The two most important days for baptism in the Christian calendar are the Baptism of Christ, and at the Easter Vigil, on the eve of Easter Day. Today we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, and we have the privilege of performing several baptisms.  

What is Baptism?

On the 25^th of December we began a period of celebration marking the birth of Jesus. The accounts in Matthew and Luke of the birth of Jesus offer us an enchanted[1] picture of the the Creator of the world entering into the experience of being part of the Creation. Christians know this event as the Incarnation or the birth of Jesus. The Incarnation divides history into a time before, and time after. Because through the birth of Jesus, God shows us that being human is to be most like God.

We live in the time after the Incarnation – the entry of God into creation through the birth and life of Jesus Christ. We are born into that changed relationship between God and humanity.  In coming to John The Baptist to be baptized Jesus is acknowledging the full implication of being God’s Son. As it was for Jesus, so it is for you and me. When we come to baptism we self-consciously accept that to be human is to be most like God. From that point-on our lives change because we live with a new intention. There is a difference between being human and becoming Christian. If being human is being most like God, to become Christian is to know we are most like God. This knowledge or self-awareness is what makes a difference to the way we live our lives in the world.

Much of popular American Christianity today tends to believe that we become individually saved through the washing away of our sins by baptism. This popular expression of Christianity emphasizes baptism as the conscious decision of the individual believer. Believer’s baptism implies that through baptism we individually purchase a ticket to salvation.

Episcopalians believe that in God’s mind we are already saved, for to be human is to be most like God. However, a gift must first be accepted to become real. The difference between popular and historic Christianity lies in the understanding of this acceptance.

As Christians of the historic tradition, while baptism is our individual response, baptism is not a ticket to individual salvation. Baptism is entry into the faith of the community that is already saved. Rather than being saved as individuals we are saved through our participation in the life of the Church, the Church as the saved and saving community of Christ in the world. 

What is the Church?

William Temple was Archbishop of Canterbury for a relatively short time during some of the darkest years of the Second World War. Although only Archbishop for a few years he was one of the towering Anglican thinkers of the 20^th Century. He once 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.

Most Christian churches define membership through a shared sense of what they believe. In contrast the Episcopal Church uses common worship, rather than shared belief as the qualification for membership. If you can worship with us, allowing yourself to be quietly molded by the rhythms and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, then you are welcomed as one of us.

Archbishop Temple’s comment – the Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members makes for fuzzy boundaries between Church and the World. At one level it means that Episcopalians do not draw a sharp distinction between the Church and the world. The Church is in the world not as the ark of salvation as old fashioned Roman Catholics were taught to believe, but as the ark of witness to the presence of God’s saving activity in the world. This activity precedes our arrival and extends well beyond our boundaries.

Episcopalians are Christians of the historic Catholic and Apostolic tradition of Christianity, defined over a period of the first 600 years of the Church, give or take a century,. Although our boundaries are somewhat permeable, it does not follow that there is no formal entrance to belonging. We welcome everyone who wants to grow into the historic tradition of being Christian and in worship all are welcome, because worship rather than belief is what leads us to gateway of baptism. Through baptism we enter into the practice of the Christian life.

Our Common Purpose 

Baptism is an event that happens in a moment of time. Yet, it is also more than this momentary event. Baptism is a daily process of living our faith in the 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 through five promises that reaffirm our own baptism and recommit us to a particular way of living in the world.

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 through participation in the church’s common prayer, seven days a week. These days we can have portable access to templates for morning and evening prayer along with daily lectionary through apps on our smart phones and tablets and wedsites on our desktops.
2. We promise to fight evil and when we fail, to return to the struggle through the path of repentance. Accepting failure with a sense of sorrow that reinvigorates us to pick ourselves up and try again is crucial.
3. We promise to share with everyone the good news that in Christ, God has already saved the whole world. Sharing Christ is not a matter of words shouted through a megaphone on a street corner. Christ is shared when the quality of our living makes others want what we seem to have.
4. We promise to serve Christ, by having a regard for our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. We have to take ourselves seriously. Until we do we cannot know what it means to serve others.
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 gloss-over patterns of privilege and discrimination that are the roots of oppression and inequality. 

As Christians of the historic tradition of Christianity, we understand baptism as entry into membership of the Church. As Episcopalians, 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. This can make for fuzzy boundaries, but maybe this is the price we gladly pay in order to advance the coming of the kingdom!

Through baptism we participate in the life of the saving community. This community commonly called the Church witnesses that in Christ, salvation is God’s freely offered gift to all, no strings attached. We are saved because first God has love us. Yet, gifts can only be offered. To become effective they need to be accepted. Baptism is our acceptance. To be human is to be most like God, yet, to be baptized is to recognize what it means to be most like God. That meaning is made clear as we struggle to live faithfully and courageously. What does living faithfully and courageously look like? It is each day to be mindfully aware of the promises of our Baptismal Covenant, made at our own baptism, and reaffirmed every time we stand in solidarity as a community with those to be baptized.

Short recap

Over the last three weeks as we have journeyed through Advent I have been exploring my concept of a trans-generational vision[1]. My concept of the trans-generational vision rests on the vision not simply spanning across the generations, but on it remaining as true and relevant in each succeeding generation as it has been in the generations previous. The task in each generation is to engage the vision so as to unlock its truth within the particular context of the here and now.

Going back to the celebration at the end of November of Christ the King as the culmination of another Church year, I noted [2] that Christ the King is less a celebration of an individual kingship of Jesus than it is a recognition that in Jesus we have the arrival of the Kingdom of God. In Jesus the Kingdom breaks into temporal time in a new, and for Christians, a final way. From this point onwards, the Kingdom is here. Yet, the Kingdom challenges our concept of linear time, for while it is already here as manifested in its signs of a call to love and justice, it remains for us, within the boundaries of temporal time, not yet complete. Hence we talk about the Kingdom of God as being both present now – in temporal time, and yet in trans-generational vision terms it is still in the process of coming.

Narratives of the birth of Jesus

Matthew, and Luke, following Mark record the baptism of Jesus as an epiphany of Jesus as the Messiah. Matthew follows Mark more closely in locating this event within the context of the preaching of John the Baptist who, in temporal time is Jesus’ cousin, yet in trans-generational vision time is Elijah come again announcing Jesus as the Messiah. While Luke makes no mention of John in his account, for Mark the baptism of Jesus comes right at the very start of his gospel account. Matthew and Luke on the other hand begin their gospel accounts with the story of the Nativity of Jesus.

We tend to conflate the Matthean and Lucan accounts failing to notice that they are both quite different. Only Luke has Shepherds and only Matthew has Wise Men. In Luke the focus is on Mary. In Matthew the focus is on Joseph. Matthew mentions Herod and the danger he poses to the newborn Jesus. Luke makes no mention of this.

The Lectionary for 2013 gives us Matthew’s account of the Nativity. In Matthew’s account the trans-generational vision is colored in particularly Jewish hues.  Matthew’s is a very Jewish gospel where Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses who comes to bring a new Law, a law no longer confined to the Jews, but a new Law, inviting all people to enter into the promises of the Kingdom. This inclusive invitation is a characteristic of the trans-generation vision as it emerges in the prophecies in the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah’s hope re-emerges in the Christian era as hope of inclusion, realized.

Another important characteristic of Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus is the focus on Joseph, the righteous Jewish man. Rather like Matthew and his community, Joseph is challenged to transcend the limitations of his Jewish culture-bound worldview in order to hear God’s very particular call to him. Many commentators explore the huge cultural implications for Joseph in his decision to go through with marriage to a pregnant Mary.

In adding the Wise Men and Herod into his account, Matthew asserts his Jewish identity through the implicit association between the infant Jesus and the infant Moses. Moses was also born into a dangerous situation with Pharaoh seeking the death of all newborn Israelite males. Moses’ mother conceals her son in the bulrushes, where ironically he is discovered and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. Joseph, soon after the birth of Jesus must flee with his wife and son from Herod’s murderous rage. He takes the familiar refugee road to Egypt. Given the significance of the connections being drawn between Jesus and Moses the irony of Egypt as a safe refuge is not lost on Matthew, nor should it be lost on us, given the current tragedy of the refugee crisis in Syria and elsewhere in our own world.

The kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God:

• Comes in the form of a child, born in obscurity, and surrounded by circumstances that place him in considerable life-danger.
• It comes as a challenge to conventional cultural values as represented by a righteous man Joseph. God calls Joseph beyond his conventional expectations of how things should be and to step beyond the security of what he knows and expects into the considerable risk of actions that carry unknown consequences.
• It comes through a young woman whose conceiving of a child is the result of a mysterious and as some contend, a miraculous process, flying in the face of the normal laws of biology. 

What matters here is how we in our own time and place receive the trans-generational vision of the Kingdom in order to unlock the truth of the Incarnation for a world in desperate need of its Good News. In this task we are burdened by the  thinking of modernity, shaped by a scientific revolution that has conditioned us to assess any claim as either true or false according to our capacity, now much enhanced by technology, to verify its veracity through external observation.

The fallacy of true or false

Matthew nor Luke construct Jesus’ birth narratives in order to articulate a true or false dichotomy. Neither of them write from a place of ignorance with regard to the biology of procreation. It is just that both Matthew and Luke hold a pre-scientific view of truth. Unlike ours, theirs concept of truth is more nuanced. They hold an enchanted[3] understandings of truth in which the everyday is charged with the mysterious and inexplicable action of God.

For Matthew and Luke the virginal conception is a truth, which is neither affirmed nor denied on the basis of its probability or improbability, as seen from the perspective of everyday experience. Truth emerges through events that ordinarily are improbable because such truth invites us to move beyond the blinkers imposed upon us by  the confines of an everyday experience that is too small for us. The paradox of modern life is that now free to move about the external world in ways unimaginable to even our parent’s generation, we nevertheless carry around within us an ever shrinking capacity for imagining ourselves in the world.

A truth for today.

The Incarnation is the powerful truth that has never been more needed by our own world today. The Incarnation as truth-claim does not rely on us having to accept or deny the veracity of the seemingly supernatural elements in the birth narratives. The supernatural within these narratives has no explanatory function at all. Rather the mystery which shrouds reported events has a protective function that prevents any one generation dumbing-down the mystery of God’s actions only to that which is capable of rational comprehension.

In Matthew and Luke the function of the narrative of the birth of Jesus is to point us to the realization that at a certain point in the unfolding of the trans-generational vision of creation, the Creator voluntarily becomes subject to the limitations of being part of the Creation. The Creator enters into within the experience of the Creation. The how of this happening is beside the point of the story.

I believe the function of the narratives of the birth of Jesus is to attest that being human, fully human, reveals something fundamental about nature of God. The trans-generational Messianic vision now anchored in the events of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah is the way God calls us to live out the fullness of our humanity as an expression of an essential truth that we are made in the image of the unseen God.

As human beings we are made in the image of God. We are invited through the Incarnation to value ourselves and the created world, because God clearly does so. When we follow God’s lead, we labor with God to continually co-create a world fit for human beings to live in. This is a world shaped by the signs of the Kingdom.

In the Kingdom of God despite appearances to the contrary, love is stronger than hate, the passion for justice confronts systems of injustice enshrining self-interest, exclusion of others as an expression of our fear gives way to a spirit of generous inclusion of all.

In our own time following the cataclysm of two world wars, we once dreamed of a better world captured by the phrase a land fit for heroes to live in.  As the radical in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus as Messiah, is God’s way of showing us what it means to be fully human, and what a world fit for human beings to thrive in, might look like!

Random Thoughts

Like many of you I grew up with the two-year Lectionary cycle from the Book of Common Prayer, in which the Third Sunday of Advent was the Sunday on which we finally got to direct attention more specifically to the coming event – the birth of Jesus as a babe in Bethlehem. This is why the pink candle in the Advent Wreath sits in third place. For the last two Sunday’s we have focused on the coming of Jesus as Messiah in what I referred to last week as the trans-generational vision, a vision so clearly articulated by the prophet Isaiah in his dream of a future in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

This Sunday will be my last stint in the pulpit for a while. Next Sunday Canon Bill Rhodes gets to talk about what, half-consciously, I had been looking forward to talking about, i.e. the message of the Angel Gabriel to the young girl Mary about the coming birth of her son. I will be taking a short break between Christmas and New Year and Deacon Myra Kingsley will be sharing the Word on the 29^th December. On the 5^th January Father Troy Mendez, the incoming Dean of Trinity will be with us.

So it was with a little disappointment that I was jerked back to the reality of the three-year Ecumenical Lectionary which keeps the joyful Annunciation stuff to the last Sunday of Advent. This change, although a little unsettling, emphasizes the counter cultural message of the Church in a world. Around us the world has already virtually celebrated Christmas already with lights, trees and infuriating popular Christmas music. The rich repertoire of Advent music has been lost to our popular culture. Maybe it never noticed it. At least, I keep hoping for some traditional carols in place of endless Bing Crosby and his more contemporary ilk.

Well, one thing is for certain at Trinity, we are not lighting the pink candle today. It now needs to wait to the last Sunday of Advent. My residue of brain-dead Anglo-Catholicism balks at such a radical departure from tradition, yet it is only sensible to keep the consistency between Advent Wreath and Lectionary.

Today we jump way ahead from chapter 11 to chapter 35 in Isaiah. Last week, I referred to the dream Isaiah has during the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 715 BCE as a trans-generation vision. By this, I mean that it is as true now as it was then because even though much time as elapsed between 715 BCE and today, Isaiah’s words remain a pertinent reminder of the way the Kingdom of God plays with time. Historically speaking we stand after the events of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, through which God dramatically fulfills the promised in-breaking of the Kingdom.  Isaiah stand before them, nevertheless we are connected by this trans-generational vision because for us the Kingdom, while here, is still in the process of becoming, in the same sense as it was for Isaiah, a here, but not yet ,kind of thing.

Within the book of Isaiah we now jump some 200 years. While chapter 35 is a continuation of the vision of chapters 2-11, it’s not the same person speaking. Chapter 35 is the voice of the man scholars refer to as Second Isaiah. Second Isaiah, writing in the name of the great prophet 200 years and several generations earlier picks up the thread of the trans-generational vision in the midst of another crisis, this time the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. The Babylonians succeed where the Assyrians had earlier failed to capture Jerusalem. In 715 the Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed. The southern Kingdom of Judah is spared only to fall victim to a similar fate in 597 BCE. Now, Jerusalem is destroyed and the southern Kingdom’s leaders taken into 50–60 years of exile in Babylon.

Second Isaiah, like his forerunner, is still speaking out of turn. He is still speaking against the grain of time. In the midst of impending crisis and this time doom, he still finds the voice to speak-out the dream of expectation. At the time of the prophecy this is a continuation of an expectation of improbable things[1]:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing. … Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Hope is a many paradoxical thing

Last week Matthew’s Gospel introduced us to the figure of John the Baptist. Today we jump forward seven verses to the time. Herod has imprisoned John and as John languishes helplessly in prison, he hears reports of the things Jesus is doing. John, in ordinary time is the cousin of Jesus. John in the trans-generational vision is the forerunner announcing the coming of the Messiah. John is deeply disillusioned by Jesus’ performance as Messiah. Jesus’ interpretation of what it means to usher in the reign of God is not at all what John is expecting. John’s message was a call to repentance with the promise of dire consequences for those who failed to heed the call. This is a message still much favored by religious figures who like to cast themselves in John’s image of the religious firebrand. His was an expectation of the Messiah as a mighty warrior returning to set things right.

John somehow gets word to his disciples telling them to go ask Jesus what on earth does he thinks he is doing? The accusation is barely veiled in the question: are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another? Jesus does not say to John’s disciples: you go tell John he can’t speak to me that way. Instead he asked them to go and tell John what they see and hear: that the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Note that in answering John, Jesus is paraphrasing the prophecy of Second Isaiah we heard in the Old Testament lection for today: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. Jesus is clearly mindful here of the trans-generational vision of the coming of the Kingdom.

There is a sting in the tail of Jesus’ message to John for he ends it with: and blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me. Jesus immediately affirms John’s importance in the trans-generational vision. John is more than a prophet, for he is Elijah come again. Jesus says that as human beings go, there is no-one more important than John the Baptist. Yet, the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. The rebuke is clear. It’s a rebuke for John. Yet, it echoes down the trans-generational vision as a rebuke for you and me. Expectations for the coming of the Kingdom and the signs of its arrival are not necessarily in sync with one another.

For two weeks I have been quoting from a section from T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker. In it Eliot reminds us that while hope is important, to hope necessarily will involve hoping for the wrong thing. It’s inevitable that as human beings we will latch onto a set of expectations that, like those of John the Baptist open us to the inevitability of disappointment and maybe even disillusionment. Like John our hopes are a projection only of what we already know. Because our expectations are so conditioned by our sense of the possible they are too limited to be accurate signs of the Kingdom’s coming. Remember Isaiah’s dream of the Kingdom is a dream of things manifestly improbable to any rational view of things. The result of our disillusionment is that like for John, Jesus becomes for us a source of offence.

Living in the paradox of hope and the coming of the Kingdom

I arose on Saturday morning around 5.30am to begin to put some thoughts to electronic paper in preparation for Sunday’s sermon. As I made coffee I switched on the radio. Alongside urgent reports on Christmas shopping trends, the NPR end of year pledge drive urging me to take advantage of the tax code because of course, I require financial compensation for any acts of generosity; there was a further report on the situation in Syria. As if the unspeakable brutality of the civil war were not enough, the weather is now conspiring to increase the burden of misery for the refugees, poorly clothed and house in the face of freezing conditions. My automatic response was to be filled with a sense of futility that compounds my guilt along with my sense of helplessness. In the face of such terrible suffering, not only in Syria and Iraq, but also currently in sub-Saharan and central Africa, and the anniversary of the slaughter of the innocents of Sandy Hook being marked by more gun violence in Colorado, I want to cry out: God, what on earth do you think you are doing? How can I hope for the coming of the Kingdom when everywhere I look I see signs that confirm the futility of such a hope. In my disillusionment Jesus the Messiah becomes a source of offence to me.

Expectation verses hope

My expectations have often been disappointed in life. My expectations often have turned out not only to be wrong, but too limited. Events have come about which have been so much richer and more fulfilling than anything I could have dreamed of if left to bring about only the contents of my own imagination. As I reflect on this in the light of my expectations of the kingdom I have to acknowledge that my sense of time frame is too limited. Like John I want to see what I expect to see, and I want to experience its fulfillment now! As I look back over my experience I can see a crucial distinction between what I shall call expectations and something else, which is more properly hope.

Hope is not the fulfillment of my optimism to come to directly experience the truth that things will be all-right in the end. Yet hope is, that things will be all-right in the end! In the meantime as my life journeys towards that ultimate realization I move from moment to moment propelled by more limited expectations, some of which are fulfilled while many others open me to repeated disappointment. Despite disappointment, even disillusionment, the long-term direction of my travel continues guided by the compass setting of hope.

How do we keep the long-term direction of travel fixed on the compass setting of hope? We do so as we come to see that the direction of travel set by hope is not detoured by disappointed expectations along the way. Paradoxically, it is fed and strengthened by repeated disappointment and disillusionment. Hope is the projection of longing born of two things. The first is faith. The Letter to the Hebrews explains faith as the realization of things as yet unseen. We trust and believe in developments and outcomes, which we cannot yet imagine. The second thing is dogged perseverance born out of our sense of loss and grief. Through perseverance fueled by a desire for things to be different we courageously act in the present time by performing acts of love, taking steps in solidarity with others, one act and one step at a time.

Word and action out-of-place

Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah goes against the grain of reasonable expectation.  It’s a word out-of-place. Jesus performed the signs of the Kingdom and these failed to realize John’s Hebrew, messianic desire for liberation from oppression. As Jesus tells the crowds, great though John is, his expectations precede the arrival of the Kingdom.

We are those who come after the in-breaking of the Kingdom event for Jesus is the Messiah. At one level, things don’t appear to have changed much. Yet, to be Christian is to believe that everything has changed. For within the reign of the Kingdom through our actions, our embodiment of the word and action that is out-of-place, our hopes and dreams ultimately contribute to its emerging. The fruits of Christian history are not as the cynics claim a legacy of hate and war. Those are endemic to the human condition, which when unredeemed is to act from fear and the hardness of heart. The fruits of Christian history are the advances of compassion and justice into a world, which in Jesus’ time knew neither. We may complain that its emergence is slow, but it is also unstoppable.

I keep reminding us that we have a part to play in the interpretation of the trans-generation vision of Isaiah in our own time. Our part is to take our place as baptized members of the community that continually speaks the word out-of-place, and acts against the grain of societal expediencies.

One of the great early figures of the anti-slavery movement was a woman named Sojourner Truth, a brilliant and indomitable slave woman who could neither read nor write but who was passionate about ending unjust slavery and second-class treatment of women. At the end of one of her antislavery talks in Ohio, a man came up to her and said, “Old woman, do you think that your talk about slavery does any good? Do you suppose people care what you say? Why, I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea”.“Perhaps not”, she answered, “but, the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching”.

Barbara Lundblad commenting on this passage notes we must be determined and persistent fleas…Enough fleas biting strategically can make the biggest dog uncomfortable.  And if they flick some of us off but even more of us keep coming back with our calls, emails, visits, nonviolent direct action protests, and votes —we’ll win.[2] 

In Advent let our hope be encouraged by being taking our part in the unfolding of the trans-generational visions for the coming of the Kingdom. Along side Sojourner Truth, over a century later the theologian Paul Tillich wrote: that for which we long for into the future already conditions who we have become in the present. In the context of hope, the psychologist Alice Miller wrote: we are already who we have been waiting for. And the poet T.S. Eliot reminds us continually that although the human-conditioned objects of our hoping and loving will often be misdirected, hoping and loving come to ultimate fruition in the faithfulness of our waiting.

Just the facts

It’s always a little dangerous to allude in a sermon to anything from TV or cinema occurring much before the early 90’s because in a fast changing culture with increasingly diminished memory span, it’s the quickest way to date oneself as irrelevant. So let me explain that one of the oddities about growing up in New Zealand was that because we didn’t get TV until 1960 I grew up on a diet of American TV shows that by the 60’s and early 70’s were often at least 10 or more years old. I mention this to account for the fact it’s not that I am so old, but that I share the same TV memories as a generation of Americans much older than me. So with that qualifying explanation out of the way, some of you may remember Joe Friday, the hero of the long running detective series Dragnet. In what to us now seems an astonishing display of sexism, Friday implored his female witnesses to: give me the facts, Ma’am, just the facts. So here are some facts.

After the death of Solomon the Kingdom of Israel, which his father David had welded together out of the 12 tribes of Israel, split in two, with a northern kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria and a southern kingdom of Judah with Jerusalem as its capital. In 721 BCE, the Assyrian army captured the Israelite capital at Samaria and deported the king, nobility, and priesthood of the northern kingdom into captivity. This left only the poorest of the peasantry, who over time intermarried with the foreign peoples around them producing the racially mixed Samaritans we know about from Jesus’ day.

The virtual destruction of Israel left the southern kingdom, Judah, to fend for itself in the whirlwind of warring Near Eastern kingdoms. At the time of Samaria’s fall, there existed two kings in Judah — Ahaz and his son Hezekiah — who ruled as co-regents. Judah existed as a vassal to Assyria during this time and was forced to pay an annual tribute to the powerful empire.

In 715 BCE, following the death of Ahaz, Hezekiah became the sole regent of Judah and initiated widespread religious reforms, including the breaking of religious idols. He re-captured Philistine-occupied lands in the Negev-dessert, formed alliances with Ashkelon and Egypt, and made a stand against Assyria by refusing to pay tribute. In response, Sennacherib attacked Judah, laying siege to Jerusalem.

It’s in this political context that the prophet Isaiah proclaims his extraordinary vision of a future time when out of the ruined and burned stump of the once mighty Davidic kingdom there will spring a new shoot. The new shoot is a metaphorical allusion to the Messiah, the promised one. He will rise up to restore the fortunes of Israel. Last week we heard that when he comes swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. In the midst of impending crisis and destruction, Isaiah dreams of improbable things.

Moving beyond the facts

Today’s first lesson gives us more of Isaiah’s vision of improbable things. Isaiah envisions that:

the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, the calf and lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

What seems to me to be the most startling thing, another of the facts, as Joe Friday would say, is that Isaiah’s picture is of the Messiah coming not as a mighty warrior, but as a little child. It is not surprising that the early Christians understood this prophecy as a direct reference to Jesus’ birth and therefore, a powerful corroboration of their claim that Jesus was the promised one, the Messiah.

Last week, I noted that the season of Advent invites us to bold expectation, diligent preparation, and courageous and patient waiting. I return to my reference to the great theologian Paul Tillich who said: …if we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait. 

Tillich’s is such an important message for us, for we are a people who no longer believe that we should wait for anything; so powerful is our need for immediate gratification. Consequently, our dreams are too small being too conditioned by so-called reality. In my view one of the characteristics of our current period is that we have lost the courage to dream, seeming to prefer the accommodation with a culture that is increasingly fearful.

So if we only expect the familiar, what we already know, then we are in real risk of bringing about a future that is simply a projection of our past. Expectation by its very nature must be of things that seem to us from our present vantage point improbable if not impossible. Advent reminds us that we must try to live life with more than an expectation of the future as a projection only of what we assume to be possible.  To do otherwise is to remain firmly within the limitation of past experience. In other words expectation is dreaming beyond Joe Friday’s, just the facts Ma’am.

What are we waiting for?

Christianity gives us a trans-generational vision, which is the dream of the coming of the Kingdom of God. It’s a vision that in each generation remains as authentic, valid and true, as it has ever been. Yet, we cannot accept a previous generation’s interpretation of that vision. We must engage with the Christian vision in order to unlock its truth for the particularity of our own time and place. Our Christian vision emerges out of the story of Jesus as Messiah. This story sets the agenda for our present-time where we must work tirelessly in the service of the Kingdom. The significance of the Kingdom of God is that it is both now, and yet to come.

Matthew’s Gospel reading for Advent II introduces us to the character of John the Baptist. John emerges in time and space within the unfolding of our trans-generational vision. In time and space, John is most popularly identified as the cousin of Jesus. In the trans-generational vision John symbolizes the return of the prophet Elijah, whom it was believed had to appear first to announce the arrival of the Messiah. John, in time and space, the cousin of Jesus now steps into Isaiah’s vision as the voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the lord, make his paths straight. The blogger Bruce Epperly brings out the commonality and connections between John’s dream and our dream as he writes:

John dreamed of the peaceable realm and so do we. He never lived to see its full embodiment, but he planted seeds that enabled Jesus to move forward as its messenger and embodiment. John is Advent personified: he embodies the fierce urgency of the now, but not yet. He is impatient with our foolishness and sin, and wants us to be better. As Advent messenger, he knows that salvation occurs through the transformation of one person at a time. This very moment is the right time for us to let go of the past, turn away from our half-heartedness and complicity with injustice, and find a new pathway to God’s peaceable kingdom, one step and one breath at a time. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2013/12/the-adventurous-lectionary-the-second-sunday-of-advent-john-jesus-and-spiritual-friendship/

Our Christian vision has a past stretching a long way back through the prophecies of Isaiah and the other great prophets of Israel into the primal Genesis narratives of creation. This long, trans-generational vision becomes our Christian vision when it finds its anchor point in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus as Messiah. In Christ, God came to dwell within the conditions of the creation. In Christ God has acted once and for all. Yet, once and for all is clearly not realized all in one fell swoop. The meaning of one fell swoop, is to accomplish everything that needs to be done at the same time and in the same moment. The Kingdom is here, and yet, its full meaning only unfolds over time.

Our expectations, if they are Kingdom shaped, will seem to us to be improbable, even impossible because only a Kingdom vision provides the courage and motivation to move beyond the limitations of imaginations conditioned by the familiarity of the past. There is a 21^st century chapter in the story of the unfolding of the Kingdom within which we have our crucial role to play.

The prophet Isaiah dreamed of a time when under the leadership of the most vulnerable and fragile of all God’s creatures – a nursing human child – the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. John the Baptist understood that the Kingdom comes with a fierce urgency, with no time to waste. We dream our way forward guided by the expectations of the Kingdom unfolding through our welcoming it. To welcome the Kingdom means turning away from our half-heartedness and complicity with injustice, finding a new pathway to God’s peaceable kingdom, one step and one breath at a time (Epperly). 

Paul Tillich reminds us if we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait. Alice Miller, one of the great psychologists of the 20^th century echoes Tillich when she says we are who we have been waiting for. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: that which we hope and long for is made real only in the waiting (T.S.Eliot in East Coker). Expecting, preparing, waiting is our work in the season of Advent.

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.