Category: John (Page 10 of 24)

Baseball and a Father’s Death: A Funeral Homily, 18 November 2015

November 18, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered at the requiem for James E. Freiberger, held November 18, 2015, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the requiem were Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33; Psalm 27:1-7; Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39; and John 11:21-27. These lessons may be found at the Burials Lectionary Page The Lectionary Page. Mr. Freiberger’s obituary may be found here.)

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Baseball and Glove The death of anyone important in our lives is a tragic and painful thing, even if the relationship was strained or even broken. This is especially so when a parent dies and, for some reason, more so when that parent is our father, perhaps because we use that metaphor of fatherhood to explain God’s relationship to us. Whenever someone’s father passes away, I cannot help but remember the poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The death of a parent, especially a father (I think) no matter what our relationship with him may have been, fills us with rage, with conflicted emotion, with a frustration difficult to name. Let us commend all of that to God, as we commend the soul of James E. Freiberger to God’s eternal care.

I didn’t know Jim Freiberger; I do not know if he was (to use poet Thomas’s labels) a wise man, a good man, a wild man, or a grave man, so I cannot eulogize him. But I do know that he was a father and I know that he was in the Navy, that he had a career in data processing, and that he had three children, one of whom I know. I am told that he was a gifted athlete and almost had a chance to play professional baseball, a game about which he was passionate . . . a love I know he passed on to his daughter.

So I got to thinking about baseball and did some research and found an article about the lessons baseball can teach us, lessons that can be applied in business and management. I think what the author has to say suggests that baseball can also teach us something about our spiritual life, as well. It’s a cliché, I think, that baseball is a metaphor for life, but (in many ways) it actually is.

The author of that business article contrasts the timing of baseball with the timing of sports such as football or basketball, noting that in those sports there is a clock which limits the time of the game and ticks down inexorably and finally, and although there might be overtime in the event of a tie at the end of regulation play, even that is bounded by the clock. In contrast, he writes:

Baseball is a game that is pastoral in nature, a reminder of a time that our life was slower and most of us lived on farms and small towns. You have 27 outs and the game is not over until all outs are exhausted. There is no clock to pressure you. You simply go on your business until it is done. Time marches slowly in baseball and baseball allows us to simply relax for three hours while drinking a few adult beverages.

I think this is part of the message of the lesson from Lamentations: “[God’s] mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” God’s time marches slowly and it is always merciful and every morning is new. We can relax into God’s time; we can find comfort in God’s time; we can find all things renewed in God’s time; we can abandon our frustrations, our rages, and our fears in God’s time. “The Lord is the strength of my life,” says the Psalmist today, “of whom then shall I be afraid?”

In the article, then, the author talks about the way baseball deals with failure:

Baseball teaches about failure as the length of the season reflects the pace of our life. You have 162 games and there are days in which the batter can’t see the ball or the pitches look more like beach balloons as the opposing hitters feast on the big fat pitches coming their way. The beauty of baseball is that you can suck one day but the next you can redeem yourself. You don’t have to wait a week before getting a chance to get it right.

And you don’t have to dwell on getting it wrong. It occurred to me this morning that there’s a real contrast between football and baseball with regard to getting it wrong. In football, every mistake a player or a team can make has a name and is remembered by that name: the quarterback sack, the fumble, the incomplete pass, the missed block, and so forth. Fans and players relive, again and again, all the mistakes of past games. In baseball, on the other hand, there’s just one word for every sort of mistake: error. The scorekeeper and the statisticians keep track of “errors,” but the rest of us move on. There’s no point in dwelling on mistakes, because (after all) they are forgiven. They will be of no consequence in the end. As Paul said, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, [and I would add that includes ourselves and any mistakes or errors or bad decisions we have made] will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The author of our article on baseball and business then takes a look at the game’s attitude towards success, something that none us (especially in our families and interpersonal relationships) really have much of. He writes:

In baseball, if you hit .300, you are very good. In most sports, hitting .300 represent failures. Quarterbacks lose their jobs if their accuracy is 55% but in baseball, a manager who win 55% of the games is brilliant. In college football winning only 55% of your games will get you fired. Ask any good salesman and they will tell you if they get 30% of their prospects to buy their products, this will produce a successful year. There are days that you wonder why you got up and then there are days in which wow, you can’t do no wrong just like the baseball player who hits for the cycle.

In the Christian faith we believe in a cycle . . . a cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth that we call “Resurrection,” not a rebirth into this world as taught by some other religions, but a rebirth into the Presence of God. This is the assurance Jesus gave to Martha, to Mary, to their brother Lazarus; it is the assurance that his own birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension gives to us. “I go,” he told his disciples, “to prepare a place for you . . . and I will gather you to myself, that where I am you may also be.” Martha said to Jesus about her brother, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” And we can say that now about Jim Freiberger and about all of us, no matter what our “batting average” or our “percentage of accuracy” may have been.

So, baseball (about which Jim was passionate) has something to teach us about our spirituality; it may be a cliché, but it is true that baseball can be a metaphor for life. If you “Google” that phrase – “baseball is a metaphor for life” – you will find, among many other less colorful explanations, this somewhat off-color monologue by the character Kenny Shea in the television program Rescue Me:

Anyway, baseball and life, one in the same. Everybody always says that life is too short. Bullshit. Life, unless you get cancer or hit by a bus or set on fire, takes forever. Just like baseball. It’s a series of long, mind-boggling boring stretches of time where absolutely nothing happens. So, you take a nap, and then, after a little while, when that crisp crack of the bat hittin’ the ball, so crisp you could almost smell that wood burning, jolts you awake and you open your eyes to see something so exciting and intricate, and possibly, very, very meaningful has just happened, but you missed it ’cause you were just so goddamn bored in the first place. Oh, you know, a couple of hot dogs, throw in some beers, . . . and that’s that.

So baseball is a metaphor for life with its long boring stretches and its moments of excitement and its disappointments. The author L.R. Knost didn’t mention baseball but she made the same point when she wrote:

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Today, we commend to almighty God the soul of James E. Freiberger – Navy man, father, grandfather, data processing worker, lover of baseball – whose life was amazing and awful and ordinary and routine and, like everyone’s in its own way, breathtakingly beautiful. Remember that, remember the beautiful part, and remember that, whatever else may be true about Jim Freiberger, remember that “nothing in all of creation will be able to separate [him] from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Caring vs Rules: A Sermon for Proper 27B, Pentecost 24 (8 Nov 2015)

November 7, 2015 / eric / 1 Comment

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A sermon offered on Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27B, Track 1, RCL), November 8, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Ruth 3:1-5;4:13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9:24-28; and Mark 12:38-44 . These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page. The collect for the day, referenced in the sermon, is found at the same site.)

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The Widow's Mite by Rembrandt I get letters. Sometimes they’re really nice letters. And sometimes they’re not. Today, I want to tell you about a letter and how it caused me to rethink the two stories of women in today’s lectionary readings: First, the end of the story of Ruth from the biblical book named for her, and second, the story of Jesus watching and commenting upon the sacrificial giving of a widow in the Jerusalem temple.

The Book of Ruth is a very simple story. As Dr. Alphonetta Wines, a Methodist theologian, has said:

The genius of the book of Ruth begins with its literary simplicity. In chapter one, Naomi’s troubles are relentless as one by one, famine, displacement, and bereavement steal her joy, turning her into a bitter woman. In chapter two Ruth ekes out a living for Naomi and herself. Both are abundantly blessed in the process. In chapter three, Ruth, at Naomi’s bidding, encounters Boaz on the threshing floor. In chapter four, the birth of Ruth’s child Obed brings Naomi joy that she thought would never be hers again. What began in misfortune has turned out to be a blessing for generations to come. (Working Preacher Commentary)

It’s simplicity, however, obscures for us its very radical messages: one of hope for women in a patriarchal society where the rules are all stacked against them, and another for inclusion of the stranger and the alien for it tells us this foreign woman, Ruth the Moabite, was the great grandmother of Israel’s King David and, thus, an ancestor of his descendent whom we believe to be the Son of God.

The story of the widow in the temple is another study in simplicity. Jesus is in the temple teaching, very clearly teaching against the scribes whom he criticizes for their opulent and self-serving ways. Having just criticized the scribes for “devouring widows’ houses,” he watches this particular widow turn over to those same scribes everything she possesses. Jesus seems to praise her for giving “out of her poverty . . . everything she had,” while criticizing wealthier donors who merely “contribute out of their abundance.”

This story has been used countless times a “stewardship sermon” text to encourage sacrificial giving by modern Christians. However, while I certainly want to encourage your generosity to the church, I think that’s a misuse of the text. Elsewhere, Jesus has encouraged such giving (as when he tells the wealthy young man to “sell all you have and give the money to the poor”) but I don’t believe that that is his intent here. Rather, in this story he is (I believe) teaching a lesson about two approaches to religion, a lesson also taught by the whole story of Ruth.

I came to this conclusion on Friday. Two things happened on Friday. The first was my practice of reading every morning from Daily Office lectionary; the second was the letter I just mentioned, which was delivered to the church office by our mailman on Friday afternoon.

The Daily Office Old Testament readings for the past couple of weeks have been from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah telling the story of the return of Jerusalem’s exiles from Babylonia and their rebuilding of the Temple; the Gospel readings have been from Matthew’s Gospel. On Friday, the latter was the story of the feeding of the 5,000 with two fish and five loaves of bread, while the lesson from Ezra told of the sacrifice made in thanksgiving for the completion and dedication of the restored temple:

At that time those who had come from captivity, the returned exiles, offered burnt-offerings to the God of Israel, twelve bulls for all Israel, ninety-six rams, seventy-seven lambs, and as a sin-offering twelve male goats; all this was a burnt-offering to the Lord. (Ezra 8:35)

In my Daily Office meditation on Friday, I wrote that the contrast between the grossly exorbitant – one is tempted to say “wasteful” – sacrifice in the story from Ezra and the frugal but plentiful picnic in Matthew is a striking illustration of two very different understandings of religion: on the one hand, religion as rules; on the other, religion as caring.

In our contemporary society and for the past several years, it’s been fashionable amongst some people to make a distinction between being “spiritual” and being “religious.” Those who study modern religion, such as the Pew Institute, even have a classification, “SBNR,” as one of their demographic categories, the “spiritual but not religious.” That distinction, I think, is what is addressed by our bible stories today; I don’t think Ruth or Naomi or Jesus or the widow in the temple would ever make that distinction, however. They would never divorce spirituality from religion. They might, however, make a distinction between these two kinds of religious practice: religion as rules versus religion as caring.

You know that I love looking into word origins, what is technically called “etymology”. Usually when I do this in a sermon I ask you to consider the original Greek of the New Testament, or the Hebrew of the Old Testament, but today I want to look at the English word religion, its root and derivation, and what we mean by it. If we look in the dictionary we will find that it is defined as “an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods.” (Merriam-Webster) Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, offers this definition: “A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation, as part of their web presence, has a really good subsection for reporting religious news from all over the world. On the homepage of that religious news section, the BBC includes this statement:

Religion can be explained as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs. (BBC.co.uk)

Notice what is common to all these definitions: beliefs about gods (or at least the supernatural), regulations of conduct, and ritual ceremonies. In other words, they are all about religion as rules. Only at the end, and only as a optional element, does the BBC definition include anything about morality or social behavior or anything that could be called “religion as caring”.

These definitions apply fully to the conduct of the scribes Jesus talks about in the Gospel lesson: they “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 . . . for the sake of appearance say long prayers.” They also apply to the Israelite society into which Naomi and Ruth come from Moab, a patriarchal society dominated by religious regulations, the Law of Moses, which denied independent livelihood to women. Beliefs, regulations, rituals: religion as rules.

The first recorded use of the word religion in the English language was in the 12th Century to describe the state of life of those bound by monastic vows and only later to describe the pious conduct all persons, lay and “religious” alike, but in both uses the emphasis is on religion as rules. Our word religion derives from the Latin word religionem which Roman philosophers, such as Cicero and Lactantius, used to connote a respect for the sacred and reverence for the gods; St. Jerome used it in the Latin vulgate translation of the Bible to render a Greek word meaning “religious ceremonies” (threskeia, Acts 26:5 & James 1:26-27).

The root of the Latin word religionem, however, was a matter of some dispute amongst those same Roman writers. Some believed it came from the verb religare which means “to bind up,” which is what rules do. Others, however, argued that it derived from relegere meaning “to read again” or “to read carefully,” that it is related to the word religiens meaning “careful”, the opposite of negligens, or negligent. This second derivation suggests that religion is less about rules than it is about caring.

The beliefs-rules-and-rituals understanding of religion is the way a lot of people, like the temple scribes and like early Israelite patriarchal society, understand religion. When this is our understanding, we end up following rules that lead the grossly over-the-top sacrifice of nearly 200 head of livestock described in Friday’s Old Testament reading, we end up following rules that leave widowed women unable to provide for themselves, and we end up with religious leaders who make a show of their piety but who “devour widows’ houses.” Religion, understood as a set of binding rules proscribing behavior and prescribing rituals and ceremonies, produces such results . . . and it produces that second thing that happened on Friday, this letter delivered to the church office by our mailman that afternoon. [Note: the letter may be viewed here as a PDF file; the highlighting is in the original as delivered.]

In the November issue of our parish newsletter, we published an article about applauding during worship services which my colleague, the Rev. Peter Faass of Christ Church, Shaker Heights, had written. In it Fr. Faass commented that he invites applause when introducing married couples and, in that, made oblique reference to the fact that following this summer’s General Convention the Episcopal Church now offers marriage to same-sex couples. He recommended, however, that most of the time applause should not be offered during worship because what we do in the liturgy is not done as a performance for the congregation, but rather as an offering to God. What Peter suggested was that

instead of applause it would be best to offer a moment of silence after a pleasing offering; a moment when we may reflect on the gifts God has given to the person who is offering them up in the liturgy. In that silence let’s offer thanks. In that stillness let’s hear God’s applauding approval. [Note: Fr. Faass’s entire article can be read in PDF format in the parish newsletter here.]

Apparently we have a neighbor who reads our newsletter and who often drives by our building because that’s who this letter is from. In it, our neighbor takes us to task not only for Fr. Faass’s points, but also for our sign on which we have, from time to time, put the statement which has become a sort of unofficial motto of our diocese: “God Loves Everyone. No Exceptions.”

The letter begins, “It seems that Episcopalians are proud of being Episcopalians, but ashamed to be Christian. That explains why they find it so easy to stray from Scriptures, and hold so tightly to ‘tradition.'” The writer condemns us as “heavily influenced by popular culture” and then goes on to proof-text from Scripture why, in our correspondent’s opinion, same-sex marriage is contrary to his understanding of religion citing particularly the story of Adam and Eve. He then suggests that Fr. Faass is incorrect about God’s applause saying, “It may very well be that God is not only not applauding, but is sickened by ‘the liturgy,'” and he cites the prophets Amos and Isaiah who condemned the festivals, sacrifices, and assemblies of unfaithful Israel.

With respect to our sign, our neighbor informs us that “God Loves Everyone. No Exceptions” is simply not true, that there are, in fact, human beings whom God not only doesn’t love but whom God positively abhors. He cites one of the Psalms for this proposition.

This [the letter] is religion understood as that which binds, religion as rules; this is Scripture understood as a set of binding regulations proscribing behavior, prescribing some rituals and prohibiting others, and denying not only basic dignity but even the love of God to many of God’s children. This is the religion of the temple scribes.

To this sort of religion, Jesus contrasted the religion of the widow in the temple. No law, no rule required her make her offering of “two small copper coins, which are worth a penny.” This is not her tithe (that would have been paid at a different time and in a different way). This is not a sin offering or a burnt offering (that would have entailed the sacrifice of some animal). This is nothing more nor less than a gift of thanks, given “out of her poverty” because she cared for the God on whose blessings she depended, because she cared for the faith that was in her. Because she cared, she gave; “out of her poverty [she] put in everything she had.” This is religion as caring.

I could answer this letter. I could write to our neighbor and tell him that the Episcopal Church believes that when Jesus told Nicodemus, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (Jn 3:16) he didn’t put any qualifications or restrictions on that statement. I could write to our neighbor and tell him that the Episcopal Church believes with our parish patron, St. Paul, that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate [any of] us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:38-39) I could do that. I could answer this letter, but I think the better response is for us as a church community to continue doing what we are called to do, to continue living a religion that emphasizes caring rather than rules.

Our correspondent admonished us that it is incumbent upon every Christian “to set the good example of following after Christ,” and he referenced the Letter of James: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (Jm 1:27 NRSV) What James is saying is that religion is caring, and the Episcopal Church could not agree more strongly!

Imagine how different this world might be if the caring, rather than the binding rules aspect, were the general understanding of religion! If we understood religion to mean “caring,” rather than “an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods,” I really don’t think there would be any people who would describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” When the story of Ruth is understood not as a story about the rules of ancient Israelite society but, as Dr. Wines suggested, as the story of “a blessing for [all] generations to come” . . . when the story of the widow in the temple is understood not as a story about following the rules of stewardship, but as a story of giving as an act of caring . . . when the whole Bible is understood not as a book of rules and regulations, but as a collection of stories about God’s love . . . then it is clear that, contrary to our neighbor’s letter, Episcopalians do not “stray from Scripture.”

Our calling as “Episcopalians [who] are proud of being Episcopalians, [and who are positively delighted] to be Christian” is to demonstrate, to live out, and to invite others into what our new Presiding Bishop likes to call “the Jesus Movement,” a religion of caring, not a religion of rules. Like the widow in the temple, we are called to give out of our poverty all that we have and all that we are, and to invite into our self-giving not only those who are like ourselves, but also and especially those are different, the stranger, the alien, the one who is not like us, without regard to his or her social status, race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, or anything else because nothing “in all creation, [is] able to separate [any of] us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” because “God Loves Everyone. No Exceptions.”

Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Fully Human: A Baptismal Sermon for All Saints Day, November 1, 2015

October 31, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on All Saints Day, Sunday, November 1, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; and John 11:32-44. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page.)

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The Raising of Lazarus, Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy, 6th century For some reason, although I know that the Lectionary is a three-year cycle and thus that the lessons are not the same every year, when All Saints Sunday rolls around I’m surprised when the lessons do not include John the Divine’s vision of the multitude in white robes standing before the Lamb’s Throne in heaven (Rev 7:9-17) or Jesus preaching the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:1-12). Those were the lessons, the only lessons provided for this feast in prior editions of the Book of Common Prayer. I’ve preached the “new” Lectionary for thirty years, so you’d think I’d be used to it . . . but each time the raising of Lazarus pops up as the Gospel lesson I think, “Well, what’s up with that?” You may have had that thought this morning, as well: “It’s All Saints Day. We’re doing a baptism. What’s up with this Lazarus story?”

So I want to delve briefly into a couple details of the story.

First of all, let’s remember who this family is, Mary, Martha, and their deceased brother Lazarus. They are clearly people who believe in Jesus and in his mission, but their belief is much, much more than simply signing on to his program, a new approach to religion. These people seem to know Jesus; he apparently stayed with them on several occasions. He lodged with them, ate with them, taught in their home. Earlier in this story, Lazarus is described to Jesus as “he whom you love” when Jesus is told of his illness. (John 11:3) These people are close to Jesus; they are practically family, may even be family.

Secondly, we’re told that the family is accompanied by “Jews.” That seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? After all, aren’t they all Jews? Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Jesus, the whole lot of them? Of course they are! So many scholars suggest that we should better understand John’s term Ioudaiou to mean “Judeans,” that is people native to the Jerusalem area; these scholars suggest that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, like Jesus, were Galileans who had moved to Judea and been accepted into this southern community. This strengthens the suggestion that they may have been members of Jesus’ extended family.

Next, when both of the sisters greet Jesus (Martha’s greeting is earlier in the story), the very first thing each says is, “If you had been here, he wouldn’t have died.” (vv. 21 & 32) Not “Hi, how are you?” Not “Welcome back.” Not “I’m so sorry we have to tell you.” What the sisters say is not really a greeting; it’s an angry, accusative confrontation. “You could have prevented this!”

In the portion we read, we’re told that Jesus’ response to this is that he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” That’s a fine translation, but it’s also a bit misleading. The word rendered “disturbed” – embrimesato – very literally means he “snorted with anger”; and the word translated “deeply moved” – etaradzen – means “stirred up” and implies a certain physicality, not simply an emotionalism. Jesus response to the sisters’ confrontations, to Lazarus’ death, to the whole situation is to become indignant and sick to his stomach.

Angry and physically ill, Jesus wept. Some of the Judeans, John tells us, interpreted this as a sign of Jesus’ love for Lazarus; “See how he loved him!” they said. While I’ve no doubt that that is true, I suggest we consider another way to understand what is happening in this story.

In a few moments, we will baptize two young men, Aiden and his brother Carson, and together with them we will affirm the Baptismal Covenant beginning with a recitation of the Apostle’s Creed in which we will claim that Jesus, the Son of God, was “conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary” (BCP 1979, p 304). In the Nicene Creed, which we recite most Sundays during the Holy Eucharist, we go further and declare that he “became incarnate . . . and was made man,” that is, that he became a flesh-and-blood human being. (BCP 1979, p 358). In the Definition of Chalcedon, which you can find on page 864 of the Prayer Book, the church goes even beyond that and asserts its conviction that Jesus is “truly [human] . . . like us in all respects, apart from sin.”

I believe that standing before that tomb where his beloved friend Lazarus had been buried four days earlier, feeling the anger and frustration of his close friends Mary and Martha, surrounded by Judeans muttering “couldn’t he have prevented this,” and perhaps physically exhausted from traveling from the other side of the Jordan valley where he was when he got the news, Jesus’ humanity hit him like a ton of bricks. In that moment, everything that it meant to be human came crashing in on him: the way human beings settle for easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships; the injustice, oppression, and exploitation we impose on one another; the pain, rejection, hunger, and war we endure . . . but, also, the love, friendship, community, family, support, and every other good thing about being a human being; it all come together in that moment standing at that grave.

Why do I think that? Because that’s what I feel every time I stand at a grave. The first time I did that, I was 5-1/2 years old. I remember standing between my mother and my paternal grandmother watching two members of the US Army fold the flag that had draped my father’s coffin, feeling loss, grief, anger, confusion, and emotions I couldn’t even name. But there was also the love of family, pride in my father’s military service, a sense of community with extended family and friends, all the comfort that comes from our common humanity. And every time I have stood beside a grave, I have felt that again, and I can surely imagine our Lord experience something very like that. No wonder Jesus – the fully-human, like-us-in-all-respects Jesus – wept.

We should feel that same way when we welcome a new member into the household of God through the Sacrament of Baptism. Symbolically, baptism is burial; in the oldest tradition of the church, full immersion baptism, we go down under the water in the same way a body is buried in the earth, then we come up out of the water as Lazarus came from his tomb, as Jesus came from his grave. Baptism is death, burial, and restoration to life all encapsulated in one short liturgical act. As the Prayer Book says in the blessing of the baptismal water, “In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit” (BCP 1979, p 306). As he called Lazarus from to rise from his funeral wrappings, through Holy Baptism Jesus calls us “from the bondage of sin into everlasting life” (ibid), into a new life of full humanity joined with “those who have clean hands and a pure heart, [those] who have not pledged themselves to falsehood nor sworn by what is a fraud, [those who] shall receive a blessing from the Lord and a just reward from the God.” (Ps 24:4-5)

The Creation story in Genesis tells us that “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gn 1:27) The story of the Fall reminds us that somehow that divine likeness has been marred, that on our own we fail to live up to that image; we fail to fully live up to the potential God created in humankind. Through baptism, the divine image is restore; through our baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a process of transformation begins and God restores us to who and what we were meant to be – fully human.

When John the Divine witnessed his Revelation, he saw that multitude of human beings in white robes standing before the Lamb’s Throne in heaven. He was told who they were – those “who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14) – and why they were there, and nowhere in that description did the Elder who spoke to him say anything about the saints having agreed to a doctrine. When the voice spoke from the throne and said, “See, the home of God is among [human beings]. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3), not a word was said about assent to a creedal formula. Nonetheless, when we baptized someone, we ask them (and ourselves) some questions that sound a lot like doctrine; we ask questions which are taken directly from the creedal formulation we call “the Apostle’s Creed,” to which I referred earlier.

Recently, a commission of Anglican theologians representing you and me and all Anglicans everywhere agreed with a similar group of theologians representing Orthodox Christians that three words could be removed from the Nicene Creed, three words that theologians and liturgists call “the filioque clause.” Filioque is a Latin word meaning “and the Son.” It refers to that place in the Creed where we say, “We believe in the Holy Spirit . . . who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Those three words (or that single Latin word) were added to the Nicene Creed by the Third Council of Toledo in 589 CE, a council in which no Eastern bishops took part; that additional phrase, which the East rejected, was one of the causes of the schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. The theologians’ agreement is part of the on-going work to heal the rift between Eastern and Western Christianity.

As you might imagine, that agreement has excited no little amount of discussion amongst us clergy. In one of our conversations, another priest said this about the Creed which I think applies equally these doctrinal statements we require of baptismal candidates:

For the past couple of years, I have introduced the creed with, “Using the words of the Nicene Creed, we proclaim our faith and trust in the God . . . .” Last Sunday . . . I asked people to substitute “We trust in” for each “We believe in” as we said the Creed, since the original Greek word . . . could have been translated either way. I wonder if the Body of Christ would be far less chopped up, if we had used “trust”. There might have been far less of, “You don’t believe exactly what I believe, so I’m out of here,” or, “You don’t believe exactly what I believe, so you are out of here”, and another denomination is created. Also, there is that “in” . . . we are doing a whole lot more than expressing belief. We are expressing a deep community whether we say, “We believe in . . .” or “We trust in . . .” Maybe you don’t believe exactly the same things I believe, but we both believe/trust in the same God.

In that same discussion, another of our colleagues objected to what he called the distinction between “faith as trust and faith with content.” “It’s always struck me as a strange distinction,” he said. “If, for example, faith as trust is about relationship [and not about content], it is like someone saying to a prospective marriage partner, ‘I love you and I want to marry you, but I’m not certain who you are.'” I suggested to him, however, and I suggest to you now that this distinction really doesn’t exist, that faith as trust or as relationship necessarily implies and includes “faith with content.” One cannot place trust in another person, such as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit named in the Creed, without assenting to that person’s existence and properties; to say, “I trust you” or “I love you” and not also agree that you exist makes very little sense.

This is why we ask those questions of baptismal candidates. When we say, “Do you believe in” the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, we are not merely asking if the candidates (and the congregation who join them in answering) are assenting to certain doctrines about them; we are asking if they claim to be in a relationship of trust and love with them, and through them with the full community of human beings whom God loves, with whom God will live, from whose eyes God will wipe every tear, and for whom God will spread that glorious and eternal feast described by the Prophet Isaiah.

That relationship, I believe, is why Jesus wept. To be sure, he grieved the death of his friend Lazarus, but he knew he was about to do something to change that; there was no reason to cry about that. But that in-rushing crash of realization of what it is to be a human being, of what it is to be fully human, that is enough to make anyone cry. The story of the raising of Lazarus is a story about Jesus’ full humanity, the full humanity he shares with and promises to us. It is into that promise that we baptize Carson and Aiden today. And that is what’s up with the Lazarus story!

In the words of a popular Franciscan blessing, let us pray that, as these boys grow into the full humanity into which they are initiated today, God will bless them with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that they may live deep within their hearts; that God will bless them with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that they may work for justice, freedom, and peace; that God will bless them with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, hunger, and war, so that they may reach out their hands to comfort others and turn their pain into joy; and that God bless them with enough foolishness to believe that they can make a difference in this world, so that they can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice, kindness, and love to all.

May God bless them with the gift and the commission to be, like Christ, fully human. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Armor of God: Sermon for Proper 16B (Pentecost 13, 23 August 2015)

August 23, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B, Track 1, RCL), August 23, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are 1 Kings 8:1,6,10-11,22-30,41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; and John 6:56-69. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page.)

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Ancient Armor In the Education for Ministry program, the first year is spent reading the Old Testament, parts of which can be as dull as dirt! There are those long lists of genealogies, long catalogues of tribes and families, the lengthy and detailed instructions for making and erecting the tabernacle that the Hebrews carried along with them in the desert and, of course, a description of the Temple which Solomon built. In our EfM group, we sort of got into a habit of not reading those parts, of just acknowledging they were there but sort of skipping lightly over them. But it is there, earlier in the First Book of Kings from which our First Lesson is taken, a description of the building in which, in today’s lesson, Solomon places the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon’s Temple (the “First Temple”) was massive; it wasn’t really very big, but it was solid and substantial. It was built of huge blocks of solid stone; it had support beams made of whole cedar trees; it had immense fixtures and columns made of solid bronze and gold. In a word, it was a fortress!

But, as Solomon says in his public prayer in today’s Old Testament lesson, God doesn’t really need a fortress: “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” Earthly buildings cannot contain God and God certainly has no need of the protection massive stone walls can provide.

No, the Temple was not built for God; the Temple was built for human beings, for the Israelites. It is the place which serves as a focus for their devotion to the Almighty; it is the place where they will offer sacrifices and toward which they will face when they pray. So Solomon beseeches God, “Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling place; heed and forgive.” And Solomon goes even further and asks that God also hear the prayers of foreigners: “Likewise . . . when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you.”

The Temple was an earthly reminder of God’s Law; it was the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, called the footstool of God by David. In the 28th Chapter of the First Book of Chronicles, David calls his court officers and his designated heir, Solomon, to an assembly and says to them, “I had planned to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord, for the footstool of our God; and I made preparations for building.” (v. 2, NRSV) He then gives his plans for the Temple to Solomon. In Psalm 132, the Psalmist (traditionally David) makes a similar reference when he says, “Let us go to God’s dwelling place; let us fall upon our knees before his footstool.” (v. 7, BCP)

The lexicons tell us that uses of this term footstool are metaphorical and symbolic of subjection to God as universal Lord. However, the term always reminds me of my grandmother Edna Funston who was a nurse. She and my grandfather lived only about four blocks from the hospital where she was employed, so she would walk to and from work everyday. After spending her days, like most nurses do, on her feet, she would walk those four blocks and then sit for a while with her feet up, resting them on a footstool that sat in front of her favorite chair. When I hear of God’s footstool, I picture God putting his feet up after a long walk. It reminds me of that passage from the Book of Genesis in which Adam and Eve, having violated God’s instructions by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” and hid themselves. (Gen 3:8) It reminds me also of that passage in the Prophet Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Mic 6:8)

The Temple was an earthly reminder of God’s Law which requires God’s people to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. Several generations after the Temple was built, God’s people were doing anything but . . . and the Prophet Isaiah portrayed God as less than pleased by that. Isaiah prophesied:

Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and whoever turns from evil is despoiled. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, and was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness like a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head; he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped himself in fury as in a mantle. (Isa 59:14-17)

Several centuries after Isaiah, the writer of the Book of Wisdom would offer an apocalyptic vision of the last judgment in similar terms:

The Lord will take his zeal as his whole armor, and will arm all creation to repel his enemies; he will put on righteousness as a breastplate, and wear impartial justice as a helmet; he will take holiness as an invincible shield, and sharpen stern wrath for a sword, and creation will join with him to fight against his frenzied foes. (Wis 5:17-20

The Letter to the Ephesians (which claims to have been written by Paul but is generally believed to have been written by one of his disciples shortly after his death, perhaps from notes drafted or dictated by Paul) makes use of these ancient armor and weapon metaphors in a new and startling way.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the audience to whom this letter was initially addressed, the church at Ephesus, a small body of believers living as a minority in a hostile environment. Their commitment to Christ set them conspicuously at odds with their neighbors, perhaps even with some in their own families. They were regarded with suspicion, even considered troublemakers and atheists, by their neighbors because they refused to join in the municipal cult of the hunter goddess Artemis whose worship was an important commercial enterprise for the city. They were regarded as troublemakers and atheists by the Roman empire because they refused to burn incense and pay tribute at the altars to the emperor. It is likely that they had had more than one encounter with the police, who were not merely the police; they were the Roman army.

So when the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians borrows the armor imagery of Isaiah and the Book of Wisdom, although “the concrete details of the armor are biblical, not Roman, the audience probably envisaged the fully armed Roman soldier when they heard these words.” (NIB, Vol. XI, page 460) It is as if someone today were to write to a congregation in (for example) Ferguson, Missouri, and say: “Put on the bulletproof vest of righteousness and the night-vision goggles of truth. Take up the automatic rifle of the Spirit.” And that is how we need to hear these metaphors, too – as shocking and disturbing and counter-cultural. It violated their, and should violate our, expectations of what a comforting pastoral letter should say, and thus their eyes were opened, and our eyes should be, to the darkness of the present reality.

Of course, whether one uses the ancient weapons of the original or modernizes the imagery, the use is metaphorical. As the Letter reminds its initial readers and us, “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the [world] powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil.” This is not a call to armed revolution; it is not a call to man the barricades and overthrow the government. Although this text has been used shamefully and wrongly to justify violence and oppression, it is not a call for the followers of Jesus to become some sort of Christian ISIS.

No! We are not called to actually take up arms. The armor we are to don is that which these metaphors represent: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, holiness, impartial judgment, and the word of God (which is not the Bible, the Word of God is Jesus!). We so by constantly preparing ourselves. Earlier in the Letter, the writer admonished the Ephesians to utilize their gifts as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to build up the church and equip one another for the work of ministry (4:11-12), to sing psalms and hymns together, to pray and give thanks (5:19-20). The same is true for us; “believers [today] must hear sermons, read scripture, talk with other Christians, engage in regular prayer, sing the praises of God, and so on.” (NIB, pg 403) Our formation as members of the Body of Christ, our preparation to withstand the “powers of this present darkness” and “the spiritual forces of evil” must be continuous.

We may skip over the details of its construction because we know that God didn’t need the Temple, but the truth is that the Israelites did. We may choose not read the full description because we know that God doesn’t need a fortress, but the truth is that we do. The Stoic philosopher Seneca taught that the soul of a wise person is fortified by reason and secure virtue. He wrote, “The walls which guard the wise [person] are safe from both flame and assault, they provide no means of entrance, are lofty, impregnable, godlike.” (De Constantia Sapientis [On the Constancy of the Wise Man], 6.8) We need that spiritual fortress!

In the same way, God really has no need of the metaphorical armor and weapons described in Isaiah, the Book of Wisdom, and the Letter to the Ephesians, but we do. Clothed with “the whole armor of God,” we will “be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,” and fed with “the bread that came down from heaven . . .[we] will live forever.”

Let us pray:

Almighty and merciful God, in your goodness keep us, we pray, [protected by your armor] from all things that may hurt us [and nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son], that we, being ready both in mind and body, may accomplish with free hearts those things which belong to your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Collect 2 [with addition], BCP 1979, pg. 228)

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Overflowing Abundance: Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B, 26 July 2015)

July 25, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B, Track 1, RCL), July 26, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are 2 Samuel 11:1-15; Psalm 14; Ephesians 3:14-21; and John 6:1-21. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page.)

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Tabgha Mosaic Floor So this is a very familiar story, right? Actually, two very familiar stories. We all know about the feeding of the 5,000. All four gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – tell it with slightly varying details. We all know about Jesus walking on the water. Three of the four gospels – Mark, Luke, and John – include that tale, again with slightly varying details. We sometimes mix up those variations, but basically the stories are the same so no big deal.

The problem is that we know the stories so well that we don’t know what we don’t know about them. We think we know the whole story, but we don’t! And one of the things we don’t know, as Evie and I discovered when we were in Palestine last summer, is the geography of the feeding of the multitude. So I thought start with a sort of geography lesson, if that’s OK with you? OK?

OK.

I want you, first, to think about what you know about Lake Erie. You know that it’s up there, north of us somewhere. You know that at one end (the western end) are Detroit and Toledo and at the other (the eastern end) is Buffalo. You know that the far shore is a foreign country called Canada, and you know pretty well where the cities and towns are located along the American shore.

So now I want you take Lake Erie and rotate it 90 degrees. Buffalo is now at the lower end; Toledo is at the top; the foreign country called Canada is still on the far shore. If we come down the near shore from Toledo, we’ll come to (among other places) Maumee, Sandusky, Lorain, Cleveland, Ashtabula, Erie.

By rotating Lake Erie, we’ve oriented it in the same way the Sea of Galilee is oriented and, by a strange coincidence, many of the places we know of along the shore of the Sea of Galilee are in relationship to one another in much the same way as places we know along the shore of Lake Erie! So … Bethsaida – you remember Bethsaida, it’s where Jesus healed a blind man and it was the hometown of Philip, Andrew, and Peter – Bethsaida would be about where Detroit is. Capernaum, which Jesus sort of made his home base and where Peter actually seems to have lived, would be about where Toledo is. A place called Tabgha, which is probably where the feeding of the 5,000 took place, would be about where Sandusky is. Gennesaret, which is where Mark says the apostles were headed when they saw Jesus walking on the water, would be about where Cleveland is. Tiberias, a resort city built by Herod Antipas (the king who beheaded John the Baptist), would about where Erie, Pennsylvania, is. Finally, go way away from the lake to Cincinnati, that would be about where Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown would be.

Except … shrink everything by at least a factor of ten, because that’s how much bigger Lake Erie is than the Sea of Galilee; that’s how much bigger Ohio is than the region of Galilee. So, now, Cincinnati/Nazareth, instead of 250 miles from the lake is 25 miles away, and Toledo/Capernaum, instead of being about 40 miles from Sandusky/Tabgha is less than 3 miles away. And the other distances are similarly reduced, but remember . . . they didn’t have cars and interstates; they would have been walking or riding a donkey on dirt paths, or maybe sailing or even rowing a fishing boat on the lake.

So let me tell you about Tabgha. Until 1948, when the Israelis uprooted its residents, there was a village there and had been for centuries; now it is simply an agricultural area and a place of religious pilgrimage. The name is a corruption of the Greek name of the place, Heptapegon, which means “seven springs;” its Hebrew name is Ein Sheva, which means the same thing. It is venerated by Christians for two reasons; on a bluff overlooking the place is where the feeding of the multitude is believed to have occurred and on the beach is where the Risen Christ is thought to have had a grilled fish breakfast with Peter during which he asked him, three times, “Do you love me?” At each location, there is a shrine and a church: the first is called The Church of the Multiplication; the second is called “Mensa Domini” (the Lord’s Table) and also known as the Church of the Primacy of Peter.

A Fourth Century pilgrim from Spain named Egeria reported visiting, in about 380 CE, a shrine where the Church of the Multiplication now stands; in her diary, she tells us that the site had been venerated by the faithful from the time of Christ onward. Shortly after her visit, a new church was built there in which was laid a mosaic floor depicting the loaves and fishes. That floor still exists today – a picture of it is on the front of your bulletin.

The reason I spend so much time on the geography of the place is this: we all know the story of the feeding of the 5,000, but sometimes we think to ourselves, “It probably wasn’t that big a crowd.” We think John and the other evangelists, or whoever first told the story, may have been exaggerating. But consider: it’s only about an hour’s walk from Capernaum to Tabhga, only an hour from Genessaret, only an hour and a half from Chorazin, maybe two hours from Bethsaida or Tiberias, perhaps several hours from Nazareth and more distant towns. But if one had a donkey or a horse, or if one could come over the water by boat, the time would be considerably less. If Jesus and his companions were there for several hours, word could easily have spread and people from all those places and more could have come to see this famous prophet and miraculous healer. Each of those places I’ve named was an important agricultural or fishing site, a residential center, a political center; each had a fairly large population for the time. It’s entirely possible that, hearing that this famous teacher was there, a crowd of thousands could have gathered there, a crowd of thousands who dropped what they were doing and headed out to see, not thinking about supplies or provisions, a crowd of thousands without enough to eat.

So there they are. Jesus has been teaching and healing, and it’s getting late, and people are getting hungry, and there’s nowhere to buy anything. Philip and Andrew are getting worried; they don’t know what a big crowd of hungry people might do, so they talk with Jesus about it. They want him to send the people away. After all, there’s nothing nearby, but (like I said) it would only take these people an hour or two to walk back home or to someplace where food could be found. But Jesus says, “No. They’re here because we’re here; we have to take responsibility for that and feed them.” Andrew says, “We’ve checked the supplies and all we have are these two fishes and five loaves (which, by the way, we didn’t bring; some boy brought them as his lunch, some boy with more smarts than a group of grown men).”

Jesus assures them it will be enough, tells everyone to sit down, blesses the food, and the picnic starts. Sure enough, there is enough. More than enough. Jesus, being environmentally aware, instructs the apostles to pick up after themselves and the crowd, and they gather the leftovers (all four of the gospels tell us) into twelve baskets. The Greek word used is kophinos, which the lexicon tells us is a wicker basket, probably a large one like a hamper. Twelve large hampers of leftovers! This isn’t simply a story about miraculously feeding a big bunch of people with a small amount of food…. this is a story about overfeeding a big bunch of people. This is a story about God’s abundance.

When Evie and I lived in Las Vegas, back before I was ordained, we used to go to a restaurant there called Keller’s. One of the things I liked about Keller’s (besides the really great food and their superb wine cellar) was that if you took home any leftovers, they made it an event. They were proud that you were taking home their food. Instead of a paper sack or styrofoam box, you got a work of art. Someone in the kitchen obviously knew the art of origami, so your bit of leftover chicken breast might come back to you packaged in a graceful silver swan; your second helping of trout, in a beautiful gold fish; your half-a-piece of cheesecake in a gorgeous multi-colored gift box.

I’ll bet that as people left the field at Tabgha that afternoon, they were sent home with leftovers, some more of the bread and fish to see them on their way. I’m pretty certain they didn’t get Keller’s origami packaging, but I like to visualize the scene that way with those thousands of people carrying silver foil swans, gold paper fish, and multi-colored paper gift boxes. Although I’m sure they didn’t have those pretty packages in their hands, they carried something even more precious as they made their way back to Bethsaida (up there about where Detroit would on Lake Erie) or Capernaum (sort of where Toledo is) or Genneserat (kind of where Cleveland is) or the longer journeys to Tiberias (about where Erie would be) or even distant Nazareth (far away like Cincinnati).

They carried the abundant, overflowing grace of God, what Paul called “the riches of [God’s] glory.” They carried the assurance in their hearts that they had been cared for with “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and that they had been “filled with all the fullness of God.” They knew, because they had seen the evidence with their own eyes, tasted it with their own tongues, and carried it away in their own hands, that the power of God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”

Today, we are going to baptize Tatum E________ K_________; today, we are going to welcome her into the household of God in which that promise of abundance is realized; today, we are going to assure her that, as Mark says of the crowd in his telling of this story, God in Christ Jesus has abundant compassion for her. Whatever may happen in her life, whatever stormy seas she may sail, she has only to look (as the apostles looked from their boat) to see that Jesus is there and he will calm the storm.

These are familiar stories; they are familiar because they are important; they are so important that all four of the gospels tell them. They are important because remind us, they assure us of God’s overflowing, abundant love and grace of which there is always more than enough.

Let us pray:

O God, your Son Jesus Christ fed the crowds out of his copious compassion; he stilled the stormy seas with his plentiful power; and he prepared his disciples for the coming of the Spirit through the abundant grace of his teaching: Make our hearts and minds, and especially Tatum’s heart and mind, ready to receive the overflowing blessings of your Holy Spirit, that we may be filled with your grace and strengthened by your Presence; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Neither Hot Nor Cold: A Sermon of Ecclesial Disappointment – 12 July 2015

July 11, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10B, Track 1, RCL), July 12, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are 2 Samuel 6:1-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; and Mark 6:14-29. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page. Note: The Revised Common Lectionary provides that the first lesson is 2 Samuel 6:1-5,12b-19.)

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Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters [New York: Harper & Row, 1982], pp. 40-41.)

I wonder if Ms. Dillard might not have had in mind the episode recounted today in our reading from the Second Book of Samuel. Confession: The Lectionary edited out the verse that describe the death of the priest Uzzah and the circumstances and causes thereof. I put them back in because they explain the sudden reluctance of David to take the Ark of the Covenant into his city, and his three-month delay in doing so. With Uzzah’s death David, as the writer of Second Samuel tells us, got a notion of “what sort of power we so blithely invoke,” of what sort of power he was bringing into Jerusalem, and it frightened him.

After all, what had Uzzah done. Nothing disrespectful of God, that’s for sure. If anything, he saved the Almighty the indignity of the Ark tumbling out of the ox cart and falling to the ground. All he had done was reach out to steady it when it was jostled by the oxen; he was doing only what comes naturally when one is moving a large, heavy object over rough terrain. And for this, for touching the Ark with the most innocent and benign of intentions, he was stricken dead. At first, David was angry with God about that; apparently he cursed up a storm because the place gets renamed “Perez-uzzah” which means “outburst about Uzzah” – could be God’s outburst that killed Uzzah, more likely it’s David’s outburst of anger after Uzzah is dead. Once he vents, however, David becomes frightened; we are told, “David was afraid of the Lord that day; he said, ‘How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?'” So, he leaves the Ark right there in the care of a foreigner, Obed-edom the Gittite, for three months. David has realized that he may need a crash helmet when dealing with the power of the Almighty.

And then there’s John the Baptizer. John knew all too well the Power he’s been dealing with; he’d talked directly with God (“The one who sent me to baptize with water said to me,” he claimed – Jn 1:33) and John spoke to earthly power on God’s behalf. He said to the crowds that came out to him, to the scribes and the Pharisee, the priests and the Sadducees, to all who came to him at the River Jordan, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor;’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Lk 3:7-9) John knew there was danger, terrible danger when one becomes involved with Almighty God. It was the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews who said it, but John knew well, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb 10:31) Because even if the power of God doesn’t kill you, the ministry demanded of you by God may well put you in harm’s way . . . and that, in the end, is what happened with John.

Speaking truth to power, John publicly denounced Herod Antipas for his sinful, adulterous relationship with his half-brother Philip’s wife Herodias, who also happened to be Antipas’s niece. For that public reproof, John was arrested and held for a time in prison; the Gospel lesson tells us that Herod protected John after his arrest because he feared him! – Even Herod Antipas felt the danger of involvement with the Almighty at second hand, the danger of dealing with God’s anointed prophet. But in the end, tricked by his own foolish behavior, Antipas must order John beheaded; for John the ax is laid not at the foot of the tree, but at the base of his neck. As Ms. Dillard might put it, “The waking god drew John out to where he could never return.”

We, the Episcopal Church, take this dangerous prophetic step out to where we might never return every time we make a statement or take an action and proclaim to the world, “We do this because we are called to do so by our Lord and our God.” I do it every time I step into this pulpit and dare to preach a sermon. You do it every time you take a stand on an issue or behave in a particular way and say, “I do this because I am a Christian, because I am an Episcopalian.” Our church does it when it meets in deliberative council, in vestry meetings, in diocesan conventions, or as we have just done in our triennial General Convention; we do it when we issue public statements on important issues of the day.

We feel like we have done it now in the aftermath of our 78th General Convention because, for example, we have taken the bold step of opening our marriage liturgies to same-sex couples. However, I would suggest to you that that was not a very prophetic step after all. We had already, several years ago, declared that gay and lesbian persons are beloved children of God entitled to the full ministry of and to full inclusion within the body of the faithful. We underscored that a dozen years ago when we approved the election and consecration of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. When we declared last week that same-sex couples could marry in the church, we were only continuing down a path we had already been walking, a path which (frankly) the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and the United States Supreme Court had just walked before us. It’s easy to be prophetic when others have already done so before you.

We feel like we have taken a prophetic stance because 1,500 bishops, deputies, and other Episcopalians marched the streets of Salt Lake City to protest against gun violence and to call for rational handgun licensing laws and for background checks on all gun sales including gun show and private transactions. We feel like we have done so because, a few days after that protest march, the General Convention passed a resolution making that same call; but in all honesty it’s a call we have made before. We have been on record as a church in support of reasonable regulation of gun manufacture, sale, and ownership for nearly 40 years; we have passed resolution after resolution urging registration, licensing, and insuring of handguns, as well as the banning of civilian sale and ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons since at least 1976. And we have not been alone among the churches in doing so. It’s not particularly original or prophetic to do and say again that which you and many others have done and said many, many times.

We feel like we have been prophetic in the House of Bishop’s election of Michael B. Curry of North Carolina to be our Presiding Bishop, our first black Presiding Bishop! But, folks, we have had black bishops in the Episcopal Church for over 140 years since the consecration of James Theodore Holly to be Bishop of Haiti in 1874. Neither God nor the world would be out of line in telling us that Bishop Curry’s election is not particularly prophetic and asking, “What took you so long?”

It’s not that these are not important and vital issues; they are. It’s not that our voice, added to so many others, is not worth raising about these issues; it is. It’s not that we should not be taking a stand on these matters; we should. We should and we have and we will continue to do so, but we are not being particularly prophetic when we do so. We are merely doing what comes naturally moving a large, heavy institution over the rough terrain of difficult issues. Like Uzzah steadying the Ark of the Covenant, it may be dangerous, but it’s not particularly prophetic.

We did have the opportunity to be prophetic, but we failed to take it. A resolution numbered D016 was offered for our consideration. It would have called upon our church and our leadership to

work earnestly and with haste to avoid profiting from the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and [to] seek to align itself with, and learn from, the good work of our Ecumenical and Anglican Communion partners, who have worked for decades in support of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers and others oppressed by occupation. (Resolution D016 as originally proposed)

It did not call for divestment from Israeli investments. It did not call for the boycotting of products made in the occupied territories. It did not call for sanctions against Israel. It did not call upon us to join the “BDS” movement as it is called – Boycott, Divest, Sanction. It was opposed on the grounds that it did, but in truth it did not.

We could have taken such action; we could have joined BDS although the resolution did not call for it. Alternatively, we could have proclaimed that, instead of doing that, we would work through positive investment and constructive engagement with both Israelis and Palestinians to foster reconciliation and peace. Or, we could simply have done as the resolution sought and undertaken a time of intentional study and discernment as to what our ministry as a church with important ties to the Holy Land might be, how we might try to encourage healing in that broken, wounded, and bleeding place. We could have done any of those things, any of those prophetic things. But do you know what we did?

We ducked the issue. We played it safe. We closed off debate. We failed to act. The House of Bishops rejected Resolution D016 so the House of Deputies never had a chance to consider it and, thus, we did nothing. – We should know better! As Paul wrote to the Ephesians,

With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Eph 1:8b-10)

We know that! We have declared as much in our catechism that “the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ,” and that “the Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.” (BCP 1979, page 305) We are a church for whom the ministry of reconciliation should come as naturally as reaching out to steady the cargo on an ox cart came to Uzzah. And yet with respect to our brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we did nothing…. We are a church who believes itself to speak like John the Baptizer prophetically to power on any number of subjects. And yet with respect to our brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we said nothing….

As a church meeting in deliberative assembly and praying for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we did nothing, we said nothing to promote justice, peace, love, and reconciliation in the Holy Land.

When John of Patmos had the vision recorded in the Book of Revelation, he was instructed to deliver a message from Jesus to the church in Laodicea. He was told to write these words to them: “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16) With regard to those living in the land where Jesus was born, where he lived and taught and loved and died, where he rose from the dead for our salvation . . . with regard to our brothers and sisters living in that land, our General Convention action (or, really, lack of action) was lukewarm; it was tepid; neither hot nor cold, worthy only to be spit out.

I love my church. I love what we do in our synods and our conventions. I love that we take positions, sometimes unpopular positions. I love that we take risks with power, the kind of risks that Uzzah took, the kind of risks that John the Baptizer took, the kind of risks for which we should be wearing crash helmets and life preservers and holding signal flares. But we failed to do that with regard to the occupation of Palestine and the strife existing between our Israeli and Palestinian brothers and sisters, and I am disappointed in the church I love. As the Rev. Winnie Varghese, a priest from New York who was one of the supporters of Resolution D016, wrote after its rejection: “I will never understand why we would not listen … to our brothers and sisters truly on the ground, the lay and ordained Palestinian Christians who have been displaced; who work for justice; and who ask for our help.” (Huffington Post, July 10, 2015) Nor will I. I will never understand.

Let us pray:

Lord our God, the earth is yours and all that is in it, so we lift up our heads, we open our gates, and we give you glory; the Psalmist asked who could stand in your holy places and answered his own question saying, “Those who have clean hands and a pure heart;” give us clean hands and pure hearts that we may follow through on the promises made at our baptism, promises to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” to “respect the dignity of every human being,” and to “work for justice and peace;” give us grace that we, as the Episcopal Church, may do so in solidarity with those who have dedicated their lives to justice for Palestinians and security for Israel, that we may be either hot or cold, never tepid or lukewarm; give us the strength to do what should come naturally and to speak prophetically in your name; all this we ask through your Son, our Savior, the King of Glory. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Our Chronic Illness, Our Besetting Sin (Eve of St. Alban, 21 June 2015)

June 20, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Eve of the Feast of St. Alban, First Martyr of Britain, June 21, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 31:1-5; 1 John 3:13-16; and Matthew 10:34-42.)

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Heavenly Father,
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Amen.

We are moving away from the Lectionary this morning and are using the propers for the commemoration of St. Alban, First Martyr of Britain, whose feast is tomorrow. I hope you’ll forgive me this personal conceit: we are doing so because twenty-four years ago today, on the Eve of St. Alban’s Day 1991, the Right Rev. Stewart Zabriskie, bishop of the Diocese of Nevada and about 30 presbyters of that diocese laid their hands upon me and ordained me a priest in Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

In our gospel lesson today, Jesus promises that one result of following him will be conflict with one’s family: “I have come to set a man against his father,” he said. Those are hard words to hear spoken on Father’s Day (which today also happens to be), but they are words that speak to me because of my family history. I have spoken to you often of my father, York Funston, and of my grandfather, Charles Edgar Funston (known to everyone as “CE”), but you may not have notice that I have never involving both of them. That is because during the time they were both alive during my lifetime they never spoke to one another; I can recall no time when they were ever together.

When my father came home from the Second World War and finished his degree at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, my father and mother moved to southern Nevada. That was in 1947. From that point until he died in 1958, my father never again saw nor did he ever speak to his father. The reason was a very simple one, but one which is deeply imbedded in the culture of this country and is the besetting sin of our society; I believe it may be a chronic disease that is killing country.

My father had been an enlisted man in the US Army artillery. While serving in the European theater, he had become friends with several black service men. That was, I believe, a transformative experience for him. I don’t know what may have happened between my father and grandfather to sever their relationship, but I do know this . . . my grandfather was a racist: until he died in 1977, I never heard my grandfather ever refer to an African American by any term other than “n***er.” That was an attitude and a word my father simply could not and would not tolerate.

When my grandfather died in 1977 it was because he had suffered a stroke. My grandfather suffered that stroke because he, like every other member of our family (myself included) had a chronic disease, high blood pressure. Being a stubborn man, he did nothing about it and eventually that stubbornness caught up with him. He suffered a stroke, became bed ridden, and eventually contracted pneumonia which killed him. His chronic disease weakened him; the opportunistic, acute illness killed him.

The accurate medical term for high blood pressure is “hypertension,” a word which was originally coined in the mid-19th Century to mean, “excessive or extreme emotional tenseness.” That’s what racism is, a hypertension, a chronic disease which is killing American society.

Cartoon from "The New Yorker Magazine" by Christopher Weyant On Wednesday night, America witnessed what happens when that chronic illness is augmented by the acute and opportunistic disease of easy unfettered unregulated unrestricted access to firearms. A 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof with a history of racism planned and carried out the murders of nine black men and women worshiping in their church, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; four of those who died were pastors of the church, including the senior pastor Clementa Pinckney, who was also a South Carolina state senator.

Researcher Timothy Tyson of Duke University has written recently about the killer . . .

[A photograph of Roof shows] a young man wear[ing] Rhodesian and apartheid-era [South African] flags on his jacket. Both countries never existed during his lifetime. Both flags are commonly worn as in-group insignia among politically organized white supremacists.

Dylann Roof told his victims that he came to kill black people because they are “raping our women and taking over our country.” Both claims date back to the white supremacy campaigns of the 1890s . . . . These ideas did not just percolate up inside of his mind; this is not ordinary “bias” or suspicion of people different from him; someone had to teach him these elaborated historical traditions. * * * He gunned down nine people at a historic black church, historic enough that he might well have selected it intentionally; Emanuel AME has been at the center of the civil rights struggle since the early 19th century. * * *

Roof said he wanted to start a race war; this is a common theme among white supremacists and depicted in their favorite book, The Turner Diaries, which also helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma City bombings. He is part of something, . . . something dangerous. America in general and South Carolina in particular are generously sprinkled with white supremacist groups. (From a Facebook Note)

Wednesday’s tragedy, unfortunately, is only one of several recent incidents throughout the nation which have made it clear that racism is a chronic disease that is killing us. It may even be a part of our nation’s DNA. The evil institution of white Europeans owning black African slaves was allowed by our Founders to continue here when our nation was created. Some recognized the iniquity of doing so. Abigail Adams, wife of the first Vice President, once wrote in a letter to her husband, “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

Many people do not realize that the U.S. Constitution as originally adopted provide that, in determining the proportional representation in House of Representatives, blacks were to be counted as lesser than whites. Specifically, it provided that the number of representatives to which a state was entitled would be “determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” (Art. I, Sec. 2, Cl. 3)

Interestingly, it was not the southern slave owners who inserted that provision, it was northerners. Elbridge Gerry, a deputy from Massachusetts who later became the fifth Vice President of the United States, objected to counting blacks at all arguing, “Why should the blacks, who were property in the South, be in the rule of representation more than the cattle and horses of the North?” I think we can all agree that valuing African Americans as nothing more than cattle or horses, or even as 3/5 of a free white person, is simply wrong; there is no other word for it – it’s wrong! Racism is a chronic disease from which America seems always to have suffered; it is our nation’s original and besetting sin.

Although it is historically wrong to assert that the United States was founded to be a “Christian nation,” it is not inaccurate to recognize that most of the Founders were members of the Christian church; many, in fact, were Episcopalians. That Christians should have valued other human beings, black human beings, many of whom were themselves converts to the Christian faith, as of lesser value, as of no more value “than cattle and horses” boggles the mind. It flies in the face of, it is a direct violation of Christ’s new commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 15:12) As the portion of the First Letter of John read this morning reminds us, “Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them.” (1 Jn 3:14b-15) Racism, the hatred of a brother or sister human being simply because their skin color differs from one’s own, is deadly; it is the chronic hypertension that is weakening and killing our country.

When a chronic illness weakens the body, an acute opportunistic infection can bring death. My grandfather’s weakened condition, bedridden from a hypertension-induced stroke, made him a prime target for deadly pneumonia. Weakened by the hypertension of racism, our country is a prime target for the deadly destruction that the acute problem of easy unfettered unregulated unrestricted access to guns can wreak. Now, I know, some will answer me that the right to bear arms is a constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment and I really do not want to get into that argument today; let me just leave the issue with one thought – if the Constitution could be wrong today about the 3/5 valuation of black Americans, could it not also be wrong today about firearm access and ownership?

May I shift gears here and tell you how I spent my day on Friday?

I started the day earlier than usual getting to the office at 7:30 a.m. because I had a 9 o’clock doctor’s appointment and I wanted to be sure the rooms where, later, bicycles would be stowed overnight were ready for that. So I got here, and moved tables and chairs out of the way. Then I worked on the Prayers of the People for today’s services until I had to go my physician’s office. That didn’t take very long, so on the way back to the church I made a pastoral call. When I got back here, I met with a parishioner about pre-planning her and her spouse’s funerals, then I put together some materials for the clergy who will be substituting here while I am at General Convention. By then it was about 1 p.m. so I took the dog home (she’d been with me through all that I just outlined), grabbed a quick bite to eat, and got back here by 2 p.m. to begin receiving the 28 bicycle riders we would be hosting. From then until we sat down to dinner with them I ran several errands getting riders to their lodgings and picking up a few things for the kitchen crew, then I helped set the tables for dinner. After welcoming our guests to supper, I sat down at a table with the bishop expecting to enjoy dinner, only to be informed that a toilet in the ladies’ room was overflowing. I am grateful to my lady-wife, who got a plunger and went to work, but unfortunately things only went from bad to worse. Eventually, I found myself standing in a puddle of rather unsavory water on the phone with our plumber and then with Roto-Rooter arranging a late night service call. So after we broke down the tables and set up the chairs for Free Farmers’ Market, I sat here while the Roto-Rooter man did his job. Eventually he cleared what turned out to be a 75-ft long plug of God-knows-what, and he and I left at around 10:30 pm.

Days like that are not typical for clergy, but they are not uncommon, either. Usually after such a day, I go home tired but feeling pretty good about the life to which I’ve been called and which I’ve lived for 24 years of ordained ministry. The priesthood is a privilege and, no matter how tiring a day may be, it is usually a joyful mystery.

Friday, however, on the way home, I started crying. I got to thinking about Clementa Pinckney who, though very much younger than I, had been a pastor for just about the same amount of time, 23 years in his case. And I got to thinking about his fellow pastors DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Daniel Simmons Sr., and Sharonda Singleton, all of them gunned-down with five of their parishioners at Emanuel AME Church by a hate-filled, 21-year-old, white supremacist. I got to thinking about how I’m sure they had had similar days of ministry, and about how terrible it is that they are not still alive to do those things for their congregation, to visit their parishioners, to help plan funerals and weddings, to bear the frustrations of coordinating activities with bishops, to be burdened by the annoyance of clogged sewer pipes, and to endure the exhaustion of 16-hour days. And the only reason they are not . . . is racism. I believe that, as the Book of Wisdom reminds us, they “are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them” and that their witness “will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble” (3:1,7), but we would all so much prefer that Wednesday had never happened.

On the anniversary of my ordination, I would so much prefer to preach about anything else, but the reality of racism cannot be denied, the sin of racism must be confronted. I don’t know if my father ever confronted my grandfather about his racism. I know that I never did and by failing to do so I am as guilty as him. Racism is our nation’s besetting sin and we must repent; it our society’s chronic illness and we must cure it, because it is killing our country.

Let us pray:

Good and gracious God, you created every human being in your image and likeness; we are weary, we are tired, we are sick of the besetting sin of racism that infects our country: we repent of the ways we have participated in or benefited from racial injustice; we ask forgiveness for the ways our nation continues to foster an environment of separation; break through the strongholds of superiority, destroy the dividing lines of racial separation, cure us of the toxic disease of prejudice, forgive us; make your church a model of unity, a beacon of reconciliation, and keep us on the path that leads to your light; through your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Not “The Will of God” – From the Daily Office Lectionary

June 18, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Thursday in the week of Proper 6B (Pentecost 3, 2015)
1 Samuel 2
33 The only one of you whom I shall not cut off from my altar shall be spared to weep out his eyes and grieve his heart; all the members of your household shall die by the sword.

This is part of a speech delivered to Samuel by a “man of God’ speaking on God’s behalf. I am often dismayed by the violence described in Scripture as the will of God. Even when God incarnate in Jesus Christ refused to engage in violence in self-defense and allows himself to be arrested, scourged, and crucified, we are later told by the church as it develops its theology that this, too, was the will of God, the sacrifice of the Son to satisfy (or at least with the foreknowledge and plan of) the Father. This is one reason I no longer use or encourage the use of the words, “The word of the Lord,” at the end of liturgical readings of Scripture. The Bible is not “the word of the Lord,” nor are the acts of violence it records the “will of God.” The Bible contains the words of human beings trying to make sense of their lives and history, and one way humans have done that is to distance themselves from their own savagery by blaming it on God. ~ I awoke this morning to news that a white suspect shot several people in a predominantly black Christian church in Charleston, SC, last night. According to the Charleston Post and Dispatch, a young white man joined a Bible study group at Emanuel AME Church for a short while, then stood, drew a weapon, and killed the pastor and perhaps nine others. He left one woman alive, telling her that “he was letting her live so she could tell everyone else what happened.” I couldn’t help but think of her when I read this verse. ~ The Charleston police chief is quoted by the paper as saying, “It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church when people are having a prayer meeting and take their lives.” Really? I thought as I read that. Given the blatant racism that has re-emerged in our country since the election of the current president? Given easy access to firearms and the rush to “open carry” laws in conservative states (including, I believe, South Carolina)? Given the witness of Scripture and human history to bloody violence throughout every age? Violence, racial violence and mass murder unfathomable? Frankly, I find the police chief’s comment unfathomable. ~ In any event, the last thing I hope to hear (but I’m sure I will hear) is someone referring to last night’s horrible events being somehow “the will of God.” That is the “witness of Scripture,” but it is a wrong understanding of Scripture. The will of God is never death; the tellers of ancient stories in the Bible may have thought it was, but it wasn’t. When God speaks for Godself, through the prophets and incarnate in Jesus, God makes that clear: “[God] will swallow up death forever” and “will wipe away the tears from all faces” (Is 25:8) and “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (Jn 10:10b) ~ These deaths are not the “will of God;” they are the will of one misguided man in a misguided culture. This is not a divine tragedy; it is a human one. May the dead rest in peace and rise in glory, and may those left behind be comforted.

Take It From the Top – Sermon for Trinity Sunday, 31 May 2015

May 30, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Isaiah 6:1-8; Canticle 13 (Song of the Three Young Men, 29-34); Romans 8:12-17; and John 3:1-17. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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holy_trinity_symbol

In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us and within.

Priest and poet Malcolm Guite’s A Sonnet on the Trinity tries to express the rhythm of a dance as a way appreciating the essence of the Holy Trinity when, on this day of the Christian year, we especially celebrate. This day, the first Sunday after the Feast of Pentecost, we set aside to contemplate the mystery of God as one-in-three and three-in-one, this is the Feast of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.

You and I have all heard many Trinity Sunday sermons filled with similes, metaphors, and analogies. We are all familiar with St. Patrick and his shamrock, with St. Augustine with his talk of Lover, Beloved and Love, with modern gender-neutral liturgies and their nearly Modalist constructions of Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. We’ve all heard about candle flames and light and heat, about water which we know as liquid, solid and vapor, about preachers who are at one and the same time fathers, sons and husbands. Mention a trinitarian metaphor and we will all raise our hands and say, “Yep, been there, heard that one.”

And, yet . . . as familiar as we may be with all of that . . . we (as individuals) still struggle to grasp what we (as the church) mean when we (as a congregation) weekly profess our faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, insisting that there are not three gods, but one God. The reason we struggle is that this doctrine, this theological perception, this self-revelation of God is a mystery in the truest sense of that word.

What we say in our creeds and in our theologies is all “code language” for this mystery. It is all an attempt to render into human words what God’s Word seems to tell us. The Trinity is not a reality that we can claim to grab hold of and test and verify and know. It is a truth that we conceive in faith, that we perceive by revelation, that we receive through the Spirit as a gift from God. It’s not spelled out in the Bible; indeed, the words “trinity” or “three-in-one” or even anything like them do not appear in Scripture. The baptismal formula “in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” is found at the end of Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 28:19), but nearly every bible scholar agrees that those words were added to Matthew’s story and that our risen and (at that point) ascending Lord never said any such thing. No, at best we find hints of the Trinity in Abraham and Sarah being visited at the oaks of Mamre by God in the guise of three angels, in Isaiah’s call to prophecy and his vision of the heavenly throne room with the seraphim repeatedly singing the three-fold sanctus of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” in Jesus’ words to Nicodemus (part of which we heard this morning) and in his words to Philip (also in John’s Gospel) “If you know me, you will know my Father also” and “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:7,9).

The Trinity is a mystery, as I said, in the truest sense of that word. Our word mystery is derived from the Greek word mysterion meaning “something hidden or secret.” Even before Christianity began, the term mysterion was used to describe an experience of divine activity in human affairs. In Christian theology, we use the word mystery to describe something that is inaccessible to the human mind through mere observation or study, something which is an object of faith because it is revealed. We cannot know that God is Trinity by any human faculty, by scientific study, or by human reason; we have faith that God is Trinity because that is revealed to us in our study of the Holy Scriptures and in our personal experiences of God.

In their conversation, Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be “born from above.” In the Greek used by John to tell the story, Jesus uses the word anothen. An alternative meaning of this word is “again,” which is how Nicodemus understands it, that one must be “born again.” What Jesus is talking about is revelation; Nicodemus misunderstands because he is thinking about mere human existence. The word anothen is used only a few other times in the New Testament and one of those is later in John’s Gospel when Christ is crucified: the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ tunic not wanting to tear it because “the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece [ek ton anothen] from the top.” (Jn 19:23) This, I think, is a clue to Jesus’ meaning.

How many of you play (or, at least, took instruction on) a musical instrument? Remember when you were practicing, perhaps with your teacher or in a band or an orchestra, and the leader would say, “Let’s take it from the top”? So you’d play it again. And then you’d “take it from the top” and play it again . . . and again . . . and again . . . and eventually it would happen; you’d get it right. Why or how that would happen was a mystery. I remember playing the clarinet in a high school dance band and I would swear that on what seemed the seventy-eleventh time through a piece I wasn’t playing it any differently, but somehow it was different. It clicked! It sounded right! That’s what Jesus is talking about: being “born from above” is “taking if from the top” until it clicks.

Faith is a matter of practice. We practice our faith again and again; we take it “from the top;” we are “born from above;” something clicks; we get something right, not because of our human faculty or scientific study or human reason, but because of the gift of God. That’s revelation. That’s life in the Trinity, the community of God the Three-in-One and One-in-Three into which we are constantly invited.

“The Trinity is a community of divine love and mutual self-giving. Each member not only loves the other, but acts for the well-being of the other in an effective manner.” (Peter C. Phan, The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, Cambridge University Press, 2011, page 384) If we would enter into this divine communion, we will find ourselves expected to engage in social and ethical practices reflecting God’s love and mutuality, both in the church and in the wider world. The mystery which we profess in our Creeds only means anything when it takes concrete expression in a Christian moral life of love and mutuality. The trinitarian connection between Christian worship and Christian life is particularly expressed by our being in the world as living representatives of God, acting in ways that befit the divine character. One cannot profess love of neighbor in church, then go into the world and cheat one’s neighbor in business; one cannot hear Jesus command us in church to feed the hungry or clothe the naked, then go into the world and shred the social safety net; one cannot pray “Thy will be done” in church, then go into the world and oppress those who come to our country from foreign lands for it is clearly the will of God that “the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you.” (Lev 19:34) Few, if any of us, are capable of attaining the ethical fullness of our trinitarian confession of faith, yet the more closely we enter into the trinitarian life of communion with God through Christ in the Spirit, the more our lives can be (and will be) expected to reflect the divine attributes of love and mutuality.

That is, in all honesty, a disconcerting revelation! Life in and with the community of the Trinity remains an ethical reality that lies beyond full human realization. It is disconcerting and disorienting; it destabilizes our existence. We are most comfortable when our lives are centered upon ourselves, but the trinitarian faith revealed in Christ demands that we focus our lives in love on the well-being of others, and not simply of a single other, but of multiple others. Perhaps this is why God’s self-revelation is found in threeness.

Karoline Lewis, a professor at Luther Seminary, has pointed out that human beings are most comfortable with pairs, “easy dyads for conversation” she calls them, and with even numbers: even numbers, she says, secure a sense of order and predictability, of expectation and dependability. But, add another person “and it’s the odd man out.”

With three, she writes, we enter “a disquieting disequilibrium. A lack of control. When you have three, the dynamics change. You are forced to share a conversation, to be attentive to another besides the one right in front of you. You have to listen to more than one person. Perhaps at the same time. You have to adjudicate feelings and responses and reactions that have doubled. That’s the problem and promise of three.” Perhaps, she suggests, “God likes disequilibrium. Maybe God thinks that’s what relationships are all about. Maybe God embraces and invites imbalance. Maybe this is essential to God’s character.” (Working Preacher: The Necessity of Three)

I think that this is what Malcolm Guite means when, in his sonnet, he writes that

[God] calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone.

The trinitarian faith is not about how shamrocks or candles or ice cubes reflect the nature of God; the trinitarian faith is about how we reflect the nature of God! This faith which calls us to love and mutuality demands that we respond to the darkness of hunger, to the chaos of homelessness, to the disequilibrium of loneliness, to the imbalance of alienation; this faith which calls us to love and mutuality demands that we “take it from the top” again and again practicing and practicing over and over, improvising until (by the grace of God) we click, until (by the grace of God) we get it right, until (by the grace of God) we truly reflect the divine attributes and live as befits representatives of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

May We Be One: Sermon for Sunday after the Ascension (Easter 7) – 17 May 2015

May 16, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Sunday after the Ascension, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 17, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Acts 1:15-17,21-26; Psalm 1; 1 John 5:9-13; and John 17:6-19. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Unity in the Community “That they may be one, as we are one.” (Jn 17:11)

Obviously, there is quite a bit more to the “Farewell Discourse” or “High Priestly Prayer” of which today’s gospel lesson is a part, but in the end (I believe) the central petition of Jesus’ last prayer is one for the unity of the church and for God the Father’s protection of that unity.

Perhaps 60 or 70 years had passed since Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension when the author or authors of the Fourth Gospel put the finishing touches on this manuscript. Bible historians believe this gospel was written in Roman Asia (what is now Turkey), perhaps in the city of Ephesus, almost 1,100 miles from Jerusalem by land (over 600 miles by sea), sometime between 90 and 100 A.D.

They wrote not from personal experience and witness, but from oral tradition crossing decades of theological development and a great distance of cultural difference. There were many things that they had heard that Jesus had said, and a great deal that they needed Jesus to have said, and when they reached almost the end of their story, they had him say a lot of it in this Farewell Discourse.

Guided (we believe) by the Holy Spirit, the authors of this gospel portray Jesus offering this lengthy prayer to the Father, a prayer which might also be thought of as his last theological instruction to his inner circle, those who came to be called “The Apostles.” At its core is his wish that they stick together, “that they may be one, as we are one,” and that they continue his ministry by teaching the Truth he had sought to teach them.

The Episcopal Church takes this call to unity and ministry seriously, understanding it as a call not to uniformity but to harmony. In 2009, the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church declared that a “Biblically-based respect for the diversity of understandings that authentic, truth-seeking human beings have is essential for communal reasoning and faithful living. The revelation of God in Christ calls us therefore to participate in our relationship with God and one another in a manner that is at once faithful, loving, lively, and reasonable. This understanding continues to call Episcopalians to find our way as one body through various conflicts. It is not a unity of opinion or a sameness of vision that holds us together. Rather, it is the belief that we are called to walk together in Jesus’ path of reconciliation not only through our love for the other, but also through our respect for the legitimacy of the reasoning of the other. Respect for reason empowers us to meet God’s unfolding world as active participants in the building of the Kingdom and to greet God’s diverse people with appropriate welcome and gracious hospitality.” (Interreligious Relation Statement – Final Text)

Last Sunday, fifteen members of our congregation, joined by two others from St. Patrick in Brunswick, knelt before Bishop William Persell and, in some manner, reaffirmed the covenant made at their baptism. One was already a confirmed Episcopalian; two were teenagers who’d grown up in this parish. The others came to us from a variety of backgrounds, some actively Christian in other traditions, some not. Whatever their background, however, those fifteen persons apparently found here at St. Paul’s Parish that “appropriate welcome and gracious hospitality,” that unity in ministry to which the High Priestly Prayer compels us.

In his prayer, Jesus refers to his disciples (all of them, not just the Apostles) as “those whom [the Father] gave me from the world.” (v. 6) Earlier during their dinner conversation, he had reminded his followers, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” (Jn 15:16a) We tend to think otherwise of our membership in this or any church; we like to believe that we are autonomous, that we are here by our own decision, and our confirmation service certainly encourages our thinking in that direction.

In that liturgy, the Bishop asks the candidates, “Do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ?” and they answer, “I do, and with God’s grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord.” (BCP 1979, page 415) We tend to focus on only the first two words of that response, “I do.” But Jesus’ words at the Last Supper compel us to surrender our autonomy and hear clearly the rest of the answer: “I do … with God’s grace ….”

“I do … with God’s grace ….”

Let’s consider the case of Matthias chosen as replacement Apostle in our reading from the Book of Acts. Peter, having heard Christ’s prayer that the unity of the church might be preserved, knew that Jesus’ plan of a leadership group of twelve followers had to be reconstituted; the unity for which Jesus had prayed had been broken and needed to be restored. “One of these [who have been with us from the beginning] must become a witness with us to [the Lord’s] resurrection.” (Acts 1:21) Peter was well aware that Jesus’ mission had been to restore Israel and that this inner circle was key to that mission; he probably recalled that Jesus had told them that they would “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Mt 19:28), something that could not happen if there were only eleven of them. To restore the embryonic church to its original unity, a replacement apostle was needed.

Two candidates meeting the community’s qualifications are put forward, Matthias and another named Justus, and Matthias is chosen through the casting of lots. It might seem that this is all just a game of chance, but that is not so. Consider what has happened here: the action is taken by the apostles as a group; before casting the lots, the group has studied the Scriptures, prayed together, and discussed what they were about to do. The decision was not that of the leadership only; it clearly was one concurred in by the entire congregation present (about one-hundred and twenty we are told). And one scholar has suggested that there may have been some sort of group affirmation after the lots were cast, as is implied by the words, “and he was added to the eleven apostles.” (v. 26)

The election of Matthias to serve as replacement for Judas gives us a paradigm for our own decision making. The first step, obviously, is the recognition that we are at a decision point: Judas is gone, something must be done. The second is recourse to Scripture. The early followers of Jesus had only the Hebrew Scriptures to which to turn; we have, in addition, the New Testament in which we are taught that there are two great commandments ~ Love God: Love your neighbor.

Every decision we make must honor these; there may be lesser rules within Holy Writ which provide guidance, but in the end, in making our decisions, we must follow these commandments above all else.

Once we have considered the guidance of Scripture, we must pray. My grandfather, the Methodist Sunday school teacher, taught me that the purpose of prayer is not to get what we want, but to make us into instruments for God to do what God wants: he was fond of saying that the Lord taught us to pray, “Thy will be done,” not “Thy will be changed.” The followers of Jesus in that upper room, faced with the monumental task of appointing a new apostle, prayed. So should we. This has been the church’s tradition from the very beginning.

Now, let’s be honest ~ the answer to prayer is often vague and often confusing. I know very few people who have ever received specific directions for their lives and, to be truthful, I view those who claim to have done so with great suspicion. Most of us will never know for certain which is the right choice; I suspect that even those in the upper room that day wondered, when all was said and done, whether Matthias was a better choice than Justus. But they chose, and we choose.

We do not do so blindly, however. As the confirmation response says, we choose “with God’s grace.” We read Scripture; we pray in accordance with church tradition; and we seek the guidance of others, reasoning together, testing our thoughts and our beliefs about prayer’s answers against those of trusted companions. Then we decide. Perhaps the choice to be made is clear; perhaps it is not so clear, but at least one choice seems better or wiser than others; or perhaps, like that first congregation, we come to a point where there are two or more choices that seem equally good and the best we can do is flip a coin and trust God. However we make the decision, we say, “I do … with the grace of God” and trust that that grace will sustain us in the decisions we make.

Sometimes, perhaps most times, our decisions will be wrong; they will be sinful. But Martin Luther once advised his friend Philipp Melanchthon, “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.” (Letter 99, Paragraph 13) Having studied Scripture, having prayed, having sought the counsel of others, we make our decisions boldly, trusting in the grace of God.

In our individual choices, we may not (indeed, we will not) reach the same decisions, but valuing this process of decision-making we are able to respect our differences of opinion, belief, practice, and action. In our corporate decision-making, by this process, we are able to reach consensus all can accept, as the disciples did in numbering Matthias one of the Twelve. In the end, “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28), even our wrong choices and bad decisions.

Every ten years or so the bishops of the Anglican Communion, including the bishops of the Episcopal Church, gather with the Archbishop of Canterbury in what is called “The Lambeth Conference.” In 1930, Archbishop William Temple preached at the opening of the seventh Lambeth Conference, assuring his colleagues:

While we deliberate, God reigns;
When we decide wisely, God reigns;
When we decide foolishly, God reigns;
When we serve God in humble loyalty, God reigns;
When we serve God self-assertively, God reigns;
When we rebel and seek to withhold our service, God reigns —
the Alpha and the Omega, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

We decide however we decide . . . but Almighty God will always reign!

I do not know why each of those seventeen people last week knelt before the bishop and affirmed their commitment to Christ in the context of the Anglican tradition and in the community of the Episcopal Church. I know why I did (lo, those many years ago): because I found in the Episcopal Church not a uniformity of belief and practice, not a church which claims to know (and thus to dictate) how all of life’s choices and decisions are to be made, but rather a unity of mission, a community of harmony, a church which offers “appropriate welcome and gracious hospitality,” where Christians are encouraged to explore and make life’s decisions in the same way the embryonic Christian community elected Matthias: through reliance on Scripture, prayerful tradition, and reasoned reflection. Perhaps that is also why our newest confirmed members have chosen to join us.

Or, rather, why Jesus chose them, why the Father has given them to Jesus in the context of this community, why we welcome them and join with Christ praying for them and for ourselves as he prayed for his first followers: “May we be one, as he and the Father are one.” Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Category: John (Page 10 of 24)

Baseball and a Father’s Death: A Funeral Homily, 18 November 2015

Caring vs Rules: A Sermon for Proper 27B, Pentecost 24 (8 Nov 2015)

Fully Human: A Baptismal Sermon for All Saints Day, November 1, 2015

The Armor of God: Sermon for Proper 16B (Pentecost 13, 23 August 2015)

Overflowing Abundance: Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B, 26 July 2015)

Neither Hot Nor Cold: A Sermon of Ecclesial Disappointment – 12 July 2015

Our Chronic Illness, Our Besetting Sin (Eve of St. Alban, 21 June 2015)

Not “The Will of God” – From the Daily Office Lectionary

Take It From the Top – Sermon for Trinity Sunday, 31 May 2015

May We Be One: Sermon for Sunday after the Ascension (Easter 7) – 17 May 2015

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