The Future of the Church?

I posted this article on Facebook yesterday: "Of Storks and Canaries: Youth Ministry, New Vocations, and the Future of the Church," by the Rev. Frederick Schmidt. The article makes the very good point that we need to treat youth and young adult ministry as a serious vocation and not a way station on the way to somewhere else; and we need to call and equip appropriate leaders for that ministry, including young adults. Our future as a church depends on it.

Well and good. My post prompted the following comment from a young seminarian: "Regarding patronizing attitudes, I think the denomination needs to gain some clarity about who the church is. The 'under-30' crowd, and even the under-20s, are not just 'the future of the church.' We too are the church."

Also well and good. Although the commenter was focusing on young(ish) adults, and I am really focusing on children 18 and under, I couldn't agree more - young people are here now, and they are fully as important members in our congregations as the older members who generally exercise leadership and control resources. The fact that we should be ministering to young people in our churches should be self-evident. We shouldn't have to argue to get appropriate resources allocated to children's and youth ministries - the least and smallest should always come first in the church. Didn't Jesus say that? Frederick Schmidt's article should not be necessary, and it shouldn't be necessary for the House of Bishops to spend a meeting considering how to reach out to young people. It should be happening as a matter of course, right? Our future depends on it, right?

Well, right. But I think this whole question is framed wrong. If we're saying that we should be ministering to young people because they are the future of our church, we have it exactly backwards.

Here's the deal: we don't do ministry to anyone in order to build up the church. The church is not an end in itself, and young people are not the means to an end. We don't do ministry to young people so that the church will survive - because we fear that we will die if we don't. If we are leaders in Christ's church, then we are meant to be leading the mission of Jesus. Not perpetuating an institution. Not operating out of fear.

Don't get me wrong - I love the church. I love this institution, and I think it's worth perpetuating. But I'm a leader in Christ's church because I believe in Christ's mission. And I will stay a leader in Christ's church as long as I believe that it's the best hope for accomplishing Christ's mission.

We don't do ministry with young people so that our church will survive. We do ministry with young people because Jesus loves them. We do it because we love them. We do it because we want their world to be a better place. We do it because of who we are as followers of Jesus. And we do it because of who they are.

And who are they? This is who they are:

• They are the two children who committed suicide this week in a neighborhood near my church. And they are all the other children in my neighborhood and yours who are depressed, sad and lonely enough for that horrible thought to cross their minds.
• They are the gay and lesbian teenagers who are trying to understand how God made them, and whether Jesus loves them the way they are.
• They are the bright, committed and earnest students who make straight As in school, and wonder whether they will ever be able to afford a college education.
• They are the runaways who spend their days in the airport terminal because it's air-conditioned, they can use the restrooms, and no one will kick them out.
• They are the kids who understand that Jesus loves them, but wonder why a powerful and loving God would allow a tsunami to wipe out whole villages in Japan.
• They are the young people who are confronted with a parent's serious and life-threatening illness, and who have to come to terms with questions of life and death way, way too young.
• They are the kids who come to youth group because they like the fun and games, and they are the kids who come to youth group because they want to understand Jesus.
• They are the kids who are bullied, and they are the kids who do the bullying.
• They are the kids who wish their parents would leave them alone.
• They are the kids who wish their parents would pay them some attention.
• They are children of God.

These children of God - inside the church, and outside the church - need to know that God loves them. That's why we do youth ministry.

Sermon for 3.27.11

Scriptures for this Sunday are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent3_RCL.html

What is your favorite romantic movie? Mine, because I like subverting well-known conventions, is The Princess Bride: an adventure story full of (as Peter Falk tells his grandson): “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles....” Necessary elements to any love story, right? Not to mention masked pirates, princesses, fire swamps, logic contests, Billy Crystal, and rodents of unusual size. (Here’s an assignment: if you’ve seen the movie and you love it, on the way out, you can tell me your favorite quote.) The hero Westley is disguised as the dread Pirate Roberts, which causes all kinds of problems as his true love, Buttercup, doesn’t recognize him, leading to mishaps and adventures as his identity is revealed and his love is proved.

When you watch a romantic movie, you know from the beginning where it’s going to end up, right? Cinderella and all the fairy tales end up with “And they lived happily ever after”. The Princess Bride ends up with “Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.” Most modern romantic movies end up with some version of a wedding, a kiss, or a happy couple riding off into the sunset.

We watch one of these movies, and we’re not sure what route the journey is going to take us on (they don’t ALL involve rodents of unusual size), but we’re pretty sure that it will involve misunderstandings, lost opportunities, disguises, discoveries of underlying truths, revelations of who people are under the masks they wear, and realizations of love that was there all the time unrecognized. And we know that the formula will end up with “happily ever after.”

The people hearing today’s gospel story for the first time would have the same feeling about the story they were hearing – because this starts out with well-known conventions in Old Testament tradition. A man and a woman meet at a well – it’s a perfect setup for a love story. In the Hebrew scriptures, romances regularly begin that way. Isaac’s servant met Rebekah at a well; Moses and his wife met at a well; and most famous of all, Jacob met his wife Rachel at a well. If there’s anyone in Jewish tradition who qualifies as the Jewish version of a fairy princess, it would be Rachel. Just to make sure we’ve gotten the point, John tells us that today’s gospel story happens not just at any well, but at Jacob’s well. The whole thing seems to be set up as a love story.

But John gets us all set up for a formula love story, then subverts our expectations. For one thing, the woman at the well is no Buttercup, no charming princess. This is a woman who has been ill-used by life and has failed in love, the victim of heartbreak after heartbreak; married 5 times, now living with a boyfriend. She might have been widowed a time or two, divorced the other times, who knows? But before we judge her too harshly, remember that women in those days had no control over divorce – it was entirely the man’s choice, by simply saying “I divorce you” three times. Perhaps she was just a woman who always found disappointment in love, perhaps she was unable to bear children so men used her and cast her aside. And in a society where women without a man had no way of supporting themselves, perhaps she has now simply settled for whatever man would support her and feed her, even if he wouldn’t marry her. Whatever the reason, love has failed her over and over. Until today: at high noon, she goes down to the well to get water.

And there, at the well, is a man, who asks for water to quench his thirst. In a society where unrelated men and women didn’t speak in public, and where Jews and Samaritans didn’t have anything to do with each other, and where honorable people didn’t associate with people who had failed in their personal lives the way this woman had (or the way the world had failed her), Jesus subverts all the conventions by speaking to this woman.

And Jesus shocks her by promising her something to quench her thirst in return for the water she gives him: living water that will well up to eternal life. It turns out that both Jesus and the woman are thirsty, and what they are thirsty for is a relationship with each other; not a romantic relationship, but a life-changing relationship of love and revelation and new life.

In a pattern that we saw in last week’s gospel about Nicodemus, and will see frequently in John, the woman starts by taking Jesus’ promise of water literally, and moves progressively toward more and more revelation, light dawning, disguises being shed, true identities being revealed. Jesus reveals that her mask is not really disguising her – he knows her past and he knows her identity, and he accepts her for who she is.

And in return, he reveals his own identity: he is the Messiah, and not just the Messiah, but the Word of God who was with God from the beginning. Jesus says in our paltry English translation, “I am he” – but in the original, it is simply “I AM”– the same words Moses had heard from burning bush – Jesus speaks the name of God, the name Yahweh. And she begins to understand that God himself is promising her not literal and tangible water from a well, but something to quench a much deeper thirst, a spiritual thirst, so that she will worship God in Spirit and in truth. This is such good news that she cannot resist running back into town and telling all the people of the town about the Messiah she had met. And as we watch her joy as a new life begins for her, we come to understand that this whole time, it has been a love story after all.

As well it should be, because just a few verses before, in last week’s gospel, John had told us some of Jesus’ most famous words: “for God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that all who believe in him should have everlasting life.” God’s love story begins with thirst: like Jesus’ thirst at this beginning of today’s gospel, it’s God’s thirst for us, his longing for relationship with us. God so loved us, says John, that God’s thirst for us welled up into a gift of God’s Son to us, beginning of a love story that will continue, as love stories do, with revelations of identity, falling of disguises, light shining in darkness, and will end up not just with “happily ever after”, but with everlasting life, life abundant, life that begins now, the moment we understand what we are being offered, and the moment we allow Jesus to see through our disguises and defenses and show him our true selves, life that wells up to eternity.

And we here in 21^st century America, a country so different from 1^st century Judea and Samaria that we have to interpret not just language, but social customs, to understand what Jesus did and meant, yet so similar to that time and place that we know we are still thirsty, we still thirst for meaning, truth, love. Yet like the woman at the well, we find ourselves trying to quench our thirst with things that are not true water. We try to base our identity on things like false relationships, money, job titles, possessions, houses; we use these things as the masks through which we show ourselves to the world; we pour our time into endless work and mindless entertainment; yet we thirst to know that when our masks are off, we will still be loved.

As the prophet Isaiah says: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” And isn’t that a fine description of so many lives in our community? Spending money on expensive things but never being satisfied; pouring life and labor into activities that bring us abundant possessions, but not abundant life? No matter how much time and energy we pour into these things, we are still thirsty, still dry in our spirits, still wanting to find a well that will never run dry.

Jesus offers us this well. Jesus gives us living water. Jesus lets us drop our masks, recognizes us for who we are, accepts and loves us, quenches our thirst. Because the love story that started so long ago at Jacob’s Well in Samaria continues still today: Jesus is still thirsty. God still longs for us. Spirit is still ready to be poured into our hearts, overflowing to touch all those around us. And all we need to do to receive this gift of living water is to let down our disguises and our defenses and allow God’s love story to be told through us.

And as God begins a new story in us, God also gives us the power, like this woman, to share that story with others. The woman runs back into town to tell everyone about this Jesus, this Messiah. She’s not thinking about things like church growth or evangelism, she’s simply telling the good news about an encounter she has had with the living Christ who has given her living water to quench her thirst.

And as we talk in this church about evangelism, which is simply a word that means telling the good news, it’s the same for us as for her. It’s not about church growth – it’s about encounters with the living Christ. What have we found in our relationship with Christ that has changed our lives? How have we found that he allows us to drop our disguises, our mistaken identities, the masks we wear? What encounters with him are quenching our thirst for the living God?

That’s what we have to share with others. That’s what we cannot, not share. That’s the gift that it would be a shame to keep to ourselves. Because it’s a gift that is desperately needed by our dry and unsatisfied world. It is the gift of living water that quenches our thirst for God, and God’s thirst for us. It is the gift of a love story with the living Christ who dismantles our disguises and loves us for who we truly are. It is the gift of love that leads to eternal life. That eternal life begins right now, and it wells up to … happily ever after.

Sermon for 3.13.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent1_RCL.html

A long time ago and far away, I served as Director of Children’s Ministries at another church. One year, we decided to do a children’s Ash Wednesday service where we explained to the children what sin was – so what better way to explain it than with today’s Garden of Eden story from the Old Testament? We wanted to tell the story experientially, so here’s what we did. We set up in the middle of the courtyard a tree – just a branch with no leaves on it, planted in a pot. On the end of each branch of the tree we put a big, fat, juicy, luscious-looking gumdrop. As the children arrived, I greeted them and watched their eyes go straight to the gumdrop tree. They were attracted to it like moths to light. And every time I saw one of them looking at it, I would explain, “No, I’m sorry, you can’t have a gumdrop. It’s against the rules.”

I started telling the Garden of Eden story, but when I got to the part about how God said the man and woman couldn’t eat from the tree, I suddenly “remembered” something I had left inside, and told them I would be back in just a minute to finish the story. While I was gone, of course I had set up someone else to be a “tempter” to tell the children it was all right, they could go ahead and eat the gumdrops.

I came back outside and the first thing I saw was a little boy, his cheeks bulging with gumdrops, a little bit of blue dribbling down his chin. He saw me and pointed at his sister. “She ate some gumdrops!” he accused. I looked at his sister, whose cheeks were also bulging and who had a little bit of red dribbling down her chin, and she pointed at the tempter. “She said I could!” she said.

It was one of the funniest Ash Wednesday experiences ever, and the parents and I could hardly keep from giggling our way through the Imposition of Ashes. If you ever want a hilarious Ash Wednesday service, this is a method you could try. And I have to say, it was one of the best enacted parables I was ever able to achieve in working with children.

However, I’m not sure I would ever do it again. For one thing, the “tempter” wasn’t too happy about being cast as Satan. But the most troubling thing was that we set up the children to fail. We knew their little hearts could not resist temptation. And we put the tree there knowing (hoping) they would eat from it.

Which begs the question: was the whole original biblical Garden of Eden story an elaborate setup by God? Did God create humans with desires, put the very thing in the garden that they desired most, then forbid them to take it? Why would God do this except to find us laughably charming? Except that in the story, God doesn’t seem to find it too laughable – the penalty is death, but he gives the people a stay of execution – banishes them for life, out into the wilderness, where they will spend the rest of their lives toiling, sweating, suffering and longing for what they left behind in the garden. God takes this transgression very, very seriously.

So the question is, what’s going on in this story and what is it saying to us? The first thing we all need to agree on is, this is not intended to be history or science. We Episcopalians agree that Genesis is not intended to provide a scientific or historical account of the origins of the world (in fact, the writers would have been puzzled by our ideas of science and history). What it’s intended to do is to convey to us a deeper truth than that: the truth of who we are as human beings, and what we are intended to be in relation to God.

So let’s listen to a beautiful, true story, and explore what it tells us about ourselves. God has created all that is, and has said it is not just good, but very good. As the crowning achievement, Genesis 1 tells us that God made human beings, male and female, in God’s own image. Genesis 2 then gives us a new wrinkle on this creation of humans. It pictures God doing this creating by taking a handful of dust, forming a little clay doll, then breathing life into it so that it becomes a human. The human is called “Adam”, which means creature of earth, little dust man. Interestingly, our own name human, from the Latin, points out the same relationship – human comes from same root as Humus, soil, and humble. Our very language confirms the truth of what the Bible tells us – we are creatures of dust and earth, made to be rooted in the earth, mortal, humble. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Yet God has a special love for the little earth creature, knows that the human should not be alone, and gives the creature a companion. And together, like a couple of teenagers, the two humans get into all kinds of mischief. The humans look at the one thing that has been forbidden to them, and they want it, they crave it, they realize that in this whole beautiful garden where they have everything they need, there is still an empty place deep inside them, a place where they are incomplete, insufficient, insecure. They look at the fruit of that beautiful tree and they suddenly believe that it is the perfect shape to fill up that empty hole, and they take it and eat it.

And why do they do this? The serpent, who is nowhere called Satan, but is instead a creature created by God, a part of nature, you might say a representative of the desires and yearnings of the human heart, gives us the key: he comes to the people and says, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

That’s the temptation: first, to believe that they will not die – to forget that they are creatures of dust. Second, to believe that God has set the whole thing up as some kind of purposeless test (“God knows”), to be violated at will. In other words, God, like me in my pretend garden years ago, is not trustworthy. And third, in their failure to trust God, they believe they can be like God.

Our mysterious human desire, the forbidden fruit that we may not grasp yet continually reach out for, the thing that we believe will fill the empty place in our hearts, is our desire to put ourselves and other things in place of God . In the garden, Adam and Eve have forgotten who they are and whose they are. And we too want to forget that we are humans, little dust creatures who will one day return to the dust we came from. We want to deny our own identity. We want to make ourselves gods, and we believe we can do it – we can stand on our own two feet – we have no need of God.

But surely this week of all weeks should remind us of our own dustiness. In the church, we come down rapidly from the mountain of the Transfiguration that we climbed the last Sunday of Epiphany, our faces still glowing from Christ’s glorious reflected light, straight down into the dry, dusty valley of Lent, as we are reminded Ash Wednesday that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And if we had any question of that, we need only to read the news – another terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, an advanced industrial country whose people were helpless in the face of forces of nature beyond our control. We think we can control the world around us, sitting in 72-degree comfort year-round, with our world lit up day and night, every comfort available to us, never hungry, never thirsty, able to reach out anytime for any luxury we desire. Yet videos of cars, trucks and ships slamming into buildings like specks of dust, advanced nuclear power plants exploding from too-hot water vapor, extremely well-built earthquake-resistant buildings collapsing nevertheless, should surely convince of us our own dustiness, our smallness, our mortality.

The great truth of our human existence is that we are not immortal, we are not like gods, we are dust – and yet our salvation lies in that very realization. Because as we realize our own mortality, we begin to understand that on our own we are incomplete. At the heart of our humanity is a restlessness, a yearning, a grasping for something more. We spend our lives searching and hoping, always looking for that thing that is missing, the thing that perfectly fits the emptiness we feel inside us.

Some of us try to fill our emptiness with good things – our families, friends, people we love. But isn’t it easy to try to stop up that emptiness with other things too? How many of us reach for alcohol to fill our emptiness? How many of us pour ourselves into our work? How many of us try to fill ourselves up by emptying other people out, through gossip or competition or grabs for power? We all have addictions, things that fill our emptiness, things we grow to depend on, yet ultimately the emptiness remains. And we are still incomplete, insufficient, insecure.

Blaise Pascal, the 17^th Century French mathematician and philosopher, said that we humans are empty inside – we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Yet he saw that hole not as a curse but as a blessing. It is the tether that keeps us throughout our lives attached to God. It is the thing that keeps us from believing we can be completely self-sufficient, a belief which in the end can only bring us death. St. Augustine said “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you.” Only God can fill that God-shaped hole in our hearts.

And so here we are, beginning the season of Lent. It is a season of emptiness – a season when, with Jesus, we commit ourselves to spending 40 days in the wilderness. If we take Lent seriously, we do with this season what Jesus did: we empty ourselves, we fast from the things that promise falsely to fill us up, things that don’t fit that God-shaped hole in our hearts. What addictions do we need to let go of? What things present themselves to us as the perfect shape to fill that God-shaped hole? And how does God give us the strength to let go of them? And what disciplines do we need to take on, to train our longing hearts to grasp onto God for our identity, like Jesus in his desert, and not the empty things that tempt us to put them in the place reserved for God alone?

This time of Lent becomes our time to remember who we are and ask Christ who we are intended to become. And to journey through this desert, this dry and dusty wilderness, with Christ. Because those words of Ash Wednesday – we are dust and to dust we shall return – are balanced by the words of baptism: There is one Body and one Spirit, one hope in God’s call to us, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all. With God as our loving Parent, we are more than dust this Lenten, desert season: we are beloved children of God, on a journey from dust and ashes to resurrection life.

Sermon for 3.6.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpiLast_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.6.11

If you have ever gone on vacation to get away from it all, and spent time hiking in the mountains, as Tom and I used to, you know the feeling. Climbing and climbing, up and up, into cooler and fresher air, thinking you’ll never get to the top, and wondering if it will be worth it when you get there. And slowly, as you ascend, feeling like you’re leaving your everyday, busy, worry and stress-filled life behind, peeling it all off like you would take off a jacket, and remembering who you really are when you aren’t rushing around like a crazy person, and step by step feeling more and more like yourself. And coming up the final hill and turning a corner and standing there at the very top of the mountain, no sound but the wind rushing in your face, and turning around and around and seeing all around you for miles and miles. You know eventually you will have to turn around and go back down that mountain, but for now, life is complete and you wish it would never end.

Today’s gospel is an experience a little bit like that. Not just in the fact that it is a story about a mountaintop experience. But because Matthew’s whole gospel is really structured that way. This is in a way, the high point of his gospel, the climax he’s been leading up to. From here, Matthew's gospel will lead straight down into the valley, as Jesus heads down the mountain and takes a turn toward Jerusalem where he knows he will die. But for today, we stand at the top of the mountain and look all around at the panoramic view Matthew gives us of Jesus’ ministry.

We can look back and see Jesus at his baptism, emerging from the waters and hearing the same words we hear today: You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased. We can look further behind us and see the beginning of Epiphany, when Matthew told us that a star lit up the sky, with light like the light of Transfiguration that we see today, and people came from faraway foreign lands to see a newborn child in a stable. We can look even further back than that and see the whole history of the people of Israel, embodied by Moses and Elijah on this mountaintop, the law and the prophets.

Then, if we turn and look the other way, we can look ahead of us and see a long Lenten road leading to Jerusalem, and we can see outside of Jerusalem another hill with three crosses on it. We can look beyond those crosses to the resurrection, as Jesus instructs the disciples to say nothing about what they’ve seen until he has risen from the dead. And we can look even further than that, to another mountain where the risen Christ will come to the disciples and promise to be with them always.

Today we stand at the top of this mountain and see those things with panoramic vision, but for now we are right here, in the presence of a teacher who has astounded us by being transfigured before our eyes. And we can ask ourselves the questions that are so important with all scriptures: What is happening here? And what does it mean for us?

If you ask – what is happening here, on the mount of the Transfiguration, and someone gives you a rock-solid, dependable, confident answer, you will know that he or she is lying. Because no human being can really understand what is happening here. This is something outside of normal human experience, this is something that defies the laws of physics. Jesus is an ordinary human being, dusty and dirty from the hike up the mountain, and suddenly his clothes become dazzling white and his face starts to glow, brighter than the sun.

We can ask: did Jesus change? Or did the disciples change how they saw him? The Bible doesn’t tell us: but I suspect that both are true. Jesus really did have a spiritual experience, Moses and Elijah appearing to him to strengthen him for the ordeal ahead. But the disciples experienced a miracle too: a gift from God of vision, a veil being lifted from their eyes so that suddenly they were able to see a truth that we ordinary human beings cannot see.

I think, though no Bible expert or PhD theologian can tell you this for sure, I think that the truth is that Jesus always glowed like the sun, but that normal people could not stand to see it, so Jesus wore a veil of ordinariness to spare their eyes; yet once, just once, the veil was lifted and they could see.

And they could not only see, but hear the truth: a voice from the clouds, the voice of God saying “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.” And this Transfiguration of Jesus brought about a transformation in them. Transformation is not the same as Transfiguration, but nevertheless what they witnessed transformed them. They are transformed by what they see, into witnesses of the power and glory of God revealed in Jesus, as we heard in the Epistle of Peter today.

And so what we have in today’s gospel is a miracle of vision, a gift to the disciples of a glimpse into God’s glory that gives them power to proclaim the gospel to all people. Yet our second question remains: what does it mean for us? One thing it certainly means is that we have the power of their witness to tell us who Jesus is, that Jesus was not just some ordinary teacher, Jesus was not even a spiritually powerful miracle worker, Jesus was not someone who was especially good at loving God and others who taught us how to do the same.

Jesus was all those things, but he was more. Jesus was God’s Beloved Son. We must listen to him.

And we have been listening to him, these long weeks of Epiphany. We have heard him tell us how to live, we have heard him explain how we are to love God and love our neighbors, we have heard him proclaim that we are salt of the earth and light of the world, we have heard him tell us even to love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us, we have felt his blessing and we have perhaps even been healed by him.

Yet now, here on this mountain, it’s time for us to see and hear more. On this mountain, we can see who Jesus truly is. But we can see more than that: we can see who we truly are. Because the true miracle of the Christian faith is this: who Jesus is, is who we are. Did we hear that right? Who Jesus is, is who we are. He is the baptized Son of God, the Beloved. So are we. We who are baptized have been baptized into his death and into his resurrection. We are children of God too. We are with him on this mountaintop, and with him we are shining like the sun.

You don’t believe that we are really like him? Listen to a story: On March 18, 1958, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the great writers on Christian spirituality in the 20^th century, was walking down an ordinary street in the shopping district of Louisville, Kentucky, as crowds went about their business. When something happened: he looked around and saw something .

He wrote about it in his journal the next day: “Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream.”

Years later, he wrote about the experience in his book, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander: “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Walking around shining like the sun? Wait, wait! That may be true for Jesus, the Son of God – but surely it cannot be true for us. After all, we got up this morning, didn’t we? We brushed our teeth, we ate breakfast, we rushed to get into the car in time, we got ourselves and our children here to church, we settled into our chairs and tried to figure out the tune to the opening hymn, we are ordinary people who every now and then get a glimpse of what God might want for us.

And yet – Thomas Merton is not the only person to have seen this happen: I have seen it too. Sitting one day in a communion service in a church I had never attended before and never would attend again, surrounded by strangers I would never see again, suddenly as I looked at the people all around me, they changed. They began to glow, brighter than the sun. It lasted for only one second, but for that second I looked at these ordinary people around me and they glowed like the sun.

Here’s what I think this Transfiguration story is telling us, brothers and sisters: What Jesus is on this mountaintop is what we are destined to be too. And more than that, it is what we are. Think of yourself as a being shining with such glory that God has to veil all of our eyes so that we don’t all blind each other all the time, God’s Holy Spirit like tongues of fire, leaping from you to me to you, back and forth all the time, God’s glorious light shining in us every moment.

And what if it is really true? What if we are truly loved, not because we are good or kind or helpful, but because we are God’s children, because we are glorious? Then could we forgive ourselves our quirks, our helplessness, our insecurities? Could we let ourselves experience our anger and our sinfulness and our thoughtlessness? Knowing the whole time that there is nothing we could do that could ever stop God from loving us, because we are like God, not despite of the fact but because we are human?

And what would it be like if we could see past the veil that darkens our eyes, could believe that if it were lifted and we looked around at each other, we would see that same uncreated glory shining in our neighbors too? How could we not love our neighbors as we love ourselves, those who are veiled in disguises of poverty and foreignness and difference, those who are veiled in disguises of irritability and resentment, those who are far away and those who are near. How can we not love such glorious beings as they are?

How could we not give ourselves for them, as Jesus gave himself for us?

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Shakespeare, and it’s true. We are the dream of God, and God has given us a gift: the light of Christ, gloriously risen in us. Let that light shine before all.

Sermon for 2.13.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi6_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 2.13.11

Happy day before Valentine’s Day! One of the great cultural festivals, complete with flowers and balloons and candy hearts and best of all, chocolate! And it’s all about love. And if we Christians know anything, we know that God is love. So naturally, when we arrive at church the day before Valentine’s Day, we expect hearts and teddy bears! Rainbows and unicorns! And chocolate!

So we take a look at the gospel and we get: “If you say, ‘you fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. And, if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away – better lose an eye than go to hell.” Well, Happy Valentine’s Day.

Evidently Jesus was not clued in about Valentine’s Day. (Obviously, he was a Bachelor.)

Now, I’m speaking a bit flippantly about Valentine’s Day, but the truth that we know about God, above all truths, is that God loves us, in fact God is the love that created us – and God’s most important commandment is for us to love God and love each other. So how does it make sense for a loving Savior, Son of the God who is love, to talk in such harsh and demanding words as he does in today’s gospel?

To understand this gospel, the first thing I think we need to do is forget about Valentine’s Day – which happens just once a year – because the whole point of this gospel is that love is not just a sometime thing, and it is not just about romance – if we are living a Christian life, love is what we love every day and every moment.

To understand this gospel, it helps to back up a little and put our scriptures in context. Our scriptures today talk about life-enhancing and life-destroying choices. In Deuteronomy, we have Moses’ farewell speech – Moses was the great lawgiver who brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai, and before he dies, he tells the people of Israel that the Law is their guide to life. If they choose to live God’s way, they will be making a choice for life, full human flourishing, true joy – and Moses urges them to choose life.

In our gospel from Matthew today, Jesus intentionally picks up where Moses left off. For the past three weeks, we have been reading the Sermon on the Mount. For Matthew, it’s important that we get the point that Jesus is on the mountain, like Moses on Mt. Sinai, giving us the law we are to live by. In last week’s gospel, which was also part of this sermon, Jesus said he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it – and here he goes on to show us what he means.

He starts with the Ten Commandments (or 3 of them – the commandments against murder, adultery and bearing false witness) – and he doesn’t get rid of them but intensifies them, expands their scope, you might even say he radicalizes them. In fact what he does in each case is, he moves from a negative law – you shall not murder, bear false witness, commit adultery – to a much broader, positive law. Living as a Christian means not just paying attention to the few things we shouldn’t do – but also adopting a much broader positive way of life – the way of love. So pay attention to how Jesus makes each of these commandments broader, more positive – not commanding us NOT to do something, but giving us a new way to live.

He begins: "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, `You shall not murder'; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, `You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.” Let’s just admit up front that we’ve all probably called other people fools. And it’s not possible to go through life without getting angry. If people tell me in counseling that they never get angry, I’m pretty sure they’re lying to me – or worse, lying to themselves.

Let’s try to understand what Jesus is doing, by asking ourselves this: if we promise not to murder each other every time we disagree, is that the basis for a good and healthy relationship between us? Well, it’s a start – but I have to say that it’s a bare minimum. If we want to be in right relationship with each other, we have to promise more than we won’t kill each other – we have to agree that when we disagree with someone, we won’t let it simmer until it boils over in resentment, anger, and frustration that leads us into a law court, as Jesus points out, or permanently scars our relationship. Because when we get this angry, we are failing to treat each other with respect, we are deadening our relationships, killing the love that exists between us.

If we want to have a relationship based on love, we have to do what I always counsel people who getting married to do – learn to disagree in a healthy way. We have to understand that conflict, when done right, is a gift from God to help us learn things we don’t know. And therefore, we have to say what is on our minds in a non-accusing way, we have to listen carefully to what the other person has to say and try to understand how they feel and how they perceived the situation.

So think about an argument: Harry gets angry at Sally and starts yelling and screaming at her. And every time she tries to say something in return, Harry isn’t listening because he’s busy using that time to make up his next argument to prove why she is wrong. For him, the point of this conflict is to win. At the same time, Sally, after trying a couple of time to say what she wants to say, clams up and refuses to talk any more, and just caves in to make him stop being angry. A week from now, she’s forgotten what the argument is about, but she’s still angry. For her, the point of this conflict is to get through it so there will be quiet, even if there isn’t any peace.

Who’s wrong? Both of them. They have both failed to use this conflict creatively. Which means truly, deeply listening and trying to understand, and making oneself understood. Because we have to try to understand each other if we are going to be able to put ourselves in the other person’s place, and putting ourselves in each other’s places is the basis of any love relationship, because it makes it possible to love the other as we love ourselves.

Jesus goes on to say something very interesting: “When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” How fascinating – Jesus says that our failure to live in right relationship with each other actually prevents us from worshiping God. Religious observance, loving God, doesn’t mean anything if it’s not accompanied by true, right relationship, loving our neighbor, in the rest of our lives. Worshiping God is an empty ceremony if we have not addressed the brokenness in our relationships with each other – and right relationship is one gift we offer God. In fact, in a very deep way, our relationship with God is based on our relationships with the people around us – we learn how to love God by loving people.

Oh yes, this gospel is all about love – Happy Valentine’s Day.

Jesus goes on to talk about another commandment – you shall not commit adultery. And again, he expands it to cover something so common that it’s very difficult for us to hear –don’t even look at someone other than your spouse with lust (remember Jimmy Carter?). Once again, what Jesus is doing follows the same pattern as before. Yes, avoiding adultery is the bare minimum in marriage. But Jesus says marriage is much bigger than this – if we are looking at other people, dreaming of other relationships, making up fantasies of how good life could be, we are diverting our attention from our spouse, putting a wedge in that relationship. And we have promised to love and cherish that spouse for life. Which means they deserve all our attention – not just by meeting the bare minimum, but by devoting ourselves, truly and deeply, to our spouse – paying attention to them, putting their needs before our own, working to develop that love relationship.

Oh yes, this is a Valentine’s Day gospel – because love is more than hearts and roses.

Jesus talks about divorce in very stark terms – and what we need to understand is this. Marriage is a sacrament and we are to devote ourselves to it, working hard at love. But sometimes no matter how hard we try, we fail – and is there a second chance? Of course there is: We serve a God of grace and love, and the whole message of Jesus’ life and ministry is that God is aching to forgive us so we can be reconciled. The point of what Jesus is saying is that in marriage and in all our other relationships, the main work of our lives is learning how to love each other – and that is a task we need to devote ourselves to, heart and soul.

Jesus says this crazy thing about cutting off hands and tearing out eyes if they cause us to sin – which is a kind of hyperbole ancient Mediterranean people used – don’t try this at home! What he means is this: if we are living in a way that causes harm to others, we shouldn’t look for other people to blame – we need to look at ourselves – take a look at what we need to change in ourselves to fix the situation – and then change it. Because there’s only one person in this world that we can change, and that’s ourselves.

Jesus talks about one more commandment – don’t bear false witness against others. Based on this saying, some Christian groups refuse to take oaths in court of law. But again, Jesus is saying something much deeper than this. He is saying, live your life with integrity; it shouldn’t take an oath in a court of law to make us tell the truth; we should tell the truth all the time. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, he says, it doesn’t take swearing on the Bible to live this way. Martin Luther went a step further and said not only are we to tell the truth about each other – we are to interpret each other’s actions in the very best possible light. We are to give each other the benefit of the doubt, believe the best of each other, don’t even hint of negative motives, don’t gossip about each other. Which could possibly be the hardest of these commandments to keep, because it’s hard to act as though we believe the best about each other all the time. But once again, it is a commandment that allows us to learn to love each other, to treat each other with respect, and to allow each other to flourish as beloved human beings.

In each of these sayings, Jesus has taken a simple negative prohibition – don’t do something, achieve the bare minimum – and he has expanded it. Do more than meet the bare minimum, he says. Work toward real, true, deep, lasting love in all relationships. And as we learn to love our neighbors, we will learn to love God. Loving God and loving our neighbors are the truest, deepest, most challenging commandments – but in learning to obey these commandments, we choose life, life lived in the fullness of God’s love.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. I hope there will be chocolate.

Sermon Notes for 2.6.11

Scriptures for today are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi5_RCL.html

What is the economic value of a church? We might not be accustomed to thinking of a church in terms of its economic value to its surrounding community. But University of Pennsylvania professor of social policy Ram Cnaan decided to measure the economic impact of a dozen Philadelphia churches. This required him to ask questions like: what is the value of a marriage saved? ($18,000) An addiction conquered? A suicide averted? ($19,600) A teenager taught right from wrong? His researchers counted up the value of weddings, funerals, social services, festivals, counseling services, preschools, charity work, and so on; they added up staff salaries and maintenance work; they calculated things like help finding jobs and training for leadership; they put values on more intangible benefits like a safer corner of a tough neighborhood, and added it all up for these 12 churches. They called the value of a church its “halo effect.” When they totaled it all, these 12 churches added up to $50,577,098 a year – an average halo effect of $4.2 million per church per year, for churches with expense budgets much, much less than that.

You bring the Body of Christ together, put us to work making change in our world, and we can do some amazing things. And all this happens in a society where church is less and less respected or valued as a contributing part of society. Fifty years ago, it was taken for granted that churches were positive influences in the community, and everyone was expected to belong to one. Now, it’s more usual NOT to belong to a church, and if the unchurched population that surrounds us thinks about churches at all, studies show that they are likely to think of us as intolerant, judgmental, narrow, old-fashioned, fundamentalist. Yet quietly, without fanfare, churches make a huge difference in people’s lives.

Which I think would make Jesus very happy, judging from the gospel today. Recall where we are in Matthew’s story: Jesus’ first act is to be baptized, where he hears a voice that says “You are my Son, Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” It is his own belovedness that becomes the foundation for everything he does. And now, in his first sermon (the Sermon on the Mount) he begins to pass that belovedness on to us, because he knows a great truth of human life: the experience of being loved changes us – it changes how we view ourselves and how we relate to other people.

If our gospel last week was Jesus beginning his ministry by blessing us, telling us that God’s love would be with us even in the darkest corners of our lives, so that we could work in partnership with God to bring God’s kingdom to earth, then today’s gospel is where he begins to tell us how to do this, how to be kingdom people, how to share God’s love with others so they also know they are beloved. But his instructions are unexpected – he doesn’t say, march out into the world and overwhelm those who disagree with sheer force of numbers, like a worldly king. He doesn’t say, frighten people into believing in him, he doesn’t say, put on great demonstrations of power and miracles; he talks about ordinary everyday things.

You are the salt of the earth, he tells us, you are the light of the world. They are curious metaphors, quiet things – a teaspoon of salt, a lamp on lampstand. So it helps us to unpack these metaphors a bit. If you are a chef, you know that salt has a very interesting quality. Jesus didn’t say “you are Sugar” or “you are Pepper.” If you add sugar to a dish, its predominant quality becomes sweetness. If you add pepper to a dish, the pepper calls attention to itself with spiciness. Salt is different: if you add salt to, say, chocolate chip cookies, they don’t taste salty – salt brings out the sweet flavor of the sugar and the round, full flavor of the butter – but if you leave out the salt, the whole cookie tastes flat and lifeless. If you add salt to meat, it makes the meat juicier, more tender. If you add it to vegetables, the flavor of the vegetables becomes crisper, more defined. We Americans eat too much salt (because we can afford to), but at its heart, in moderation, salt’s main contribution to a dish is not to overwhelm, but to support and enhance: it brings out the flavor that is already there, makes it richer, livelier.

A lamp lit and set on a lampstand is similar in some ways. You don’t light a lamp to look at the lamp – you light it so you can see everything around it – it lights up a whole house, as Jesus says, and makes it possible for us to carry on normal human activities even on a dark night. The light turns the grays and blacks, the shadows you can see on a dark night, into the colors of your home, words on a page, smiles on the faces of your family. It’s not the light we look at, it’s the things the light allows us to see.

Both salt and light simply create an environment so everything else can shine. So it is with us followers of Christ, says Jesus, we don’t exist for ourselves – we exist for the world around us – we are gifts given by God for the sake of the world. And if we are truly being who we are called to be – salt and light – we bring out the best in those around us.

Do we believe we can really do these things? Be salt and light for our communities? Let me tell you an amazing story that happened just this week in an Episcopal church. (This story is paraphrased from a story that appeared online at the Episcopal News Service.) Tuesday night, after warnings of overnight temperatures of 30 below zero, St. Mark's Church in Casper, Wyoming, decided to keep its doors open all night as an Emergency Warming Shelter for the community's homeless. The shelter, organized entirely through alerts on Facebook, spurred generous donors into action and volunteers into service, transforming St. Mark's parish hall into a well-stocked and welcoming venue within hours of the first Facebook alert. All day, a steady stream of families and volunteers poured through the church's back door, laden with sleeping bags, bedding, coats, gloves, hats and boxes of food. By mid-afternoon, a local small business owner commandeered the large commercial kitchen and began preparing vats of soup, along with hundreds of cookies & muffins. Throughout the evening mobile crews with carloads of coffee, cookies, coats and bedding scoured the city's underpasses, parking lots and out-of-the-way places in search of homeless people still outdoors, bringing people into the church so severely under-dressed for the weather that they never would have survived the night. (One interesting note: it was a semi-homeless man who came to volunteer who served as the best consultant for where and how to find this often invisible segment of the community.) Someone at the local radio and TV stations read about the emergency shelter on Facebook and reported it on the 10 pm news, and a homeless person came to the shelter and guided the volunteers to 18 freezing people huddled in an abandoned apartment without heat or food. The outpouring of community generosity was so vast that there was enough food, clothing, bedding left over to stock the neighborhood Safe House and Salvation Army. A tremendous gift to the people of St. Mark's was the crew of 20- and 30-something dedicated and passionate young adults who volunteered most of the night at the shelter -- none of whom presently attend a church. One volunteer was heard to say, "I am not a churchy-kind of person, but something about this place really resonates with me."

Something about this place really resonates with me – yes, that’s the feeling you get when Christ is alive in a place, when Christians are living with the joy of being beloved by God. Being beloved by God doesn’t mean that we are happy all the time, it’s not a matter of living a sugary-sweet life; it’s a matter of being salt and light for the world. Being beloved by God means that we give that love away: we give ourselves for others, come out into the cold when we could be safe and warm at home; take the time to pray for those who are sick or bring meals to those stuck at home; spend hours helping others find jobs to support their families or write anonymous checks to help out those who have nothing left. It means that we find where the world is suffering and enter into that suffering – not because we enjoy suffering, but because that’s what our Savior did. He inaugurated the kingdom of God by entering into the world’s darkness and bringing light. And when you shine even one small light into the darkness, the darkness is gone.

If we are the light of the world, we will know that the light we are shining is merely a reflection of the true light, which is Jesus Christ – we will be the window that lets his light pour through. And if we are a community that lets God’s light pour through, that means people will sense something about the power of God’s love when they see us in action. They will know the things that can’t be measured by any money, any halo effect: what’s the value of a prayer? A meal for a family when someone is sick? A smiling person saying welcome when you walk in on Sunday morning? The bread and wine of the Eucharist? A group of friends? The love of Christ? Everlasting life?

It’s by the things we cannot count that we know the true economic value of the kingdom of God: priceless, incalculable, a treasure beyond compare.

Sermon for 1.16.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi2_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 1.16.11

Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

I was at a conference this week called Gathering of Leaders, for Episcopal priests engaged in transformational ministries like church planting. One of the other participants was the rector of Trinity Church, Asbury Park, NJ, David Stout. He became the rector there 7 years ago, and since then, the church has increased average Sunday attendance from 45 to 280. But if you’re like me, the first thing you want to ask the rector of Trinity Asbury Park is not, how did you lead this remarkable renaissance – but have you ever seen Bruce Springsteen? Because of course Asbury Park’s one claim to fame, as far as I know, is that it is the boyhood home of arguably the biggest rock star of last 35 years.

He laughed indulgently when I asked him this question, as if he had never heard the question before (although I heard at least two other people asking the same question at the conference), and told me this story: Trinity Church has a soup kitchen to feed the many homeless people in their area. Two years ago the Health Dept. was ready to shut them down because they needed a $3,000 commercial sink. They were interviewed on local radio about the problem because they just didn’t have the money and didn’t know what they were going to do. Two days later a check for $15,000 arrived in the mail from guess who. Apparently Bruce Springsteen still listens to Asbury Park local radio.

But even more striking: Bruce heard the story of what this congregation was doing to transform lives and decided to be a part of it, help make it possible. What a blessing to be able to help God’s mission in this way. Money truly empowers mission and is one of the things that makes it possible. We don’t all have the power to write $15,000 checks, though some do. But we all have the power to be part of God’s mission in some significant way. When you see Christ’s power at work in the world, it’s hard not to want to be a part of it – because Christ’s power is absolutely life-changing.

All three scriptures today are about how God calls us to be partners in God’s life-changing ministry of transforming the world. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet tells us about his call to become a prophet, an agent of God’s life-changing power. Before he was born, he says, God formed him to be a prophet – the prophet genes are in his DNA. Remember who a prophet is – not a fortune-teller, but someone who sees where God is working and calls people to join in that transforming work. A prophet is someone like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, who gave his life for his ministry of prophecy (as public servants too often do – as we saw in Tucson last week). The ministry of the prophet is a lonely and dangerous one, as both MLK and Isaiah discover. But there is comfort: we are not all called to be prophets, though at some point we are all required in some way to listen to prophets, hard as it may be. But, the Bible is clear, we are all called to some kind of ministry. We are all agents of God’s transformation, called to use the gifts and talents God created us with, in some kind of ministry of God’s justice & love. Because following Christ means being part of God’s work in the world, an agent of God’s transformation.

And how are we to react when given the impossible task of transforming the world It won’t necessarily be easy, says Paul in the letter to Corinthians today, but it won’t be impossible either. Anything that God calls us to do is possible, says, Paul, because God has already given our church communities every gift we need to answer God’s call. One person is given the gift of healing, one the gift of prayer, another the gift of leadership, another the gift of teaching, etc. One individual doesn’t have all the gifts, but a church community together has all the gifts they need to accomplish whatever God calls them to do. Which is one reason we are called to be part of church communities, instead of worshiping on the golf course – all of us are called to take part in the community’s call to transform the world around us. In the words of retired Bishop Claude Payne of Texas, we are a community of miraculous expectation – if Christ is present, miracles occur routinely, and each of us has our part to play in making miracles happen. Whatever it is that we are called to do by the circumstances of our lives and the situations we find ourselves in, whatever God calls our communities to become, God has given us the strength and the means to do it already.

If we are a community of miraculous expectation, the challenge our gospel lesson gives us today shouldn’t be too difficult – the challenge of evangelism – sharing the good news of Christ with others. In our gospel lesson, John the Baptizer points to Jesus, and two of his disciples follow Jesus. Jesus turns and asks them: what are you looking for? A profound question each of us could ask ourselves – what are we looking for? What brings us to seek out this Jesus, to be one of his followers? What kind of personal or world transformation are we asking for? Maybe Jesus’ question is a warning: do you truly want to see and feel the power of God at work in you? Because if not, Jesus isn’t the person to follow.

Perhaps it’s too big a question, so they ask him a smaller question – where are you staying? And he invites them to come and see. We don’t know what they saw, but we know that it was powerful enough and amazing enough that they couldn’t keep it to themselves. The next day Andrew brings his brother Simon, Peter or Cephas. And John’s gospel goes on to tell us of ever-widening circles of invitation and sight, as more people are invited to see Jesus and stay with him. The power of God at work is so transformative that people can’t keep it a secret – once people see it in action, they have to share it. Being a community of miraculous expectation means that we routinely expect Christ to transform the lives of not only ourselves, but others too.

I read an article this week by Anglican bishop Bill Atwood, who tells of meeting an old retired priest in the 70s, who told him this story. His Bishop hired him in the late 30s to plant a church in a small town in the US. The priest knew exactly how to go about it, and knew he couldn’t do it alone. So he called for help: he hired – get this – an engineer, an architect and a builder. He bought tickets for them all to go to England, toured the English countryside until they found the perfect English village church, created blueprints from the church, bought native stone in England to be shipped to the US, and came back and built that church – an authentic reproduction of an English village church. As a church planter, I said – what??? I read that story with astonishment. You want to plant a church, so you hire an architect? That’s the old model of doing church – the model where you expect everyone to be Christian, so if you come to town and open an Episcopal franchise, you might attract people away from the Presbyterian franchise, the same way they might choose McDonald’s over Burger King.

But things aren’t like that in our world any more. It was clear to me from the beginning of planting this church that a church is not a building; to plant a church, you don’t build a building, you build a community. The building will come in time – I have confidence in that. But people don’t come to church to see a building, except perhaps out of mild aesthetic appreciation – if it’s really a church, then people come to church to see the authentic power of Christ at work – and when they see Christ working and transforming lives, there is no power that will keep them away.

I see an amazing power of Christ at work here at Nativity – a power that enables us to build houses with Habitat for Humanity; to give blood, to donate blankets for Navajo youth to give to the homeless, to provide Christmas presents for children and young people, to provide food, education and medical care for barrio children, etc. I see the power of Christ at work in our children and youth, who are growing together as a community of young people who love God and love each other, experiencing amazing growth and transformation to equip them for life. I see the power of work among our ministries of healing, prayer, meals for the sick, as we live out the power of Christ in our care for each other. I see the power of Christ at work in our ministries of worship, which provide our own touchstone to God who strengthens each one of us for ministry. And I see the power of Christ at work in people in our congregation who go out from here to live out that power in their everyday lives, as teachers, healers, bankers, businesspeople, parents, friends, neighbors.

The transformation Christ asks for is the revolutionary power of love that spreads through every place that Christians gather, live or work. So Christ asks each one of us to pray and think about how we are called to live out that power of love, in church and in the rest of our lives. And Christ gives each one of us a call to evangelism, a word that simply means, telling the good news. It means saying, I’ve found something that means a lot to me, and I invite you to come see for yourself.

A book I’m reading on evangelism (Unbinding the Gospel, by Martha Grace Reece) says most mainline Protestant churches aren’t “how” churches but “why” churches. A “how” church wants to know what steps to follow to do evangelism. A “why” church wants to know why to do evangelism. A “why” church is where someone says, You do evangelism, I’m going to go alphabetize the Sunday school closet. Episcopal churches have been a “why” church for too long – which is why we plant churches by building buildings rather than building communities. A church founded like that is at risk of becoming a nice club to belong to instead of a community of miraculous expectation. No wonder many Episcopal churches are in decline.

But we are part of a community of miraculous expectation. Which is why I think we are called to invite others, why we bother to do evangelism: the reason is, Christ has made a life-transforming difference in my life, I have felt the power of God working in me, Christ is transforming the lives of other people around me and other people I don’t even know. Life transformation means simply inviting others to come and see Jesus. When the power of Christ is at work, Christ will do the rest. So we say: Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God in the highest.