July 6, 2008

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year A

Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Romans 7: 15-25a
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
Psalm 45

The Rev. Robbin Clark

Hi, I’m back. It’s good to be home after three months of travel. I’m still settling back in at my house and here and trying to catch up with all that has been going on. I want to offer thanks for the gift of sabbatical time and all the wonderful experiences it has provided. I hope you won’t end up hearing more about them than you would like. And I also want to offer thanks to all who took on additional responsibilities here during my absence. I’ve heard that Micah did a great job as interim and wish he were still here and sharing in our life and ministry. Our staff stepped up and handled many things that would have been referred to me, and for that I am grateful. But I especially want to recognize our volunteer leadership for their dedication and hard work over the past three months. Sr. Warden Tim Sullivan has done an outstanding job. Bob Williams has continued to go ‘above and beyond’ as is his wont. And I know I’ll hear of the good deeds of others. On the clergy side, Deacon Ellen has really outdone even her own customary dedication in holding everything together despite all the other pressures in her life. And June’s services could not have happened without the generous help of Arthur Holder. Please join me in offering them our profound appreciation. Truly, it does ‘take a village’ to cover a sabbatical.

I was trying to figure out how to tell you sabbatical stories while still preaching on the lessons for today. It’s a tall order, since they are pretty random in themselves. One theme I noticed, though, is an exploration of the ‘is’ of life. What are the basic truths of a situation, and to what extent are they contextual versus eternal and universal? Do different places and times create different cultural equations?

Many of the great stories and sagas in Genesis purport to tell us why things are the way they are. Scholars have termed this ‘etiological mythos’ The pre-history passages of the first twelve chapters set the cosmic stage – creation and its order, the human predicament and nature of society. The stories of the Patriarchs explain the foundation of the relationship between God and God’s chosen people. What we have today may be more than we feel we need to know about the getting of a wife for Isaac, but it shows us the view that God has a fairly detailed plan and all runs smoothly when it is followed. God’s messengers reveal to the players what they need to do and they do it and all goes well. This may be fine for etiological mythos, but it’s a little too neat for real life. Many later stories give us more of a sense of the struggles of living or even preserve contrasting stories when human recollection and tribal traditions diverge about important people.

When we get to our New Testament texts. I find the ‘is’ that they present to be much more realistic. Without trying to read modern depth psychology into this ancient text, doesn’t Paul’s dilemma have our situation written all over it? We probably wouldn’t express it as a war between flesh/sin and mind/God’s law. We’re more likely to speak of frustration and self-loathing or approach/avoidance issues, but the fact is that we experience this struggle on a daily basis, and we find ourselves falling frequently into the territory covered by our general confession of ‘done and left undone’. How many times have I berated myself for falling yet another time into the same old behavior I hate? I think we can all cry out, with Paul, “Wretched [one] that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

He finds the answer in Jesus, and so do we, but we still have to deal with our day-to-day experience. I do see some Christians taking the ‘if I follow God’s plan for me all will go well’ line as in our first reading, but I’m not sure about how they come to know the details of that plan. I myself have only a big-picture understanding based on the commandment to love as Jesus did, a lot of examples from scripture and Christian history and occasional hints specific to my own situation.

Jesus seemed to find his own cues in his deep and prayerful relationship with the one he called ‘Abba/Father’. And he did look to the Law and the traditions of his people, but not in a slavish way. Love of God and neighbor were sometimes acted out in ways that countervened specific regulations. His was a way of affirmation, celebration and inclusion, and for that he was sometimes vilified, especially by those who thought they were just too smart or erudite for him. That should give us some pause. He urges us to go back to our earliest, most basic selves, to shed our sophistication and superiority and to come to him and learn from him.
The invitation to “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” is a welcome one indeed. It is enshrined as one of the so-called ‘Comfortable Words’ in our traditional Eucharist, and it is comforting indeed. We are not as eager to hear the following phrase, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” but that is the necessary path to the promised rest we so desire.

Douglas Hare, commenting on this passage, reminds us of the Greek originals of some of the words in order to assist our interpretation. The yoke described as ‘easy’ might better be termed ‘kind’, a yoke that is well carved and shaped to our shoulders to reduce chafing and enable us to carry our load more easily. It’s not that we have less to carry, but that we don’t have to deal with an ill-fitting apparatus for doing it. I can’t help but think of how important it was to have the right boots for walking the Camino. When your own equipment is fighting you, you don’t get far. So maybe it is a good time to look at your own life equipment – the things that count as “is” to you and see if they truly are fixed or relics of a previous context.
Another phrase Hare picks out is “learn from me”. He cautions that, in line with the reminder not to think yourself too smart, but to get back to basics, Jesus used a term for his disciples that was less ‘pupil’ than ‘apprentice’. Their learning was not primarily listening to his lectures, but walking and working alongside him or, one might say, being yoked to him.

This is another way our burden is made easier to bear. We can share it with Jesus. He can be the ‘lead-ox’ of the team, setting the direction and pace and instilling an attitude of gentleness and humility. As we walk with him, we come to conform our steps to his.

This passage may be meant to recall for us a verse from Jeremiah (6:16) “Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” Jesus is the one who, at the crossroads of our lives – the places where we struggle with ourselves or with others or where we need to make decisions, who will show us and walk with us along the good way, the way that will lead to rest for our restless and conflicted selves. The phrase ‘good way’ strikes me because it is the greeting called out to pilgrims journeying toward Santiago. ‘Buen Camino’ people say in greeting or parting. What a great thing to wish for one another. What an encouragement it was and can be. ‘Buen Camino/good way’ let it be what we wish for one another. Let it be an ‘is’, a permanent characteristic of our attitude toward each other. Let us each keep to the ‘good way’ of being yoked to Jesus. Because our restless souls will find no other avenue toward repose.

June 29, 2008

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year A

Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42
Psalm 13

The Rev. Ellen Ekström

Ouch!

Tough lessons for tough times.

When I read the Hebrew scripture, I was reminded of my friend and mentor, Father Domingos Jacques. He was the pastor of St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church on Gilman Street; I was the choir director there when my children were young. He opened the church school year by gathering parents, students and staff together for prayer and an exhortation, which went something like this: Love your children; listen to them; don’t make religion a weapon, or a punishment; God is love; God loves all his children; the Bible isn’t a punishment, it isn’t scary.

Later while we were preparing for the mass I mentioned to Father Jacques how glad I was the story of Abraham and Isaac wasn’t in the lectionary that morning. Imagine all the kids and their parents running screaming out of the parish hall.

Now, my daughter Celia was in the Sunday school that year. Most of you know my daughter, Celia Fernandez, a bright, lovely, young woman – she was an acolyte and thurifer here for a time. Celia announced that she was going to read the entire Bible cover to cover. So off she went. A few weeks into the project I heard her say something I wouldn’t expect from a ten year old and when I asked her how it was going, she said, “Whoa! You did NOT tell me about Abraham!”

That was a pretty uncomfortable moment, which made me think of this from the 1928 Prayer Book:

“Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him.”

Do you find anything comforting or comfortable in the Gospel lesson this morning? Jesus is asking us to go beyond our safe, comfortable circle of friends and reach out to strangers. Didn’t Mom tell us not to talk to strangers? How about the Hebrew scripture? Pretty disturbing. And the passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Rome? The word ‘sin’ is mentioned ten times, that’s once in ten verses out of twelve, though one of the verses mentions ‘impurity’, and another mentions ‘shame.’

Sometimes we have to read and hear the uncomfortable words to hear what God and Christ say to all who truly turn to them.

Let’s see if we can find the good news among the bad.

How do we reconcile the loving God of the Christian scripture, the deity in the person of Jesus who bids us welcome prophets and little ones, people on the fringes of society, with a God that tells a father to kill his son? Let me answer that by asking this: do you really think God wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?

The story begins with the sentence, “After these things, God tested Abraham.” These “things” were God’s calling of Abraham, his journey with Sarah into Egypt, passing his wife off as his sister to the Pharaoh, and there was Sodom and Gomorrah, Hagar and Ishmael – how many tests can a person take? Abraham is rightly held up as a person of great faith, but he has his moments of weakness, and he has his shortcomings – passing his wife off as his sister? Twice? He’s an enigma. He pleads with God over sparing, fifty, then forty, then twenty, then ten righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, many perfect strangers, but he says nothing about sparing his son.

I was thinking that while God was testing Abraham, maybe Abraham was testing God. Or maybe it’s one of those moments when one is so frozen by fear, so horrified, that the shock leads to inactivity.

Our narrative is stark. We have no indication of Abraham’s state of mind. As soon as Abraham hears the command, he cuts the wood for the offering, takes his son, two servants and donkey and heads out for Moriah. He’s silent until they reach their destination three days later when he tells the servants to wait for them while Abraham and Isaac go up on the mountain to pray. Here, the narrator gives us dramatic tension and hints that Abraham prepared for the sacrifice methodically – first he builds the altar, then he lays the wood that Isaac has been carrying – maybe he stalling for time? Waiting for that call at 11:55 p.m. call from the governor to stay the execution.

Then we have a heart-wrenching moment. Isaac notices that they haven’t brought a lamb for the sacrifice and asks his father about it. Abraham says, “God will provide.”
He raises the knife . . . it’s like watching a movie. You want to yell at the screen, “Turn around, Abraham! There’s a ram caught in the thicket! See? God does provide!”
This story has a happy ending. Abraham is stopped from murdering his son by an angel. Isaac grows up to become the father of a great people. This is the last test God gives Abraham.

Many questions are unanswered here. Did Abraham pass the test, or did he fail? Is his failure the reason why God no longer spoke to him, or had Abraham served his purpose? Did God want Abraham to stand up to Him with the same passion he used for Sodom and Gomorrah to ask why he was being asked to sacrifice his son?

I don’t have the answers; I have my own theories, as do we all, but I’ll let you decide in your own dialogues with God. It’s a copout, but I’m still wrestling with these questions and someday I might just have the answers – or not. I do know this. I think that God only gives us as much as we can handle. He knows our hearts and minds and what we can or cannot do.

What we can surmise is that God surely understood Abraham’s feelings when He sacrificed his son, Jesus.

The truth of the matter is that we are all tested by God, aren’t we? Perhaps not in the dramatic ways that Abraham was put to the test. Think of the events of the past week or so. Why are there floods in the Midwest destroying lives and homes when God gave us the rainbow? Why does a complete stranger shoot and kill a family at an intersection? Why does a father kill his toddler on a road out in the country? Why do we still argue over gender? Why is race still such a hot button? Why is gas so expensive and why is there a global food crisis? These are tests of the heart, soul and mind. And in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus throws a challenge at us. He tells his disciples, and us, that whoever welcomes a prophet or little one welcomes him. We know from history and scripture that prophets are those noisy, confrontational types, who tell us truths we don’t want to hear, and they don’t make the best of ends, but they open our hearts and minds to reality and how things are supposed to be. Think of John the Baptist, Stephen, Perpetua and her companions, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr. Little ones might be children or people outside of the norm of society, what we might call the ‘fringe element’ We are asked to welcome them, make them a part of our community, give to them as Jesus would give to us. It’s not hard to be welcoming. The effort comes in being welcoming those society thinks are not welcome to the table. Giving a cup of water to a little one, or a hot meal to someone who’s hungry, or listening, really listening to a message offered by a prophet – that’s easy enough. Doing it because we love God and we want to live out the Gospel – now that’s where it really is at. Righteous people aren’t holier than others, righteous people are you and me, in a covenant with God and Jesus, chosen, called, tested – sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t, but there’s always another chance to get it right – the right way that God wants us to take to the best of our abilities. Righteous people are people who say yes to God, even when it’s the most difficult thing they have to do in their lives.

And no matter what, God loves us and welcomes us into the Kingdom – prophets, little ones, the righteous, you and me.

I hope you find some comfort in that.

June 22, 2008

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year A

Jeremiah 20:7-13
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39
Psalm 86 1-10, 16-18

The Rev. Owen Thomas

“Almighty God, To all your people give your heavenly grace, and especially this congregation here present; that with open hearts and minds we may hear and receive your holy Word, truly serving you in holiness and righteousness all the days of our life, all of which we ask in the name of our savior Jesus Christ, your word incarnate.”

From the Gospel: “Have no fear of them who malign you… Do not fear those who kill the body. … Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows..”

This is a recurring theme throughout the Bible – in the words of the prophets, the psalmists, and Jesus: Fear not, Have no fear, Do not be afraid.

When the disciples left the empty tomb on the first Easter morning, the risen Christ met them and said “Fear not.”

This is one way of summarizing the Gospel, the good news of what God has done for us in Christ: “Do not be afraid.”

Now there is plenty to fear in this uncertain life, we have all kinds of fears, including some that are not very important, fear of what people will think of us and say about us, fear of embarrassment, and so forth.

But there are also serious fears, for ourselves and for those whom we love, fears of disease, accidents, crime.

Also we live in what has been described in a couple of recent books as a culture of fear, a culture in which fear in large part drives the economy, in which fear often dominates our political life. Fear sells things, fear of not being attractive, fear of not being accepted, fear of falling behind financially. As a nation our fear is shown in the fact that we have one of the highest rates of incarceration and execution in the industrialized world. And fear wins elections, as we saw in 2004, and it is also being used in this election year.

A few years ago the BBC had a four week series entitled The Power of Nightmares. It told the story of the parallel rise of neo-conservatism in the U. S. and radical Islam in the Middle East. It recounted on how they have finally found each other as their perfect enemies which could keep them both in power indefinitely through fear. This is the Power of Nightmares.

How can we resist this culture of fear? The author of the first letter of John writes “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us. … There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” (1 Jn 4:10,18) In a sermon preached 1500 years ago St. Augustine commented on this passage. He said, “Fear can be a starting point. … Fear prepares the place for love. When love has taken up its dwelling place, the fear that prepared the place for it is expelled. As one grows the other diminishes. As love moves to the center, fear is driven outside. The greater the love, the lesser the fear.”

A few verses later the author of this letter states: “God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in this one.” That is, whenever one loves, one participates in God who is love. So in our loving of our neighbors, namely anyone whose life we can affect by our actions, we can engage the culture of fear, and in the many ways available to us, we can begin to undercut this culture of fear and to replace it with a culture of care and responsibility, a culture of love, especially in this election year.

Jesus calls us to love our enemies, those who hate us, those who are different from us, those whom we fear, those who fear us, and to seek the well-being of those whose lives we can affect by our actions. And in this election year we have the greatest opportunity to affect the lives of everyone in our city, our state, our nation, and our world.

And love is active and powerful. In another sermon Augustine states, “Love has feet which take us to church; love has hands, which give to the poor; love has eyes which tell us who is in need. Love has ears which hear the cries of the poor.” So love can begin to overcome a culture of fear.

The Gospel of God announced by Jesus is this: Fear not, for God loves you; God cares about you. God will bring you and those you love to your fulfillment in God’s kingdom, no matter what happens. So this is the essence of Christianity in a nutshell, Fear not, for God loves you, as you can see in Jesus Christ.

Now what specifically is Jesus speaking about in the Gospel for today? “The disciple is not above the teacher. If they call him Beelzebul, the chief of the demons, they will call you even worse things.”

The atheist authors today are certainly calling us worse things. But have no fear of them, Jesus says, the truth will come out about them and about us, that God is for us.

Then Jesus gets to the heart of the matter: “Do not fear those who kill the body but not the soul. Rather fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Now who do you suppose that is? It is God. And what does that mean? Augustine comments on this strange saying of Jesus. In a sermon preached on this text he states: “The divine message which has just been read advises us to fear by not being afraid, and by being afraid not to fear. So let us be afraid in order not to be afraid. Let us fear in order not to fear, that is by fearing wisely in order not to fear groundlessly.”

Fearing wisely here means fearing God, but what does that mean?

Because God loves us, if we insist on turning away from God, God will honor our decision, and leave us to our own deserts, which we should fear. This is the other side of the coin and another one of the great recurring themes of the Bible: We do not need to be afraid of anything as long as we fear God.

This phrase, “The fear of the Lord,” occurs over fifty times in the Bible. But this sounds very odd to us. It is something deeper than simple fear of the dangers of this life. It is awe in the face of the holiness of God, the holiness of God’s love.

This fear is felt when God is revealed: After his disobedience Adam is afraid when the Lord God comes looking for him in the garden. Moses at the burning bush is afraid to look upon God. When Jacob has the vision of the ladder to heaven, He cries, “How awesome is this place! This is none than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!” At the annunciation to Mary, the angel Gabriel says, “Do not be afraid.” The disciples are frightened when Jesus comes to them walking on the sea, and they cry “It is a ghost!” but he says to them “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid,.” They are frightened at the Transfiguration. When the risen Christ appears, the disciples are afraid.

And his response is always the same: “Fear not.”The Psalmist cries, “There is forgiveness with you, therefore you shall be feared.” Why? Because the holy God in the divine mercy actually loves us and forgives our sins. And that is awesome and fearful. One commentator states, “It is at this juncture [the association of fear with faith and love] that the biblical way of thinking is most startling to the modern Western mind.”

So Job, the Psalmist, and the Proverbist state “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That is, the beginning of the understanding who we are as creatures of God, beloved by God, called to love as God loves.

Throughout the Bible wisdom is the gift of God for understanding our life before God, and as a guide to the good life. Jesus was seen as a teacher of wisdom, even greater than Solomon wo is the great figure of wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures. When Jesus began teaching in the synagogue, his hearers asked, “What is the wisdom given to him?” (Mk 6:2) Finally Paul states, Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

To have the wisdom of God, then, we must look at Jesus, listen to Jesus, open our hearts and minds to what he is saying.

In the gospel reading Jesus goes on, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father (in heaven). So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” With apologies to animal rights advocates, this means that we are created in the image of God, with the possibility of knowing God as he is shown to us in Christ, and thus responsible before God for our lives, how we live them, and also responsible for our neighbors and the created world around us.

The worth of human life is in grave peril in the many nations today in which there is political strife and war, famine, and disease, and thousands die daily. Fear is the most powerful tool of those who rule in authoritarian regimes.

Jesus says, Do not fear those who kill the body.” And therefore, those who do not fear death are the greatest threat to these authoritarian regimes. That is why Christians have always been persecuted by them. In the first four centuries thousands of Christians died as martyrs, and they still are, under the dictators of the last century, and today in similar places around the world.

So the only thing we need to fear is losing God, for that is final loss.

But having that fear of the Lord, that awe before the holy God, which is the beginning of wisdom, we need fear nothing else. As Jesus says “Fear not little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

St. Paul sums it up this way: “I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height. Nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8: 38f)

Let us pray: Most loving Father, you will us to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you and to cast all our care on you, who care for us; Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, and grant that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have shown to us in your Son, our savior, Jesus Christ.

June 15, 2008

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year A

Exodus 19:2-8a
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:8[9-23]
Psalm 116 1, 10-17

The Rev. Arthur Holder

What Kind of Church Are You?

Do you like to take quizzes? I don’t mean the kind you have to take in school, but the kind you find in magazines or (increasingly) on the internet. These are quizzes that tell you what kind of person you are based on your preferences, likes, and dislikes. Here is a sampling of personality quizzes that you can take on www.quizfarm.com :

Which great U.S. president are you most like?

Which Star Trek species are you?

Are you Goth, Emo, Prep, or Nothing? (If you don’t understand that, ask someone in high school!)

A lot of these quizzes have to do with spiritual themes:

What is your ideal religion? (My top three results were Baha’i, Sikh, and Christian—in that order!)

What is your ideal Christian denomination? (I came out Lutheran on that one.)

What level of hell do you belong in? (I’m not going to tell you how I scored on that quiz, except to say that apparently I have some trouble with all the major sins.)

Well, some of these quizzes aren’t very scientific, but they can be fun. There was one other religious quiz I took that did seem to give pretty accurate results. Believe it or not, this quiz was based on the five “models of the church” from a well-known theological textbook by Cardinal Avery Dulles. The five models are Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald (that is, Proclaimer), and Servant. I wasn’t surprised to learn that I came out highest on the Sacrament model, which the result page said “has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church.” In other words, I’m a liberal conservative catholic protestant traditionalist reformer. No one model does it all for me, but I see some value in them all.

Which brings me around (at last) to today’s readings. When you put them all together, you have all five of Dulles’s models of the church, and then some. Just listen to the images that we have heard:

From the Collect of the Day (Proper 6): the church is a household of faith and love that proclaims truth with boldness and ministers justice with compassion. (Remember that when this collect was written, and back to biblical times, a “household” was not a nuclear family but more like an extended family, a neighborhood, or a village.)

From Exodus (19:2-8a): as the New Israel, the church is God’s treasured possession, a priestly kingdom, and a holy nation.

From Romans (5:1-8): the church is a community of forgiven sinners, justified by faith, made perfect through suffering, with hearts filled by the Holy Spirit, at peace with God and hopeful of sharing God’s glory.

And from the Gospel of Matthew (9:35-10:8): the church is a group of disciples or students, but also laborers in the field and apostles sent on mission to proclaim the good news, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons.

What kind of church are you? If we were just to focus on one of these readings, we might well come up with a one-sided view of the church. Think of all the great questions that have been debated about the church through the ages, and still today:

Is the church a hospital for sinners or a society of saints?

Does the church exist to serve its members or those outside of it?

Did the church produce the Bible, or did the Bible make the church?

How would you answer those questions on an ecclesiological quiz? If you ask me, the answers are “yes,” “yes,” and “yes.” I think we are called to be both/and Christians, not either/or Christians, and certainly not neither/nor Christians.

I don’t mean that we never have to make decisions or choose sides. I just mean that we aren’t supposed to make decisions and choose sides ahead of time. That wouldn’t be theology but ideology, which is an unconscious and predetermined value system applied without reference to the facts of the case.

In the old Hymnal 1940 there was a hymn that began “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.” It didn’t make the cut for the new hymnal because it contains some questionable theology along with the sexist language. But there were a couple of lines that I still think are true:

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

James Lowell wrote that poem in 1845 to protest the United States going to war with Mexico because he feared that a U.S. takeover of Texas would lead to an expansion of slavery. It is telling that his original title for the poem was “The Present Crisis.” This suggests that Christian action is a matter of discernment. In any moment of crisis, we always have to ask the hard questions: Who benefits from our action, and who loses? Whom have we consulted, and whom have we left out of the conversation? What are our own motives and self-interests? And as the French philosopher Michel Foucault said, what is the “main danger”? There may be many values at stake in a given situation, and many potential dangers to worry about. But what is the “main danger” here and now—especially for those who are weak and powerless?

There are some pretty important decisions coming up for us as Episcopalians in California. This past week, our bishop Marc Andrus issued a pastoral letter calling on the people of this diocese to support gay and lesbian people who can be legally married now that the state Supreme Court has declared it unconstitutional to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples. Some people will want to say that arguments over homosexuality are really just about biblical interpretation, or the power of bishops, or equal rights and justice for all. I hope that we at St. Mark’s will recognize that this particular crisis or opportunity is about all of those things, and more besides.

St. Mark’s is already on record as an Oasis Covenant Congregation, which means that we “encourage gay and lesbian people to participate in all aspects of the ministry of this church.” That is a quote from the charter that many of us signed several years ago, which is now framed and standing on a table in the south narthex. But this new occasion is bound to teach us some new duties! For instance, Bishop Marc is encouraging all couples—both gay and straight—to have a civil marriage service followed by a church blessing ceremony. The bishop is saying that this is an interim measure for the time being until there is an official diocesan policy providing for equality of marriage rites for all people. (I assume that is going to involve consultation with the rest of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.)

How will we as a parish respond to gay and lesbian people who want to get married at St. Mark’s? How will we respond to straight couples who want to get married at St. Mark’s? Do we see the bishop’s guidelines as going too far, or not far enough? If we think he has overstepped or understepped, do we follow his guidelines anyway? Why or why not? This is a real quiz—please discuss among yourselves!

I hope that when someone asks you what today’s sermon was about, you won’t say “gay marriage.” I hope you will say that this sermon was about the church—what it is, whose it is, and what it’s good for. And I hope you will remember one more model of the church that I’m going to put before you: the church as “community of interpretation.” This term comes from the early 20th century philosopher Josiah Royce, a native Californian who taught here at UC Berkeley before moving to Harvard. To put it simply, as a community of interpretation, the church is defined not by a monolithic set of beliefs or practices, still less by its institutional structures. The church is the Beloved Community guided by a shared spirit of truth-seeking, whose goal is to see the world as God sees it. As a diehard, but flexible, liberal conservative catholic protestant traditionalist reformer, that is a model of the church that I can believe in!

What kind of church are you? That is the question of the hour. And a right answer is: As redeemed sinners, working together and by the power of the Spirit, we are the Beloved Community seeing the world as God sees it, loving the world as God loves it, and giving ourselves to the world as Jesus gave himself for us and for all.

May 18, 2008

First Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, Rev. Common Lectionary Year A

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
Psalm 8

The Rev. Louis Weil

Many of you know that I have taught for a long time – for a VERY long time. As a teacher of the theology of Christian worship, at some point in this long stream of years, I realized that when I speak of the deepest truths of Christian faith, the words I find are never really adequate.

Teaching data – teaching facts, that is easy. That is generally a transferal of information: words are well-suited for that task. But when it comes to the Mysterious Reality to Whom our prayers are addressed – as in our liturgical prayer here today: finding adequate words for that task is much more difficult.

At times I have felt like one of our primitive ancestors, awaking one morning to see the glory of the sun rising into the sky – and perhaps pointing, or jumping, or even dancing—to express the awe of this experience. Or perhaps my primitive ancestor would look up on a night of the full moon, serene and silent --- and perhaps that ancestor uttered sounds—moved to say something—in response to such awesome beauty. But the sounds my primitive ancestor might make fell short of the power of the experience.

This is something like the situation that a Christian must face when she or he attempts to speak about the Mystery of God in Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our words are totally inadequate: they are our gestures, our pointings—perhaps even our grunts – and inadequate as they are, we must do and say something in response to the awesome experience of the Presence of God: the experience of the Presence of God in the ordinary lives of people like ourselves.

Our words and gestures – our liturgies – are an attempt to at least find some way to respond to this experience of God. When speaking of the Holy Trinity – in some of the sermons I have heard in my long life – some preachers have, I think, spoken of the Holy Trinity in some type of mathematical gibberish: One in Three, Three in One, Incomprehensible. This led Dorothy Sayers to observe that “the whole Thing is incomprehensible.”

What we need to do is NOT to define God:   [the very idea is blasphemous] — speaking of the Trinity, I believe, requires us to speak of our experience of God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity – the ONLY doctrine which the Church celebrates in our liturgical calendar – this doctrine emerged slowly within the framework of the Church’s life: and I believe that it emerged in response to experience.

The earliest Christians, as good Jews, affirmed the belief in one God: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” This one God was the Creator of all that exists. But it is this one God, whom Jesus referred to as Abba – Father: a term of personal intimacy. In their experience of the Risen Christ, Christians found that the best language they could find for their experience of him was God Incarnate. And so also for the Holy Spirit: these early Christians experienced the outpouring of the Spirit as nothing less than the action of the one God. Again, language falters, but the language which emerged was “One God, in Trinity of Persons,” because in their experience of God in their lives this was the only way to speak of God’s self-revelation.

For me, it is a happy coincidence that our celebration of this Feast of the Holy Trinity occurs on St. Mark’s Music Memorial Sunday. It is a happy coincidence for me because music was my religion long before I came to Christian faith. I believe, in fact, that it was music which led me to faith – because music – far beyond the power of speech – has the power to embody our experience of the Holy One.

Last week a very dear friend of mine gave me a [birthday] card with a quotation on it from Aldous Huxley: it read, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” One could say, I think, that the experience of Beauty in all of its forms, has this extraordinary power to express the inexpressible. For me, music points to God in the midst of the dissonances of our world – including the dissonances of the institutional Church.

Music reminds us that beauty is an essential link to faith in God: the beauty of the Father mirrored in the wonder of Creation; the beauty of the Son revealed in the face of the Incarnate Lord, and seen again and again in the faces of the men and women we meet in our daily lives—just as Jesus taught us when he said, “what you do unto others, you do to me; and the beauty of the Spirit’s dance, the Divine Energy who inspires and enlightens, who consoles and strengthens, who sustains us even in the darkest times’ as the hymn says, “of all Comforters, the best.”

This has been the experience of Christians over the centuries – the experience of the Divine Presence revealed to those who have eyes to see, even if it is “through a cloud, darkly” – even if our words, our gestures and rites, and even our most beautiful music still fall short of the glory that has been revealed – and before Whom we stand, “lost in wonder, love and praise.”

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