Category: Psalms (Page 23 of 41)

Thomas the Realist: Sermon for Easter 2 – 12 April 2015

April 11, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 12, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; and John 20:19-31. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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I assume that you are all familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mural of The Last Supper in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Nearly all of us have seen reproductions of it; it is said to be one of the most reproduced (and most parodied or satirized) paintings in human history. I have been privileged to see it in person twice in my life: once when I was a 16-year-old student studying in Florence and again in the summer of 2000 when I chaperoned the Kansas City Youth Symphony on a concert tour of northern Italy.

Each time I have looked at that painting, either the original or reproductions, I have found myself drawn more to da Vinci’s depiction of the disciples than to his Jesus. We know from Leonardo’s notebooks who each of the figures is meant to be. Thomas, who figures prominently in today’s Gospel lesson, figures prominently in the painting, as well. He is the first figure on Jesus’ left, right next to Jesus, looking intently at Jesus (we see him only in profile) with his right index finger pointing in Jesus’ face!

Has anyone ever done that to you? Gotten in your face making a point, raising their finger in emphasis? [Gesturing with index finger pointed upward] You know that this is a serious person. They know the way the world is; they have a very definite view of reality; and they are intent and making sure you see and understand their viewpoint. In The Last Supper, Thomas is only the first person on Jesus’ left because he leaning over St. James the Greater to make his point. He is a serious person with a definite view of reality.

That’s why I never call St. Thomas “Doubting Thomas.” This was not, in the upper room, and never in any other Gospel story, a man filled with doubt. This man is serious, sure of himself, and sure of his world. He is, in a word, a realist, a pragmatist, not a doubter.

Although Thomas is listed among the Twelve in all of the Gospels, we only encounter him as a speaker in John’s Gospel, and our first view of him is in the discussion leading up to the raising of Lazarus. We are told that the disciples (perhaps it was even Thomas) tried to dissuade Jesus from returning to Bethany in Judea, where Lazarus and his sisters lived, because they believed his life would be in danger: they remind Jesus that the Judeans “were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” (Jn 11:8) Jesus, however, will not be turned away, so Thomas says to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (Jn 11:16) This man is a serious realist.

He is so realistic, so down-to-earth, that he doesn’t understand metaphor. When, in his farewell discourse, Jesus says . . .

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.

. . . Thomas’s very pragmatic reply is, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (Jn 14:2-5)

So we should not be surprised, and we should not call Thomas a “doubter” when he demands proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Would any of us have been any different? And, let’s be honest, none of the other disciples were themselves any different. None of them believed it either. In his Gospel, Luke is very clear about that: “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told . . . the apostles. But [their] words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” (Lk 24:10-11; emphasis added)

I’m fairly certain that when Thomas said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe,” (Jn 20:25) he never really expected to have the chance. Such a thing simply wouldn’t fit into the real world he understood. He wasn’t a doubter; he was a realist.

So, I think, Thomas has gotten a bad rap because of this story and the story has gotten a resultingly bad interpretation. This is not a story about changing someone’s mind; it’s a story about changing someone’s life!

Confronted by the reality of the risen Jesus, Thomas the realist is confounded by what reality really is; his perception of reality and thus his life is what is changed. When Jesus rises to his challenge and invites him to “put your finger here and see my hands; reach out your hand and put it in my side,” (Jn 20:27) he is not belittling Thomas, but he is positing the possibility that Thomas’s reality was too little. Thomas’s vision of reality is too small, too limited; his life is too circumscribed. His worldview is defined too much by evidence and too little by trust. When Jesus calls him to believe, he is calling on him to accept the evidence of an intellectual proposition; he is inviting him to live into a whole new world of trust. This is not a story about changing someone’s mind; it’s a story about changing someone’s life!

In 1961, an English priest named J.B. Phillips published a short book entitled Your God Is Too Small. In it he challenged many prevailing notions of God, many of which we still have with us today. He called these the “unreal gods” and gave them names such as “the Resident Policeman,” the “Parental Hangover,” and the “Grand Old Man.” These unreal gods, he said, were the gods of what he called “the modern outlook, which regards the whole of life as a closed system.” That “modern outlook” is precisely the point of view that Thomas had before meeting the risen Jesus! It is a too-small vision of reality in which it is unthinkable that anything could happen outside of what Phillips called “the whole huge cause-and-effect process,” that view of the world supported by physical evidence of the sort Thomas initially wanted.

But Thomas’s life and point of view, and that of all the apostles, were radically altered by their experience of Christ’s resurrection. Phillips wrote:

We may . . . point out the great difference that has come to exist between the Christianity of the early days and that of today. To us it has become a performance, a keeping of rules, while to the men of those days it was, plainly, an invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. The difference is due surely to the fact that we are so very slow (even though we realize our impotence) to discard the closed-system idea. *** With the closed-system sooner or later you have to say: “You can’t change human nature.” Ideals fail for very spiritual poverty, and cynicism and despair take their place. But the fact of Christ’s coming is itself a shattering denial of the closed-system idea which dominates our thinking. And what else is His continual advice to “have faith in God” but a call to refuse, despite all appearances, to be taken in by the closed-system type of thinking? “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you”—what are these famous words but an invitation to reach out for the Permanent and the [truly] Real? (Your God Is Too Small, online PDF, The Common Life, pp. 88-89)

The story of Thomas is a story for all of us because we too easily fall into that closed-system worldview with its rules and its limitations. The story of Thomas reminds us of a grander vision. A vision defined not by limitation but by possibility, governed not by scarcity but by abundance, ruled not by remembered offenses but set free by forgiveness and reconciliation.

This is the vision shared by “the men of those days” (as Phillips called them), the members of the earliest Christian community described by Luke in the Book of Acts, that community of believers “who . . . were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” They had this shared vision because “the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” In other words, Mary Magdalene and the other women told their story of the empty tomb and of meeting Jesus in the garden; Cleopas and his companion told their story of meeting Jesus along the road to Emmaus; Thomas and the others told their story of meeting Jesus in the upper room.

The result was that peoples’ lives were changed. They lived in a way radically different than they had before, radically different from those around them: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

“From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” is not an economic model developed by Karl Marx; it is a religious model lived by the followers of Jesus Christ whose lives have been radically altered by their encounter with the Risen Lord. “Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when brethren live together in unity!” (Ps 133:1)

We live in different times. The total sharing of resources practice by Christ’s first followers no longer seems practical to us. We say to ourselves, “It just won’t work in our circumstances.” And we call ourselves realists and pragmatists. We hang onto that closed-system model and say [gesturing with index finger pointed upward]: “You can’t change human nature.”

But Jesus appeared to Thomas and said, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” (Jn 20:27) And proved that he can change human nature. Are we willing to let him change ours?

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

Enter Into Resurrection: Sermon for Easter Sunday 2015

April 4, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Resurrection Sunday, April 5, 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 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 and Mark 16:1-8. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Anastasis Icon at Chora

I love poetry. There is something about the way poets describe the world that simply cannot be found in other forms of literature. Poets encourage us not to understand the world, but to experience it; not to be concerned with facts, but to comprehend Truth.

Recently, I’ve been introduced to the world of a Guatemalan woman named Julia Esquivel. Esquivel lived through the Guatemalan civil war which lasted from the 1960s into the 1990s and during which hundreds of thousands of people died in terror sanctioned by the Guatemalan government. Many of these simply “disappeared;” they were the “Desaparecidos,” taken away from their families and never seen again. Many families in Guatemala will never know what happened to their loved one; few of those responsible for the tragedies have stood trial and most never will. Darkness and evil often seem to entomb goodness and light. Into this hopelessness Esquivel’s poetry speaks a word of hope:

There is something here within us
which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest,
which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside,
it is the silent, warm weeping
of Indian women without their husbands,
it is the sad gaze of the children
fixed there beyond memory,
in the very pupil of our eyes
which during sleep, though closed, keep watch
with each contraction of the heart
in every awakening . . . .

What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with resurrection!
Because at each nightfall,
though exhausted from the endless inventory
of killings since 1954,
yet we continue to love life,
and do not accept their death!

. . . . because in this marathon of Hope,
there are always others to relieve us
in bearing the courage necessary
to arrive at the goal which lies beyond death. . . .

Accompany us then on this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
You will then know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with resurrection!
To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep
to live while dying
and to already know oneself resurrected!
(From Threatened With Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan, September 1982)

Isn’t that wonderful? To “know how marvelous it is to live threatened by resurrection!”

We, unfortunately, live in a world in which other things are threatened — in which the sorts of things that happened in Guatemala (and in many Latin American countries) in the late 20th Century continue to happen in many places. Human cruelty to other humans often astounds us; human indifference to the suffering of other humans amazes us. We live in a world where laws are passed to make it easy for privileged majorities to discriminate against minorities, to abuse those who are unusual, to despoil the lives those who are different, to bury the poor in their poverty, to entomb the stranger in hopelessness, to start wars in distant countries, to trouble us so that “there is something here within us which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest, which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside.”

Today, we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the One who “exhausted from the endless inventory of killings . . . continue[d] to love life, and [did] not accept . . . death,” the One in whose death and resurrection we acknowledge that, yes indeed, we are “threatened with” resurrection, the One in whom we “already know [ourselves] resurrected.”

I mentioned in our Parish Newsletter for April that one of my favorite contemporary American poets is Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, and one my favorites among his poems is Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
(From The Mad Farmer Poems, January 2014)

Esquivel reminds us, in the face of a world of cruelty and death, that we are “threatened with resurrection” and that we should “already know [ourselves] resurrected;” Berry encourages us embrace that “threat” as a promise, to “expect the end of the world [and] laugh,” not merely to know ourselves resurrected, but to act upon that knowledge and “practice resurrection.”

That’s not easy to do in this world, no matter how simple Wendell Berry makes it sound. Sometimes the biggest barrier we face . . . is ourselves. The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai writes about this in his short verse The Place Where We Are Right:

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
(From The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai, Newly Revised and Expanded, October, 1996)

Every single human being on earth is convinced that he or she is right; that’s the nature of human beings and always has been. Judas was sure he was right; the chief priests and the scribes were sure that they were right; Pilate, the Imperial governor, was sure that he was right; the Roman soldiers were sure that they were right. We are always sure that we are right and, thus, we become the ones who pass the laws that make it easy to discriminate, to abuse, to despoil, to crucify, and to entomb beneath that hard and trampled place where we are right, where “there is something here within us which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest, which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside.”

Yesterday, in our meditations for Holy Saturday, I shared with those assembled here that my favorite artistic depiction of Christ’s Resurrection is an Orthodox icon in which Jesus stands within the arch of his tomb ready to come out. Beneath his feet are the gates of Hell, broken and fallen into the form of a cross, and o either side of him are two other tombs, broken open. From them Christ is pulling two figures, a man and a woman representing Adam and Eve. They seem almost reluctant to leave their graves, but Jesus grasps them by their wrists and seems to strain to lift them. Behind them are ranged the prophets and patriarchs of Israel, the righteous dead awaiting resurrection. This liberation of those who were already dead is known as the “Harrowing of Hell,” which is the title of poet Denise Levertov’s contemplation of this icon:

Down through the tomb’s inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food – fish and a honeycomb.
(From A Door in the Hive, October 1989)

Levertov, I think, is probably right when she suggests that the work of freeing those trapped in Hell was, for Christ, easier than “break[ing] through [the] earth and stone of the faithless world;” breaking through where privileged majorities to discriminate against minorities, abuse those who are unusual, despoil the lives those who are different, bury the poor in their poverty, entomb the stranger in hopelessness, and start wars in distant countries; breaking through the hard and trampled place where we insist that we are right . . . but break through he does for he is the love that digs up the world so that whispers are again heard where the ruined houses of our lives once stood.

Do you doubt that? Do you have difficulty feeling that promise of resurrection? Do you not feel threatened with resurrection in your own life? Do you not know yourself already resurrected?

At the vigil service each year, in place of a sermon of my own, I follow the ancient tradition of the Orthodox church and read for those present an oration or homily from one of the early doctors of the church; today I read selections from St. Gregory Nazianzan’s Second Easter Oration. In part of that great speech, St. Gregory offers advice on how one can enter personally into the Resurrection; if one cannot comprehend the whole of the story, focus on that part which most resonates with you. This is what he wrote:

If you are a Simon of Cyrene, take up the Cross and follow.
If you are crucified with Him as a robber, acknowledge God as a penitent robber.
If even He was numbered among the transgressors for you and your sin, do you become law-abiding for His sake. Worship Him Who was hanged for you, even if you yourself are hanging; make some gain even from your wickedness; purchase salvation by your death; enter with Jesus into Paradise, so that you may learn from what you have fallen.
Contemplate the glories that are there; let the murderer die outside with his blasphemies; and if you be a Joseph of Arimathæa, beg the Body from him that crucified Him, make your own that which cleanses the world.
If you be a Nicodemus, the worshiper of God by night, bury Him with spices.
If you be a Mary, or another Mary, or a Salome, or a Joanna, weep in the early morning. Be first to see the stone taken away, and perhaps you will see the Angels and Jesus Himself.
Say something; hear His Voice. If He say to you, Touch Me not, stand afar off; reverence the Word, but grieve not; for He knows those to whom He appears first.
Keep the feast of the Resurrection; come to the aid of Eve who was first to fall, of Her who first embraced the Christ, and made Him known to the disciples.
Be a Peter or a John; hasten to the Sepulchre, running together, running against one another, vying in the noble race. And even if you be beaten in speed, win the victory of zeal; not Looking into the tomb, but Going in.
And if, like a Thomas, you were left out when the disciples were assembled to whom Christ shows Himself, when you do see Him be not faithless; and if you do not believe, then believe those who tell you; and if you cannot believe them either, then have confidence in the print of the nails.
If He descended into Hell, descend with Him. Learn to know the mysteries of Christ there also, what is the providential purpose of the twofold descent, to save all [humankind] absolutely by His manifestation.
(From Oration 45, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 7, February 1996)

Become a part of the story in whatever way you can. If you cannot now comprehend the whole, grab hold of that fraction that resonates for you, but do not strive to understand, do not strive to be right, do not trample hard a place where flowers will never grow; instead, enter into the narrative, simply experience the truth, put your faith in two inches of spiritual humus where you may plant things you may not live to harvest. Remember that Christ is the love Who digs up the world, Who breaks through faithless earth and stone, expect the end of the world and laugh:
Accompany us then on this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
You will then know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with resurrection!
To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep
to live while dying
and to already know [your]self resurrected!

Christ is Risen! We are risen! Alleluia!

(Note: The illustration above is widely agreed to be the most striking exemplar of the traditional Byzantine Anastasis icon. It is the fresco in the apse of the arekklesion or funerary chapel, of the Monastery of Chora at Istanbul.)

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

Washing Away RFRA: Sermon for Maundy Thursday – 2 April 2015

April 1, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 116:1,10-17; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, and John 13:1-17,31b-35 [all of Ch. 13 was read]. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Foot Washing Every year on Maundy Thursday in the Episcopal Church we do this thing: we gather for Eucharist and we hear these lessons – the story of the Passover from the Book of Exodus, St. Paul’s retelling of the institution narrative of the Eucharist, and St. John’s story of the Last Supper in which he focuses not on the meal but on Jesus’ act of humility and service during the meal (probably quite early in the evening) of washing the feet of the others present.

In many parishes the liturgy of this evening will include a formal washing of the feet of selected participants by the presiding priest and others. You may have seen pictures or video of the Pope doing so in the Vatican’s celebration of this feast. We’ve broadened that practice to allow any who wish to follow Jesus’ example to do so during the Agape Feast. There are foot washing stations in the Parish Hall for that purpose.

Why did Jesus wash his disciples’ feet? Tradition (as I just mentioned) tells us that it was to display and model humility and servanthood. In First Century Palestine, sandals were the most common form of footwear. Walking the dusty desert roads made one’s feet filthy; it was imperative that that be washed before a communal meal. In those days, people didn’t sit on chairs to eat at a table. Instead, they reclined at low tables; feet were very much in evidence. When Jesus rose from the table and began to wash the others’ feet, he was doing the work of the lowliest of servants. The disciples must have been stunned by this act of self-effacement and condescension. The humility expressed by this action with towel and basin foreshadowed Jesus’ ultimate act of humility on the cross.

Although the Lectionary only requires that we read certain verses of Chapter 13 of John’s Gospel, I
chose to read the entire chapter because I think tonight we need to remember exactly whose feet Jesus washed. When we read only that he washed “the disciples’ feet” we can gloss over and forget that John makes it very plain that among that group were two who, to our modern minds, clearly did not deserve the honor: Judas, who would betray him, and Peter, who would deny him. And John also makes it very clear that Jesus knew that both of them would do what they ultimately did.

I think it is important that we note that in particular this year, this Holy Week because for the past several days we have all heard a great deal about something called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, something that was passed 25 years ago by the federal government and versions of which have been adopted in several states, most recently next door to us to the west in the State of Indiana. The law recently passed in Indiana, though it bears the same name as the federal act, is not the same as the federal law. During the past 25 years various state and federal courts have interpreted and to some extent limited the application of the federal or similar state laws, and so later-enacted versions have tried to answer and overcome those judicial limitations, Indiana’s (and now a nearly-identical act in Arkansas) being the broadest.

The impetus for these laws, of course, is the growing legal acceptance of marriage equality, the movement to allow same-sex couples to contract civil marriage in the same way as opposite-sex couples. Indeed, Professor Garrett Epps, who teaches Constitutional Law at the University of Baltimore, has said of the Indiana law that it is clear that its purpose is

. . . to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” (What Makes Indiana’s Religious-Freedom Law Different?, The Atlantic, March 30, 2015)

And the Rev. Franklin Graham, the son and heir of the Dr. Billy Graham, specifically extolled the Indiana act as “a religious freedom bill that would protect [Christian] business owners who want to decline to provide services for same-sex marriages.” (Facebook posting, March 25, 2015, 10:39 am)

And that is why I think it important that we specifically name Judas and Peter as being among those before whom Jesus knelt in abject humility and washed their feet. Presumably those ‘Christians (about whom Mr. Graham spoke) [want] to live out their faith’ and follow Jesus Christ by refusing to serve those whose actions they find offensive. The problem with that is that Jesus didn’t refuse to serve those whose actions were not only offensive to him; their actions were downright fatal to him! He didn’t refuse to serve them; he knelt in humility and washed their feet!

In answer to Mr. Graham, another Baptist preacher, the Rev. Russ Dean, co-pastor of Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC, wrote these words in Baptist News Global:

Mr. Graham opposes same-sex marriage. Maybe he also thinks women should stay home with their kids, and not work outside the home. Some Christians believe this, too. Maybe Indiana should also defend an employer’s right to decline employing young mothers? Whose religious views will we defend? Whose won’t we defend? And where will it stop?

Religious freedom is one of the principles that defines the genius of America – but only a secular state can actually defend that principle for all of its citizens. Otherwise, we might have Indiana defending conservative Christian views and another state defending liberal Christian views; one state defending Sharia law and another writing the codes of Leviticus into the law books in favor of a Jewish majority.

What this means, of course, is that some Christian business owners may have to break the law to defend their religious convictions. (Some Christian business owners did just that when Jim Crow was the law of the land.) But when Christians, or adherents of any religion, go into business, the secular law of the land rules. I have no doubt that in the coming months gay marriage will be the law of the entire land, so some Christian business owners will have a decision to make: uphold the law, or defend their understanding of one religious conviction — and suffer the consequence of breaking that law.

But let the government keep its hands out of religion. When the day comes that Christians have no other way to motivate religious conviction than through legislation, secular government will be the least of our worries. (Why do so many Christians think we need government to prop up Jesus?, Baptist News Global, April 1, 2015)

My purpose tonight is not to debate the merits or demerits of marriage equality; like the Rev. Mr. Dean, I believe that in the not-too-distant future same-sex marriages will be legal throughout the country, but whether that is or is not the case is irrelevant at the moment. What is relevant is how we as followers of Jesus Christ relate to and interact with those who are different from us in whatever way and for whatever reason, so different that, in fact, we find them or their actions offensive. What is relevant is this: do we respond to them with arrogance and condescension, enacting laws that some have gone so far as to call “a license to discriminate,” or do we embrace them in humility and love, kneeling down to wash their feet? Do we try to motivate religious conviction by enacting secular legislation or do we do so the way Jesus did, by example?

“Do you know what I have done to you?” Jesus asked Judas and Peter. “If I . . . have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. . . . If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.” Judas failed utterly and committed suicide when he realized it; Peter failed, as well, but was forgiven and eventually taught the church “that God shows no partiality” and that “everyone who believes in [Jesus] receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:34,43)

We call this day “Maundy Thursday” from an old English word meaning “commandment” because, after demonstrating what it means by washing their feet, Jesus admonished the Twelve, and through them admonishes us: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

May the world know that we are his disciples because, in everything we do, we do not stand in arrogance and condescension, but rather we kneel in humility and love before others, even those who differ greatly from us, even those who offend us.

Steve Garnaas-Holmes, United Methodist pastor and poet, recently published this poetic prayer with which I will close:

Lord, what was it like to wash Judas’ feet,
on your knees, with such tender kindness?
An act of love, not irony.

What is it like to so humbly serve me,
to kneel at the feet of my failure and betrayals,
to welcome and wash and soothe me
as if I am your master?
Pure love, without demand.

Give me this love, this gentle humility,
to wash the feet of those who oppose me,
to treat them with tender kindness,
to seek always to be closer to you,
on your knees below us all,
serving in perfect love.
(Found at the poet’s Unfolding Light blog)

Amen.

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

The Ten Predictions: Hear the Music & Dance – Sermon for Lent 3, 2015

March 7, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Third Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; and John 2:13-22. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Dancing Feet Today is the Third Sunday in Lent but, being March 8, it is also the day set aside on the calendar (both that of the Church of England and that of the Episcopal Church) for us to remember a hero of the Anglican tradition, a World War I chaplain named Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy. In 1914 he became the vicar of St. Paul’s, Worcester, UK, but a short while later, on the outbreak of war, Kennedy volunteered as a chaplain to the armed forces. He gained the nickname “Woodbine Willie,” for his practice of giving out Woodbine brand cigarettes to soldiers. In 1917, he won the United Kingdom’s Military Cross for bravery at Messines Ridge.

He was, additionally, a poet and an author of Christian social critique. We will sing one of his poems as our offertory presentation hymn this morning. (Not Here for High and Holy Things, Hymn No. 9, in the Episcopal Church’s Hymnal 1982.) Among his works of social criticism is one entitled Democracy and the Dog Collar published in 1921. It is an imagined conversation between a representative of “Organized Religion” and one from “Organized Labour” which was just then getting a strong foothold in Britain. In the introductory chapter, he wrote these words:

God is the great politician. He is out to build a City — the new Jerusalem — and He has to work through subordinates and trust them. We are all His subordinates, some of us knaves and some of us fools (perhaps most of us rum mixtures of the two), but we are all He has got to work with and we all must play our part, we must all be politicians. That’s the essence of Democracy, and with all my heart I believe that the City of God is to be a democracy. It would be tidier, more efficient, and less noisy if it were to be built as an autocracy or an oligarchy; but from what I can make out, God is not out for tidiness (if He is He has scored a failure so far, for this world is about the untidiest place I have ever been in — save us, what a muddle it all is!), or efficiency or silence, God is out for life. That is why He is a democrat, and would rather see a world of fat-headed, blundering, vicious fools that are free than a world of strong, silent super-men that are slaves. If you want to save your soul alive you have got to be a politician — a builder of the City of God — there is no other way. (pp 4-5)

I want neither to endorse nor to debate Studdert-Kennedy’s politics, but I do want to say that I think he is absolutely correct when he says that every Christian must be a politician and, a little later in the book, when he writes, “We cannot have any truck with this travesty of Christ’s truth which would bid His servants save their souls and leave their brothers to be damned. Christianity has to do with politics, in fact it is politics — the politics of God.” (p. 6) What I understand him to mean by that is that Christianity, indeed religion in general, is all relationship. The term “politics” at its most basic means “the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society.”

Today, we have had a reading from Exodus in which we heard that familiar list of ten items popularly and traditionally known to Christians as “The Ten Commandments.” To Jews, however, they are known as Aseret ha-Dibrot, a phrase more accurately translated as “the Ten Sayings,” or “the Ten Statements,” or “the Ten Declarations,” or “the Ten Words,” but not as “the Ten Commandments,” which would be Aseret ha-Mitzvot. These Ten Declarations form the very basic politics, the basic societal relationships of the Judaism from which our faith sprung and which our Lord famously summarized in this manner:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. (Mt 22:37-40, quoted in The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 319)

Now, traditionally these “Commandments” are considered to be what is called “apodictic law,” which means that which is “absolutely certain or necessary.” The Decalogue (another name for the Ten Commandments, a Greek word meaning Ten Laws) is seen to be the basic foundation upon which was built the more detailed instructions of the whole Mosaic Law that follows in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Those 613 detailed mandates, or mitzvot, are the Law Jesus referred to as “hanging” on the two Great Commandments.

Tom Long, a Presbyterian seminary professor, once wrote of the Decalogue:

In the popular religious consciousness, the Ten Commandments have somehow become burdens, weights and heavy obligations. For many, the commandments are encumbrances placed on personal behavior. Most people cannot name all ten, but they are persuaded that at the center of each one is a finger-wagging “thou shalt not.” For others, the commandments are heavy yokes to be publicly placed on the necks of a rebellious society. (Dancing the Decalogue)

But as I was studying the Scriptures for this sermon, I learned two things about these passage from Exodus: one that I had known and forgotten, and one I’d never known before.

The former is that the articles of the Decalogue are numbered differently among the religious traditions. Jews number the Ten Sayings differently from Christians and – among Christians – Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and Lutherans number them differently than do Anglicans, the Reformed Churches, and other Protestants. That really is a minor matter inasmuch as we all eventually get to the same bottom line, except for this – Jews separately enumerate the first several words of what we historically call “the first commandment” and make it an introductory comment to the entire set.

Take a look at page 350 in The Book of Common Prayer 1979. This is the contemporary English version of the Decalogue (there is a Jacobean English version beginning on page 317). Notice the way it begins: “Hear the commandments of God to his people:” and then follows what we have always taken to be the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.” In the Jewish understanding, that first sentence is not part of the first commandment. And, truly, it is not a commandment at all; rather, it is the statement of a relationship out of which all that follows flows.

God first establishes God’s relationship with the People; what follows is a description of the behavior of a free people, people whom God has freed “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” As Tom Long puts it, “Understanding the Decalogue as a set of burdens overlooks something essential, namely that they are prefaced not by an order – ‘Here are ten rules. Obey them!’ – but instead by a breathtaking announcement of freedom.” These people may be, as Studdert-Kennedy remarked, “fat-headed, blundering, vicious fools,” but they are free and in their freedom, if they are in this right relationship with God, this is how they will behave: they will worship God and no other; they will keep the Sabbath; they will honor their elders; they will not commit murder or adultery; and so forth.

The second thing I learned is that at least some, if not all, of the so-called commandments are stated in a Hebraic verb form called “the infinitive absolute.” There’s nothing quite like it in English grammar. It is a verb form that, while it can be used for mandates and instructions, is most often used for prophecies!

Putting these two learnings together, I have come to the conclusion that these “ten words” are better thought of, not as “ten commandments,” but as the “ten predictions.” It’s not a case of “because I am your God you will do this” but rather “because I am your God you will do this.” God does not give the law as a means to salvation; the “ten words” are not conditions precedent, which is what commandments are: “If you do these things, then God will be your God” (and if you don’t . . . well, then, watch out!) They are, rather, statements of what happens simply because God is our God; they are predictions of what naturally follows from that relationship. The relationship comes first and this manner of life is the outcome. Lutheran theologian James Arne Nestingen has said that the Ten Commandments are “gifts of redemption, a gracious bequeathal given in the course of release from bondage,” (Word & World) or as my friend and colleague Peggy Blanchard said, “The Decalogue is not a prescription but a description.”

If the ten articles of Exodus 20 are “laws,” they are more like the laws of nature than like statutes. They are statements of the uniformities and regularities in the world, descriptions of the way the world is, principles which govern the phenomena of existence. Add two to two and you get four. Drop an object from a tall building and it will accelerate toward the ground at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared.

Our saint-of-the-day, Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, in another of his books wrote:

A man cannot act right unless he believes right, because men always act according to their belief. A man may not act according to the belief he professes, but he will always act according to the belief he really holds — he cannot help it. * * * A man must always act upon his neighbour according to his master-passion — his real belief. He must always love his neighbour as he loves his God. That your love of your neighbour depends for its force on the love of your God is not a Christian dogma but a law of social life, as the law of gravity is of natural life, just as universal and just as inevitable. (Lies!, 1919, pp. 109, 111)

Love God, love your neighbor, “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Be in a right relationship with your God and you will behave as described in Exodus 20; it is “a law of social life, as the law of gravity is of natural life, just as universal and just as inevitable.”

To quote Tom Long one last time, “The good news of the God who set people free is the music; the commandments are the dance steps of those who hear it playing. The commandments are not weights, but wings that enable our hearts to catch the wind of God’s Spirit and to soar.” Remember what the Psalmist wrote:

The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent.
The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes. (Ps. 19:7-8, BCP Version)

Be in that right relationship with God and you will be revived, you will be given wisdom, your heart will rejoice, you will catch the wind of God’s Spirit and soar; hear the music of the good news and you will dance. Amen.

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

Decision Train: Between Stimulus and Response – Sermon for Lent 2, 2015

February 28, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Second Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Genesis 17:1-7,15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; and Mark 8:31-38. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Decision Train Track I was an English and American literature major in college (well, I finished as an English literature major – I was a biology major, a sociology major, an anthropology major, a philosophy major, and an undeclared major before ending up with a degree in literature.) I remember a certain type of end-of-term take home exam, the compare-and-contrast question. For instance, you’d read a bunch of novels and then along would come the final exam with a question like, “Compare and contrast the vision of the sea in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and Melville’s Moby Dick.”

Reading our lectionary selections today, I had the sense that I was being handed a compare-and-contrast question: Compare and contrast the covenant made by God with Abram in Genesis 17 with the demand made by Jesus in the 8th Chapter of Mark.

On the one hand, we have “I will make you exceedingly numerous. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful.” On the other, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

On the one hand, “I will give you everything.” On the other, “Give it all up.”

And yet the process and the promise is the same. The covenant offered to Abram and the demand made by Jesus both require a decision (that’s the process) and both lead to the promise described both by Paul in his letter to the Romans and by the Psalmist in Psalm 22: “the promise that [the righteous will] inherit the world” – the promise that “they shall be known as the Lord’s for ever” – that they shall enjoy what Jesus variously described as the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, eternal life, or abundant life.

As I was making my notes for this homily, I was also carrying on a conversation by internet chat with a friend and colleague about something else, and my friend quoted the late philosopher-psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. He reminded me of something Frankl, an Austrian Jew, had written in his book Man’s Search for Meaning which described the things he had observed and learned as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It occurred to me that Frankl’s “space between stimulus and response” is a key to understanding the process which is common to God’s covenant and Jesus’ requirement.

Between God’s offer to Abram and Abram’s answer, between Jesus’ demand of his disciples and their reply is what Frankl identified as this space of our power to choose, this place where our potential for growth and freedom lies entirely within our control, where we either accept the kingdom of God or reject that abundant life. God offers, Jesus mandates, but we decide. We choose our response and “in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In our response also lies our identity. It is important to note that it is when Abram accepts God’s offer – which he does not only for himself but for his wife Sarai, a detail we might explore at another time – he and his wife are given new names; they become Abraham (“father of many nations”) and Sarah (“princess to all”). Their new names are symbolic of their act of giving up their former lives for the sake of God’s truth. In that “space between stimulus and response,” they were freed to live and grow into the new names, the new identities that God promised to give them.

The same is true for the disciples of Jesus. In that moment of decision, that “space between stimulus and response,” they (we) are given a new name. It is not without reason that in the sacramental sign of that decision, baptism, we are given a name, “sealed by the Holy Spirit,” and “marked as Christ’s own for ever.” As Peter reminds us in his first letter, we are to “glorify God because [we] bear [the] name” of Christian.

I got to thinking about the language we use to describe the act of deciding, and particularly the difference between the way Americans describe deciding and the way the British refer to it. We are, as George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have quipped, “two countries separated by a common language.” In colloquial American speech, we “make decisions,” but in idiomatic British, one “takes a decision.” To “make” a decision, or to “take” a decision? In all honesty, I think the British have the better of us here. To take a decision is certainly more responsible and more theologically sound than to make one. Here’s what I mean . . . .

Consider the difference between “making” something and “taking” something.

When you make something . . . when you have made something, you’re done with it. You do a lot of preparation, a lot work getting ready; you put a lot into the process, and then you create whatever it is – a painting, a piece of pottery, a casserole, a pie, whatever. You make it, and then you stop making it because there it is. You’ve made it. It has an independent existence in the world. You set it on the counter and the world will do with it whatever the world will do. You can just leave it there and let the world have it.

When we “make” decisions, we do the same thing. We treat decisions as destinations, as end points. In business management courses, students are taught to use “decision trains” in which the process of deciding is metaphorically diagrammed as a locomotive passing through “stations” labeled “situation,” “factors to consider,” “desired outcomes,” “possible consequences,” and so forth, eventually arriving at the terminus labeled “decision.” We even, in everyday speech, talk about “reaching a decision.”

There! We have arrived! We’ve done it! We’ve made our decision! Set it on the counter, record it in the minutes, put it in the filing cabinet, and let the world do with it whatever the world will do. We’re finished.

But when you “take a decision” the act of deciding is not the end . . . it is the beginning. When you take something, you are doing something very different from making something. When you take something, you hold it in your hands rather than set it on the counter. When you take something, you have to do something with it rather than let the world do with it whatever the world will do. When you take a decision, you have to act on it. It is not the terminus of your decision train; it is the start of the journey. Not the end, but the beginning.

When we make a decision, our “decision train” runs from stimulus to response . . . and stops. When we take a decision, our “decision train” starts at the response and runs for the rest of our lives.

In that “space between stimulus and response,” between God’s offer of covenant and our reply, between Jesus’ demand for discipleship and our answer . . . in that space lies our power to choose, to decide, not to make a decision and simply end an old way of being, but to take a decision and begin a new way of being, to give up an old life and save a new one, to surrender our old name and take on a new name, our true name.

As Episcopal theologian Elizabeth Webb reminds us: “To know our true name is, as it was for Abraham and Sarah, to turn, to reorient ourselves according to that name, and to live it. Just as God’s naming of Abraham and Sarah was also a calling, in naming us God is calling us to discipleship, casting off the old names by which we’ve been known, and living into (and maybe ‘up to’) the name that God bestows.” Whether that name be Abraham (“father of nations”), or Sarah (“princess to all”), or, simply, Christian (“follower of Jesus”).

So . . . compare and contrast . . .

For some, the decision we must take is to accept God’s offer: “I will give you everything.” For others, the decision we must take is to follow Jesus’ demand: “Give it all up.” For all, the promise is the same: “[We] shall be [named and] known as the Lord’s for ever.” Amen.

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

What Is Lent All About? – Sermon for Lent 1, 2015

February 22, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the First Sunday in Lent, February 22, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; and Mark 1:9-15. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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God the Father and Holy Spirit What is Lent all about?

Some say it’s a time when we are supposed to find the presence of God in everyday life. Dr. Jonn Sentamu, the current Archbishop of York, suggested as much in his 2015 Ash Wednesday meditation when he said, “Lent is a time to get to know God better.” Similarly, an interdenominational Lenten devotional refers to Lent as a “journey [on which] you seek – and find – God.”

That’s one way to think about Lent. But that way isn’t working for me this year, especially as I contemplate Mark’s description of Jesus’ baptism and its aftermath. If in our Lenten discipline we are to be, in some way, doing what a Lenten hymn attributed to St. Gregory the Great says — “keep[ing] vigil with our heavenly lord in his temptation and his fast” — then we should pay particular attention to what really was going on there and seek to do during Lent what seems to be going on with Jesus in the wilderness.

Let’s look at Mark’s spare and barebones description of it all again. It’s a short Gospel text, so let’s read it in full one more time:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

OK. It doesn’t seem to me that Jesus needed to look for God! God is always there (which is the promise of the story of the rainbow in today’s Genesis reading) and the presence of God is very apparent in these first few lines of this Gospel story. The Holy Spirit (the Third Person of the Trinity) doesn’t just make a polite visit here; she’s not just gliding in here or fluttering by. No! The heavens, Mark says, were “torn apart” and the Spirit (in the form of a dove) came diving done like some eagle homing in on its prey! And there’s a bit of a mistranslation here, as well; the English translation we read says the Spirit descended “on” Jesus but the Greek makes more sense if we read it as saying that the Spirit came down into Jesus.

This really is an active, even violent description, that Mark has laid out for us. Jesus doesn’t just emerge from the water like someone stepping carefully out of a swimming pool; the Greek is “euthus anabainon” – Jesus “immediately ascended” out of the water; like a whale breaching the surface of the sea. And the Spirit, having torn the heaven’s apart, “katabainon eis auton“, dives down into Jesus. Rapid movement up is met with rapid movement down, a collision of the Son and the Spirit. This dove dove deep into Jesus; Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit.

And, of course, God the Father (First Person of the Trinity) is right there as well, fairly shouting, “You’re my son! I love you! I’m please as punch with you!” Jesus doesn’t need to go on any journey to find this God; he doesn’t need any time to get to know this God any better!

So what happens next?

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

Mark continues his energetic, and here overtly violent, description of Jesus’ encounter with the Holy Spirit. There’s a sense here that Jesus is not a willing volunteer; the Spirit is making no polite suggestion that Jesus go spend a few days in the desert so that he can know “the presence of God in everyday life.” No! Jesus is prodded, herded, pushed, forced, driven out into the rough country to cozy up to the wild beasts.

Why? What was he to do out there?

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

“Peiradzomenos hupo tou satana” reads the Greek: literally, “he was tested by the tempter.” Our English translation eliminates the definite article that is clearly there in the Greek, “the satan,” the tempter, and then capitalizes “satan” thus personalizing this tempter and, in fact, makes us think of the Devil of later Christian poetic mythology. But who else might the tempter have been?

“Sometimes we are devils to ourselves, when we will tempt the frailty of our powers, presuming on their changeful potency,” wrote William Shakespeare in the play Troilus and Cressida (Troilus speaking to Cressida and Aeneas, Act IV, scene 4). “The devil tempts us not — ’tis we tempt him….” wrote George Eliot in her 19th Century novel Felix Holt, the Radical.

Could it be that the temptations Jesus faced were those he put before himself? We certainly put enough temptations in front of ourselves; we are, more often than not, our own tempters. Could it be that Jesus’ tempter was his own human self? Scripture reminds us (and the Lenten preface of our Eucharistic prayer repeats) that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” (Heb 4:15) Could it be that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to confront himself, to learn about himself?

If Lent is not a journey to find God, could it be journey to find ourselves? It could indeed! Lent, it has been said, is a period of self-discovery in which we encounter the parts of ourselves we don’t want to discover. If Jesus was made to spend time in the desert to learn about himself, then such self-discovery during this season surely would be, as Gregory’s great Lenten hymn proclaims, a reminder that “though frail we be, in [God’s] own image were we made.” Lent is a time to find ourselves, a time to reorient ourselves to who we are, where we have come from, where we are going, and how we are going to get there. This is surely what those forty days in the desert were for Jesus, as Mark demonstrates when he concludes this brief story with these words:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

At the end of his 40 days with the wild beasts, Jesus knew who he was and what he was about. What can we do, then, to experience a similar self-revelation? How can we reorient ourselves to who we are, where we have come from, where we are going, and how we are to get there?

What we can do is to engage in a Lenten discipline, a rule-of-life for these 40 days. I plan to adopt a program set out several years ago by a famous bishop of Rome. It is known as “the daily decalogue of Pope John XXIII.” I plan to use it as a Lenten spiritual exercise to be renewed and lived out each day. As its name implies, it has ten parts:

Only for today, I will seek to live the live-long day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.

Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behavior; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.

Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world but also in this one.

Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.

Only for today, I will devote 10 minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.

Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it.

Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure that no one notices.

Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.

Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances, that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in this world.

Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12 hours I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.

I hope that through this daily wilderness exercise of prayer, fasting, and discipline I will find myself, even those parts of me that I don’t want to discover.

May your Lent, too, be a wilderness time of self-discovery. Remember, you don’t need to look for God; God is always there. This Lent, look for yourself. Amen.

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

Life Is A Banquet And Most Poor Suckers Are Starving To Death: Sermon for Ash Wednesday 2015

February 18, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Day of Ashes, Wednesday, February 18, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Joel 2:1-2,12-17; Psalm 103 or 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; and Matthew 6:1-6,16-21. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Banquet “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

When I began contemplating a sermon for the beginning of Lent, that famous aphorism by Auntie Mame, a line from the movie of that name spoken by the character to her nephew Patrick, came to immediately to mind and, as I am sure you may be, I was more than a bit surprised. “What,” I thought, “is that all about? What is the Spirit trying to tell me about Lent, what would the Spirit have me tell you about Lent, with that statement which seems so antithetical to everything we have been taught about Lent?”

We have been taught – haven’t we? – that Lent is about “giving up” something enjoyable? In fact, in a few minutes, I’m going to read the Prayer Book’s Ash Wednesday exhortation and remind you that the next six weeks are intended to be (at least in part) a season of “fasting and self-denial.” (BCP p. 265) So what do we do?

Well, I went online (as I often do) to see what people are claiming to be “giving up” this year. Here’s a partial list: red meat, coffee, wine (that’s a big one), alcohol of all kinds, chocolate (another big one), white sugar, cakes and cookies, desserts in general, potato chips, yeast bread, cheese danish, pizza, soda pop, ice cream, and the list goes on and on.

Is that really what this season is about, though? If Mame is correct and life is a banquet, if our faith is correct and this banquet is provided by God the Father who, Isaiah prophesied, intends to “make for all peoples a feast of rich food [and] well-aged wines” (Is 25:6), and if the Father is truly represented by Jesus of Nazareth who said, “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10), is turning our backs on food really what this season is about?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not. If this season of Lent is about giving something up, it’s not about putting on a show of fasting and self-privation, otherwise Jesus would not have said what he said in today’s Gospel lesson about giving of our resources as alms for the poor in a secret way, about praying in private, and about washing our faces and looking content rather than deprived when we do (in fact) fast from foods.

This is a season when we are called to fast, but not from coffee, or wine, or cheese danish, or pizza, although those foods people listed may be symbolic of what this season is all about. We are to fast, as Isaiah said, from injustice, from oppression, from seeing others go hungry and doing nothing about it, from pointing the finger, and from speaking evil. These are the things about which we should weep and mourn, these are the things from which we should fast, rending (as Joel said) our hearts and not our garments. We should fast from these things because they are what prevent us and the other poor suckers from enjoying that banquet, the things that cause us and the other poor suckers to starve to death while God spreads that feast of rich food and well-aged wines.

My colleague in ordained ministry, Lutheran pastor Phil Ressler has put together a list of forty things he suggests we fast from during this season of Lent. I could not improve on his suggestions and so I want to just read Pastor Ressler’s list (and his comments) to you and add my own homiletic endorsement:

Fear of Failure – You don’t succeed without experiencing failure. Just make sure you fail forward.
Your Comfort Zone – It’s outside our comfort zones where new discoveries are made.
Feelings of Unworthiness – You are fearfully and wonderfully made by your creator. (see Psalm 139:14)
Impatience – God’s timing is the perfect timing.
Retirement – As long as you are still breathing, you are here for a reason. You have a purpose to influence others for Christ. Our work is not always tied to a paycheck.
People Pleasing – I can’t please everyone anyways. There is only one I need to strive to please.
Comparison – I have my own unique contribution to make and there is no one else like me.
Blame – I am not going to pass the buck. I will take responsibility for my actions.
Guilt – I am loved by Jesus and he has forgiven my sins. Today is a new day and the past is behind.
Over commitment – Do less better and accomplish more.
Lack of Counsel – Wise decisions are rarely made in a vacuum.
Impurity – Live lives pure and without blemish.
Entitlement – The world does not owe me anything. God does not owe me anything. I live in humility and grace.
Apathy – Life is too short not to care.
Hatred – Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).
Negativity – I will put the best construction on everything when it comes to other people. I will also minimize my contact with people who are negative and toxic.
The Spirit of Poverty – Believe that with God there is always more than enough and never a lack.
Going Through the Motions – The more you invest yourself, the more you will get back.
Complaint – Instead of contributing to the problem, be the solution.
The Pursuit of Happiness – God wants something greater and more lasting than happiness. It is called joy.
Bitterness – The only person I am hurting by holding on to this is myself.
Distraction – Life is filled with distractions that will take our eyes off the prize.
Giving up – God never gives up on us.
Mediocrity – If you are going to do something, then give it all you got.
Destructive Speech – Encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching (see Hebrews 10:25).
Busyness – It is a badge of honor to be busy. But that does not always translate to abundance.
Loneliness – With Jesus I am never alone. He is with me wherever I go.
Disunity – If two of you agree on earth about anything, it will be done for them by the Heavenly Father (see Matthew 18:19).
The Quick Fix – Rarely does true transformation happen overnight.
Worry – God is in control and worrying will not help.
Idolizing – Don’t assign anyone a standard they cannot live up to.
Resistance to Change – Change is certain. It is not if we will change, but how we will change.
Pride – Blessed are the humble.
Small View of God – Don’t tell God how big your problem is, tell your problem how big your God is.
Envy – I am blessed. My value is not found in my possessions, but in my relationship with my Heavenly Father.
Ungratefulness – You have been blessed in a way greater than you realize.
Selfish Ambition – God has a mission for me that is bigger than me.
Self-Sufficiency – Jesus is my strength. I can do all things through him (see Philippians 4:13).
Sorrow – Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5b).
My Life – Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life (John 12:25).

(See Pastor Ressler’s parish website and the original list here.)

I’m going to come back to this list in a minute, but I want to return briefly to Isaiah’s prophesy of God’s great feast. What sorts of foods do you suppose will be set on that banquet table? There is at least one category of foods I’m sure will not be there.

Among nutritionists today one often hears the term “empty calories.” Many of the foods and beverages we Americans like to eat and drink contain these empty calories. In general, they are calories from solid fats and unnecessary sugars added to our diet. These ingredients add calories to the food but few or no nutrients.

Solid fats, by the way, are fats that are solid at room temperature. There are natural solid fats like butter, beef fat, and shortening. There are also unnatural solid fats, such as hydrogenated vegetable oils, that added when convenience foods are processed by food companies or when they are prepared by fast food restaurants. Unnecessary the sugars are sugars and syrups that are added when foods or beverages are processed or prepared.

God’s banquet table, God’s feast of rich foods and well-aged wines, does not – I’m pretty sure – contain any empty calories.

But there are areas in our country where empty calories are nearly the only thing that the residents have available. The USDA refers to these areas as “food deserts” and on the department’s website we find this description:

Food deserts are defined as urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food. Instead of supermarkets and grocery stores, these communities may have no food access or are served only by fast food restaurants and convenience stores that offer few healthy, affordable food options. The lack of access contributes to a poor diet and can lead to higher levels of obesity and other diet-related diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. (USDA website)

The foods and beverages predominantly available in those areas, and to all of us no matter where we live, the foods that provide the most empty calories for Americans include the following: cakes, cookies, pastries, donuts, soda pop, energy drinks, sports drinks, sugared fruit drinks, processed cheese, pizza, ice cream, and processed red meat products such as sausages, hot dogs, bacon, and ribs.

Did you notice something about that list? It’s practically the same as the list of things people said they were giving up for Lent! It is, perhaps, a good thing to give these things up because they prevent us from enjoying the healthier foods and beverages set out on God’s banquet table! The abundant life promised by Christ and for which Lent is to prepare us is a life of health and vitality, not a life filled with empty calories, and this is true both physically and spiritually!

Which brings me back to Pastor Ressler’s list. I suggest to you that the things on his list are the empty calories of our spiritual and emotional lives, and just as the empty calories of our physical life lead to physical diseases the empty calories of complaining, mediocrity, busyness, people pleasing, resistance to change, pride, worry, and all the others lead to spiritual illness and emotional malaise. They prevent us from enjoying God’s abundant banquet of joy, love, hope, and peace.

Auntie Mame was right, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” This Lent give up being one of those “poor suckers,” fast from the things that may be causing your soul to starve.

Give up those empty emotional and spiritual calories, and God will “redeem your life from the grave and crown you with mercy and loving-kindness; he [will] satisf[y] you with good things, and your youth [will be] renewed like an eagle’s.” (Ps. 103:4-5)

Amen.

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

I Wish I Knew Her Name: Simon’s Mother-in-Law – Sermon for Epiphany V, February 8, 2015

February 8, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 8, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12,21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; and Mark 1:29-39 . These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Rembrandt, 1660, Healing of Peter's Mother-in-Law After I did my first sermon-prep read through of this morning’s gospel I thought, “There are two stories here.” Then I thought, “No, there are three.” And then I realized that there are really more stories here than I can count.

Mark, of course, is interested in telling only one story, Jesus’ story, and so he gives us these glimpses into the lives of others only insofar as they serve to move his main story along.

We haven’t even reached the end of Chapter One yet and already Jesus has been baptized in a river, heard the voice of God, spent forty days in the wilderness tempted by Satan and waited on by angels, recruited four disciples, taught in a synagogue, cast out a demon, and (in today’s bit) healed a woman in a private home, gone back out into the wilderness to pray, and then traveled throughout the region preaching in more synagogues and casting our more demons.

And Mark has told us all of that in only 39 sentences. Mark probably would have failed a creative writing class and definitely would have failed a journalism class! He hasn’t even come close to answering those all important questions known to every reporter and every novelist on the planet: Who? What? When? Where? How? and Why? He hasn’t come close to answering them because he doesn’t care; unless those are questions about Jesus, Mark simply isn’t interested in them.

But I am! I would like to know some details. I’m like Karoline Lewis, Associate Professor of Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, who in writing about Simon’s mother-in-law repeatedly makes the parenthetical observation, “I so wish she had a name!” I would love to know her name. In fact, not only would I like to know who she is, I’d like to know what she’s doing there! Why is she in Simon’s household at all?

Is she there because she’s widowed and, bound by the law of Moses to be dependent on some man, has no male relatives other than her daughter’s husband to rely on for support? Is she there because Simon’s widowed and needs her help to raise his children? (Are there any children to raise?) Why is Simon’s mother-in-law the one who (after arising from her sickbed) performs the duties of hostess which normally would be those of a wife or an elder daughter? For that matter, why was she sick in the first place? What was actually wrong with her? There are more stories here than I can count because Mark hasn’t told them, because he hasn’t answered any of these questions.

Mark isn’t interested in answering the questions; the answers aren’t necessary to moving his story of Jesus along, but they would help me in understanding my story of Jesus. I know I’m not very much like Jesus, though I try to be; I am, however, a lot like those other people, like Simon or his mother-in-law or that man in the synagogue we heard about last week. If I could know more about how they related to and followed Jesus, it would help me as I stumble along trying to do the same.

I wish we knew more about the nameless Mrs. Simon’s mother (I wish Simon’s wife had a name!) because it would help me understand this statement: “The fever left her, and she began to serve them.” I read that statement and my 1960s-70s college student, sexual revolution, women’s liberation, gender equality heart just goes all cold and still, and I think, “Really? The first thing an elderly woman does on being relieved of sickness is get up and cook for the men?” But, you see, that’s my story, not Mark’s; that’s me reading into the text, instead of setting aside my preconceptions and letting the text read out to me. If I read the text carefully and in the context of the whole story of Jesus (as told by Mark’s and the other gospel writers), my gender-equality objections may not entirely fade away, but at least they are answered.

Here’s how . . . .

First, there’s the way Jesus seems to have refused to countenance the position of women in First Century Jewish society. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, women were subservient men; they had no rights of their own; they could not own property; they were completely dependent upon the eldest male member of their family (which is one reason why Simon’s mother-in-law may have been living in his household). But we should remember that Jesus would have none of that! Jesus spoke openly with women when that was absolutely contrary to the norms of his culture as, for example, when he converse with the woman at Jacob’s well in Sychar (Jn 4) or when he prevented a crowd from stoning the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8:3-11). Jesus believed that a woman had as much right to study Torah with him as a man might, as when (over her sister’s objection) he permitted Mary of Bethany to sit at his “feet and listen to what he was saying.” (Lk 10:38-42) Jesus allowed women to whom he was not related to touch him, as when (in the home of another Simon) he allowed a woman known to be a sinner to bathe and anoint his feet (Lk 7), or when Mary of Bethany did the same just before his crucifixion (Jn 12:3). Would Jesus, who seemed to value women as the equals of men, have allowed an elderly woman to wait on him in a subservient manner? I wouldn’t think so.

Second, there’s that word “serve.” In this passage the translation of the Greek original is not incorrect, but it’s a certainly a loaded one! A 21st Century Christian American like myself hears inequality in that word “serve;” I hear a disparity in social position between the one who serves, the servant, and the one who is served, the master. I cannot shake the sense that the one serving is subservient, and that is especially so when reading Holy Scripture in English translation.

There are a couple of Greek words we should learn here; they both are interpreted as meaning “to serve” in modern translations of the New Testament. One is douleuo; its root is doulos, a noun meaning “slave.” One who serves in the since of douleuo serves as a slave serves. Jesus frequently uses this as a metaphor for the Christian life. When, for example, he said, “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master,” it is this word doulos that he uses; not simply “servant,” but “slave.” (Mt 10:24) And again, when he instructs the Twelve that “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” it is this word doulos, “slave,” that he uses. (Mk 9:35) And when he reminds us all that “no slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth,” it is again this word doulos, “slave,” and this kind of servitude – slavery – that he describes. (Lk 16:13)

And that is what we hear, what we understand when we read this word “serve” in English translation. We hear it here: Simon’s mother-in-law rose from her sickbed and like a subservient slave she waited on these men. Except she didn’t! That’s not what the Greek says even though that’s how we hear it when the second of the Greek words is translated as “serve” and that word, used in this passage, is diakoneo. As a noun, the word is diakonos. The verb means “to minister;” the noun we is the root of our word “deacon.” This is not the servile submission of a slave. When Mark, or any of the gospel writers, uses this term, something very different is intended: this is the willing ministration of one equal to another.

It is instructive to look at other instances where Mark uses the word diakoneo; this author uses the word only four times! The first is when Jesus is in the desert for forty days and Mark tells us that “the angels waited on him.” (Mk 1:13) The second is in today’s gospel reading. The third is when Jesus tells his disciples, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mk 10:45) The last is when Mark describes those who were present at Christ’s crucifixion: “There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” (Mk 15:40-41) In that last, the word translated “provided for” is diakoneo. This then is the sort of “serving” Simon’s mother-in-law does: ministering to Jesus and his disciples in the manner of the angels, serving as Jesus himself came to serve, providing for Jesus and the others as the women at the cross had provided for him.

Episcopal nun and priest, Suzanne Guthrie, writes, “Something more than healing occurs when Jesus ‘grasps’ her. The word used is the same as the word for Jesus’ resurrection – he ‘raises her up’. She embodies the Easter mystery of resurrection and the Pentecost mystery of apostleship – of service. …. She’s a mother of the church. A deacon. A template of holiness.” (Edge of the Enclosure)

Cuban theologian Ofelia Ortega observes, “This woman gets up and turns the Sabbath into a paschal day of service to others. Jesus does not command her. She is the one that assumes the initiative and awaits the consequences, discovering the value of mutual service above the sacredness of the Sabbath.” (Feasting on the Word Year B, Vol. 1)

This is the story Mark does not tell. Mark is interested only in moving forward his tale of Jesus, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, so he does not give us any details about other stories that he considers tangential. If we want to learn from those other stories, we have to ferret out the details ourselves; we have to read Mark’s brief mention of other people along the way within the larger contexts of Mark’s whole story and the gospel story as told by others. When we read the story of Simon’s mother-in-law in this way, we find much more than the story of a subservient First Century woman merely doing what was expected of her. We learn from and are called to emulate the ministry of a woman many scholars have called “the first deacon of the church,” who rose restored from her sickbed, made well and whole by Son of God, and offered herself in service to others.

As Professor Lewis said, “I so wish I knew her name.” Amen.

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

Beyond Jesus’ Instructions: Annual Parish Meeting Sermon – January 25, 2015

January 25, 2015 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered at the 198th Annual Parish Meeting, the Feast of the Conversion of Paul, January 25, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Acts 26:9-21; Psalm 67; Galatians 1:11-24; and Matthew 10:16-22. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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St Paul's Conversion by Gustav Doré “I heard a voice saying in Hebrew: ‘I have a job for you. I’ve handpicked you to be a servant and witness to what’s happened today, and to what I am going to show you. I’m sending you off to open the eyes of the outsiders so they can see the difference between dark and light, and choose light, see the difference between Satan and God, and choose God.'” (Acts 26:16-18a, The Message)

Amen.

A personnel recruitment and testing agency sent this memorandum to their client:

To: Jesus, Son of Joseph, Carpenter Shop, Nazareth

Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve men you have picked for managerial positions in your new organization. All of them have now taken our battery of tests. We have not only run the results through our computer, but we have also arranged personal interviews for each of them with our psychologist and our vocational aptitude consultant.

The profiles of all tests are included. You will want to study each of them carefully. As part of our service, we make some general observations. These come without any additional fee. It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in background, educational and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. Specifically, we have the following observations about these candidates:

Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. Andrew has absolutely no qualities of leadership. The two brothers, James and John, place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas demonstrates a questioning attitude that would tend to undermine morale. We feel that it is our duty to tell you that Matthew (the former tax collector) has been blacklisted by the Greater Galilee Better Business Bureau. James the-son-of-Alphaeus and Thaddaeus have radical leanings and registered high manic-depressive scores.

Only one candidate shows great potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness who meets people well and has a keen business mind. He has contacts in high places and is highly motivated, ambitious, and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your chief financial officer and right-hand man.

All the other profiles are self-explanatory. The candidates do not have the team concept. We would recommend that you continue to search for persons of experience and proven capacity in management. We wish you every success in your new venture.

Of course, our commemoration today is not about any of these guys . . . today we celebrate the “conversion” of our Patron Saint, Paul of Tarsus, who was (as he says himself in his letter to the Galatians) “violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” (Gal 1:13) Clearly not someone you would recruit to grow the church . . . and yet that is exactly what the Risen Jesus did! He handpicked him to be a servant and witness. As has been observed by many writers: God does not call the qualified; God qualifies the called.

And that’s as true for the church today as it was when Jesus was calling fishermen from their boats on the Sea of Galilee, or recruiting tax collectors out of their offices in Capernaum, or accosting the firebrand Pharisee Saul on the road to Damascus. Just look around this room. If you were going to call some group of people to represent God and spread the gospel in Medina, Ohio, would you call any of us? Be honest! Maybe one or two . . . but the whole group of us? Not likely. But here we are, tasked with doing just that.

The other thing Jesus doesn’t do is give instructions. He calls the unqualified and then sets them to work with minimal direction. Just a few verses before the bit we heard this morning Jesus has told the Twelve:

Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. (Mt 10:8-10)

Then he gives them some advice about finding lodgings. That’s it. Minimal instructions and then the part read today, which boils down to “This is hazardous work” and “Don’t be naive.” (Thanks to Eugene Peterson’s The Message for those paraphrases.)

Professor Greg Carey, who teaches New Testament at the UCC’s Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, PA, in discussing this passage notes that although “Jesus gives the Twelve clear [if minimal] instructions,” once they are sent, “they are on their own. They must assess the responses of the cities; they determine whether to stay or to move along.” They probably wanted something more in the way of training (they were, as that fictional memorandum suggests, grossly unqualified). We would like more in the way of instructions and that drives many Christians to treat scripture as a rule book. But scripture isn’t a rule book and Jesus instructions, as Prof. Carey notes, “only take us so far. The faithful church must move beyond Jesus himself, as the disciples do.” Like “the disciples the church finds itself cast into the world, taking Jesus’ message [of healing and liberation] beyond his instructions into surprising new contexts.” (Working Preacher commentary)

As we begin our 199th year of being the Episcopal Church in Medina, Ohio, that is the self-examination we must undertake. Have we moved beyond the minimal instructions we have been given? Have we successfully taken the gospel message of healing and liberation into our context in this time and place?

In the Annual Journal that you will be given when we begin the business session is a page of parish statistics which reflects the data our national church requests from us each year in the Annual Parochial Report. Looking at those statistics might suggest that the answer to that question is “No.” You will find there, for example, that we began the year with a registered membership of 539 persons (active and inactive); we baptized six but lost two to transfer and one to death for a net growth of three; that’s a growth rate of a little more than 1/2 of 1% – not really very good. But . . . that report is constrained by the definitions and requirements of the canons, our “instructions,” if you will, from the national church.

If we move beyond the instructions, as Prof. Carey suggests the followers of Jesus are supposed to do, one gets a much different picture. We may have a “registered” membership of 542, but a good number of those people are inactive . . . some don’t even live in Ohio anymore. Our active worshiping community at the beginning of the year was really composed of around 200 people and to that active group this year we have added 19 adults and six children that I can name. They are not yet technically “members” as defined by the canons, but they are certainly part of our parish family! There may be some more, people who have quickly grown so familiar that they seem to have been here longer than the year. But even just counting those I can name off the top of my head, that’s a growth rate of 12-1/2%, twenty-five times what our “official” statistics would suggest.

However, as the Rev. Loren Mead suggested more than twenty years ago in his book More Than Numbers, there are other measures of church growth: there is growth in maturity of faith, increase in corporate effectiveness, and success in transforming the outside world. Those are very difficult metrics to measure. It’s really not easy to determine if, when, and how God’s “ways [have been made] known upon earth,” and God’s “saving health [manifested] among all nations.” (Ps 67:2) There, however, some indicators.

We have, for example, not only added 25 people to our worshiping community, we also added two pledging households to our stewardship base and have seen an increase in financial commitments from pledging households of about 2-1/2%. In 2014, we added to our outreach ministries, increasing our outreach expenditures to 18% of our operating budget, well above the nationwide Episcopal Church average which is 11%. Our outreach includes, as you can read in the Annual Journal, $11,000 raised for and spent on feeding the hungry through the Free Farmers’ Market which provided almost 50,000 pounds of food to over 4,300 of our neighbors.

We are offering education in biblically based personal fiscal responsibility and financial management through the Financial Peace University program in which sixteen Medina households are participating, about half of them not (yet) members of this congregation.

We have added to our youth group which now includes middle and high school students not only from our own congregation but from other Episcopal congregations in our mission area and other Christian churches in our city, youths who meet in this building every Wednesday evening for supper and bible study and who, throughout the year, have raised awareness of homelessness in our community, raised money for shelter ministries, built teddy bears for children in need, repaired the homes of the poor, and taken part in the councils and ministries of the church. Two of our youth group members, Nick _______ of our own parish and Richard __________ of Christ Church, Kent, are among thirteen diocesan youth nominated to be part of the official youth presence at this summer’s General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

Of course, we completed addition of 400 square feet of open and inviting gallery space to our parish hall, and reorganized our usage of space moving the nursery to the second floor of Canterbury House (on the same level as our worship space) and consolidating our offices in the undercroft. (There are still some finishing touches to complete, but for the most part that process is done.)

I suggest to you that all of this represents growth in maturity of faith, increase in corporate effectiveness, and success in transforming the outside world . . . and that it is just the tip of the ice berg.

Yes, our official statistics may not look all that good and when the hierarchs of the diocese and the national church look at them, they may “hand [us] over to councils and flog [us] in their synagogues,” (Mt 10:17) although I don’t really think they will. As we approach the bicentennial of our congregation, I believe we have ample evidence that we have followed Jesus’ instructions to feed the hungry, house the homeless, cure the sick, and liberate the captive. And we have followed his last instruction, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Mt 28:19-20a)

Can we do better? Yes, of course, we can and we will because we have faith that those “who endure to the end will be saved,” (Mt 10:22) and we believe Jesus’ assurance that he is “with [us] always, to the end of the age.” (Mt 28:20b) We have followed Jesus’ instructions and gone beyond them. We may not be the most qualified, but we are the ones who have been called. We have taken Jesus’ message of healing and liberation beyond his basic instructions into our context in Medina, Ohio.

I believe that through the open windows of our gallery, through the activities of our youth, through the ministry of our food pantry, through our faithfulness our neighbors and all who pass by “can see the difference between dark and light, and choose light, see the difference between Satan and God, and choose God.” (Acts 26:18a, The Message) I believe that through our faithfulness and God’s grace St. Paul’s Parish has grown in many ways and will continue to increase; “may God, our own God, give us his blessing. May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him.” (Ps 67:6-7)

Amen.

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

The Great Dance with the Christ-about-to-be-Born: Sermon for Christmas Eve 2014

December 24, 2014 / eric / 0 Comments

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A sermon offered, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; and Luke 2:1-20. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Dachshund Plush Toy Tonight we gather once again to celebrate a memory, the memory of the birth of Christ, the Christ who is about to be born again as he is every year. We don’t really know if he was born at this time of the year; in fact, most scholars agree he wasn’t. But that doesn’t matter. It isn’t the date that we celebrate; it is his birth, then and in our lives each time we remember.

I have mentioned in this pulpit before my memory of a childhood incident in which my brother, clothed in a cowboy outfit he’d received at Christmas, wondered in a neighborhood bar and, when told that the bar did not serve minors, retorted “I’m not a miner; I’m a cowboy!”

I remember that incident as if it was yesterday. I can see that set of cowboy clothes. I know the bar where it occurred. That memory is as clear as clear can be.

But here’s the weird thing about that memory: That incident happened four years before I was born.

I think probably everyone has memories like that, constructed memories, memories which are ours, but are of events which we did not experience; that’s what it is to be a part of a family, of a community. We share the collective memories of the group and make them our own. Celebrating the Nativity each year at this time is like that, a memory and a future we have made our own because we are part of God’s family.

My first real personal memory is also a Christmas memory. The Christmas I was three years old I got a puppy, a dachshund puppy my father named “Baron.” Baron was probably about ten weeks old and what a mess he made of our Christmas! We had Baron for five years, but when my father passed away and my mother decided that we would move to southern California, Baron had to be given away. Still, one always remembers one’s first dog!

So imagine how delighted I was a few days before Thanksgiving when Evelyn and I went shopping at Aldi and I found this! [Holds up stuffed plush toy dachshund dressed in green Christmas attire] A Christmas dachshund! Like a visit from my first Christmas dog. And imagine my further delight when I squeezed his foot and discovered that he plays this Christmas classic:

[Toy plays truncated version of C+C Music Factory’s Everybody Dance Now]

Everybody dance now
Da da da, Da!
Da da da, Da!
Dance till you can’t dance
Till you can’t dance no more
Get on the floor and get warm
Then come back and upside down
Easy now, let me see ya
Move
(Let your mind)
Move
(Put me online)
The music is my life

Okay, so maybe it’s not so much a Christmas classic . . . . But it did remind me of the Great Dance, a classic metaphor for the actions of God, and how that metaphor can help us to understand and enter into the joy of the God’s Incarnation in the Christ-about-to-be-Born.

This is nothing new, of course; the old Cornish Christmas carol portrays the birth of Christ as an invitation to the Dance.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to my dance;
Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance
Thus was I knit to man’s nature
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

The metaphor of the Great Dance portrays the cosmos as rhythmic, trustingly and lovingly attuned to and following the lead of its Creator. The concept of the Great Dance is found throughout human cultures and predates Christianity. It is found in Plato who wrote, “The dance, of all the arts, is the one that most influences the soul. Dancing is divine in its nature and is the gift of the gods.” The Roman poet Lucian wrote of the dance of the heavenly bodies which came into existence at creation. The Hindu God Shiva is called “Lord of the Dance,” and his eternal dance creates, destroys, and recreates all things. The spiritual practices of many tribal cultures involve communal dance. King David, the Second Book of Samuel tells us, “danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Sam 6:14) as the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem. The last of psalms enjoins us to dance:

Praise [God] with the blast of the ram’s-horn; *
praise him with lyre and harp.
Praise him with timbrel and dance . . . .
(Ps 150:3-4a, BCP Version)

In his book To a Dancing God, theologian Sam Keen, wrote that human flesh “has a natural sense of the sacred.” (Harper & Row, 1970, pg 153) When human flesh dances it joins in patterns and takes on memories and dreams of a future that are not originally its own.

Are you a dancer? Do you and your beloved enjoy a turn on the dance floor from time to time? Do you remember what it was like when you were first learning to dance? Tentatively and awkwardly you took your position on the floor, shuffling your feet not knowing where to put them, raising your arms, hands trembling, feeling like an idiot. Where do your hands go? Where do your feet go? Which way should you look? At first, this strange position with arms outstretched in an awkward formal embrace of your partner, your feet oddly placed on the floor, is a position of vulnerability and humility. But eventually, whatever the form you may have been learning – foxtrot, two-step, waltz, tango, whatever it may have been – eventually you learned it; your body learned it; your body with its “natural sense of the sacred” becomes a part of the Great Dance, remembers the steps and moves that were not originally your own.

Those of you who know me well know that for relaxation I like to read science fiction. It was through science fiction that I was introduced to the great Anglican apologist Clive Staples Lewis. Most people become familiar with Lewis because of the Narnia stories and then move on to read The Screwtape Letters and then possibly Lewis’s Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity or his memoir Surprised by Joy. My first encounter with Lewis was his science fiction trilogy and in that work was where I first read about the Great Dance.

The story of the trilogy centers on an Oxford Don named Elwin Ransom who, in the first book entitled Out of the Silent Planet, voyages to Mars and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the solar system. Ransom learns of and meets angelic beings called eldila who oversee the solar system on behalf of the Creator (who is called “the Old One”). One of these eldila, a being known as the Bent Oyarsa, has turned (as modern Hollywood would put it) “to the Dark Side” and taken control of earth. In the second book, entitled Perelandra, Ransom journeys to Venus. Near the end of the book, Ransom is shown the Great Dance by the eldila. At first, they describe it to him and then he begins to experience it for himself. This is the way Lewis tells it: one of the eldila says to Ransom –

The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect . . . . We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always. There was no time when we did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made.

Others of the eldila speak of the Dance and then Ransom begins to see it for himself. Lewis describes it this way:

And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity – only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word ‘seeing’ is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells – peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the like – ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what: But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which live and died in the clashing of their streams: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from trance, and coming to himself. (Lewis, C.S., Perelandra, Scribner:NYC, 2003, pp. 183-88)

This, then, is the Dance into which the Christ-to-be-Born invites us.

In a book of the Christian apocrypha called The Acts of St. John, we are told that after the Last Supper Jesus came down from the table and danced a ring dance with his twelve disciples. The picture here is of the disciples united with their Rabbi in the mystery of atonement. Sounding through the dance is the voice of Christ, the Logos, the original Word that was there at the beginning, that came to dwell among us, that will be there at the end, imparting the essence of divine mystery through the Great Dance described so brilliantly by Lewis.

Perhaps because of that dance scene in The Acts of St. John, Christian writers, musicians and poets have repeatedly used the image of the dance. Theologians use the Greek word perichoresis, which means “dancing around,” to describe the way in which the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity relate one to another. In the Trinity’s dance, “each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. [This] creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love.” (Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Penguin: New York, 2009, p. 215) Creation is a dance with the inner life of the Trinity written all through it and the Christ-about-to-be-Born invites us to join the dance, to share the memories and dreams of God, to be part of the family of God.

Early Fathers of the Church often commented on the dance as a means of worship and of linking the faithful to the angels and blessed souls in Paradise. The Fourth Century bishop, St. Basil of Caesarea wrote, “Could there be anything more blessed than to imitate on earth the ring-dance of the angels . . . . ?” And, although the attribution may be spurious, there is a poem in praise of the dance credited to St. Augustine of Hippo:

I praise the dance,
for it frees people from the heaviness of matter
and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance,
which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space,
of time,
of people,
who are in constant danger
of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person,
one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life,
who is not obsessed by lust for people and things
and the demon of isolation in his own ego.
Dancing demands a freed person,
one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.
I praise the dance.
O man, learn to dance,
or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.

“Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,” sings the Christ-about-to-be-Born in the old Cornish Christmas carol. In a more contemporary song many of you will know, the Christ-about-to-be-Born says:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun.
I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth;
At Bethlehem, I had my birth.
Dance, then, wherever you may be;
For I am the lord of the dance, said he.
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be;
And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.
(Lord of the Dance by Sydney Carter)

The Christ-about-to-be-Born invites us to join the Great Dance, to share the memories and dreams of God and to be part of the family of God.

Or as Baron the Christmas Puppy would put it [sings]

“Everybody dance now! A-a-a-a-men! A-a-a-a-men! A-a-a-a-men!”

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

Category: Psalms (Page 23 of 41)

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Beyond Jesus’ Instructions: Annual Parish Meeting Sermon – January 25, 2015

The Great Dance with the Christ-about-to-be-Born: Sermon for Christmas Eve 2014

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