Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 18

The Light of Glory

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on December 23, 2012.

What is Heaven Like?

“Those who ask me what heaven is do not mean to hear me but to silence me; they know I cannot tell them.”  John Donne, was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, when he said that almost 400 years ago, and if John Donne couldn’t tell you what heaven is, neither can I. But I promised three sermons about heaven and, although we missed one last week, there’s still time to say something.

Donne said, “I cannot tell them,” but, nonetheless, no one has ever described heaven better than John Donne. So what I want to do this morning is piece together some things Donne said that will describe heaven in the words he used. I think they still have value.

“When I meet them there,” Donne went on to say, “I shall be able to tell them, and then they shall be just as able to tell me. We shall be able to tell one another that this, this that we enjoy, is heaven, but the tongues of angels, the tongues of glorified saints, shall not be able to express what that heaven is, for even in heaven our faculties shall be finite.”

So that’s point one: only God is infinite; only God is unlimited.  Even in heaven we will still be limited. We will not have God’s power or God’s knowledge and the tools we have for communication will still be limited.  I would hope to have time to pick up another language or two, and that will help because each language has special terms and ways of putting things that are unique and enable those who use it to say things they understand simply because they have the words for it. English has to borrow from French to talk about a coup d’etat because the French have a word for it and we don’t.  Maybe it’s because we have less experience of it, and thank goodness for that.  The Japanese can say “Ite mairimasu” “I’m going out and coming back.” and that’s useful.  The Navajo have words and ways of speaking that are said to be more useful for atomic physics than English is (who knows why?) and the Greeks have words for love that make distinctions we can’t make in English. So if we pick up a few more languages in heaven – and we’ll have an eternity to work at it – we may be able to say more about heaven than we can now but we’ll never have words enough to understand or express it all. That’s why, after two sermons on heaven, there will be a lot left unsaid.  There would have been even if I had had time for three or even more. We simply don’t have enough words.

But we have some words and we can use the words we have and stretch them almost to the breaking point to say something.  For example: John Donne writes, “In heaven it is always autumn.”  Literally? With falling leaves for ever and garden cleanup to do?  Well, no, of course not.  That’s not what he meant.  But something of what autumn is, is what heaven is. Donne put it this way:

“God’s mercies are always in their maturity. We ask our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday.  God never says you must come again tomorrow, but today God will hear you . . .  Now God comes to you. God comes not as the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to light all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest to fill all need.  All locations invite God’s mercies and all times are God’s seasons.”

In other words, heaven is that place where the fullness of God’s goodness is always and everywhere evident; that’s like autumn and heaven is like that.

Another way to talk about heaven is to talk about the earth and say, “Like that only more.”  Donne said,

“In that heaven the moon is more glorious than our sun, and the sun as glorious as the one who made it.  In this new earth all the waters are milk and all the milk is honey; all the grass is corn and all the corn is manna;  all the clods of the earth are gold and all the gold of countless carats; all the minutes are ages and all the ages eternity; everything is every minute in the highest exaltation, as good as it can be, and yet superexalted and infinitely multiplied by every minute’s addition; every minute is infinitely better than ever it was before.”

In other words, take the best of everything and heaven is better than that; infinitely better.  And yet there are other words we can use that convey something important. Donne also said, “Heaven is that place where righteousness is at home.” All the good things that we only have a glimpse of here will be familiar there.  Righteousness, for example, and justice and mercy and truth and love.

When people take a new job, they think it’s terrific; when people fall in love, the other person seems perfect; when you get what you want for Christmas, you’re thrilled.  But the new job makes you work with real people and the person you fall in love with has little habits that begin to get to you, and the perfect Christmas present that you’d been hoping for for weeks, gets chipped by the end of the day, or the batteries go dead, or you find out somebody else got a better one. Heaven is where that never happens; where the best only gets better; where the thing you longed for never disappoints.

But the central theme in all Donne’s writing about heaven is the theme of light: heaven is that place where there is always enough light. Have you heard of seasonal affective disorder, SAD for short? It’s a psychiatric phenomenon of which some people are victims and this time of year gets them down. They need light to keep positive. And we all do to some extent. Dull days get us all down. That won’t happen in heaven.

Donne said, “The light of heaven is such a light that the one who sees any of it sees all of it, and so the light of glory is communicated entirely to every blessed soul. God made light first, and three days later that light became a sun, a more glorious light. God gave me the light of nature when I quickened in my mother’s womb, by receiving a reasonable soul. And God gave me the light of faith when I quickened in my second mother’s womb, the church, by receiving my baptism. But in my third day, when my mortality shall put on immortality, God shall give me the light of glory, by which I shall see God’s own self. Compared to this light of glory the light of honor is ony a glow worm; the majesty itself only a twilight; the cherubim and seraphim only candles; and that gospel itself, which the apostle calls the glorious gospel, is only a star of the least magnitude.”

So will we then be blinded by so much light?  How much light can we stand?  Even when the sun is eclipsed, we can’t look at it directly without being blinded.  Everyone knows these days that you need to protect yourself from the sun. We have the advantage of living in a state where it’s less of a problem than in Florida.  Some people think Florida is heaven but you can’t ever go outside there without sun screen.  And heaven is not like that. Donne wrote a prayer in which he said that in heaven there will be “no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light.” We will not be blinded by either the light or the darkness.  In fact the Bible itself says that in heaven, “the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat;” and that’s because there will be no sun in heaven. The Book of Revelation says, “the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” God will be our light. And in this world, that is a light too dazzling for human eyes. Even reflected, the light of God is too blinding for human eyes.

Maybe you remember the story of how when Moses first came down from the mountain with the ten commandments “the skin of his face was shining, and (the people) were afraid to come near him and therefore Moses had to put a veil over his face whenever he came back from talking with God.”  Even the reflected glory of God was too blinding for mortals.  But John Donne says that the chief joy of heaven is that there we shall see God: “We shall have a knowledge of the true glory, the essential glory of God, because we shall see God as God is.”

Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  And that has always been held up for Christians as the goal of all existence.  A former Bishop of London said of this goal: “the simple words of this beatitude have in their day called men into the desert, have drawn them into the cloister, have made of them saints and solitaries, martyrs and missionaries. They have bred errors and schisms past man’s power to number . . . they

have led a Pope himself to the verge of formal heresy ; they have been tied with the bands of orthodoxy, only to break their chains and witness again to the freedom of the gospel. They have torn men from the . . . love of family and friends; and . . . have taught them to look for God in the sanctities of the Christian home. Under their influence some have learnt to hate the beauties

of nature and of life, whilst others have been inspired to embrace those beauties perhaps too rashly.  And all this for the hope of seeing God hereafter.”

But what’s the thrill of that for people like us who can say, “Now I’ve seen it all.” Well, that’s our 21st century malaise, but we haven’t yet seen it all. We do have a longing – even in this day and age – to see more. Some people retire and buy an RV so they can travel endlessly and see something new every day. They’re hungry for God and don’t know it. Some people are always renting another movie to watch at home.  They’re hungry for God and don’t know it.  Some spend their free time wandering in shopping malls. They’re hungry for God and don’t know it. Every new place you visit reflects something of God’s glory because God made it. Every movie or play that’s worth anything, that depicts something of humanity in all its diversity, reflects God’s glory because we were made in God’s image.  We’re always looking for something more of that infinite glory that we were made for and that at last we will see.  And perhaps some will be blinded and some will turn away  but those who have looked for God here will see God there and be satisfied.

“Do not therefore,” Donne said, “be strangers to this face. See him here that you may know him there.  See him in the preaching of his word. See him in the sacrament.”  Jesus said we should see him also in the poor and the hungry; see him in his human face.  “Look him in the face,” Donne said, “in all these respects, of humiliation and of exaltation too. And then as a picture looks at the one who looks at it, God, on whom you keep your eye, will keep God’s eye on you. And, as in the creation, when God commanded light out of darkness but gave you a capacity for this light, and as in your calling, when God shines in your heart, God gave you a beginning of this light, so in associating yourself to God at the last day, God will perfect, consummate, accomplish all, and give you the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

So that’s what heaven is like, and it’s because the birth of a child at Christmas breaks through the boundary between earth and heaven, and brings the heaven of God’s presence to this earth that we celebrate Christmas. And that’s why heaven matters.

For Whom Do the Bells Toll?

The Governor of Connecticut has asked that church bells be rung on Friday at 9:30 am, one week after the tragic events in Newtown, to remember the victims.  It reminded me of a passage at the end of Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael mystery, One Corpse Too Many, in which a number of hostages are killed and a murderer “hides” his victims corpse among the others.  The book ends this way:

“‘As for justice,’ said Brother Cadfael thoughtfully, ‘ it is but half the tale.’  He would say a prayer at Compline for the repose of Nicholas Faintree, a clean young man of mind and life, surely now assuaged and at rest.  But he would also say a prayer for the soul of Adam Courcelle, dead in bis guilt; for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many . . .   ‘From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man’s scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.’”

Why should the church bells not ring 28 times?  Are there not, indeed, 28 victims: all of them a result of our society’s failure to deal adequately with issues of mental health and gun violence?  Is not every life precious in the eyes of the Creator?

Why?

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on December 16, 2012.

A couple of months ago  I published a book called The Beowulf Trilogy in which Part III is “Yrfa’s Tale.” My first sequel to Beowulf, published six years earlier,  followed a warrior’s effort to lead his tribe to a safer place but Part III, Yrfa’s Tale,  looks at the same events  through the eyes of the warrior’s wife, and halfway through she talks about their first child  and how the baby died in an epidemic not yet two year’s old.

“ I almost envied her,

To be at rest, beyond the rub and rush

And weariness of wending in this world,

But I would ask the question none can answer:

Of all the evils in this life of ours,

The constant care and conflict crushing us,

Why has the Heaven Ruler high above

Assigned the little ones to suffer so?”

There are many things that can be said  after Newtown, many things that need to be said, about the anger that flares out of control  in our society and the prevalence of violence and the role of government  but the first question is always “Why?”  You can explore that question at many levels:  the easy questions are the practical ones: Why did this man explode in violence?  Why were guns so available?  Why don’t we have a society that deals better with people in trouble,  and doesn’t make these explosions so easy? Why are there more than twice as many deaths from guns in this country  as in any other western democracy  and more than three times as many as in Canada? What are we doing wrong?  What can we change?

But those are the easy questions  that we have to answer together later.  The harder ones, if I can put it this way,  are my department. Why did God create a world with so much pain?  Why so much suffering?  John Milton in Paradise Lost  said his purpose in writing was  to “justify the ways of God to men.” And that’s the number one priority of the preacher:  not so much to explain, to answer all questions,  as to put things in context, to provide the balance and the perspective  that are always absent in the immediate chaos.

Why?  Why?  That’s always the question we ask first and, as I said, we can explore it  at many levels.  But the deepest level asks:  Why do bad things happen?  Why should children suffer?  The human instinct is to look for an explanation.  We want the world to be logical and human civilization exists  only because we expect the world to be logical and instinctively look for reasons. If we know why, we can do something about it,  so we look for reasons.

Almost ten years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner  wrote a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People  and it was on the best seller list for weeks. Kushner set out to explain “Why?” He reduced the options to two logical choices:  either God is not almighty or God is not good. Well, yes, in terms of human logic  those are the choices.  A good and all powerful God that we can understand would not allow such evil. So either God is not good  or God is not almighty. Kushner chose option One:  God is not omnipotent. But that assumes God answers to human logic  and that human logic can answer all questions.

But why should we assume that? The Book of Job confronts the same question.  Job was a good man and dreadful things happened to him and his friends, using human logic,  implored him to recognize  that he must have done bad things. But Job resisted  and finally God spoke  and God asked the obvious question:  “Where were you  when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4)  How can the created thing  know the Creator’s mind?

Every child asks every parent that question:  Why? And every parent learns to say, “Because,”  because the child is too young to understand. Eventually the child will be old enough  for better answers. When children become adults and have an adult understanding they can be given adult answers. But human beings do not grow up to be God  or arrive at God’s understanding. There will always be “Whys” beyond us.  We can’t assume  there are answers to every question that we will understand. At a point we have to be satisfied  with the answer that doesn’t satisfy the child and can’t really satisfy us:  Because.  Just “Because.” It doesn’t satisfy our need for reasons  we can understand, but we are not God.

If I were God, I would do things differently,  but I think we are better off with God running things than with me. I don’t understand and I’m not sure I will ever understand but God is all powerful and God is love  and that’s all I need to know.

I do, however, know one thing more  and that one thing more makes all the difference: it’s “incarnation.”  God made us  and therefore God knows  how little we understand and therefore God came into this world  to be with us in all our limitations. That’s what Christmas is all about:  God here, God in human life, God in a cradle, God on a cross,  God suffering for us, God suffering with us.  As the Bible also says: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are.”  (Heb.4:15). Our God is not some distant impersonal power  but One who comes to be with us. That, for my money, is the only reason to be a Christian:  God knows our sorrows. God has been here. And God is here.

An incarnational faith has more than words to offer.  Jesus left us a meal to share, a physical evidence of God’s presence.  Not just words, but bread and wine, something tangible,  something physical, something real.  Not just words. There’s a point in the musical My Fair Lady  when Eliza sings:

“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!

Don’t talk of stars burning above; If you’re in love, Show me!

Tell me no dreams filled with desire. If you’re on fire, Show me!

Here we are together in the middle of the night!

Don’t talk of spring! Just hold me tight!”

Now, that’s incarnational religion:  “if you’re in love, show me!” And God does love us and has shown us. St John wrote to his fellow Christians: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.”  (1 Jn.  1:1)

So God shows us God’s love  physically: on the cross, in the sacraments, outward signs of inward reality. Did you notice on Saturday – how could you not – how people were hugging each other? Parents were hugging children,  parents were hugging parents, strangers were hugging strangers. And when they brought on the experts and asked,  “What should we do?” They said, “Hug each other.”  We don’t need grief counselors to know that,  do we?  We do it instinctively. We are what God made us to be:  physical human beings,  who instinctively reach out  for the physical contact that reminds us of who we are.  We are not isolated, self-sufficient individuals but part of the human family  who cannot survive alone.

It would be nice to have answers,  to be able to explain, to use our reason to find answers and cope,  but we cope better by hugging, by coming together and being what God made us to be  and what God also has shared. When they brought children to Jesus  he didn’t sit them down to hear Bible stories, he took them up in his arms  and hugged them.

Our worship here today  is structured around that point.  Half way through the service  we stop talking for a while and reach out to each other physically.  A sermon is important but not the center. A sermon can help but it never has all the answers  Anyone who tells you they have all the answers is someone who is ducking the hard questions.

Finally, you know, there’s a question for all of us as we move on:  in the close-knit fabric of human life, what role do we play now? Are we doing more to increase anger or to deepen unity?  Every cross word, every impatient release of anger,  changes the world. Most people are not murderers  but most of us do yield to anger from time to time and whatever we do spreads like the ripples in water when a stone is thrown.

I read a book recently called The Confederates in the Attic.  It’s a book that explores the way  the Civil War still poisons our relationships. There were no winners in that war.  You can’t kill 750,000 people and then just move on.  You can’t kill one and just move on. John Donne said it best 400 years ago:

No man is an island, Entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own or of thy friend’s were.

Every man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

When theologians tell us that the cross  is God’s way of showing us the consequences of human sin  it’s hard to argue the point. Sin has consequences.  We are all one body. Every human act has consequences  and the first lesson to draw from this last week is that we need to love each other more,  to forgive each other more quickly, to be more patient, more kind. It’s simple, almost trite, but essential.  Two weeks ago we were reminded  how President Roosevelt, on a dark day seventy-one years ago, told us that December 7, 1941, was “a date that will live in infamy.” I wonder whether December 14, 2012, can be a better date: a date to remember not for revenge  but for renewal.

Let the deaths of these children not be in vain.

Let us resolve to make a difference in their memory, to be different ourselves.

Remember the children,

and be kind,

and forgive.

Getting There

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on December 9, 2012.

My wife was a travel consultant for a number of years and specialized in guided tours and sometimes I got to go along. And we never went anywhere without doing a good deal of research so we would know where we were going.

I knew someone else whose husband liked to surprise her, plan a trip and not tell her where they were going. The marriage didn’t last.

Why would you go on a trip and not know where you were going.  Why would you go if you didn’t know enough to know you wanted to go?

I ask these questions because it’s Advent again; a new year beginning; and Episcopal Churches turn color.  It’s been green for ever.  It’s time for a change. And the change to blue or purple has enormous significance. Green was all around for the last six months: grass, trees, on our level everywhere we looked.

But blue is different.  You have to look up – or down if you’re near a lake. But most blue for most of us is up: it’s the color of the sky, of the heavens; it’s the color of heaven. And we use it to make a point.  There is one link between green and blue, between earth and heaven, and that link is Jesus Christ: he came from heaven to take us to heaven, indeed to make this earth a bit more like heaven.

So we’re starting again in Advent, a new year, and we are asked to imagine, to envision, a new heaven and a new earth.  And it seems to me that we don’t spend near enough time thinking about that, thinking specifically about heaven.  So here we are, all of us, en route to a country we’ve never seen and you’d think we’d be curious.

How many books have you ever read about heaven?  There’s one Ann McGurk gave me a couple of weeks ago called The Boy Who Returned from Heaven. It’s an interesting story but not really very helpful. He says he heard choirs of angels and all that but what hymns did they sing? Episcopal Hymnal or something else? And what else is there for those who can’t carry a tune?

I don’t know about you, but I have lots of questions, more every year and I want to use these remaining three weeks of Advent to try to answer some questions about heaven: what it is, where it is, how to get there, what to do when you get there. All those questions we never ask and I think we ought to. What’s it like?  Is it really eternal rest? Won’t we get bored pretty fast?  Well, I’ll get to that later.

Today let me just talk about getting there. Before you get to any destination you have to plan how to go, what you need for the trip.  Let me begin by telling you first about a man named Samuel Yellin. I spent twenty-two years in a parish that had a good many furnishings made of wrought iron forged by Samuel Yellin. There was a great hanging candelabra they used at Christmas. The wrought iron altar cross and candle sticks were made by Samuel Yellin and the candle sticks by the font and an alms box at the back. They had an Advent wreath made of wrought iron by Samuel Yellin, and so on. Samuel Yellin, by the time of his death in 1940 was generally recognised, and still is recognized, as the greatest artist in wrought iron this country has ever known. He did wrought iron screens for the library at Yale and the Library of Congress and decorative iron work for a number of major American institutions. He was a man who loved his work and he said once, “I love iron; it is the stuff of which the frame of the earth is made and you can make it say anything you will.  It eloquently responds to the hand at the bidding of the imagination.  When I go to rest at night, I can hardly sleep because my mind is aswarm with visions of all the gates and grilles and locks and keys I want to do.  I verily believe I shall take my hammer with me when I go, and at the gate of Heaven, if I am denied admission, I will fashion my own key.”

Now, that’s a statement to meditate on. There’s a marvelous confidence – even cockiness – chutzpah – about it.  But is it a supreme statement of faith or is it the same human pride that God shattered at the Tower of Babel when human beings first made the attempt to get to heaven by their own efforts?  So how do we get in to heaven?  What kind of key do we need? What key will we have when that day comes for each of us?

This is the time to ask those questions. Advent is heaven-season.  It’s the time of ends and beginnings;

the time to clarify our goals: where are we going and what do we have to do to get there?

What kind of key do we need?  A key, in Biblical terms is power; it’s the ability to control. There’s a place in the Old Testament that looks ahead to the coming of Christ where God says through the prophet Isaiah , “I will give him the key of David…” And what he means is that the promised king will have David’s power, David’s power to control and direct human lives, to close them in or open them up. So, in the New Testament, when the risen Christ says, “I am the key of David,….” (Rev.3:7) he means, “I have that power: the power to open heaven itself to human lives.”

Now, if that’s true; if Christ has that power – and it’s the basis of our faith that he does – why would Samuel Yellin need his own tools or his own key? Why would any of us need to concern ourselves with the use we make of the gifts we are given?  I think we all realize that Samuel Yellin was speaking in metaphor, not in literal, factual terms. After all, in the language of poetry, the tools of his trade would probably be less usable at the gates of heaven than at the gates of hell.  If you want molten iron, that’s where they’ll have it. “Down below,” as they say, he’d be more likely

to have molten metal to work with. But we all know his words were metaphor and what he was really saying was this; “My hope of heaven, my hope of eternal life, is based completely on the way I have used my gifts.  I was given great gifts, and I have developed them to the full, used them unselfishly to the glory of God. I have lived with integrity.  I have been what God meant me to be.  If that’s not enough, I have no other hope.”

And surely God does want just that of each of us. You and I don’t have the particular gifts of a Samuel Yellin, and most of don’t have gifts even of that quality in some other field, gifts that possess us almost more than we possess them.  But we all do have gifts. Your gift may be the gift of music or graphic art; it may be a gift of language or leadership; it may be ability in law or business, in teaching or selling or nursing or keeping records or running a small business. Some have a gift of parenting, and no gift is more important than that. Some of us, I imagine, have several modest gifts instead of one great one: modest gifts of friendship, some ability to keep a desk in order, some skills in producing a warm meal for a small family, gardening skills, abilities as a volunteer. Some of us, perhaps, do several of these things pretty well. But whatever the gift, it is a gift, and our responsibility is one of stewardship; how we use the gifts God gives us, and how we return to God, offer back to God, the result of that gift.

And when we think that way we might remember that the faith we profess here is incarnational: to use a fancy word. It has to do with the whole of life, not just an abstract, spiritual part of it but all of life, the stuff we run into every day, not just on Sunday.  The keys we forge are made not only in worship and prayer – though that’s part of it – but they’re made primarily where we live and work seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

Each of us, day by day, forges his or her own key but at the end we will neither take it with us nor leave it behind, but it will be there ahead of us and it will open the gate or not depending on how well we have forged it day by day over the years. That’s what Samuel Yellin knew, and yes, he was brash. But maybe no more so than St. Paul when he said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of victory, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award on that day…” (2 Tim.4:18)  In fact the Prayer Book itself has a prayer that speaks of the “confidence of a certain faith…” It’s right to be confident, right to be secure in our faith, if we have been good stewards – and if we also know that finally the Lord Christ himself IS the key,

For that’s the paradox.  We are called to be good stewards and offer back gifts well used. And yet, it is not the gifts but Christ who will open the door. And he will find us there as men and women who have always acknowledged that the gifts are his, the endurance is his, the response of faith is his grace working in us. If we have done all to the glory of God it was only because God enabled us. The key to the kingdom of heaven is Christ himself, Christ in us who works day by day to forge us, to shape us, into his image. And those who have opened their hearts to him, turned to him in faith, lived by that faith, expressed that faith in their daily lives, can be confident that Christ will forge in them a key that will open every door to the end of life and to the life beyond.

 

The End is Near

A sermon preached at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, by Christopher L. Webber on December 2, 2012.

A priest I know has just published his first book.  Years ago he was rector of a parish in the New Haven area and he learned that a former Rector, in the nineteenth century, had been very controversial and so he began to do some research to learn more about this man’s life and year after year he continued to do that research as he had time with the idea that someday he might write the man’s biography and finally, this year, he did it. He told me, “I realized that I was ninety years old and if I didn’t do it soon, I might never have the chance.”

Yes.  Time is limited. The human life span is limited. There’s a psalm that says, “The days of our age are three score years and ten.”  Obviously some get a good many more years than that and some get a whole lot less and none of us knows what our own allotment will be but there is a limit.

I read a story in the paper last month about a parade in Texas to honor veterans in connection with Veterans’ Day. Some of them were riding on a float that was pulled across a railroad track just as a freight train came down the track and a dozen veterans who had survived Iraq and Afghanistan died very suddenly on a Texas highway.  As they say in the ads for the lottery, “Hey, you never know.”

The Committal service in the Prayer Book used to begin this way: “Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death . . .”  But that’s not very cheerful, is it, and so it was changed in 1979 and now it begins: “Everyone the Father gives to me will come to me; . . . He who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also give new life to our mortal bodies . . .”  So 40 years ago the emphasis was on the shortness of life and now it’s all about resurrection which is certainly more cheerful.  But I don’t think the facts have changed. “In the midst of life we are in death . . .”  Life here is not eternal.

And yet in a way, perhaps, the facts have changed.  When the English Prayer Book was written life expectancy was well under 70 – closer to fifty even when you took out infant mortality – and now it’s closer to eighty. That’s quite a difference and I wonder whether that change has made it harder for us to take death seriously. On average, at least, we have another thirty years or so, so why worry? Now, what I wonder is this: is that why church attendance everywhere is going down and why even those who go to church are less likely to hear about death? It’s almost as if religion has relied on death to get people’s attention and it doesn’t work any more. It’s as if a somewhat longer life span gives us such a feeling of security that we don’t worry any more, as if somehow a fifty year average life span gets our attention and eighty doesn’t.

And yet in any larger perspective it hardly makes a difference at all. Thirty years is the blink of an eye in terms of eternity.  It’s like, if I can put it this way, Warren Buffett or Donald Trump worrying about the changing price of gas at the pump. You and I might worry because our funds are limited but there are others out there who have no such concern. So can we imagine that medieval people worried about death because they had only an average 50 years to work with and that we’ve stopped worrying because now we have 80?  If we now had a million years, or even a thousand, it might make sense, but 80? I can tell you from experience, that 80 goes by pretty fast. The child we baptize today will be eighty before you know it – and eternity is still as long as ever.

So why do we seem less concerned about the “shortness and uncertainty” of human life? Maybe it’s not the increasing life span that reduces our anxiety. Maybe it’s because we have television to entertain us. Medieval people had long dark evenings in which to worry but we have The Big Bang Theory and Dancing with the Stars to keep us happy and make us forget our mortality. Is that what’s happening?

I say all this because it’s Advent Sunday, and while the culture wants us to rush to the stores and begins its annual assault on our ears with so many Christmas songs and carols that we’re sick of Christmas before we ever get there, the church, more out of synch with the culture than ever, asks us to think not about Black Friday and bargains on cell phones and talking dolls but about the end of the world.  You come to church in early December in a Christmas mood and the Gospel is all about judgment, the Gospel this morning tells us,

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”  Luke 21:25-26

I wonder whether that echoes recent weather events closely enough to make us pay attention?

I went home last Sunday to read the paper and the New York Times Sunday Review had this headline: “Is This the End?” It’s one thing for fundamentalists to obsess about the end times but when the New York Times asks the question, it may be time to take the Bible seriously.

“Is this the end?” Are we bringing it down on ourselves? I think the critical question is one of perspective. Jesus said no one knows when the end will be so there’s no point in not getting a 2013 date book.  I’ve got one date for January 2014 already. Years ago there was a Secretary of the Interior who was asked about environmental issues and he said he wasn’t going to worry because Jesus might come first.

Well, yes, Jesus might come next week but I still plan to send out Christmas cards. Until I get better information I still need to plan – but differently, differently, with an eye to the goal, an eye to the purpose.  Keep alert, says the Gospel today; be on guard; don’t let your hearts be “weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.” It’s about attitude.  It’s about a way of living.

So what is it that shapes our outlook on life, that seems to make this generation less religious? Is it because we live longer?  Is it because science seems to have more answers to our problems than religion? Is it a weariness with war and conflict that makes us satisfied with entertainment to forget our troubles? I’ve seen lots of polls lately that tell us church attendance is down, belief in God is down, but I haven’t seen a poll that tells us why.  And what I’ve been trying to do this morning is guess at the reasons, but none of the answers I come up with make very much sense. A life span lengthened by twenty or thirty years isn’t a blink of the eye in terms of eternity. The best entertainment available may gives us a few laughs but what is that when it comes to judgment? And science has answers for lots of things but not for the questions that matter most eventually: questions like, “Why should I get up in the morning? Is there a reason for acting one way rather than another?  Why am I here?”

The readings today assume several things: they take it for granted that there is a God who has a purpose for human life, that God is at work in history and has created us to work together toward that purpose. And they tell us the time is short. Well, yes, it is short. Think of it this way: human life on this earth in any recognizable form has been around for a mere two hundred thousand years and that means that if you set out to tell the story of creation from the big bang until now in a series of books and if you took 200 books to write that history and fill a bookshelf ten feet long, the whole story of the human race would be written on the last page of the last book and the story of the last 2000 years would be the last few words on the last page. You and I and the baby baptized this morning would all be barely a blip, a hair’s breadth at the end of the page.

Here again science and faith provide very different perspectives. Science tells us about the unimaginably long saga from the Big Bang to the present: the long ages of the dinosaurs that are gone for ever, the billions of stars that form our galaxy, the insignificance of our star in the larger picture of the universe, and all that suggests that we are a meaningless short term speck in an accidental universe. Against that background, we come to church on the first Sunday of Advent and are reminded that, yes, that speck is here for a very brief time but – but there’s one thing more – there’s one thing more that makes all the difference: there is a God who cares for you.

Look at the readings again: it’s not all gloom and doom. Yes, there’s an end to remember but listen to the Bible.  The Epistle is a prayer that we be ready when Jesus comes, that we be “abounding in love” on that day. It talks about joy and holiness.  The Old Testament talks about justice and righteousness in the land, it talks about a time when people in Jerusalem will live in safety.  Finally!  That’s a day to pray for and the Bible tells us it’s coming. So I think there’s a lot of hopefulness in these readings.  Yes, time is short but God is at work toward a purpose, toward a radically transformed world.  If that seems no nearer now than ever we have readings that ask us still to look at a bigger picture than we might find in the media.  So why does our focus seem to be somewhere else?  The Old Testament speaks of a coming time of peace and the Epistle speaks of the joy of serving God and the Gospel speaks about standing at last in Jesus’ presence.  It’s all about meaning and purpose the very things about which science is silent and from which the media would distract us. But it’s a perspective without which it doesn’t much matter who won the election or whether the Congress take us over a fiscal cliff or I drop dead tomorrow.  A cold and meaningless universe will never notice.  It makes no difference. But the Bible has a different outlook.  The Bible asks us to believe that it matters enormously because every human life – your life – is of infinite value and belongs to a Creator who shared this brief human life himself to call us back, to get our attention again, to remind us that we are loved, that we are valued, that we are here for a reason. Advent asks us to remember that and I think we desperately need that reminder.  We may be easily distracted but we are here for a reason and God is here today to give us new strength and joy in working together toward that purpose.

The Widow and Us

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on  November 11, 2012, at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut.

I went out one day last week to bring in the mail and I found thirteen items in the mail box – every one of them a catalog. It’s that time of year, isn’t it?  The leaves fall from the trees and the catalogs fall from the mail box. I probably get more Bible-themed catalogs than most people and I got one catalog that advertised a “widow’s mite” bracelet – which brings me to today’s gospel  and the story of the widow’s mite.  To make the widow’s mite bracelet they take genuine coins and set them in silver and sell them for $99.95.  I guess that was a few year’s ago because when I looked on line last week I found them from Amazon for just under $500.  The widow in today’s gospel wouldn’t have been able  to afford a “widow’s mite bracelet.” But what occurred to me was this: if every member of the congregation  would put just one – not even two – just one of those widow’s mite bracelets in the offering each week, we could double our budget  and do wonderful things.

Today is Stewardship Sunday  and you might think that’s on purpose and that today’s gospel is about stewardship,  the right use of our possessions.  Well, I don’t think it was planned  and I’m not sure it really is about stewardship as we often understand it.  But I’ll come back to that.

Jesus was teaching his disciples as he often did  about wealth and poverty. You can read about it in the Bible  and you can read about it in today’s paper.  Some things don’t seem to change.  But all the studies I’ve seen show the rich getting richer  and everyone else being left behind and that’s not good for the church. It may be good for the banks and insurance companies but not the church because there have been numerous studies that show that those with the most  give the least. But what do people with all that money do with it  if they don’t give it away? Some do, of course; but a lot of them don’t.  But what do they do with it? Does anyone really need  ten zillion dollars a year? And can anyone be so smart, so skilled,  so valuable and irreplaceable as to earn that kind of money in the first place?

The Bible has only one message about wealth; we read it again and again from the prophets, from Jesus, from the apostles:  condemning the rich for their avarice and calling for justice for the poor.  The story of the widow’s mite is part two of the longer section  and we read and the previous three verses warn us to beware of people with money and power. Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

That’s the background for the story of the widow’s mite.  That story tells us how Jesus sat down and watched people putting their money  in the temple offering. Imagine that: Jesus watching as the plate is passed! So Jesus was watching  as the scribes  who had probably just made a deal  to defraud a widow of her inheritance were putting in their tithe:  ten per cent of what they had stolen. But Jesus was watching.

Now, this is politics and this is economics.  Preachers are supposed to avoid such subjects and stick to what they know about.  Well, I majored in politics and economics in college so I do know something about it but I’ve spent much more time studying the Bible  and you can’t do that without encountering politics and economics on every side.  But you read the papers and watch television so I’ll let you make the connections. You know the standard question:  What would Jesus do? I think what he would do is what he did do:  teach, point out to his disciples what they could see in front of them, ask them what they thought of it.

There was also the day when he acted, when he drove the money changers  out of the temple.  It was probably the most aggressive action of his whole ministry. Who would he drive out today?  I’ll let you think about that  because we might answer it in various ways.  What would Jesus do today about wealth and poverty?  I’m not sure what he might do,  but I’m very sure what he would say  because we know what he did say.  He said, “Wealth is a snare.  Money is a snare.” He didn’t say, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” But it’s in the New Testament and a kind of summary of Jesus’ teaching.  The only good thing he ever said about money was about the widow’s mite.

I read a piece in the New Yorker a while back  about the young people of the Ivory Coast in West Africa whose only dream is  to get to America. Why?  Because they watch television  and they see a society of incredible wealth and people who indulge themselves in ways  a young west African can only dream about. It’s ironic that there are other Americans  who leave all that behind and go to West Africa to try to bring  modern medicine and education to people who lack everything.  But the tragedy is  that they make far less impact on Africa  than the ones who stay behind and pile up their wealth and create the picture the world sees on television of a society concerned only for itself and using its strength and wealth only to increase its own wealth and security.  From their point of view, that’s all of us.

What would Jesus say?  He’d say what he did say: “those who devour widow’s houses  will receive the greater condemnation.” Those in Washington, those on Wall Street,  those anywhere,  who work to acquire the resources of the poor to increase their own comfort  are condemned. They will stand before the King on his judgment seat  and have nothing to say when they are asked why they didn’t respond  to Jesus’ presence in the poor,  the hungry, the homeless.  They are condemned,  and the poor widow is praised. The gospel reverses the values of society -  its own society and ours as well – and we need to ask ourselves how it can be that this so-called Christian nation,  a Bible-reading society, doesn’t understand the gospel,  doesn’t know the judgment it faces.

It all comes back eventually  to some very basic stuff. It’s a matter of who God is, of what we believe about God, and what that means for the way we live.  It’s the ABCs of Biblical faith:  God is first of all a Creator: Genesis, Chapter 1. God created a universe and created human life  and placed us here with responsibility for it, to care for it. It’s a matter of stewardship.  Why does God create? To enrich himself?  Don’t be silly.  What does God need?  No, God creates out of love. Creation is always an act of love,  of giving, of self-expression. God is first of all a giver and God made us in the image of God  and calls on us to be like God: to give, to love, to share this good earth.

I have sometimes suggested that we should think of stewardship from the top down instead of the bottom up. Take today’s widow as an example.  She didn’t stop to figure out a tithe or to plan a budget for the week. She just gave all she had. I think that’s the model the Bible gives us  for stewardship.  You take it off the top not the bottom. God first; self second.

Now probably you do need some for yourself: groceries, clothes, the mortgage,  the stuff you need to survive. And since in this society you can’t count on the government or church  to pay your medical bills or support your golden years, you probably need to salt some away.  But start with 100%. That’s where the widow started.  That’s where God starts. Start with 100% and decide whether you can afford  to return it all to God right now. Eventually there’s no choice;  you can’t take it with you – though as a bishop I used to know liked to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it ahead.”  It all comes back to God sooner or later. You never see a Brink’s truck  following the hearse. Sooner or later, you have to give it away  or leave it behind. But now, when you have a choice how much do you need to keep?  If not 100% now, then what?  Maybe you can’t even give back 90%,  maybe not even 50%, but 10% from that point of view  isn’t asking much at all.

I heard a story once of a man who decided when he was very young  that he would tithe. He would always give God 10% of whatever he had.  And he told his clergyman that: this was a solemn commitment. And this young man did very well for himself.  He started at ten dollars a week -  this was long ago – and he put a dollar in the plate every Sunday.  And he prospered, and before long  he was making a hundred dollars a week  and every week he put ten dollars in the plate. And still he prospered.  Five hundred dollars a week;  fifty dollars in the plate. A thousand dollars a week; a hundred dollars in the plate. Ten thousand a week; a thousand in the plate. But finally he began to feel  that maybe he’d made a mistake. And he went back to his pastor and said,  “You know I made that commitment when I didn’t have very much, but now that I have so much,  it seems like a terrible amount to give and I want to ask you to relieve me of my commitment.” The pastor thought for a minute or two  and said, “Well, I don’t think I can relieve you of your commitment, but I could ask God to set you back to a level  where you felt more comfortable keeping it.”

I wonder whether we as a society  are in somewhat that position, where we feel as if God has given us so much  we can’t afford to respond fully. They’ve done studies, as I said, that show  that the higher your income level the less proportionately people give away. The rich are less generous than the poor.  Those with the most ability to give, give least. It makes no sense, but that’s what human beings are like. It’s why God needed to give us a specific example  of the way we are meant to live. Jesus is more an example than a teacher,  and more an example in his death than his life. The cross is the symbol of our faith  because it sums up the full meaning of God’s giving: giving all;  holding nothing back.  The cross is not a tithe and certainly not a tip  or a minor gesture.  By the time we come to the end of the Christian year  we are supposed to understand this. We have heard of Jesus’ birth, we have read about his fasting and temptation,  we have taken part in the events of Holy Week and Easter, we have spent the time since then  hearing week by week of how he healed the sick and fed the hungry; we’ve heard again the parable of the Good Samaritan  and the Prodigal Son. And it’s all about giving,  it’s all about stewardship, it’s all about the right use  of the gifts we are given. And what better way to come to the end of the Christian year now only two weeks away than with the story of this widow  who gets it, who knew the gospel and lived it to the full. She understood it.  Do we?

Political Saints

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on All Saints Sunday,  November 4, 2012, at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut.

I think it’s interesting that election day and All Saints Day always come close together. Is it a study in contrasts? Not necessarily.  It may give us a chance to see what’s possible. As you know, I like to tell stories at All Saints’ time and there are, in fact, many stories of Christian people in politics who changed the world by their lives.

Take, for example, William Jennings Bryan: he’s remembered now, I think, for his involvement in the Scopes trial, the so-called “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925 testing the right of a science teacher to reach evolution contrary to state law – a fight that still goes on.  Bryan took the fundamentalist side and won but there was a lot more to him than that. He ran three times for President, first when he was just 36 and lost every time, but he became Secretary of State in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet.  Bryan, however, was a pacifist and he resigned on principle when it seemed to him that Wilson’s policies were going to involve the country in war. You can agree with him or not but it’s rare for someone in Washington to resign on principle – and maybe to have principles! – so that’s worth remembering.

Bryan was also a strong advocate of woman’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the income tax, the Department of Labor, and other liberal causes.  But what matters is not so much what he did as why he did it. He said this:

“I recognize that the most important things in life lie outside of the realm of government and that more depends upon what the individual does for himself than upon what the government does or can do for him.  Men can be miserable under the best government and they can be happy under the worst government. Government affects but a part of the life which we live here and does not deal at all with the life beyond, while religion touches the infinite circle of existence as well as the small arc of that circle which we spend on earth…When discussing questions of government I must secure the cooperation of a majority before my ideas can be put into practise, but if, in speaking on religion, I can touch one human heart for good, I have not spoken in vain no matter how large the majority may be against me.  So Bryan was never elected but he kept his principles and he’s one of the best remembered losing candidates.

Angelina Grimke grew up in a wealthy southern family but she was a bit of a rebel. Her family owned slaves and she instinctively hated the whole slave system.  When she was old enough to leave home, she moved north and became a Quaker and a leading advocate of abolition.  She published “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” calling on women to use their moral influence to overthrow slavery.  Copies of the document were burned by the South Carolina post office and she was threatened with arrest should she ever return to her home state.

There’s a transcript of a speech she made in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, complete with sound effects from the mob that gathered outside the hall:

“Men, brethren and fathers — mothers, daughters and sisters, what came ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? Is it curiosity merely, or a deep sympathy with the perishing slave, that has brought this large audience together? [A yell from the mob without the building.] Those voices without ought to awaken and call out our warmest sympathies. Deluded beings! “They know not what they do.” They know not that they are undermining their own rights and their own happiness, temporal and eternal. Do you ask, ‘what has the North to do with slavery?’ Hear it — hear it. Those voices without tell us that the spirit of slavery is here, and has been roused to wrath by our abolition speeches and conventions: . . . This opposition shows that slavery has done its deadliest work in the hearts of our citizens. Do you ask, then, ‘what has the North to do?’ I answer, cast out first the spirit of slavery from your own hearts, and then lend your aid to convert the South.”  As the speech went on the report tells us: [Just then stones were thrown at the windows, -- a great noise without, and commotion within.] [Shoutings, stones thrown against the windows, &c.]  The next day, the mob burned the building down, but Angelina fortunately wasn’t there and she continued to campaign for abolition and added the cause of woman’s suffrage to her agenda. She was one of those people who might have said what George Bernard Shaw said first and Robert Kennedy quoted: “You see things as they are and ask why; I see things that never were and ask why not.”

Paul Jones was the Episcopal bishop of Utah when the United States entered World War One.  The people of Utah, a newly admitted state, were eager to show their patriotism and embarrassed by the fact that the Episcopal bishop of their state was an avowed pacifist who had declared war to be un-Christian. The Episcopal House of Bishops was asked to take up the question, and they supported Jones at first but then backed away under pressure and asked for his resignation.  So Jones resigned and spent the next ten years of his life as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, speaking and writing on behalf of peace. “Where I serve the church,” he said when he resigned as Bishop of Utah, “is of small importance, so long as I can make my life count in the cause of Christ.”

He said to the House of Bishops, “In the first place, let me say that I, as a loyal citizen, am whole-heartedly for this country of ours in which all my hopes and ideals and interests are bound up. I believe most sincerely that German brutality and aggression must be stopped, and I am willing, if need be, to give my life and what I possess, to bring that about. I want to see the extension of real democracy in the world, and am ready to help that cause to the utmost; and finally, I want to see a sound and lasting peace brought to the world as a close to the terrible convulsion in which the nations are involved.  But the question is that of method. It is not enough to say that the majority have decided on war as the only means of attaining those things and therefore we must all co-operate. I believe that it is not as easy as that, for the problem goes deeper.  If we are to reconcile men to God, to build up the brotherhood of the kingdom, preach love, forbearance and forgiveness…rebuke evil, and stand for the good even unto death, then I do not see how it can be the duty of the church or its representatives to aid or encourage the way of war, which so obviously breaks down brotherhood, replaces love and forbearance by bitterness and wrath, sacrifices ideals to expediency, and takes the way of fear instead of that of faith. I believe that it is always the Church’s duty to hold up before men the way of the cross; the one way our Lord has given us for overcoming the world. . . .  Prayer is, I believe, the best test of the whole matter. If it is right and our honest duty to fight the war to a finish, then we should use the Church’s great weapon of prayer to that end; but the most ardent Christian supporter of the war, though he may use general terms, revolts against praying that our every bullet may find its mark, or that our embargoes may bring starvation to every German home. We know that those things would bring the war to a speedy, triumphant close, but the Church cannot pray that way. And a purpose that you cannot pray for is a poor one for Christians to be engaged in”

But maybe no one illustrates what a Christian in politics can do better than Frances Perkins. who was secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the Cabinet. She said, “I came to Washington, to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.”  Well, it’s a common thing for politicians to make generic references to God but sometimes hard to tell about their sincerity. But Frances Perkins used to make regular retreats at the Episcopal All Saints Convent in nearby Catonsville, Maryland. “I have discovered,” she said, “that the rule of silence is one of the many beautiful things of life.”  As the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet and one of Roosevelt’s most important advisors, she needed that perspective on things.

Frances Perkins spoke about the “great and mighty principle . . . presented to us in the Incarnation . . .the overwhelming principle of God and man made one; of God and man reconciled to each other, and through that, of course, of man’s possibility to be reconciled to himself. . . It is the reason for man’s effort, it is the cause of man’s effort to build a Christian society. This knowledge of the Incarnation, this fact of the Incarnation, gives to man the capacity with God to love his fellow creatures, and to work, and to cooperate with God for the establishment of a Christian order of society. A kind of holy society which we conceive to be the will of God . . .”

Frances Perkins began her professional life as a teacher and a student of economics and sociology.  In 1911 she was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire – the worst such disaster in New York history until 9/11. When fire broke out in a factory building the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time to prevent pilferage – so there was no escape from the flames except to jump.  Frances Perkins watched the young women trapped in the fire pray and then leap off the window ledges of the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors into the streets below.  The youngest victim was just 13 years old.  Perkins never forgot what she had seen and worked to raise the employment age and factory safety standards. Governor Al Smith of New York brought her into his administration and Franklin Roosevelt continued to give her important state positions.  When he took her to Washington, she said she had seen first-hand

“the specter of unemployment–of starvation, of hunger, of the wandering boys, of the broken homes (that) stalked everywhere. The unpaid rent, the eviction notices, the furniture and bedding on the sidewalk, the old lady weeping over it, the children crying, the father out looking for a truck to move their belongings himself to his sister’s flat or some relative’s already overcrowded tenement, or just sitting there bewilderedly waiting for some charity officer to come and move him somewhere.”

She knew new laws were desperately needed and set out to persuade Roosevelt. He thought of Social Security as “the dole” and was opposed to it at first. Perkins said, “I had a great time to get him to quiet down and stop talking about the dole; to try to think about the realities.” He said, ‘Well, there are constitutional problems, aren’t there?’  And she said, ‘Yes, very severe constitutional problems; but what have we been elected for except to solve the constitutional problems?”

Frances Perkins was the primary force behind the adoption of the Social Security system and considered it her most lasting and significant achievement.  She was especially concerned to assert the connection between religion and politics.  It was, she said,

“(the) duty of Christian people to take part in politics. I feel that more sincerely than I can possibly say. The withdrawal of Christian people of high purpose and nobility of mind and heart, the withdrawal of people like that from political life, has been a terrible loss not only to the world, but particularly to our form and organization of government and society.”

You may or may not agree with the positions taken by these people but they did what they did out of Christian conviction and that’s uncommon even now and deserves respect and sets us, I think, an example and raises a question for all of us as we prepare to vote. Do we also act out of faith and a deep conviction and have we prayed for guidance before we act? I think William Jennings Bryan,  Angelina Grimké, Paul Jones, and Frances Perkins are people to remember because as the Bible says, “we are fellow citizens with the saints.”  We have their witness to guide us and their accomplishments to show us what can be done when we trust in God to work through us for the building up of the kingdom.

Healing the World

(This is how things happen in a church:  for the Vestry meeting Bible study last month I suggested we look at the next week’s epistle – James on healing.  I said something about the church’s healing ministry and someone said, “We used to do that every month.”  So I said, “Why don’t we do it next month?  St. Luke’s Day is coming up and we could take the nearest Sunday.”  After the meeting one Vestry member told me that she had been trained for healing ministry and would be glad to assist.  Why did it take three years to find this out?)

They say that St. Luke was a doctor. St Paul calls him “the beloved physician”- you heard that in the second reading – and it’s certainly true that Luke pays close attention to how Jesus healed people.  He thinks like a doctor.  Luke’s gospel goes into medical details that the other gospels lack.

But the definitive evidence it seems to me comes in the story of the woman who had had an issue of blood for twelve years. Mark says “she had endured much under many physicians and had spent all she had and was no better but rather grew worse.”  Well, if Luke was a doctor, you know that would bother him and sure enough he leaves out that line about “endured much under many physicians” and simply tells us “though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her.”  So Luke was definitely a doctor, a dues paying member of the local chapter of the medical society. It’s no wonder hospitals get named for him.

But there’s more to Luke than just a narrow self-interest and specialist’s concerns. Luke cares about healing and he tells us the story of Jesus in a way that gives us the big picture. It’s not just physical healing that matters.  Human beings get sick in lots of ways and Luke wants us to see the big picture and Jesus’ role in the big picture: God’s concern for healing and wholeness in all the places where it’s needed.  There are many.

Did you notice the agenda Luke set in this morning’s gospel? The four gospels are very different in the way they begin the story of Jesus’ ministry. Three out of four begin with some reference to Jesus teaching in the synagogues but only Luke tells us what he taught, and that matters.  Luke tells us that Jesus read a passage from the prophet Isaiah and said he would fulfill it. We heard it in the gospel, but listen to it again:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,” Jesus said, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

It seems striking to me that Luke, Doctor Luke, gives us a passage that says nothing direct about disease. The closest it comes is in citing “recovery of sight to the blind” but first place goes to “good news to the poor.” And that’s another priority for Luke. He does, later on, tell a number of stories of how Jesus healed the sick and he’s more specific about it than the other gospels. He describes the disease and he tells us specifically what Jesus did to heal the disease. But in the agenda that Jesus sets here at the beginning. the focus is not narrow, not just physical disease, but the poor and the oppressed because that’s also a sickness: where there is poverty and oppression society is sick and needs to be healed. Luke keeps the focus especially on poverty as he goes on to tell the story of Jesus.

In fact, even earlier in the gospel, Luke set that agenda. When the angel announced to Mary that she would give birth to the Messiah she responded, Luke tells us, by singing what we now call the Magnificat: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,” she begins, and she goes on to say, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty. . . .”  It’s a continuing theme throughout Luke’s gospel.

When we come to the sermon on the Mount, we know Matthew’s version best: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” says Matthew, but Luke gives it differently: just “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of heaven is yours . . .” And that’s more like a blank check: just being poor gives you the kingdom.

Well, think about that; I think we tend to think much more about individuals, but we only exist within a society, in relationship to others: family, friends, fellow workers, the larger community, and, of course, the so-called global village. The Presidential debates can’t avoid talking about China and Iran and Libya because what happens there affects us, can be a matter of life and death for us. If those relationships are healthy, life is better; if they’re difficult, tense, troubled, life is harder for all of us.  If the global community is sick, so are we.

Think about some societies that are obviously sick, societies in revolt, for example, like some of the mid-eastern states. The diagnosis would certainly include poverty and oppression. When people lack opportunity, can’t find good jobs, can’t express themselves freely, when all the power is in the hands of a few, the sickness comes finally to a crisis point and erupts like a fever that requires emergency treatment.

But put it in a larger perspective than that: why are we here?  Why did God create us? To satisfy ourselves, to get rich, to pile up possessions, to be winners or losers in terms like that?  I don’t think so.  I don’t think you would be here if that were what you valued. I think we know that life is not satisfying in purely material and monetary terms. I can’t tell you first hand, I haven’t been there myself, but they tell me there comes a time when another million or too doesn’t do a single thing for your joie d’vivre.

If you get to the Bill Gates level, you may well find more satisfaction in giving stuff away than piling it up. But you don’t have to get to that point to find that satisfaction.  You can start right now and most of us have already begun: we find ways to help and to share and to build up the community. You don’t need a zillion dollars to do that and I think most of us know it.

I remember a story I heard somewhere of a poor widow, somewhere in the south, I think, who was struggling to raise her children alone with never enough to make ends meet – but she always tithed to her church.  And the elders of the church concerned themselves about the situation and finally commissioned their pastor to go and speak to her and tell her that they thought that even though it was the standard for their church they thought she should be excused from tithing.  So the pastor went and told her what they had decided and she burst into tears and said, “You are taking away the one thing that gives my life meaning and joy.”

What joy could there be in a life locked up in self and nothing to share with others?  It’s a sick society that loses that perspective. I think we need to be concerned about a society in which the politicians focus entirely on the so-called “middle class.” That probably includes me and I should be grateful but I don’t find any reference to the middle class in the Bible. Jesus never said, “Blessed are the middle class . . .”  I think there was a middle class even in those days but Jesus’ focus is always on the rich and the poor: the danger the rich are in and a deep concern for the poor.

It seems to me a very simple equation: if we were made for life together, life shared, as I believe we were, then the rich are in danger because they are so likely to let their goods get in their way, to pile up possessions instead of sharing them, and the poor are blessed because at least they are free from that obsession. Oh I know, there are poor people obsessed with possessions and rich people who could care less about all that, but you can go to the people that do polling and they’ll tell you, the poor give far more to others than the rich in relative terms. They know what need is like and are readier to share what little they have. For the rich, it’s all too easy to center your life on possessions. I mean, if you have five houses and ten cars just think of the time it would take to keep the houses painted and the cars serviced and remember which house you’re in at the moment and which car you left in the parking lot. I mean, it’s got to be complicated to be rich, and most of us don’t have that worry.  We can be a little more aware of the needs of others and work together to make a better community for all.

So Luke, the good physician, has that larger concern for the sickness of obsession with self, a sickness we often treat today with psychiatry and drugs. Are you anxious, are you insecure?  We have a pill for that. But it might just be that a better cure would be in learning to reach out in self-giving concern for others, the self-forgetfulness that has no time or need to worry about self because the needs of others always seem to come first.

We will take time today to anoint and pray for those who are sick or crippled or limited physically but those who become involved In the healing ministry will always tell you that healing is often much more than physical, that often in fact physical healing depends on a deeper healing, a peace that comes from a deeper relationship with God, a sense of security and wholeness, and where that is present healing spreads out and heals the whole society, drains away the anger and bitterness that poisons our politics, and gives us a new focus, a new center and security and peace releases from the narrow self-concern that can so easily enslave us. Pray God that we may all receive the healing that releases us from the oppression of self-centeredness and enables us also to proclaim an acceptable year of the Lord.

More than Biology

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on  October 7, 2012.

If I were smart, I would not preach on the gospel this morning. If I were running for office this year, I would definitely avoid the subject. But I’m not very smart and not running for office, so I’d like to ask you to think with me about this morning’s gospel and about marriage with an open mind and see whether there are some principals, some suggestions, some guidelines, that could be useful to a society changing in front of our eyes.

Now, the subject of marriage is more than I can deal with in one sermon and I may raise more questions than answers but questions are good and if we ask good questions we may get some suggested answers that can help us be better Christians.

So, what is marriage?  I think we used to think we knew; some people still do. From the time of Queen Victoria to the time of President Eisenhower, most people thought they knew what marriage was all about. It was a relationship between a man and a woman, it took place before you lived together, and it definitely happened before you had children. Lots of people still think that; they haven’t noticed that times have changed or if they have noticed, it just makes them angry. If I had a choice, I would go back to that world myself.  I think there was a lot to be said for it.  But, the fact is that that world is pretty well gone and I doubt that it’s coming back any time soon no matter what we say or do.

There was an article in the New York Times last Sunday that talked about marriage and suggested that with the divorce rate what it is we might do better to reorganize marriage by contract for twenty years instead of for life, or maybe even for five years renewable.  “I John take you Mary, . . . for better for worse, for richer for poorer, for five years renewable.”  What do you think?

Well, the answer to that question depends on what you think marriage is.  If it’s just about biology, it might work. So it might work for a lot of people. But I think marriage – at least potentially – is about much more than biology. I think it has to do with God’s purpose in human lives.

In the Gospel today, Jesus is asked about marriage.  Well, actually, he’s asked abut divorce, but notice what Jesus does with it: He talks about God’s purpose in creation and he traces a history of change. He says, Here, first, is what God created and here, second, is what Moses did because you couldn’t live up to that standard, and here, third, is what I think marriage ought to be.

But here’s an odd thing: Mark quotes Jesus as saying something about what happens when a woman divorces her husband. But under Jewish law, a woman could not divorce her husband. So why would Jesus even talk about it? But the Gospel of Mark was most likely written years later and in Rome where, under Roman law, a woman could divorce her husband.  So it looks as if Mark was trying to update the gospel and make it more relevant, trying to have Jesus say what Jesus might have said if Jesus had lived longer and gone to Rome.

You and I don’t get to rewrite Jesus’ words but every one of us who takes the gospel seriously does something very much like that when we try to apply Jesus’ words to our own lives. What would Jesus say about our current issues: the death penalty, universal health care, the tax code, whatever it is we argue about?  We ought to be trying to apply Jesus’s words to that problem. We should be asking, What is the essence of Jesus’ message and how does it apply to me, here and now?  That’s what we should ask and it may mean putting words in Jesus’ mouth: I think Jesus would have said this . . .

So how do Jesus’s words apply to the institution of marriage today? How can we take what Jesus said and make it relevant?  Well, first of all, what Jesus did in Mark’s gospel was to ask what God had in mind to begin with.  Before Moses and the Ten Commandments, before Queen Victoria and white weddings dresses, what was God’s intention? Well, God made them male and female, Jesus said, and intended them to become one flesh.  Yes, but suppose we discover that the lines between male and female are not that clear today and suppose we find that the males and females who come together don’t always stay together and become one flesh. What then?

When I was ordained, the answers were easy: if you don’t feel drawn to the opposite sex, you keep quiet about it, and if you can’t stay married, you don’t come back to try again.  But suppose you were to come to Jesus and ask, Is that how you want it: no second alternative, no forgiveness, no second chance? Do you think Jesus would rule out forgiveness?  The sermon on the mount ends with Jesus saying, “You must be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect.” But when Peter asked whether he should forgive seven times, Jesus said, “No, seventy times seven.”

So how do you match up Jesus’ call to perfection and Jesus’ almost unlimited forgiveness? What the Episcopal Church did some years ago was decide there had to be room for forgiveness.  We forgive murder, is divorce that bad?  And if there are some who don’t seem to fit into that neat division between male and female, can we say, Sorry, no room for alternatives?

Now, these are not easy questions unless you think there are easy answers to all life’s problems. We want there to be easy answers, clear lines; we want to be able to say, I’m right; you’re wrong. It feels good to know I’m right and to know you’re wrong, that I’m on God’s side and you’re not. Last week, if you remember, we had the disciples trying to draw that kind of line and Jesus wouldn’t do it.  No, he said, those who are not against us are for us; there’s room for different approaches; we don’t all have to do it the same way.

I wrote a book years ago about marriage and how it’s changed over the years and how it needs to change more. I didn’t suggest renewable contracts but I did suggest that the exchange of vows at the altar is serious stuff and the point at which we are ready for it may not be where it used to be. There was a time well before Queen Victoria when a couple didn’t commit to marriage until the woman was pregnant because why would you marry someone who might not have children? By Queen Victoria’s time, customs had changed and I’m not sure the couple had even kissed each other before the wedding night.  So what is the right time to go to the altar and exchange vows?  Statistics show that people are doing it later now than ever before and that later marriages generally last longer. So if the goal is a lasting commitment, maybe it makes sense to wait.

But there’s still a more basic question: what is the goal? What are we aiming for? Jesus talks about becoming “one flesh.”  I’m not sure that happens at the altar no matter how long you wait.  I like to quote Helen Oppenheimer, an English theologian, who once wrote: “Call no one married until they are dead.”  Her point was that marriage isn’t an act, it’s a process. It’s a journey with bumps and turns in the road, not an instantaneous once and forever change.  Jesus is calling us to perfection and why settle for less? But why expect perfection overnight?  Instead of trying to control behavior by law, wouldn’t it be better to try to support those who embark on the journey, giving them every support and forgiving them when they fail?

But here’s something I think is even more important: Jesus goes back to God’s intention as if to say that marriage is related to God’s purpose for us in creation.  That is not a biological question. “Birds do it; bees do it.” Well, yes and no.  Birds and bees don’t much come into church to do it but some of us do.  Why is that? I think it reflects a deep-seated feeling that marriage, as I said at the beginning, is about more than biology.  I hear Jesus saying that marriage is what our Prayer Book says it is, “A holy estate, instituted of God.”  Now that is still a revolutionary idea.  Marriage will happen no matter what we say for biological reasons and the race will be propagated. But I would suggest that there is also holy matrimony, that God is able to work within a marriage to make it much more than biology, to make it perhaps the most powerful way we have of understanding the love of God, that God is able to work in a marriage to change us, to recenter us, to draw us out of our narrowness and self-centeredness, into a faithful relationship with another, and that in that other-centered relationship we can begin to discover what it might be like to enter more and more deeply into a relationship, a unity even, with God.  I’m saying that marriage is a sacrament, that as God works through the water of baptism and the bread and wine of communion, to draw us into the life of God so God is also able to work through the flesh and blood of marriage to be spiritually present in our material world and draw us into God’s own eternal life.

Now, not even all Christians make that claim and a lot of those who fuss the most about “traditional marriage” and “Biblical marriage” are really talking only about biological marriage and have no idea at all of marriage as a sacrament. Do you know that the first Puritan settlers of New England never allowed marriage in church? They thought it was just a civil matter, a legal matter, not a sacrament at all. Most Protestant churches still believe that today. Yes, they come into churches now for weddings, but not with communion, not as a sacrament.  It’s still for most Protestants just a civil, secular event, with prayers added. But it seems to me that Jesus’ words point to something much more and the church has gradually grown to glimpse that potential and bring the biological, legal relationship into church and make it a sacrament.

I think, as I said, that it’s a lot like baptism.  We have a baby and we see the potential. What can that child become? A decent citizen, a good father or mother, a capable employee or small business owner or maybe a scientist or investor or billionaire – who knows? The human potential may be there, but as Christians we see also the image of God and potential for eternal life and so we bring the child to baptism to get that process started. I think marriage is like that.  At one level, yes, it’s biological and can lead to a nice relationship and children and happiness. At one level, it’s a civil and secular relationship that creates a social unit and is recognized by the state and confers certain privileges and certain obligations. But Jesus said God created us for a relationship that involves a deeper unity, “one flesh.” St Paul builds on that to say that marriage is “a great mystery” but that it is like the relationship between Christ and the church. And that is not a sexual or biological relationship but deeper, much deeper, and not, it seems to me,  something easily defined or limited by human law.

So I don’t think we can solve our problems with a simple appeal to the past. I can’t anyway give you an example from the Bible of a marriage that provides a good example for us; not one.  Most of the Biblical marriages we read about – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon – were polygamous. I can’t think of a single Biblical marriage to hold up as an example today.  But the Bible is not a rule book, it’s a history book, the story of God at work slowly, surely, leading the people of God into a new land, a new world, new understanding. And it’s not an easy journey with clear guidelines and simple answers. Show me a good marriage and I’ll show you two people who are not the same as they were when first they met. They’ve grown into a deeper, more mature relationship, and they’ve probably worked hard to get there and maybe been helped along whether they knew it or not by God’s presence and guidance and strength.

I would suggest that the critical issues for Christians are not sexuality so much as faithfulness and not the sequence of events as much as the destination and certainly not sticking to laws or customs as much as growing in love.  I’m not at all suggesting an anything-goes approach but one that holds up Jesus’ call to perfection. And I see perfection not as doing what’s always been done but as doing what has never yet been done, what we need to be working on all the time – uniting ourselves more and more deeply and fully with God through Jesus Christ, through worship and prayer and self-sacrifice until we come at last to the fulness of life that God has promised us now and forever.

CHOOSING SIDES

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Paul’s Church, Bantam, Connecticut, on September 30, 2012.

Years ago, the church I was serving was using mite boxes for something or other and put extras out in the entry way for people to pick up. Some children wandered in one day and found them and went up and down the street ringing doorbells and telling people they were collecting for Christ Church.  We never found out who they were and never got the money but we stopped putting out mite boxes.

You can’t have just anybody collecting in the church’s name. It’s a little like the story we just heard from the Gospel.  Someone was casting out demons in Jesus’ name and it wasn’t Jesus. It wasn’t even one of the apostles or disciples. And that got the disciples upset. How come he’s out there talking like one of us when he’s not a dues-paying member? What right as he got to do good things if he doesn’t come to our church on Sunday?

It’s not too many years ago that the Vatican put out a statement saying, in effect, “If you’re not a Roman Catholic, you’re not a real Christian.” I think maybe some Cardinals went to the pope the way the disciples went to Jesus and said, “There are people out there claiming to be Christian but they don’t think you’re infallible and some of our own members seem to think it doesn’t make any difference.  We’ve got to do something about it.” Now, the pope could have said, “Those who are not against us are for us” but instead he said something more like, “Those who are not with us are against us.”  

Now, the hard part is that Jesus also said that. We are reading St. Mark’s gospel where Jesus says, “Those who are not against us are for us,” but in St. Matthew you find the opposite: “Those who are not with us are against us.” And in St. Luke’s gospel you find it both ways two chapters apart.  One way is open and inclusive, the other is narrow and exclusive. And depending on which gospel you read, Jesus said both. What do you do about that?

Well, but doesn’t it depend on the context?  Suppose you’re rolling a rock up hill and the slope is slippery and you’re about to lose your grip and the rock is about to roll back down and take you with it and your friends are just standing there watching, giving you the benefit of their advice but not putting their shoulders to the stone.  Those who aren’t with you are against you. But suppose, on the other hand, someone who hates you is trying to round up a gang to come throw stones at your house and he goes to one neighbor after another and gets turned down. Maybe they just don’t care one way or another; they’re watching a soap opera on television or weeding the garden or something else and can’t be bothered to get involved one way or another.  You might wish they were more supportive but, hey, at least they do no harm.  So this time, those who are not against you are for you.

Matthew shows Jesus facing a hostile crowd and saying “Those who are not with me are against me.” Mark shows the disciples reporting on someone who is somewhere else acting in Jesus’ name. That’s a very different situation and in that situation, those who are not against Jesus are with him. They’re spreading the word that Jesus can heal and that’s good news no matter who is doing it.

So now think about our life in this community.  Jesus’ followers line up in a number of different groupings on Sunday morning and we all claim to be acting in Jesus’ name.  In the town of Litchfield even the Episcopalians line up in three different groups. But out in the country at large you have many more kinds of people claiming to be Christian and believing weird things – it seems to me.  Should we try to prevent them and say those who aren’t with us are the enemy?

Well, perhaps we should ask, “Do they enhance the name of Christian or not? Do they act in a way that brings honor to the name or do they dishonor it?”  Isn’t that the basic question?  If members of other churches bring honor to the name of Christ that strengthens all of us but if they act in a way that makes others sneer at Christianity, that’s no help.

In this country, there’s a pretty wide range of people claiming to speak for the gospel. And there are, to be honest, some who claim to be with us but do damage to the name of Christ so that people say, “If that’s what Christians are like, forget about it.”  And there are others who maybe aren’t any kind of standard brand Christian, but who make outsiders say, “If that’s what a Christian is, I should check it out myself.” Those who are not against us are for us.

I think the attitude Jesus reflects in this gospel is one of a broad and generous inclusion of anyone who is serving God. And I think this attitude of a broad and generous inclusion is one the churches are finally beginning to adopt themselves. Episcopalians and Lutherans, for example, both come from traditions that used to say “Those who are not confirmed in our tradition aren’t doing it quite right and can’t come to communion at our altars.” Some of you certainly remember how Episcopalians used to say, “If you weren’t confirmed by a bishop in apostolic succession you can’t come to communion in opur church.”  We may read the same Bible and say the same Creed, but we have some different customs about bishops so we can’t possibly work or worship together. Those who are not with us are against us.  Both Lutherans and Episcopalians used to take that kind of stand.

But does it really work against us and against the cause of Christ if we have slightly different patterns of ministry as long as ministry gets done? If those who claim to be Christian are selling snake oil on television that’s another question. If they are teaching hostility toward other Christians, that’s another question too. But don’t we do more damage to the name of Christ by our divisions than almost any other way, and isn’t it good that we’re beginning to be a bit more open toward those with whom we have so much in common?

In fact, aren’t there even greater opportunities than that to work together with other people of good will whether Christian or not toward common objectives? There are service groups in every community made up of Christians and non-Christians but working together for the common good. And I think that’s a good thing. God is able to work through non-Episcopalians as well as Episcopalians and even non-Christians as well as Christians.  God is greater than we are and is not limited by our boundaries.

And then we might look more closely at ourselves.  We claim the name of Christ; we come here and worship; but are we with or against our Lord when push comes to shove: when there’s work to be done, when pledges are needed, when there are children to teach, when there’s a witness to be made, when there are prayers that are needed? Are we with Jesus in a way that makes a difference, or are we actually deadweight holding others back, claiming to be Christian but not giving much evidence of it?  It’s one thing to be generous and inclusive in regard to those outside our particular church or even outside any church. If they aren’t against us, if they don’t get in the way, if they maybe even do some of the things we should be doing, surely that’s good. They’re really with us whether they know it or not.

But here, within the community, the congregation, when there’s work to be done and some of those needed aren’t with us, aren’t there when they’re needed, that’s a negative, not a plus.  Those who aren’t with us in that sense are against us; they weaken the whole body.

I heard of a church recently where every member was mailed a piece of a picture puzzle along with their pledge card and asked to bring both in on stewardship Sunday.  Have you ever noticed how incomplete a jigsaw puzzle looks when one piece is still missing – even one piece out of several hundred – the puzzle is obviously incomplete till that last piece is there.  If you aren’t with us, we’re incomplete, we can’t be the church that we need to be to serve Christ in this community.

And look at the way the gospel this morning then goes on to stress that point. Every member counts. Every member of the body counts. If your hand causes you to stumble, or your foot or eye, cut it off, tear it out, you’re better off without the member who isn’t contributing. Suddenly we switch from being open and inclusive toward those outside the body to being incredibly narrow and exclusive to those within the body. I wonder if Jesus had Judas in mind?  One member of the body who destroyed the head of the body.  Those not with Jesus in Gethsemane were surely against him.

So the standard we hold up to others can be open and generous, but the standard we hold up to ourselves I think is very different.  It’s fine to be easy on others, but not on ourselves. Discipline is for our children, not the neighbor’s children. What they do doesn’t reflect on us; what our own children do does. We hold our own to a higher standard.

I read reports of these new mega-churches – one of the best known is in Willow Creek Illinois – that have no prayer books or hymnals because they throw everything up on a screen, they use rock groups for their music and actors to do a skit in place of a sermon and they preach a minimal gospel.  It’s been called entertainment evangelism and I have to wonder how long the fad will last without the tradition or the creeds or the sacraments. But should we bomb the place?  I don’t think so. They act in the name of Christ and they draw a lot of people who aren’t touched by the traditional churches. We can hope the small first step will lead to a thirst for something more. But that’s not our problem.

Our challenge is our own body, this church, and our own bodies, the kind of lives we live – and how much of that life – our life – your life, my life – is for or against the Lord who loves us and calls us to work together to serve God’s people and build up the Body of Christ.