Bold, Courageous Risk-taking - a sermon for 28 October 2012

A Sermon for October 28, 2012 (RCL B Proper 25)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:             Hebrews 7:23-28; Psalm 34:1-8,19-22; Mark 10:46-52

Themes:        goodbye
Title:               But He Cried Out

My dear friends: for the last four (or three) years, God has given me the privilege of speaking with you from this pulpit as I have attempted to make sense of Holy Scripture within the context in which we are living in our society today.

As I reflect upon what God has laid upon my hearts over the years, there is a wonderful serendipity with the Gospel reading appointed for this morning.

Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd are passing Jericho on their inexorable march toward the conflict in Jerusalem. Along the way, a blind beggar cries out for help.

And the Lord Jesus turns to this man and asks him an amazing question:

“What do you want me to do for you?”

Bartimaeus makes his request for the restoration of his eyesight, and Jesus replies with a line that is quite typical for him to say: “Go; your faith has made you well.”

My friends: I invite you right now to think with me for a few minutes about the fact that true faith in God is bold, courageous risk-taking.

Think about it for a minute, my friends: the Messiah, the Son of God, this very popular Rabbi surrounded by eager crowds, on his way toward the end of his life in the showdown in Jerusalem – this one stops in the road in order to offer his services to a poor, blind beggar.

“What do you want me to do for you?”

Why? Why does he act in this way toward Bartimaeus? What about the other blind beggars whom the Lord surely passed by on the road without even a notice? Why is Bartimaeus healed?

The crowd ordered the poor blind man to be quiet, but he would not. Instead he shouted out all the more.

You see, Bartimaeus took a risk. He was incredibly vulnerable. Poor, blind, sitting down in the midst of a large boisterous crowd. People were yelling at him; they could have struck him, kicked him, hurt him.     

But Bartimaeus would not be silenced. He took the risk; he called out for help.

The Lord heard and replied. “Your faith has made you well.”

It is always this way with Jesus.

He calls out the twelve. They risk everything to go and follow him.
Four friends risk much to bring their sick brother to Jesus for healing.
The syro-phonecian woman risks scorn and ridicule – and worse – by debating with Jesus for the healing of her daughter.
Here, Bartimaeus risks his personal safety in order to ask for healing.

Over and over again, those who connect with Jesus are the ones who take risks in order to be near him, who take risks for the sake of love.

Do you see it, my friends?

Everything in the life of faith depends upon taking risks.  In fact, that is the very essence of faith: bold, courageous action, the ability to take risks.

And this is seen so clearly not only here in the Gospels.

Look at all of the saints who are honored and celebrated in the church: Paul of Tarsus, Patrick, Benedict, Francis of Assisi and Clare his dear friend, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, even Mother Teresa of Calcutta of our times. On and on and on we could name them.

All of these are honored and remembered and celebrated today. WHY?

Because they took risks for the sake of God! They were bold in risking much for the sake of the Gospel.

Some of these risked physical harm, like St. Patrick when he returned to Ireland and faced those who had attacked his village and had kidnapped him.

Francis and Clare took the risk of living life entirely by faith, with no material possessions at all and no money, no possessions at all. And guess what? They lived lives filled with incredible joy and peace! Because, by the way, you do not need money to have joy and peace in your life!

Other risked social embarrassment and exclusion, like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as they labored to reform the church in their day and restore it to its spiritual foundations.

Countless others risked their time by devoting hours on end to prayer and meditation.

This kind of devotion offers no promise of immediate reward. It is something people do because they fall in love! They fall in love with Christ and they want to spend time in his presence. For all they know, this will be wasted time which they can never recover, with nothing to show for it. But saints have done it – over and over again, simply out of love.

And what have they gained? They have gained intimacy with God, closeness to Christ.

Amazing insight, vision, a sense of peace and trust in God which does not change even when the circumstances of life.

A number of different times, I have shared with you this quote, which is one of my favorites:

“Grace will not baptize us while we sit at home, slighting the means which God has appointed.” These were words preached by John Henry Newman more than 160 years ago, but their truth applies in all ages.

The grace of God is available today. This is transforming powerful grace. It is dynamic energy and power.

BUT – it is available to those who take risks, who step out in faith into the unknown with boldness and courage and confidence.

Now, to be clear, not all risk-taking is good. One of the primary reasons that our society finds itself in such an economic downturn is due to reckless, irresponsible risk-taking by those in the financial sector.

It is not risk-taking by itself which is inherently good, but risk-taking for the sake of love, for the sake of God. It is the willingness to lay yourself – your wants and needs, your money, your resources, your time – to lay these down in order to serve others, to serve God.

THAT is faith in action.

This past week I became acquainted with the story of Katie Davis.

As an 18 year old from Tennessee, Katie traveled to Uganda during Christmas break with her church youth group. She was immediately captivated by the people and the culture of Uganda. Her heart was touched by the graciousness of the Ugandan people, but also by their immensity of their needs.

13 months later, in January of 2008, Katie had graduated from high school and had returned to Uganda to launch a new effort at helping impoverished children here to receive a basic elementary school education and the basic food staples needed to live, and to be nurtures by a caring, Christian community. Today, Katie is a 23 year old young woman living in Uganda, and she is in fact now a mother – at 23 years old! – who has officially adopted 13 orphaned Ugandan girls. (See her story here: http://www.amazima.org/katiesstory.html).

What causes an intelligent, athletic, attractive high school graduate – the senior class president, no less! – to leave behind her home and her friends and her future career potential in order to care for poor children in Uganda?

Faith in Jesus, because true faith is bold, courageous risk-taking.

Those who step out for the sake of God are the ones who go out and change the world!

When God gives the call to you, my dear friends, how will you respond?

Remember: “Grace will not baptize us while we sit at home, slighting the means which God has appointed.”

Oh, you can sit at home and watch TV and complain about how messed-up the world is and then wonder why it’s not getting any better! Sure, you can do that.

But that is not faith! That is not active participation in God’s mission in the world!

That is not the way to experience grace in your life.

Think it through for a moment right now. Think through your life. What have you risked for the sake of love, for the sake of God?

What is true of our individual lives is true of our churches as well. What has your church risked for the sake of love, for the sake of God?

 

True faith in Jesus Christ is bold, courageous risk-taking.

 Not because we hope to gain anything from it! We have already gained everything!

Baptized into Christ, we have been forgiven and redeemed in him.

And now, because of that, we have the chance to step out in faith, to risk ourselves for the sake of him who died for us.

Christ offered himself for us, so that we might offer ourselves for him.

That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ.

May you never forget this, never shrink back from God’s call out of fear, never seek to protect yourselves from the pain of sacrifice. But may you always reach out in love for the sake of the Gospel, and offer yourselves so that others may live in the grace of Christ. Amen.  

 

The Greatest Nation & the Servant-Ideal

A Sermon for October 21, 2012 (RCL B Proper 24)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:           Hebrews 5:1-10; Psalm 104:1-9,25,37b; Mark 10:35-45

Themes:        service to others, self-sacrifice

Title:             Whoever Wishes to Become Great

Earlier this morning, nearly 4,400 miles to the east of this place, the Bishop of Rome officially canonized a woman who had consecrated her life to God as a Sister of Saint Francis and who is exalted because of her service at a leper colony in Hawaii, nearly 4,900 miles to our west.

Saint Marianne Cope is how the Roman church refers to her now, though most of her life she was known as Mother Marianne. In July 1883, while serving as the mother superior of her community in Syracuse New York, Mother Marianne received an Emissary from the Hawaiian government who was sent throughout North America in hopes of finding religious sisters who would relocate to Hawaii in order to offer medical care to a colony of people with Hansen’s Disease – which is the official name for leprosy.

Faithful to the spirit of St. Francis, and in memory of his famous encounter with a leper on the road outside of Assisi, Mother Marianne agreed to accept this challenge. Three months later, Mother Marianne and six other sisters set out for the island of Molokai in the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Before setting out, Mother Marianne made a bold promise to her sisters: no one, she said, who was willing to minister to lepers in the name of Christ would ever contract that horrible disease. The risk was very real indeed. This leper colony had been established hastily in the 1840s because of the sudden arrival and rapid spread of the disease. People in Hawaii were afraid, and every one with Hansen’s Disease was immediately exiled to this remote peninsula, completely cut off from the rest of Hawaii by the highest sea cliffs in the world which fall straight down into the ocean.

The Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Molokai

Mother Marianne and the sisters risked their lives to help these isolated, desperate souls who had no help, no supplies, no homes – about 1200 people in total, all suffering from a deadly and debilitating disease. They risked a painful and gruesome death in order to serve these people, but, amazingly, no Sister among them ever did become infected.    

When the sons of Zebedee made their infamous request to sit at the right and left hands of Jesus when he took his place as King, they had no idea what they were requesting.

To drink the cup of Jesus does not ever lead one to a position of royal, earthly power like that which James and John had requested. But it does lead one to a position of service to the poor, the needy, the sick, the outcasts.

“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:44).

It may be that Mother Marianne’s example of living out the servant-ideal of Christ is, perhaps, an extreme one. But it is a faithful example, and it teaches us much about the kind of risk-taking and self-sacrifice that is part-and-parcel of following Jesus.

Last week, we considered together the importance of reading and meditating upon Holy Scripture on a regular, daily basis, because “the word of God is living active” (Hebrews 4:12).

This is crucial for our daily lives as individual Christ-followers, but it doesn’t stop there. What we learn in the Scriptures has implications for every facet of human life.

Right now, I am going to push to the edge of what is culturally acceptable by talking a bit about politics. I do this because it is true that what we learn from the scriptures has bearing not only upon our individual lives but also upon how we conduct ourselves as a nation.

Now, let me be perfectly clear at the onset by stating that I do not believe that America is a Christian nation.

I do not believe that it ever has been such, nor do I even think that a Christian nation is a true possibility, to be entirely honest.

But if it were – if we were to set out to live collectively as a Christian nation, as a entire country dedicated to following the teachings of Jesus – what might that look like?

What might we learn from the Gospels that would shape our policy as a nation?

What about from today’s Gospel reading?

What would it look like to be a nation which intentionally took the position of servant to the other nations of the world? A nation which took extreme care to ensure that we never lorded it over others, never threw our weight around, and never demanded from others what we are unwilling to do ourselves?

What would it look like to have a foreign policy shaped by this teaching of Christ?

“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

Thankfully, I am not a politician, nor am I a policy adviser to any. But it doesn’t take expert eyes to notice immediately the stark contrast between the servant-ideal of Christ and the foreign policy of this nation.

To be a servant of others, like Mother Marianne Cope, means that you are willing and ready to lay aside your own needs and interests in order to focus instead upon the needs and interests of others.

This is sacrificial service and it is costly. To willingly accept the baptism of Jesus is to join him in his sacrificial service on behalf of the world.

I do not have any clear and easy prescriptions for how this ought to be applied in our relations with the other nations of the world, but this is how I understand – on a personal level – the teachings of Jesus regarding self-defense and the legitimate use of violence.

As a follower of Christ, it is NEVER appropriate to defense myself.

The one who gave himself up to death on the cross on MY behalf calls me to follow his same path, to carry my cross, to offer myself as a sacrifice for others.

That is what we call agape love. As a Christian, I can NEVER hurt another human being in order to protect myself or to protect my honor.

This is what it means to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give away my cloak also.

However, as a Christian, I have a duty to protect the innocent and the needy.

If I were ever to see someone harming a child or abusing a woman, I would not hesitate a moment to inflict serious pain upon the perpetrator.

By taking up the defense of those who are defenseless, I am risking myself and my safety and security in order to serve someone in need, and I personally am willing to do that at any moment, whenever called upon.

As a student of the Bible, I understand this distinction between self-defense and the defense of others to be clear and decisive.

Again: I believe that the Bible is clear that I never have any right to cause harm in defending myself, and at the same time that I have a moral obligation to defend others who are in need. And in that case, force may be necessary and is therefore justified.

So how does this distinction work for a nation as a whole who might seek to follow Jesus as our Master, Savior, Lord?

If we actually wanted the policies of our nation to be shaped by the teachings of Christ, how would we carry out this distinction in the use of force? How would we see ourselves as the servants of others?

Tomorrow night, during the last scheduled debate between the two leading candidates for President, there will be a lot of talk about the use of force by our nation.

After all, the principal subject is slated to be foreign policy.

You will hear these two men speak often about doing what it is in the interests of the nation, about protecting our national interests, and about projecting our power throughout the world.

I invite you, as a Christ-follower who might be observing this discussion – or talking about this debate among you family or co-workers – as you do this, I invite you to hold in your mind this clear teaching of Christ about the servant-ideal, and to remember also the example of Mother Marianne in her sacrificial service to the lepers in Hawaii.

As you listen, consider the Bible’s teaching that force and violence are never to be used in self-defense but only in service of those who are powerless, of those who are in need, of those who are defenseless.

“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Thanks be to God that the Son of Man has served us, and has ransomed our lives, so that we might show off his glory and greatness throughout the world. Amen.

The Presiding Bishop preaches on Teresa of Avila - Oct. 15, 2012

A Sermon offered for the Executive Council of TEC by Katharine Jefferts Schori

Monday, October 15, 2012, The Feast of Teresa of Avila

Texts:   Song of Songs 4:12-16; Psalm 42:1-7; Matthew 5:13-16

Most people who know anything about Teresa of Avila know that she was a mystic, and spent much of her life in contemplation.  Some people are aware that she was proclaimed a “doctor of the church” by the pope in 1970, the first woman to get that title.  In Roman Catholic circles, that means that her writing is judged sound and good for teaching, and it means that this gospel is read on her feast day – you are salt of the earth.  Teresa’s life was a good deal more complex than the popular image of a sickly nun shut up in her cell only to pray and write.  One modern commentator calls her, “stubborn as an ox, thick-skinned as an elephant, and sly as a fox.”[1]  There’s a taste of the saltiness that Jesus charges us to be.

 Teresa was born about 1515 to parents who were members of the foremost families of Spain.  All of her life, she seems to have been profoundly hungry for God.  When she was a child, her uncle found her and her younger brother outside of town – they were going off to be martyred by the Moors so they could enter heaven.  He took them home.  Teresa’s mother died when she was 14, which seems to have unleashed a fairly normal and frivolous adolescence.  She writes about indulging in clothes, and perfume, and trashy novels, and, she says, “all the vain trimmings my position in the world allowed.”  Her father responded by packing her off to a convent school.  She got sick and had to come home, and it appears that she continued to experience the same kind of illness most of her life. Maybe it was recurrent malaria.

At age 20, Teresa insisted on entering a Carmelite monastery.  She stayed four years, when she got so sick that they dug her grave.  Her father took her home again, and it took her three years to recover.  She eventually went back and spent another 18 years there.  She grew tired of the tepid life, for many convents in those days were more like hotels for unmarried aristocratic women.

With the assistance of two Jesuits, Teresa began a period of serious silent prayer, and began to have vivid experience of the near presence of God.  Her writings are the first to give a fairly explicit description of the experience of deep prayer, as a process of contemplation, quietude, and union with God in both conscious forms and un- or supra-conscious forms.  She was both descriptive and analytical, like William James centuries later, and her writings invited others into a similar kind of experience.

Within a few years, she began to envision a radical reform of the Carmelite order, that would return to a more ancient and ascetic discipline.  She established the Convent of St. Joseph in 1562, where the nuns gave up shoes in favor of sandals, took a rough habit, lived fully cloistered, largely silent and in strict poverty, and ate no meat.  After a while her superiors objected, and she was ordered off into seclusion.  The pope spoke up for her and countermanded the order, and permitted establishment of the discalced, or shoeless, Carmelites as a separate religious order.  In all, she founded 17 convents for women and 14 for men.  Teresa died while on a journey to establish yet another convent.

Teresa hungered and thirsted for God in ways that may shock us today – think of that imagery in the Song of Songs has often been used to speak of mystical union with God.  Bernini made a famous sculpture of Teresa in rapt prayer that was termed “indecent” by one commentator because it’s so sensual.  Christians who live too much in their heads have a good deal to learn from Teresa’s salty writing.

You are salt of the earth and light of the world, Jesus says to his disciples.  We’re not worth much at all if we can’t use our saltiness to spread light abroad.  Let me make a connection between salt and light.  In chemical terms, salts are charged molecules that react in the presence of water or other solvents.  Salts are what make batteries work, salts underlie most of the chemical reactions that give life.  The sun, and the light it gives off, are the result of reactions among charged particles.  The ability of plants to use sunlight to make sugars depends on salts.  Saltiness is the potent ability to interact with the world around us – and it’s intimately related to our created nature – it’s part of our earthiness.  We can’t be light-bearers if we reject our created nature.  Teresa’s hunger, and all that sensual imagery in the Song of Songs, are about the way we are created – to interact with creator and creation.  If we have no salt, we can shed no light.

What does that say to us right here?  Embrace your salt – in moderation.  Teresa’s ascetic lifestyle was designed to give her salt its optimum field for action.  That field looks different in different human beings – some of us are made for the convent and monastery; most of us are not.  We are all, however, made to be conscious of our created nature and how it might be stewarded most effectively.  Think about what a whole lot of salt does – it preserves living things so that they stop living, like the brine we use to make ham or bacon or pickles.  If we eat too much salt, at the very least our blood pressure goes up, and at most, we die.  Salt mines are used to store precious things and as tombs for dangerous ones like radioactive waste.  Perhaps the abandoned salt mines under the Diocese of Michigan would make a good home for the Episcopal Church’s Archives…

But salt in moderation is essential to life – balance is the key.  You are salt of the earth and light of the world.  Salt is not meant for us alone.  It’s meant to react with the world around us and create light.

Teresa has something to offer this body in her push to get back to the core of her monastic tradition.  She challenged her sisters and brothers in the religious life to let go of the non-essentials, the frills and the frivolity, so that their own salt could be readier to interact with God.  We’re challenged to do similar kinds of work – recovering and focusing on the central aspects of God’s mission that engage this church and its partners.  That’s radical work – going back to the roots, to get back to the essence of God’s call to heal the world, and to let go of the details that so often distract us.

How will the challenging conversations here (God willing in moderation!) help to shed light in the world around us?

The salt of reactivity is essential to produce light. But I don’t mean simple anxiety; rather the kind of reactivity that can experience hunger like Teresa’s, or feel the suffering of the vulnerable and hurting people around us.  What gets our justice juices flowing, what rouses our passionate response?  That is salt at work – and there is no light without it.  Teresa’s cell did not cut her off from the world’s hunger.  She felt that hunger deeply, and she responded.

Where is your salt at work?  What suffering is starting your tears, what need is making you sweat, where is your lifeblood being spent?  That’s how light gets shed in the world.  That’s how we give glory to God.  And that is the garden in which we find the beloved, and the beloved finds us.

[1] Christian Feldman:  God’s Gentle Rebels: Great Saints of Christianity.   Crossroad, NY: 1985

You Lack One Thing

A Sermon for October 14, 2012 (RCL B Proper 23)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:           Hebrews 4:12-16; Psalm 22:1-15; Mark 10:17-31

Themes:        the word of God, the commandments, the one thing lacking

Title:             You Lack One Thing

Amy Carmichael was a young Presbyterian woman living with her family in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1880s. She eventually went on to lead a famous mission effort among poor children in India, but that was many years later.

One Sunday morning, while returning from the liturgy back to her home, Amy Carmichael heard a passage of scripture audibly spoken in her ears. She remembers it clearly.

They had just passed a new fountain built near the curb of the street, when suddenly the voice spoke and said: “The fire shall try every man’s work to see what sort it is. If any man’s work abide…”

She turned to look for the face behind that voice, but there was no one. Everything was ordinary. This voice spoke these few phrases to her  - and to her alone – and then it was gone.

These phrases came from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:13-14, probably the King James Version).

Amy Carmichael heard this as the voice of God speaking to her, and her life was never the same. Her entire frame of reference for life had changed in that moment. Now, somehow, deep inside, she knew that she must spend her life on works that will last, creating things  that are of eternal value (They Found the Secret by V. Raymond Edman, 1984: p.24-25).

This, my friends, is a testimony to the power of Holy Scripture.

“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12).

This word is the Logos – the wisdom, the communication of God.

We might recall this Logos from the first chapter of John – the prologue to the Gospel of John. But it needs to be unpacked a bit for us today.

According to John, the Logos of God is the very person of the Incarnate One – Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah. “In the beginning was the Logos – the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). 

Of course, in the context of this letter to the Hebrews, the “Word of God” referred only to the received texts of Hebrew scripture, what we call the Old Testament.

But our context is different, and for us the Word of God is all the texts of the Bible – that sacred library of witnesses to God’s faithfulness in human history.

Let’s be clear about this: there is absolutely no substitute for reading the Bible.

There have been a number of studies which have attempted to identify correlations between the spiritual growth of Christians from various traditions and their particular spiritual practices.

Again and again, these studies have shown that there are two simple practices which are a vital part of the lives of those who are growing in their connection with God:

prayer and the reading of the Bible.  

That’s it. No great magic formula. No mystical experiences. These two simple things – and they are usually done together. Reading the Scriptures in a prayerful state, meditating upon the meaning.

My friends: there is no getting around it. The Word of God is living and active, and we need to expose ourselves to it on a daily basis.

Just look at how our Lord Jesus used Holy Scripture in his conversation with the wealthy man on the road. Look at how he used it to diagnose the deeper needs of his soul.

You know, I think we all tend to be more like this rich man than we care to think. Are you with me?  “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

We tend to come to Christ in order to figure out what we have to do to be on the good sides of things, right? To make sure that we can get into heaven when our final day arrives.

And we tend to keep the commandments. We do most of these good things. We’re not bad people, right?

But, we know that there is more. We can feel it in our gut. There is more to the story than this. There is something about life, about God that we haven’t gotten yet.

Jesus looks at us, and loves us, and says, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

Like it or not, most of us will never take this step with Christ because we are far too afraid of losing our treasured possessions, or our comfortable way of life, our supposed safety and security. 

But is it hard to understand why?

After all, we swim in a sea of advertising, guided by an advertising and marketing industry which spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to convince us that we need certain products in order to be healthy, or happy, or cool, or whatever.

The average American consumes at least a few hundred pieces of advertising every single day.

Each one of these pieces is sending you a message, and in fact that message sounds a lot like what Jesus said to this man on the road:

“You lack one thing.” - You lack our products, our service! And you need to have it!

My friends: how are you going to counter-act, or at least balance out a little bit, all of this aggressive messaging poured into you by this relentless advertising?

May I suggest to you that this is perhaps one of the primary reasons why you and I have MORE need to read the Bible every single day than those of previous generations?

Because we have been so programmed to live as consumers that we need extra help to remember that we are –first and foremost – beloved children of God.

Daughters and sons of a gracious God who provides everything that we could ever need. 

Do you believe this? Can you bet your life on this truth?

Anthony De Mello was a great Indian Jesuit priest who taught widely about the spiritual life. And Fr. Tony shared the story of a meeting which changed his life.

He met a rickshaw driver in Calcutta named Rinsai. This poor man was dying from a painful, terminal disease. Rinsai was so poor, in fact, that he had to sell the rights to his eventual skeleton while he was still living so that he could eat!

And yet, Rinsai was a believer who was full of faith and trust and a deep, interior joy.

This is confidence and joy and peace which passes all human understanding, because it comes from somewhere far deeper (The Way to Love by Anthony De Mello, 1992: p. VIII). 

Do you want to live with that kind of trust and joy and peace – no matter what the circumstances of your life might be?

Jesus knew the truth with amazing insight, because it is in fact the poor who find this kind of life much easier to attain than the wealthy. It has always been this way.

“How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.”

But in this regard, there is no difference between the upper, middle or lower classes.

We are all bombarded with the marketing messages that tell us to buy more, more, more. 

Whether you have wealth or not, how are you going to keep yourself on the path of God, and not allow your mind to be controlled by these messages?

Let’s stick with the basics: prayer and the daily reading of Scripture.

There have been countless numbers of saints whose lives have been changed and re-directed by the word of God.

Sometimes it is only a simple phrase from the Bible, as in the case of Amy Carmichael, when the Holy Spirit pulled out of her deep memory this one verse and flashed it across the screen of her consciousness at just the right time.

Those words of Scripture were there in her memory because she had read the Word of God regularly, and so the holy words were there, implanted within her, ready for active use in the hands of God when the time was right.

Consider it, my friends, and commit to it. Prayer and Bible reading – every day.

It sounds simple, because it is! Simple but profound beyond measure, because there we are invited to engage every day with the living and active Word of God.

May it always be so among us. Amen.

More lessons from Puppy Duty!

Having a large, energetic puppy in the house brings a number of challenges. If Clare (the St. Bernard/Lab mix puppy) is not sleeping, then she is chewing on something. Some item must be in her big mouth every waking moment of her life. The challenge is to make sure that only her toys end up in her mouth, and not the furniture, laundry, shoes, barbie dolls, car keys, tea bags, electric cords, kitchen towels, books, etc. I guess that everything looks tasty to a young puppy like Clare!

Clare with the toy doughnut in mouth!

In order to survive the months of this chewing fixation with minimal damage to our household goods, we frequently ask our children to help with watching Clare. They find this difficult to do, because she moves around the house quite a bit, or tries to escape from the backyard. How can they watch YouTube videos and watch Clare at the same time? 

Recently, I explained to Angus (our 16 y.o. son) that he did not actually have to watch her all the time with his eyes, but that he had only to maintain continual awareness of Clare's presence. To know what she was doing and where she was without actually looking. 

Wow! I thought, what a great spiritual lesson! This works in the same way as our relationship with God! The goal of our spiritual lives is to reach the point where we   maintain continual awareness of God's presence while we continue to live our ordinary lives. 

The skill required here is splitting consciousness into two different areas of focus without becoming bi-polar. Doing the task before you with complete attention, while at the same time maintaining a deeper, underlying awareness of the Holy Spirit. 

This is tuning the radio of the heart to the Spirit's frequency and listening in the background while we continue to function in life at a high level. Just like having the baby monitor on in the background while the mother is working. She is doing both things - listening carefully AND being productive (hopefully). 

When we reach spiritual maturity ("to the measure of the full stature of Christ" Eph. 4:13), then we are able to maintain this continual awareness which is central to living "in Christ" while also being 100% engaged in the tasks of ordinary life - even more engaged than we could ever be otherwise. 

Here is another of the ironic oxymorons of the spiritual life: learning to listen at all times with our interior consciousness to God enables us to become better listeners at all times to the people around us. 

This, I know, is where the Holy Spirit is leading me. I look forward to this journey! Thanks be to God.

God is an Amateur - a sermon for Oct. 7, 2012

A Youth Message for the 10-7-2012 (RCL Proper 22 B)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:           Hebrews 1:1-4,2:5-12; Psalm 26; Mark 10:2-16

Themes:        reflection, imprint, the imago dei, the amateur, like a child

Title:             God is an Amateur

My dear friends: how many of you like to play? Play games? Play dolls? Play sports?

That is excellent! Playing is something that God wants you to do! Let’s come back to that in a minute.

First, did any of you hear our first Bible reading today from the Letter to the Hebrews? In that reading, we heard this:

“Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:2).

Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory. What is a reflection? It’s an image that we see in a mirror.

When we look at Jesus – how he lived his life, what he taught and what he did, we see God exactly! Just like looking in a mirror. Or like walking out of a dark room onto a sunny beach in the middle of the day in the summer! Do you remember how bright it can be? The sun reflecting off of all that sand and the water!

When we look at Jesus, we see the brilliance of God shining back at us just like walking out of a dark room and into the full light of the summer sun.

Now did you hear what Jesus taught us this morning? About the little children?

He said, “Let the little children come to me…Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  

Now, I brought a small mirror. Look at yourself. What do you see?

Listen: one day you will grow up to be big like me, to be an adult.

Do you know what most of us adults see when we look in the mirror?

We see problems. We see trouble. We see failure.

Do you know why? Because we don’t look like the stars on TV or in the movies.

Because our faces have changed, or we’ve lost our hair, and we wish we were as good looking or as beautiful as the superstars. But we don’t see that, and that makes us sad.

But what does God see when God looks at us?

Jesus is the reflection of God, and we are the reflection of God! You and I are made in the image of God!

St. Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being when fully alive!

In our faces shines the glory of God, when we do not see problems and failures.

What is it that makes us feel fully alive?

The other day before dinner I took our puppy Clare out to a local nature park to play.

Have any of you seen Clare? Here is a picture. She’s a beautiful, well-behaved puppy.

But she loves to play, all of the time.

So I took Clare out to this park where there is a creek and the path crosses over the creek on a bridge.

I sat and watched Clare play in the water. She loves the water! She jumped in and splashed around in the sunshine, and I chased her for a while, and she chased after me. And then she tried to catch grasshoppers in her mouth. And do you know what? I felt completely and fully alive!

Do you know what I think? I think that we are fully alive when we play!

Jesus said “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Children love to play! Puppies and kittens love to play! Is that by accident? I don’t think so.

God intends for us to play, to be fully alive, to celebrate the gift of being alive, to look at ourselves and see the glory of God because we are wonderfully made and put together!

Have you ever heard adults tell you to stop playing around and to be serious?

Sometimes, unfortunately, we have to do that. Sometimes we have to get stuff done.

But don’t ever think that playing is less important than working. That is not true!

You and I – all of us, young and old – we all have to play in order to be fully alive!

When I play with my family or my friends or my puppy, then I feel fully alive!

We adults get all mixed up, because we think that we need to stop playing in order to focus on “important adult matters.”

But I don’t know of any adult who feels fully alive when in a committee meeting!

We have to do those things, of course.

But if we ONLY do those things, if we forget to play, then we are not listening to what Jesus taught us! Then we are not reflecting the glory of God!

This morning we are getting ready to baptize little Lillie Ann Gilbrook.

Babies love to play, don’t they? Just like puppies, actually. Because this is the way that God made them to be! It is perfectly natural and godly for children to play.

This is one of the joys of baptizing little babies. When we bring them into our community through baptism, it's like we are saying, "We need your playfulness among us. We get too serious and we forget about the importance of play."  

Speaking of play, and especially playing sports, do you know what it means to be an amateur? Today, it usually means someone who does something as a hobby, someone who dabbles in an activity – usually someone who is not good enough to be a professional, right?

But I want to tell you straight up that God is an amateur! That word comes from Latin roots which mean to love something. An amateur is someone who does something, not for what they will get paid by others, but simply because they love doing it!

God is an amateur. God made you, God breathed life into all of us, simply because God loves to do it! I don’t know why, but the Bible tells us that God loves to create, and especially God loves to create human beings.

There is a kind of playful joy in what God does, and I think that this perhaps is why Jesus said that we must be like little children to enter God’s kingdom.

Because when we play like a child, then we are most fully alive and most faithfully reflecting God’s glory!

Now, I have something here for you to remember our talk this morning.

We can’t play all the time. A lot of life is work – getting things done.

But whenever you do play – and I hope that it a lot - I want you to remember that you are doing what God wants you to do, and you are reflecting God’s glory, just like in the mirror.

Can you remember that?

And you adults out there, please listen and understand: if you do not make regular time in your daily life to play, then you are not being faithful to God’s calling.

I mean it: God made us for play! Not all of the time, of course, but we must do it to restore our souls by being fully alive. It is then that we are more like Jesus; it is then that we more reflect the glory of God.  

The loyalty of Mormons

What is the defining characteristic of Mormon faith? Loyalty.

I just read through the TIME magazine article called "The Mormon Identity" (here's the cover - The Mormon Identity).

At the core of what it means to be a Mormon (as far as I can discern as a student of religion and an observer of the LDS faith) is loyalty. Loyalty to family, to clan, to the Church, and most importantly loyalty to the Prophet. This is the bedrock characteristic of Mormon faith. Given their early history of persecution, you can see how the community was defensive in posture. Loyalty to the Prophet Joseph Smith was  the key to ensuring the community's  initial survival. Doctrine has been important also, but not like it is in various Christian churches. This explains, in part, how Mormon's like Romney can be so pragmatic and change positions as needed to fit the circumstances. As long as he remains loyal and he is working to ensure that their community survives and thrives, then a good Mormon will adjust as needed - within certain limits, of course. This helps to explain, also, why family cohesion is so crucial for Mormon's. 

The LDS religion is the quintessential American religion. It was created here, and America is central to its understanding of life and history. American national success is closely linked with a Mormon understanding of the world's destiny. I think we can all get used to having a Mormon run for president. Joseph Smith did it himself. Now that there are so many financially successful Mormons, I expect that there will be a continual supply of wealthy Mormons running for president in the decades to come.