David Deppen's Sermon for 12.19.10

This sermon was preached by The Rev. David Deppen, on 12.19.10 at Church of the Nativity, on the occasion of the 51st anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood.

First of all, let me express my appreciation to Susan for her generous offer to let me celebrate the Eucharist this morning. After she had asked, I upped the ante by offering to preach as well. I wouldn’t have done that except for the fact that I have a sermon left over from a year ago – a sermon that went unheard. On this same Sunday last year, I was to celebrate my 50^th anniversary of ordination and the rector of our parish in Cape Cod – St Mary’s in Provincetown - issued the same invitation as Susan. Our family were all in Wellfleet for Christmas and all was in readiness. But that Sunday we awoke to a major snowstorm with a foot already on the ground and more coming down. The roads were a mess, the police warned against venturing out, and the 15 mile drive seemed foolhardy. Consequently, my 50^th went unheralded and the sermon went in my file. Until today! Not new, but unused and with a few obvious adjustments, here is what I wrote.

Fifty-one years ago today I was one of eleven men ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church at St. James Cathedral in Chicago. Fifty-one years ago tomorrow I struggled through my first Eucharist, trying to get all the prayers and hand gestures and genuflections correct as befitted a proper newly minted Anglo-Catholic priest. I never did get the silent prayer at the Lavabo right, and when I confessed that a year or two later, my confessor nearly had a heart attack. Had I robbed a bank or run off with the organist, I would have upset him less. Well, fifty-one years later, I just wash my hands and to heck with the prayer.

In the greater scheme of things, fifty-one years is a pittance; in a lifetime, it amounts to a lot. Fifty-one years ago was like another world. Church going, for one thing, was all the rage. The parish where I was curate had an active men's club and several women's guilds, but the really big thing was the couple's club.

What a lot energy and creativity was poured into that group - and how much fun they had! The Church was a real focus for people's social lives, and I remember as if it were a refrain, the oft-repeated phrase "Church friends are the best friends."

Few of us were prepared for the changes that were to come, least of all this newly ordained cleric. It still amazes me that I could have gone through three years of seminary training, ignorant of and untouched by the breezes of Change that were soon to blow with gale force over the Church and nation.

In Seminary we used to joke that we were exquisitely trained to be 19^th Century English country parsons - right out of Trollope, if you please. It was not that there was any absence of prophets to caution us about the inevitability of the future, but as usual it was easier and more comfortable to ignore the prophets than to take them seriously. This has been the fate of prophets from the days of Israel down to the present.

In 1959, The Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church had been at work for ten years in the long process leading to a new Prayer Book. It would be another 20 years before the new book was approved. But what phenomenal failure of vision led my seminary to ignore the work they were doing? The Civil Rights Movement was already underway, and its prophets could certainly be heard if we had listened. Viet Nam was, for most of us, still a failure of French Colonialism, but already CIA advisors were filling Saigon to prop up the Diem regime against a resurgent Ho Chi Minh, and the tragedy of the Viet Nam war was only a handful of years away. 'The voices of feminism were heard here and there, but who would have believed that women would be ordained priests within seventeen years when at that time they were not even seated as deputies to the General Convention of the Church.

Of course the issue of human sexuality was not on the radar screen then. AIDS had years to wait before it began to lay waste to so many gifted and vibrant men. And while there were gay priests by the dozens, no one raised the issue and "Don't ask; don't tell" worked like a charm.

Finally, the manifold advances in science and technology which have so altered our times were multiplying faster than anyone could keep up with them. The tempo of change was increasing dramatically, yet in 1959 I was ready to slip into a stable, secure and respected slot in what many of us still believed was a world we understood and could master. How soon that was all to change.

Today that old worldview which sustained us for so long has faded, and we are in the process of fashioning a new one to take its place. This is an uncomfortable time; we are in transition, and that is a suitable situation for our reflection in this Advent season. Advent is a time for waiting, a time of hope and expectation. What will be is not yet fully formed, and so we wait.

Many of us find it difficult entering that new world, but the birthing process is usually accompanied by trauma and pain. What we have to bring to the situation is our natural intelligence, the resilience and adaptability of our species, and, for those of us who profess the faith of Jesus Christ, a vision of what the world might be, indeed, what the world will be in the Day of the Lord. We bring the element of Christian hope, and the assurance that God reigns, into whatever confusion, doubt and uncertainty lie ahead.

What might we expect the role of the Church to be in this new age? First off, let me say what I think it will not be.

The Christian Church will never again enjoy the kind of centrality and power she experienced in the Western World for so long. The Western World itself has lost its grip and while the West may still be in the game, any dreams of the Church recovering its ancient supremacy are doomed to failure. The magisterium or teaching authority of the Church has largely vanished, as recent Popes know all too well. The very word magisterium speaks of an arrogance which makes honest men cringe. The days of "Father knows best" are mercifully long gone.

The popularity of Christian fundamentalism is a kind of last-ditch effort to hang on to what has been. It will not go away, but I believe it will become more and more eccentric and less and less influential over all. The Church that survives will be a genuinely constituted community of believers - of the committed. As for those who now cling to the fringes as a kind of insurance policy for heaven, or who utilize its services to be hatched, matched and dispatched, these will fade away.

Finally, I believe that for the Church to go forward with integrity into the future, she must embrace fully her calling as a servant Church. Triumphalism is not only dead; it was wrong in the first place. Jesus, at the Last Supper, washed his disciples’ feet as a sign of that servanthood. He said "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, but not so with you; rather the greatest among you must be like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. I am among you as one who serves."

In the Near East and North Africa, where travel through barren and desert places was an arduous undertaking, it was the custom on caravan routes to set up shelters along the way where travelers might break their journey for a night's rest. It might be a small oasis or some other spot where comfort, shelter and safety could be found. Travelers would send servants on ahead to prepare at the next of these caravanserais, or resting places, for their arrival. It is this image of the caravanserai that Jesus used in his farewell discourse to the Disciples in John's Gospel. This is what He said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself; so that where I am, there you may be also."

In the context in which they were first spoken, Jesus was clearly referring to his approaching death and resurrection - and his promise to his followers of their place with him in God' s Kingdom. In the translation I have used, the Greek word [unknown Greek word] is rendered as dwelling places; in others the word is rooms and in the familiar King James Version it is mansions.

Whatever the translation, it is Jesus who is the servant going on ahead to prepare a place and we who are His guests.

But in striking reversal of roles, today’s collect has us praying that we become the servants, so that at His coming Jesus may find in us a mansion prepared for Himself. That word mansion is misleading - it conjures up images of so many overbuilt properties peppering our area. Of course, no mansion would be great enough to house the Lord, but this is the servant king who was born in a strong smelling stable and was laid to rest in a borrowed tomb. Surely we can do better than that!

Servanthood was the hallmark of Jesus' life and ministry, and so it should be for the Church - for you and me who follow in His steps.

If we are to welcome the Christ-child into our lives this Christmas, if we are to prepare ourselves as a mansion for His dwelling place, we will need to clean house and lay up those treasures of the spirit which are uniquely ours to give, and in love and humility of service, embrace the world for which He gave his life.

Joy to the world! The Lord is come; let earth receive her king;

let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

Sermon Notes for 12.12.10

Scriptures for the day are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Advent/AAdv3_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 12.12.10

Imagine that you are holding a handful of M&Ms in your hand. Look at them, sort through them with your fingers. If you want to, do what I like to do and sort them by color – brown over here, orange over here, blue, green, etc. Note the little M in middle of each one. Now reach out and pick up one of your favorite color – mine would be blue. Put it in your mouth, taste it, feel how it crunches, feel the soft chocolate in the middle, notice how it tastes. Now if you get bored with the sermon, feel free to eat the rest of them too. Otherwise you can put them in your pocket and save them for later.

Or, if you’re on a diet, you might want to go ahead and eat them right now. That’s right – eating imaginary M&Ms apparently helps you lost weight. At least that was the finding of a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon: those who imagined eating M&Ms ate fewer of them when offered real M&Ms later. Apparently if you imagine eating them, you feel full, as if you had eaten them. Imagining something makes your brain believe it is real. Which a lot of people believe to be true in a lot of contexts – if you want something to happen, visualize it happening. It’s a kind of prayer. Imagining something, in a way, makes it reality.

In fact, this is the job of a prophet – not to foretell the future. The prophet in the Bible is the person who imagines a reality that no one else can see. The prophet is the person who can see God’s will coming to life before it happens. The prophet looks at ordinary prosaic life and sees where God is working – sees an underlying reality that others don’t see, by the power of imagination. And by imagining this reality, the activity of God that underlies everything that exists, and describing it to others who come to believe in it, the prophet helps make it come true, as an outer, visible reality and not just an imagined one. Without a vision, the people perish, said one prophet in the Bible. The prophet is the one who opens the eyes of the people to God’s vision.

In our scriptures today, we hear of three prophets: Isaiah, Mary, and John the Baptist. Isaiah speaks to a people in exile, and describes a vision of how God is working with them, even in exile, and a vision of what they will become. Mary sings the song we hear in place of our psalm today – the Magnificat, named for the Latin word that begins it, meaning “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Mary has stood in the presence of an angel, she has heard that nothing will be impossible with God, she has discovered that she is pregnant, and she has come to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is also miraculously pregnant. Seeing Elizabeth, Mary breaks into song, not a characteristic song for an uneducated peasant girl: Mary turns into a prophet who can see God’s reality when no one else can see it. She has been told that she will bear a son who is the Son of God. And she understands not only this fact, but what it means – she describes a vision of God’s hope for the world. The famous preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, says: Mary is not just singing the song, the song is singing her. She sings of the greatness of the Lord, she sings of God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, she says the hungry will be filled and the rich sent away empty.

We who are skeptical may believe that this is religious romanticism. But don’t underestimate the power of the religious imagination. The government of Guatemala in the 1980s didn’t – they forbade anyone to sing Mary’s song – afraid that people would take it to heart and begin believing in the power of God to bring down the powerful. Afraid that imagining God’s truth would make it start to happen, they knew and fled in fear from the great truth that the prophetic imagination can truly help God describe and therefore create a new reality.

But what if the converse is true? If you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it reality? What happens if you can’t imagine a reality that runs under the surface of all things? What happens if you believe that the mundane everyday world is all that exists or can exist? Maybe you can’t see a deeper reality even if it’s there.

Some reporters at the Washington Post decided to test this question in 2007. They set up a hidden camera in L’Enfant Plaza subway station, where thousands of people pass through every day. As the camera rolled, a young man in jeans, Washington Nationals baseball cap and T-shirt walked into the station, set down a violin case, took out a violin, put a few dollars and coins in the case to seed the pot, and began to play. For the next 43 minutes, as 1,097 people passed by, he played 6 classical pieces – some unknown but exceedingly difficult, and one, perhaps the best-known and most beloved religious song of all time, Shubert’s Ave Maria.

Each of those 1,097 people passing through the subway station had a choice: rush on by, stop to listen, put a little money in the case? As the Post said, the violin sang, it sobbed, it shivered. What the commuters didn’t know was that the young man was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing his multi-million dollar Stradivarius; 3 days before he had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall, where pretty good seats went for $100.

Here’s a short clip of what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw

In that 43 minutes, 7 people stopped to listen for a while; a few put in money; only one person actually recognized him. Many people interviewed later didn’t even remember there was a musician in the subway station. Many of those had iPods in their ears, their music already pre-programmed, but some didn’t have their iPod as an excuse – they just didn’t notice. Interestingly, every single child who walked by stopped, pulled their parent toward the violinist, wanted to listen, and every single parent hurried their child away.

The Post’s question was this: “His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” The answer, apparently, was no. We expect to hear beauty in a symphony hall. In a subway station, we can’t imagine it – so we just don’t hear it.

John the Baptist had this problem in the gospel today – what he imagined the Messiah to be was what we heard in last week’s gospel – wrath, fire, separating wheat from chaff, awe-inspiring displays of God’s power. Yet that isn’t what Jesus is doing, so he has trouble imagining this is the Messiah, and he rather plaintively sends a message to Jesus – are you the one to come, or is there another? Jesus sends a message back to his cousin inviting him to imagine a different reality, a reality that the prophets Isaiah and Mary had described. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, poor have good news brought to them.

Imagine, Jesus says, that this is how God works – not by smiting the wicked, but by bringing new life and healing to the poor and suffering, as Mary sang in her beautiful song. Imagine that God’s kingdom could become a reality on earth in a whole new way than John had imagined – a way that comes quietly, like a baby in a manger, to the least and the lowest, without displays of power, but with humility, with healing, with love that invites the world to join in.

We don’t know whether John was convinced – Matthew doesn’t tell us – but we know that this was exactly how Jesus continued his ministry, in a way that only those with God’s imagination could understand was God’s kingdom. The powerful understood it, and had him put to death, but Jesus’ kind of ministry was so unimaginable to most people as a picture of God’s kingdom that most of them missed it altogether.

Could this be true of us too? Could God be in action all around us and we can’t see it because we can’t imagine it? Could the Holy Spirit be weaving beautiful music all around us, sobbing, singing, sighing, the most beautiful music we’ve ever heard, the music of the Kingdom – and we can’t hear it because we can’t imagine it? Maybe we can only imagine Jesus at work in church, and can’t see or hear what he’s doing the other 167 hours of our lives. and because we can’t see or hear it, we can’t live in the reality of God’s kingdom, we can’t be like Mary the prophet.

Maybe we’re the blind and the deaf who need to be healed, we’re the lame who need to be taught how to walk, we’re the dead who need to learn to live. We’re the poor who need to hear good news, or we’re the rich who need to understand that feeding the hungry and helping others is part of our mission.

So let’s ask God to open our eyes and ears. Let’s ask Jesus to show us: where is God working in our lives? What is God calling us to do with the 167 hours a week that we’re not in church? Each one of us has a call from God – a call to teach a child to read or understand the mysteries of science, a call to provide accountability for an organization’s money, a call to relate to the person in the next cubicle or the house next door in a way that enriches their lives and helps them experience God’s love, a call to raise children, a call to love a spouse, a call to help the poor and the needy, a call to make life beautiful for others.

If we could only recognize God’s work in the world all around us and understand that everything we do is holy, if we could open our eyes and ears and see Christ here and now, all of life might be infused with the sweetness of his presence. And our very lives might sing Mary’s Song.

Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlTuBnpKpc&feature=related

Sermon for December 5, 2010

Scriptures for the Day are found here:http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Advent/AAdv2_RCL.html

Down in the Deep South where my father grew up, in the cotton farming country of Northwest Louisiana, people are fascinated by genealogy. I grew up hearing stories of various illustrious and notorious ancestors. One of my ancestors was apparently Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana in the mid-1800’s – that’s not a bad thing. He's even fondly remembered as the founder of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a prominent Episcopal seminary. But when the Civil War came, Polk wrote to his old friend, Jefferson Davis, and got himself appointed a Confederate general, a career for which he is best remembered for his constant squabbles with both superiors and subordinates, and his failure to follow an order at the Battle of Chickamauga, which his commander later said may have cost the Confederacy the war. So let’s give thanks for incompetent ancestors who lose the war for the bad guys!

I happened to be perusing Polk’s Wikipedia entry recently, because when you have a Southern father you can’t help but get interested in this stuff, and discovered an even more interesting ancestor: Polk married the great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher in mid-1700s – one of the greatest preachers in American history, who is credited with sparking the Great Awakening, a movement of spiritual renewal that is considered to be one reason that America is such a religious country even today. That’s right folks, and not only that, Edwards is famous for having many descendants who are also famous preachers, as well as university professors, college presidents and other well-known speakers. (Never mind that my actuary spouse did a few calculations and determined that Jonathan Edwards is likely to have approximately one million descendants alive in the United States today, so it would be surprising if he didn’t have a number of clergypersons and preachers among them. Who has time for math when we’re talking about the Bible?)

So I have obviously inherited preaching genes from Jonathan Edwards, which means you’ll be hearing a lot more hellfire and brimstone from me! Because Edwards’ most famous sermon, a work which is a classic of early American literature, is the immortal “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he provided detailed descriptions of the tortures of hell. And guess what – John the Baptist throws me a softball today, with his talk of wrath and chaff and unquenchable fire – I can hit this one out of the park with “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God!”

Now I can see you all shifting in your pews and checking your watches and remembering important appointments you need to get to – because who wants to hear about wrath and unquenchable fire?

And yet – something brought all those crowds out to hear John preach, to repent and be baptized. What is the attraction of this angry man with the odd wardrobe and the unbalanced diet, preaching fire and brimstone and the wrath of God?

First, we need to understand that there are three groups of people present here: Pharisees, Sadducees, and everybody else. And when John shouts “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” – he is talking to Pharisees and Sadducees, not to the ordinary people.

So who were these Pharisee and Sadducee people? Very good question – I’m glad you asked. The Sadducees were the leaders of Temple priesthood; they took care of Temple sacrifices, and were appointed by the corrupt King Herod with consent of the Roman occupiers. What this meant was that they were collaborators with the corrupt Jewish King and his corrupt counselors, and with the Romans who oppressed the ordinary people, terrorized them and kept them in poverty.

Sadducees didn’t believe in an afterlife or any notion of judgment. As a result, they felt free to do whatever they liked in this life, and many of them grew very wealthy because of their corruption. In effect, they gave lip service to God, took part in Temple ceremonies, but for practical purposes, acted like God didn’t exist – they were functional atheists. John warns the Sadducees that they will stand in front of God and be accountable for their actions – and because God's judgment would come one day, they should change their ways.

Pharisees are a different order of people altogether, the opposite extreme. We have to be very careful when we critique the Pharisees, because they were good observant Jews who centered their religious life on reading and discussing the Torah, and carefully observing the law – and these are good things. But like any good thing, when taken to an extreme, it can become a harmful thing. And evidently, by the time of John the Baptist and Jesus, extreme Pharisees had become rigid observers of the law, all 613 rules, who left very little room for God’s love or grace, and had a tendency to judge harshly anyone who didn’t meet their religious standards.

What John and Jesus critique in Pharisees is their tendency, taken to extreme, to judge others, and their literal interpretation of scripture – these are biblical fundamentalists who want everyone else to behave the same way they do. These are people who are pretty sure they’re on the fast track to heaven – and John is beside himself with frustration over it – he wants them to think again. He warns them that those who judge others will be judged themselves. And their genealogies won’t save them.

Now when we look around our world today, we see plenty of Pharisees and Sadducees. Fundamentalist extremists spring up in every religion – certainly there are Christians who spend lots of time judging others and forget to look at themselves – taken to extreme, we see people like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, the group that goes around picketing soldiers’ funerals with signs that say “God Hates America,” and other, worse, things I won’t repeat in church. To those who want to point fingers at others, John says they need to look at themselves first.

Sadducees are even more common in our world, I think. Our society is filled with people who may or may not give lip service to God, but who live as if God didn’t exist and they can do whatever they want to in this life. Whether or not they say they believe in God, they act as if God doesn’t care how they treat others, or what kind of business ethics they pursue, or how they spend their money. They are functional atheists, and to them, John says watch out, judgment is coming. They will one day be accountable to God for how they lived their life.

And if we want to be honest with ourselves, we have to admit that there’s a little Pharisee and a little Sadducee in each of us. We all would rather pass judgment on other people than on ourselves. And we all have times when we are tempted to live for our own benefit and no one else’s, forgetting Jesus’ command to love God and our neighbor. And so if we’re really honest, we listen to what John is saying and we ask God to help us separate this chaff from the wheat in each of us, ask God to remake us into the loving human beings God created us to be.

But note: there is a third group of people in this gospel story – the people in the middle. And really, most of us are somewhere in the middle – sometimes tipping a bit in the Pharisee direction, sometimes tipping a bit in the Sadducee direction. But most of the time, we’re ordinary people muddling our way through life.

Matthew tells us that ordinary people like us are coming from all over Judea to hear John preach, and that they’re confessing their sins and being baptized. Matthew doesn’t tell us that John screams about God’s wrath to these ordinary folks – he tells us that John preaches a very simple sermon to them: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Now you and I may hear this simple sermon and say, that sounds a lot like a sermon that could be titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” We hear these words, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near, and we hear them as a warning that violence and terror are going to descend on us if we don’t bow down before a God who wants to scare us into submission. But it is really important to understand – this is not what John is talking about.

John is talking to ordinary people who live very difficult lives in the middle of an oppressive empire that cares nothing for their troubles. These ordinary people are waiting for God to act, hoping for God’s justice, longing for a new and better world to come. To a people with little hope, a people who live in longing for salvation, John brings a glimmer of light: a hope that something new is around the corner, a hope for salvation and new birth and new life.

The word John uses that is translated as repentance is a Greek word: Metanoia. This word comes from “meta” – beyond, above – and “noia” – knowledge, understanding. A metanoia is a reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook that changes everything about how we see ourselves and the world. John is telling them to open their eyes and see the new kingdom that is coming, brought to birth by love and living by the law of love. It’s a vision that Isaiah describes for us in our Old Testament lesson today: a world governed by the Messiah, who judges with righteousness and equity for the poor and meek, and rules a creation that has been remade. John is lighting for the people an Advent candle: a candle of hope.

Every year, while the world around us dissolves into the overwhelming stress of a holiday season that seems to bring more and more obligations all the time, we come to church and hear instead this Advent vision of a new world, anchored in the peace that passes understanding, ruled by Christ, the Messiah. And every Advent, we ask God for metanoia – we ask God to help us change. We ask God to help us give up on the things that are keeping us separated from God – our self-righteousness, like Pharisees, or functional atheism and our indifference to anything but our own wealth, comfort, and success, like Sadducees. We ask God to help us give up on our belief that a world of violence and power, where people live with poverty and oppression, is the only way the world can work, and begin truly to pray for a new world, God’s kingdom, to come.

So listen to John’s Advent call to us today: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near – and hear it as a sign of hope. Into a dark and troubled world, a Savior is coming. Let us prepare a way for him, a way through the wilderness of our hearts, so that in us, he can bring a new world into being – a world of love and grace.