Sermon January 24, 2010

Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Luke 4:14-21

It has been a rough couple of weeks to say the least.

I looked up just the Episcopal Church in Haiti. In 2008 it was the fastest growing diocese in the Episcopal Church. It celebrated over 200 child and adult baptisms, and over 700 child and adult confirmations. There are over 83,000 Episcopalians in Haiti in 97 churches representing 115 congregations and faith communities. Now one quote I read said, “there is no Cathedral. The entire Holy Trinity Cathedral complex is gone including the school. The convent for the Sisters of St. Margaret is gone. The Bishop's house is gone. College St. Pierre is gone” and a Jubilee Center. All gone.

In this country, the political pendulum swings from one extreme to another with a Republican win in Massachusetts and a Supreme Court decision erasing decades of campaign finance reform. The debate over health care drones on and on and the economy continues to leave more than 1 in 10 of us out of work. All of this while at the same time we rally as a nation once again to meet the challenge of another disaster and unite around getting aid to Haiti.

Personally, I have been busy with our Homeless Network planning for a big event to serve a 1000 homeless people this coming week, while at the same time dealing with some angry landlords and non-compliant tenants who we simply put back on the streets. I have also been talking with folks about ministry possibilities here in the Lower Valley and the Yakama Indian Reservation and our conversation often turns to centuries old systems of oppression and disenfranchisement that lay underneath current problems.
I also spent the week finishing my Postulancy Packet. I worked through some pretty heavy questions. Describe your relationship with God and how it has changed over the years. Describe your prayer life and how you communicate and experience God. Describe the central themes of your ministry, a significant event in your life, your main reason for seeking ordination, your take on the baptismal vows and which are the hardest for you to live out.

In the face of it all I am left wondering really how do I feel? Mostly exhausted. Definitely a little small and weak.

I thought of the Jewish people returned from exile to their homeland in our scripture lesson today from Nehemiah. In this passage, the people are listening to Ezra and the scribes read and interpret the Word of God for the first time in generations in front of the Watergate across from the newly rededicated temple in the newly rebuilt Jerusalem. The people’s reaction is to weep and Ezra has to exhort them not to mourn, but to be joyful and find their strength in the Lord. Imagine if you were the Israelites returned to Jerusalem, with a remnant of folks and little resources. You begin to restore the ruins of your city, build a few walls, erect a temple that really looks nothing like what it used to be. You may have come back, but you know in your heart that the glory of the former days of Israel is long gone, unrecoverable. There is no way to recreate the past and all the efforts to rebuild the city of Jerusalem after the return from Exile pale in the light of the descriptions of what once was in the Holy Scripture. The reality of our best efforts always falls short of our visions of the way things should be.

And then there is Jesus in the Gospel lesson. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! The Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor!” And the congregation just stares at him. “Who is this fellow!? Isn’t this Joseph’s son? What in the world does he think his is saying? Really you know let’s throw him off a cliff for being so presumptuous!” We are called to follow Jesus, but really, none of us is going to get up and say this kind of thing in front of all our friends and family. And look at me, I’ve gone through the discernment process, I’ve submitted the packet, but really, what was I thinking! When it comes to judging me, I often take the side of the congregation in the synagogue that day!

Then I thought of Chrissy Chavez. Chrissy was my daughter’s best friend growing up in California. She has just graduated from Medical School and is actually a real doctor, which is pretty hard to believe.  And right now she is excited to be on her way to Haiti to give her expertise to the crisis. Many years ago I was suppose to pick Chrissy up after her soccer game near San Francisco and bring her to spend the week with us in Stockton. I was extremely late in getting there, she and her coach were the only ones left and she was in tears. Cell phones were pretty new then and mine was dead as a doornail anyway. But her mother finally got a hold of me and chewed me out royally. I felt so incredibly irresponsible!

But it dawned on me yesterday as I was writing this sermon that though I was feeling pretty small in the face of so many overwhelming events, I had actually made a rather significant contribution to Haiti long ago in that I did not lose Chrissy Chavez that day. As today’s Epistle reading says, “We are all the Body of Christ and individually members of it.” We cannot say to the hand I have no need of you. And we don’t get to tell ourselves that we are insignificant. It turns out as the lesson today says, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are in fact indispensable.”

We have all been baptized into this One Body. Turn with me to the Baptism service in your prayer book on page 304. I want to look at this with you.

I wrote a poem once with a line about “a voice crying in the wilderness, searching for a clear image of joy.” It described a group of poor children I saw once who were laughing and dancing in and out of the spray from a water hose among the broken glass and garbage in the alley between their rundown apartment buildings. That is baptism, finding joy in the wilderness. Like John the Baptist and the original disciples, we are all voices crying in the wilderness. In baptism we covenant together to be that image of joy in the wilderness for ourselves and the whole world.

Down at the bottom of the page. Will you persevere in resisting evil? We are called here to simply hang on in the face of overwhelming odds. There is the biblical image of the spiritual powers and principalities that seem to have control over this world. These powers can be clearly seen in the systems of racism, economic injustice, environmental degradation, all forms of political, social and economic oppression. They are there in the military systems that violently enforce the unequal distribution of power. These forces are larger than any one life, overwhelming, beyond our control but we are called to resist, to see how we in fact participate in these systems and whenever we fall into sin to repent and return to the Lord. Our small personal acts of penance, asking for forgiveness, has an impact in bringing down the evil that seems to run rampant in our world.

There is also just suffering that defies explanation. Natural disasters that we are facing now in which we cannot spend time asking why, looking for explanations, but instead simply respond with an out pouring of love. At the top of the page, “Will you proclaim by word and deed the Good News of God in Christ?” In the face of all of the suffering of this world, we vow to model an alternative way of living in our common life. We vow to continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers. In this new community we seek to serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. We strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being. Thanksgiving for the grace of God is at the heart of this new vision. We are called to be a community formed by the grace and forgiveness of God in Christ. God has reordered our relationships and we have covenanted together to be ambassadors of reconciliation.

How to live out these baptismal vows in our daily lives and our corporate witness is of course no easy task. Loving our neighbor as ourselves means of course loving ourselves! Being able to ask for and receive God’s forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do, right alongside forgiving ourselves, let alone forgiving others! Much of our time in community is spent in all sorts of dysfunction. Being graceful to one another is at times the furthest thing from our minds as we are often too busy nursing our own wounds and inflicting pain. We must sift through a mixed bag of Christian tradition as well as changing morals discovering that some things we thought were sins really aren’t so bad, while other things we had no idea had anything to do with the Gospel suddenly are paramount. In the face of systemic evil and overwhelming suffering we don’t always know the right thing to do. All of this stuff is negotiated in community and we never fully agree on all the various lifestyle choices we can make, or actions we can take in our attempt to resist evil and live into the Kingdom of God. But one of my favorite lines from St. Francis which he said many times in his life to his fellow friars right up to his last days was “Brothers, [and Sisters] let us begin in earnest.”

Where we begin is with this one thing that is for certain. We cannot for a moment imagine that what we do is insignificant. All of our actions have eternal significance and reverberate throughout all of God’s creation, connected as we are one to another in the Body of Christ. The Spirit of the Lord is upon us and we are sent to proclaim Good News to the Poor! Each congregation is an intentional Christian community. In our baptism we have made a covenant with God and one another that forms us and guides us and we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to live out this life for the hope of the world.

Even though after weeks like this one, it is clear we are still in the wilderness - nevertheless, we are voices crying, singing, proclaiming in that wilderness. We are children dancing in and out of the water from the garden hose. We are Chrissy Chavez on her way to Haiti.