How do we live, preparing for the future? A more problematic question is how do we live while waiting in the face of the unknown? For many of us our lives are lived in anticipation of the unknown. The readings for the First Sunday in Advent present in different ways the question, so how do we live in the present-time with expectations  that point us towards the a future, while our memories keep us prisoners of our past? Between the past and the future lies the uncertainties of the present-time.

For most of us, our attitude towards time is at best ambivalent. We behave as if past, present, and future are insulated from each other as if contained in water-tight compartments . We say, oh that’s in the past to imply it is something done and dusted and recognising that nothing now can be done about to change it, Likewise, we regard the future in much the same way as we regard the past. We might say of the future, oh the future hasn’t happened yet it’s not real, it’s only a dream.

These ways of treating the past and the future are our attempts to bring some order and clarity to our experience of the flow of events in the present. Yet, time remains an ambivalent experience for us. The definition of ambivalent is, to have mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. Both mixed feelings and contradictory ideas describe our relationship to time.

T.S. Eliot, is a poet whose work is familiar to many of you. For some of you he may be only a name you have heard or not heard before. Eliot explores the ambivalence of time in much of his poetry. Note a moment ago i used the present tense, Eliot is a poet. Is he a poet or was he a poet? See how our ambivalence towards time expresses itself in such ordinary figures of speech. Anyway, Eliot explores our ambivalence towards time in passages like this one from his poem Little Gidding, the finale to his Four Quartets:

What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. … We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.

The past finds echo in our expectations of the future. In the yet-to-become-known we encounter the unresolved projections of that which is now only half remembered. That’s the way the human mind works. It pattern matches experience so that present experience and future expectations are often strongly conditioned by projections of the way the remembered, or half remembered, or apparently forgotten, still actively influences us. This is the process Freud identified so clearly as the operation of the unconscious. Through the content of the unconscious our past maintains its power over present and our future. The unconscious mind is like a computer hard drive. We think something is erased because we have tried to get rid of it and no longer see it. Yet, it is nevertheless still there awaiting  our unpleasant rediscovery when we least expect it.

The season of Advent is the start of a new Church year. Advent is for many of us our most favorite season. Advent evokes for me a memory of all those new beginnings. I especially recall when at the beginning of the new school year opening my new exercise book for the first time. I can see the pale green lines on the page and thin red line of the margin. This is a memory of expectation as I survey the virgin page lying before me.my expectations are high for it has yet to be despoiled and defaced by my untidy handwriting with its inevitable multitudinous crossings out.  A memory long forgotten, coming to mind and coloring my expectations and experience of the season of Advent.

Advent is a season of expectation, preparation, and waiting. Expectations are often-times difficult. How can we know what we expect will really come to fruition? Preparation is somewhat easier. At least in preparation we have something to do. In contrast waiting is an experience that is the most difficult to tolerate. The Old Testament lessons for the next four weeks are from the prophet Isaiah. We might call this Isaiah’s futuristic dreaming of a messianic age, expected but yet to arrive. Isaiah’s dream of the future is set within a present context of high anxiety. The Assyrians are at the gates of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah is inevitable.

Advent is Expectation

In the midst of political and national turmoil, Isaiah dreams of a time when the improbable will happen as part of a new messianic age. Jerusalem, no longer beleaguered and awaiting destruction will be raised up for all the nations to stream towards. Even more improbable is his dream of warfare ending and the striking image of swords beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks. He ends this chapter with an invitation: come house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord. Put another way I believe that through Isaiah’s prophecy God is saying to us: Come Trinity, let us plant in the present-time, the seeds of our audacious dreaming of our future. 

Isaiah’s dream is a dream of a future that has yet to become fully realized and yet, because he has the courage to dream it, becomes already known. It is a vision of a future that dares to break free of imagination limited by our memories of the past. Although on a chronological level, Isaiah speaks to us from our collective past, we hear his voice speaking directly to our own experience of the present. The context changes, yet the challenges remain the same. We live in a time when to have a positive dream for our collective future feels like a forlorn hope we can’t afford. Instead we feel we need to prepare for the worst as we survey a future where:

• The post WW II stability of the Pax Americana is fraying. New and ominous forces, both terrorist and nationalist, rise to threaten our world order. The world order of Pax Americana, has for 70 years ensured stability and security. However a stability and security dictated on our own terms.
• In the face of apocalyptic visions of the future the cohesion of our nation fractures. We argue over the best way to address our problems. More serious still, we disagree about the nature of the problems facing us. Some argue for  budget reduction while others advocate the urgent need to renew our vital infrastructures.
• We hotly contest among ourselves about the reality of global warming and the degradation of the world environment as natural disasters of epic proportion ravage the planet. We argue even though its plain to all that we are not insulated from the frightening power of nature as parts of the country are ravaged by flood, wind, fire, and drought.While some lobby for  policies that might avert what they see as a coming environmental catastrophe, others argue that continued degradation of the environment is a price worth paying to maintain our competitive economic edge.
• We are witnessing a resurgence of institutional racism many of us thought long dead and buried; our forgotten past rising to haunt our present.
• Economic disparities increase to alarming proportions. The prosperity of the many is sacrificed to the profits of the few.  A recent survey reported by PBS News reveals that 65% of Americans, both Republicans as well as Democrats, favor an increase of the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with only 28% opposing this measure.
• Our own middle class dreams of financial security evaporate before our eyes. We are not only fearful for our children’s futures, we are baffled and disquieted by the cynical indifference of our society as a whole to the future of our children as commitments to education and jobs for the young are abandoned in the face of economic expediencies.
• Our political system becomes even more corrupted by unfettered restraint on the financial influence of vested interests. As the conservative New York Times journalist and commentator David Brooks noted recently, the problem for the political system is not the amount of money pouring in, but the lack of transparency, so that we can’t know who it is that is wielding undue influence over our politicians. 

Advent is Preparation

So what is the point of Advent’s message of preparation in the face of our tendency to be so fearful in the face of the yet-to-become-known? The Lectionary readings for Advent all echo the common theme of the need to let our dreams of a future time inform the way we live in the present. 

The present is where we live sandwiched between our past and our future . We get on with living as well and as creatively as we can in the present-time. The Apostle Paul reminds his readers that: You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. Jesus advocates that as in Noah’s day his disciples should go-on eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, images of getting-on with normal life. The seeds of future hopes are planted in the ordinariness of the present. The present is also the place where we struggle with the past is played out.  Our half remembered and forgotten memories project their power to dictate our future. To dream new dreams we must first become aware of and break the shackles of memory. Isaiah’s vision speaks to us down the ages because it is an invitation to walk in the light, not hide in the dark. It is an invitation to not fear to dream the seeming impossible.

Advent is a time for expectation of things to come. Advent is a time for preparation, which means having the audacity in the present time to plant the seeds that will one day mature into our future hope. Advent means consciously rejecting the self-protective foreboding that results when we can only see into our future through the prism of our past.

Advent is Waiting

However, most of all Advent is a time for patient waiting. In my experience waiting is the hardest thing to tolerate. Yet, the ability to courageously wait is the hallmark of our task in this present-time. The Theologian Paul Tillich put it beautifully when he wrote:

Although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we already possess it. Waiting, says Tillich, anticipates that which is not yet real. That is, if we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait, Tillich says, in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait. Theology of Culture as compiled at http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=378&C=83

In another of his poems from the Four Quartets, titled East Coker, T.S. Eliot writes that to hope is often going to be to hope for the wrong thing. To love will inevitably be at some level a love of the wrong thing. Eliot understands the power of memory to dictate that the mind and heart recognize only what they already know. So is loving and hoping and believing a fruitless task?  No, he answers for: the faith and the love and the hope are realized only in the waiting!

I. An historical perspective

In 1925 Pius XI proclaimed the feast of Christ the King as an assertion of the Catholic Church’s protest against the rise of fascism and the growing power of communism. There is an interesting background to this development. In 313, the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, forever changing the developmental course of Christianity. The Church now became a great institution of state adopting the images and attributes of political and economic power.

Under Constantine and his Byzantine successors, in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire centered at Constantinople, the Church becomes incorporated as the spiritual aspect of imperial power. In the Western part of the Empire, at Rome now increasingly subject to barbarian invasion, the political center of imperial power collapses and comes to be replaced by the Church as the only center for both political and spiritual power. In Rome, over time the Pope replaces the Emperor. The Pope as the Bishop of Rome, also becomes a king directly ruling a swathe of territory straddling the central part of the Italian Peninsula known as the Papal States. The Papal States existed as an independent state, with the Pope as its kingly ruler, until as late as 1861.

While, the Constantinian Settlement set the Church on a course to become a center of political power rivaling the other great center of power, the Imperial Court, it also resulted in the attributes of earthly kingship being projected onto the image of Christ. In many Churches of the Byzantine style, Christ is depicted in the image of Christ Pantocrator as Emperor of the Universe. Even today we see in some Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches the central image not of the dying Christ on the Cross, but of the Christus Rex, Christ as King, reigning in glory from the Cross. 

Pius XI’s 1925 proclamation of the feast of Christ the King seems to me to stand in this tradition. In the face of the growing power of fascism and communism, Pius XI asserts the old Constantinian power of the Church as the only center of allegiance for Roman Catholics.  Here is an old story of one authoritarian system asserting itself against competing authoritarian rivals. 

Pius’ proclamation also needs to be understood within the Italian context. In 1861, the newly unified Kingdom of Italy proclaimed Rome as its capital. This was greeted by the Vatican as a hostile act amounting to the annexation of Rome by the Kingdom of Italy, leaving only a small enclave surrounding the Vatican itself as the remnant of the once mighty Papal States. Between 1861 and 1929 the Popes considered themselves prisoners of the Italian State and thus refused to leave the Vatican City. The Vatican and the Italian Government signed the Lateran Agreements in 1929 bringing the papal self-confinement to an end inaugurating the situation we know today.

II. A contemporary perspective

In 1994 with the publication of the Common Revised Lectionary most mainline Christian Churches including those of the Anglican Communion adopted Christ the King as the last Sunday of the Christian Year. We are among those first generations of Christians who are acutely conscious of living in a post-Constantinian era. In Pope Francis I many of us hope we are witnessing a beginning of the reversal of the Roman Church’s retreat back into a Constantinian world-view, a marked trend since Vatican II. Therefore, the question for us is, in what sense has the Episcopal Church  adopted the celebration of Christ the King?

III. The struggle between Culture and Gospel

Luke’s Gospel draws our attention to Jesus in the travail of dying on the Cross.  In the Gospels the so-called kingship of Jesus is a way for the Roman authorities to draw attention to the irony of his situation. The Romans are saying: look Jews, here is your King just like your nation, defeated and humiliated. Jesus on the cross is no serious contender with the power of Caesar. Herein lies a difficulty! Christians have often wanted to transform the image of Christ on the cross into a subtle exercise of power as understood within the contexts of their own political landscapes.

I am grateful to Brian Stoffregen in his sermon blog on Text Week for his reference to Robert Capon, who in Hunting the Divine Fox confronts us with our typical American Messiah which bears little resemblance to Luke’s image of Jesus on the cross:

. . . almost nobody resists the temptation to jazz up the humanity of Christ. The true paradigm of the ordinary American view of Jesus is Superman: “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way.” If that isn’t popular christology, I’ll eat my hat. Jesus gentle, meek, and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than‑human insides bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It’s got it all — including, just so you shouldn’t miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane. 

Capon notes that the human race has always been deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. He notes that we don’t want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, because:

… he claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.” [pp. 90-91; this book has been reprinted, along with two other books under the title The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology] 

Superman Jesus is one way out of our having to take the suffering servant ministry of Jesus revealed through the cross, seriously.  It is our American cultural equivalent to the earlier images of Christ Pantocrator and of Christus Rex, both reigning in triumph and glory, both avoiding the shame and humiliation that Luke and the other Gospel writers show us as the essential elements of Jesus dying on the cross. The challenge for us today is to realize that the celebration of Christ the King is not a celebration of Jesus Superman. Neither is it a celebration of Jesus as secret King (my kingdom is not of this world) who rejects the pain and mess of the real world in preference to some other world that is accessible only in the inner world of the believer.

Christ the King is the celebration of Jesus as Messiah. The theology of Jesus’ kingship is the Jewish theology of the Messiah as God’s promised one, who, in his coming confronts the business-as-usual mentality of human political, social, and economic structures. However, the Jewish theology of the Messiah undergoes a development in the hands of Jesus. Jesus as Messiah does not conform to the Jewish (and we might equally read here American) nationalist expectation of a mighty king coming to fight fire with fire. Jesus as Messiah is God announcing the in-breaking of the Kingdom. Christ as King is not a celebration of kingship as we understand it to be, the projection of earthly images of power residing in a single person. It is the announcement of Kingdom. The Kingdom is made real in those attributes Jesus reveals on the cross; courage, servant-hood, forgiveness, generosity, and inclusion.

Kingdom is a realm of being that makes us very uneasy. The Kingdom of God challenges our easy accommodation with the status quo. The status quo draws on the privileging of power, which is always unequally distributed. From the unequal distribution of power, flow all the forms of oppression that characterizes our contemporary society.

I want to single-out two aspects of the way living in the Kingdom challenges our accommodation with the cultural values around us.  Christ the King is Trinity Cathedral’s in-gathering Sunday. An expectation of the Kingdom of God lies in no longer praying that God’s kingdom will come while we continue to manage our wealth as if it actually belonged, rather than was entrusted, to us. The health and vitality of the common good requires that prosperity is shared and spread around. As a society Americans discover this truth, then forget it, only to have to rediscover it once more as the fabric of society frays under the weight of unrestrained greed. As a culture we currently seem to be in the forgetting part of the cycle.

Therefore it is important that I share with you that in 2013 your generosity benefited good causes at home and abroad to the tune of $33,500. There is not a month that goes by when I am not able to offer financial assistance to those in a tight spot as a result of your continued generosity in support of the Dean’s Discretionary Account. I do want to thank the community for this powerful expression of support for our common good!

Christ the King this year coincides with Speak-out Sunday. Speak-out Sunday is a fitting protest for Christ the King against the shocking prevalence in our society of violence against women. In our society one in four women experience some form of violence against the person. Violence against women is an expression of the injustice of our society. It is an expression of the continued distortions of power between men and women. It is an expression of the economic stress that disproportionately affects the poor. It is an expression of our cultural, victimization of women typified in much of the popular police and crime drama we see on TV and in the cinema. Violence against women results from our society’s distorted images of masculinity. Patriarchal- competitive attitudes pitch men against one another in unjust hierarchies of power. It is often the men who lose-out in this hierarchical struggle for power that are most likely to turn their anger and pain against woman. Women become for many men a symbol of the vulnerability and helplessness they most fear.

Living in the Kingdom means one thing above all others. No-longer can we keep our faith a private affair and ignore the need of our neighbor. Jesus on the cross announces the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom. We struggle to accept this because if we do then who knows what God will expect from us? 

Next Sunday is Advent Sunday, heralding a new Church Year. Christ the King announces to us that we are already living in the Kingdom of God. We live this out when we follow Jesus in refusing to conform to the expectations of this world by an easy accommodation with its limited vision of worth and its truncated understanding of justice. In the Kingdom, Christ as King is not content to rule from afar, but rather comes to meet us in the humiliation of our powerlessness. In the Kingdom redemption is the gift offered to all as an expression of God’s deepest and truest nature.

As we celebrate the ending of a wonderful year and prepare with anticipation and excitement for the changes that 2014 promises, my prayer for us is that this Trinity community will become more and more a place where we recognize and make more manifest that Kingdom of God, already within and around us.

I have had the privilege of journeying with this community since 2009. During the last 16 months this has been in the capacity as your Dean, interim. Today, Allen Kimbrough, the chair of the Nominations Committee will joyfully announce the call of the next Dean, elect, who will take up his responsibilities as Dean on January 1^st 2014.

This is a moment of excitement. It has been a long haul for the members of our dedicated Nominations Committee, all of whom never imagined they would have to carry their responsibilities over such an extended period of time. I am excited because I believe they have discerned the prompting of the Holy Spirit faithfully and chosen well. And so, we move with expectation into the future. Because the future is still largely the yet-to-become-known, excitement and expectation are tinged with natural uncertainty.

This community is not the same community as the one, as Canon Pastor, I came to serve in 2009. This is a rather unremarkable statement because like the human body, human communities are always in the process of renewing themselves. Because this is literally a moment-to-moment process, we don’t normally notice the changes.

Each Dean brings to this community the timely gifts of that which is needed. Some of you will have long memories stretching over the tenure of a number of Deans. With the vantage of hindsight, it becomes possible to see how each brought timely gifts which, at the time, were the gifts the Cathedral needed. With time what is needed changes as the Cathedral Community develops and responds to the gifts each Dean has brought. Inevitably a community also chafes against the reality that one person cannot be all things to all people. In this way change occurs, emerging out of the tensions between strengths and limitations.

Periods of steady growth, inevitably lead to points of transition where a new consciousness beckons the community towards a different phase of growth. As a community we have been hovering at such a transition point. The ways we have done things in the past have needed to evolve in order for us to realize our potential as a community.

Over the last 16 months I have seen my task as Interim Dean as one of signaling the importance of possessing both courage and hope as we move forward together.  As when the stage lights dim and we sit in darkness hearing the scenery props repositioning, awaiting the lights to go up signalling the next scene in the play, my task has been to introduce changes, which while not attempting to change too much prepare for the coming of a new scene in the pageant of our community life. I would like to share with you my three priorities over this period of interregnum.

My first priority has been to strengthen the staff team by the introduction of a new style of collaborative working that I call freedom within a framework. I have encouraged the members of the paid staff to see the fuller integrity of their professional authority. In their areas of responsibility, I have encouraged them to employ their gifts of initiative and skill freed from the concern of micromanagement from above, and undue interference from members of the congregation from below. That’s the freedom part. The framework part of freedom within a framework is that of collegiality. Collaboration rests upon collegiality and communication providing the framework, as the rim of a wheel holds each of the spokes in place. One of the significant changes I have signaled to the community is that the paid staff are the people who carry the day-to-day responsibility for the good order of the organization. This emphasis is one of the necessary steps enabling our transitioning from a smaller to a larger organization.

My second priority has been to address the challenges in the area of financial stability. Last Fall, I introduced us to a structured and intentional conversation about money. This conversation resulted in 30% more of you committing to becoming pledging members. This Fall, our structured and intentional conversation about money focuses on an invitation to raise the level of our personal financial commitment to this community by a minimum of 1% of net income.

On Sunday November 17^th at the end of each service, the Treasurer, Keith Cook, will update us on progress to date in our current financial quarter. Then the Chair of the Stewardship Ministry Team, Tim Watt, will introduce us to a proposed expenditure budget for 2014. We are taking time at the end of worship to communicate to members of the Cathedral Community the import of the heavy lifting to be done if we are to close the gap between 2013 and 2014 budgets. As the British Chancellor of the Exchequer says each year on introducing the government’s budget in Parliament, this will be a budget for growth! 

Following the 10 am Eucharist, there will be a forum opportunity for questions and answers concerning our current financial position and our spending proposals for 2014. 

My third priority has been to call our attention to the centrality of our discipleship as followers of Christ. Dean Knisely used to tell the story that at his appointment some members commented on his too much talk about God. One member reassured the others that there was nothing to worry about because, he would soon get over that! He didn’t get over that and as a consequence we deepened and grew as a community.

Why else are we here if it is not to realize our inarticulate longing to fall more deeply in love with God. I am aware that to some this may sound almost like intemperate and embarrassingly evangelical language. However, I do not apologize for it. Our only future as a Church is to be faithful to our calling. I define that calling to be the ark of witness to the presence of God in the world all around us. We cannot do that unless we are a community where courageous hope and love challenge us to move beyond the limitations of our socially constructed imagination of God.

Each of us takes our own time as we grow into richer and fuller ways of being disciples. I have no wish to force, push, or hurry individuals on this journey. However, I refuse to pretend that there is any other journey for Christians to take, other than the journey of opening to an ever-deepening love of God and one another.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that on the road of Christian discipleship there will always be a temptation to misread and follow the signs of the times. We will encounter periods of intense difficulty, even at times dire danger, as the passions of division wreck havoc around us. The challenges of living a Christian life in our time and place continually threaten to divert us from our purpose and destination. In the warning there is also Jesus’ characteristic assurance that we will not come to harm nor lose our souls for the way to persevere in our Christian calling is to live motivated by faithful, loving, and courageous patience.

Background  

Last Thursday in our Episcopal 101 class we began to look at the Bible. In everyday speech we often refer to the Bible as a book. One of the things that people are often surprised to learn is that name Bible comes from a Greek word that does not mean book, but library. The Bible is more properly a library of books in a single binding.

All the books of the Bible address the core themes of our human experience of God. I am fond of the comment that everything in the Bible is true, and some of it actually happened. The Bible expresses truth, not because it is the product of divine dictation, but because its truth speaks directly to our difficult and painful human struggle of being in relationship with God.

Not everything in the Bible agrees with everything else in the Bible. This confuses modern people shaped by a scientific approach to the use of language. How can we know what to believe?  Amidst competing claims, how can we decide what is true and what is not?  Some Christians solve this dilemma by casting doubt aside and insisting that everything agrees with everything else under the cover of it being God’s divinely dictated word. Other Christians explain the Bible away as a series of interesting myths, the product of past pre-scientific cultures, having as much value as Greek mythology as a practical guide for living life in the 21^st Century.

As Episcopalians our approach to the Bible has been strongly influenced by our understanding that the relationship we have with God never takes place within a timeless vacuum. Christianity, like Judaism is a historical religion, meaning that the relationship with God is shaped by events in time and space. God communicates with us through becoming involved in the events not only of our history, but the events of our present-day lives. The reason for the huge variance between scriptural writings is that each book is the product of an exploration of human relationship with God as seen from within a particular social, political, and economic context. Rather than timeless, scripture is contextual, and herein lies its truth value!

The problem with context is that it is always relative. This is one of the laws of the universe with which we just have to live. Context allows for both a discovery, and a concealing, of God. Our context allows us to discover important elements in our relationship with God while at the same time hiding from us other perspectives on God. That is why we need the Biblical record. It communicates tradition to us. As the living past, Tradition is the Church’s interpretation of the record of Scripture.

Tradition works to keep our experience and perspective on God wider than our own context might otherwise allow. Yet, the task in each generation is to sit in the tension of having to interpret the Tradition of the living past in a way that equips us to meet the challenges we face living in our context of 21^st Century America.

Each Sunday, through the Lectionary of readings given for the particular day, God speaks to us as we gather as the people of God in worship. Through hearing how context has shaped the different ways the people of God, Hebrew as well as Christian, have grappled with their experience of relationship with God, we are invited to do likewise; to grapple with the demands of being in relationship with God within our own time and place.

Application I

In the Old Testament Reading from Job,  Job in the strongest possible terms, challenges God. Who is this God whom Job challenges? This is the God of Job’s culture and context. This is the God of easy answers and trite explanations for complex matters. Job is undergoing a devastating experience of loss and persecution and the wisdom of his friends rests on a conventional view of God, who says to Job: if disaster befalls you it must be your fault so suck it-up!

Job is the example of a human being able to breakout of the straightjacket of his religious and social conditioning. In confronting God, Job uses an element of his context to expand, through direct challenge, his understanding of God. Job expects his redeemer to vindicate him.

The term redeemer is so familiar to Christians that we automatically assume that although Job would not have been aware of doing so, he was implicitly referring to Christ, the redeeming second person of the Trinity. However, in Job’s time a redeemer was usually a human guardian whose role was to offer protection for an individual against the harsh impact of economic misfortune. Using his contextual understanding of redeemer Job pits his culture’s limited view of God against an expanded expectation of how God should be in relationship with him.

I am attracted by the idea that Job is breaking free of his world’s social construction of God – a God who amuses himself by giving and taking with equal capriciousness. Job expands  his expectation of God challenging God to give an account of their relationship. That is the audacity of Job’s demand. Job breaks new ground and moves well beyond the limitations of his culture’s social imagination of God.

Application II

Luke gives us another story about Jesus in argument with the Jewish authorities. Usually, Luke presents Jesus in argument with the Pharisees. Here, Jesus is accosted by another group known as the Sadducees. For once the Pharisees are his supporters.

The Sadducees were the aristocratic, priestly class whose political power centered in the Temple and its rituals. There were significant political and religious differences between Sadducees and Pharisees. Politically, the Sadducees collaborated with the Roman Occupation in order to protect their privileged status and power. The Pharisees were stridently nationalistic. Religiously, the Sadducees and the Pharisees differed on the belief in resurrection.

Both the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus shared a belief in resurrection, which at the time of Jesus was a theologically progressive doctrine. It emerges out of the Pharisees acceptance of the oral tradition of Prophets augmenting the Torah. Both Pharisees and Jesus’ followers saw resurrection as a sign of the in-breaking of God’s reign through the coming of the Messiah. What they disagreed on was the identity of the Messiah. The Sadducees, being religiously conservative held firmly to an interpretation of the Torah that did not allow any theological development.

Using the inheritance practices prescribed by the Law of Moses where a widow became an inherited item of property, passing like other pieces of property to her husband’s brother, the Sadducees sought to entrap Jesus in a scenario that made the concept of resurrection seem ridiculous. Jesus does not argue with them he simply replies that the laws of this world do not apply in the world to come.

Context

In any society there are religious groups who are very happy with the status quo and see God as supporting the maintenance of the status quo. There are other religious groups whose hope is for God to reverse the injustices of this world in the world to come.

The content of Luke’s story is particular to 1^st Century occupied Palestine. But the context is the universal struggle between those whose religious perspective imprisons God in the limitations of the status quo, and those like Job, whose religious perspective challenges the status quo leading to an understanding of God that breaks free of social and religious constraints.

How does our context shapes our perspective of relationship with God? The authority of the Scriptures is honored, not when the solutions of past are imposed upon our experience, but when we struggle to expand our picture of God as appropriate for our own context, just as previous generations did in theirs.

In this period of stewardship renewal we are called upon to question our social assumptions that the fruits of our labor are attributable to our own efforts and are therefore, ours to control. When gratitude replaces pride of accomplishment as the source of our reflection on the best use of our resources in support of our Trinity community we are directly challenging the social assumptions of our materialist society.

Job expected God to give an account for God’s actions. This is a two way street. From the relative security and privilege of our own social location God likewise asks that we also give account for our willingness to see, or to remain blind, to the expectations of the Kingdom of God in our own time and place.

A little recap

Last week we launched our two-month annual renewal program, the theme of which I characterized as the stewardship of tender competence.  Stewardship is a year-long process, however, it gets an injection of energy during  the Fall of each year with an annual renewal phase. In the annual renewal phase we are asked to enter into an intentional reflection within ourselves and within our community. The focus of this reflection is on our relationship with God, lived and expressed through our relationship with one another as members of the Body of Christ at Trinity Cathedral. For me, there is a metaphor for the process of reflection borrowed from London Underground’s slogan: mind the gap.

As we begin the process of spiritual reflection on the way we are living, where do we notice the gap in our awareness lying?  I am keenly aware of a gap between what feels safe and manageable and what feels more than I am able to share from my gifts of time, talent, and treasure. It is when we mind the gap, that we notice the emotional- psychological chasm in our awareness between what we feel is reasonable and what is asked of us.

As Christians, and as a Christian Community, we long to contribute to the increase of well-being in the world around us. Becoming aware of the link between our desire to make a difference and our own spiritual growth and health is crucial. For instance, there is a strong spiritual health connection between the extent to which we long to open our hearts and the comparatively closed nature of our checkbooks. I am afraid that spiritual health requires us to open our checkbooks as widely as we long to open our hearts.  

The links: faith, courage and gratitude

In the passage from Luke’s Gospel that we heard proclaimed last week, Jesus drew our attention to the nature of faith. The problem of faith is not that we don’t have enough faith, but that we are not living courageously enough to believe that the mustard seed amount of faith we do have is able to achieve more than we can either imagine or expect.  Where are we to find the source for courage?

We live lives of gentle courage when noticing that at the heart of the mustard seed amount of faith there lies the core experience of gratitude. Gratitude is the first fruit of the spiritual life of discipleship. No circumstance is able to knock us off course for long when on a day by day basis we give grateful thanks for the freely given benefits we enjoy in our lives. In my experience only gratitude supplies enough of the energy needed for courageous, faithful, living.

The Gospel readings that will take us through this season of stewardship renewal focus on Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. This journey is an image for the path of discipleship. We are the disciples who accompany Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. Along the way we are learning what God needs from us as accountable and tenderly competent stewards. Mark, Matthew, and Luke each offer their own interpretation of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. Each, creates a particular feel for this journey through their selection of events encountered along the way. This year we journey with Jesus as seen through Luke’s eyes.

One of the key characteristics of the journey as perceived by Luke is the way Jesus goes out of his way to welcome those who were on the outside of society. Luke’s Jesus is particularly attentive to the plight of women and children in a brutally, male dominated society. He attends not only to the physical plight of the sick. He pays particular attention to the way illness socially relocates individuals to the outer edges of their social and religious systems. In doing this we are asked to reflect on the way social and religious systems continue today to relocate the sick and vulnerable to the margins. Luke’s Jesus is particularly concerned with the issues of inclusion and exclusion, who is in and who is out.

Gospel context

Today’s Gospel centers on a typical Lucan event, that of a request for healing. As Jesus moves through the contested borderlands between Jewish Galilee and the hostile region of Samaria, ten lepers encounter him along the road. They respectfully keep their distance while calling out for Jesus to have mercy on them.  Jesus turns his attention towards them and seeing them simply says: go show yourselves to the priests. As they set off to do so they are healed.

Miraculously finding themselves healed, nine continue on their way. Only one turn’s back to thank God, falling at Jesus’ feet, overwhelmed with gratitude. Jesus then asks the onlookers as well as his disciples, were not ten made clean?  Jesus’ point is that it is only the foreigner, the spurned other, who returns to give thanks?

This short story is crammed to overflowing with significance. Luke intends for us to read between the lines in order to grasp the significance for our own journey of discipleship.

1. The first thing to notice is the location. Jesus is in the contested border region between two mutually hostile populations, Jews and Samaritans. It is significant that Luke does not place this event among the rolling hills of Jewish Galilee. Neither does he wait until Jesus has safely crossed into the Jewish heartland of Judea. Because it is in the borderland, the places in our lives in-between those comfortable zones of certainty and secure identity. It is in the in-between spaces that we find God is most active.
2. The region between Samaria and Galilee is a metaphor for the in-between places where we experience risk and uncertainty, maybe even danger. It is in those uncomfortable experiences of taking a risk that we are more likely to be open to the power of God in our lives. The reason for this is simple. God is always closer to us in our vulnerability than in our security.
3. The phrase Luke uses for the healing of the lepers is made clean. Jesus sends them to the priests so that they can be certified to be ritually clean again. We miss the point if we see their physical disease as the core problem for the lepers. It’s their ritual contamination, a source of their exclusion from society and religion that is the core problem for them. In my experience it’s often the so-called religious worldview of good Church–going Christians that presents the strongest resistance to the inclusive expectations of the Kingdom of God.
4. In reflecting on tender competence in our relationships with others, does our religion protect us from those we shun? Does our faith challenge our need to protect our own sense of security by scape-goating and shunning those we fear as other?
5. A related point follows. Presumably nine of the lepers were Jews. Luke wants us to see that only the Samaritan, the feared other, the foreigner, allows himself to be spiritually and not merely physically healed. The fruit of his spiritually healing shows in his becoming overwhelmed with gratitude.

Some concluding remarks

Why does God desire our expression of gratitude? The latin word gratis means freely given, not earned, not paid for, but gift. Gratitude is our human response for what is freely given to us by God. Gratitude is not a matter of groveling before an irate, finger wagging God, who in a booming voice demands: you should be be grateful!  By closing the gap in our awareness, gratitude functions as a spiritual and emotional realignment towards God that issues forth in generous love and service. Gratitude opens us to God like flowers before the warmth of the Sun. Gratitude calls us to more deeply appreciate the link between the gifts God has given us to enjoy and our responsibility towards the health and welfare of the common good.

God invites our collaboration. We have the free will to either accept or decline the invitation. Most of us don’t really decline God’s invitation, we simply postpone acceptance until what we imagine will be a more propitious time in the future when we will be better situated to accept. In this way we perpetuate the gap between what feels safe and what is required of us. In this gap our courage fails. We feel unable to make an impact upon the world around us. We are filled with a sense of futility that encourages us to close-in, living increasingly in the interests of our own safety and security.

As we proceed with our intentional reflection on the art of tender competence, my hope for us all is that we become more mindful of the gifts of health, wealth, time and talent, which are ours not only to enjoy, but to share through lives of courageous faith and generous service.

First part of a message for the opening Sunday of stewardship renewal 

October 6^th is the Sunday designated for the launch of our Annual Renewal Program. The first question to address is what is annual renewal? The short answer is, it’s the start of our annual renewal of stewardship awareness. Stewardship is a yearlong process, which focuses our attention, as individuals, on our relationship with God as our creator and our commitment to the creation, which is the world around us.

At the heart of being Christian lies the key realization that God is not solitary but relational and communal. In Genesis: 1, God converses with God-self saying: Let us make humanity in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves and let them be masters all that lives upon the earth. The essence of what it means to be human flows from being formed in the essential image of God. Consequently, we are relational beings made to seek our fulfillment through relationships with one another.  In other words, like God, our identity and fulfillment is to be found in community. Tertullian, the Early Church Father, is reputed to have said: one Christian is no Christian. To be Christian is to be a member of the people of God. We are the Body of Christ because we are all baptized into one body. 

Somewhere in his description of the responsibilities of the cellarer, the person in the monastery entrusted with the management of resources and care of fabric, St Benedict uses the phrase tender competence. Norvene West, a prominent writer on Benedict writes: Stewardship means working with God to tend and care for the world, including tending and caring for our own vocation. 1997 p59 

In creation God has appointed us to be trustees. The job of the trustee is to look after things that don’t strictly belong to us. It is to look out for the interests of others. It involves giving account for actions taken. To be a good steward involves learning, day by day, how to be watchful, and mindfully aware of the responsibility to practice a tender competence in the care for the material world and human relationships. Through tender competence we give thankful account to God for all we have been given in trust to enjoy.

Tender competence is the action of discipleship, an action flowing from the experience of gratitude. Gratitude is the first fruit of spiritual living. To live the spiritual life of discipleship is to live from the experience of gratitude. Disciples never resist, for too long at least, a generous impulse.

Second Part

I begin this cycle of annual renewal by sharing with you my enormous gratitude to this community for the honor and love you extend to me as your priest and pastor. My gratitude to God for leading me to this phase of my life connects me with my desire for all of you to live joyful lives, lives lived outside the box rather than lives created by the limitation of imagination and failure of courage.

The first element of our annual renewal process is to address the thorny issue of money. As we look to 2014, we need to assess our financial strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to plan how we are going to exercise tender competence in the coming year. Gratitude, expressing itself in a generosity made real through tender competence for the world, is God’s call to us.

Since 2009 we have been running a deficit budget. The reason for this lies in the fact that it was only in 2009 that Trinity Cathedral took full responsibility for paying our own clergy. We think of Trinity as an old and well-established community. Yet, financially speaking we are only really four years old. We survived the collapse of the Downtown and the white-flight to the suburbs in the 1970’s and 80’s because the Diocese took financial responsibility for keeping a cathedral presence in the heart of the City. That act of faith bore rich fruit and all of us here this morning are evidence to that.

Once again we are growing year on year. I believe that growth is the strongest evidence that we are meeting needs. Each one of us has a need for a place to journey in the company of others similarly searching. Here, together, we stand in the tension between our received Tradition and the expectations of the Kingdom.

Today, I invite us to renew our intentional conversation around a metaphor of the gap. Anyone who has been to London will have heard the voice-over telling travelers to mind the gap as they move from platform to train and vice versa on the Underground. I invite us to mind the gap in our expectations between what feels safe, and what feels generous.  Let’s mind the gap between what we think we can provide, and what we really can provide. The difference between the two is simply the limitation of expectation and imagination, and the failure of courage. loves live from a notion of scarcity rather than abundance.

We limit our expectations to what most of us can easily afford, which in most cases amounts to an incredibly low percentage of our surpluses of money, time, and skills. Yet, what is needed is a prayerful and courageous generosity of money, time, and talent. Part of the malaise of modern life lies in our experience of futility and helplessness. We accept that we are unable to effect any real change in the world.  At the heart of all our longing is our human need to experience making an impact for good. Through our shared journey of discipleship as a community, Trinity has the power to make animpact in the world and through this we come to experience making a difference in the world.

Last year was the first year that we addressed our annual renewal program in an intentional and planned fashion. I would like to share with you the three most important fruits of that during this past year.

• Firstly, we increased the number of pledging households by 30%.
• Secondly, we have faithfully served one another and the world around us through our vibrant ministry programs.
• Thirdly, we have grown in talent so that this year, as Interim Dean, I do not have to lead our annual renewal. We have in place a highly skilled annual renewal ministry team that represents both established and new elements of our membership. The extent of their commitment to this ministry lies in their willingness to sign-on for three years so that continuity and incremental vision become the bedrock of the way we will address the demands upon us to become more empowered stewards.  

From today until Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday before Advent, or the Sunday before Thanksgiving, selected speakers from the congregation will share with us the importance for them of being part of Trinity’s community. Members of the stewardship ministry team will explain the stages of our renewal process.

It is my life experience that God does not encroach into that part of life which is ours to be accountable for. One of the reasons we so often feel that our prayers go unanswered is because we want God to take all the responsibility for changing our lives and making a better world. God does God’s part, but God is also reliant on us doing ours!

Third Part

Today’s Gospel reading starkly sets the theme for our annual renewal phase of Stewardship. Jesus is saying two things to us:

• We need only to have an amount of faith the size of a mustard seed for there to be no limit to what we can achieve.  Often our courage and vision fail because we think we need more faith than we have. What we have is enough!
• As stewards and disciples, there is nothing out of the ordinary in doing only what is our duty and responsibility to do.   

We are God’s stewards. As Christ’s disciples we are called to be accountable for the good use of the resources of money, time and talent entrusted to us.  One result of this accountability is that we give generously from the benefits we enjoy so that this Christian Community can make an impact in the world for good. Another is that we encounter that longed-for deepening sense of purpose, which is the spiritual fruit of an expanding sense of gratitude.

Part I

Spiritual understanding emerges over time from humanity’s long march of  relationship with God.  Christianity and Islam both inherit from Judaism a very historically rooted understanding of the evolution of God’s relationship with humanity. This historical understanding of God can be contrasted with the understanding of the great Eastern religions which hold a view of God as cosmic, outside historical time and place. In this view God is universal and unchanging.

In the Judaic historical view of God, God appears to be continually changing – evolving into human consciousness through events in time and place. The Scriptural record is the unfolding account that witnesses to this process of evolution. If we compare the images of God in Exodus:32 and Luke:15, God appears to grow and change over time. The point here is not the complex theological question of whether God changes or is unchanging. God appears to grow within an evolving relationship with humanity. With the evolution of culture our image of God, hopefully, deepens.

In Exodus 32 we see God entering into history very clearly through the long forty day conversation with Moses on Mount Sinai. Forty days is a long time, and in conversation with Moses, a clear picture emerges of a God  possessing strong feelings. The God of the Torah feels and reacts when things don’t go according to plan. Exodus:32 reveals a God who, when crossed can rise to heights of rage that threaten to obliterate Israel. God rages against Israel because God passionately loves Israel. The passionate God is revealed here to have anger management issues. God appears to have a poor tolerance for being disappointed and displays an alarming tendency for poor impulse control.

Part II

The people have become frightened by Moses’ long stay on the mountain. They feel lost and bewildered without Moses and the God who accompanies him. Lost and afraid, deprived of Moses they turn to Aaron, Moses’ brother for comfort and leadership. They ask him to restore their lost sense of God’s presence.

Aaron is priest and priests are usually more down-to-earth than prophets. So Aaron and the people construct a God who is more immediately available to them. It’s not so much that they confuse the Golden Calf for the unseen God of Moses. Through the Golden Calf they simply long to experience a God who is accessible and available.  In the Golden Calf, they can see God, and they can touch God. This image is an image of God with them, a God to whom they are able to pour out their concerns, to whom they can express their fears, a God before whom they can dance and celebrate with ecstatic joy. Feeling lost and abandoned, through the Golden Calf the Israelites have a God they cannot lose.

Exodus:32 seems to be one of those powerful cathartic moments in the history of the relationship between God and this small section of humanity, namely the Israelites. In the face of God’s rage and the threat of poor impulse control Moses discovers it’s possible to stand his ground and force God to calm down. Moses discovers that God can be reasoned with. If this is a first for Moses it is not for God, who earlier in time seems to have had a similar encounter with Abraham who convinced God to save the cities of the plain – Sodom and Gomorrah. In both instances a human being needs to remind God of God’s desire to remain faithful to his promises despite a sudden rush of blood to the head. There is a deep insight into the psychology of relationship here. No real relationship can exist where either party to the relationship lacks the power to make an impact upon the other!

God also seems to learn something from this encounter. God’s mood is changed by being reminded of the bigger picture of the covenant with Abraham, now being renewed with Moses. Despite his rage, God also seems to realize that human beings need a level of physical intimacy of encounter with Godself.  Rabbi Arthur Waskow commenting on this aspect of the encounter on Mount Sinai says:

The ancient rabbios thought there was a relationship between the Golden Mishkan (the portable Shrine known to us as the Tent of Meeting) and the Golden Calf. The way they understand the relationship was that from watching how the people dance for the calf, God ruefully accepts that the people need a physical focus for their experience of God. So God gives them the Mishkan in place of a calf. In this approach, the story as we have it in the Torah is “out of order” — chronologically reversed. For it is the experience of the calf that convinces God to design a Mishkan.

Rabbi Waskow ruefully notes the similarity between the golden calf and the golden altar to be placed at the center of the Tent of Meeting; both made of gold, both with horns. He says:

And the people? Dimly from the foot of the mountain, they hear the overtones, a blur: “Plenty of gold? Uh-huh. And — something about horns? — Un-huh. Must be a golden bull-calf!!” So they build it. For God as well as us, the truth is firm: What you sow, that you shall reap. Or to put it in another way: certainly earth is spirit, there needs to be a physical context for the spiritual path. (A “path” is very earthy.) https://theshalomcenter.org/content/golden-calf-golden-mishka

Part III

We also live in a time when idols abound. Since the Enlightenment, God has been in retreat from the stage of the universe, finally ending up well off stage, leaving us to strut with increasing self-importance center stage. Christianity takes a detour into Deism where the image of God is that of the prime mover who subsequently leaves the universe to run itself. God absents Godself, leaving us feeling alone because we are now like the Israelites at the foot of Mt Sinai, bereft of a lively sense of being in relationship with God and trying to get on with things the best way they can. Finding substitutes to fill the chasm of our loss we construct and worship our own golden calves. Amidst the many idols of Western Society the idols of science and morality particularly stand-out.

Like the Golden Calf our idols of science and morality comfort us with something more immediate and tangible in the face of an experience of existential loneliness. I am not suggesting that scientific progress is not a benefit to society but as an idol it comforts us with the illusion that through increasing control over the material universe we don’t need God because we can become the authors of our own salvation. Similarly, civilization needs a moral compass.  Yet, the idol of morality comforts us in the belief that if we just follow the rules we will be saved by being a good person.

Idols function well, up to a point. It’s lonely center stage with only the faintest intimation of God whispering from the stage wings. In our loneliness we question whether we really do have a relationship with God that is accessible to us in the here-and-now of our lives. In our need to assuage our existential loneliness the idols of science and morality promise more than they can deliver. The 21^st century is a time when these idols increasingly fail to fill the gap created by our loss of tangible relationship with God. This causes us to plunge into even deeper despair!

Part IV

Many Christians might accuse me of heresy in suggesting that God is anything but unchangeable. Yet, my point is because we have a God made known to us through the particularity of human history and culture, as we evolve our experience of God and our images of God, evolve with us. In Luke:15 Jesus offers us profound images that reveal the evolution of God over the long march from Exodus to the Incarnation. Where the God of Moses is passionate and jealous, the God of Jesus is compassionate and extravagant.

The parables of Jesus are not morality stories. They are exhortations to discipleship. Through the juxtaposing of images that are at once familiar and at the same time absurd, Jesus challenges us to move beyond the limits of our idols, which limited by what we are able to imagine for ourselves. The expectations of the Kingdom of God (thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven) break into our safe but lonely experience, forcing us to draw uncomfortable comparisons between what we are prepared to settle for, and what God desires for us.

The God of Moses demanded obedience. The God of Jesus call us into a relationship of discipleship in which we find the courage to live and work for more than we imagine being possible. Only discipleship leads us to the discovery that in the midst of feeling alone and lost, we are already found. As David Ewart in his weekly sermon blog Holy Textures puts it:

There may indeed be joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, but the parables are more about the joy to be had on earth from hearing the good news of the extravagant God who risks all to search for each one of us personally, individually – joyfully. Our God isn’t sitting passively off somewhere in heaven waiting for someone to bring news that a sinner has repented today. Our God is actively searching for us.

My question is will we allow ourselves to be found?

Our lives are live-out within a place of tension between the Tradition we receive and the demands of the times in which we live. As human beings we like to divide reality into past, present, and future. For us these divisions carry real meaning. The past is gone, the future has yet to arrive. So we are invited to pay attention to living in the present.

This neat division of past, present, and future breaks down when we consider the tradition is the presence of the living past in the midst of our present experience. At the same time the future is always breaking into the present through what we Christians recognize as the expectations of the Kingdom. Daily we pray the words: Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. In God’s sense of time Tradition as the living past, and Kingdom expectations as the direction of that which is not yet, flow in and out of our experience of present reality.

Two weeks ago I preached on the passage from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus heals the woman with curvature of the spine on the Sabbath Day. https://relationalrealities.com/2013/08/24/the-humanizing-of-tradition/

I explored the importance of this healing lying not as an expression of physical cure but as the healing through which Jesus lifted from the woman the moral burden of sin, which popular Jewish belief of the time maintained was the cause of her deformity.

At issue between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue was not the fact of the woman’s deliverance, but that Jesus had infringed and interpretation of God’s command in Genesis to keep the Sabbath day holy through abstaining from all work. Jesus understood his action as releasing the woman from the bondage of Satan, an fitting action for the Sabbath Day.

I went on to explore Jesus’ reference to the bondage of Satan as an expression of the way the interpretation of Tradition becomes subject over time to the hardness of the human heart. For Jesus indicates that Satan is to be found in way the hardness of the human heart turns Tradition into an agent for human oppression rather than an instrument of our liberation.

My title for this sermon of two weeks ago was the Humanizing of Tradition. Luke shows us how Jesus’ uses the circumstances of the here and now to humanize the application of the Tradition of Moses by interpreting-out of the living tradition the distorting effects of human society’s need to find scapegoats to sacrifice.

Some have commented how helpful they found my sermon from two weeks ago. Episcopalians are very comfortable when we read how Jesus again and again seeks to humanize religious tradition. We particularly like the way Luke attends to the human realities encountered in this place of tension in the present time. As Episcopalians, we warm to this Jesus. Ours is a very human interpretation of Christianity. We are at home with there not being easy answers. In fact we are hugely relieved that life requires skillful negotiation of a world of grey rather than feeling locked into the certainties of a world of black and white. We embrace culture and are passionate advocates for the interpreting-out of the hardness of heart from the Christian Tradition. 

Yet our mood changes to unease when we encounter Jesus proclaiming the expectations of the Kingdom. We puzzle at his call for us to take up our cross and follow him on the road of discipleship. We don’t usually think of ourselves as disciples. That’s a little too intense for us. Passages such as Luke 14: 25-33 really disturb us if we allow ourselves to pay attention to them. Our response is to take comfort in Jesus’ use of hyperbole as a teaching tool, whispering reassuringly to one another that when Jesus says: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father or mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple – he doesn’t really mean it, he is just exaggerating for effect!

Yet, Jesus does mean what he says. If he teaches and demonstrates the humanizing of tradition, he also calls for the radicalizing of culture through the expectation of the coming of God’s Kingdom. We welcome the expectations of the kingdom through embarking on the path of discipleship. This is a path that requires us to place relationship with Christ as our first and highest priority. Only if we do this can we become agents of the Kingdom.

Episcopalians may not have much enthusiasm for the notion of discipleship, especially because those Christian’s who do, give it such a bad name! Yet, we really do care about the coming of the Kingdom. We are a Christian tradition that is passionate about social justice and the eradication of discrimination that results in the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty.

It’s not possible to ignore Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom and the radical implications of the coming of the Kingdom for our culture. Neither is it enough to explain away his words as simply the use of hyperbole, although this is also true. So what is the way forward for us in relation to this text and other texts in which Jesus proclaims Kingdom expectations?

At Trinity Cathedral summer is passing. Two things for me mark the passing of summer: the Choir returns after its summer recess and we move into the period of the annual renewal program. Financial stewardship is a significant element of our annual renewal. Following the custom developed last year we will commence the annual renewal program on the 6^th of October and run through to the Sunday before Thanksgiving. A departure from previous years means that we will have a pretty clear draft budget for 2014 in advance of the renewal campaign so no-one can remain unaware concerning the urgent financial priorities facing us in 2014.

It is urgent that we meet the financial challenges presented by the 2014 budget. Yet, we will not do so if we only rely on those who can afford to be more generous. The only way we will grow into the challenges in 2014 is through taking seriously Christ’s call to discipleship. Generosity without gratitude is not sufficient. Members can be generous. Only disciples experience and are able to express gratitude.

For me the pivotal section in Luke 14:25-33, God’s invitation to conversation with us as a community, comes at the very end when Jesus says: So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.  

Unfortunately, the English translation uses the word possessions, which implies things to be given up. However, the Greek can also be translated as possessing. Possessing implies that what is to given up is not a thing – a possession, but an attitude to possessing. Our relation to possessions lies not in having them but in the meaning and importance we give them, i.e. our attitude towards them.

The same is true with relationships. Our relationship with the people we call husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers or sisters becomes a spiritual problem when we seek to possess them. What offends many of us when we hear the phrase family values is the way this phrase operates as short hand for relationships of control and possession. We possess others when we see them as objects to satisfy our own need for security. We glory in them as extensions of our own needs, thus bringing us social approval and acceptance. However, relationships are gifts to be enjoyed. Even our own life is a gift which is given back to us again and again. The danger here is of clinging to a view of our life as the result of our own self-assertion, of something we earn, the success of which we is in our control.

It’s not a matter of hating family members and our own lives in the literal sense. Jesus is inviting us to see our relationships, our possessions, and our own life as flowing from the priority we give to our longing to love God.  As Augustine put it: our hearts are restless Lord, until they find their rest in thee.  

The message of this Gospel passage is this:

• Success does not lie in the numbers of followers, in fact numbers alone pose a danger, because nothing attracts like success and success alone will not provide the staying power and stamina needed to bring about the expectations of the Kingdom.
• The problem lies not in family relationships, but in the attitude we harbor towards others as objects to possess, with the power of possessing being the source for our own sense of security.
• If we cling to our relationships and even our own life as something to congratulate ourselves on having earned through the hard work of self-improvement, we will lose the only thing that is certain, the enjoyment of life as gift and the fruitfulness of life that flows from this.
• As a community of Christians we will not be able to fulfill our passion for the coming of the Kingdom unless we first accept the call to discipleship. The Kingdom is not furthered simply by our being good people doing what good people like to do.
• We become disciples through our membership of the self-denying, cross- bearing community of the Body of Christ at the intersection of Central and Roosevelt. This alone defines us as a community of disciples. Discipleship alone has the power to provide us with the resources to complete the task God calls us to.

Discipleship is an expectation of the Kingdom of God. Through responding to the call to follow Christ, the expectations of the coming of the Kingdom break into the present through us as daily we pray: Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.