Identity

"The gospel's central message -- that God loves us enough to die for us -- severs self-serving spiritualities like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism at the root. Christian identity comes from worshipping a God who loves us enough to suffer on our behalf, and who calls us to enact this kind of love for others: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." - Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian.

I'm reading this and getting lots of good data...and having to ask myself lots of hard questions about how to articulate what I believe.  I have been trained with a vocabulary that I don't find useful anymore (it's heavily focused on penal substitutionary atonement), but I haven't been in another school long enough to be able to talk about it much.  Yesterday I was wrestling with this some and now maybe I'll stat getting some new vocabulary, too.

Sermon: Luke 10.1-9

Joseph P. Mathews
For the Mission of the Church I
1 March 2011
PR106

In the name of the God who sends laborers to the harvest. Amen.

Some of you already know this: I spent three and a half weeks of January in Mexico. I had planned to be volunteering at an after school program in Veracruz. A few weeks before Stefanie Wilson and I planned to leave, the Bishop of Southeast Mexico e-mailed us and asked if we could go to somewhere else. The priest we’d planned to work with would be visiting her family but there was another mission that worked with orphans in the diocese, and he’d already cleared it with that priest if we were willing to be there.

Stefanie and I were just excited for news about a final green light, so we jumped at the opportunity and said of course we would. Our first day there we asked what we could do to help and Pedro said to watch and rest. Our second day we asked what we could do to help. Pedro said to enjoy the morning and read. The children’s home we were volunteering and living at is on a ranch complete with, sheep, pigs, chickens, and seven acres of cornfield. All the while we were reading and resting and taking walks and trying to herd the sheep with the younger boys, the older boys were in the fields working.

At first they pulled the ears of corn, dried on the stalk, off the stalks and piled them together. Then they would bag them up and bring them to a storage area. Bags and bags of corn, it seemed like there was always more. After a few days of watching and resting and feeling like we weren’t doing mission, the director of the home said that there was work that we could do in the harvesting of the corn. You see, this wasn’t corn that anyone would be eating, and there was much more to harvesting than getting it in from the field.

First it had to be shucked. We shucked corn for six hours the first day we did that. And there was always more corn to be shucked. Early in our time, there was a machine that the shucked corn was run through. This was corn that would be used to feed the chickens and pigs, so the kernels had to be pulled from the ears. The machine was borrowed, though, and when it was returned we pulled the kernels off by hand with a twisting motion or using a corncob to help. The harvest wasn’t just one step of pulling ears of corn off the stalks in the fields.

In our gospel text today, Jesus sends out seventy to the fields to harvest. The harvest is plentiful, he says, but the workers are few. They are to go out working together, to preach peace to those they encountered and to rely on other people to care for them. Rather than moving around, they are to stay with those who are offering hospitality. But what is this harvesting that the seventy are supposed to be doing? Most of the gospel text is Jesus telling them how to live off of other people and that if people reject their peace it will come back to them.

In the chapter prior to this Jesus gives the twelve the assignment to proclaim the Kingdom of God and heal. And that’s what he tells the seventy to do, as well saying, “Cure the sick who are there and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you.’ ” That’s the work in the field that Jesus sends the seventy out to do: cure the sick and say that the Kingdom of God has come near.

To me, one of those things sounds a lot easier than the other. “The Kingdom of God has come near, y’all!” There, I said it. That’s half of the work, right? Curing the sick? Well. I don’t know that my spiritual gift is that of laying on of hands and performing miraculous healings. It’d be awesome if that’s how Jesus decided to use me to bring the Kingdom of God from at hand to in hand. But thus far in my life, that’s not in the gift set that I’ve been given. But Jesus doesn’t qualify this charge with “If you’ve been given this gift.” When the seventy return they rejoice because they have been given this gift, and he gave it to the twelve, as well. So what to do?

Well, for starters, I don’t think merely saying “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” is really all that helpful. What does that even mean? What does smiling and saying that to the man on the train shaking a cup do for him? Or how good is that news, really, to the woman who can’t find a job and has children and whose unemployment benefits are about to expire? Or to the workers who are trapped in a system that prohibits them from working together to have a better quality of living? I don’t think simply telling them that the Kingdom of God is at hand does much.

I do, however think that all of us are sick and in need of a healer. Our sicknesses come in various forms of plague that makes us cough and unable to carry groceries or enjoy our sabbaticals and they come in feeling lonely even though you live in a tight-knit community in a city of over eight million. Sickness comes in however we feel separated from God and other people, whether we’ve wronged someone, been wronged, feel shunned, or are isolating ourselves to keep from spreading germs or recover our strength. Christ has come to heal us and to restore us.

And we understand that that is the mission of the church, as well: restoring all people to unity with God and one another in Christ. Reconciliation is healing, preaching peace brings reconciliation, and in reconciliation the Kingdom of God is at hand. The passage from Isaiah today offers more about what that looks like, where all nations stream to the mountain of the Lord’s house and God who alone is Good is the fair judge and arbiter with no special interests, only best interests and justice in mind. The instruction that comes from the Lord’s house leads the people to beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more.

Our catechism teaches that the church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace and love. But justice, peace, and love only come to us for promotion because Jesus has come to us, reconciled us, and sent us out into the fields to be laborers of the harvest, and it is through all of us that the church carries out its mission. While we are all sick and in need of Good News, some of us hear tidbits of it more regularly than others. As we go out into the fields, we are called to labor with those in church and those out of Church. We have been given authority to heal the sick and proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” Harvesting is a process and is not something done quickly or at once. In the same way that harvesting the corn was more than pulling it from the stalks for me and Stefanie, proclaiming the Kingdom of God is usually more than simply talking to someone once. Proclaiming the Gospel has to be done continually, and relationships must be built, and people cared for. In our prayers and worship we are given a model of what this looks like practically that we may live it in our day-to-day lives.

When we pass the peace and come to the Table in love and charity with our neighbor we show that we take being reconciled seriously. At the Table in Christ’s Body and Blood we are strengthened to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ. During this time together we step out of what we face day by day and are reminded of what the Kingdom of God at hand is like as we experience a foretaste of that heavenly banquet where all are welcome, there is always enough, and there are no worries because God has made all things well.

But from this place we go in peace to love and serve the Lord as laborers. Renewed afresh to do God’s work and to meet new people and take the Good News to the nations preaching peace to those who are far off and to those who are near. All the while as we work on God’s behalf we realize that it is God who is at work and God who helps us as we don’t stop at telling someone that they are cared for but instead help them from whatever places of privilege we may occupy. That may mean finding food and also serving as support in navigating bureaucracy for to get long-term aid and finally celebrating a change when things get better.

Curing the sick and preaching peace through Christ’s strength are what we’re called to do. As we help others and receive help from others and Jesus, I hope that as Derek Webb says, the bread on our tongues leaves a trail of crumbs to lead the hungry back to the place where we are from. Working as a harvester for Christ isn’t about reaping numbers or rewards inasmuch as showing those in need – which is all of us – what God has to offer us and how Christ has made things better for us. From the stalk to kernels was a multi-step process. Bringing Christ’s healing to the world is too, but we’ve been given authority to do it, and do it we must. Amen.

Sermon: Luke 21.5-19/Is. 65.17-25

The following sermon was preached in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd as part of Preaching 1 on November 10, 2010.  

Joseph P. Mathews

10 November 2010

PR1

Luke 21.5-19/ Is. 65.17-25

In the name of the God who was and is and is to come.  Amen.

Can you feel it?  Do you feel the tension mounting?  Do you feel the beginning of the end?  If you’re feeling anything like me you’re definitely feeling the tension of the end of the semester creeping up on you.  That systematics paper is due, the liturgics paper is due, and unless you turned it in today you’ll have a church history paper due.  And two extemporaneous sermons yet to do in this class.  And then another liturgics paper and a church history final.

But that’s not the ending that I’m asking if you’re starting to feel.  No, I’m talking about the end of the world -- and the end of the church year.  We’re in a liminal space right now and the designers of the lectionary know that.  We’re moving.  On Sunday we remembered those saints who have gone before us, those whose temporal lives have ended.  Parishes all over the Church baptized people, and part of their lives ended as they were born anew in water and the Spirit, and now they are between the Font and the grave.

All Saints’ is a sign to me that we’re winding down a church year, that Advent is just around the corner.  We’re in between extremes right now: the days are getting shorter, and the temperatures are getting cooler.  All Saints’ has passed.  Summer has ended but winter is not yet here.  In my mind, with Advent comes the cold.  With Advent comes the dark.  With Advent comes the end of the world.  And with Advent comes a new reign and ordering of the world.  But we’re not yet to Advent.  We’re in an in between space that gives us foreshadowing of that season yet to come.

In our Gospel passage today Jesus tells his followers that the temple would be destroyed and that the end was coming.  With what had to be startled alarm, they ask Jesus when it will be and how they’ll know it’s coming.  Rather than saying “Y2K will be the end of the world,” Jesus tells them not to be led astray.  Led astray?  The want a date.  And he says that people will claim to be him and will tell people the the end is just around the corner, maybe even with a specific date!

Whenever I read apocalyptic material, I think about these people who know the date of the end of the world.  I don’t mean the people who have calculated it based on the Myan calendar, but those people who have cracked the Bible code and know just the year, the month, the day, the hour, the minute, the second that Jesus will return.  And I think “Have you not read the Bible that you claim to take so seriously?!  We aren’t supposed to focus all our energy (if any!) on the end of the world.  Don’t you remember what Jesus told his followers?”

I also think about a Southern Gospel song based on the apocalypse in Matthew It was sometimes sung my traveling quartets in my childhood church, and the refrain says, “We are living surely living in the days he speaks about/all these things we now are having every day/Let’s be ready for his coming let us meet him with a shout/for he tells us in his word to watch and pray.”  The third verse talks about “all these things he speaks about” “Many wars shall come upon us when the end of time is near/ Many earthquakes will be numerous in those days/All of these today we're having and in Matthew it appears/We should live our life for Him and sing his praise.”

Yes, Jesus does talk about wars and earthquakes.  But in Luke’s version he’s pretty clear that, well, they don’t mean much...neither do the famine and plague all over the world or Comet Halebop.  All the stuff that Jesus lists wasn’t all that new.  One of the things that differentiated Jesus from the other messiahs running around first century Palestine was that he didn’t lead an insurrection against the empire.  But in all of those things, we won’t yet be to the end of the world...and we won’t yet be to Christ’s reign.  Before those things come to be lie challenges that many of us in the United States will never face: persecution by civil authorities for taking the name of Christ and following him on the Way.  We are blessed in this country to have the freedom to gather and worship whatever we choose.  This hasn’t always been the case, as St. Lawrence -- roasted alive on a grid iron -- St. Perpetua -- mauled by a wild cow in the arena and then beaten -- and all those saints in Fox’s Book of Martyrs will tell you.  But the point of Jesus’ talk about the end times isn’t about being martyred.  No, the point of his talking about the end times is that he wants people to follow him and trust him.

In the midst of adversity and persecution Christ’s followers are given the opportunity to testify.  When non-believers say, “Okay Christian” or “Okay chaplain,” or “Okay priest, what do you have to say for your God now?” Jesus’ followers are given the opportunity to tell their truth of the Good News.  And how does he want them to testify?  Not by rehearsing elaborate speeches to share or trying to think of every possible situation and how to answer it.  Not by giving them easy answers.  No, Christ wants his followers to trust him for the words to say.  

I don’t know how many times in the hospital this summer that’s all I could do.  Pray before going into a room when I knew it was going to be rough, listen, and keep praying.  We’ve all done a unit or two of CPE.  Take a minute to think about those experiences where there was nothing that you could say, where no amount of role play during orientation would have helped you know exactly what to do when a social worker invites you to be a part of a care conference before the decision to withdraw life sustaining care from the ninety year old -- or the four year old is made.  What defense could you prepare to give to those survivors whose world as they knew it was ending?

When I think about those times, if I said anything at all, I often don’t remember what I said.  What I remember is faces being in pain and looking for peace.  What I remember is Christ being present in the space between us.  What I remember are holy moments that I didn’t make, moments where Christ guided me.  And I remember feeling like I’d made something of a mess when I tried to go it on my own.  At the end of the world -- as we know it and live it or temporally as governments grow more and more oppressive -- this is what will be expected of Christ’s followers.  But we’re not there yet.

And how different that is from what comes after the end, that new heaven and new earth that Isaiah writes about where no more shall the sound of weeping be heard or the cry of distress.  Where no more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime, where one who dies at a hundred shall be considered a youth.  In Christ’s reign, which we’ll celebrate next week, violence is no more.  The wolf and lamb eat together, and the lion no longer attacks another creature as prey, but eats grass with the ox.  Society is just: those who build their houses don’t have them taken away by people with more money.  Those who tend the fields are not the slaves of oppressive systems.  But we’re not there yet.

We’re in an in between space.  We’re between the saints who’ve gone before us, and we’re moving toward the Reign of Christ and the end of the world.  And in this in between space we have to remember that we’re not the ones in charge of anything.  We look to that day when in the fullness of time all things will be put in subjection under Christ and made well.  But we’re not there yet.  Right now we’re in a place of looking to the Christ who loves us and died for us, who conquered death and the grave, showing our feet the way.  

Jesus tells us to not prepare our defenses in advance, though he doesn’t say anything about not preparing sermons or classwork in advance.  In telling us this, he’s inviting us to trust, listen, and follow him.  We follow him when we answer the call to different types of ministry.  And we follow him when we do acts of service for the poor in field ed.  We follow him when we take up our crosses and give of ourselves to others.  And we hope that we’ll follow him in the resurrection to his New Reign.  But we’re not there yet.

Sermon: Luke 17.11-19

This sermon was preached in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd on October 6, 2010 as part of Preaching 1.  It was modified and delivered twice at St. Paul's Chapel the following Sunday, October 10.

Joseph P. Mathews

PR1  - Lab C

Mo. Mitties

Luke 17.11-19

Proper 23

In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, who creates, redeems, and sustains us.  Amen. 

When I first looked at this passage I was excited!  A plain reading of our text today about the ten lepers being healed but only one of them coming to Jesus to thank him is where I wanted to go.  I wanted to talk about how it is right and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks to Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth.  I wanted to preach about the joy of gratitude.

And then I did a little homework to get some background information on the text.  

An online commentary I regularly consult starts off this way, “The temptation to moralism with this story of ‘ungrateful lepers’ is very strong...we all should do better expressing thanks to God.  But this text isn’t about moralism.”

 Moralism?  I didn’t want to preach about moralism, I wanted to be joyful.  Good news in gratitude.  The author of the commentary said, “It’s almost always okay to preach about gratitude...but this text isn’t the best support for it!”

So I sat and read and listened to the Spirit.  And this text isn’t about moralism, but rather ritual cleanliness and priestly work.  The ten lepers in our story today were ritually unclean in addition to being sick.  This ritual uncleanliness had bonded together an interesting group of people: nine Judeans and a Samaritan, who otherwise would not have been hanging out together.  Ethnicity didn’t matter at this point.  They were all on the margins, and they were in community with one another.

But they longed to be in their greater communities, the way one feels when moving to seminary from her sponsoring congregation...or New York in general when moving away from all family and friends.  This group of ten was on the outside, and they cried out to Jesus for healing.  The way these people could come back into their communities, however, was not for Jesus to simply heal them and send them on their way.

No, a priest had to examine them and declare them clean, and here’s the crux of our story.  The nine Judeans do what Jesus says to do not because they’re ungrateful, but because they have to.  He sends them to a priest, and as they go they realize they’ve been healed and can thus show themselves to the priest.  They aren’t being ungrateful, they’re following directions.  In their cultural context they would not have thanked Jesus anyway; they weren’t longing to just be healed, but to be welcomed back into the communities.  That required a Judean priest declaring them clean, not an itinerant rabbi healing their physical illness.  Gratitude would be shown to the person who made the declaration of cleanliness.  

The nine Judeans do what they’re told to do.  The Samaritan man, though doesn’t.  When he realizes he’s been healed he turns around and thanks Jesus.  And here’s the turning point.  Rather than going to a samaritan priest, this man comes to Jesus and thanks him.  Jesus tells him that his faith has made him well and doesn’t send him back to a priest but sends him on his way.   In this Samaritan’s act of thanksgiving the Samaritan man says, “You’re the priest I need.”  Jesus’s declaration of cleanliness Jesus is his assent to being the priest for the outsider, the marginalized, the one who slips through the cracks.  

Jesus is not just the healer, but the one who reconciles outcasts to broader communities and integrates them into societal life.  Jesus taught his ragtag band of followers that because of their faith in him, they could also be reconcilers, welcoming the people around them who were physically or ritually “unclean” back into community.  And guess what?  We’re Jesus’s ragtag band of followers now.  This event with the Samaritan leper might as well have been Jesus writing the mission of the church as The Episcopal Church understands it.

Our catechism says, “The mission of the Church is to restore all people unity with God and each other in Christ.  The church pursues its mission as its prays and worships, proclaims the gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.”  Our mission is to reconcile each other to one another and to God.  Our mission is to love and do acts of service to all people, especially for those on the margins.  

Think about times that you’ve done this kind of work.  Do you do it for the thanks you get?  When you open the shelter is that because you want the women to thank you?  Or what about when you work at St. Martin’s?  Mission trips around the country and around the world?...the work that you plan on doing as priests ordained in this church?  Do you do any of that because you want thanks?

Or do you do it not just because you have to, but because of the value you place on that role.  I shouldn’t project.  When I’ve done these types of things it’s not because I want someone to thank me.  When I worked in Alabama one summer leading youth groups in repairing roofs and doing other home repair projects, it wasn’t because I wanted people to thank me.  It was because I had been given good news of Jesus’s works of reconciliation that I wanted to share.  I wanted to help these people who felt outcast and downtrodden know that they were loved by their sibling travelers on the way and by the God who created them.

And I made promises at my confirmation, when I reaffirmed my baptism, to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ and to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.  In water and the spirit we are baptized into Christ and all of God’s acts of redemption.  In our Gospel passage today Jesus says non-verbally, “Here I am, the one who serves as the priest to the outsider, bringing them back into community with the human family.”  We have been joined to that example and witness and given a task of reconciliation, outreach, and love.

At the table we’re strengthened for our journey and continually reconciled to God and one another.  Because there is one loaf we who are many are one body.  Let’s be about God’s business of reconciliation and welcoming the stranger into the body.  Amen.

Raymond Brown on Orthodoxy

"When the charge of heresy is raised in Christian communities today, there is a tendency to associate that stigma with wild-eyed radicals proposing new ideas. IN Christian history, however, some of the most significant heresies have been conservative rather than radical -- the tendency to hold on to old theological answers when new questions have caused the main body of Christians to move on to new answers. The Jewish Christians, as we detect their presence in John and know their presence in the second century, were holding on to oder and more primitive views on such subjects as Christology, the eucharist, and relations to Judaism, views that were widely held early in the first century but were now no longer deemed to be adequate expressions of truth. At the Council of Nicea ([325 CE]) the lower Christology of Arius was more primitive than the higher Christology of Athanasius. Arius was content with the scriptural formulations of Jesus' identity, e.g., 'In the beginning was the Word,' which meant for him that the Word had a beginning. Athanasius had to persuade the Council to accept newer, non-Scriptural formulas, e.g., true God of true God, coeternal with the Father. But he did this with insight: The Scripture answers were no longer adequate because now a question was being asked that had not been asked in [New Testament] times, and the new answers he proposed were true to to the direction of the Scriptures. "Orthodoxy," then is not always the possession of those who try to hold on to the past. One may find a truer criterion in the direction toward which Christian though has been tending, even if that direction suggests that past formulations of truth have to be considered inadequate to answer new questions." (Bold emphasis added, italics in original)

pp.80-81, The Community of the Beloved Disciple by Raymond Brown.

The Community of the Beloved Disciple

"The exalted Johannine christology is not some abstract test of orthodoxy that has nothing to do with community living. If it is crucial to believe that Jesus is the pre-existen Word of God who has come from God and is of God, it is because then we know what God is really like --- He really is a God of love who so love the world that He was willing to give of Himself, in His Son (3.16;I John 4.8-9), and not merely send someone else. And such an understanding of God and of Jesus demands that the Johannine Christian, who is the child of God, behave in a way worth of his Father and of Jesus his Brother: 'By this will all identify you as my disciples -- by the love you have for one another' (John 13.35)."

pp.60-61The Community of the Beloved Disciple, by Raymond Brown.