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Lena gets her son ready for school

She says, “On these streets, Charles

You’ve got to understand the rules

If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite

And that you’ll never ever run away

Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight”

Is it a gun, is it a knife

Is it a wallet, this is your life

It ain’t no secret

No secret my friend

You can get killed just for living in your American skin

The reaction to Springsteen’s song was swift and vitriolic.  The President of the New York Policeman’s Benevolent Association called for a boycott of Springsteen’s upcoming concerts and Bob Lucente, President of the New York State Fraternal Order of Police called Springsteen a “dirtbag” for singing the song.^[1]
But as always, the facts get more complex.  Within weeks of his comment, Bob Lucente was removed from his position.  And another police group, calling themselves, “100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care,”issued a statement saying “We commend Bruce Springsteen, and we believe that he is courageous in the position that he is taking”^[2]
Just when we think we can find a group to accuse and judge en masse, we find ourselves standing again in the shoes of ancient Israel hearing Amos call us to account.  Amos is so hard to hear because just at the point where you are sure you are on the side of righteousness, that your judgments are unquestionable, the challenge turns back upon you – does your lovely liturgy make you above reproach? are your judgments miraculously without self-deception or self-interest? are you waiting for the day of the Lord knowing that your side will get vindicated?
And so as we pray for the souls of the departed: Garner, Brown, Crawford, Gurley, Brisbon, Jackson, we also need to pray for Darren Wilson, Darryl Pantaleo, Sean Williams, Charles Kleinert—some of the police officers who did the chasing and choking and shooting.  Their lives and their decisions are not without ambiguity and pain and perhaps even remorse.  They have been trained to do exactly what a fearful populace has asked them to do—protect “us”at all costs.  The problem is that this “us”does not include everyone.
Yes, it is insufficient for police departments to point to “a few bad apples.”  There is systemic racism and injustice that must be addressed.  But it is also too easy for citizens to look at police departments and say “there’s the problem”—easily contained among those who are not “us.”
My brother-in-law is a police officer in Albuquerque, NM, and I have ridden along with him in the middle of the night as he seeks to bring protection and justice to places where most of us don’t go at times when most of us are asleep.  He does not lack conscience or a soul, but his work often takes him into situations that are chaotic and ambiguous and dangerous.
If justice is to “roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”it is a task for all of us.  Racism is a rhizomatic scourge, springing up from multiple sources, finding expression in multiple locations.  When we point the finger and call for justice—as we rightly do in cases of unjust and unwarranted police shootings—we must, as Amos reminds us, point the finger back at ourselves and our communities and ask, what are we doing to make this vision of justice true for all of God’s people?

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“But I was her slave and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor.”

Let us pray.  O Holy One, may only your words be spoken, may only your words be heard.  Amen.
In the first slave narrative composed by African American female author, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs sheds light on the horrors of slavery from a female perspective, while also exposing the sexual exploitation of slave of masters.  Her story begins when her mistress, described as a kind and considerate person dies.  Harriet recounts a promise which was made by her mistress to her mother, that she would receive her freedom upon the death of her mistress.  She writes:
“After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read and we learned she had bequeathed me to her niece, a child of five years old.  So vanished our hopes.  My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s word, “Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself.”  But I was her slave and I supposed she would not recognize me as her neighbor.  I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great wrong.  As I child, I loved my mistress; and looking back on the happy days I spent with her, I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice.  While I was with her, she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory.”
This passage describes Harriet’s story and understanding of the biblical passage we hear today in James and throughout bible focusing on loving our neighbor.   It is the passage Harriet probably heard most of her enslaved life.  It is also a passage where Harriet recognizes the differences in biblical interpretation.  You see, her mistress did not include a slave in her biblical concept of what it meant to be a good neighbor.  Harriet understood this concept of neighbor probably from passages read to her from Leviticus, the gospels and perhaps even from our appointed scripture today from James.  These are probably passages that were taught to by her very own mistress; these are passages she probably based her hopes and dreams upon.  This concept of loving neighbor as self probably enabled Harriet to endure the cruelty of her slave master, who constantly confronted her with sexual advances.  It was a passage that provided visions of a new future; visions of freedom and family.  The premise of loving your neighbor for Harriet was a promise of new life, now shattered through the reading of her mistresses’ will, where slave, was not embraced as neighbor.  But Harriet still lived on the promises of the scriptures that if the poor, the downtrodden, and the least of these were to be considered neighbor, surely a young slave girl could be as well.
In our reading from James today, he provides his own version of loving thy neighbor, but first he emphasizes and clearly makes the distinction of class division.  James highlights for us the behaviors and parameters of who we deem as acceptable, and who we consider as neighbor based upon worldly things, power and social status.   I believe even today this is where we too struggle with loving our neighbors as God loves us.  It is so easy for us to love those who look as we do, dress as we do and move in the same social circles as we do.  But what becomes problematic is when we are asked to move beyond the realms of comfort into the world and treat all those we encounter with love, respect, justice and mercy.  It is easy to love those we self-define as worthy, but it is harder to love those who may be different than we are or those we pre-judge and label.  It is often difficult to widen the circle of life to include those we discriminate against, those who we would rather not break bread with, those who God has called us to include as sisters and brothers.  James has much to contribute to our thinking about separatism and inclusion.  James jumps right in to remind us of favoritism and the disregard of “other”.   Author Cain Hope Felder observes that James provides what is perhaps the strongest castigation of class discrimination in the New Testament or for that matter any discrimination based on outward appearance. Felder states that these words have particular pertinence for African Americans who still experience such discrimination today. James mention of acts of favoritism should prompt us to ponder those places in our lives when we to have made snap judgments about others and perhaps embraced familiarity on face value only.  But more importantly, from James’ perspective, he directs us to understand that discrimination of any kind is simply not consistent with the Christian faith.  He reminds us that when we discriminate, we sin.
Defining the parameters of “who is neighbor” and “who is not” is sometimes a hard habit to break.  As Christians it should be as easy as ABC, but before we embrace the gift of caring for our neighbors, we have a prelude to neighboring; we first have to define who is our neighbor.  This is not necessarily done so that we can begin to serve others, but perhaps it is done as an unconscious act, where we find ourselves defining neighbor so we can develop a short list–a list which defines who it is that we do not have to serve.  This list serves as a place where we distinguish the haves from the have nots.  The danger in this is that we don’t just exclude the undesirable neighbor but we also exclude the presence of God.  Within all of creation God’s desire is for us to work together using our unique gifts and talents.  We all have been blessed with at least one or two offerings for the kingdom.   But when that list or line is only drawn for those we define as neighbor we work against the gospel message of offering love, justice and mercy.  We limit the means of forming a free and just society for ourselves, our children and our children’s children.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, the disregard of any human life, where discrimination and in-just treatment occurs, speaks volumes about our theological commitments than any ecclesial confession.  Self-defining who is neighbor also reveals the kind of God we believe in and exposes the deficiencies in how we love the God we serve.
The key to allow love and peace to coexist in our world today resides inside each of us. It seems so often today we look at others and wonder what they may want from us or what their agenda really is all about and then we move into protection mode.  We live in a world that is so easily blinded from truth and allows laws to mandate the very core of the treatment of human life.  And as we keep our blinders tightly fastened, our distrust of the stranger grows, our attitudes spill out into the world to add to its distrust, while continuing to make the world a less inviting place.  But the GOOD NEWS is that I am still dreaming, hoping and having faith in a different type of world and I hope you are too.   I still believe there is a world for us, which comes from hard work and discipline, from lessons learned from our ancestors, from treating others as we want to be treated.  I still dream of a world where love for others exists and prevails over envy, power and hate.  I dream of a world where love can make room for the other and a world where we have visible signs and wonders of the living Christ among us.   But this type world is going to cost us something.  It is going to demand that some tables are turned over in the temples and a tenacity to never rest until all humanity is respected and cared for.
There is an illustration that reminds me of the world we must work to create and sustain.  It is an icon in an Austrian cathedral which pictures a small town or community in which people can be seen walking the streets of the town as they attend to the tasks of the day.  In the foreground is a large table with people sitting around it sharing a meal.  Everyone in the icon looks quite ordinary except for one thing-a glow or halo encircles the head of each person.  The icon is titled, Xenophilia, which is the love and friendship of strangers.  Paul Waddell writes that it was the icon’s title which invited him to look at it differently because it suggested that not everyone walking the streets or sitting at the table was a citizen of the town. It seems that some were strangers and outsiders, and immigrants from elsewhere.  But as he described it, all were able to enter the town because there were no walls surrounding it, nothing to suggest that some were welcome but others were not.  Anyone could feel at home in this town because everyone was welcomed as friend.  Instead of Xenophobia, which is the fear of strangers, this little town embodied the befriending hospitality of God.  Everyone who walked its streets glowed with holiness because they truly had learned to love whatever neighbors came their way, especially those neighbors which were easy to fear and exclude.  Everyone in the painting, Wadell wrote, “radiated the goodness of God because whether they were host or guest; Citizen or stranger– love was being given and received.”  It was a holy exchange that characterized true hospitality. (Toward a Welcoming Congregation, Paul Wadell.)
In her book Radical Welcome, Stephanie Spellars also describes this type of care for neighbor, as a spiritual practice of embracing and being changed by the gifts, presence, voices and power of the other. Spellars states, “this care combines a Christian ministry of welcome and hospitality with a clear awareness of power and patterns of inclusion and exclusion.”  This is the type work that we must begin to engage in. This is the task before us today. This is the dream continued.  After the blood, sweat and tears of 50 years of progression, it is up to each of us to carry the torch a bit further.  It will not be easy, it will require much, and it will definitely move us from our levels of comfort.  Brick by brick, step by step I believe this type of world is possible for all who believe.  My prayer for us today who gather to share in the celebration of Black History, is that we leave this place changed and dedicated to love and serve others. May God grant us each the courageous faith of those who have gone before us, so that we may continue this work together of transformation and radical hospitality.  AMEN.

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“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

Today we honor John Elbridge Hines, the founder of the Episcopal Theological 51ÊÓÆ”. We remember his fearlessness as he led the Episcopal Church into the most difficult, divisive, compelling challenge of his generation: the legacy of slavery, the inequities of race, the ongoing suffering of citizens of this nation. We recall his powerful preaching — that very old-fashioned low tech art of personal, corporate, scriptural persuasion and conversion. We give thanks that he established this seminary, and that God has given it growth to be the place that we love and serve today.
I know John Hines through those who knew him, Dena, Charlie Cook, and Carl Shannon, and lots of others, even people I run into in my travels: Dolores Goble, from Houston, who still talks proudly of having been confirmed by him as a young woman at the University of Texas in a confirmation class of one. I have heard fine preachers interpret him in sermons on his feast day.
However, I am mindful that whenever you celebrate the past, (especially if you weren’t there) there is a risk that you will romanticize and exaggerate the accomplishments of saints of an earlier era, and compare the colorful drama of then with your own pastel and uneventful present.
It would be a terrible shame to do that, because then we would miss God’s call upon us at the present moment.
Today, when we dedicate the Loise Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation and give God thanks for the gift from her foundation to endow and name the center, we are taking the present seriously.
Now in the present, we are exercising, in our own way, the gift that John Hines had: of reading the signs of the times.  He looked around, at reality of the world – in Jesus’ time the region of Galilee, in Hines’ the United States of America and he looked at it in light of the good news. And he discerned how the church was being called to take up the cross daily and follow Jesus.
We are reading the signs of our times and recognizing and naming the world’s brokenness and hurt. We are feeling the pressure and experiencing the lure of God’s call. Our Vocation.
For the drama of the present moment is indeed as intense, and the suffering as severe as in the time of John Hines.  The gospel makes a claim upon us to speak and to act – to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
In the present moment, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning home, and their wounds are not yet healed. Their families need to be held up and cared for. They are traumatized, broken, disoriented – these are the ones whom Jesus went with, those who showed faith.
The graduates of the Loise Henderson Wessendorff center will be serving these, they will listen for their questions, listen them into speech, hear them into healing. Bring them a word of hope.
Whole families without health insurance get sicker and sicker – the old, the babies and go en masse to the ER. Graduates of the masters programs in counseling and chaplaincy will care for the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. They will minister to them, in the translation of the scripture, “wait upon them.”
Graduates of the Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation at the 51ÊÓÆ” will offer healthy food to the spiritually hungry, who are high on junk food but famished for the Word of God.
To postmodern, media-overloaded, surfers, driven to distraction, they will seek together for the peace which passeth all understanding.
God calls gifted people, from all walks of life, to come and study for ministry as counselors, chaplains, teachers, and spiritual directors. They come to be well trained in the clinical methods of their fields, and to be grounded in the Christian tradition, formed in its patterns of prayer. In their listening, questioning, pastoring, they invoke the prophetic vision of the new creation spun out by the prophets and embodied in Jesus.
In a violent dog eat dog world, human beings are chemically programed for survival at the expense of the unfit, and the laws of the marketplace are the only reliable rules, contrast and summon Amos’ vision of God’s justice measured with a plumb line, straight and true, against which the violence and greed of Israel would be judged.
Weave Isaiah’ vision of comfort to those who mourn in Zion, a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
Recover and put into new words (or even old words) the vision of the human being, made in the image of God (Genesis 1) and (Genesis 2) molded from dirt and infused with the spirit of GOD.
The human being, us, our sister and brother, as made of clay, basically mud, or even hard fired shiny china, but even so, able to be shattered by force, by childhood trauma, by a roadside bomb, back into the dusty elements from which we were formed, and yet even then, precious, worthy, holy, beloved.
Paul recovers and weaves the prophetic vision:
“We have these treasures in earthen vessels (clay jars) so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”
“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”
Jesus invoked the prophetic vision and preached the reign of God. He taught the paradox at the heart of reality that it is by losing one’s life that you ultimately save it. He performed that paradox in his passion.
It is God’s call upon us at this present moment to invoke this prophetic vision, through the work of the Loise Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation of the 51ÊÓÆ”. Let us pray that we will be swept up into that same arc of prophetic preaching, shared with John Hines, with Amos, with Jesus, and with Paul, the vision of the new creation.
Amen

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Today this is more of a discipline than a practice for me, because our daily eucharistic lectionary has dealt the 1st letter of Paul to Timothy.

1 Timothy is not a favorite of mainstream historical biblical scholars, with their Protestant preference for the undisputed Pauline letters, the Paul of freedom and transformation. “For freedom Christ has set us free.”

For them, and I confess that I include myself in their company, the authors of the Pastoral Epistles “domesticated” Paul, made his radical teaching digestible as the Christian movement accommodated itself to its surrounding culture.

The Pastoral Epistles brought back strict gender roles – power and prayer for men, for women, seemly attire and silence.

What might have had the most effect upon us in the Episcopal Church, whether we are aware of it or not, is its influence of this epistle in the language of the Book of Common Prayer:

Notably:

“Almighty and ever-living God, who in thy holy Word hast taught us to make prayers and supplications and to give thanks for all men
”

“We beseech thee also so to rule the hearts of those who bear the authority of government in this and every land, that they may be led o wise decisions and right actions for the welfare and peace of the world.”

I have been editing an article on the Pastoral Epistles by my colleague, Deborah Krause at Eden Seminary (Fortress. forthcoming). I have been thinking about what if and how these epistles speak to us in this era.

Their teaching raises for us the truth that the church can be/has been in different relationships with the civil authorities  —

—-it has been (and is) persecuted, in danger, and compelled to be “quiet.”

—-it has been (and is) identified totally with the powers-that-be, and divinize, enforce the status quo, to the harm of the weak and the advantage of those with power– think of apartheid, slavery, suburban success.

—–it has been, but is now, perhaps more than ever, irrelevant, drowned out by noise, driven to distraction, outmaneuvered by more sophisticated techniques for telling and selling compelling stories.

Critical reading of the Pastorals causes us to ask where in this complex mix we and our faith community stand. Are we to be quieter or louder, or more empowered or humbler? Are we to compete with the technologies of our age, or invent or rediscover some other way?

These are big questions with hard answers. Today I discover a lifegiving word for us today in this epistle reading, as we enter deeper into dangerous geo-political waters, with Syria and Egypt


It’s kind of unglamorous, kind of “domestic”:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

At the same time the counsel is counter cultural and potentially powerful – in another way, crazy, radical:

we are to pray  for everyone, all kings and rulers –, Elizabeth, Basher al-Assad, Obama, Abdullah, Juan Carlos, Adly Monsour.  In prayer we do not place these individuals either on the axis of evil or the side of the angels, but we are exhorted to pray for all.

I give thanks that this indiscriminate prayer is built into our prayer book and into the structure of intercessions in our daily offices.

Such prayer requires letting go of judgment, and of labels, and of thinking that by thinking the correct way, you can control what happens or make yourself any safer than you are.

Such prayer requires radical humility, and faith as deep and broad as any undisputed letter of Paul.

I can’t believe that I just said that!

Such prayer requires radical humility, and faith as deep and broad as any undisputed letter of Paul.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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The Very Rev. Douglas Travis

Evensong, May 13, 2013

Lections:

Philippians 2:5-13

John 15:12-17

 
St. Teresa of Avila was one of the great mystics of the church. Born after Columbus came to this continent but before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door, she spent her entire life reforming not only her order, the Carmelites, but the larger Roman Catholic Church. She is one of only four women “doctors” of the Roman Catholic Church.
There was very little that scared Teresa including, apparently, God. She founded and visited Carmelite convents all over Spain, and so she rode her donkey a lot! One day her saddle slipped, and she found herself head down under the belly of her donkey as she crossed a stream. Complaining to the Lord of her treatment, she heard him reply, “Teresa, whom the Lord loves, he chastises. This is how I treat all my friends.” She replied tartly, “No wonder you have so few!”[1]
I must confess to you there were days during the earlier years of my tenure here when being president felt more or less like riding a donkey upside down in a slipped saddle with my head under the water. I’ll leave it to your imaginations to determine whether I complained to God about how he treats his friends!
But I will share this: the older I’ve gotten the more convinced I’ve become that the essence of being a mature Christian leader is resigning oneself to being a friend with God. I say “resign” because by many conventional standards being God’s friend is often not much fun . . . but it may ultimately be the only thing that makes life worth living.
I recently shared with one of my good friends, Cynthia Kittredge, that to my mind the gospel story could nearly be summed up in two passages from the New Testament – Philippians 2 and John 15, our New Testament and Gospel lessons for this evening. Indeed, so convinced am I of this notion that in preparation for this evening’s service I did that most un-Anglican of all things: I completely disregarded the lectionary and chose the readings myself! There is a certain license that comes with being the retiring dean of the chapel!
Let me tell you why I chose these two passages.
Fully a third of the people in the Roman Empire were slaves. In many contemporary versions of the Bible, the Greek word for slave is often gently translated as “servant”, and one can understand why. A servant is a wage owner. She can quit. In contrast a slave is property. He can’t quit! Slavery is perhaps the most horrible of all human institutions. It implies the complete objectification of one human being by another. Despite being human, a slave is little more than a beast to service the needs or pleasure of the master. The horror of that reality is served by accurately translating the word douloV in the Greek text, because it brings home the shocking drama of the biblical message.
The word “slave” appears in both our texts this evening:
 
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. (Phil. 2:6-7)
 
And in John:
 
I do not call youslavesany longer, because the slavedoes not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. (John 15:15)
 
Sometimes the biblical vision is assumed to be so pre-modern that contemporary folk cannot find it meaningful. We’re told that in the world of modern science we can no longer believe in the three-tiered universe. We just celebrated the ascension of our Lord, and I have to confess that stained glass windows showing the bottom of Jesus’ feet as he disappears into the cloud do stretch credulity. But I don’t think that’s the biblical idea. Philippians 2 makes the point: The ever present God, the God who knows the number of hairs on my head, the God who names me and calls me gives me identity – this God is far too big for any of my senses or even my mind to grasp. This God is hidden in light inaccessible and is ineffable. I can only yearn to see this God’s face.
And yet, Paul tells me, in his overwhelming humility and love for me, this God empties himself, taking the form of a slave, and is born in human likeness – so that we who are so very, very small and so very, very limited can see, touch, hear, and know him. As John reminds us, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I was raised with a profound bias against Baptists. As a kid I could sum up the difference between the Baptists and the Presbyterians with this: the Baptists had “Jesus”. We Presbyterians had “Christ” because, being more sophisticated and less credulous, we were on a last name basis with the Lord. But then I discovered the mystics, people like Teresa of Avila, and I began to have an occasional experience of riding donkeys upside down through streams, and I realized that the only thing really wrong with the Baptists constantly talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus was that they weren’t being biblical enough. The Gospel of John doesn’t talk about having a “personal relationship.” The Gospel of John talks about being friends with Jesus!
Think about the extraordinary elevation that’s occurring in our passage from John. Think about what Jesus is saying! You’re not slaves! You’re not my property! You’re not here simply to serve me! Rather you’re my friends. You are my friends! But there is a price. “You’re my friends if you do what I command you: Love one another as I have loved you! Not just “love one another” but, “love one another as I have loved you!”
Now who can pull that off? The answer is, nobody. Nobody – absolutely nobody – is capable of loving as Jesus loved. So why would he give us a command we can’t possibly fulfill?
Frankly I think the only way we can love as Jesus loves is to love with the selfsame love with which Jesus loves, and to be able to love that way can come only as a gift, a grace. You and I are able to love with the selfsame love with which Jesus loves only through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit – the Holy Breath of God – the breath with which Jesus fills us.
Now think about this: might not Jesus empty himself, becoming small enough for us to see, touch, hear, and know him that he then might breathe his breath into us that we might become like him, returning with him whence he came. Athanasius put it well: “God became human that human beings might become divine.” And to become divine with Jesus is to become Jesus’ friend.
Now what, you may all be wondering to yourselves, has any of this to do with 51ÊÓÆ”?
Together as a community and an institution we have enjoyed extraordinary success these last six years, and the world has noticed. Believe me, the world has noticed.
Success is fun. Success is measurable. If you’ve been successful you can prove it, and you can say, â€Àá” did this.
But there’s the rub – the temptation to say, I did this.
Who can love with the love of Jesus? Can I love with the love of Jesus? Can I be Jesus’ friend? Can you?
I’m convinced it is a law that our strengths are also always our weaknesses, and our greatest strengths are always our greatest weaknesses. We have been remarkably successful, and that puts us at great risk.
Let me quote two great 20^th century mystics on the notion of success. Regarding success, Thomas Merton said, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”[2]
Strong words. Now let’s be clear. Merton is not counseling that we do our jobs poorly, and he’s certainly not suggesting that the church (or the 51ÊÓÆ”) ought not grow. He’s just suggesting that, perhaps more than anything else, success will give the appearance of being what life’s all about at the expense of our discovering what life is truly about. And the Gospel is about nothing if it is not about what life is truly about!
And Mother Teresa had this to say: God does not call us to be successful. God calls us to be faithful. We must figure out what God wants us to do and do it.
You nor I can love as Jesus loves except as we allow Jesus to love through us. You nor I can ascend with Jesus except as Jesus breathes his Holy Spirit, his Holy Breath into us – the same Holy Breath he breathed into those frightened disciples in the upper room after his crucifixion.
Success is fun because it’s measurable and I can say, “I did it.” But it’s as seductive as it is precisely because it so calls me into my â€Àá” – it so calls me into my “eČ”ŽÇ”.
°ŐłóČčłÙ’s not how the love of God works. The Love of God calls me out of my ego into the infinitely larger universe of God’s Presence and Love. There miracles happen. Success is measurable, but the General Thanksgiving that we pray at the end of both Morning and Evening Prayer reminds us that the Love of God is immeasurable.
So, how can we live into God’s immeasurable love?
Sisters and brothers, there were times early in my tenure here when I really did feel like I was riding upside down on a donkey with my head in the water, just like Teresa of Avila, with this exception – Teresa was a very short woman. I’m a tall man. As that donkey traversed that stream I kept banging my head on the rocks at the bottom of the stream!
I could not figure out how to get the various constituencies of this community to see and so truly appreciate each other. Everybody seemed to be in a fighter’s stance.
What has changed is this: Before the enrollment grew, before the annual fund doubled, before the Campaign for Leadership proved successful, before the world began to notice – we had to become friends. Our eyes had to be opened so we could see each other, as God sees us. °ŐłóČčłÙ’s what the love of Jesus does. °ŐłóČčłÙ’s what the Presence of God’s Holy Breath does.
It is more important that we be friends than it is that we succeed. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we be professional. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we use the latest marketing technique. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we be colleagues.
As we are such friends – as we are friends in Christ – there is a third one always with us, the one who gives us breath, the one who gives us energy. This one who makes it all work, and then it is not â€Àá” who am succeeding. It is “we” who are succeeding, in Christ.
Have this mind among yourselves, the mind of the one who emptied himself taking the form of a slave.
And always recall what this one said: I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends . . .
Focus on your friendship in Christ first and, to quote yet another mystic, all shall be well.
 

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Good Friday Sermon 2013

Christ Chapel

Dr. Steven Bishop

         The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the most disturbing stories in the Old Testament.  Its matter-of-fact, stripped down narration heightens to its disconcerting contents.  Few words are spoken in the scene, the focus is on the action.  There is no reflection on the consequences or meaning of the action. We don’t know what any of the characters think or feel. There is not even a sign of a psychological or moral dilemma.
What we have is a knowing father who takes an unknowing child to an unknown place to commit an unthinkable act.  Even more troubling is that the God who orders this sacrifice is the God who, later through the prophets, will condemn child sacrifice as an abomination so vile its practice brings down nations. Some have tried to recast the story so that it has to do with something other than sacrifice.  But this is what it is—the words ‘offering’ and ‘knife’ are identical to the sacrificial language of Leviticus and other portions of the Old Testament.  The killing intention is clear.
We are told that this sacrificial command is to be a test for Abraham.  But what kind of test?  We are not told, but a plausible explanation is that it is a test to prove that Abraham believes the promises God made to him can be fulfilled in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  Isaac is the child of promise, the one through whom progeny will grow and land will be settled.  Abraham passes the test by demonstrating through his actions that he trusts that the death of the promised child will not interfere with the fulfillment of the promise.
But this does not change the fact that the story is empty of human feeling.  Compare our other readings.  John’s portrayal of Jesus’ final hours of life moves us because of the dying attention Jesus pays to his mother.  A compassionate and devoted person is revealed by John’s description.  Even the reflections of Hebrews on Jesus’ sacrifice show pathos and attention to the human cost of suffering.  In stark contrast, the narrator of Genesis presents the story with what appears to be a sense of detachment.
Abraham’s lack of reaction is shocking.  His speech is sparse and without affect.  Contrast his reaction to the news that Sodom and Gomorrah would be destroyed.  Abraham leaps into a mode of pleading with God to be just.  “Would God kill the innocent with the guilty?” he questions.  “Will not the judge of all the earth do justice?” He pleads for the innocent and he appeals to God to spare the cities by basing his argument on the injustice of killing the innocent.  He doesn’t just ask but he pleads and bargains and keeps pressing that fewer and fewer innocent would need to be found in order to spare the city.  But here, in the matter of his own son, he is strangely, uncharacteristically and hauntingly quiet.
When I was in high school my Sunday School teacher once imagined out loud what Abraham’s demeanor must have been like.  My teacher was reacting to a made for TV movie that showed Abraham wandering alone in the hills of Judea, screaming out to God and agonizing over the command to kill Isaac.  My Sunday School teacher preferred the stoic Abraham, the one the text reveals, going about God’s business.  This Abraham refuses to question God’s command.  Sacrifice your child Abraham, just as you would a goat or lamb or bull.
Abraham is silent about the sacrifice of his son.  He does not reveal it to his servants who travel with them nor to Isaac.  The narrator too is silent about the sacrifice of Isaac.  We do not know if Abraham contemplated what he was commanded to do.  We have no insight into his mind, the very thing a narrator could give us.  There are no details to give us a hint about the feeling that such a commandment would inspire: no sights, no sounds, no description of the attire of the travelers on their journey, no description of the villages they passed through or by, nothing about the heat of the day or the coolness of the evening.  The monstrous event unfolds while everyone is unaware of its relentless momentum.  All we get from Abraham or the narrator is a determined silent march toward death.
A vision of pathos finally emerges at the end of the scene.  The knife is in Abraham’s hand ready to cut the throat of his sacrifice when an angel of God intervenes with a message from God.  Abraham has demonstrated that his adoration of God knows no limits.  Abraham, like the very texture of this text, was determined.  He was going to the bitter end to prove himself to God, even if it meant killing Isaac.  But Isaac was spared by the timely intervention of a heavenly messenger and all ends rather well.
In spite of its ending we are still left face to face with the brutality of human sacrifice.  The story ends well for Abraham and Isaac but it does not end well for countless others who are considered expendable on the altars of sacrifice for reasons as unclear to us as Abraham’s were to Isaac.  So often the victims are like Jesus or Isaac: innocent, young, obedient.
On this day, it does not end well for Jesus.  Isaac’s sudden and divine escape from the thirsty knife of sacrifice makes it startling that Jesus hangs upon the cross and heaven is silent.  There is no one to stay the executioner’s hand.  No voice from heaven to stop the savage butchery that is crucifixion.  And no angelic messenger to say “you’ve proven how far you are willing to go, your adoration of God is clear.”  Abraham said nothing in the face of sacrificing Isaac.  God says nothing as Jesus dies upon the cross.  Today, when Jesus is dead, we are left, like so many who see brutality and death, who experience torture and abuse, who die as innocents, appalled and silent.
 

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In our lives Lord, be glorified
In your Church Lord, be glorified
In my words Lord be glorified, today

 
I am going to invite you to do something very un-Episcopalian (participate) – most of us have seen signs, banners or bumper stickers which proclaim, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You”.  If you believe that proclamation in your soul, say ‘ŽĄłŸ±đČÔ’.
Unfortunately, for me and others in our communities we find those words to be hollow. The words do however, invite us to stretch our understanding of ‘welcome’; and grow into the reality of what those words mean.
Rev.  Alexander Crummell who we remember today, was a product of not being welcomed, not being accepted, and being made to feel that he did not belong in the denomination he felt called to serve.  His journey of faith was circuitous and difficult. He was denied entrance to General Theological Seminary, yet that did not deter him. He studied privately and at the age of 25, Alexander Crummell was ordained priest in 1844. 50 years after the ordination of Rev. Absalom Jones in 1794 and 19 years before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863.  We, the descendents of slaves have been faithful members of this Church a very long time.
Rev. Crummell decided to leave the United States and travel to England after experiencing additional personal affronts. He graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge University in 1853. Then his ministry called him to Liberia, he was an evangelist, church planter, educator and author.  When he returned to the States Crummell began ‘mission’ work at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Washington DC. Rev. Kim Baker, a graduate of this seminary is currently assisting at St. Luke’s.
Rev. Crummell never left the Episcopal Church, even when it was silent on the institution of slavery.
In 1882, a priest in Mississippi launched an attack on Blacks because our numbers were declining. The reasoning was that Blacks lacked the intellect, morals and leadership ability to be members of The Episcopal Church. The Sewanee plan proposed to segregate Blacks into a ‘diocese based on race’. In response, The Convocation of the Colored Clergy was organized; Rev. Crummell was its 1^st president. The name was later changed to the Conference of Church Workers among Colored People.
Their agenda was to lobby and fight for the full inclusion and participation of Blacks in the life of the Church at the congregational level, in seminaries, at diocesan conventions, and General Convention. The organization fiercely opposed the Sewanee Plan. Under the leadership of Rev. Crummell, separate and unequal was not formally placed in the canons or polity of our church.
Rev. Crummell was highly educated, well traveled, and articulate. Can you imagine? Men and women who were slaves or newly freed having the audacity to speak up in support of their rights, as children of the Living God to participate in the Church they loved. This was during a time when it was dangerous for Black people to speak out against or challenge anything.
Some called Rev. Crummell a trouble maker, an agitator because he was a vocal activist who pushed the Church to stretch and grow. I call Rev. Crummell and members of those early organizations – prophets, servants of God who were courageous and willing to take personal risks to the ‘glory of God’ and for the greater good.
Rev. Crummell and those early organizations laid the foundation and the continuing vision for The Union of Black Episcopalians, which formally organized in 1968. As president of the Chapter in the Diocese of Texas, I am proud to inherit their legacy of advocacy, evangelism, education, identification of and eradication of systems of oppression in the Church and in society. It is a privilege to stand on the shoulders of praying, faithful, dedicated servants like Rev. Crummell.  When I think about it Not much has changed.  Leaders of the church still use scripture to deny the humanity of some of God’s children.  I have neverleft the Episcopal Church, even though in my lifetime the Church was silent on Jim Crow laws (voter suppression/poll taxes) and it was only in the 1990’s that The Episcopal Church began to address the issues segregation and racism.
You are thinking, “What pray tell does this have to do with me or my ministry? I offer two take a ways:
*Our church must not be one of exclusion, the church of our great grandparents, grandparents or parents. Research the histories of non-white Episcopalians in your community/diocese and insure that the histories of ‘many peoples’ are imbedded in the fabric of your ministry. Share their love of God, their faith, witness and tenacity in the face of being pushed to the margins and outright rejection.
*When people show up at gatherings, who don’t look like you, smile, acknowledge their humanity and demonstrate the type of welcome we proclaim. As a leader, everyone will be watching your reaction and response. It is important to model the love of and respect for every human being which Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry.
Our baptismal covenant requires it
it is not optional.
Did you hear ‘his’ story? Rev. Alexander Crummell’s story. What will you do with the seeds that have been planted? Will they become a part of you – thrive, grow and bear fruit? Or will they die? My sisters and brothers, God the Holy Spirit is pushing each of us to stretch and grow.
 
“The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” and I mean it.
AMEN~

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Delivered by the Rev. Charles James Cook, Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology, 51ÊÓÆ”, Austin.
 
References
The Holy Bible. The Letter to the Romans: Chapter 8. NRSV
——————–Psalm 139: 1-11. NRSV
The references to Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Dylan Thomas are all well known expressions of their work. I particularly recommend The Dorothy Day Book (Templegate Press); Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday); and the poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
 
 
 

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Because It Is True

A Commencement Sermon

The 51ÊÓÆ”

May 8, 2012

Exodus 19: 3-8
Psalm 15
Matthew 16: 24-27
 
            Because it is true.  On this celebratory occasion, an occasion that is at once an end and beginning, my prayer for you is that in the future, when you are asked why you came to seminary, why you sought ordination, why you were willing to be a priest in a confused and compromised church, or even why you are a Christian, all you will be able to say is, “Because it is true.”  That all you can say is, “Because it is true,” may mean you have had a difficult life, that is, a life stripped of what many associate with standards of success.  Yet I side with the Psalmist who insists that those who would abide in the Lord’s tent must “speak the truth from their heart.”  “Because it is true” is the necessary condition for such speech.
            I do not mean to suggest that if your life has been successful, or at least happy, you have failed to speak heartfelt truth.  But we live in a time when Christians are tempted to make truth irrelevant for why anyone might consider being a Christian.  Faced with the church’s declining membership and status, a cottage industry has developed to entice people to give Christianity a try.  These strategies for church growth are designed to work in a manner that makes irrelevant questions of truth.  I have no reason to deny that being a Christian may give your life meaning– whatever that may mean or whatever good it may do―may save your marriage, or even get you to work on time, but it is also the case that to speak the truth from the heart may disrupt our presumptions of success.
            Of course it is not only Christians who have given up on truth.  Voltaire no longer thought he needed God as an explanatory hypothesis.  In the same spirit Richard Rorty, one of our most distinguished contemporary philosophers, argued that truth is not a concept needed to sustain the work of philosophy or science.  Nietzsche gave this denial of truth classical expression when he observed:
                        What then is truth?  A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms:  in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which,                                 after long usage, seem to people to be fixed, canonical and binding.  Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become  worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
            This eloquent denial of truth earned Nietzsche the characterization “nihilist.”  But ironically he was anything but a nihilist.  At least he was not a nihilist if you acknowledge he was in fact passionately committed to living a life free of self-deception.  As he wrote in The Gay Science the “’will to truth’ does not mean ‘I do not want to let myself be deceived’ but—there is no alternative—‘I will not deceive, not even myself’; and with that we stand on moral ground.”  Yet Nietzsche knew that to avoid living free of deception must be an ongoing struggle for we so love the lie.  Nietzsche is a witness Christians dare not ignore.
            Nietzsche was surely right to observe that we do not like to be deceived, but it is also true that we wish others to regard us more highly than we deserve.  That is why Pascal observes that we hate the truth and those who would tell us the truth.  We desire that others be deceived in our favor, that is, we want to be esteemed by others in a manner that confirms the illusions we harbor to sustain our life projects.  That is why, Pascal suggests, few friendships would endure if each friend knew what was said by their friends in their absence.  According to Pascal it is a fact that if everyone knew what was said of the them by others there would not be four friends in the world.
            From Pascal’s perspective human society is founded on mutual deceit because our loves, and in particular our self-love, requires that we hide from one another and ourselves the truth.  We fear wounding one another with the truth because we so desperately want to be loved.  We do not wish, therefore, for anyone to tell us the truth and we avoid telling it to others.  These habits of deception become rooted in the heart making it impossible for us to speak truthfully from the heart.
            I fear you will find Pascal’s account of deceit all too relevant for your calling as a priest.  After all you are a human being.  You will want to be loved by those you serve.  In particular you will be called to be present to your people when their lives are in crisis.  Do not be surprised, however, because you have been present at such times those to whom you have been present will find it difficult to love you.  Because you are a priest you will be welcomed by people even when they are without protection and have no way to disguise their vulnerability.  In the midst of the crisis you will be loved, or at least admired, for your presence and care.  But after the crisis is over you will discover the very intimacy established by the crisis between you and those to whom you were present now means they fear what you know of them.  You have been allowed to see truthfully who they are which will often mean that they want as much distance from you as they can get.
            To sustain a community capable of having the lies that constitute our lives exposed, to sustain the practice of speaking the truth from the heart requires, as our Psalmist suggests, requires the creation of a people who do not slander one another.  Rather they are people with a genius for friendship refusing to do evil to their friends.  Nor do they reproach their neighbors because they honor all who fear the Lord.  They stand by their oath even when it is not to their advantage, and they do not lend money at interest or take bribes against the innocent.  The Psalmist seems to suggest these are the necessary conditions for a community of trust because without trust we are incapable of being truthful about ourselves. And if we are incapable of being truthful to ourselves we will eventually discover that we cannot be truthful to one another.
            For Christians the truth that makes such trust possible is no abstract truth.  The truth that makes possible truthful speech, heartfelt speech, is a person.  The “it” in “Because it is true” is a person.  Truth for us is not a principle or system, not a structure of correct insights, not a doctrine.  The expression of the truth may use any of these means to say what is true, but as Barth rightly insists, “Jesus Christ in the promise of the Spirit as His revelation in the sphere of our time and history is the truth.”  Only in the person of Christ are we encountered by the one who can unmask our illusions without utterly destroying us.  In Christ we are made intimate with God, making possible a nearness from which we do not flee.
            Jesus is the truth that judges and tests all other truths that would seek to be established independent of the love shown to us in Christ.  Accordingly any attempt to judge Jesus by a theory of truth not determined by cross and resurrection can only tempt us to think we are the measure of what is true.  Jesus is, as Barth maintains, the true witness who does not need to be confirmed or authorized by any other truth.  Rather he is the truth from which all other claims of truth are to be judged.  “He is the true Witness.  He is Himself the truth and its expression.  And in His existence and life as such He unmasks every other man.”
            Jesus is the heart from which the truth must be spoken.  Thus the truth that must be spoken is known only through witness.  Because he is the truth we can speak the truth.  That speaking the truth takes the form of witness means we are confronted with this truth in a manner that does not allow us to distance ourselves from him.  Any attempt to sunder truth from this the true witness, to make truth an idea about the relation between God and man, cannot be the truth.  If the truth is thought to be but a symbol, no matter how exalted, it is but a falsehood.  The true witness is this man of Gethsemane and Golgotha.
            Because the truth is this person, the one who endured Gethsemane and Golgotha, it is a truth that cannot resort to coercion to secure its status.  The truth that is Christ, the truth that can only be known by witness, is a truth that must make its way in the world by refusing to use the desperate means of the world to force others to acknowledge what is claimed to be true.  There can be nothing desperate about the witness that is Christ because what God has done through the Son cannot be undone.  That is why the truth that is Christ is so compelling.  It is compelling because those possessed by this truth are filled with joy.
            But then what are we to make of our Gospel for today in which we are told that any who would be a follower of Jesus must take up their cross and follow him?  What are we to make of Jesus’ claim that those who would save their lives must be willing to lose their lives?  I confess I cannot think of any advice more destructive for those called to the priesthood.  Such advice cannot help but tempt you to think that your calling is sufficient for you to believe you are making a sacrifice of the self.  Such a presumption, unfortunately, is a formula for priests to try to secure their status and power by becoming proficient at playing the game of passive aggressive behavior.
            Jesus, however, does not say that to live sacrificially is a good in and of itself.  Rather he says that those who lose their life for my sake will find their life.  “For my sake” means that we are invited to be a witness to the witness that is Jesus.  That witness to be sure may require a sacrifice, but if the sacrifice is to be true it must not point to itself but to Jesus.  It is the cross of Christ that is the sacrifice that has ended all sacrifices other than those whose end is Christ.  By the grace of God we are invited to share in Christ’s sacrifice, but such a sharing makes possible lives no longer captured by our self-deceptive strategies to secure our own significance.  The appropriate description for lives so determined is joy.
            Joy is the mark of lives shaped by the truth that is Christ.  To be captivated by such a truth, to be as the Psalmist suggests, a heartfelt speaker of the truth, means those so determined will “never be moved.”  “To never be moved” is the Psalmist’s way of saying that those whose lives are determined by Christ can be trusted to be who they say they are.   “Sincerity” and “integrity” are not sufficient to describe such people.  Steadfast I think is closer to the mark.  They are who they are by the grace of God.
            What a wonderful time to be a Christian.  What a wonderful time to serve the Christian people.  Odd sentiments if, as I suggested above, the church seems to be in a downward spiral.  Yet that this is the case simply means we have nothing to lose by speaking the truth to ourselves, one another, and the world.  It is surely the case that the world is dying –quite literally ― for a people capable of speaking the truth from their heart.   It is true that truth in our time is obscure and falsehood is well established, but that is no reason for us to despair of truthful speech.  After all, God, through his Son, has shown us that to desire the truth requires loving the truth. For without love we cannot know the truth that moves the sun and the stars.
            So I end where I began, that is, I pray that when you are asked why you came to seminary; or later when you reflect on why you have given your life in service to the church, that is to say, why you have lived your life as a Christian, the only reason you have left to give ― and it is a sufficient reason ― is, “Because it is true.”

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The Very. Rev. Douglas Travis

Martin Luther King Sunday, January 15, 2012

St. James Episcopal Church, Austin

Genesis 37:17-20

Ephesians 6:10-20

Luke 6:27-36

 
Who am I to preach to you?Here I stand, a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, heterosexual male, one of arguably the most privileged group of people in the history of the human species.
Who am I to preach to you? A descendant of Chatham Jack Alston, in the 19^th century one of the wealthiest men in all of North Carolina, the owner of hundreds of slaves.
            Who am I to preach to you?
 
Paul encourages us, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not count equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave . . . .” (Philippians 2:5-7)
 
The night before he died, Jesus said to his disciples, “I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends . . . .” (Jn. 15:15)
 
Jesus also said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn. 15:12-13)
 
Who am I to preach to you?
 
The night before he died, Martin Luther King told the crowd in Memphis,
 

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long time, longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned with that now. I JUST WANT TO DO GOD’S WILL . . .

 
And then, with that extraordinary voice and presence he had, that presence that told you that there was SOMEONE ELSE with him, some larger ONE who spoke with Dr King when Dr. King spoke, he boomed out . . . .
 

And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seeeen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! And so I’m happy tonight! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord![1]

 
Dr. King was not always without fear. Facing what he faced, he could not always be without fear. No man, no woman, could.
 
But he knew he was not alone. Twelve years before he had learned he was not alone. One night, during the Montgomery Bus Strike, King found himself faltering. It simply seemed too much. History had thrust upon him this challenge of leadership. He hadn’t asked for it. He had just received an anonymous death threat on the phone:
 

As he later recalled that late night hour of desolation, “I couldn’t take it any longer” and “tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.” Dropping his head into his hands, he suddenly realized he was praying aloud in the midnight hush of the kitchen: “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right . . . . But Lord, I’m faltering, I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this. . . . But I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” And at that moment, as King would tell it, he seemed to hear “AN INNER VOICE . . . THE VOICE OF JESUS,” answering him: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.” That voice of Jesus, Dr. King recounted, “promised never to leave me, no, never to leave me alone.”[2]

The night before he was crucified, Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. Going to be by himself, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Daddy, for you all things are possible; REMOVE THIS CUP FROM ME; YET, NOT WHAT I WANT, BUT WHAT YOU WANT.” (Mark 14:32ff)
 
What is the Holy Spirit of God? WHO is the Holy Spirit of God? He is the breath of God that blows around us and through us, that dwells in us, that gives us Life, that Holy Life that we will have with God always. I have the Holy Spirit and YOU have the Holy Spirit, and that breath of God that fills us with life will make you and me friends, friends forever.
 
At Pentecost the friends of Jesus were gathered together, hiding from the authorities, frightened of being arrested, feeling alone, and “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filed the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” (Acts 2:2-3) The sound of this event was so loud that people throughout the city of Jerusalem gathered to see what was happening, and the Apostle Peter – the same Peter who had abandoned his Lord as he hung naked on the cross – this same Peter suddenly understood, and he stood up, quoting the prophet Jo-el, and he said,
 
In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
And your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.(Acts 2:17)
 
I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh . . . . and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. (Acts 2:17)
 
Dr. King had a dream, Dr. King had a vision.It was a dream he received from God Himself, it was a vision he saw with God’s own eyes. Isaiah described it this way:
 
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. . . .
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;

FOR THE EARTH WILL BE FULL OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD AS THE WATERS COVER THE SEA.(Isaiah 11:6-9)

 
THE EARTH WILL BE FULL OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD.
 
What does the knowledge of the Lord look like? Better yet, what does the knowledge of the Lord make us do?
 
Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also . . . . (Luke 6:27-29)
 
One night during the Montgomery Bus Strike a bomb exploded on the front porch of King’s home. King had been at a meeting at Ralph Abernathy’s church. He rushed home to discover, to his relief, that Coretta and their infant daughter were safe, but a crowd had gathered outside. A very angry crowd. A crowd armed with clubs and guns. A crowd threatening to disintegrate into riot and vengeance.
King stood in the shattered rubble of his front porch, raised his hands and said, “We are not advocating violence! We want to love our enemies – be good to them. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. Love them, and let them know you love them . . . .” At least one of the white police officers at the scene understood that Dr. King had just saved his life.
 
Why love your enemies?
 
I BELIEVE IN THE EMPTY TOMB. It seems a dream. It seems a fantasy. But I believe in it! I believe a dead man rose. I could not stand before you today if I did not so believe.
But there’s more to it than that. I believe I executed the dead man who rose. I believe this dead man whom I executed rose and extended his hand to me. I believe this dead man whom I executed rose and extended his hand to me, and said, “COME, BE MY BROTHER. COME, BE MY SISTER. COME, BE MY FRIEND.”
 
One of the most tangible pieces of evidence we have that the resurrection of Jesus was an historic event is that not one – not a single one – of his disciples sought revenge. Instead they proclaimed a mysterious Gospel of Love, a love that is for everybody, that excludes nobody. A love that’s free for the asking, whoever we are, whatever we’ve done.
This is a very strange way to react to the unjust execution of a friend!
 
Who am I to preach to you?I am nobody. I do not stand before you with any claim to a right to be here. Certainly I’ve done nothing to earn it.
But the same Lord you call Lord I call Lord. The same Jesus you call friend I call friend. The same Jesus who calls you friend calls me friend.
And because we are friends with Jesus we can breathe his Holy Spirit, we can dream his dreams, we can have his visions.
Dr. King had a dream, he had a vision. He knew he was not alone. He spoke with the voice of the prophet. When Dr. King spoke we heard the voice of God, we saw the Kingdom of God, we knew the love of God.
Who am I to preach to you?I am nobody – nobody but a friend of Jesus and your friend in Jesus rejoicing that God gave us Martin Luther King.
 
May God’s holy name be praised. Amen.
 

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… for he gives the Spirit without measure.

Measuring, weighing, analyzing, counting, verifying, certifying, judging…

So many of our common activities require us to figure things out.

We get the picture of day upon day spent in trying to arrive at conclusions that will allow us to live another day.

Of course, living another day seems to be a metaphor to those who are healthy and wealthy.

Only for the dying or those in greatest peril does the metaphor fail and become an existential question.

I am blessed to be back in the parish working a lot of hours right now.

At 10 last night I got a call telling me that a parishioner who befriended me about four years ago had finally passed away. Russell.

Thursday a week ago, I got a frantic call from his wife to come deliver the last rites of the church, so this was not unexpected.

And before that, he had taken his best effort to attend his last Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s.

Both my predecessor and I benefited from Russell’s unqualified love and support for us. He was always ready with a compliment, always quietly making funny remarks, always a great smile, firm handshake and an open look.

You will meet Russell in your parish: He’s not simpleminded in his praise, not just fair words without hard work, not just going to answer “yes” to every idea you have: But he is openly admiring of the ministry of the ordained in general, and HIS minister in particular.

Old School.

When his mind was beginning to be affected by the disease, he still would wake up to my visits, he still would make some smart crack, and he would seriously and openly tell me he loved me.

He and I plan on meeting again on the other side.

I bring Russell to you today for a measure of the phrase that was applied to Christ:

… for he gives the Spirit without measure.

The ordinariness of good people in your parish may seem to be overshadowed by the controversies and the conflicts between people and ideas that characterize our seminary life.

It may be the pursuit of intellectual discipline and inquiry that creates such an atmosphere for this community.

Such discipline and inquiry are needed to make us ministers in the church of God, disciples with some discipline to back up their role as those set apart.

Nevertheless, I remind you that the daily life of the parish is mostly a joy filled place where sorrow is real, but does not overcome. Darkness exists but it has not vanquished the light.

The Parish is where single, solitary sinners gather into a body of saints precisely made holy precisely because they love and support one another.

As a minister in the congregation, you are sent, you speak the words of God, and you assure all that Christ has given the spirit without measure.

You will affirm that the Spirit is alive and well in the Church today.

Every so often a saint will provide his or her testimony to the faithful body, and Russell did that as the end approached.

His serious and open affirmation of his trust in God was known to all members of the church.

He even made it a point on Easter Sunday to say good-bye to the Latino congregation with some help from me.

The community will gather Monday to celebrate the passing of Russell’s earthy remains into the ground, and to petition God to fulfill his promise and raise his spirit to the exalted place where Christ is.

We have seen He whom God has sent, who speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.

To this we testify, thanks to Russell and all the saints in God’s church.

Amen.

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Psalm: Psalm 122

Gospel: John 17:6a,15-23

In the summer of 2001 I accepted the call to become the rector of a parish which had recently undergone a somewhat catastrophic split over the issues of the day. My predecessor, the majority of the vestry, and about 150 members of the parish had left to form a new parish no longer in the Episcopal Church.
When you’re the rector of such a parish you hold your breath every third year as General Convention comes around. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with what General Convention’s going to do. It’s a matter of dreading yet more infighting as parishioners takes stands on this side or that of whatever the issue of the day is – sort of like iron filings in a box with very strong magnets at either end. Everybody gravitates to one side or the other, there’s nobody left in the center, and the folk at either end quit talking to each other.
So I wondered, what to do? How are we going to hold this thing together?
As you all know, the opening words of the baptismal rite are taken directly from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. The Celebrant says, “There is one Body and one Spirit. The people respond, “There is one hope in God’s call to us.” “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.” “One God and Father of all.” (BCP, p. 299)
There is one . . . one . . . one . . . one . . . one . . .one . . . one . . . one. Seven “one’s”! Count them!
Rather difficult to not get the message, huh!
In Paul’s letter what precedes these verses is: “I therefore . . . 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.” (Ephesians 4:1-3)
I’m loathe to take liberties with worship. To my mind, one of the great beauties of belonging to a liturgical tradition is the manner in which our worship becomes part of the very fiber of our minds and souls through our repeating the same words again and again and through our knowing that worship in one Episcopal parish will look pretty much like worship in another. But in this instance I decided to innovate. Beginning some time in 2002 we inserted Ephesians 4:1-6 between the blessing and the dismissal at the end of the service. Every Sunday the entire congregation would rise and to together recite: “I . . .  beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called . . . bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the UNITY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE BOND OF PEACE. There is one body and one Spirit . . . .”
2003 rolled around. Gene Robinson received consent to be ordained bishop. To my recollection in a parish of well over a thousand members in a very conservative city we lost perhaps two families.
                According to the Gospel of John, the night before he was crucified our Lord prayed: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may my followers also be in us . . . so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, SO THAT THE WORLD MAY KNOW THAT YOU HAVE SENT ME AND HAVE LOVED THEM EVEN AS YOU HAVE LOVED ME.” (John 17:21)
In 1950 my grandfather was a Presbyterian pastor in Abilene, Texas. Do you know how many psychiatrists there were in Abilene at that time? Two! Think about that! Two psychiatrists for a population of well over 100,000 people!
Do you really think they were less inclined to be mentally ill than we are today?
You’ve probably all heard Frederick Buechner’s famous description of vocation: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” What you may not have heard is what precedes it. Let me read that to you. It’s from his little book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (1973, p. 95)
VOCATION
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirements (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
NEITHER THE HAIR SHIRT NOR THE SOFT BERTH WILL DO. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
All of you here tonight pondering the possibility of coming to 51ÊÓÆ” are here because you’ve heard a call, you’re seeking your true vocation. Our mission at 51ÊÓÆ” is to form mature Christian leaders, lay and ordained. Notice that “lay and ordained.” 60 years ago there were only two psychiatrists in Abilene because if you had troubles you went to the preacher.
I loved my grandfather dearly. He was a wonderful man and a wonderful pastor. He would have been a lousy shrink.
We in the church can draw the boundaries of our collective vocation ever more narrowly, leaving the very important work of psychological and physical healing and seeking justice to more “secular” professions, or we can acknowledge that God is his infinite mercy does not restrict himself to sharing grace only with those who have mastered ecclesiastical formulas or have made the conscious effort to belong to that peculiar group of people we call “church”.
At that same parish I referenced earlier there were each month something like 55 Twelve Step Meetings. There was real crossover between the two communities, but there were those in the church who had no contact with the 12 Steppers, and there were 12 Steppers who’d be at the church six days a week – every day but Sunday.
What I learned was, that’s okay. God goes where the need is. There is nowhere God isn’t. God is seeking to heal, to love, to usher in his reign of love everywhere.
This is no way compromises my confidence that Jesus is Lord, my conviction that the tomb was empty and the resurrected life is ours to have, or that Christ is present with us at His Table.
It does however weaken my conviction that entrance to the Kingdom will be determined by passing a theology exam.
And so at 51ÊÓÆ” we form priests because the church – and the world – desperately needs good priests. But we also train counselors and psychotherapists and chaplains and spiritual directors, and we welcome enthusiastically those who have not yet really determined just what they think of God, but they need a safe place in which to seek entrance to God’s Kingdom.
They need a safe place . . . .
Safety is marked first and foremost by friendship.
All of you are here this evening seeking to discern whether 51ÊÓÆ” is the community in which you will seek to be formed as Christian leaders. As surely as we were all created in the image of God, so in God’s mind there is an image of the true you and an image of the true me. In God’s mind there is the true self God calls us each to be.
Self and vocation may not be exactly the same, but it’s sure difficult to separate them from each other – rather like trying to separate heat from fire or wet from water. And self and vocation go hand in hand in knowing God. As St. Augustine put it, “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know You.”
As surely as we each have a vocation wherein our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger, so we each have a deeper vocation as well. Sisters and brothers, every one of us sitting here this evening – every single one of us, no exceptions! -has a vocation to friendship, first with God, then with each other.
That same evening Jesus prayed that his followers might be One, he said to them “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. . . . You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit . . . I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” (John 15:12-17)
I spend a lot of time pondering just what a Christian leader is. It’s not always the person in charge, believe me. What I’ve come to think is that a Christian leader is that person who truly knows God and so who truly knows her self. Likewise a Christian leader is that person who truly knows his self and so truly knows God. And in this truly biblical knowledge the Christian leader knows his or her vocation. And so the Christian leader knows the joy of her deep gladness meeting the world’s deep hunger.
But more than that the Christian leader understands the primacy of friendship with God and so of friendship with one another.
And so, from her heart the Christian leader can say “there is one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

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            For centuries the Christian church has celebrated Easter Sunday as a joyful event.  For Christian believers all over the world Easter Sunday is the time to celebrate, remember, and glorify God’s victory over death manifested in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The empty tomb is empty only in so far as it does not contain the body of Jesus Christ.  But the empty tomb is full of God’s expression of reconciling love, radical forgiveness, and a new era of being in relationship with the world and with God’s people.
As a Christian believer I can say this because I lean upon the faith and tradition of the Christian church that has articulated, interpreted, and taught the joy of Easter for centuries.  However, for the women at the grave, the disciples, and all other followers, the joyous reality of Easter morning and the empty tomb was not so obvious.  The scriptural account of resurrection in Luke tells us about the shock and bewilderment of the women, and about the doubts of the disciples upon hearing the news from the women.  The empty tomb presents us with the real tension of the resurrection event: on the one hand the empty tomb shocks and bewilders.  On the other hand it fulfills God’s promise, grows hope, and revives memory.
When we joyfully celebrate the Easter season, we are not quite in solidarity with the sad, bewildered, and fearful women at the empty tomb.  Their joy over Christ’s resurrection is not spontaneous; their understanding is not automatic; and their mission is not clear, much less accomplished.  The angels by the empty tomb remind the women to remember what Jesus taught while he was still alive.  The reality of the empty tomb calls the followers of Jesus to remember the order of salvation, to proclaim it, and to hand it down.  It also challenges these followers to find a life-giving purpose to their lives after Christ’s death.  The empty tomb calls all followers of Christ-whether those at the empty tomb or those of us who remember and celebrate the empty tomb today-to an exclusive task: the task of imagining the shape of our faith.
When we lose a family member or dear friend to death, we are faced with an extraordinary task: What shape will we give to the memory, to the spirit, to the voice, and to the presence of the person who is no longer among us?  We may walk to this person’s house, to her or his bedroom, we see a bed which can still preserve the contours of the body.  We open our beloved’s closet, touch the clothes and shoes; we smell the fragrances and perfumes, we browse through the books, we feed the lonely pet, and we look out the window.  We see the street life as usual, and while all the material objects might still breathe life, the emptiness of house presses upon our minds the most painful sting of death.
Such an empty house and the empty tomb call us to a task: What shape will we give to our memories and to our faith?  When the body is not here to touch, to interact with, what shape will we give to the bodyless reality; how will we reconstruct the form, how will we put flesh on the spirit?  Jesus’ disciples are confronted by this task of reconstruction: they need to have a vision for their faith.  Before the crucifixion, Jesus was physically present with them, eating with them, healing them, journeying with them, even calming nature’s storms.  Thus, in a paradoxical way, the resurrection event shook the frame of their faith: Jesus died and was resurrected-and his body was gone!  And the empty tomb called disciples to construct a new frame of their faith, of their relationships and practices: a frame that will be able to hold their faith and the faith of the generations that come after them.
So, what is the post-resurrection frame of faith?  The passage from Luke tells us that there are three shapes for this faith: the shape of the body, the meal, and the catechesis.  When Jesus appears to his disciples in this narrative, at first their hearts are filled with fear at seeing the apparition of Jesus.  Jesus sees their fear and doubts and asks them to look at his arms and legs.  “Touch me and see;” he says “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”  The bodily presence of Jesus conveys to his disciples the first clue about the shape of their faith.  Faith in Jesus Christ is an embodied faith.  Jesus Christ encourages us to embody our faith in his body-in his flesh, in his wounds, in his arms.  The theologian Sally McFague reminds us that when we talk about the body of Christ in its spiritualized form only, we can easily forget the needs of our hungry, naked, or wounded brothers and sisters.  This means that we can easily ground our human interaction and relationships in the abundance of rhetoric.  And in doing so, we might create relationships that surf on the waves of theological language, but do not take a deep dive into the reality of brokenness, loneliness or estrangement from one another and ultimately from God.  The resurrected flesh of Jesus Christ denies us an escapist spiritualized faith.  The resurrected flesh instead grounds us in the embodied and palpable shapes of our faith.
The resurrected Jesus asks his disciples: “Have you anything here to eat?”  The disciples offer Jesus a piece of broiled fish.  Jesus takes it and eats it.  Having a physical need such as hunger, Jesus shares with his disciples and all human beings the real needs of the body.  As Christ’s body has become the universal body, it is morally normative: it shows us what hunger, thirst, pain, cold and heat feel like for us and for all other human beings.  The body is formational: it prompts us to offer each other practices such as hospitality, forgiveness, or sharing resources through which we can soothe and alleviate the various needs of the human body at large.  And the body is mystical: through breaking the bread as the fellowship of disciples with Jesus Christ, we join in the sacramental union with the Trinitarian God and foretaste the eschatological banquet of divine hospitality.
When Jesus eats with his disciples, he also teaches them.  He repeats his teachings and the interpretations of Mosaic law, prophecy, the order of salvation and makes his disciples understand.  He opens his disciples’ minds so that they can understand and indwell the Word of God.  In Luke’s account, the meal and the teaching are not two separate, disjointed functions of the body.  Rather, having a meal and teaching combine as a sacramental catechesis that initiates believers into the true understanding of the Word of Scripture.  The disciples’ or our understanding of the Word is not mainly the matter of intellectual assent; it is the matter of God’s transformative grace through the Holy Spirit.  The Trinitarian God dispenses God’s grace through the body and its life-giving rhythms such as proclaiming the Word, administering the sacraments, teaching, and other ministries.  The third shape of faith that Luke’s narrative offers is that of teaching, of handing down the faith as a practice that is always accompanied by instructing clearly, interpreting truthfully, and imparting faithfully in the paradigm of table fellowship.
The shape of faith that we are called to form is neither exclusively theoretical nor practical.  It is not exclusively what we think or what we do.  It has to do with forming the body, drawing the corporeality of faith so that it becomes a joined property at which everybody has an equal share.  It is about togetherness and creating the circle of faithful friends in Christ.  When we sit down together to have our meals in the Weeks Center, when we come together to this place of worship, when we sit together in the classroom, we embody and draw the shape of the resurrected body of Christ.  We experience, teach, and reenact the life-giving and life-sustaining beats of this body.
First, we experience the sacramental transcendence of this body in Eucharist.
Second, the meal and the Word unify us with creation and the commonly shared tradition of the Christian church.  Our shared meals become catechetical tools.  Through them we hand down tradition and cement our rootedness in divine praxis of sustenance and hospitality.
And finally, our practices such as chapel time, community hour, composting and recycling, pizza nights, or faculty picnics create embodied expressions of our faith.  Through them we reenact God’s act of befriending us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus will ascend to heaven but not before he tells his disciples that they are witnesses to the event of the resurrection, that they have a unique mandate to tell and proclaim the Gospel, and that they will be filled and equipped with the power of the Holy Spirit.  The resurrected body of Christ is embodied in the fellowship of disciples and fifty days later solidified as a spiritual and physical entity called the church.  The post-resurrection faith is God’s oikos-or house-in which we break bread together, share stories together and till the garden together.  Life in God’s house is a life abundant in the fullness and richness of our relationships with God, with God’s creation, and with one another.  Making God’s house full, however, begins with the emptiness of another space.  It is this reality of empty tomb that is bewildering, hopeful, and joyful because it calls us to imagine-as faithfully as we can-the life with and in the resurrected Jesus Christ in the household of God.

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This past summer, I made the journey-along with several thousand other people–to that particular expression of our tradition–General Convention which was held in Anaheim, California, the home of Disneyland and down the road from Hollywood.
As I wasn’t a deputy I had the freedom to wander the exhibit hall, hang out around the free wi-fi station and generally schmooze with people I knew  and with people I didn’t know. It was fascinating-and proved to me once again that there might just be some truth to a theory called  “six degrees of separation.”
You may be familiar with the term from a movie by that name.  The idea is that any two individuals can be connected through at most five acquaintances, thus the phrase “six degrees of separation.”   In other words, I know x, and x knows y, and y knows z, and so on, thus there is a line that runs from me to z.
The idea that the distance between two perfect strangers is shorter than you might imagine intrigues people.  Curious mathematicians have worked on algorithms that would support its validity and social scientists have developed networking experiments to see if it really works.
But the idea’s most happy result so far has been a trivia game called —“The Kevin Bacon Movie Game” also known as “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.”   Now Kevin Bacon is an actor whose career has been prolific.  He’s been steadily employed in one movie after another since the 1980s. At one point, noting how busy his career had been, he guessed that he had pretty much worked with all of the name actors in Hollywood.  Thus the game:  Name any actor that comes to mind and you can connect that actor to Kevin Bacon within the famous six degrees of separation by following a trail through the movies they’ve been in.
There’s even a web page that helps you do this. So I tried it, and for some reason-don’t ask me why–the name of Lillian Gish came to mind.  (Now for the youngsters among us she was the Julia Roberts of the 1920s, but but she continued to act as she aged and I was amazed to discover that there were only two degrees of separation between her and Kevin Bacon-TWO!–a bit player in one her later movies went on to co-star with  the ubiquitous Mr. Bacon.  Amazing.
 
Of course this should come as no surprise to Episcopalians who play this game all the time.  When two Episcopalians meet, say in the exhibit hall at General Convention, it usually takes about five minutes before they start to plot out the degrees of separation and soon they find some common point of connection-a person, event, diocese, bishop or  place.
At one point I stopped at a booth just to pick up some handouts and then made the acquaintance of an Episcopal priest who it turned out had been best friends with a Catholic priest who had brightened my life when I was in fourth grade.  Amazing.
What that encounter made me realize is that even though the idea is called six degrees of separation it is really about the chain of connection, the ways in which we are linked to one other.
So of course this being the day when we gather to remember and celebrate the life and ministry of John Hines, the question comes to mind-What is our connection to John Hines, the founder of this seminary? What is it that links us to him?
         
For some the connection is obvious.  Some people are here today because they knew him well as a father, friend and colleague.  Many more, I would guess, know him indirectly. I myself  never knew him personally but are blessed to include those who did among our friends and colleagues. Even more are connected to him because we have benefited from the institutions that grew out of his vision-like St. Stephen’s School and we are connected because we are worshipping here in this chapel of the Seminary upon which he rested his hopes for preparing a generation of ministers who would serve the Church in a changing world.
See, I’ve already veered from the kind of simple straight lines that run from one person to another to a whole complex set of people and relationships-Bishop Hines, students, faculty and supporters of this school over several decades…and then the circle gets even bigger-the Episcopal Church at large, and then even more-the people in the world around us.  What John Hines liked to call “the entire universe.”
“Six degrees of separation” begins to look like a pretty thin way to account for the ways  our lives are intertwined-and the ways in which our lives are touched –not just by the people we know but by people who may appear to us just a names on a list -the 22^nd Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, for example, or as subjects of biographies that we plan to read when we have the time.
Even the question grows larger-it’s not just how we are linked to one another but how do we trace those patterns of connection in a way that brings us closer to God and closer to fulfilling God’s intention for us as the Christian community.
 
So what glimpse of the kingdom of God does the life of John Hines give us?
John Hines was a man with a fine mind, a big heart and an outgoing personality.  He was a priest whose spirituality ran deep and energy ran high. He was a bishop with a vision and a mission and he had the courage and resilience-and the grace–to stay true to it.
When I stop and think about the world in which John Hines lived and carried out his ministry, some of what he did is truly breathtaking.
He grew up in the Piedmont of South Carolina, in a small textile and farming town, where the lines between races and classes were tightly drawn and almost impossible to cross.  His family was not rich but he had all of the advantages that would have made it so easy for him to settle into a kind of acceptability and ambition that would have kept him silent in the face of the racism that was woven into every layer of society.
But he did not remain silent-from the very beginning of his ministry as a priest, John Hines took on the role of watchman for Christ, challenging not just prevailing attitudes toward race but the very particular ways in which that sense of how things should-must-be –damaged the lives of all it touched.
John Hines is often described as the modern day equivalent of the Old Testament prophet.  There is no doubt but that today’s passage from Amos shaped the way Hines understood what God expected of the Church.  But we do him an injustice if we think that his prophetic voice was all about the words.  It was all about the action too, the action that he was able to take because he had the gifts of courage and vision and also because he had another gift that is essential to leadership-clarity about his vocation and his identity.   For him there could be no separation between words and deeds.
This is who I am and so this is what I must do.
But that didn’t make it easy.  John Hines was not naĂŻve—he knew that whenever the fabric of creation is pulled apart by sin, by self-interest or by self-righteousness, any attempt at reweaving it would be difficult, and it was.
He knew what it meant to be on the losing side of an issue-
 
In 1948, as the new bishop coadjutor of Texas, he proposed opening vestries and diocesan council to the participation of women-it failed. 
In 1949, again as bishop in Texas, he proposed that if black and white delegates to diocesan council could not be served together at a common meal, which they could not, then the council would forego the meal-that proposal not only failed but the delegates voted to commend the hosting parish for observing the segregation laws.
Throughout the 1950s he had to fight battle after battle to integrate diocesan camps and institutions, even his beloved St. Stephen’s was not formally desegregated until 1963.
And In 1971, as presiding bishop, and amid great criticism he challenged General Motors to stop making a profit off apartheid in South Africa, this ten years before the divestment movement gained ground.
John Hines’ accomplishments came at a cost.  His leadership as a bishop and as presiding bishop was marked by criticism, resistance and conflict but also on his part, by patiently waiting upon the Lord. But I’m not even sure the word “accomplishment” was in his vocabulary.   He knew that the work of creation remains unfinished, and that racism and other forms of oppression would continue.
I think he would call the things he did simply living in witness to the Gospel.
 
And that helps us see the real source of our connection with John Hines because at the heart of that connection is our connection with the heart of Christ. When all is said and done, what connects us to Hines is simply what we share with him-baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ.    And sharing that– we have a shared vocation-to proclaim not ourselves, earthen vessels that we are, but Jesus Christ.
We can’t be John Hines; we shouldn’t even try.  And our ministry will not look like his because our world is not the same as his-but we do know that racism remains, that people still live under many forms of oppression-and that Jesus Christ still calls us to turn our face to a broken and hurting world– as He did looking out from Calvary.
John Hines lived his life as priest, bishop,  leader and servant in response to the call that Jesus makes to his disciples in today’s Gospel-How will you follow me? Will you pick up the cross? Will you take the risk and give your lives over to the most radical thing of all-grace.
What John Hines deeply believed is that the personal answer to those questions cannot be separated from the answer that we give as the Body of Christ, the Christian community in all its particular expressions. How do we proclaim hope; how do we persevere in trust;  how do we speak truth -not just to power-but to ourselves!-and how will we embody God’s love in our life as an institution.
How we answer those questions matters for this Seminary, for this Church and for this  world.  These are not trivial pursuits, in the same category as knowing who acted in what movie.  They are deep and sacred journeys.  Because what we do matters-not so that we can proclaim our own righteousness or try to assure our own salvation but in service to others and for the glory of God.
It matters that John Hines saw
that the church needed to include women.
It matters that St. Stephen’s
and all the places where children gather need to be a blessing for all.
It matters that he envisioned a seminary
that would take the concerns of the world seriously.
It matters that he saw a connection
between his life and the life of perfect strangers in South Africa.
May we, standing in the circle of the earth-bound round by God’s embrace-
Proclaim God’s glory and God’s grace, through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
(Final prayer inspired by Hymn 540, Awake Thou Spirit of the Watchmen, Hymnal 1982; sung before the Gospel and a favorite hymn of Bishop Hines.)

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A Brief Explanatory Prologue
 
This sermon makes use of a pattern of typological exegesis common in the early church.  In these readings, Sophia is read as a dimension of, or perhaps a synonym for, the Logos, and so her personification in Wisdom literature is taken as a cosmic telling of the story of the Incarnation. My reading is influenced by a group of Russian Orthodox writers, though they would want me to clarify whether I think Sophia is an earthly manifestation of the divine, or the Logos itself, or perhaps a name for the divine nature that all divine Persons share.  I don’t clarify such matters here, because I couldn’t imagine how that would be important to the rhetorical task that this sermon attempts.
Even more than these Russians, the text most in my mind was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and this my source for the image of the violated Sophia.  Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightening contains the suggestion, which I borrow near the end, that Peter’s satanic intervention is really an attempt to get Jesus to follow him, rather than the other way around.  The image of our suspension from heaven by golden threads comes from Plato’s Laws, and is his way of characterizing life in a liturgical city.
The only other acknowledgement that I feel I should make is to give credit to Professor Micah Jackson for the slightly “blue” line about Lady Wisdom’s annoying behavior.  In using this line, I am trusting the skills of a gifted rhetorician.  If it offends, I simply remind you that I, like Moses, am lacking in the orator’s art, and my Aaron, in this case, is officed a few doors down in the back corner of the McDonald building.
 
The Sermon
 
Proverbs 1:20-33
Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-8:1
Mark 8: 27-38
 
It’s one of the more disorienting teachings of Christianity:  the vast expanse of interstellar space, and within it this earth, our fragile island home, are only a dim and distant reflection of the beauty, majesty, and grandeur of the Garden of Eden.  The main issue I take with Eucharistic Prayer C from the Book of Common Prayer is not its oh-so-seventies language, which has aged about as well as the “attacking the Death Star scene” from the original Star Wars.  The trouble is that the Prayer speaks as if the universe searchable by telescopes, microscopes, and jet planes is identical with the one God created.  The Prayer thinks when it looks out on the vast expanse, it’s looking at the Garden.
 
And there is a danger in the assumption that what appears at first glance to be the case is actually what’s true about the world.  Not to be too hard on the Eucharistic Prayer, I’d rather turn a bit closer to home for an image of this common sense that turns into a hazardous sort of anti-wisdom.  I’d like to call this way of thinking the Logic of My Neighbor’s Van.
My neighbor collects vans.  I don’t know where he gets them, and I’m not sure I want to.  But the game of guessing what sort of vehicle will be parked on the street in front of our house has become a favorite way for the Bakers to entertain themselves during the rush hour trips up and down I-35.  Sometimes it’s a big red 15 passenger affair, sometimes a white van with a Budweiser logo on the door, sometimes a prisoner transport that warns ominously, “Do not come within 15 feet of vehicle.”
The current addition to our neighborhood, though, is my favorite.  A big white bus that says on the side:  “US Extradition.”  And then the slogan, “Securing and Protecting all roads and avenues of extradition.”  Now I wondered, first of all, what the difference between a road and an avenue is.  But what really has allowed this van to become an object of interest and contemplation to me is that the Extraditors seem to have run out of words, and ended it up by repeating the name of the department within its slogan, which comes down to saying:  “US Extradition: We’re here for Extradition!”
The logic of my neighbor’s van seems to govern an awful lot of the received wisdom of our age.  “America exists to protect America,” “Democracy exists to further the cause of democracy,” “our money is here to make us money,” “health insurance is out there to make sure we have health insurance.”  “The Episcopal Church must survive the current crisis so that there can be an Episcopal church.”  “Gays and lesbians need to be ordained because then we’d have ordained gays and lesbians” —or sometimes, “gays and lesbians shouldn’t be ordained, because then we’d have ordained gays and lesbians.”
This is static thinking, ultimately conservative, regardless of where it lands on the political spectrum, because the goal is self-preservation.  It’s summed up neatly in the phrase, cherished of CPE survivors and said with a shrug or-alternatively-a sigh, “It is what it is.” This little phrase really means, “The horizons of this issue are limited in reality to the way they appear to me at this moment.”  In philosophical language, this is called reducing ontology to epistemology — but you may have to take Kathy Pfister to the Posse East for an explanation of that.
Today’s scriptures can be read together as a narrative of the confrontation of the Wisdom of Heaven with the Logic of My Neighbor’s Van.
The Wisdom of Solomon announces with great fanfare the arrival of the character who, under God’s direction, fashioned this creation.  The Lady Sophia, divine feminine, is “fashioner of all things.”
She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
She is intelligent, and holy.
She loves the good.
She is beneficent, humane,
steadfast, sure, free from anxiety,
all-powerful, overseeing all,
she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well.
A universe ordered by such a royal queen would be wonderful place to live.  We would find ourselves connected to the goodness and beauty of God by golden threads, and would live our lives in happy suspension from the overflowing heavens.  I would love to meet this queen, and thank her for ordering the world that I am fortunate to call home.
And, as if on cue, she appears, in the text from Proverbs.  I meet this queen of queens on the street, oddly enough, and I know that the knot in my stomach is going to make my voice quiver.  I try a few practice lines:  “Lady Sophia, I’ve heard all about you.”  “Hagia Sophia,” I wonder?  What’s the proper address?  “The Very Sophia?”  “The Most Very Sophia, welcome to your world?”  But my rehearsals are all for naught-she’s not greeting her populous today.  Instead, she’s walking about with a maddened eye, shouting through keyholes and banging on shutters.
How long will you fools hate knowledge?
Because I have called and you refused,
have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,
and because you have ignored all my counsel
and would have none of my reproof,
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when panic strikes you,
when panic strikes you like a storm,
and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
 
You have planted the fruits of malice, she tells them, and of self-assuredness, greed.  Let the fruit that you have sown and tended like cherished children now be your food.  Let the machines that you have built in order to consume everything in sight now turn on you.  And when you call on me, your prayers will rebound off a silent sky.
I quickly duck into an alley and avoid this tirade.  Hell hath fury after all, and it’s the fury of Wisdom’s scorn.
I wonder why Wisdom is turning out to be such a wise ass?  This is a foolish way to behave-there are standards and protocols to be followed in the city, and she’s making enemies. She shouts again, “How long you fools?”  Someone from inside a locked house calls back, “This is the world, get used to it!  This is the way people treat one another, the way we use our money.  This is the way things are.  It is what it is!”  And she calls back, “No it’s not what it is, because it’s no longer what I made it to be.  Your city is not a true city, you are not truly people, your world is not a true world, and your wisdom is not true wisdom.  I’m the mirror of God, and I don’t recognize my creation any longer.”
Finally, collecting my nerve, I approach the Heavenly Queen. As I come near, I see that her clothes are soiled and torn-as if she’s has been violated.  I take her by the arm and stop her in mid march down the street.  “Lady, why are you making them hate you?” I ask.
She turns and looks at me.  “Who do you say that I am?”
“I know who you are,” I reply.  “You are Wisdom, come from God, the hidden fabric of the universe.  And that’s why you have to stop this.  You should be on a throne, with crowds of people sitting at your feet-but this ranting is not the way.”
She turns her back on me and begins to walk away, but then stops again.  “Get behind me Satan,” she says. “The Wisdom of heaven does not imitate the foolishness of earth.  If you are my disciple, then follow me through these streets.  You may lose this world,” she said, casting her arm about to the shuttered windows around us, “but you will gain the life I fashioned you to live.”
I stand for a moment, rooted in place.  Was I right about her identity?  Is it possible to recognize the Wisdom of God, but not recognize the foolishness of the world? Those people shuttered up in their houses seem pretty sensible to me actually, sitting at their tables, ignoring this street barker who wants them to give up everything for her.
What do I do now?  Do I follow her, into a future that I can’t imagine or even really understand?  Or do I slink off into the alley, assuming that this was all a case of mistaken identity?  Who do I say that she is?
Ours is a community that gathers round wise words.  Our story is the story of the Divine Lady, incarnate as the man Jesus.   This story tells that the universe was crafted by these wise hands, made by God’s own Wisdom, which is a spotless mirror of his being.  But the world that we look out on has come ungoverned by wisdom.  The stars we see, the winds we feel, and the words we hear no longer witness directly to the craftsmanship of their maker.  Wisdom is abused in our age.
But we are a community gathered round wise words. We have these scriptures, and two millennia of written and lived commentary on them that we call the church. That means that in this place wisdom must be given voice, and not drowned out by foolish banter that stubbornly insists that vans and people and cultures and institutions are what they are.
Here the light must shine in the darkness and the darkness must not overcome it.  We must care for wisdom, even as she is handled roughly by this world. We cannot, however, care for her by protecting her. Our temptation may be to hear Christ speak in our sacred text, but then, like so many half-blind Simon Peters, to fix him up; to ask him to follow us, so that we can show him the right way to make a grand entrance on the public square of the age.
But Wisdom’s path goes a different direction.  We stand today at the fulcrum of the gospel:  So, Simon Peter, you recognize Christ. You know who he is. Will you follow him on the path to Jerusalem, or stay behind with the Messiah of your imagination, the one who might yet make nice with the powers and principalities? This call to follow will seem foolish, since it runs counter to the logic of a world that is what it is. We’ll be asking for whatever we get, when we start opening our doors on this street preacher.  He’ll likely pester us about our lives being out of sorts with the grain of the universe. And then there we’ll go, off to Jerusalem to do something stupid.  That’s the Wisdom of heaven, lived out on planet earth.
Who do you say that he is?  We answer not only with our lips, but with our lives.
 
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Christ Chapel– 51ÊÓÆ”

Micah Jackson, John Hines Assistant Professor of Preaching

 
Several years ago, the United Church of Christ began an advertising campaign designed to answer what they considered to be one of the primary questions facing people wondering about the church. Their slogan was “God is still speaking.” It was a powerful campaign, and by all accounts, it was successful. And I wouldn’t want to criticize the marketing geniuses behind the United Church of Christ, but I do think that they’re asking the wrong question. If you ask me, there is a much more important question facing the Church these days. And I suspect that Bishop Hines would agree with me on this. Of course God is still speaking. The real question is this:
Are God’s prophets still speaking?
God said, “Amos, what do you see?” and Amos replied, “A plumb-line.” The plumb-line, of course, represents God’s way of building, one that is straight and true. This passage from Amos was very important to Bishop Hines, and indeed, it is the source for the beautiful sculpture in the narthex here in Christ Chapel. The sculpture shows the plumb-line coming from Heaven, to guide the people of the city toward that which is true. But it also hangs over the city as a sign of judgment, for indeed, dire consequences befall those who do not build straight to the plumb-line of the Lord. But in front of the sculpture is a stand, with a Bible on it. And inscribed on the stand are God’s words (in the Authorized Translation, of course) “Amos, what seest thou?” This is significant to me because it reveals that Bishop Hines knew that the plumb-line was important, but even more so was the vision of the prophet.
Prophets are the ones who see not only the world as it is, but also the world as God created it to be, wholly good, restored and rebuilt, as if with a plumb-line. And they can help others to see it, too. 51ÊÓÆ” a month ago, we presented the Charles Cook award in Servant Leadership to one of our own graduates, Zane Wilemon. He is the founder of Comfort the Children International. He was honored not only for his work, but also for his vision of relationships between us here in America and the people of Kenya. But more even than his vision, he was honored for what he causes others to see. The citation for the award quoted Zane’s grandmother who wisely taught him, “Seeing your life may be as close as some people get to reading the Bible.” Zane Wilemon is a plumb-line, placed in the midst of the people, which we are invited to see.
Are God’s prophets still speaking? Yes, they are.
Paul’s extraordinary letter to the Corinthians gives us another piece of this puzzle. He tells us how to proclaim the vision we see. For, as Christians, we do not see ourselves, or even plumb-lines. When God asks us “What seest thou” we see Christ crucified for the salvation of the world. And it is this vision that we must proclaim. And Paul knows that such a proclamation is not easy, indeed that it is very dangerous. But even if we are not simply afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down, but also crushed, driven to despair, forsaken and destroyed, we follow the vision of a man who has been to all these places before, and has triumphed over them all, even death, the final fear.
Bishop Hines lived this way. He proclaimed a true Gospel–even though unpopular with some–a Gospel of social justice inflected by the particular concerns of his day, racial injustice. His work with the General Convention Special Program was criticized for his insistence that the money the program distributed be given freely, without conditions and without oversight. Some said that it was irresponsible, and that the money might be wasted, and that without oversight, there would be no way of knowing if the programs the GCSP supported, let alone the program itself, was being effective. But Hines knew that so long as people in power insisted on judging the effectiveness of things, that true change in the systems of oppression would never be possible. He disregarded this criticism and all others because he knew that proclaiming the vision he saw of a world transformed by justice was his sacred calling, his one duty, and his joy.
Are God’s prophets still speaking? Yes. They are.
Jesus makes a difficult invitation to us this morning. Surely, following him means going where he goes, and maybe even ending up where he ended up. Jesus tells us not to be too concerned about protecting our lives. Indeed, he says that those who save their lives will lose them. Certainly, lives here could mean that our earthly existence could be demanded of us, but it could just as easily mean our metaphorical life–our safety and comfort–which is often harder to imagine surrendering. Taking up the cross daily is not easy, but it is the third piece of the prophet’s call. Not only to see the vision, nor only to proclaim it, but also to live it out in the world.
I might give another example here of one of God’s prophets, and how he or she is a living example of Christ’s call to us to take up our cross daily, but I won’t do that. I won’t do that because, frankly, I don’t want to let any one of us off the hook. If I name someone here then it might seem like all is well and I can just go on about my daily business of caring mostly about myself and paying lip service to the rest of the world. As a part of fallen humanity, I have that tendency, and maybe you recognize it in yourself, too. Instead, I’ll simply ask my question again.
Are God’s prophets still speaking? Yes, they are.
But are you speaking? It’s not an empty question. Simply flipping on the television or tuning in the radio, even just going down to the corner store will reveal that there are plenty of unloving, uncharitable blowhards still speaking. And though many of them are Christians, you couldn’t tell it from their actions, or their message. They’re speaking all right, but it is not the kind of challenging yet life-giving prophecy God demands of us. Some of them have a plumb-line, but often it is they themselves–and not God–who is doing the measuring. There should be more vision than that. They’re speaking all right, but some of them proclaim themselves rather than Christ crucified, his life poured out for the salvation of the world. There should be better proclamation than that. They’re speaking all right, but they speak from the safety of distance–distance and safety born of wealth, and power, and privilege rather than the all-encompassing, unblinking love of God for the creation. There should be more congruence between word and life than that.
God calls out to each of us, every day, and charges us to speak–to speak of love, and justice, and understanding, and peace; to speak of strength, and power, and mercy; to speak of friendship, and joy; in other words, to speak of God. Samuel heard God’s voice and said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Today when you hear God’s voice calling out to you, you will hear it saying, “Speak, prophet, for my world is listening.”

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