The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
Listen to the Sermon for June 28, 2015
Note: The sermon was recorded during an outdoor service at St. Hubert's before the annual barbeque and there is sound from people arriving and passing vehicles.
Read the Sermon for June 28, 2015
The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
Listen to the Sermon for June 21, 2015
Read the Sermon for June 21, 2015
The Third Sunday After Pentecost
This sermon was preached at the 8:00 a.m. service and no audio recording was made.
Read the Sermon for June 14, 2015
An inclusive and authentic community of faith ought to stand by us and encourage us through all the stages and struggles of faith. I am reminded of this every year on the Second Sunday of Easter when we always read the account of the experience of St. Thomas the Apostle with the Risen Christ (John 20:19-31). This incident shows us that even the most empirical evidence is incomplete without the evidence from personal experience. One role of a faith community is to be a safe place where we can explore and seek understanding of all our experiences, especially those that puzzle and confound us. While the biblical revelation is primary in our faith journey, we believe tradition, reason, and experience are necessary lenses through which we discover the way forward together.
What are the five senses without experience? A scientist must rely on experience of the evidences that are seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled in conducting an experiment. How is the experience of the presence, the love, and the power of the living Christ in a person’s life any less real? No experiment is complete or valid, no philosophical argument is authentic, apart from the existential fact of human experience. After all, the words experience, experiment, and expert all have their origin in the Latin word experimentum, from experiri, which means to “test” or “try.”
One of my seminary professors used to say, “One can neither confirm nor deny in the armchair what has been established in the laboratory of the human soul.” Without experiential evidence, faith cannot survive and the doubts that live on the edge of our lives will consume us.
I’m grateful to be in a Church that recognizes that doubt plays a role in the quest for truth. Honest doubt is the forbearer of discovery! A questing spirit is normal and necessary in the development of a growing person. Thomas expressed his doubts in the security of the community of those whom Jesus had called along with him. He could have chosen other friends. Instead, he chose to remain among the friends of Jesus.
Never did one of them say, “Thomas, you’re through here. Out you go. You can’t stay in our midst because you are a heretic, a skeptic, and an unbeliever.” The disciples stood by Thomas in his struggle to believe.
Fundamentalism has gained a stronghold in our culture and, I suspect, driven more people away from faith than it has attracted. Our Church offers a healthy alternative. My friend Bill Cherry described The Episcopal Church this way: “Here's the deal about being an Episcopalian. You get to tinker with what you're taught until you get a personal encompassing belief that you're comfortable with. Meanwhile, your Church doesn't scream at you that what you've just done is the work of the devil. Consequently, you love being an Episcopalian and can't imagine being anything else. I'm one of those.” Me too!
If you have doubts about the Resurrection, about your relationship with God, about life eternal, take heart! You are not the first and you will not be the last. You’ve come to the right Church. All are welcome here in the company of others who have been lovingly guided through doubt to faith. It’s the original Discovery Channel.
I’ll see you in Church!
P.S. Join us for a Discovery Weekend, either May 8-10 or June 12-14.
How do you feel about your faith this Easter? St. John’s account (John 20:1-18) of the experiences of those first disciples on that first Easter morning offers an important message: not everyone takes the same path to faith in the Risen Christ. In this account of the resurrection, the responses Simon Peter, the "Beloved Disciple", and Mary Magdalene are carefully interwoven. In their responses, the writer is able to show how faith in Christ's resurrection is generated in different ways.
Some people come to an Easter faith on the basis of evidence. And the process of gathering external evidence can take time! Peter arrived at the tomb second, but entered it first, looked around, saw everything and yet nothing. Then, he left. There is no evidence that what he saw generated any faith in him at all. All Peter took away from the empty tomb was a personal confirmation that indeed, Jesus' body was not present, just as Mary had reported. It took some time for Peter’s faith to develop because he required the additional evidence that came as the Risen Christ appeared to the Apostles over the next few weeks.
Other people come to their Easter faith in a relational way. The disciple whom Jesus loved ran with Peter to the tomb and arrived first, but he entered the tomb after Peter. He saw the same things Peter saw but his response was different. When he entered the tomb "he saw and believed." But he did not know what to do with his belief. He, like Peter, returned home. He believed Christ is risen. But what are the implications of the Resurrection for him? He seems to have come to understand the implications as he participated in the community of believers. Some think that it is this "beloved disciple" who wrote the gospel attributed to St. John. This gospel is characterized by both an understanding of love divine that is both deep and broad. Long after the first Easter, this writer remembered that Jesus had said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," and "love one another, just as I have loved you…I have told you this so that my joy will be in you, and your joy might be complete."
Mary Magdalene represents faith formed yet another way. The empty tomb, rather than even hinting resurrection, saddened Mary with the thought of Jesus' body being stolen. Even the appearance of two angels does not break her sorrow. In fact, the voice and the appearance of Jesus do not at first stir her to belief. Only when he speaks her name does she believe. Mary comes to faith through the word of Christ and by that word she must be sustained. She cannot resume her old relationship with her Lord. When Jesus says to Mary, "Do not hold on to me," he wants Mary to understand that "the past is prologue." There is much more to faith than what has gone before. Mary’s path to an Easter faith is no more normative than any other. We don't know whatever happened to her, but we do know what happened to her message. It spread around the world until it reached us.
Not everyone takes the same path to faith in the Risen Christ. There is not one normative way. Some respond to a word, others to evidence, and others to a relationship. But whatever the path, and whether sudden or slow, it is always faith that removes the distance between the first Easter and our own.
I’ll see you in Church!
Christian faith means hearing and responding with trust in God when God reaches out to us, offering a promise, wooing us, and calling us into a living redemptive relationship. There is an historic pattern to the phenomenon of faith: God calls, promising to use our lives for God's high purposes. The recipient of the call expresses fear, doubt, or anxiety. Then comes divine reassurance. Finally, there is a faithful response. We see it in the life of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Jeremiah, Mary and Joseph, the Apostles, and others through the ages.
We also see it in the life of Jesus. In his Baptism and Transfiguration there is the call. In the wilderness there is the question and divine reassurance. In the cross there is the faithful response. He does not allow the warning of friends nor the threat of foes deter him from what God has called him to do and the promise before him.
In his book, Living Faith While Holding Doubt, Martin Copenhaver writes, “There are times when we must make a 100% commitment to something about which we are only 51% certain.”
But faith is not a momentary phenomenon, an act at one point in time. Faith is a long-term trust, a committed, continuous response to God’s promises. Out of real doubts and deep questions, Abram ventures forth with God. The venturing forth does not erase those doubts and questions. Rather, he gathers up his doubts and stumbles on trusting God into a future on the basis of nothing but the promise.
God told Abraham that he and his descendants would be a blessing to all the people of the earth and that the promise would last forever. The old Rabbis said that when God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the dust, he was referring not only to numbers but to the fact that they would outlast those who trampled upon them. Given the way some in the three great Abrahamic faiths have fought one another for centuries, it is a wonder we have survived thus far.
St. Paul tells us that all who trust God like Abraham are his descendants, not just those who have his genes (Romans 4:13-25). Jesus shows us that the way of the cross is the way of faith. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
When God calls, how do you answer? With doubts, anxieties, fears? You are not alone! But can you listen beyond those obstacles to God's reassuring voice, calling you to trust him to lead you through them, perhaps even to use those obstacles as bridges into the future where he is trying to get you to go with him? Can you say, I'm 51% sure, Lord, but I'll trust you with the other 49%?
There is a beautiful prayer by Thomas a’ Kempis that expresses the heart’s desire to live with faith in God:
Write thy blessed name, O Lord, upon my heart, there to remain so indelibly engraven, that no prosperity, no adversity shall ever move me from thy love. Be thou to me a strong tower of defense, a comforter in tribulation, a deliverer in distress, a very present help in trouble, and a guide to heaven through the many temptations and dangers of this life. Amen.
In our Lenten journey together with our Savior, let this prayer be on our lips and learn from him what it truly means to trust in God.
I’ll see you in Church!
Last weekend, Dr. Richard Blackburn, Executive Director of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, was at Christ Church Cranbrook to lead a Healthy Congregations Workshop. The guiding principles of this workshop are derived from the work of Dr. Murray Bowen and Rabbi Edwin Friedman in family systems theory.
“Family systems theory postulates that the operation of the emotional system reflects an interplay between two counterbalancing forces – individuality and togetherness.” Of particular significance is their study of how anxiety affects any emotional system and the individuals in it.
Anxiety is the response of an organism to a real or imagined threat and is present in every person and relationship. Acute anxiety is a response to a real threat and most people usually adapt fairly successfully to acute anxiety. Chronic anxiety occurs in response to imaginary threats and often strains people’s ability to adapt to it.
An emotional system may be a family, a company, a sports team, a governmental entity, or a congregation. Individuals find ways to adapt to the anxieties of the family systems from which they come and bring those behaviors into other emotional systems.
Two key objectives of the workshop were to help each person explore and manage the anxiety in his or her life and to learn to recognize and appropriately respond to anxiety at work in the emotional systems in which they are involved.
An example from the story of our faith is the reaction of the Hebrews when Moses was on the mountain and did not return to them as soon as some expected (Exodus 32). Aaron was left in charge of the people while Moses was away. The people gathered around Aaron and expressed their anxiety about the delayed return of Moses. Instead of responding to the anxiety of the people from grounding in the divine values and principles that shaped them as a people and him as their leader, he reacted by abdicating his leadership role and instructed them to make a golden calf, which they could worship. As a poorly defined leader, Aaron let the anxieties of the herd take charge and proposed a quick-fix solution to the imagined problem they brought to him. When Moses confronted Aaron about what he did, he blamed the people instead of accepting responsibility. He even went so far as to give a completely passive explanation for the idol’s existence: “So, I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Moses himself failed in leadership in the face of the fears of the people at Kadesh-barnea. When the spies brought back a fear-laden report from the land God had commanded them to enter, the people said, “Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear” (Deut.1:28 NIV). Instead of responding to their fear of an imagined threat from the reality of God’s promise of protection, Moses reacted by caving in. The result, as you know, was that the people had to wander around in the wilderness until that faithless generation had died and Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.
Contrast these two examples with the leadership of Jesus during his temptation in the wilderness, where he responded to Satan by managing his own inner being, during the occasion at Caesarea Philipi when Peter urged him to take another path than the one that would lead to the cross, and during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane when his struggle with anxiety was so intense that he sweated blood.
Maybe Lent can be a time for us to search ourselves and discover the anxieties that interfere with our life in community and our ability to remain calm when others around us are losing their heads. When we do that, the life of the emotional systems of which we are members become healthier and we become more human, because we make better use of the uniquely human part of our brain that allows reason to overcome the reactions that come from the more primitive parts of our brains.
I am aware that many of the things that emerge from those more primitive parts of the human brain are necessary for survival. But when we are faced with imaginary or even potential threats, we have the God-given resources and opportunities to more fully express our humanity. And, as St. Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.” It is God who calls us to live our lives from divine values and principles so that we can build up the Church, advance God’s reign on earth, and embrace God’s vision of a creation restored in God’s Son.
That’s a worthy objective for the observance of a holy Lent.
I’ll see you in Church!