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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my last blog entry Sustaining Service, I noted that Episcopalians no longer expect to see God materially active in their day-to-day lives, or in the world around them. What’s more, I encounter men and women who have devoted lives of faithful service to Church and community and who have never expected God to even notice them. Is this the unfortunate consequence of low expectation or might it also be the self-effacing spiritual humility which is characteristic of our Anglican Culture in general?

That as may be, I also detect a recent movement, recent in the sense of a development of the last 100 years, whereby Episcopalians along with their Liberal Protestant neighbors have become confused between being in discipleship with Christ and being good persons doing only what good people do. A pervasive social humanitarianism has increasingly blinded us to the fact that the goal of Christian discipleship is not becoming good, but being in love.

I am aware that placing God as the object of our being in love seems strange to many Episcopalian ears. Such language has a very non-modern, vaguely revivalist tone. It is this revivalist-evangelical tone, so pervasive in the religious culture of United States, that Episcopalians see themselves in opposition to.  Although our Anglican Tradition of public worship has deep roots in mystical theology and uses the language of metaphysical experience, alas, at the personal level of our individual day-to-day lives we have come to view mystical or metaphysical experience as a relic of past centuries.

For many of us God has set the laws of the universe in motion and now stands off-stage. Our task is to be good servants and stewards of church and community. This attitude is akin to servants in a great house getting on with their work and never expecting to encounter, or be encountered by, the master of the house.

I recall Carl Jung having made a comment somewhere in his voluminous works about how 20th century people no-longer possess a medieval mindset. He was referring to something that Charles Taylor, in his magnum opus, A Secular Age refers to as the process of disinchantment. In the enchanted world of the medieval mindset, God is magically present and experienced as a tangible, material reality. In the enchanted world human beings experience the reality of God primarily through the external material world in contrast to internal emotional reality.

Taylor charts the historical process whereby the world of enchantment becomes supplanted.  The disenchanted world is a world in which God becomes displaced from external material reality. The first stage of this process relegates God to the sphere of internal emotional experience. The end of this process produces the secular age in which it is now possible for human beings to understand themselves and their world without any reference to the existence, let alone the presence, of God, active in the world and in their personal lives.

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Anglicanism has always displayed a surprising  openness to contemporary culture. Pick any age and Anglicans were in the lead among those Christians who embraced the spirit of each age. This is one of our great strengths, but also poses a danger for us; that in an age when God has largely disappeared from wider social and material discourse, we find it increasingly hard to contemplate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Our deep liturgical life, designed to open us to the mysterious and yet identifiable experience of God permeating our experience, now functions as something that filters-out direct experience of God. For us the practice of religion has become very safe. The celebration of the community in love with God becomes the mere celebration of the community for, and of, itself.

My very superficial excursion into the historical process that has contributed to Episcopalians no-longer expecting to see God, is a preamble to saying, I wish I could be a person like Bartimaeus in the Gospel passage set for this Sunday, which is a continuation of Mark chapter 10.

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I just hate myself when, in an over-priced restaurant serving mediocre food, the waiter comes over and asks: ‘Is everything all right?’. I usually find myself responding in my best brought-up voice: ‘Everything is lovely, thank you’, and then muttering through the rest of the meal, ‘well I shan’t have to come here again!’

I wish, oh how I wish, I could be like Bartimaeus who seems to have no difficulty making a fuss in order to get what he wants. He is completely unperturbed by the admonishment of the people around him telling him to shush and not make such a scene.

Bartimaeus, is not only completely impervious to what others think of him, but he knows exactly what he wants. He also has no doubt about who it is that has the power to help him. Bartimaeus not only knows who Jesus is, he expects to be noticed and responded to, by Jesus. What is it that motivates Bartimaeus? If it’s self-confidence then he earns only my envy. If it’s his desperation, then he earns my admiration. Could I allow myself to show that degree of vulnerability and to take such a risk?

Although confidence and desperation are clearly part of his motivation, Mark intends us to see Bartimaeus’ action as faith-driven. The crowd tells him the commotion is caused by Jesus of Nazareth passing by. Bartimaeus does not call out Jesus of Nazareth in calling out to Jesus. He calls out instead for Jesus, Son of David (code for Messiah) to pay attention to him. Bartimaeus is compelled by the courage to believe, placing all his hope in the expectation that God will notice and hear him.

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In Jung’s sense, Bartimaeus has a medieval mindset. He lives in a world described by Taylor as one of enchantment. He is surrounded by a tangible and material presence of God’s Divine power. Divine power is located in objects, categorized as pure and impure. Divine power resides in places, this one holy, this one profane. It manifests through situations and people. If the divine is materially present then so too is Satan and evil. Evil too, surrounds Bartimaeus and he knows it, intimately! Being blind he may well have felt himself cursed. Certainly others would have attributed his blindness to the results of sin. Bartimaeus is a human being feared and shunned by others in his world as a source of spiritual defilement, a human manifestation of evil.

However, I have to conclude that Bartimaeus is not like me or you. His motivations and expectations have been shaped by a culture of enchantment, whereas, ours are shaped by living in a post-enchanted world, a world of  disenchanted, in which God is felt by us to be materially absent. There are some Christians who struggle to maintain the medieval mindset. However, Episcopalians are not found among these kinds of Christians. We no-longer look for God or really expect to be encountered by God. Instead, we live in a world of personal agency and personal responsibility. In fact, we are spiritually constrained to become increasingly self-referenceing within a world of disenchantment. We have become the authors of our own salvation.

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What then, is the value for us of this Gospel story? I believe Mark’s story still carries a value for us because it is through this story that God continues to speak to us. Culture separates us from the individual called Bartimaeus. However, Bartimaeus is still a human being. We share with him motivations that are still a condition of the human heart. Where we differ is in our sense of what expectations.

Bartimaeus has faith and the courage to hope. In that hope he risks not getting. He risks disappointment! Yet, Bartimaeus risks, with all his being, because he is at a point in his life where he can’t afford not to take the risk. Bartimaeus is a man who not only expects a response from Jesus, he also knows what he wants. It might have been easy for Jesus to assume he knows what Bartimaeus seeks, as in, another blind person to be healed. Yet, Jesus does not assume he knows and so asks Bartimaeus to asks him, what is it you want me to do for you?

As we share the contours of the human heart with Bartimaeus perhaps there are some questions that help us with this story.

• What have you seen or heard that brings you to back to Church week by week?
• Do you long to see hope walking by?
• What do you need Christ to free you from in order to become?
• What will it mean for you when God removes what has been holding you back in your life?

&&&&&&&&

Jesus connects with Bartimaeus in a manner that results in the removal of his blindness. This is because of a change that has already begun to take place inside him. Using the more appropriate terminology of our culture I might say that Bartimaeus’ faith, hope and courage to risk failure allows him and Jesus to come into alignment. We seek and find God through the way our hopes, and disappointments bring about an alignment between us, and God.

Borrowing from computer technology, the cordless keyboard and mouse have to come within range of the bluetooth signal. They have to be in alignment with the desktop. We come into alignment with God through giving expression to the yearnings of our hearts.

Mark’s Gospel story ends in a key phrase.  For weeks now, in successive sermon blogs, I have been mining this phrase to create an image for our coming into alignment with God. Mark tells us that Bartimaeus having regained his sight followed Jesus on the road.

I have been exploring in recent posts the central metaphor for discipleship – that of being on the road with Jesus. Jesus invites us to join him on the road. The road leads to Jerusalem. The Evangelist Mark records a series of events involving Jesus as he travels towards Jerusalem. Through the chronology of events Mark shows Jesus gradually revealing to those who are with him what being in discipleship means.  As in today’s section Mark 10:35-45 we once again see how the disciples continually remain imprisoned within the limitations of only what they are able to imagine. Their imaginations, like ours, have been shaped and remain encapsulated within very conventional ways of looking at the world. As I mentioned last week, the impact of Jesus’ teaching about the meaning of being a disciple has the potential to shake us to the core and break open our encapsulated world views like the proverbial martini – vigorously shaken and not just stirred. The road to Jerusalem is a metaphor functioning at two levels of perception. Jerusalem is both a place-name on a map and a symbol of the destination of our own road of discipleship. This is the destination for our own internal dying to the old in us and rising to the promise of the new.

Last week we passed the road sign TIME TO EXAMINE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY. Approaching this signpost we become uneasy, fearful of an implicit demand. We are unsure we will have the courage to meet this demand. Here we enter a less familiar stretch of the road. Here in order to pass-on we have to face-up to the most difficult realization of what being in discipleship means. It means accepting that being on the road requires us to relinquish our illusion that the money we earn is  ours to control. For it’s difficult to face the implication that if we long to open our hearts publicly, we cannot continue to keep the open or closed state of our wallets as a private matter between us and God. 

Having passed through this section of the road we may be somewhat relieved today to find that the next section of the road is better paved and the route more familiar to us. It is with relief that we approach the next sign post that reads: WELCOME GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANTS.

Yesterday, at the Diocesan Convention, Trinity Cathedral was recognized as a center for Jubilee Ministry. Trinity Cathedral has become designated by the Episcopal Church as a center for Jubilee Ministry. The concept of Jubilee Ministry is taken from Isaiah’s proclamation of the year of Jubilee – the seventh year when all social injustices will be righted. This is God’s call to his people to build societies based on divine principles of social justice. In this morning’s Gospel Jesus echoes an important element of Jubilee when he tells us that we are not to abuse one another through the exercise of power. Among us, he or she who wants to be first must become the servant on all.

While Episcopalians may have a low threshold for pain in the area of giving till it hurts, in the area of service they show a remarkable pain tolerance. Here at Trinity Cathedral we know about service. As was duly recognized yesterday at Convention,   we give of ourselves unstintingly in the service of others. The proof of this can be seen in the summary of ministry achievements for 2012, which you will all receive as part of your Annual Renewal Packs this morning.

So does this mean that we have met the challenge of Jesus’ teaching on servanthood and passed with flying colors? I think not! For while the product of our service is second to none, one question remains. What is the motivation for and the spiritual fruit of our service?

Much of our motivation for service seems to me to be continually outwardly focused. We long to make a difference in the world and we give of our energies to make the world a better place. Does this mean that we are good people only doing what good people should do? I suspect many of us operate from this motivation. Again while the product of our labors is beneficial, so much of our service could be seen as just another expression for our self-assertion – which is always an expression of our power. Service becomes our equivalent of following the commandements. The rich man in last Sunday’s Gospel followed the commandments as an expression of his self-assertion, his self-sufficiency, his being well and truly in control of his relationship with God. All of this masqueraded as spiritual faithfulness, and deep down he knew it, because he felt the promise of eternal life continued to evade him.

In our world, commitment to social justice, the imperative of the Year of Jubilee, is not a characteristic confined to Christians alone. Many non-believers hold Jubilee values with passion as an expression of Humanitarianism. I am not troubled by Humanitarianism. I welcome and applaud it. The rise of Humanitarianism, a product of the Enlightenment, has made our world an infinitely better place. The question I am asking is, is there a difference between being a disciple of Christ and being a good person, doing what good people do? For me there is a difference. The difference is not discernible in the product of our service but it is discernible in the motivation for, and the spiritual fruits of, our service.

The difference between a Christian and a Humanitarian approach to service lies in the direction of the motivation. For the Christian, it’s not enough to have the outward focused motivation of wanting to make the world a better place. For the Christian service is our response to God’s invitation to come into the intimacy of relationship. We are motivated to make the world better because we are in the process of growing more deeply in love with God. Growing in love with God through being in discipleship with Christ, is our motivation for service and produces the spiritual fruit that is the hallmark of our discipleship.

Anglican openness to a dialogue with culture has its dangers. We have become much influenced by the humanitarianism of the age.  As Episcopalians we no longer expect to see God active in the world. The world is no longer enchanted, a term coined by Charles Taylor. By this he means a world full of a magical sense of God in all things. Our world has become as Taylor terms it, disenchanted. God seems far off. God is the prime mover who has set up the clockwork of the universe to now run itself. Our job has become that of good servants of the machine oiling and cleaning and repairing so to maintain its efficiency.

Lives of service will always be missing something when the service is not motivated by a deep love of Christ and an expectation of being in relationship with Christ. In such a relationship we expect to encounter God intimately in our day-to-day living. In such a relationship we expect to not only notice God, but be noticed, by God! This personal component of intimacy with Christ, in which we feel a love for Christ and expect to be loved in return, is the engine of our service. It is also the spiritual fruit, the promise of eternal life, for which perpetually seek and for which our hearts are continually in restless search.

I discern that there are two kinds of need in our congregation. I see traditional church people, committed to lives of service and outreach. They are the backbone of this congregation. Their need is to enter into the intimacy of relationship with Christ and let this become the driver for their  service in the world. I encourage them to expect to see God and to see themselves no longer as merely faithful servants, good persons doing what good people do. They are called into the being-ness of discipleship that takes them beyond being merely useful to God. They are nothing less than courageous disciples of Christ, beloved of God and accompanying Christ on the road.

I see others here who have little experience of being good servants in any traditional sense. They are newer arrivals to this Cathedral, drawn here by a force that defies rational explanation. They are here because they know they can be no-where else. They sense here in the depth of the liturgy, God’s conversation with them, mediated through Lectionary and Sermon. They know they are being personally addressed. They know the pull of the longing to open your heart to God. For them, the need is to move beyond a solitary search and to enter on the road in the company of others. For them it is through community dedicated to service that they will find themselves to be already on the road with Christ.

Being in Discipleship      I note the feelings and thoughts within as I begin to blog on Mark 10: 17-31 where the story of the rich man seeks from Jesus the answer to eternal life. I experience discomfort at having to address Jesus’ encounter with the rich man and his famous words about rich people, heaven, and the eye of the needle.   Jesus continues on the road which is a key phrase for Mark. Being on the road is not just about the destination of Jerusalem and its tumultuous events. Being on the road for us is about an internal journey. A journey towards a transformation within each one of us, leading to the state of being in discipleship. Being in discipleship, rather than the normal expression of being a disciple, better describes for me the experience of trying to open myself to this transformed state. This is an experience of the continuous present, i.e. being in – rather than a state of arrival being a -.

Mark wants us to scoff a little at the obtuse way Jesus’ disciples continually miss the point. We have been merrily scoffing away since the early part of September when the lectionary started to focus our attention on Mark’s picture of Jesus starting-out on the road. Yet, being on the road with Jesus – the process of being in discipleship, is also for me a struggle to take-in and make room for a particular world view, which shocks me to our core.

Our World View      My world view is the way my individual life experience conditions me to experience myself in the flow of life around me. Being on the road with Jesus turns my world view upside down. There isn’t a part of me that remains untouched by this upheaval. Like the proverbial Martini, we are all shaken and not merely stirred. This starts with Jesus’ instruction to anyone of us who wants to be his disciple to deny self, take up our cross, and start-out on the road. For further thoughts on this, I refer readers back to my blog Follow Me for the 16th September.    

Illusions      What do I need to do – to inherit eternal life? This is the rich man’s question. Isn’t also our deepest question? The rich man tells Jesus that he has done all things necessary for salvation and yet there is something that continues to evade him. So, please good teacher Jesus, he says, tell me what I need to do? Jesus gives him what he seeks:  go sell everything that is stopping you starting out on the road with me. My discomfort with this text tells me that it is not only the rich man whose heart falls at these words. Unlike the rich man I don’t even have houses, money in the bank, stocks and shares to dispossess myself of. My discomfort lies in Jesus’ call to me to give up another secretly guarded illusion.   

Money is the single-most powerful illusion of happiness. Or if happiness is too much to expect, then at least money provides the illusion of security. Jesus is telling us that this illusion endangers our inheritance of eternal life. Yet, what is eternal life?  I have long ago jettisoned the notion of eternal life as pie in the sky when you die. I am interpreting eternal life to mean the here-and-now experience of being on the road, i.e. to being in discipleship with Jesus. At Mark 10:17-31 we arrive at a signpost on the road that says in bold letters: LOOK AT YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY. 

The Myths of Scarcity and Abundance       Currently, there is a lot being written about our relationship with money and setting this issue within the larger context of how our collective and individual world views are shaped by the fear of scarcity which fuels our obsession with the need for more and more- the illusion that what we have is never enough! For those of you who live in Arizona, if you have a chance to attend one of Canon Timothy Dombek’s STEW-U’s (stewardship university) I recommend you do so. With conviction he explores the myth of scarcity and our obsession with over abundance, and how this distorts the lives of our Christian Communities. I also refer readers to Lynne Twist’s book Unleashing the Soul of Money. For those of us who can’t bear the thought of reading one more book, Twist’s book comes in audio format and makes for compelling listening. You can also refer back to my reflections on illusion and the illusions of scarcity and more is better in my blog Passing Through The Veil of Illusion.

The Comfort of Self-Assertion       I want to take us back to look at the construction of the rich man’s question. The construction presupposes that there is something we need to do.  In my experience we tend to ask the question – so what do I need to do, or how do I do that? – when we seek to quieten the anxiety we feel at having arrived at a significant insight so disturbing in its life changing implications that we need to run from it as fast as we can. We run from the possibility of being changed by our arrival at an insight. We take refuge in the futility of our own inability to see how we can act. This is part of our universal human experience – we long to change with such a desperate intensity, while at the same time, fearing with an equal intensity the prospect of changing. If I let go this source of grievance, if I puncture this illusion of safety and security – what would happen and/or who then would I become?

Following the Commandments is code for how we confuse self-assertion with living as if we are on the road to being in discipleship. The rich man in Mark’s Gospel follows the Commandments because he easily has the material and spiritual resources to do so. Following the commandments is, in other words, the action of self-assertion and self-sufficiency, masquerading as spiritual faithfulness.

How do I know this? I know this because the rich man is me and he is you. I know this from the rich man’s reaction to Jesus asking him to sell his possessions and give the money not just away, but to the poor i.e. those who are in need, and enter onto the road. This I can easily identify with, but because it is about him, I can also take the moral high ground and judge him at the same time. He could not do it because this would require him moving beyond controlling his relationship with God. Through selling his possessions he is being called back into relationship. Not a private relationship with God in which he is always in control of his own feel good factors and personal security. He is being confronted by the need to enter into a public relationship with a God who is present to him through his relationships with others, commonly called community. What is the rich man’s response?  He goes away with a heavy heart  .Here is the litmus test that we all face within the context of our own relationship with money and possessions. It matters not,  how much or how little of these we feel we have.

Going for the Jugular       I heard some funny quips this last week about Episcopalians and money. Did you know that Episcopalians give until it hurts? It’s just that we have such a low pain threshold. Episcopalians when faced with the invitation to pledge will stop at nothing! Think about it. Alas there is an uncomfortable truth in these parodies. Episcopalians are unstinting in their service of one another and the wider world. Ask them to do something, to get involved with a mission and they are right there. Ask them, are you on the road to being in discipleship with Jesus and you usually draw a puzzled look and may evoke a response, oh I am not one of those – those being Evangelicals. Ask Episcopalians, would you like your name published as a supporter of the Opera, or the Ballet, or NPR?.  They will gladly go public with their generosity. Ask them to go onto a list of those who are pledging, and heaven forbid, tithing members of Trinity Cathedral and the look of horror has to be seen to be believed. No! The good Episcopalian says. That’s private between me and God – and the cute among us might even quote scripture, parade not your faith in public and go into your closet and let not the right hand know what the left had is doing. Well, we usually avoid the going into your closet, bit, – but you get the drift.

Last week I coined the snappy phrase: open your wallets as wide as you long to open your hearts. This week’s Gospel confronts us with our willingness to publicly open our hearts and yet, to keep the open or closed state of our wallets, our secret. As a priest, I avoid becoming categorically prescriptive on issues. However, on the issue of money I have to state, our money is not our money, and our relationship with it is not a private concern. God calls us to account publicly for our relationship to money. Because – God’s dream for us is, that the use of our money becomes a source of blessing and spiritual transformation for us.

Money, Being Transformed, Becoming Sources for Transformation       The rich man’s question for assurance that he would inherit eternal life represents all our narcissistic anxieties. Jesus’s response offers a possibility of transformation – turning the question into: are you willing to use your resources to make a difference in the world?  The rich man is afraid of such a transformation and goes away sad. He would rather rely on his own self-sufficiency.

Don’t we all want to make a difference in a world where we mostly feel so ineffectual? Our use of our money becomes a blessing and a fulfillment towards our spiritual longings when we allow it to become an instrument for making a difference. It makes a difference through the way it brings us into a transformed and transforming relationship with others – and together, we build strong community.

The Dilemma        Today is the Sunday Trinity Cathedral has designated as the beginning of our two month Annual Renewal Program. I have a phantasy that if Trinity Cathedral was a mega church I would be well prepared for the commencement of the program by having pre-selected a text or a series of texts well in advance. I would then have built an impressive series of sermons around my text or texts, all of which in a subtle variety of cleaver ways, utterly convinces you- my hearers-  of the need to open your wallets as wide as your desire is to open your hearts.

Alas, this option is not open to me. In a liturgical tradition the preacher is both constrained and enabled by the fixed nature of the Lectionary. Constrained, because as we begin our Annual Renewal Program, I am not able to pick and choose scriptural texts around which to build an utterly convincing argument for the necessity of tithing. Enabled, because the Lectionary forces me to stay within the conversation that God chooses to have with us as a community concerning his dream for our becoming. The Lectionary disciplines us, not only me, but all of us, to listen to what God is telling us as a community – a community that seeks to remain within a covenanted relationship with God’s self. In our tradition preaching is not so much a conversation that I have with all of you. It’s the articulation -often in seemingly inarticulate groans and sighs – of the conversation the Holy Spirit is fostering with us.

All of this is a preamble to the more difficult task of squaring-up to the gospel for our commencement Sunday – Jesus’s teaching on divorce. Aghhhhhhhhhhhh!

Taking the text Head-On      In some churches you would hear the preacher present this text as the scriptural basis supporting the indissolubility of marriage. In other churches you might hear the preacher attempt to explain this text away. Both approaches successfully avoid struggling with the text. The opportunity this text presents is one of the most powerful examples of what we as Episcopalians really believe God is calling us to do. We are a tradition that believes that each generation has to sit in the tension between the tradition, as we receive it, and the lives we actually live. At Trinity Cathedral we express this through our tag-line:

Trinity Cathedral where traditional worship meets with contemporary ideas. 

If you want to know who we are and why you might feel drawn to belong here, this tag-line says it all.

This is the fourth week of a consecutive reading from the central chapters of Mark’s Gospel. Each week our struggle with the text has led us to an understanding which connects the scripture with the reality of the lives we live without hopefully, damaging the integrity of either. You might like to refresh your memory of this journey by rereading my sermon blogs beginning on September 16th or listening to the sermon podcasts posted on the Trinity Homepage or Facebook page.

Jesus’s words about divorce are not, as in the case of last week’s Gospel reading, an example of his use of hyperbole. The context is one of those pesky ones where the Pharisees, presented in the Gospels and the bad guys, seek to entrap Jesus in the manner reminiscent of a presidential debate. It’s refreshing to see that Jesus does not pivot.

The key line for me is where Jesus, referring to the Mosaic Law tells the Pharisees that divorce was allowed:

Because of your hardness of hearts …

He then tells them that this was not what God intended from the beginning of Creation. So does this mean, as the Church once universally contended, and in some sections of Christianity still does, that divorce is a sin against God’s intention at the Creation that men and women to live together in indissoluble marriages? I think not!

For a more in-depth exploration of the reasons why I think Jesus is not universally ruling out divorce, I refer you to an exegesis of the context and meaning of today’s text by Matt Skinner in his 2009 commentary on the Mark 10:2-16 at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=10%2f4%2f2009&tab=4

Themes Within the Text      What I see here is not so much Jesus talking about divorce but about the integrity of marriage, and within that integrity, the rights of the woman. For it was, and remains, God’s intention that human beings accept their responsibilities for one another when they choose to enter into covenanted relationships. What makes marriage a covenanted relationship is that God at Creation intended that human beings should not live alone. It is also an earthly image for the covenanted relationship between Christ and the community of those who follow him.

Last Wednesday, I was part of a discussion of the upcoming Gospel passage at the Bishop’s weekly staff meeting. I listened hoping to glean some helpful pointers for addressing this text. Instead I became deeply moved as in this mixed group of colleagues, some clergy, some lay,  several persons spoke of the painful memories of their experience of divorce. If I could sum up my sense of their pain, it was the pain of the loss of innocence. The pain of the disillusionment at finding themselves unable to continue to live in an unhappy marriage. What seemed to have hurt them most was not the emotional trauma of the break-up of their relationships but the breaking of their sacred vow to live with their marriage partner for the rest of their lives. It seemed to me that no-one in that room who had been through a divorce, had remained unscathed by the loss of their once innocent belief that when you make sacred promises everything should work out, and people should live happily thereafter.

The loss of our innocence leaves a deep and often ugly scar in us. And yet, I also noted that each of these persons had gone-on to make a new and fulfilling marriage with another person. For me there could not be a more graphic example of how we are called to live in the tension between the tradition we receive and the lives we actually live. As Anglican Christians this place of tension is where we expect to encounter God. It is in this tension that God comes looking for us.

I am at the point where I feel I could go on writing about Mark 10:2-16 all day. I interpret this feeling to be a sign that I need to wrap-up this blog entry.  The central statement in this whole passage for me is  when Jesus refers to divorce as a law written to mitigate the hardness of human (read male) hearts.

Two Distinct Conversations     Jesus has one conversation with the Pharisees and then moves to a different conversation when he goes indoors with his disciples. With the Pharisees Jesus seems to be concerned about the plight of women in the case of a writ of divorce. Under the Mosaic Law the writ of divorce was to be given to the woman as a protection against the huge discrimination she would experience in a patriarchal society where women were merely the chattel firstly of their father and then their husband. The Pharisees, all men of course, make no mention of this aspect of the Law.

When Jesus is alone with the disciples he specifically includes the possibility of a woman divorcing her husband in cases of adultery. Matt Skinner notes that this was such a shocking suggestion that Matthew, in his Gospel omits mention of this possibility altogether. It’s an interesting aside that in the Church of England the priest hands the marriage certificate to the bride reminding her that the certificate is her legal property and not her husband’s. This custom is a historic leftover from a time when proof of marriage was a woman’s only legal protection in a society where it was men who held the upper hand.

Jesus seems to be saying not that there can never be a divorce but that in divorce men and woman are equal.  In his conversation with the Pharisees his message is that divorce is impossible when it is being used by men as a loophole to justify adultery. When this is the case, divorce or no, the new marriage contract does not protect the guilty person from continuing in an adulterous state.  Jesus does not see the sin of adultery as a sin against the property rights of other men, but a sin against the marriage partner- against the wife – a sin against covenanted relationship. This is the link to his second and different conversation with the disciples. Here, Jesus alludes to the centrality of the marriage partnership. He seems to understand that both men and women can institute divorce and that both will be morally accountable to each other for their behavior. I don’t read his words to be saying that relationships never fail. I hear him speaking against the reduction of the marriage relationship to a matter of male property rights over women and divorce as the easy legal loophole to justify male or female adultery.

Jesus’ Concerns    I note how having shown his concern for woman Jesus then rebukes the disciples for their exclusion of the children from his presence – suffer the little children to come unto me for to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven. In today’s passage we hear Jesus continuing is teaching about vulnerability.Woman and children are the images Jesus uses for the way that God, incarnate in himself, volunteers to become vulnerable to the hardness of the human heart. To be vulnerable and excluded from the protections of power is the chief qualification for inclusion into the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ seeming prohibition on divorce is not a denial of the propensity for human relationships to fail. It is a reminder that covenanted relationships carry responsibilities that can’t be sloughed off without a recognition of the pain of relationship failure. This is a pain that is healed only through repentance. Only in repentance do we gain the ability to move forward and learn from our failures how to make better informed future choices.

Linking the Improbable   Perhaps this Gospel reading is not such a bad one to have on the Sunday we commence our annual renewal, looking forward to 2013. Rather than being read as a prohibition on divorce the text is about the integrity of marriage and the costs to the human heart when marriages fail. It’s about marriage as a model of covenanted relationship intended by God at Creation. That God intends marriage as a fruit of Creation necessitates in our own generation, extending the concept of covenanted marriage to include our gay brothers and sisters. It is also a reminder that through our baptism, we, as the saving, and cross bearing community of Christians at Trinity Cathedral, on the corner of Central and Roosevelt, have entered into an intentional and covenanted relationship with God. As members of the Body of Christ we incur responsibilities and obligations to our faith community.

Not to put too fine a point on it. One of the responsibilities of our covenant of baptism is to open our wallets as wide as we desire to open our hearts. Wallets and hearts exist in a virtuous cycle.  If we are serious about being in covenanted relationship with God, the opening of one is intended by God to lead to the opening of the other.  However, more about pledging and tithing in weeks to come. So stay tuned!

This last week I made my first visit to a Mormon Church, where I attended a funeral service. Among a wealth of impressions and unanswered questions that played in my mind, the experience left me with two key  impressions. I felt humbled by the deep interpersonal quality that pervaded the gathering. I felt I was in the presence of a religious culture which witnessed to God’s presence through the personal connections between people. Everyone around me appeared to feel as if they belonged together. The worshipers seemed to me to be bound together not only by a tangible experience of gratitude to God for his love, but also, by an everyday experience of showing one another the power of that love. I will return to the second off my two key impressions in a moment.

As it happened, later that same day a new member of our congregation came to speak with me. In the course of the conversation he told me about his Mormon upbringing and  his early adult years spent in the Church Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.  In the course of our conversation he said something that really surprised me. He told me he was finding in the Episcopal Church a deeply felt resonance to the Mormon culture that he could no longer be a part of. He noted that both religious cultures shared an experience of the importance of place. He grew up in a town in Utah where the only church in town was Mormon.

Episcopalians in the U.S. never enjoy the exclusive experience of being the only church in town even thought sometimes we like to behave as if are. Ours is a tradition that was formed in a context the English village and town where for hundreds of years the only Church was the Anglican Church.

The surprise of the last week, for me, has been to realize that Mormon and Anglican Traditions have things in common. Both emphasize the importance of  place and the importance of identifying with the local. The locality is the setting for the world of  everyday life. This is the setting within which God speaks to us. Here, both Mormon and Anglican Traditions emphasize the centrality of being in right relationship with one another.

My second key impression from the funeral service was reaffirmed in my conversation later in the day. As I sat sensing the deep interpersonal bond that tied the worshipers together I was also profoundly disquieted by the knowledge that the interpersonal bonds were only extended to those who shared the Church’s beliefs. Because Mormon belief is that homosexuality is a sin against God, both the person I went to the funeral to support and the person who spoke with me later that day had experienced rejection from the Church when they reached that point in their lives when their integrity as persons required an open acknowledgement of being Gay. For both of them this became the point where the loving community they had grown up within, and to which they had devoted much of their lives, closed its doors to them and left them on the outside.

Mormonism and Anglicanism both stress the centrality in the Christian life of being in right relationship with one another. However, this is where the similarity ends.  Mormonism is among the many examples of religious cultures that are truth based. In a truth based culture it seems that right relationship can only extend to those who share right belief.

As Episcopalians our Anglican Tradition emerges out of an experience where people with very different theologies and political ideologies were compelled by the law to sit alongside one-another in the same pew Sunday by Sunday. Historically we refer to this as the Elizabethan Settlement. Over time, the Elizabethan Settlement broke down, and it eventually became possible for English men and women to express their differences in the choice of the Protestant chapel and eventually the restored Roman Catholic Church. However the mainstream of English culture continued to be dominated by its identification with its National Church, expressed at the local level of the Parish Church.

Over several centuries the necessity of tolerating religious and political differences under the same church roof led to what we today recognize as the distinctly Anglican compromise.  This need for compromise and tolerance has prevented us becoming a truth based religious culture. Instead we became a worship based culture.

What makes Episcopalians stand out in the current American religious landscape is our distinctive emphasis on worship as the context in which we find our commonality. Over generations the rich and poor, Tory and Whig, those with High Church sympathies sitting next to their Low Church neighbors were all moulded into a common culture of worship through the linguistic and imaged richness of the Book of Common Prayer.  Like Mormons, we too stress right relationship. However, for us right relationship is not predicated by shared truth. Our foundation of right relationship rests on the experience of praying together. We are people committed to praying with any person who wishes to pray with us.

Gathered together in worship we hear God speaking to us through the proclamation of Scripture. This morning’s Gospel is rich in potential preaching themes. As we move Sunday by Sunday through the central chapters of Mark’s Gospel we see a pattern repeating itself. Jesus teaches the disciples about what it means to be his disciples and they, the disciples, then graphically demonstrate in behavior that they have miserably failed to understand. If Jesus’ disciples could get it so wrong and still come through in the end, then there is hope for you and me.

The disciples are pissed-off not only that someone else is healing in Jesus’ name, but healing successfully where they previously had failed. They try to do what groups always try to do – protect their territory by attempting to silence any opposition. Yet, Jesus tells them:

Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.

These words are familiar to us because we usually hear them being misquoted. Instead of Jesus’ actual words whoever is not against us is for us, we invert the phrase to whoever is not for us is against us. This reversal communicates the opposite meaning. Anyone who is not for us is against us expresses a narrow need for exclusive control. It maintains that those who are not on the inside are automatically on the outside. So Jesus tells the disciples, don’t exclude him because he is not one of your band, but include him on the strength of his actions and purpose being the same as yours. Exclusion is replaced by inclusion.

The disciples were operating from the principle that those who are not for us are against us. They intuitively define being for us as being the same as we are. They want to form a self-selecting, truth based group.   Self-selecting groups have to keep clarifying who is in and who is out. Whereas, Jesus is inviting anyone into relationship with him on the basis of the way he or she behaves.

The disciples are only seeking to defend themselves against the fearful message of Jesus. If everyone is included, then how will we control the message and keep the truth clear.  Perhaps its desperation that forces Jesus into graphic hyperbole?  The sin for which drowning by mill stone, severing of limbs and plucking-out of eyes is the atonement is the sin of thinking and acting in ways that put stumbling blocks in anyone’s path to God.

Mark portrays a sequence of events in Chapter 9 in which the central linking theme is following Jesus. We follow Jesus when we welcome and receive others into relationship with us. Sin is our human need to draw sharp distinction between those we consider with us and our consequent desire to exclude those we are not the same as us. It’s a short step from here to defining   them as those who are against us. For me this is the sin of falling out of right relationship with another because I am not able to tolerate difference and diversity in community.

I remember my father delighting in repeating two old world sayings which summed up his need for an easy solution in relation to his argumentative children:

Do as I say, not as I do!  and  Children are meant to be seen and not heard!

I don’t think for one moment he really believed these saying to be true. In fact he would always laugh as he recited them. Yet, I suspect like a lot of parents he felt torn. Not believing these sayings to be true he nevertheless resorted to them in the hope that they would provide him with a simple solution in dealing with the challenges his children presented.

What are your memories of the world you grew-up in? I grew up in a world of solid suburban values supported by the social provisions of healthcare and universal education accessible to all and free at the point of use.  Looking back in hindsight the N.Z. I grew up in seems from this distance a place where life was sweet, uncomplicated, and safe. I grew up in a golden age of national prosperity funded on the back of a forty-year economic boom which began to unravel only after  Britain’s entry into what was then called the European Economic Community in 1973.

As a child, the world I grew up in gave me freedom. I was free to go out on my bike, which was my only form of transport for both getting to and from school and for exploring the world around me. My friends and I rode the country roads and explored the disused water filled and overgrown gravel pits and pine forests that surrounded the area where we lived. No-doubt many Americans of my age remember growing up in a similar kind of  (suburban) world.

The world I now find myself living in seems such a different place from the world of my memories. The prospect of allowing my granddaughter a freedom to roam about on her bicycle exploring the world around her is beyond thinking about.

As I look around me I see a confused picture of a society where we are both obsessively anxious and at the same time, callous in the extreme in our attitudes towards children. Millions of children are the obsessive focus of anxiety driven parental over indulgence. We are beginning to note the fruits of anxiety-driven, intrusive parenting in a prolonged period of adolescent dependence now extending for many into early adult years. At the same time the results of the recent American Survey reveal that in 2012 16.4 million children now live in poverty.

Child poverty is not simply being monetarily poor. After all many of us can legitimately claim that: we may have been poor but we were loved and happy. Therefore, child poverty is a relative term inclusive of multiple deprivations effecting a wide rage of life experiences. At the risk of stereotyping myself as a frequent listener to NPR, I heard this last week a commentator speaking about research findings that show clearly how poor life prospects can be linked to the effect of early poor nutrition on brain development.

It has been said that the truest picture of any society or other social grouping can be seen in its attitudes and treatment of children.

The images created by this morning’s gospel reading evoke a deep sympathy in me for Jesus! He hears us arguing about which among us is the more important. I imagine him in desperation taking hold of the child nearest to him and confounding those around him, he proclaims whoever, welcomes this child welcomes me and not only me but the one who sent me.  Mark (:30-37

Mark gives us a glimpse in two places of Jesus’ attitude towards children. In two weeks we will encounter the second and arguable the more famous – Mark 10:13-15 suffer the little children to come unto me. In the context of 1st century Palestine Jesus’s comments about children run strongly against cultural assumptions. In doing so Jesus once again is standing in the prophetic tradition which presents women and children as the ultimate symbols of vulnerability and dependency – and thereby powerful images of an essential quality of God.

In the long march of time some things remain constant. At the level of social attitudes and actions children evoke powerful ambivalence in us. Our 21st century Western ambivalence towards children is exemplified in a number of ways. Social ambivalence towards children is an expression of the fact that children are our future, yet, in the present moment they are often experienced as an inconvenience, a burden on our patience and our pockets.

We sharply distinguish between our experience as parents and our attitudes as general members of society. As parents we draw a too sharp distinction between my-our children – and children in general. Towards my-our children we are often over-anxious, over protective, and over indulgent. As taxpaying members of society we tend to think about children in general.

As a society we express attitudes of callous neglect towards children in general. We think little of cutting social welfare provisions in child and family healthcare, and in education because we claim they are too expensive. When we act at this level we are not thinking about my-our children. We are thinking about all those children in general, whose parents should be able to take better individual care of their children and not expect me or us, to do if for them!

The Episcopal Church is greying. For generations we have neglected the formation of our children. Sunday School as a form of child minding that is an insult to the natural intelligence and curiosity of our children does not qualify as an adequate response to the formation needs of our children.

One of the strengths of our Cathedral is the long commitment to Children’s Ministry. Often this area has been the focus of tension and has been the context for strong contention.  While this is often difficult to manage I see this as an indication of the passionate importance that our parents and teachers place on the formation of our children. Children and youth formation is important enough to passionately disagree over what is best.

The Diocese of Arizona has one of the strongest commitments at diocesan level to children’s education and youth ministry. Nevertheless, despite this, a survey of parish budgets would still reveal how little actual investment is made by many of our parishes in children and youth ministries. As a result nationally among the mainline churches the Episcopal Church has the poorest retention rate among adolescents and young adults. Now this is saying something in a culture where according to the Pew Religion Survey 2010, all churches, whether mainline, nondenominational or evangelical, are irrelevant to 30% and rising of mellennials, i.e. people born since 1981.

The same ambivalences towards children found at large in society regrettably also find expression within Church communities. Most churches when asked about their number one priority will say, growth. Thinking generally as members of a congregation we connect our desire for growth with encouraging families with children and young people. When asked more individually to reflect on the shift in our personal attitudes required to encourage growth, our increasingly greying Boomers rail against the interruptions to the dignity and contemplation of their worship occasioned by the presence of families with children and young people.

For Jesus, the child is not a focus of sentimental dreaming. Nor is the presence of children a cause of irritation. Jesus takes and holds up the child as an image of his own experience of vulnerability. The image coming to me from this morning’s gospel is an image of Jesus’s vulnerability and loneliness as he begins his long journey on the road to Jerusalem.

Jesus is not inviting us to become sentimental about the child as a figure of lost innocence. Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem is his lonely road and he invites us to become his companions on this road.  He is not holding up the child as a model of discipleship. He is not saying that disciples are those who become innocent like a child.  Jesus is showing us that when we welcome, love and support the child in our midst we welcome God into our lives and thereby become disciples.

Jesus is telling us if we want to be his disciples we will have to place ourselves at the service of others. The clearest image of serving others requires us, with all our hearts, to desire to welcome children into our midst.

What more powerful image is there of  service to others than an image of ourselves placing the interests of others before our own? The contours of this image are those of the welcoming of the child as an expression of the welcome of God into the heart of our communities.  This is what it means to become Jesus’ disciples and lovers of God.