Proper 16b
Christ Church, Lancaster
August 22, 2021
Gathering
lectionary In the collect today, we pray that God would provide power to the church gathered in unity of spirit. This is one of those times when I think, "What if God is listening to us?" I mean who do we think we are? And what presumption to think that we are in unity of spirit? And what would that even look like?
Church gathered together
This might be one of those times that's kind of a "one off" -- a turn of phrase to get the liturgy started. And yet, it is a powerful and evocative phrase when we pause to consider it.
I feel distressed with my fellow clergy when they begin the liturgy with "Good Morning."
I apologize if your favorite priest does that.
But speaking for myself only, that everyday greeting, the thing the grocery clerk might say, takes away from the sacred nature of the gathering of the church. The church -- in Greek it is "those who are called out" -- needs to be gathered after being called out.
That is in fact something that seems powerful about the "muezzin" in Islam -- calling the people to prayer. The "gathering" is spread throughout the community.
It's a solemn thing when we call the people together. We shouldn't take it lightly.
Such a commonplace thing, and yet doing it is not as easy or simple as you might think. Sometimes it's straight forward. Sometimes it feels like Herding cats. In the last year and a half we have realized that gathering is a luxury that we took for granted. It's a part of the passion for the people, seeking a return to a time when we could gather.
In addition, we live in a time when the very meaning, the experience itself, of "gathering" is shifting. While some feel the inadequacy of gathering digitally, Zoom meetings and the like -- others find a special significance in the digital communities that are out there.
Some that I know have redefined what it means to "pray together" as they experience community stretched across thousands of miles. So we live in that time when the Gathering of the people is not something to take for granted.
Solomon
In our first reading today, we continue our journey with the emerging people and nation of Israel. We've been reading the outline throughout the summer in the books of Samuel and Kings, we hear of the solemn occasion of gathering the people by Solomon as he processes with them his conviction about how to proceed with his desire to build a "house for the God" of the people -- a temple that would become "Solomon's Temple."
It was to house the ark of the covenant.
Some background might be in order on what Solomon is wrestling with. From the time of Moses, the covenant had been embodied in tablets -- like many tablets unearthed by archaeologists from that era and that part of the world. The 10 commandments, yes, but really much more than that. The covenant was a contract made with God whereby the people agree that God (Yahweh) will be their God and God agrees that they will be his people. A contract written in stone. Not to be taken lightly. Various "rights and privileges" as well as "duties and responsibilities" were spelled out. The ark housed that covenant.
From the beginning, as the people traveled away from slavery in Egypt and God appeared to them to make the covenant, the ark had been carried -- in caravan as the people traveled from here to there.
The people have traveled with those tablets, carried in an ark, with 2 handles to be carried by specially chosen people. They have traveled into Canaan and for several generations have settled in the land. Eventually, as we have heard, they badger Samuel to let them have a king "like all the other nations."
Now, after the death of David and the rise of his son Solomon, the king has decided that it is time to stop camping, stop traveling by caravan, and time to settle down. The ark is to no longer moving from camp to camp and is to have a home. Not such an unusual impulse. I began to feel it in my 40's and 50's. I feel it now.
Like we did when we opened this liturgy, Solomon had the brazen courage to talk to God as if God was listening. He said, "When foreigners come to this house, they will hear of the LORD, they will hear of you, GOD."
This a form of: "If you build it they will come". I first heard that phrase, I think, in the context of the movie, Field of Drea.ms . In the movie, an Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella has fallen on hard times, but while standing in his corn field one day, he sees a vision of a baseball field in his cornfield, and a voice tells him, “If you build it, he will come”, referring to Shoeless Joe Jackson, a long-dead baseball player.
Proverbially the phrase has come to mean building something that might seem far-fetched -- and trusting that people will come to enjoy the thing. Major league baseball seems to have encouraged that thinking as they staged a game on that very Iowan cornfield from the movie on August 12th this year. Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees.
King Solomon might have been there. Praying to God, "If people from far and wide see this thing, surely they will say, God is alive and well." In Iowa. In Jerusalem. It is so powerful for me when figures from across the ages, so remote from me, end up sounding like me when I wake up in the morning.
Solomon was concerned that the children who come after him will know that God is real and God dwells in our midst. It's all about the children isn't it? Passing it on. Whether literally our children or figuratively. As true for the young families with children as it is for those like me who look back on the time of my children's childhood.
We gather the people so they will see the awesome power of God.
Gather the people
Solomon is aware of the need for Holy places. Places that may not be in and of themselves anything special, but when set aside they become sacred spaces. During this time of wandering during our pandemic, we have been especially aware of the "holy places" that we couldn't fill as we formerly did.
Here at Christ Church you've been gathering in the sanctuary longer than many Episcopal Churches.
When I brainstorm with students the whole concept of "holy place", they just get it. It's almost a human need, I think.
- It's often tied to the connections we feel with those who have gone before.
- Equally important when directed toward those who will come after.It is truly "God's house", a sacred place to father the people who have wandered, sometimes far, sometimes near.
A bishop of mine, Frank Gray, told a personal story about the church as a wandering people of God. It was his story, but is so powerful I have often shared it. His grandfather, Campbell Gray, had been bishop of the diocese where I served and his cathedral had been the church where I was living at the time. During the 2nd world war, Frank Gray's father was a priest and missionary in the Philippines when the Japanese captured the islands. They put all of the Americans into interment camps where young Frank Gray effectively came of age. Following the end of the war, Frank and his family sailed to San Francisco, took a train to Chicago and then to South Bend, and went directly to the church where his grandfather was bishop. He told this story inside that very church. He said, "When I walked through those doors -- pointing to the very doors -- I experienced church as a building for the first time. Before then the church had always been the people gathered wherever they could in the interment camp in the jungles of the Philippines."
Pilgrim people
We are a pilgrim people and there are times when we need to be gathered together. In sacred spaces when possible. In recent times the wider church has become conscious of being a pilgrim people, not lodged in one place, but sometimes homeless, sometimes displaced, sometimes in a foreign land. It is a powerful image for the church.
I hope we don't lose that awareness. I fear the prospect of losing that image.
The image of the church as -- e.g. Noah's ark. A people who have been chosen, marked as God's own. A people chosen but not yet arrived at the destination.
We are, in effect, on pilgrimage. A pilgrimage like:
- Santiago de Santiago ( I have known a few) The El Camino Spain -- followed since the 9th century
- A priest friend from Hawai'i was determined to walk the Appalachian Trail
- I would sometimes go to a place in Wisconsin known as "Holy Hill". Wisconsin is very flat. North of Milwaukee there was a little mound or hill and on top of it sat a church, dedicated to Mary. For a century or more pilgrims had traveled there, seeking healing or peace. I would go there seeking a quiet place that was also sacred.
- When I was a teenager I visited Lourdes. I was young enough not to make too much of it. When my daughter visited there many years later, the holy water she brought was a precious gift.
These are "holy places" that one goes to as a pilgrim, not as a resident. It is in the journey that God's power is revealed.
May show forth your power
As a "pilgrim" people, even Solomon knew that we are more empowered to show God's power and mercy than as residents. As Paul knew centuries later, it is as a pilgrim people that we can "Put on the whole armor of God" to "withstand the evil of the day".
As a pilgrim people we are conscious of the dangers that lie about us all the time. Dangers of storm and pestilence. Dangers from those who wish us harm. Dangers from those who are indifferent.
What does this all mean? Is it just evocative language? How literal are we to take it? Is it just poetry?
It was that same Bp. Gray who gave his clergy a book by Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor. In it Peterson describes what he perceives to be the necessary poetic component of pastoring in the church. His translation of the Bible makes clear that God himself is evocative the way poetry is evocative.
Being a "pilgrim church" may be poetry -- but it is sacred poetry.
Conclusion
With today's Gospel reading, we conclude the "Bread of life" sermon from the Gospel of John. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Here Jesus embodies a part of what a pilgrim people need to sustain themselves. Two things are essential: shelter and food. Solomon has called out to God that he be allowed to build a shelter for the people -- God's house, as it were -- but providing the shelter of God's presence, God's armor for the people. That presence and that armor has sustained the people for 3,000 years and more.
But the people also need sustenance. "I am the bread of life" Jesus said. And he is, and nourishes us, even to the present day.
75 years ago a British scholar, Gregory Dix, published landmark study of the Eucharist. You've probably heard about it or from it before. Like the liturgy itself, it bears saying over and over again.
Jesus said, "Do this in memory of me." About the Eucharist Dix said:
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; ...
for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church;
tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
Today, as so often through my life, I think to myself, "Do we have any idea of what we say and do here?" Sometimes we do. And then it is fitting to just say, "Thanks be to God."
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