A little recap

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

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

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

The links: faith, courage and gratitude

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

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

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

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

Gospel context

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

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

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

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

Some concluding remarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Part

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third Part

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

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

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

Part I

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

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

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

Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part III

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

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

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

Part IV

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

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

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

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

My question is will we allow ourselves to be found?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The message of this Gospel passage is this:

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

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

Part I  

I am again watching the TV series The West Wing. The action is set in the first term of a fictitious Democratic presidential administration and this multi-season series aired between 1999 and 2006. I am still watching the episodes in the first series and what is so interesting is that it is possible to trace back the evolution of current political trends to a time when their outline is clear yet, their future trajectory has yet to set in stone. Despite the programs clear liberal-Democrat bias, The West Wing portrays a time when politicians still believed in the importance of political consensus in the service of the best interests of the nation. Thirteen years later, the loss of belief in, the need for, consensus on issues of vital importance to the nation has come to completely characterize a current political scene of governmental gridlock. While this is interestingly instructional, this is not the point to which I want to draw your attention.

In one particular episode concerning a request for the President to pardon a man awaiting execution on death row there is a particularly moving seen between Toby Ziegler, the White House Chief of Communications, and his Rabbi concerning the right and wrong of the death penalty. In his Sabbath sermon, the Rabbi had stated that vengeance is not Jewish. Toby points out to the Rabbi that it is written in the Torah an eye for and eye. Throughout Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy the Torah prescribes the death penalty for a large number of offences mostly, religious in nature. The Rabbi’s reply is powerful. He says that maybe the Torah sanctioned death penalty represented the best teaching at that time. He then tells Toby that the later Rabbi’s who compiled the Talmud, which is the collation of later rabbinic interpretation of the Torah, went to great lengths to confine the meaning of the Torah texts to forms of reparation that did not require death. Jewish thought moved-on as a result of a deepening, over time, of the human understanding of God’s justice.

Witnessing this exchange between Toby and the Rabbi offers a reminder that in Judaism, unlike some branches of Christianity, the literal ferocity and violence present in many Old Testament texts cannot be applied in a timeless manner. Later Jewish thought moderates the violence and ferocity implicit in many passages of the Torah. In our relationship to the Holy Scriptures I am pleased to say that our own Anglican tradition of Biblical interpretation follows in this rabbinical tradition of evolving interpretation in response to social and cultural development. Social and cultural development is very often the indicator of our growing into an ever- deepening sense of God’s truth, which Spiral Dynamics understands as a product of cultural evolutionary development http://spiraldynamics.org/  

Part II

The argument we see in Luke 13:10-17 turns on whether or not it is lawful for Jesus to heal the woman on the Sabbath? If this is a story about physical healing, then, as the leader of the synagogue says, why not wait and perform it on a regular day? However, this is a story where the alleviation of physical suffering is a by-product of a moral action. Jesus performs a moral work of God, which he sees as a fitting action for the Sabbath. Citing the exception that allows for animal welfare on the Sabbath, Jesus asks the synagogue leader:

ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?

The weightier part of this woman’s burden is not her physical deformity, but the burden of being morally and ritually unclean. The patriarchal interpretation of the Law places upon her and anyone else who suffers from disease or deformity a burden of moral impurity. Such an interpretation attributes disease and deformity to individual or familial sinfulness. It is from this moral burden that Jesus releases her and claims in doing so he is fulfilling God’s Sabbath command to keep this day holy. In his question Jesus couches the woman’s condition in terms of satanic binding. How do we attribute Jesus’ reference to the binding of Satan?

Unfortunately, dualism still characterizes much popular Christian thought. Dualism posits the notion that Satan is a celestial figure in opposition to God; that the world is the battleground for the war between the forces of Satan and the army of God, a battle between evil and good. This is, and has always been declared throughout Christian history to be a serious misunderstanding that flies in the face of the meaning of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. There is no celestial battle, for God is triumphant and supreme. However, in the old myth about the heavenly war between the archangel Lucifer and God, Lucifer- Satan is defeated and we are told his body falls to earth.

We can interpret the fall to earth of Lucifer- Satan to mean that Satan is to be found not as a celestial rival roaming the universe in opposition to God, but as the symbol for the presence of evil rooted in the human heart. As one commentator puts it, Satan exists, because we exist!

The foremost exponent of this view is Rene Girard, a philosopher, we at Trinity Cathedral remember as much loved by Bishop Nicholas Knisely. A Girardian perspective holds that Satan is an anthropological not a metaphysical presence in the world. In other words, Satan is a projection of the hardness and evil that lurks in the human heart in opposition to God. Time and again in the Gospels Jesus stands in powerful opposition to the way the Tradition of Moses falls captive to the hardness of the human heart. History shows that if unchecked even the best traditions and social systems inevitably degrade into instruments of oppression and discrimination.

The example from Luke 13 reveals Jesus in a Giradian light. As a foretaste of the later rabbinic tradition that was to come to flower in the Talmud, Jesus confronts the use of tradition as an instrument for satanic oppression. Satanic oppression is code for the processes by which traditions look for a scapegoat for the collective inability to process projected guilt and fear.

Part III

I was recently asked to articulate in a sentence the essence of my understanding of my priestly ministry.  I believe my ministry is to witness to a personal relationship with God that is lived-out in community where it is forged from within the tensions between the Tradition we receive and the challenges of the lives we live. I trust that for many of you this statement will be confirmed in your experience of me.

We use the word tradition with a small t and Tradition with a capital T interchangeably. The difference between in usage between the two is that small t traditions are non-binding and subject to change all the time.  As Anglican Christians, Episcopalians understand Tradition with a capital T as referring specifically to the Church’s interpretation of the Scriptures and historic creeds. This Tradition is handed-on from one generation to another. So how are we to relate to Tradition with a capital T?

One of the chief characteristics of being Episcopalian comes from our Anglican  understanding that God speaks to us from within that place of tension between the Tradition handed-on to us and the culture in which we live. We understand Scripture to be subject to the interpretation of Tradition, i.e. its meaning is what the consensus or mind of the Church comes to understand it to mean. This interpretation evolves over time. We also understand that both Scripture and Tradition are subject to the scrutiny of Reason. Like Tradition, Reason with a capital R is not just any rational thinking. It is confined to the expression of the higher universal values of love as justice, liberty as freedom from systems of oppression, equality as in non-discrimination.

This place of tension is not an easy place to stay. Our Christian journey forces us to find ways of living lives that are both faithful to Tradition and authentic for the needs of our time. Yet, sitting in this place of tension is what makes Episcopalians stand out in a religious terrain where Tradition is seen by some Churches as a timeless expression of God’s law to be imposed upon culture, and by other Churches as something to be overturned and discarded as a relic of a former age.

As Episcopalians we believe that God communicates through the process of our dynamic interaction with the Tradition. This approach to interpretation is guided by attending to the signs of the times. In last weeks Gospel from Luke 12:49-56 Jesus rebukes his hearers for failing to do just this. He says: you know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? 

In Conclusion  

In Luke 13:10-17 we discover something of an historical paradox. Jesus confronts the leader of the synagogue, whom we can assume to be of the Pharisee party with an interpretation of the Sabbath Tradition that not only humanizes its application, but proclaims God’s desire that this Tradition be honored in a way that unbinds human beings from the satanic, as in heart-hearted, and scape-goating application of Tradition.

The paradox here lies in the fact that it was the Pharisee party that went on following the destruction of the Temple in 70AD to give birth to Rabbinic Judaism. As witnessed by the West Wing encounter between Toby and his Rabbi, the Rabbis began to restrict the unmediated application of the Torah through increasingly,  humanizing interpretation, interpretations later compiled into the Talmud.

Jesus engages the leader of the synagogue who accuses him of violating the Sabbath by curing the woman suffering from curvature of spine. What we can easily misinterpret as Jesus’ opposition to the Law is really Jesus, as Rabbi, interpreting-out the violence of the human heart from within the Tradition with a capital T.

We can do no better than to follow the example Jesus gives us. To do so is to live our encounter with Tradition in such a way that it becomes an instrument for God’s continual desire for the re-forming of human society. In our hands, the Tradition we receive becomes an instrument for liberation from hardness of heart on the long march of the Children of God.

Last Sunday, I got to use the new TED-style microphone headset, a result of a generous donation from one of our members – a practice I am keen to encourage through the formation of a Friends of Trinity Cathedral ministry. I first noticed this headset while watching the TED Talks. For those who are not familiar with these, go to Netflix on your TV, or to Ted Talks on your computer. Here are three links to talks I recently posted on Trinity’s FaceBook site.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sasha_dichter.html?source=facebook#.UeH3q0SIFHx.    http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html?utm_source=facebook&source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html?source=facebook – .UeH2hA7PUFw.facebook

What fascinates me about the TED Talks is not only the content of the presentations, but the style of presentation. Presenters do vary in their presentation styles, yet the TED style is a masterful use of the immediacy of conversation, made possible by the combination of verbal and visual stimuli. This is achieved by the engagement of both our eyes and our ears as pictures, key words, and short phrases flash on the big screen behind the speaker’s head, pithily capturing the meaning of the words we are hearing. So when I said last week: now I have the headset, next comes the big screen above the pulpit, many anxiously snickered, hoping that I was making a joke, but sensing I was not!

The Episcopalian Brand features a strong emphasis on traditional worship. Yet, even Episcopalians are increasingly conditioned by the communications revolution, taking place all around us. As the world shifts from the communication style established by the invention of the printing press, we become less oriented to complex verbally based expression of ideas and argument, and more oriented towards a communication style that skillfully mixes the visual with verbal into the message. One picture speaks a thousand words as the old adage goes, captures the increasing return to the use of visual elements in mass communication, which in the digital age works on our minds and stimulates our imaginations through the skillful mixing of sight and sound. Through our ancient liturgy, a medium of sight, sound, and action, the Episcopal Church is already ahead in the game, so why not take further advantage of modern electronic media to further enhance our core communication modality.

One stumbling block to this is that those of us 40 and over have been shaped by a communication style that uses words to stimulate thoughts and ideas. What you said really made me think is a comment I often receive from parishioners following one of my sermons. Well, I am glad to know that, particularly as I am one who loves the interplay between words, thoughts and reflections. Yet, Jesus has a teaching style that does not aim to stimulate thoughtful reflective connections between words and ideas. Jesus teaching style is closer to that of the TED Talks, in that words are used conversationally to evoke powerful, usually contradictory images rather than thoughtful reflections. It is through his confrontative image based message that Jesus, who is not interested in sparking reflective debate, seeks to change lives. These images don’t flash on a big electronic screen behind Jesus, but on the internal screens of his listener’s individual minds. Jesus communication style uses words to evoke images that challenge us directly in ways that expository teaching and preaching cannot!

Unlike the Buddha, Jesus teaches very little about the internal spiritual life. As I said two weeks ago, even when he refers directly to prayer, he does so by provoking uncomfortable images that direct our attention to the quality of our engagement with the world of relationships around us. Recently in his teaching on prayer, known to us as the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus presents an image of shamelessness driving our longing for God.

https://relationalrealities.com/2013/07/27/when-you-pray-say-abba/   He provokes the image of the small child whispering daddy or mummy as the way we are to approach God. Note these are direct and controversial images, not complex metaphysical instructions.

Last week, Canon Rhodes shared his sense of relief that it was I, and not him, who had to deal with the Gospel for today. I have spent a week wrestling with this text from Luke. Like the Ted-Talks, Jesus uses words to provoke images that flash across our internal screens. If taken seriously, these images disturb me deeply because when I measure myself, my attitudes, and my actions against these images, I am uncomfortably aware of how far in my discipleship, I fall short.

In what ways do I fall short of being able to live the fullness of the life of a disciple?  To begin with, my alms are given from my surplus and not by selling my possessions. If my surplus decreases, it would seem eminently reasonable to me that the level of my giving should likewise follow.  Is my treasure where my heart can be found?  This is not a comforting image for me because it requires me to examine the question: what is it I treasure? My treasure is not monetary. Yet, it is personal to me. My heart is devoted to the pursuit of my own competence and self-sufficiency.

I have such a vivid picture of a purse that does not wear out and will contain the wherewithal necessary for life in heaven. If I had a big TED screen behind me now would be the time to flash pictures of moth eaten purses and rust corroded strongboxes, contrasted to a scene of living the good life floating about on clouds in heaven. Pictures of heavenly purses which I have been prudent enough to prepare for in advance remind me that this last week GEICO encouraged me to take advantage of my eligibility for an Umbrella Policy, which for a small increase in my premium will give me a million dollars coverage against evil third parties intent on suing me. Yet, what if heaven is not a future event to be prepared for? Jesus is more likely to be suggesting that heaven is here and now and the heavenly purse is one that is unfailingly useful in bringing about good in this world. Resources that are put to use now are less subject to the decay of moth and rust than if they are amassed and horded, left unused in preparation for some future, and largely imaginary state.

Am I dressed for action? Oh most certainly I am. Yet, a more pertinent question is: how am I dressed for action? My early life experience has given me a prodigious skill to anticipate and be ready for whatever trouble might lurk around the corner. Dressed in armor, I am ready for action. Yet, the action Jesus has us picture here is not that of battle, but of expectation and readiness to welcome with joy and celebration being in loving and trusting relationship. The servants are overjoyed at the return of their master. This is an image that looses its power for us until we remember that in Jesus’ world the relationship between master and servant was one of mutual dependency, trust, and protection.

Am I dressed for expectation? This does not mean being ready for the future before it happens. Jesus means that I should be ready in the present moment and in each successive present moment to celebrate because I trust God and am trusted by God. All that energy expended on anticipating the future is futile for none of us knows at what hour the imaginary threat we anticipate will present itself. Anxious anticipation results in our not being ready for what happens to us in the present. If I am ready now, I am always ready and I have no need to scare myself into a state of anxious anticipation of disaster, which never really arrives anyway. Jesus asks us to focus our attention on the only moment in which we are actually living – the present moment is the only moment in which we are actually alive.

How would my life change if I knew that I was going to die next Sunday. I suspect that the next week would be the most life filled experience of my life. Under the impetus of no time to lose I would turn my attention to what really matters for me. This would be the present celebration of love and friendship.

In the Letter to the Hebrews, the reading, which precedes the Lucan passage with which I am inviting us all to struggle, we hear the greatest definition of the character of faith ever recorded. This anonymous writer tells us that: Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The great American novelist Mark Twain puts a more idiomatic spin on the character of faith when he has Huck Finn proclaim: Faith is believin what you know ain’t so. 

I have a version of Huck’s comment which I tell people when they ask: how can I risk taking the leap of faith when I don’t know what I feel about God or even if there is a God?  I tell them to fake it till you make it. What I mean by this is that in longing for a trusting and loving relationship with God it’s important to live as if what you most long for is – already true!

So, what is it that we must live-out everyday as if it is true? Jesus begins this particular conversation with us with these words: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. Note that God addresses us as a little flock, i.e. as a community, not as individuals here. God is inviting us to trust and to relax, to be less preoccupied with getting so that we can respond to God’s giving and emulate God’s generosity in our giving. Jesus tells us it is only through being open to God’s initiative, God’s provision, in sum God’s reality that our deepest needs come to be met.

Is not our deepest need to make a difference through living life as an expression of gratitude and generosity? What we most long for is not only that our need is met, but that we live beyond the confines of our self-centeredness so that our life becomes a source of what makes a difference for good in the lives of others who share the world with us! Let this be our prayer today and everyday.

For many of us in the Episcopal Church we feel somewhat surprised by so many spiritual seekers coming through our doors and finding enough of something, often very indefinable, that makes them want to come back. Yet, on deeper reflection, our initial feeling of surprise fades, for was this not also our initial experience on finding our way into relationship with the Episcopal Church?

The Cathedral and the Life of Prayer

In August of 2006, I found myself sitting in Trinity Cathedral for the first time. My partner Al and I, at that time still living in London, were on one of our visits to Phoenix to spend time with our young family who had recently moved here from Washington D.C. My first impression was how different Trinity was from my more familiar experience of an English Cathedral. Yet, as I sat with the light streaming through the stained glass windows the words from T.S. Elliot’s poem Little Gidding drifted into my mind:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

I knew without doubt that I was kneeling in a place where prayer has been valid. The walls of Trinity Cathedral are saturated with the prayers of generations of Arizonan Episcopalians. From here all Episcopal life in the city of Phoenix traces its origins. Even in this new world, the cathedrals of the Episcopal Church are places that collect the intensity of generations of hearts laid bare in prayer.

What is a Cathedral?

The easy answer is that a cathedral is the church housing the cathedra, or bishop’s chair. Yet, as I remind the members of our diocese on those great family gatherings around diocesan confirmations, and ordinations, the cathedral is also our collective spiritual home. On such occasions I rather enjoy the surprise on many faces as I say, ‘welcome home!’

Unlike a parish church, the cathedral exists as a benefit for the life of the whole diocese. The peculiarity of its clergy being known as canons further drives home the point. For the title of canon simply means appointed for the benefit of the whole Church. Although at Trinity, we have a life that is not unlike that of any parish, it is in our identification with the wider church that we feel most particularly fulfilled. 

Trinity and the Diocese

In the Diocese of Arizona, Trinity Cathedral is the church that everyone has a right to look to for an example of excellence in liturgy, music, and as a source for spiritual guidance. Our sense of service is most potently experienced when the members of the diocese gather together in the presence of our bishop. Bishop Kirk is not only our shepherd; through being in communion with him we are connected to the network of relationships we call the Wider Church.

Although an attitude of elitism is a temptation cathedrals are often vulnerable to, Trinity is a source for excellence and tradition in a world where the value for such is easily lost. Trinity is the place where tradition in worship encounters contemporary ideas as we seek to live out the tensions between the traditions we receive and lives we are actually living in the 21^st century. For us this tension is the very essence of being Episcopalian.

Trinity and the City of Phoenix

In the City of Phoenix, Trinity Cathedral is the church for the city. We embrace the city through our ministries of music, the arts and social outreach. Ministry to the arts is an important service to civic life that cathedrals in particular, are able to offer. At Trinity we welcome all who seek a sacred space for those important life occasions such as weddings and funerals. We are a place where the civic life of the city has an opportunity to connect with the dimension of the Divine.

Being placed in Phoenix’s urban heart our embrace of diversity enables us to be a place of refuge and hospitality for those who have found it difficult to find a spiritual home elsewhere. For any person an essential ingredient in finding a spiritual home lies in being able to look around and experience themselves reflected in the faces of others. In this sense, diversity is not simply a quality Trinity aspires to. It is the core quality defining our particular identity. Diversity is what makes us different from many parish churches, which rightly tend to reflect the profiles of their particular neighborhoods.

As the cathedral, Trinity does not exist only for its own members. Neither does it exist only for the diocesan family. It exists for everyone, whether they are Episcopalians or not, our kind of believers, or not.

The Anglican Tradition has been molded within more than a thousand years of interaction between Catholic Christianity and the cultural life of the English Nation. This interaction between Christian Tradition and culture has shaped an attitude of openness to the world. For over 300 years the Episcopal Church has continued that interaction between Church and World within the distinct experience of American culture.

Trinity Cathedral’s particular vocation is to embody in its life the heart of our Anglican Tradition of Benedict and the Benedictine Spirit. Historically, our cathedrals continue the spirit of the Benedictine monastic institutions and traditions they came to replace at the time of the English Reformation. As this spirit comes to be re-embodied afresh in each new generation, not only in our cathedrals but in all our parish churches, at Trinity we understand this to be in particular, our vocation and mission.