Proper 11b
July 18, 2021 Our Saviour, Rock Hill
Introduction
Those of you who were here last week journeyed with me to the first century, Paul was traveling around the Mediterranean because God had commissioned him to take the gospel to all people. I offered up a brief introduction to the letter to the Ephesians, suggesting that in order to really understand and to digest what is in that book of the New Testament, we needed to keep a proper perspective, remembering to keep in mind the big picture.
The lessons we have heard today from scripture make it possible for us to put that into practice, keeping our perspective on the cosmos as well as what is going on around us.
The lessons today invite us to consider our place in the community of God‘s people. To consider who are God‘s people, and who do we include in that definition? The lessons today invite us to consider the implications of the gospel for our lives today and the church's mission in the world at this time.
That's a lot.
Covenant and Community
Consider from the first reading. We are reading throughout the summer from the books named after Samuel, a prophet linking Israel’s past and its future. Israel both a figure, a person, from the ancient past and also the name of a community bound together by their binding covenant with God, the God who created that cosmos we looked at last week. The past of that community built on the gifts and spirit of patriarchs and matriarchs, judges and warriors. The future, now we’re back 3000 years ago, is a journey into being a nation like all other nations.
The journey stretching back into the far distant past reaches all the way up to the present where the same kind of conversations occur in the Middle East and once again there’s a nation with the name Israel, wanting to be like all other nations and claiming a special relationship with God. It’s a narrative that has been with us a long time.
David has succeeded Saul as the king of the community and Nathan has succeeded Samuel as the prophet in the community. David is trying to figure out the nature of this covenant that God has made with us? Surely it must involve providing a stable home for the ark of the covenant, he wonders to the prophet?
What is God doing with the covenant today? Where does the community of the church fit in with that covenant? Questions continue up to the present.
Community and Covenant are utterly central to understanding the Bible. The community passes through many different manifestations. They struggle from generation to generation with the tension between what the community wants and what God wants of them. I’m thinking of the community of Israel, but I’m thinking no less of the community that was formed around Jesus and became the beloved community.
Becoming Beloved Community -- that's the name being used today by the Episcopal Church to begin to describe what we're about. On the web site of the National Church we read:
As the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement, we dream and work to foster Beloved Communities where all people may experience dignity and abundant life and see themselves and others as beloved children of God. The Becoming Beloved Community Vision Document and accompanying resources help us to understand and take up the long-term commitments necessary to form loving, liberating and life-giving relationships with each other. Together, we are growing as reconcilers, justice-makers, and healers in the name of Christ. National Church
From the beginning the covenant that bound us with God also set us apart. David and his descendants for generations would come to realize that being like everybody else was not all it was cracked up to be. Jesus and his descendants would continually be reminded of how the ways of the world did not correspond directly with the ways of the beloved community.
Ephesians
The people of God continued through the centuries to understand and define for themselves what it meant to be in covenant with God. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul continued that questioning and searching.
So when we read in today’s passage from the letter to the Ephesians the subject matter has to do with the question of how God‘s chosen people live in covenant with God and with one another? Paul argues that it is not in the definitions that the Torah has passed down. It is not in circumcision. Rather, it is Jesus who is the bed rock and corner stone for providing an answer. He is our peace.
No longer strangers
From a time in my own life when it seemed as if I was cut off from the beloved community and didn’t know where to turn for Hope I discovered a song that was recorded by John Michael Talbot. The title of it was no longer strangers. I listen to it over and over again. The words are virtually a paraphrase of Paul’s letter.
If you google the phrase "No longer strangers", you will see the wide range of inspirations associated with this phrase, which is inextricably linked to today's passage from the letter to the Ephesians. Talbot's version is the one that I first latched onto, finding there the hope about which he writes.
"You who once were far off are brought near".
John Michael Talbot No Longer Strangers 1
Once you were strangers to the covenant The promise of God Born without hope, you were without God
A recent recording by the Vineyard ministry is beautiful, peaceful, hopeful:
Beautifully made By nature I've fallen By grace I've been raised You're calling me I'm coming home You're calling me I'm coming home Beautifully made
"No longer strangers" is the name of a ministry in Dayton, OH, aimed at refugees and immigrants.
It is the name of a book that sets forth the many ways in which Protestant evangelicals are obliged by the Gospel commission to minister to immigrants, providing hospitality and healing, all as a form of evangelism.
Community is defined by hospitality
Community. The sacred community. The beloved community in covenant with God. It turns out that it can only happen and only be real in relationship with others. From ancient times Israel understood itself to be set apart, to be chosen. That is virtually the definition of sacredness, holiness. Set apart.
But Israel again from ancient times understood Torah to command that the set apart community would welcome with hospitality and healing those who were wanderers. Israel understood from ancient times that its own well-being was dependent on the care of those who were outside the community and in need.
Covenant can only happen between partners. It cannot happen with just one. The covenant of community, the beloved community, is one that embraces all.
Community defined by moving in and out of solitude
Jesus
In the passage from Mark‘s gospel that we hear today, Jesus bears the marks of the beloved community to which I’ve tried to point today. He has looked at those who have gathered around him, those who have been drawn to him in search of hope and healing. And he has had compassion for them.
Only in relationship to others did Jesus understand his covenant with God.
Merton was a Trappist monk of the mid 20th c. whose writings brought to life for many the realities, the passion, the holiness, the beauty, and the deep commitment of the contemplative life.
I thought of an extraordinary scene from his life that illustrated the point I've been trying to draw. It was a mystical experience. It revealed to him the deep bond between the solitary person striving to live in prayer and the bustling people in the world around him or her. The bond was love.
On March 18, 1958, Thomas Merton was running errands in downtown Louisville when he had an experience that would change his life and influence countless others. The spot is marked with a historical marker, the only one that I know of in the United States that marks a mystical experience.
He described it this way in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: link
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Merton like Jesus and like each of us is called to be set apart, in prayer, but only so that our compassion may come forth and our connections, our love, for all of the others can be manifest.
Prayer
All kinds of prayer
This covenant in which we find ourselves, this beloved community in which we know who we really are, calls to prayer, yes to be a part, to be holy, but only to show forth the love that belongs first and foremost to God and through God to all people.
Call to prayer, to all kinds of prayer. For example in one of the better outlines an acronym form for the variety of prayer, the beloved community is called acts.
ACTS
It goes like this: 2
Adoration: Give God praise and honor for who he is as Lord over all.
Confession: Honestly deal with the sin in your prayer life.
Thanksgiving: Verbalize what you’re grateful for in your life and in the world around you.
Supplication: Pray for the needs of others and yourself.
Collect
Or rather succinctly brought together in today's collect:
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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