On Friday of this last week, Canon Jeff Bullock, Canon Theologian for the Diocese of Arizona and our last Sunday’s preacher at Trinity Cathedral convened a small group of clergy for a book study. (Canon is Anglican-Episcopal speak for a priest or leading lay person appointed by the Bishop for the good order of the Church) The book chosen is Brad Kallenberg’s http://academic.udayton.edu/bradkallenberg/Home/Bio.html  Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age.

Kallenberg’s maps three phases in Western thought which he describes as precritical, modern, and postcritical. The Bible belongs to that period he identifies as precritical thinking. Precritical is a way of looking at the world akin to Charles Taylor’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(philosopher) term enchantment. Modern describes the way of thinking and looking at the world originating with the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th Century and reaching a peak in the mid to late 20th Century. A modern worldview is informed by the analytical method of scientific observation. In the precritical accounts of the Bible, the emphasis is on story and the picture of a world created by the details of the story. That many details in Biblical stories seem to us improbable does not worry the precritical reader. The details of a story take on a meaning by their context within the overarching theme of a story. Kallenberg uses the example of Jesus walking on the water. To the precritical mind this is not improbable. It is the kind of thing one would expect within the overarching context of Jesus as Son of God. Contrast this with the way a modern reader approaches the same Biblical story. Details are separated from overall contextual meaning and analyzed through asking questions like, could this really have happened or is there any historical proof for this claim? This is the world view Taylor calls disenchantment. 

We are now passing through a period when the modern worldview is breaking down in favor of what appears to be a return to a holistic, in contrast to an atomistic, approach to experiencing the world. The modern approach of constructing reality only from what can be externally observed and verified has left us in a universe that seems flat and drab and in which we feel deeply lonely. We are left with the question: is this all there is to life? Increasingly, our experience is that the modern worldview is inadequate and leaves us wanting more. Our current dissatisfaction with the limited world of factual certainties expresses itself in film and book through an increasing longing and appetite for mystery, and magical-realism. Consequently, the modern is giving way to an emerging world of thought Kallenberg sometimes calls postmodern, a somewhat confusing term because of its association with the deconstructionists, or postcritical, to my mind a better descriptive. In the modern world view stories are to be analyzed and verified. In the postcritical world view stories are to be inhabited and lived out.

The 27th January is the day when Trinity Cathedral holds its Annual General Meeting. In preparation for the meeting it has been customary for the Dean to offer a review of the past year. I suspect that previous Deans have tended to approach this task in a modern frame of mind. Cathedral Deans, like the rest of us, strongly influenced by our modern approach to thinking will have tended to break the past year down into events, facts and figures – the past year broken down into its atomistic parts and viewed from a perspective of achievement or failure, pride or disappointment.

A modern view of 2012

In this vein I can confirm that in 2012 Trinity Cathedral began the year with three full time priests, one nonstipendary priest missioner and three deacons. We ended the year with one full time priest, one nonstipendary priest missioner, and two deacons. Nevertheless, we have continued to flourish. We said goodbye to Canon Deborah Noonan at the end of July as she prepared to go off to become the Vicar of Dibley. With sad and somewhat anxious hearts we bade farewell to Dean Nicholas Knisely and his wife Karen at the end of August, wishing them well as Nicholas became the next Bishop of Rhode Island. This resulted in the Canon Pastor, at the Bishop’s invitation, stepping into the role of Dean in-between. At the end of December Bishop Kirk accepted Deacon John Mather’s request for a sabbatical year.

I can confirm that we experienced other personnel changes, in particular Sarah Gennett’s resignation as Youth Minister, Joan Howell’s stepping down as Children’s Education Director and Colin Gennett’s appointment as Children’s Education Co-ordinator. At the change-over of the year, Carol Lamont Walker, after many years of ministry in the Cathedral Shoppe has made a decision to step down as Shoppe Manager. For Carol and for the Trinity Community this is a decision that really does signify the passing of an era. For as the Cathedral grows in size it also is moving from a culture which rests heavily on the work of volunteers to a culture which needs a more centralized organization led by paid staff. To the paid staff, I express my deepest gratitude for the way they have accomplished more by using less.

I can confirm that our numbers have continued to swell as we have welcomed new spiritual seekers, along with Episcopalians from elsewhere together with others with established spiritual lives in other Christian Traditions. Our La Trinidad Community has continued to flourish in response to the welcome of the Episcopal Church, embodied by Canon Carmen Guerreo, priest missioner and Canon for Hispanic Ministry. The Trinity Community’s embrace of diversity welcomes members of the Latino Community excluded or discriminated against within an increasingly conservative Roman Catholic Church and wider Arizona Society. The growth of La Trinidad is reminiscent of Luke’s description of the first days of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles – as each day more and more were added to their number.

I can confirm that we had a most successful Annual Renewal Program. So many of you have responded with gratitude to God and generosity in support of the ministry of Trinity Cathedral. As a community, as well as individually, we continue to deepen our response to Jesus’ call to accompany him on the road of discipleship. We began 2012 with 170 pledging units and a $50,000 deficit and we ended the year with a balanced budget, thanks in large part to the spending discipline of the staff. As all the statistics are harmonized we start 2013 with and net increase of 44 new pledging units. Our current total stands at 195 pledging units and as the phone calls go out to those yet to respond, we anticipate this number continuing to rise.

Passing from a modern to a postcritical view of 2012

All of these events, facts and figures are true. Yet, this modern worldview, in breaking down the past year into atomistic parts leaves out something crucial. A precritical reading of the last year would have emphasized the story of how the Holy Spirit is active within Trinity Cathedral’s Community. A modern reading analyses the past year, dividing it up into a series of events, achievements and failures seen primarily, as the results of human agency. Yet, I want to address 2012 through a postcritical lens which emphasizes our experience as participants within a story. The past year is a story about who we are as a community. Through inhabiting our story in 2012 we encounter our identity. Who are we? We are the Body of Christ in the world.

Ours is a story of being Church through our participation in the life of the cross-bearing and saving community at the intersection of Roosevelt and Central. Ours is a story of a Spirit filled community inwardly strengthening its identity as a community of love. Ours is a story of a missional community reaching out beyond itself through prayer and active service, bearing witness to the presence of God in the world. As we inhabit the story of being the Church we discover our identity, not as a society of individual Christians but as the mystical Body of Christ bearing witness to God’s generous and abundant love for the world.

The Gospel for this morning from Luke 4:14-21 articulates what it means to be the Church bearing witness to the abundant love of God for the world. In worship our postcritical community story encounters our precritical Biblical story, transmitted to us across 2000 years as part of the collective memory of the Church. As we inhabit the postcritical story of being Trinity Cathedral facing-up to the challenges posed by life in 21st century America, we we encounter with the precritical Biblical story of salvation history. As we seek to inhabit both stories we become more and more those whom God is dreaming us into becoming.

Within this process of becoming, we emerge to find that the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. God has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. God has sent us to proclaim release to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

The postcritical invitation to inhabit our story

2012 has been but another year when through worship, prayer and action we have endeavored to rediscover over and over again our identity through inhabiting this story. As we enter into another year of change and challenge we don’t necessarily, need to know, let alone be able to agree among ourselves about what bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, challenging oppression and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor will, or even should, look like in 2013.

There are different possible interpretations ranging from a powerful focus on the fight for a just society to deepening our psychospiritual understanding in order to challenge our own spiritual and relational poverty.  While challenging the blindness to inequality in our society we also look more deeply into our own spiritual lives, challenging our own blindness, our sense of captivity and societal and self oppression. Some will be called more to engage in the external struggle, while others will be drawn more deeply into the internal exploration. Our identity as the Church means that we will be engaging across both outer world, and inner-world, fronts.

Luke 4:14-21 echoing the words of the Prophet Isaiah, goes to the heart of the story that is Jesus’s ministry. This precritical story takes us to the heart of our own postcritical story as the Christian Community in this place. We inhabit that story thereby encountering the source of our identity as those who can say the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. My invitation for all of us is to continue to live out the implications of this as we move into 2013.

Boundaries 

William Temple, perhaps the most influential  of the Archbishops of Canterbury in the 20th Century commented that the Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members. Perhaps this helps explain the Anglican Tradition’s rather odd view of boundaries. For nothing seems easier than to become a member of the Episcopal Church. In fact, just showing up on a regular basis might easily result in your slipping seamlessly into membership.

Given the prevailing truth based, salvation, preoccupied culture of large swathes of American Christianity this might appear to be a very odd way to carry on. The open boundary practice of the Episcopal Church regarding everyone who shows up for worship expresses the point behind Archbishop Temple’s comment – the Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members. Consequently, the Episcopal Church struggles to define the boundary between the Church and the World. Yet, that does not mean there is not a portal of entry into the Church. In worship all are welcome, yet the portal of entry into the practice of the Christian faith is still baptism.

Baptism

Our Gospel this morning is Luke’s account of the baptism of Jesus. Luke’s account has some interesting departures from the original account recorded in Mark.  John the Baptist is absent. In Luke’s chronology, at the time of Jesus’ baptism John languishes in Herod’s prison.  Luke does not give us the mechanics of who is doing the baptizing and the implication is that the Holy Spirit is the chief actor. Luke makes it clear that the Spirit takes bodily, physical form. The Holy Dove descends upon Jesus for everyone to see. The heavenly voice publicly proclaims Jesus’ identity as Son of God for everyone to hear.

In Mark, Jesus’ baptism seems intensely personal. His identity seems to be a secret that only he and John the Baptist really know about. In Luke, Jesus’ baptism has become everyone’s baptism. This last week, while wondering about the difference in emphasis between Luke and Mark I noticed that the difference in emphasis reflects something of the continual dispute among Christians as to whether we are saved through baptism or whether baptism is the sign that we are already saved.

Evangelical Christians tend to believe that we become individually saved through baptism. Baptism first requires a personal sign of faith, and so Evangelicals emphasize baptism as the conscious decision of the individual believer, i.e. a believer’s baptism. Baptism is the individual believer’s purchase of a ticket to salvation.

Anglicans tend to believe that baptism is a sign that we are already saved by God. For us, baptism is not like purchasing a ticket to individual salvation. Baptism is entry into the faith of the community that is already saved. We are saved through our participation in the life of the Church. God has already saved the world through the birth, death and Resurrection of Christ.

Through entry into and participation in the life of the Church we actively witness to this truth.

Church

I began with noting Archbishop Temple’s statement – the Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members. We are all painfully aware that the sad truth is that the Church often behaves as if it exists only for the sole benefit of its members.

Different Christian traditions all use the same word Church for the gathering of Christians. Yet, Protestants, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics have differing understandings of Church. Generally speaking, for Protestants the Church is simply the voluntary gathering of Christians who are all individually saved through their personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord. For Anglicans and Roman Catholics the Church has a collective identity greater than the sum total of its individual members. Salvation comes from our participation in the life of the saving community.

Current Roman Catholic emphasis tends not to agree with Archbishop Temple’s statement. For Roman Catholics, salvation is confined within the boundaries of the Church itself, which is why those boundaries have to be so rigorously policed. Using an analogy form baking bread for a moment, Roman Catholicism sees the Church as the loaf. Anglican Tradition understands the Church as the leaven in the loaf. For Episcopalians, the purpose of the Church as the saving community is to bear witness that God’s saving action extends to the whole world.

Implications

Does any of this matter? For me it does. In a society dominated by a  Calvinist reoccupation with whether each and every person is saved or dammed, I reject the notion that as an individual, through my choice of Jesus as Lord, I can be saved while the person next to me is dammed. My salvation has nothing to do with my self-assertion of belief. I am saved, and you are saved, because God loves us both without distinction. In a society where Christians easily become preoccupied by a notion of the Church as the Ark of Salvation, I accept that salvation comes to me through my participation in the saving community of the Church. Yet, the point of Temple’s statement is that God’s gift of salvation is not limited only to those within the Church.

The Baptismal Covenant of the Book of Common Prayer

Baptism is not a once upon a time event. It’s a daily process of living out our commitment to God’s world. We articulate our common purpose as the baptized in what’s known as the Baptismal Covenant. Every time a person is baptized we all participate in the Holy Spirit’s action by affirming five promises that commit us to action.

1. We promise to be faithful in our participation in the life of the Church. In other words we not only show up on Sunday morning but we try to practice being Christians seven days a week.
2. We promise to fight evil and when we fail, to return to the struggle through the path of repentance.
3. We promise to share with everyone the good news that in Christ, God has already saved the whole world.
4. We promise to serve Christ, by having a regard for our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.
5. Finally, we promise to strive for justice and peace in the world and to respect the dignity of all human being. In every generation that last promise is a real challenge. For it requires us to go beyond our easy accommodation to the values of culture that glosses over patterns of privilege and discrimination.

As Episcopalians, our apparent fuzziness about the boundaries, is by design. We trust the truth behind Archbishop Temple’s statement that the Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members. Our boundaries may be fuzzy, but our identity is clear!

Through baptism we participate in the life of the saving community. This community commonly called the Church is a witness to the fact that in Christ salvation is God’s freely offered gift to all, with no strings attached. Because of our baptism, our lives are lived in a tension. On the one hand we can be tempted to live with an uncritical accommodation to the values of our culture. Or we can view the events of our daily lives, and life of the communities around us, through the lens of those five promises in our Baptismal Covenant.

So to live, is to live as a Christian in the world.

The Church’s Calendar mark’s two kinds of celebrations. It marks celebrations that always occur on the same date each year, and celebrations that always occur on the same day each year.   Each year we celebrate the feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. This is an example of a fixed date celebration. Each year we also celebrate the Baptism of Jesus on the second Sunday in the Christmas Season. This is an example of a fixed day celebration. Today is both the 6th of January as well as being the second Sunday after Christmas and so both the Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus occur on the same day. According to the complex formula used for rating celebrations, the Epiphany takes precedence.

The arcane workings of the Calendar may seem tedious information, better suited to an Episcopal 101 class than a Sunday Sermon.  Actually, I never discuss anything as tedious as the  organization of the Church’s Calendar in EP 101. My point in raising it in the context of a Sunday Sermon is because the clash of Epiphany and Baptism of Christ, occurring on the same day, offers an opportunity to explore the inner and outer dimensions of our experience of God.

Epiphany is a Greek word that translates into English as showing.  In everyday speech we sometimes report: “I have had an epiphany” to communicate that we have had something of an ah-hah moment.

I prefer the word glimpsing as a better expression of the meaning of epiphany. When we catch a glimpse of something we suddenly see through, or see behind, or see around, the usual way our experience of the world appears to us. In the event that Matthew records as the Epiphany, for only Matthew’s Gospel records this detail in the narrative of the birth of Jesus, God is giving us a glimpse of the bigger picture within which a fuller understanding of the identity of this infant is revealed. 

In the Birth Narrative both Matthew and Luke report the details that set the birth of Jesus in its first century Palestinian context. Matthew’s addition of the arrival of the Magi, variously referred to as wise men or three kings, moves us beyond the everyday details of Jesus’ birth which is firmly located in a time and a place, into the bigger picture. In the bigger picture the muling and sucking infant we know as Jesus is none other than God’s anointed Christ. The arrival of the Magi bearing their gifts of gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, and myrrh for a death, offers us a glimpse into the larger world – a world that reveals to us the significance of the infant Jesus’s birth.

So the Epiphany is a point of intersection between the outer and inner dimensions of experience. Our burden as 21st century Christians is to struggle with a rationalist inheritance that since the Enlightenment has convinced us that what we see is all there is. This leaves most of us with feelings that echo the words memorialized by the singer Peggy Lee:  

Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball – if that’s all there is?

Our experience of living in a world where the appearance of things is all we think there is, is profoundly unsatisfying! We need to know that what we see is not all there is. What we often fail to notice is the way our lives unfold within a frame that encompasses more than the appearance of the external dimension of our day-to-day experience. This more than – we catch a glimpse of from time to time, when we connect with a sense of significance in our living. From time to time we catch a glimpse of a significance that lies beyond the mere appearance of events that unfold around us in the world. We catch it – and then the glimpse fades. 

What can be done about this? In attempting to answer this question I turn to the Baptism of Christ. It’s interesting, that Mark who tells us nothing of the birth of Jesus begins his gospel with the account of his baptism. It too, is an epiphany experience. As John performs the act of baptizing Jesus the heavens open and the voice of God confirms that Jesus is the Christ.

To escape the burden of the way 300 years of scientific rationalism has reduced our ability to see the bigger picture by confining our vision only to that which is externally observable, we have to seek help. That help comes to us through our spiritual development. Spiritual formation opens us to those repeated glimpses of significance, of our lives unfolding within the frame of a bigger picture. Our spiritual formation chiefly results from our participation in the life of religious community.

Human beings are not meant to live alone. We need to gather and organize into communities. Communities provide the resources necessary for our individual flourishing. Tertullian, one of the Early Church Fathers said, one Christian is no Christian. Being Christian is the result of belonging to the community of Christ’s Followers. The Christian Community is much greater than the sum total of its individual parts because it is expanded by the inflowing of the Grace of God. In this moment of time we are more than a gathering of individuals, we are the very Body of Christ in the world at the corner of Central and Roosevelt, in down-town Phoenix, Arizona. 

This morning we are welcoming seven persons into membership of the Body of Christ. We will promise before God to be the community within which they will be formed and sustained on their spiritual journey. Baptism is entry into participation in the community of faith. Participation shapes us so that we become more and more open to those moments of glimpsing the greater significance to our lives. For these six children and one adult, their baptism is their entry into the spiritual journey that we as the Body of Christ in the world are making together.

As individuals we catch glimpses from time to time of the divine significance that underpins our existence. These moments of epiphany offer snap shots of lives unfolding within a larger picture. These snap shots, these glimpsings, redirect and re-enliven us as we travel along the way. However, these are only glimpses. Epiphany is not for individuals, a continuous experience. 

Through baptism we come to participate in the life of Christ’s earthly body – the Church. Here we join others and together become greater than the sum total of our individual selves. It is only from within the experience of being part of the Body of Christ that we become more open to the profound glimpses of the significance of our lives within the continual action of God’s dreaming us all into becoming. 

It’s been several weeks since my last sermon blog. I have been enjoying a rest after a solid three-month period of weekly preaching on the theme of discipleship. As I return to writing today, its early Saturday morning and as I settle to reflect on the thoughts concerning the Gospel reading for Advent III what is uppermost in my mind is yesterday’s tragic events in Sandy Hook elementary School.

The airways and internet buzz with analysis and comment. We feel sick to our stomachs as we identify with the grief of the parents, teachers, first responders, and of course, the children all caught up in this whirlwind of suffering. If past events are an accurate guide to the unfolding of analysis and comment over the days, weeks and months to come, the central question will be what can we as a society learn from yet another tragic mass shooting?

Opinion will polarize around two positions. Many will seek to build meaning out of meaninglessness by distinguishing this event to the deranged psyche of one individual. Still many others will seek to understand this event as a generalized symptom of an increasingly distressed society.

Polarizations stereotype real life. Between stereotypes there can never be agreement. Human beings stereotype real experience because this process offers the illusion of explanation and maybe even the more illusive illusion of  understanding. As rational beings, we need both explanations and understandings. These enable us to feel the universe can still be predicted in ways that leave us feeling safe. Our desperate need to feel safe leads us to passionately defend our stereotypes as if they actually provide us with the potential to learn from our experience.

Stereotypes posse a semblance of the real truth of a situation. This is their danger. They seem on the face of things to be the truth. However, they are encapsulations that distort the reality they claim to represent through simplification and generalization. Both the shooter and the shooting have been described as evil – by no less a personage than the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia. The stereotype of evil is simply a way of saying the motivation and the act challenge understanding. To describe an act as evil closes-off any possibility of comprehending the meaning and restricts the potential for there to be any learning from experience!

To paraphrase Freud, experience that we cannot learn from is experience we are destined to repeat. My own background in Psychoanalysis confirms for me a truth that seems to be hard to learn. The only way we can begin to set ourselves free from the dark forces of our individual and collective unconscious is to allow that which can’t be thought about, and so, continues to be acted out, to become thinkable.

Our current difficulty as a society remains to allow the unthinkable to become thought. We can only allow this process to emerge if we resist our need to stereotype. The result is that we sit with complexity without the comfort of simple explanations. Only then might we begin to really learn from our collective experience.

**

The Gospel reading from Luke appointed for Advent III comes to us across 2000 years of transmission. We receive it as a stereotype. For us we have a mental picture of John the Baptist, dressed in a coat of camel-hair cursing and  cussing-out the sheep-like crowds who flock to him. We have an image of hordes running out through city gates and traversing the rocky desert terrain to arrive at a place in the wilderness. Here, they yearn to hear what they hope will be John’s simple and uncompromising answers to the complex anxieties that fill their daily lives. Wilderness is not only the location of meeting John, it is also symbolic of where their lives are lived.  The crowds revel, taking masochistic comfort from John’s firebrand style of collective verbal flagellation.

Although the crowds attending John are a mixed lot, Luke offers us an interesting profile of them. Once we get beneath our stereotype of the scene, we note Luke’s profile of the crowd. We see tax collectors and soldiers among the throng representing the powerful amidst the powerless, the exploiters among the exploited.  Within the collective of the crowd, all come together to seek answers to the challenges of their lives.

The crowds who throng to John represent a conquered society disintegrating under the pressures unleashed by the destruction of the traditional checks and balances through which Jewish society has traditionally governed itself. For us this would be the equivalent of an invader abolishing our form of government, straining our society to the point where the mechanisms of  civil society begin to unravel, i.e. the law, organized religion, education, economic regulation, the social contract.

The tax collectors are private entrepreneurs who buy the right to collect the tax owed to Rome. This is a lucrative franchise which allows several layers of middle men to add their inflated commission to the baseline tax. Not only do the people resent paying the tax to their Roman oppressors, but they also resent being additionally exploited by the tax collectors who, after-all are their fellow Jews. Occupation pits Jew against Jew. Likewise, the soldiers are the local thugs working security detail. They are the hired muscle used to intimidate the ordinary people. They practice free-lance intimidation and extortion of their own. Occupation pits citizen against citizen.

Luke identifies John as an Essene-like character. The Essenes, are known to us as a radical sect who sought out an alternative lifestyle in the back-blocks of the Idaho of Judea. We think they are the authors of the scrolls found at Qumran. Whether John was an Essene or not, we can’t really know. However, for Luke and for us, John represents the last of the great Hebrew Prophets. In times of crisis people rush to embrace the prophet’s uncomfortable message only to later disregard it when times improve.

John employs the ritual vocabulary (brood of vipers etc) of the prophetic genre and we can assume this would have been understood as the convention of prophetic speech, by his hears. However, the focus of his preaching is upon announcing the coming of Jesus as Messiah. He calls his hearers to prepare for the Messiah’s arrival. In answer to their question: what then should we do?, John abandons his ritualized prophetic language and addresses each category of questioner before him with surprising intimacy.

To the ordinary people he exhorts them to relationships of mutual support. To the tax collectors he exhorts them to ethical practice. To the soldiers he exhorts them to cease extorting their fellow citizens through force and to be satisfied with what they honestly earn. As we penetrate beneath the stereotype of our image of a first century Judean scene we find the question asked by the crowd becomes our question also – what then should we do?

**

Earlier this week I had an email from someone who has been attending the Cathedral fairly frequently over the last couple of months. In the email this person, with some sadness, reported that with the exception of the Greeters and the Clergy not one person from the congregation had spoken to them. We need to take this person’s experience to heart and I would like to invite us to wonder together about what this tells us about our community.

Episcopal Churches have an appalling record of welcoming strangers. I have shared with you some common jokes about Episcopalians and money – like: we give till it hurts- pity we have such a low threshold to pain. There are also jokes about the quality of our welcome. All our churches have a sign outside that says: The Episcopal Church Welcomes You!- and the joke is: as long as you are like us. Another rather shocking aphorism runs: Everyone who needs to be an Episcopalian, already is. I don’t believe these witticisms in anyway reflect our actual attitudes at Trinity. In actuality we are a community of spiritual refugees. We are a warm community that welcomes diversity and intends to be a place of welcome for new people. However, it seems that our intention and our practice are out of sync.

So what then should we – the people of Trinity Cathedral- be doing?  The answer this morning is to be a source for God’s expression of welcome to everyone whose path directs them to come through our doors. Through the warmth of our smiles, our readiness to speak to the visitor, our sensitivity that gently allows the newcomer to find their own level of comfort while leaving them in no doubt of our delight they have found their way to worship with us – we provide the human connection. While the visitor to our worship battles with the unfamiliarity and complexity of our liturgical expression, it’s the human connection of welcome that supports them as they explore the experience of being drawn to our Anglican transmission of historic Christianity.

Crunch!—-the sound of gears suddenly shifting. I recently offered my car to the Canon Musician to use on an errand only to discover he has never learned to drive stick shift. So, I am aware that my verbal allusion of “crunch” to the sound of gears grinding might be an unfamiliar sound for Americans, who it seems to me universally drive automatic transmission vehicles. Yet, the gospel reading today evokes for me the sound of gears grinding as the Lectionary seeks to take us through a sudden turn and up a steep hill.

Since September, we have been working through the central sections of Mark’s gospel and arrive on the final Sunday of Ordinary Time with a quick change of gear as we shift into John. Mark’s Gospel has been a good companion for us during the two months of our Annual Renewal Program at Trinity Cathedral. It has provided us with our central motif, that of being on the road accompanying Jesus and his uncomprehending disciples as they walk the road to Jerusalem. The road to Jerusalem has become for us a metaphor for our own journeys, the journeys we are making as individual disciples. Together we make a journey as the community of God’s people in this location of time and place.

Mark’s very human portrayal of Jesus as a prophet and visionary, walking, talking, teaching, healing, and confronting both those who accompany him and those he meets on the way, is replaced by John’s very different image of Jesus. The prophet-visionary, reminiscent of Isaiah’s Son of Man, gives way to John’s majestic and self-contained Son of God. 

We encounter a regal Jesus, who throughout his encounter with Pilate remains stationary, a seemingly non-anxious presence standing alone in the portico of Pilate’s Praetorium. It is Pilate who, no less than seven times, rushes in and out, shuttling between his judgement seat, the source of his power, and the portico, the place of unnerving encounter with this mysterious and perplexing figure. Throughout their encounter, it is Jesus, not Pilate, who controls the direction of the conversation.  We miss the point if we simply focus on the content of the debate Pilate is seeking to have with Jesus concerning the nature of kingship. The power of John’s image lies in the way Jesus embodies the kingship of God. Like a Wimbledon Champion, who has gained control of the match forcing his opponent to run all over the court, Jesus remains still in the face of Pilate’s increasingly anxious scurrying to and fro.

While the image of Christ as King can be squarely located in the Christology of John’s Gospel, the feast of Christ the King is, comparatively, of recent origin. In 1925 Pius XI instituted the feast as a protest against the rise of fascism. In 1969 Paul VI moved it from the last Sunday in October to last Sunday before Advent. With the adoption of the Ecumenical Three Year Lectionary, Anglican Churches, including the Episcopal Church, have adopted Christ the King as the finale to the liturgical year. Christ the King has replaced our old Stir-up Sunday, a name commonly thought by many in England to derive from the Sunday when your gestating Christmas Pudding gets its first vigorous stir. Actually, the name comes from the opening lines of the Collect: Stir up our hearts, O Lord.

Today was chosen as Commitment Sunday to bring our Annual Renewal Program to a close. Last week, I posed the question, “does today present the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning with respect to stewardship?” Our intention is that, today, we mark the end of the beginning as our focus on stewardship becomes a year long process extending throughout 2013.

The notion of year-long stewardship goes to the heart of the journey we take when we set out on the road with Jesus. Time and again, I have referred to our difficulty of being on this road. The necessary limitations of our own small imaginations make it frightening for us to consider the changes that will result when we shift from identifying with the worldly appearance of our lives to identify with the dream that God is dreaming us into becoming.

Identifying with God’s dream for us, and for our world, leads us want to love God and God’s world. When we are changed through love our anxious, culturally inculcated, self-sufficiency becomes transformed into an experience of being enough and of having enough.

Discovering that we are enough and we have enough is the fruit of discipleship, a fruit that takes us beyond the limitations of our imaginations:

into a freedom to celebrate with joy rather than frenzy, to buy and give only out of love rather than out of insecurity or compulsion, and to give thanks for all that we have been blessed with rather than focus on what we’ve been told we lack  (David Lose, A Kings Gift, Working Preacher 2012). 

As Jesus stands before Pilate, he is the image of a non-anxious presence. His is a life given over to the love he shares with God, and this frees him from fear. Many of us feel that we don’t know how to love God. Yet, within each of us is a deep ache. When we find the place where we ache we become aware of our deep need to want to love God. It is from here that we start on the road to loving God.

Since the second week of September,  I have been encouraging us to notice the journey of being on the road. Along the way we have passed key sign posts. Each sign post directs us towards a possibility of deepening our sense of meaning and purpose in life by following Christ into love with God.

Being dutiful servants, doing good to feel good, is not enough. Christians are more than good people doing what good people do. Being faithful givers, honoring our responsibilities to the institution that does good is not enough. We must become people who open our wallets because we long to open our hearts. It’s our desire to open our hearts that conforms our generosity. Our hearts become filled with gratitude as our eyes open to the goodness of God’s love, manifested through the ordinary joys of living. We begin to become less anxious as we let go of the illusions of self-sufficiency and the need for self-assertion.

As Jesus stands before Pilate, he is the image of a non-anxious presence.  Parker Palmer in his book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, offers us an image taken from his Quaker wisdom. It’s the image of letting your life speak. This is how Jesus embodies his Kingship before Pilate. He is not attempting to speak his life, rather he is simply letting his life speak him.

Palmer’s Quaker wisdom suggests to me a picture for our transformation into discipleship:

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent. 

Year-long stewardship is to embody our calling, our vocation to discipleship. Our motivation comes from that place where we ache to fall more deeply in love with God and with one another.  Jesus’ embodiment of his Kingship speaks-out his life of love with God. This is a different vision of power, and Pilate is unable to imagine it. Amid the sound of gears crunching our lives speak out our longing to love God more. For is not our calling, our vocation as disciples, to become centers of non-anxious presence in a world constrained by fear?

Maybe some are getting bored with my use of the image – being on the road – to describe the continual process of being in discipleship. This is literally a physical journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. It’s also a spiritual journey during which Jesus teaches the disciples about the meaning of being his followers. What we have noted time and time again is how difficult it is for the disciples to grasp Jesus’ message. They are encapsulated within the necessary limitations of their own conventional imaginations.

Accompanying Jesus along this road to Jerusalem we have had to climb onto a road that has led us to challenge the necessary limitations of our own conventional imaginations (refer back to my blog entries since the beginning of  September).

I use the term necessary because, being a part of our own society with its conventional attitudes and ways of looking at the world, offers us the illusion that we are protected from an exposure to the risk. Risk describes the process we experience as fear and anxiety when we contemplate becoming unconventional. When we begin to realize that what God is calling us into requires breaking company with the comfortable anonymity of keeping our heads down and mindlessly grazing along with the heard. Risk is the experience of breaking out of the necessary limitations of our own imaginations into a glimpsing of something new. The new always begins with a sense of the unfamiliar.

&&&&&&&&

Jesus is now in Jerusalem and he seems not to like what he sees. He notes a Temple religious system that through the force of convention functions to outwardly oppress and impoverish the poor while rewarding the rich. It is a system that encourages the poor to further impoverish themselves in the name of religious duty and fidelity. The pernicious element in systems of oppression is the way they internally conform us into supporting the very world-views that in reality, are the source of our own oppression. Jesus’ observation of the Widow in last week’s Gospel reading seen from this angle is less an endorsement of sacrificial piety and more a comment on her own internalized oppression (see my last entry of Widows and Veterans).

Today’s gospel from Mark 13:1-8 introduces a new and even more frightening tone into Jesus’ conversation with the disciples. This chapter is known to Biblical Scholars as Mark’s Little Apocalypse.

David Loose, commenting on this week’s text notes three core characteristics of apocalyptic writing:

1. In a nutshell, apocalyptic literature stems from a worldview that believes that everything happening on earth represents and correlates with a larger, heavenly struggle between good and evil.
2. It therefore reads into earthly events cosmic significance and anticipates future events on earth in light of the coming battle between the forces of God and the devil.
3. Hence, it often tries to make sense of current events and experiences by casting them in a larger, cosmic framework and in this way give comfort to people who are currently suffering or being oppressed.

It appears that Mark is probably writing around 70 AD or, at least, during the period of  the Jewish insurrection that leads to the final destruction of the Temple in 70AD at the hands of Caesar’s legions. The community Mark is writing for is literally living through a period of social collapse with its ensuing chaos. This is probably why his Gospel takes a sharp turn at chapter 13 veering into apocalyptic writing. It’s possible to take out the whole of chapter 13 and not actually disrupt Mark’s larger narrative, moving seamlessly, from the end of 12 to the beginning of 14.

&&&&&&&&

This fearful apocalyptic mindset fills our viewing screens today. As I flip through the TV programs I am aware of at least three series currently running that set us in a post apocalyptic time where following an alien invasion or a nuclear catastrophe or following a mysterious world-wide collapse of the electrical power grid we are plunged into a world where primitive tribal consciousness consigns us to lives that are brutish and short.

We live in an age when the institutions that form the pillars of Western Society seem to have become either unalterably corrupted or are in a state of chronic collapse. The world wide banking system seems corrupted beyond reform. Even the BBC, which is arguably the world’s greatest information and media institution seems continually rocked by its failure over recent years to confront its own silence in the face of entrenched systems of political and societal corruption and abuse.  Our political and judicial systems are in gridlock. At the local level are schools collapse around us for lack of funding and the 20th century version of Institutional Church is clearly disintegrating before our eyes. When we add to the signs of societal collapse the heady cocktail of hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, and the ever increasing degradation of the environment symbolized by the ever rising sea level and depletion of the ozone layer we can understand why apocalyptic fears are alive and kicking in our own time.

However, the point of apocalypse is not, primarily, to frighten or even warn us. Its function is to remind us that the cycle of renewal and the risk of the new requires first that the old order falls away to make way for the new. That this is a traumatic process and that it involves a period of uncertainty and even chaos only shows us that there is light at the end of the long dark and dangerous tunnel.

Systemic change follows an internal change within a each one of us. We come to understand that the critical question is not can we afford to risk things changing, but can we afford to risk things not changing. As this realization reaches a critical mass of individuals, we arrive at what is commonly referred to as the tipping point. Systems change when we realize how little they serve us in their current form.

&&&&&&&&

Next Sunday our Trinity Cathedral Annual Renewal Program, launched on the 7th of October, culminates with Commitment Sunday. This coincides with the feast of Christ the King marking the transition in the liturgical calendar from the Sunday’s of Ordinary Time to Advent, the Church’s New Year. The active phase of our annual renewal will come to an end with Commitment Sunday. However, annual renewal is a year long activity that invites us to attend in new and novel ways to the enrichment of our spiritual lives as individuals and as the community of God’s faithful people at the intersection of Roosevelt and Central.

There may be an assumption that attending to our spiritual growth will not involve pain and the uncertainty of risk. All around us we see the signs of change amidst a continual collective expression of anxiety and fear that what lies ahead is only an ensuing chaos as the world we know passes away.

The disciples ask Jesus how are they to recognize the signs of the birth pangs of the new order? Jesus’ response is to reassure them. ‘Don’t be alarmed’, he tells them, about how things appear. Only watch for the signs of change that must take place.

Over the next 12 months at Trinity Cathedral we will together be watching to note the signs – in each of us, in our congregation, in our country – that promise to open us to the new things that God dreams to be accomplished?

Tomorrow will be the first Sunday in just over two months that I am not preaching. I am enjoying the freedom to roam a little more widely in this blog entry.

Stewardship    At Trinity Cathedral a number of themes come together for us on Sunday 11th November. For us it is another Sunday in our intentional conversation over the course of our two month Annual Renewal Program for 2013. The Gospel appointed for the day is the famous story of the Widows Mite. Preachers everywhere will be trotting out the tried and true interpretation that casts the widow as an example of virtuous and generous giving in contrast to the nasty and corrupt Scribes.

This will be especially the case in the Episcopal Church,  for this Gospel reading allows the clergy, usually squeamish about addressing the issue of money, to claim Jesus’s mandate for doing so on this  Stewardship Sunday.

I have been addressing discipleship and in particular our stewardship of money for several weeks now. In my sermon summary that went out in our E-blast yesterday and will appear in the Sunday Bulletin, I am afraid I caved-in, and went for this traditional take (the self-scarificial generosity of the widow) on the Gospel Story. My excuse is that space didn’t allow for much more.

Remembrance     I will return to the Gospel in a moment. However, I want also to note that tomorrow is the Sunday of the Veterans Day weekend. This weekend in November marks the ending of the First World War, when at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns on the Western Front fell silent bringing to an end the greatest war of human carnage history has known. Armistice Day, later renamed Remembrance Day still carries a huge emotional and spiritual significance for not only the British, but also for the peoples of  New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and our nearest neighbor to the the north, Canada.

In these countries most people still practice the wearing of the red poppy for Remembrance. The red poppy came to symbolise the futility of war and the carnage of death because in the springtime of 1918, the churned-up, battle-scarred, blood-soaked fields of Flanders in Northern France were transformed by fields of red poppies coming into bloom. Those at Trinity with longer memories tell me that the wearing of the poppy was once the custom in the US as well. I am not sure why the wearing of the poppy has fallen out of vogue here.

People tell me that Memorial Day is the day for remembering those fallen in the service of their country and that Veterans Day carries a wider meaning of celebration of service for the nation. At Trinity Cathedral we will attempt to bring both aspects to mind as we remember the futility of war through honoring the fallen as well as acknowledging the commitment to service not only of all Veterans, but of the men and women in many different walks of life who serve the needs of their communities, their nation, and the wider world through unstinting daily acts of self sacrifice.

Self-scarifice    Self-sacrifice offers a nice segway back to the Gospel Story of the Widows Mite. I am with those who question the traditional interpretation of Mark 12:38-44. This interpretation casts Jesus as praising the self-scarifice of the Widow in contrast to the self-inflation of the Scribes. It tends to divide the passage into two, condemnation of the arrogance and corruption of the Scribes and praise for the Widow. Yet, the passage has to be taken as a whole.

Firstly, the corruption and power of the Scribes is the cause of the Widow’s poverty. As a widow, the estate left by her husband would have been administered by the Temple Scribes, who were like the court appointed trustees of our own day appointed because women had no legal status. The Scribes, in the absence of laws on financial regulation, fraudulently devoured the property they administered in trust, and so the Widow may well have been literally homeless. Yet, nevertheless she comes to the treasury and gives the little money she has left. The traditional interpretation implies that Jesus praises the Widow’s action. Yet, no where in the text does Jesus praise her or imply any approval.

On the contrary, the whole passage need to be read in the wider light of Jesus overt criticism of the Temple culture. This was a religious system based on fraudulent exploitation of the poor. Jesus sees her action as a demonstration of how the Widow acts against her own better interest because she is conditioned to do so by the religious system she lives within. In his blog commentary on this text D. Mark Davis notes:

The story does not provide a pious contrast to the conduct of the scribes in the preceding section (as is the customary view); rather it provides a further illustration of the ills of official devotion. … She had been taught and encouraged by religious leaders to donate as she does, and Jesus condemns the value system that motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do it.

Addison G Wright in his paper on this text, Widow’s Mite: Praise or Lament? — A Matter of Context, says

And finally there is no praise of the widow in the passage and no invitation to imitate her, precisely because she ought not to be imitated. 

Conditioning      Organized religion always plays an ambivalent role in any society. This is no less true of our society as it was at the time of Jesus. On the one hand religion motivates and inspires people to transcend narrow self-interest in the service of a wider common good.  Yet, at the same time, organized religion is a pillar of the status quo, and as such, it conditions us all to unquestioningly operate within  systems that privileges some and oppresses others.

None of us can live completely outside the systems that condition our thinking and limit our expectations. We all have to do the best we can within the systems that lead some to believe in, and offer their lives for causes that others perceive as a fruitless self-sacrifice, which goes against a persons self interest in the best sense. That is the nature of society.

Service     Speaking candidly on the issue of war, I cannot support what seems to me to have been 15 years of reckless adventurism by the US-British-led military coalition in the Middle East. Yet, I wish to profoundly honor the many young men and women who have given their lives in the service of our countries. I also wish to honor the courage of those who everyday give up comfortable lives to serve the poor, advocate for the marginalized, visit those in prison, and support those whose communities are ravaged by natural disasters.

For all of us our grasp on what is the truth can only ever be partial. Yet, the message of Remembrance is that there is no greater love than to give of yourself, even to the point of giving your life in the service of others.

Observing the fervent celebrations of Halloween, an anthropologist studying American culture might add a line in a learned paper which reads:

The eve of All Saints and All Souls remains one of the great folk religious customs that unifies the otherwise fractious and quarrelsome North Americans. 

Since last Wednesday evening we have been living through a  series of events that have enormous significance for who we are as a people. The sadness is that the significance of these events seems lost to most of the population. Since last Wednesday, we have been celebrating the events of two great traditions, the tradition of Halloween and Día de los Muertos. 

The significance of both these celebrations lies in the eruption of ancient pagan folk religion, which like all folk religion lies buried underneath the brittle carapace – the hard shell of Christianity. On the 1st and 2nd of November each year, the dead-hand grip of both Protestant and Catholic orthodoxy is shattered by the eruption of  deep pagan currents running in the subterranean rivers of the collective unconscious of both Anglo and Latino cultures.

For Halloween Trick or Treating owes its origins in Samhain, the great Celtic celebration of the onset of Winter when the door to the other world opened and feasts were prepared for the souls of the dead and people protected themselves from harmful spirits through donning costumed disguises.

Following the English reformation, the celebration of Halloween was discouraged. The need for a lively celebration at this time of year was transferred to the 5th November – Guy Fawkes, which for the English marks the attempt by one Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament as part of a failed Papist plot to restore Roman Catholicism. This is the night for public celebration with bonfires and fireworks and the burning of the Guy – an effigy of the Pope.

Among the Puritans who settled in American, the celebration of Halloween was strictly forbidden because of its demonic overtones. It seems the popularity of Halloween takes root in America among the millions of Scots and later Irish who, in their own part of the British Isles, refused to abandon the old Celtic festival.

Likewise, the origins of Dia de los Muertos lie in indigenous observances dating back hundreds of years to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl. This Aztec festival of honoring of ancestors was colonized  by the Conquistadors and incorporated into the Christian festival of All Saints and All Souls. Yet, the dominant iconography and customs of the Aztecs continue to live through the Mexican celebration of this most Catholic of festivals.

On Friday night, our congregation of La Trinidad celebrated the Dia de los Muertos. I counted 17 or so from our Trinity congregations among those attending this moving celebration. For me this signifies a wonderful reality. We may be two cultures, but we are one community.  The feast of All Saints and All Souls joins us through our different and yet powerfully related celebrations. In each culture Christianity has baptized divergent pagan practices, which nevertheless express universal themes of relationship between the living and the departed.

&&&&&&&&&

Human Nature expresses itself through culture. Our cultures are punctuated with small openings which allow expression of deeper psycho-spiritual needs.  We need these openings into luminescence to illuminate what otherwise becomes the mind-numbing monotony of the here and now.

Our current version of the Book of Common Prayer, compiled in 1979, has brought enormous richness to our liturgical celebrations. The strength of contemporary revisions of our liturgical life is that they emphasize the nature of community in the here and now. Yet, here-in lies a danger, equal to the strength. What the 1979 revision lost was the older version of the Prayer of Intercession which began with the haunting words:

Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church, Militant here on earth.

That odd word militant identifies who we are. We are not the whole Church, we are only the Church active in this world. The whole Church includes two other states, which the old prayerbook referred to as the Church Expectant, and the Church Triumphant. My guess is that the vision of the three-fold hierarchy of the Church was abandoned because it is an expression of what I referred to in last week’s blog, as a medieval mindset.

Perhaps the imagery of souls having recently passed through death into the waiting room of Heaven, where they rest in expectation of eventual entry into the white-robed throng of the Saints triumphant in Paradise, does belong to the medieval mindset. Yet, its imagery expresses the truth of reality.

As the pagan elements of our great festivals continue to express, for human beings from time immemorial, life in this world is not all there that can be hoped for. In abandoning the medieval imagery of the Book of Revelation, let us not throw the baby out with the bath water.

The division between All Saints and All Souls expresses our deep human psycho-spiritual need in the face of death. All Saints is a celebration. Through our remembering the great exemplars of the Christian living, our eventual life with God; however, we, as moderns, struggle to imagine it, is, a joyful expectation!

Yet, in the face of death there is sorrow, loss, bewilderment and pain for us as those we have loved are no longer physically present to us. All Souls expresses this element of human need. Our hearts still reach out for those we have lost. Our hearts open in the urgency of prayer for those who are still achingly loved and yet no longer present to us. The vision of the Church Expectant helps us to picture them now as they wait in the hopeful expectation of becoming. We are compelled through need to pray for them as much as we are compelled through need to ask the Saints, who having already attained the joy of paradise, to pray for us. For we are all united in one Church through the timelessness of relationship – uniting militant, expectant and triumphant states of being.

&&&&&&&&

At first sight it may seem odd to us that the Lectionary appoints the Raising of Lazarus from John as the Gospel for today.  This is a powerful story in which the themes of faith and grief are linked together. Jesus confronts Mary and Martha with the need to trust, to take the risk of the leap of faith. He asks them to trust and believe in the face of how things seem to be. We see the deep humanity of a Jesus disturbed by grief and sorrow. What this shows us is that grief and faith are not incompatible but complementary.

In the Gospel story of the Raising of Lazarus, God is telling us something crucially important. God is telling us that death is a biological event, not a human event! Biology ends because it is a condition of life in the Church Militant. Humanity is a continuous event and does not end with biological death.

Human life is a process of journeying into the fulfillment of God’s Covenant made with us in Christ. This is a promise that our humanity is more than an accident of biology; it is nothing short of the promise of incorporation into the  life of the divine community that is God.

Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in the one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy son Christ our Lord: Grant, we beseech the, to thy whole Church in paradise and on earth, thy light and thy peace. Amen (Burial Service, BCP Rt I)