Category: Church of the Good Shepherd

An Advent Story

Advent is a time of preparation. The messages of the Hebrew prophets and of John the Bapitzer tell us that repentance is a necessary element when we are preparing for God’s entrance into our lives. The call to repentance is a call to examine our lives and change directions in ways that open our lives for God to do something new.

At this time of year, many people turn again to the wonderful Victorian era classic A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. As I read it, A Christmas Carol is really an Advent story. The surly old curmudgeon, Ebenezer Scrooge, lives a miserly existence with his entire being. Then he is visited in a dream by three Christmas ghosts. He sees his past and then his present. But what is most frightening to him, what shakes him to the core, is the vision of his future. Scrooge awakens to find that nothing has changed. Dickens says, “The bedpost was his own. The bed was his own. The room was his own.” Then Dickens adds, in what might be an Advent text, “Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends in.”

Scrooge undergoes a radical transformation and becomes an entirely new person. He leaves behind the cold and indifferent miser and becomes generous and compassionate. He seizes the time and becomes what the Bible might call “a new creation.” The world has not changed, but he has!

It is a heart-warming story. But more than that, it is a hopeful story. It provides us with the hope that we too can have a change of heart and mind when we know we should. John the Baptizer tells us that someone is coming, someone so spectacular that it is not enough simply to hang around waiting for him to arrive. It is time to get ready, to prepare the way, so that when he comes he can walk a straight path right to us.

That’s what makes the news good! The call to wake up and change directions is filled with the promise that something new is about to happen right before our eyes and in our lives. The time before us is our own “to make amends in” as we prepare room for God to make us new creatures. May this Advent be such a time for you!

December 1, 2011
Sermon at Church of the Good Shepherd ~ November 27, 2011

First Sunday of Advent Year B
November 27, 2011

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November 27, 2011
Taking Time for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving may be a teachable moment, when we can connect the dots that form a picture of family life and family identity.

Families seem busier now than when I was a child. It's easy to understand, particularly with more two-career households, more activities for children and youth, and significant shifts in cultural values. When something has to give, family meals may fall by the wayside. And yet, family meals are not only a time for strengthening family ties and keeping track of your children's lives, they can actually lead to better physical and mental health for your children and for the entire family.

Studies in recent years have concluded that family meals are a central feature in better nutrition, mental health, academic achievement, vocabulary, parenting, and family life in general. Many of us can recall how we learned the story of our family and came to an understanding of our place in that family while sitting at the table with our families.

Have you noticed that as the trend away from family dining has increased, worship patterns on Sundays have also changed? I suspect the same factors that make it more difficult to gather the family around the dinner table also make it more difficult for Christians to gather around the Lord's Table. I invite you to consider that the health and well-being of the Church is impacted by regular worship in ways that are similar to ways our families are impacted by regular family meals. When God calls us together to recall the family story and share in the family meal, we are nourished and formed as Christians. We remember who and whose we are.

Maybe the adage, "The Family That Prays Together Stays Together," is not so trite after all. I do understand that many people do not have good memories of family and home. Many have not found the church family all that wonderful either. However, there is universal hunger for a sense of belonging and identity that we might call "family feeling." Those who have found surrogate families will tell you how much it means. Those who have returned to their church families or found new ones will tell you how it has impacted their spiritual journey.

Now is a good time to pause and reflect on the busyness of our lives and consider what valuable times with our families and our church family have been crowded out. And, it is a good time to recall and give thanks for the good things that have not been crowded out. It is easy to focus on what we lack. Occasions of thanksgiving help us focus on the abundance of our lives.

If we are too busy to gather around the table – at home or at church – maybe we are just too busy for our own good and the good of those whose lives are closely linked with ours. At home and at church, we need that time together!

Here's a prayer and a selection of music to share with those whom you care about this Thanksgiving:

• The Collect for Thanksgiving Day from the Book of Common Prayer

Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the
fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those
who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of
your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and
the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of your Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

• The hymn Now Thank We All Our God, performed by The Cambridge Singers and the City of London Sinfonia, conducted by John Rutter.

November 22, 2011
Sermon at Church of the Good Shepherd ~ November 20, 2011

Proper 29A ~ The Reign of Christ

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November 20, 2011
Christ’s Reign in Our Lives – Now and Then

We are coming to the Last Sunday After Pentecost. Many liturgical churches also celebrate this as The Feast of Christ the King. In our continuing efforts to make our language more gender inclusive, the term Reign of Christ is gaining acceptance as the designtion for this Sunday. I really prefer Reign of Christ because the emphasis is on what Christ is doing throughout the cosmos and throughout eternity – reigning!

Sunday’s Gospel, Matthew 25:31-46, is often referred to as The Parable of the Last Judgment. It speaks of the accountability of all people when the reigning Christ sits upon his throne.

I recall an encounter I had with a radically evangelical fundamentalist during my college years. He and I were about the same age. He was a member of Campus Crusade for Christ and had chosen me as the target of his mission. We talked about our differing theological views and never found much common ground. It turned out to be a debate, not a conversation. At the end of our debate, he referred to this passage of scripture and said as he parted, “I hope you’ll see the light and end up in heaven with me after the great judgment.”

He wanted the Reign of Christ to be all about the Last Judgment. Ever since then, I've been very curious about how and when we are accountable to Christ. So, naturally, when this text pops us, that's where my thoughts go.

If you’ll read the passage carefully, you’ll see that the basis of our accountability is not on having the right doctrine. When we stand before Christ it is always about how we express the faith we profess – how we are ministering to Christ through our service to the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the sick, the prisoners, the marginalized and vulnerable people we encounter in our journey of faith. Faith in Christ is a challenge to expand our comfort zones and reach out beyond them to such as these in ways that our faith and our good works are in alignment.

A hungry man was walking down the street in a village of medieval Turkey. He had only a piece of bread in his hand. He came to a restaurant where some meatballs were being grilled. The cooking meat was so near and the smell so delicious the man held his piece of bread over the meat to capture some of the smell. As he started to eat the bread, the angry restaurant owner seized him and took him away to see a judge.

The owner protested, “This man was stealing the smell of my meat without asking permission. I want you to make him pay me for it.” The judge thought for a moment, then held up his purse in front of the owner and shook it. “What are you doing that for?” asked the restaurant owner? The judge replied, “I am paying you. The sound of money is fair payment for the smell of food.”

The challenge when we dealing with the kind of people described by Jesus in this passage is to make sure that what we are sharing with them is real. We must make sure that our care is expressed in ways that are tangible and life changing.

Each Sunday, we say we believe “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” One might say that Matthew 25:31-46 is a scriptural basis for that belief. It seems clear to me that the Judgment is not about arguing our case or preparing to be judged. Neither the sheep nor the goats had much of an argument or seemed prepared. It is about how we live day by day and it is about being accountable for our discipleship all along the way and not just at the end. The reigning Christ is already on the throne. We are judged not by the precision of our dogma or our membership in a particular church but by what we do for others. We are judged not by what we know but what we have shared.

What I wish I’d had the experience and presence of mind to say to my fundamentalist friend at the end of our conversation long ago is this: Both the sheep and goats will be judged not by their creeds but by their deeds.

November 17, 2011
Sermon at Church of the Good Shepherd ~ November 13, 2011

Proper 28A

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November 14, 2011
Sainthood

To the saints of God, greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I called you “saints.” Does that surprise you? If it does, perhaps it’s because we’ve done such a good job of substituting other words to identify those who have been joined to the Risen Christ. Let’s see how many I can name: members, communicants, parishioners, disciples, Christians, congregants, and, my least favorite, volunteers. There is more to being a saint than any of these words can possibly convey because, you see, only God can make a saint.

In our church, we're going to help make some saints on Sunday morning when we baptize some children. By water and the Holy Spirit, they are going to be sanctified through Baptism. They are going to become “holy ones of the Most High” who “shall receive the kingdom.” And I promise you, neither of them has volunteered to have this water poured over them any more than they have volunteered to be born with their particular skin color, born into U.S. citizenship, born to their respective parents, or born into these families. Neither will they volunteer to have their vaccinations, learn to wear clothes, take baths, or brush their teeth. They won’t volunteer to stay with the babysitter, go to school, come home before curfew, or fall in love. Without their knowledge or consent, we are going to pour some water over them, rub some oil on their heads, and declare that they are saints – baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own for ever. Those present are going to vow to do whatever it takes to help them grow to claim the new identity given to them through the Sacrament, to be formed as we have been as saints of God.

Whatever else they may be called during the course of their lives, in God’s eyes they are saints – blessed, sanctified, made holy, not by their own will but by the will of God. And, by virtue of the fact that someone baptized us, so are we. We are saints of God by grace and adoption. Above every other reason, when we return to the church week by week to worship with other saints, we return to be reminded who we are and to give thanks, to offer Eucharist, for the divine gift of and vocation to sainthood. For we were created by God to bear a divine image, to be shaped and formed by the will of our Creator, to be filled with the fullness that only God can give.

Have you noticed how often God's people are referred to as saints in both the Old and New Testament? The saints are those whom God has chosen and anointed to live in unity with God, one another, and those who have gone before us. We are supposed to represent God and bear God's message wherever we may be. We sometimes speak of the Church’s message, but if you read carefully, you will see that it is the other way around. It’s not so much that the Church has a Message as that the Message has a Church. The saints, who are the Church, are the delivery system for the Message. That is our inheritance and our vocation.

And consider the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes describe the blessed, the saints, those who have been made holy not by volunteering, which is an assertion of human volition, human will, but by the Divine Will. Our life in Christ takes us beyond being a volunteer. Luke’s version of the Beatitudes speaks directly to us, not to “them.” Blessed are You – Blessed John, Blessed Barbara, Blessed Phil, Holy Dominic, Holy Michael, Holy Lauren, Saint Kathy, Saint Amanda, Saint Clay. Here, the heart of the Gospel that enlivens and blesses all the saints of God is found. These “exclamations” are not a set of self-help sayings. Neither are they philosophical reflections on ways to govern life. They are not therapeutic ways of correcting dysfunctional lives. They are not information about what would make life better. They are not even a prescription for godly living. They are above all the way the Gospel looks when it appears in the person of Jesus Christ from whose lips they come and who lives within us today, filling us with a divine presence. In this sense they are truly “in-forming,” a filling full of the emptiness of this life and re-forming the way we understand and live life. It is what his presence in us causes us to become when he claims our hearts. Blessed. Holy. Saints.

This fullness is not our own doing. Hopefully, we have exercised our unique vocation as human beings and exercised faithful stewardship over that fullness. But it is not our own doing. The fullness is from God and belongs to God who in our creation gave us breath of life.

A colleague of mine enjoys telling of a time when a little boy was visiting his grandmother, whose church had beautiful stained glass windows like ours. The little boy asked his grandmother who the people in the windows were. His grandmother told him, “Those are saints.” And the boy exclaimed, “Oh, I get it! Saints are people that the light shines through.”

Saints of God, you and I, are people through whom God’s light shines. Throughout our lives, as our wills are transformed and we grow more receptive to God’s grace at work in us, the light of Christ shines more brilliantly through us. Theologians call that process "Sanctification." It is how God perfects the saints.

November 3, 2011
Passing On The Fruits of Our Contemplation

This blog, e-piphanies.com, is devoted to glimpses of God at work in our lives. That is another way of speaking about recognition of signs of the Kingdom of God – God’s Reign in our midst. It is my small effort to shine a light, so to speak, on places where I believe God is active and God's reign is intersecting with the world.

The heart of the message of Jesus Christ was the Kingdom of God. It is supposed to be the heart of the message of those who follow him in every age. When we read the Gospels, we see that sometimes Jesus used the terms Kingdom of Heaven, Abundant Life, or Eternal Life to refer to the same reality – God's life and intersecting with the created world. That intersection, for Jesus, had the purpose of transforming the reality of those who experienced it.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori writes about the Kingdom of God in this way, "The physicists may call it a parallel universe; we call it the dream of God. Pull it out, polish it up, and put it to work because that vision can change the world" (from A Wing and a Prayer: A Message of Faith and Hope).

We who are called out and entrusted with the message of the Kingdom need to be sure we order our lives in ways that make it possible for us to experience the reality of the Kingdom so that our message is authentic and effective. Now just what do I mean by that?

On Wednesday of this week, I heard The Rev’d Chris Webb, an Anglican Benedictine, speak about how the Kingdom of God breaks into our life in the world and confronts us with another set of realities. He said, “The world around us needs the confrontation of the Kingdom of God because it is a broken, wounded, hurting world.”

He went on to point out the irony that we who are called to be bearers of the good news of God’s reign are a part of the world to which we bring that news. It is inevitable that we “minister our brokenness into the brokenness of the world” even as we deliver the news.

An example of this inclination is seen in the life of Moses. When Moses realized how the Hebrew people were being mistreated by their Egyptian masters, he reacted in anger and killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew. He fled the scene and went to Midian where he met and married Miriam, the daughter of a priest named Jethro. It was there when he was herding his father-in-law’s sheep, that he had the remarkable encounter with the burning bush through which God confronted him. Later, he encountered God on the holy mountain and God delivered the Law to Moses. Then he had the tabernacle built as a place of corporate encounter with God. Still later, he would set up a tent apart from the camp where he would meet privately with God. When that happened, the pillar of cloud would come down and stay at the entrance, while the LORD spoke with Moses. (Exodus 33) Imagine that!

The trajectory of Moses’ experience of God matures from an impulsive activism, to an accidental encounter, to an intentional encounter, to an habitual one. At each step of the journey, Moses takes the fruit of his experience of God and shares it with others. And, at each step of the journey, the fruit appears to be more fully ripened and, as a result, makes a greater impact upon those with whom he shares it.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in trying to describe a healthy relationship between contemplativeness and activism, used the phrase contemplata alliis tradare, which Thomas Merton translated to mean “passing on the fruits of contemplation to others.” Like Moses, our active work of delivering the good news of the in-breaking reign of God requires the contemplative work of experiencing God first-hand in order for their to be good fruit.

Worship, both private and corporate, provides God with opportuities to give us glimpses of the Divine Life in the midst of our own lives and the life of the world. Our witness has to be more than talking about God; it must be a witness to our first-hand experience of God. We can’t give to the world something we don’t have in the first place.

So, this weekend, when you are planning your activities, remember that an encounter with the Living God awaits you. Come to worship expecting to be encountered in unexpected ways by the Creator of the Universe. Prepare to be changed. And don't be surprised if your experience of God extends into your daily life in equally unexpected ways. Life may never be the same. At least, that is the way it is supppoed to work. Our participation in worship opens our eyes to see God's hand at work and transforms our hearts to share what we see with others in words and actions.

Our witness requires worship. Share the fruits of your contemplation with others.

October 27, 2011
Sermon at Church of the Good Shepherd ~ October 23, 2011

Proper 25A

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October 23, 2011
The Christian Lifestyle

Jesus summed up the lifestyle God wants us to live a few words; "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:37-40).

The call to be faithful stewards of God’s bounty is the call to a lifestyle – a way of life – that acknowledges that everything we have belongs to God and that we are managers of a sacred trust. We fulfill that vocation through the spiritual disciplines of worship, proclamation, teaching, presence, fellowship, service, and offerings.* We commit ourselves to offer God the very best we have in the confidence that when God receives our offering, joined with the offering of Christ, it will be pleasing to God and accomplish the things God’s heart desires to accomplish through us. There may be no vocation in the universe that is greater or more of a wonder than the vocation of stewardship. It makes us unique among creatures. It makes us human. It is an expression of our creation in the image of God.

To avoid faithful participation in the life of the Church because we are too busy should be evidence to us that we are simply too busy. To avoid tithing because we think we don’t have enough is to insult God who has so bountifully blessed us and is evidence that we are living both materially and spiritually beyond our means.

Loving God with all our heart, and soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves involves giving the best we have, devotion to this shared way of life, and an understanding that the life God wants us to live demands faithful participation. A parable that has been told from thousands of pulpits for who knows how many generations gets to the heart of the matter:

A small village was excited to discover that it would soon receive a visit from their beloved King. Community leaders immediately began planning for the great event. Everyone agreed that they wanted to present a gift to the King that would represent their appreciation for his benevolent supervision and management of the realm. But the village was poor and couldn’t afford a gift worthy of a King as great as theirs.

Someone suggested, “We have wonderful vineyards and produce the best wine in the land. Let each of us bring the best wine from our cellars and create a great vat of wine to present to our beloved King!” The people embraced the idea with enthusiasm. Over the next several days, they brought bottles of their best wine and poured it into a large vat that would be presented to the King upon his arrival.

It occurred to some of the townspeople, however, that with so many people contributing wine to the large vat, their own contribution would not make much difference. “With so much wine,” they reasoned, “my failure to contribute will neither be noticed nor missed.” So people brought bottles filled with water instead of wine.

The day of celebration arrived. The village leaders proudly made their presentation of the town’s best wine to the King. They raised their glasses in honor of His Majesty and tasted the best wine their village had to offer. To the abject horror and humiliation of the entire village, the “town’s best wine” was nothing more than water. Everyone had thought the same thing; their personal contribution would not be needed nor missed. Although they all wanted to honor the King, they had failed to understand the necessity of their own personal participation.

Loving God and our neighbor is the essence of how God created life to be lived. It is not meant to be simply an abstract theological concept to which we give intellectual assent. It is meant to be carried out in tangible ways. It is meant to be the driving force in the life of the community of God’s people. It is meant to be central to our witness to others that God will always give us enough to be generous.

So don’t hold back! Give God the opportunity to use your life and all the blessings that have been entrusted to you in ways that become evidence of your love for God and for your neighbor. And, through the miracles that God will perform in your life, you will see that it is also the best way of loving yourself.

The night before one of his musicals was to open, Oscar Hammerstein pushed past Mary Martin, his singing star, in the soft red glow of the semi-darkness of the curtained stage and pressed into her hand a slip of paper. On it were these words, which later were to become the basis of one of the hit numbers in the uncut version of “The Sound of Music.”

A bell is not a bell until you ring it.
A song is not a song until you sing it.
Love was not put in your heart to stay.
Love is not love until you give it away.

* Gk. – Leitourgia, Kerygma, Didicae, Proseuche, Koinonia, Diakonia, Laetrea

October 20, 2011