A sermon for November 11, 2012 - Unless the Lord builds the house

Better late than never! Life has been a bit hectic and crazy lately, but here is the first message delivered at Saint Mary's in Falmouth, Maine. 

A Sermon for Proper 27 (RCL B) 11-11-2012

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for The Church of Saint Mary

Texts:             Hebrews 9:24-28; Psalm 127; Mark 12:38-44

Primary message:  The local church is the hope of the world      

Call to action:          Commit everything to join God’s work in the church

Title:               Unless the Lord builds the house

My dear brothers and sisters: God is building something new here in this community known as Saint Mary’s.

And what a privilege it is for me and Erin and our children, Angus and Se’ and Fiona, to be part of the new work that God is doing in this place. It is a great joy and a privilege!

After all, you and I have been called to labor together with God to build the house of God, which is nothing else but the community of those who have found new life in Christ.

You must understand this: I am absolutely convinced that the local church is the hope of the world.

I am convinced that groups of ordinary, average people just like you and me who gather together to be filled with the grace of God so that we might pour out that grace to others – that groups just like this right here are the hope of the world.

Let’s be clear about this: politicians can’t save the world. Businesses can’t do it. The university will not save the world.

All of these persons and groups have their role to play, but in the final analysis it is only the church that can transform the world!

It is only the Body of Christ that can make this world to be what God intended it to be!

How is this possible? Of course, it is not about us, after all. This is God’s doing; it is God’s work being done by God’s people with God’s energy.

God works through the church!

As crazy as it sounds, my friends, God has no other plan for humanity except for the Church!

And this Church through whom God works is an assembly of ordinary people like you and me who open our hearts to the living God and become channels of God’s grace to others.

I can remember very clearly the time that I first began to realize this for myself.

I was raised in a small country parish in the village of Vincentown, New Jersey. This was Trinity Episcopal Church, and it was founded in the 1800’s as a chapel for summer visitors escaping the heat of Philadelphia.

We were not very regular attenders. Our family was mostly of the “Christmas-and-Easter” variety (do you know any folks like this?). So I remember going to the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at this little parish when I was a senior in High School. By that time, I had become quite an idealist. I was truly disappointed with the world as it was, and I wanted to change it. I wanted to see people respect one another, and love one another. I wanted to experience some real peace in the world.

And at the passing of the peace there on Christmas Eve, in the candlelight, when all of these folks who had known me for my entire life were hugging me and hugging each other, at THAT moment it first began to dawn on me: HERE IT IS!

Here is the peace and love and joy and hope that I was seeking! Right here, in this ordinary, simple little country chapel, among these very people gathered together because of the love of God poured out on the world in Jesus Christ.

Well, what about us here at Saint Mary’s? How are we going to do this? How will we manifest this transforming grace of God in the months and years to come?

The details, of course, remain to be seen.

But I can tell you this much with certainty.

There are three things that we are going to do together.

Three paths of action which will be characteristic hallmarks of this Saint Mary’s community.

We are going to celebrate God and the gifts of life.

We are going to honor one another.

We are going to serve the needs of the world.

Got it? Can you remember these?

(Well, they’re written down in your bulletin, if you need some help!)

Celebrate.                  Honor.               Serve.

Let’s say them together. Are you ready? “Celebrate! Honor! Serve!”

Excellent!

Celebrate God and the goodness of life. Honor one another. Serve the needs of others.

It’s that simple. I am convinced that this is the kind of community which God is calling us to be, the kind of house that the Lord wishes building in this place.

A house where God is celebrated, where all that God has done for us is celebrated.

After all, this is why we gather together every Sunday – to celebrate our new life in Christ!

We will celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, promotions and graduations, retirements and new homes, weddings and baptisms, Earth Days and pet blessings, and even funerals.

I suspect that some of you might even get a bit tired of all the celebrating that we are going to do together! I can imagine someone saying, “Gee, can’t we just get together for a good complaining session?! to lament and to complain about all of the problems in the world. I mean, why do we have to celebrate all of the time?”

Nope, sorry! Can’t do it! After all, God has called us to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances.” That sounds like a whole lot of celebration to me!

We will also be a house in which all people are honored.

We will honor the gifts of our children and youth. We will honor the faithfulness and wisdom of our seniors. We will honor those who give and serve in whatever capacity, big or small. Jesus honored the poor widow who put in only two small coins. But that was a great sacrifice for her, and Jesus knew this and he honored her. We will honor those who have gone before us, those who have made this place, and this parish community, possible. We will honor the strangers in our midst – guests and visitors and seekers. And we will honor those among us with whom we disagree, for we are all called to be the family of God together.

And we will be a house which serves the needs of the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I know that you are already very good at this. We will build on the good outreach work already in place and reach out more and more to those in need here in our towns, across the nation, and around the world.

This is the kind of house that God is building among us.

And again, let me say it: there is nothing else in the world like the local church!

When working together as we are called to do, there is no other group or organization anywhere on earth which has the potential to be and to do so much good!

I am convinced of this. I will stake my life on this fact. And I invite you to join me in this journey.

In your bulletins, I have shared with you a special prayer of dedication. It is called “My Morning Prayer.”

Take it out now please. We will pray it together as an act of commitment to this new journey that we are beginning together.

“God, this is a new day. I freshly commit myself to the role you have invited me to play, as you are building your church in this world. I am awestruck again today that you include me in this grand life-giving, world-transforming endeavor. So today I joyfully offer you: my love, my heart, my talents, my energy, my creativity, my faithfulness, my resources, and my gratitude. I commit all of myself to the role you have assigned me in the building of your church so that it may thrive in this world. And I will ‘bring it’ today. I will bring my best. You deserve it. Your church deserves it. It is the hope of the world.” 

Sign it and date it, if you are ready to do so. This is for you to keep, to remember and to pray again and again.

Just remember, my friends, how incredible, how awesome this is! We have been invited to labor with God in the transformation of the world. What a gift! What a privilege!

And what a joy to be able to labor together with God in this very special and wonderful community known as Saint Mary’s. Amen.   

Happy Tessaracoste! A sermon for 1 Lent

A Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Lent (RCL A) 3-13-2011, offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Matthew 4:1-11

Happy Lent, my friends! Once again, we have circled back to this season in which we prepare ourselves for Holy Week and our celebration of Christ’s resurrection.

The original name for this season of the church calendar is Tessaracoste, which comes from the ancient greek word meaning forty. This season of 40 days has always been intended to correspond to the forty days and nights spent by Jesus out in the wilderness.

As most of you know, the name which we use, Lent, is an Old English word which means “spring.” And so Lent is not meant to be a time for dark foreboding or morbid thinking. It is meant rather to be a time when we deal head-on with reality as it is, and not as we so often want it to be.

Today, we are given two parallel stories which serve as foundations for a biblical view of life. These stories give us a framework for understanding our own lives, and indeed, the experience of all of humanity.

On the one hand, we have Adam, the first human, the proto-type of all humanity, living in a beautiful garden-like paradise where everything needed for life is provided by a gracious and creative God.

Notice, please, the original vocation of the human: placed by God in Eden to till it and to keep it. The second part of this vocation is quite odd: to keep it. The work implies protection: to keep it, to guard it, to protect it, to shelter it, to defend it.

But, protect Eden from what? There was no one else present with Adam! And the cousin animals had no malicious intent. What was the source of any possible danger?

It was, of course, himself. Adam needs to guard and defend Eden from himself, to keep it against the mis-use of his own God-given freedom and power.

In contrast, we have a story about Jesus, who is described by the apostle Paul as the second Adam, the new human being who puts back together that which the first Adam has broken.

Here we have the two sides of humanity, the two sides of every single human being: Adam, who lacked self-control and who was unwilling to accept responsibility for his own behavior.

And Jesus, the second Adam, the one who is able to control and direct himself only toward life-giving and life-serving ends, and who takes responsibility for himself, his actions and his future.

The first Adam remains strong in all of us. We human beings seem to have an infinite ability or self-deception. We are quick to hide from reality, to avert our eyes from our own shortcomings, or to lay the blame for our troubles somewhere else.

We love to play the victim, don’t we? It’s not my fault! I couldn’t help it! Or, if only she had done XXXX, then I would not have done this! If he didn’t cut me off on the road, then I wouldn’t have done that! Excuses, excuses, excuses.

At the end of the day, the only one that we can ever blame for our words and our actions and our attitudes is ourselves.

This, for me, is what Lent is all about. Facing stark reality once again. Taking stock of my life so that I can take full responsibility for myself, for my family, for my community.

You might recall how Adam and Eve responded to God’s questioning about eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam said it was Eve’s fault; Eve said it was the serpent’s fault. God knows that it is humanity’s fault.

But the second Adam, the one who was faithful when tempted by the serpent, this one has restored our original vocation: we are to till and to keep this good earth as God’s representatives on this planet.

When we gather around this Table of the Lord, and when we “do this in remembrance” of Jesus, we are giving ourselves to this work. As in any relationship, there is a give-and-take. In the blessed sacrament, Christ feeds us. We receive much in the way of grace and comfort. But we also come forward and kneel at this altar rail in order to give – to give ourselves away into this amazing task of bringing God’s light and truth and love into the places of darkness, lies and hatred.

We say that we are here because we remember what Jesus Christ has done. To remember comes from the ancient Greek word, anamnesis. It means to put back together something that has come apart.

Think about our English word “re-member”. Members of a group, or of a body, are inherent parts or aspects of the whole.

When we “re-member” Jesus here as the Body of Christ, we do this by ingesting his Word in the scriptures, and by ingesting his Life in the bread and wine.

We “re-member” Christ by putting the body of Christ back together again, by re-creating here in this time and place the true and real Body of Christ.

We are all missionaries when we are baptized into Christ. After baptism with water, each child is anointed on the head with oil. Do you remember what the title of Christ meant in the original Greek? It’s the translation of the Hebrew word, Messiah. They both mean “anointed one”. This refers to the ancient practice of anointing a ruler with oil when they took the throne of authority.

So Jesus is the Messiah because he was anointed with the Holy Spirit after being baptized by John with the water of the Jordan River. We are anointed with oil and the Holy Spirit after being baptized with water. And this is where the name of “Christian” originated. To be a “Christian” is to be a little anointed one, a little Jesus, a little Messiah. Or, if you like, a reproduction of the Messiah in this particular incarnation – in this time and place, with my name, in my family, with all of my skills and gifts and abilities, and among my unique relationships in the human community.

By his faithfulness in the wilderness, by his ability to face reality head-on and to deal with the failure of humanity, by the taking of responsibility for our sin, our Lord Jesus Christ has restored our original purpose in the world.

When you take your place within the body of Christ, you are empowered to be who God has always intended and created you to be: little Christs who bring hope and peace and healing grace into a hurting world.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

So It Is With Christ

Sermon for 3 Epiphany RCL 1/24/2010, Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

My friends, Saint Paul has gotten a bad rap in recent years. Over the last few decades of biblical research, St. Paul has been written off as someone who fundamentally changed the Hebrew character of the early Christian communities by inserting foreign Greek ideas.

Well, it is certainly clear that St. Paul’s insights and leadership did momentously change the future of the Church. But I believe that it would be a travesty to place a negative judgment upon the particulars of his teaching.

Here today, in our Epistle reading, we are given a distinct example of one of St. Paul’s signature contributions to the Church. Most of us here have heard this passage about the Body of Christ so many times that it feels quite commonplace and familiar and, thus, we miss the truly radical nature of its message.

Think back through all four canonical Gospels and all of the teachings of Jesus. Nowhere is there any suggestion even remotely like this. Nowhere does Jesus suggest that his disciples would serve as the manifestation of his own Body. The only clear reference Jesus makes to his Body is at the last supper, and the reference here is directly related to the Eucharist: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

So where they did Paul come up with this new idea? It was common for Greek writers to speak of their city-states as one body politic with a plurality of many parts, each of which had a specific role to play in the community. Surely, as an educated Roman citizen, Paul had heard of such analogies. But here he applied this concept in a quite different way, on a deeper and mystical level. Here he applies it also directly to Christ.

Tomorrow, January 25, is the date on which the Western Church remembers and celebrates the Conversion of St. Paul. This event was his inspiration behind this remarkable analogy of the Body of Christ. Do you remember what the Lord said to him, still named Saul at the time, on the road to Damascus? “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Why are you persecuting me? Not, why are you killing my disciples? But, why are you persecuting me? As St. Paul meditated over the years on this event, he came to understand that, although the resurrected body of the Jesus was now invisible in the heavens, it is all of his baptized disciples together who make his physical presence manifest here on the earth.

Praise God for St. Paul’s vision and insight. "For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit… Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” And so, in beautiful words now famous, does St. Paul remind us of our true identity. We are together the Body of Christ, and each one of us has a crucial and vital role to play.

Here in our Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry, we are embarking on a new adventure in ministry. This will be a work in progress for quite some time as we discern together how best to integrate all of our gifts and talents together for effective ministry to one another and to the wider community. But this much is clear: it will certainly require some effort from each one of us in this community.

Church is not a spectator sport. No one here is an innocent bystander! We are all players on the field, and it is vital that each one of us knows our role and is diligent to perform that role at a high level.

Therefore, in order to ensure that we are all working toward the building of an active, integrated Christian community here, I would like each of you to turn or move to the person sitting closest to you and in one minute describe to your neighbor what role you believe God has given you to perform in this community. Tell your neighbor what key position you are called to play here. What part of the Body of Christ are you? Let’s do that now for just a few minutes.

After a few minutes of discussion in the pews: “The unity of the body consists in the fact that its many members supply the things which the other parts lack.” So wrote Ambrosiaster in the fourth century, and his insight is true.

I want you to know that as I prepared for today, I realized a simple and yet very profound mistake that I have been making over the last few months. If you look at the front of the Sunday bulletins, I have made it a point to name our Presiding Bishop and the Bishop of New Jersey. They are vital to what we do here, because they are the physical manifestations of the apostles, our tangible link to our apostolic heritage. And then my name is listed as the Vicar. But something is missing. Something so basic, so simple, so obvious. I have forgotten to name the ministers here in our Shared Ministry. But from now on, this will change. Next week, and the weeks after, you will now see the correct designation placed there. It will say, Ministers – Comma – All baptized members. For this is what you are: the ministers of the Gospel in this time and place. “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.