Sermon for Pentecost Sunday - May 20th 2018

         

So? How many of you watched the Royal Wedding? How many of you have watched the Rev. Michael Curry’s amazing sermon that was part of the wedding?

          I did not watch the wedding, but by lunchtime yesterday I had read enough comments on line that I KNEW I needed to watch the sermon … and I was NOT disappointed … That was one of the finest Pentecost Sermons I have ever heard … it was one of the best sermons I have ever heard.

          It spoke of love, but it also dripped with a powerful social justice message that was delivered in the heart of the rich and powerful from around the world … and it was delivered by an American preacher from the Episcopalian Church, a church that is no longer in full communion with the Mother Church of England because the Episcopalians keep doing things like ordaining women, ordaining gays and lesbians and recognizing same-sex marriages as a sacrament blessed by God … so the homiletic arrow the reverend curry launched yesterday was directed at the heart of our society and said clearly – we can do better.

          That he spoke of love hearkens back to that heart wrenching day when a young Prince Harry watched his mother’s funeral and heard the immortal words of St Paul speaking of Love, eloquently offered by Tony Blair … words that Rev Curry picked up when he said:

Love is not selfish and self-centered. Love can be sacrificial, and in so doing, becomes redemptive. And that way of unselfish sacrificial redemptive love, changes lives and it can change this world.

If you don't believe me, just stop and think and imagine, think and imagine, well, think and imagine a world where love is the way. Imagine our homes and families when love is the way. Imagine neighborhoods and communities where love is the way. Imagine governments and nations where love is the way. Imagine business and commerce when love is the way. Imagine this tired old world when love is the way.

When love is the way, unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive, when love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook. When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the Earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more. When love is the way, there's plenty good room, plenty good room, for all of god's children because when love is the way, we actually treat each other well, like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that god is the source of us all and we are brothers and sisters, children of god. My brothers and sisters, that's a new heaven, a new Earth, a new world, a new human family.

          That in an eloquent and beautiful nutshell is the guts of Pentecost!!

          And Curry knew this as he spoke because he went on to speak of the importance of FIRE to humanity … how fire allows us to do all that we do today from live in cold frost places like Canada, to flying across the ocean, to doing things we do every day without even considering them … and he challenged his listeners – those in the chapel and the BILLIONS who have listened around the world to consider that we MUST discover for a second time the gift of fire – but the fire this time is LOVE …

          The redemptive power of love – and when we rediscover it we will, as he says, make of this old world a new world …

          In our readings today we hear of the spirit coming upon the disciples of followers of Christ like tongues of fire … fire … love … the redemptive power of love falling on the disciples – the church – you and I – as tongues of fire. And what does fire do? It either sputters out and is extinguished, or it grows and strengthens and spreads …

          Yesterday, we were challenged to celebrate love by encouraging that fire to spread and to transform the world with its power … it is, as poet Ann Weems observes of Pentecost:

The church is Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is poured out upon us
and sends us out together
aflame with new life,
inheritors of the wealth of God:
life abundant.
We are liberated from the prisons of pettiness,
jealousy, and greed,
liberated to be the church.
We are freed to free others.
We are affirmed to affirm others.
We are loved to love others.
We are family;
we are community.
We are the church triumphant—
you, me, anyone who would come unto the Lord—
renewed, redirected, empowered
to change things and lives
together in love and wholeness.
We are the Lord’s church,
the church of justice and mercy,
the people sent to open prisons,
to heal the sick
to clothe the naked
to feed the hungry
to reconcile
to be alleluias when there is no music.
The mantle is upon our shoulders.
Joy is apparent in our living.
We have been commissioned to be the church of Jesus Christ

          For me, this weekend I have rediscovered my flame for preaching … in the fall of 1990, I remember going into the Anglican Book room in downtown Kingston – we called it “Maria’s” because the lady running it was named Maria and even though it was an offshoot of the Anglican Diocese in Kingston, it was very much Maria’s bookstore … it was where we theology college students went to get our text books, and where we could go to just browse and make purchases on an account we could carry until we graduated three or four years later … I know my library expanded exponentially in my three years at Queens’ and I’m also sure I’m not the only one … but some purchases stand out more than others … I can still remember the grey rainy September day I discovered the works of Ann Weems … her book “Reaching for rainbows” was like a theological bomb for me … her use of language, her insistence on focusing on pushing the boundaries and celebrating the joy that is within the church touched me deeply and radically altered my view of church and ministry and life … I have all of her collected books of poems and liturgies, and I have used them over and over and over …

          But to be wholly honest … after 28 years, I had grown weary and her words didn’t resonate with me like they once did … I was approaching preaching my 27^th Pentecost wondering what I could possible share or reflect on that was new and that could revive that fire …

          And so yesterday I listened to the preaching of Rev Curry on love and fire, and I felt a stirring … Listening to rev curry, I was reminded of the power that we hold as people of faith when we take the message we hear over and over seriously … I was blown away as he quoted Solomon, Martin Luther King, Pierre De’ Chardin, and pulled it all together with a POWERFUL proclamation of love and its power to transform not only the world, but those who open themselves to it …

          The backstory of this weekend is how Prince Harry’s life is framed by the words LOVE … as a young boy we ALL saw beautiful pictures of he and his brother with their mother Diana, and there was clearly deep love shared between them … at her memorial the words of Paul spoke of the kind of love we all saw reflected in Diana, and our hearts broke for young William and Harry at their loss … and I’m sure many of us prayed that they wouldn’t simply fall into the clutches of the grey men made famous by their mother … then as a teen Harry had a wild reputation, but as a young man joined the British Military and served in combat – a first for a Royal putting himself in harm’s way as part of a larger whole … then with his discharge he truly embodied love by being one of the forces behind the Invictus games that celebrates the accomplishment of men and women damaged by combat, allowing them a place to bring their best and achieve more than perhaps even they thought possible … and now, this weekend as a young man becoming a husband, we celebrate the presence of love and ALL that it has done in his young life and we wish he and Megan well in their life together … it is as we were told – power in love, and where true love is found, God is there.

          The message that falls upon us today – Pentecost – as we leave this place is the message that tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves – and everything hangs on that love of God and our neighbour – EVERYTHING …

          And so, what shall we do with this? How shall we nurture and sustain and grow the Pentecost flame that rests within each of us?

          Shall we allow it to sputter out and die? Or shall we fan it and help it grow and strengthen?

          Today is the birthday of the Church – the day we as a church universal and catholic came into being … the day, like that of the tower of Babel, when we were sent into ALL the world to proclaim and live the Gospel … and what was the message?

          One simple inalterable, accepting, welcoming, and transformative word: Love … our message is love, and now it rest upon us to share it in all that we do and say and think … and it isn’t as hard a task as we may think.

          I would like to end by sharing some of the powerful words by the late Ann Weems that helped propel me into the last 25 years of ministry … she once wrote:

          (This Church

          We don’t pretend to understand

                    the mystery of what goes on in God’s church.

          We just know we feel a pervading spirit of love

                    that reaches into the niches of all of us

                    and pulls us out into the open, free and alive and belonging.

          We believe this spirit of Love exists

                    because God’s spirit lives within this Church,

                    this unity of persons trying to be the Good News.

          We see this Church as a circle of people …

                    … holding hands … and dancing … supporting each other,

                              accepting each other, loving each other …

          Each person in this dancing circle is facing outward …

                    reaching into God’s world,

                              listening for the whimpering,

                                        watching for the hurting,

                    willing to offer a cup of cold water in God’s name …

          Sometimes they need the water …

                    Sometimes you need the water …

                              Sometimes I need the water …

          Being a part of the Church means knowing

                    that the cup is always filled in GOD’S name …

                                                                      (searching for shalom pg 54)

          May it be so … thanks be to God … let us pray … 

Total Authenticity ... scruffy visitors stretch the welcome ... Advent 2

This morning I would like to add to our nativity set … today we welcome in the Shepherds and their sheep …

          Why shepherds?

          Historically, we know that shepherds lived very much on the margins of the society – they were regarded as thieves and bandits and the good church people of Jesus day had little to do with them.

          I learned an interesting tid-bit this week reading up on shepherds – if the shepherds were out on the hillside tending their flocks when the angels appeared, it was NOT December but likely mid to late May that the visitation happened … it would appear that the flocks get let loose on the hills in the spring, not in the dead of winter. In December the flocks and the shepherds would be safely ensconced in paddocks close to town …

          But that aside – why are the shepherds part of the Nativity story ? They are an unlikely group to come and welcome the newborn king … yet, there is an appropriateness in having them gathering in the stable … Raymond Brown, the great Catholic theologian notes that the shepherds were indeed on the margins of their society, and as such they represent us – the ordinary and common people – the workers, the labourers, the average joes who are coming through the darkness to herald the birth of the new born.

          On a deeper level, the joy and excitement that marks their arrival and departure, and the certainty with which they appear and gather, is something we would do well to emulate.

          On a deeper level, in keeping with the spirit of the ideas from John Pavlovitz’s book, the transformation of the shepherds from a rejected marginalized group who were good and NOT keeping the customs and rituals of the people, and who regarded as unclean and impure, - the transformation to a central participant in the Good News proclamation that is Christmas, is a template for the Church and for us as people of faith …

          The concept on the table this week is – total authenticity … and there is perhaps no better figures to reflect on total authenticity in our scriptures than the shepherds and John the Baptist and the Biblical prophets …

          The shepherds make the transition from outcast to central player, and we now hold them as paradigms of faith – we sing hymns about them, tell stories about them, we have created an amazing pastoral panorama around them … and we have the character of John the Baptist.

          John himself is pretty out there and pretty much standing firmly on the margins of society before he even opens his mouth – then he speaks … in our reading today we have an edited version of John – a tame voice … in other accounts he calls those gathering before him a brood of vipers …

          Let that sink in for a moment – can you imagine coming to a worship service and having the preacher thunder from the pulpit calling you a brood of vipers and speaking of the wrath of God that is about to fall on you?

          Yet, here is John in all his glory doing just that … he is the messenger for the greater one that is yet to come, but as he speaks, he calls for repentance of the people and for the wrath of God to fall on them …

          You can’t get much more authentic than that …

          But authenticity opens the door to deeper conversations … to stronger relationships and to a healthy community that moves beyond the casual “hey, how are you? Lousy weather we’re having isn’t it …” that we are far too familiar with.

          The transformation that can come with total authenticity in the Church, is the transformation the prophet Isaiah dares to dream of … a new way … a bold way blessed by God’s presence and touched by the holy … and forever changed. The prophets were not warm and fuzzy theologians – their words challenged people and often rubbed them the wrong way, and more often than not totally opposed the rulers and powers of the day.

          So, of that new way …

          Pavlovitz writes that after years in ministry “one day I turned around and I didn’t recognize myself. I began to grieve the smallness of life, the lack of diversity around me. Not only was I now surrounded solely by other Christians, but only other Christians from my church AND only those who I easily clicked with. My table had grown staggeringly small … the reasons he notes that his table had shrunk rather than grown was because he had stopped being authentic as a person and as a minister.

          He notes that even though the scriptures are full of people who wear their doubt and their uncertainty openly, and are still regarded as caretakers of the religious tradition, that openness doesn’t exist in the church. Instead we edit and censor and offer a highly selective version of ourselves to those we share the pews with … we have put comfort over openness and authenticity. But the church thankfully is capable of much more than gathering heavily edited and carefully censored saints, the church can, if it chooses, be a place where real people gather warts and all, and where we no longer deny our authentic selves …

          And therein lies the challenge … how do we embody and live that level of authenticity as a church? As people? As a community?

          The monty python troop has a great sketch called nudge-nudge, wink-wink … the characters are having a conversation and hit a controvertial topic and they do a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more-say no more” bit that infers a different level of behaviour or response … that has long been true in the church.

          This past week I read a disturbing story from the US about a priest who murdered a young church member he was infatuated with, but for 57 years he went unpunished because of an epic “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more-say no more” approach to his crime … he confessed to other priests, but they did nothing … he was a suspect, but the church ignored it … he went on to have a hand in other crimes and enabling other priests to abuse young men and young women throughout the US … but today in his late 80’s he is being held accountable for his actions because the game of nudge-nudge, wink-wink has ended …

          It’s the same game that is underlying the #metoo movement and the precipitous decline of careers throughout Hollywood, and the world as the truth is being spoken and embraced. Too often, and for too long bad behaviour was endured and ignored as a ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ attitude prevailed and no one called the badly behaved to account …

          So, in the church – how do we claim our authenticity?

          If we can welcome in the shepherds to the stable, and listen as they leave proclaiming the Good News at the top of their lungs with great unfettered joy, then we can welcome and even BE the shepherds in our world – the marginalized people who with great faith, and even greater joy, celebrate the presence of the Holy.

          And so, it begins by being wholly open to the TRUTH … not the truth we chose to hear, but the truth …

          No more nudge-nudge, wink-wink … no more looking the other way when unrealistic expectations or hypocritical behaviours become evident …

          Instead, the church becomes as Pavlovitz suggests:

A beautifully restorative community, one where disparate people are invited to bring the full weight of their inconsistency and hypocrisy and vacillation, and to be lovingly received as they are. It can and should be (we can be and should) a place of loving renovation and healing and growth. BUT only when we allow everyone to be exactly who they are.

          The first question that arises is - What does that look like?

          It looks remarkably like you and I being ourselves – no more roles, no more pretense, no more editing or censoring – the person that you bump into at the grocery store on Tuesday, or at the game on Thursday, or at the coffee shop or bar or beer tent, is the SAME person … if we use blue language and cuss, so be it … if we can cuss at the arena or at home in front of the tv, then total authenticity calls us to cuss here too …

          If we like to have a glass of wine with dinner, then we have it and don’t pretend we didn’t …

          For me authenticity begins with a rejection of the lovely line – “but you are a minister …”

          For starters, we are ALL ministers, and secondly, I am not different from any one except that I have specialized training and education to do the job of paid accountable ministry … I’m human like everyone else … I make mistakes and missteps and so on, just like the rest of us …

          My first encounter with the “but you’re a minister …” came a year into my time in Bella Coola when very nasty letter from a very unhappy man who had been storing his junk in the basement of the manse … when we moved in the basement was FULL – and I mean full of stuff. Some came from the years and years of ministry at the end of the road literally and physically, but the store room was full floor to ceiling with the possessions of a tenant who had rented a room from the previous minister when he arrived five years earlier.

          I managed to track him down and asked him nicely to remove his stuff – I contacted him every couple of weeks for almost a year until one day a buddy of his showed up and took a bunch of the stuff like cameras, a saw, tools and so on … I asked him about the rest and he said “this is all he wanted” SO I sent him another letter politely asking him to please remove the stuff – we had a baby coming so we really needed the space for other things … a year after my first request to him, I heard nothing so I made arrangements to clear out the room – most of which it turned out had been damaged when the basement had flooded the spring before we arrived …

          A week after the room was cleaned out, painted and made inhabitable again I got a letter from him raging at destroying all his stuff and ruining his life and so on … it repeatedly said “how could you do this? You are a minister!”

          The letter upset me, and I shared it with an elder in the native community who sat for a long time and then said – “you did nothing wrong, you were more than generous letting him keep his crap there (insert a stronger word though) for so long. This isn’t about you being a minister, this is about him being a terrible human being …” then he said something that has stuck with me in the 24 plus years since – “a minister is a person like the rest of us, some people just don’t understand that nor do they accept it …”

          More often than not – when we hear the words – “but I expected more of you – you are a minister …” it has less to do with me, or the clergy and more to do with the speaker being called on their bad behaviour …  

          Total Authenticity means opening our doors, our community, ourselves to each other not with some façade hiding the truth, but opening to each other as they and we truly are … it means sharing our frustrations, our doubts, our sadnesses, our angers, our struggles, our triumphs … sharing whatever is going on in and around our lives … sharing who we are on Tuesday after getting bad news or on Thursday when we are watching the big game …

          Total authenticity invites us to step in the door as the marginalized, and like the shepherds to be transformed by the presence of the holy in the community we find in the dark night, and it then sends us back into our days proclaiming the transformative power of the Spirit working in and through us. And it all begins by simply being who we are with no masks, no facades, no editing, no censoring – just you and I sitting down at table together and being nothing more than that children of God … creating a new reality in the presence of the holy …  

          May it be so … Thanks be to God … let us pray …