of the acts of the apostles when I say that the people of Hawaii include: native Hawaiians, Japanese, Caucasians, Chinese, Filipinos, Pacific islanders and more. None of those groups is a majority.
At first sight it might seem strange that Hawai'i felt so much like home to me, since many of the values were unlike any that I had grown up with.
The history of Hawaiians goes back many centuries before there were any Caucasians to "discover" them. In the larger history of Hawai'i, Christianity is quite recent. The Anglican Church was introduced by the King and Queen in the late 1800's, in part to try to counter the acquisitiveness of the U.S.
Though significant effort was made to suppress Hawaiian values, there has been a growing effort in the last 50 years or so to bring new life to them. For example, the Episcopal bishop wrote a few years ago that: "ministry here must seek to care for others, creation and all that God has given us (mālama), to live righteously and in respect one for another (pono), and to find the holy (mana)that comes from God in all creation and all of God’s children."
That might give you a sense of what I found amongst the people of Hawaii. What at first seemed strange, came to be home in a deeper sense. For various reasons, in 2014 Mary Pat and I made the decision to move to the mainland. She was a professor of Mathematics at Winthrop University until she retired in 2019. I have been an adjunct in the Philosophy / Religion department.
The terms: mana, malama, pono may have a strange ring to you. Something unfamiliar. Something unlike home to you. But for me there is a recognition that is deeper than the surface foreign-ness. They call me to a home deeper than any home I've known. 1
Ordinary time
In the church, we begin a cycle today that lasts until Thanksgiving and the next advent season.2 In the Catholic church it is called "ordinary time." It is also referred to as the year of Mark because of its focus on the Gospel of Mark, although that hasn’t been as apparent for several months now, with extensive readings from the gospel of John.
We will also be listening to a cycle of readings in the books of Samuel and Kings. Some of these passages will be familiar to us. Sometimes they may be more familiar because of how they have been portrayed in films and on TV more than from reading the Bible. In the course of my ministry I have found these readings especially accessible and evocative.
Samuel:
This opening reading from 1st Samuel is actually an exceedingly important passage for understanding the whole Old Testament and I don't think it's a stretch to say that the impact of it stretches all the way up to the present day, both in the state of Israel as well as in the U.S.
The religious elders have come to Samuel, a prophet and an intermediary between the people and God. They’ve come with a message and it is, we want to be just like all the other nations of the world and have a king to lead us. Samuel faithfully relates the cry of the people to God himself, who in turn responds by saying all right already you don’t want to be the people that I want you to be I’ll let you have a king. It turns out to be Saul, and then there is -- the rest of the story.
It's not much of a stretch, I think, to draw a line, crooked as it might be, from the people's demand of Saul to be "like all other nations", and the event in our gospel passage from Mark. A common thread is something, "We are comfortable with what is familiar. We don't like the foreign and unfamiliar. Let us be like all the other nations."
It's a 1,000 years and some very crooked lines, but here again we have the authorities of the people coming before Jesus with demands.
What a colorful and vivid set of images it is:
- scribes from Jerusalem,
- a home-type scene with Jesus' family,
- he is accused of having some strange thing named Beelzebul,
- a proverb about a house being divided against itself,
- looting
- something Jesus calls "blaspheming the holy spirit"
- Jesus' mother and brothers
- Jesus pointing to the crowds and saying "these are my mothers and brothers"
The authorities are accustomed to the familiar, and they look at Jesus' work and find it unfamiliar. They conclude it's diabolical -- "Beelzebul".
But Jesus is radically focused on what God is doing in their midst. He knows that God is doing a new thing and that the people of his home by and large can't recognize it.
Jesus' family is familiar with him and they're sure they know what's going on. But as he will do over and over in his ministry, he turns the tables on them.
It is as if he says, "You think you know what you know, but what is unfolding before you is unlike what is familiar to you. You must be prepared to enter into a new land, a new time, a new way of being. There is a new home awaiting you."
What is our true home?
From Samuel's time to Jesus' time and up to the present, we look for the familiar, we are comfortable with what we can see before us.
When I moved to Hawaii I experienced something like what I imagine Jesus' family felt, what the religious scribes felt. They spoke English in Hawaii, they drove cars on highways the way I was familiar with. There were so many things that suggested that it was like what I was familiar with.
But there was something different. There was a different kind of home from any I had known before. The values that permeated this new land were at the same time strange and exotic and somehow resonated deep within me. Mana. Malama. Pono. Those were unfamiliar words yet resonated within me. The idea of the sacred as all around us -- that I understood. Having respect for one another, even with our many differences -- that I understood. Care for all of God's creation -- I knew that.
Paul to Corinthians
Paul makes a distinction in today's passage from his letter to the Corinthians between our familiar "earthly tent" and the "eternal building" which is our true home.
He contrasts the outer nature of our lives -- the part that we can see and feel, the part that is familiar -- he contrasts that with our "inner nature." It is unfamiliar. It's not what we expected.
But that's our true home.
The word from God that I hear today calls us to recognize and embrace our true home.
I'm sure it was clear to you right away that I am not a boy raised in the Carolinas. We recognize right away the things that stand out. The unfamiliar.
Our impulse again and again is to want to have things "like everyone else has." That's what the elders said to Samuel. That's what they said to Jesus.
With a quiet authority Jesus responds: “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
I urge you, then, my brothers and sisters (mothers?) (fathers?) to seek to do the will of God.
I am tempted to try to sing hymn #711 in the hymnal. Maybe I'll do it when I know you better.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God And His righteousness And all these things shall be added unto you Allelu Alleluia
Ask and it shall be given unto you Seek and ye shall find Knock and it shall be opened unto you Allelu Alleluia
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