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.

Put on Jesus!

Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent (A RCL 11/28/2010), offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

Happy New Year, my friends! Happy New Year! And so, once again, we find ourselves at the start of another cycle of the Christian year, back at the beginning. And what is it that we hear now as that first initial call that the Church sends out to us at the start of this new year? What message do our appointed lessons give us here at the beginning of Advent? They are all a call to return to consciousness, to deep and continual awareness. What did our Lord command in this reading from Matthew’s Gospel? “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42).

Jesus uses the story of Noah as the framework for his discussion here. Let us think for a moment about this reference to the days of Noah. While Noah worked diligently at the building of the ark, those people around Noah continued on with their usual daily activities, oblivious to and unaware of what God was doing. “They knew nothing”, Jesus says, “until the flood came and swept them all away.” But they knew nothing because they chose to know nothing. It was a question of awareness, a matter of paying attention.

This is where it becomes personal for us. Do we not all struggle with paying attention? Do you not find it challenging and difficult to maintain awareness, to sustain focused consciousness upon God and upon what God is doing around you?

Our strategy for accomplishing this is given loud and clear in our reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14).

Put on Jesus. Put on the Lord like you put on your clothing each and every morning!

Have you heard of the famous Saint Augustine of Hippo? Do you know the great story of his conversion? Though he was born into a poor family in present-day Algeria in the year 354 AD, Augustine had a brilliant mind. He was a gifted young man, but also troubled in many ways. As a master of speaking and of classical literature, Augustine became a teacher of rhetoric. After moving to Rome and to Milan, and he was very much sought-after as an excellent teacher for the children of the wealthy.

Augustine’s mother had become a Christian and she prayed for him. Augustine himself was very much impressed by the writings of the apostle Paul, but his was a divided soul. He was attracted by the wisdom and beauty of the Lord. He could see that truth was in Jesus, but he was afraid to give up his past life, afraid of the changes that God would require of him once he committed his life to Christ. Augustine did not want to give up the pleasures of his easy and successful life, but deep down he knew that he was being a coward. He knew that he was forsaking eternal truth for the sake of silly falsehoods of this world, and he despised himself for it.

Until one day, in July of the year 386, when this tension within him became too much. Pacing in a garden in Milan, Augustine heard the voice of a child calling out in Latin “Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege!” “Take and read. Or pick up and read.” He could not see a child and he could not tell from where the voice was coming. So Augustine accepted this as the voice of God calling him to return to his book of the letters of St. Paul which he had left nearby. He picked it up and turned to this very passage from the Letter to the Romans: “Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14).

These very words struck him to the heart. These words chased away his cowardice, his lack of awareness. And right there, Augustine decided to take up the light of Christ and to leave behind the darkness of his sin once and for all. And immediately, he was overcome with joy and peace. He had been so afraid of letting go of his petty pleasures and secret desires, but once he had crossed this line – once he had reached out to Christ in faith and in trust – he could see right away how foolish his fear had been. When Augustine put on Christ, his eyes were opened and he could see himself for who he really was (Read Book VIII of Augustine's Confessions for the entire story).

Keep awake, the Lord calls to us. Wake from sleep, the apostle calls to us. But how? How are we to find the strength to do this? We cannot just buck ourselves up and make it happen. That might work for a while, but it can’t last. So where do we find the power, the energy, the strength to make this happen?


We put on the Lord Jesus Christ. And how do we do this? Through prayer. Through continual prayer in the name of Jesus, the Lord, the Messiah, the coming Prince of Peace.

Is it possible actually to live our human lives with this continual awareness of God? Is it possible to stay awake and alert at all times? Some may wonder: how can I maintain this consciousness of God at all times, even when I am stuck in the midst of the crazy business of life, or when other tasks demand my full concentration?

Yes. It is possible, and you can do it. During this season of Advent, as we prepare ourselves to celebrate the birth of the Lord once again, let us welcome this season as a time when we can maintain the name of Jesus on our lips, and in our hearts, at all times, in all places. In this way, we can put on the Lord Jesus Christ and so stay awake and aware. Amen.

Not to Lose Heart

Sermon for Proper 24 C RCL 10/17/2010, offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

In our Gospel reading today, the Lord tells a parable to his disciples so that they would learn to pray always and not to lose heart. There are only 3 parables on prayer in all of the gospels, and all 3 of these prayer parables are found only here in Luke. We heard the first earlier in the summer, and next Sunday we will hear the 3rd of these. But today we are given this brief little parable for our meditation. And what is more, we are even told before hand what the lesson of this parable is meant to be!

“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

What does it mean to lose heart? It’s an unusual Greek word that is used here and it means something like becoming weary or tired, losing heart, beginning to despair.

What a fitting word given to us today, I believe. I know that there are many among us here who are feeling weary and tired; many who are tired of carrying such a heavy load in the church all alone.

Well, if you are in that category, then listen well to this message of hope that the Lord brings to you today. The persistent widow who finally receives justice from the wicked judge because of her patience and perseverance is a lesson for all of us who labor in the Lord’s work but see little fruit for our efforts.

I spoke with you a few weeks ago about prayer, particularly about the woman who was praying a novena to St. Joseph. And I suggested that she was misguided in her prayers because she did not, first and foremost, seek after the will of God above all things. (10/3 Sermon - Life that really is life)

But there is, of course, a place for pleading to God for those things which are on our hearts. We call that the work of petition and intercession.

Let’s take a minute to get our understanding of prayer straight before we go any further. Please turn to the Catechism in the Prayer Book on Page 856. Let us look together at how the church has defined prayer, and particularly this discipline of asking God for help and relief.

Prayer and Worship (the first question)

Q. What is prayer?
A. Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.

All that we can ever do in prayer is to respond. God always initiates; we are always in the position of reacting and responding to what God has done.

Q. What are the principle kinds of prayer? (at the bottom of the page)

A. The principle kinds of prayer are adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition.

There, at the end, are the forms of prayer that we are considering today: intercession and petition.

(on to the next page, about in the middle – the 6th question down)

Q. What are intercession and petition?
A. Intercession brings before God the needs of others; in petition, we present our own needs, that God's will may be done.

This work of prayer is nothing other than the work of love. If we love others, and if we love God, then it is natural and completely expected that we would bring to God the needs of those who love, and our own needs as well.

But this is not intended to be simply an individual effort. When we get down to it, the work of the church is prayer. Remember that the Lord’s concern when he entered the temple and overturned the tables was that the temple is to be “a house of prayer for all nations.” Our relationship with God – on an individual level – is our life of prayer. But this is true on a community level as well. Our collective connection with God begins and ends with prayer. It is our task to fulfill the vision of Jesus and to become a house of prayer for all people.


In his classic book called Prayer, Richard Foster shares the remarkable story of a prayer movement among churches in South Korea. Over the last 50 years, the church in Korea has absolutely exploded with exponential growth and, at least in terms of people who identify themselves as Christians when asked, South Korea today ranks as one of the most Christian nations on earth. One of the keys to this growth has been their commitment to prayer. Foster tells the story of Myong-Song Presbyterian Church in Seoul. Koreans are known for their early-morning prayer meetings, but this church has taken this to a new level. Back in the 1980’s, about 40 members of the church gathered together early in the morning to pray. By the mid-90’s, around 12,ooo people were coming out each morning simply to pray, and that’s all. They began at 4 AM. Once the church was completely full, they closed the doors and a large crowd waited outside until 5 AM when the doors opened and the next group was allowed inside. Another group entered at 6 AM. Even during cold winter mornings, with the temperature well below freezing, these crowds continue to gather each morning.

And why do they do this? Simply for the ability, and the privilege, to pray together.

By the way: isn’t it remarkable how quick we are to complain when things aren’t precisely as we would want them? And yet, here are thousands of Christians who are so eager to pray with their fellow believers, that they will wait up to 2 hours in the dark, in the cold, on the street, solely for the sake of that privilege of praying together?

This work of ongoing and unceasing prayer is what the church is all about. Thomas Merton wrote this about the ever-present call to prayer that we experience: “The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God.”

Because change is the one constant in our human experience, this change offers us an opportunity to bring everything we experience before God in reverence and expectation, patiently waiting for the Spirit to move.

This is something that we are not particularly good at. Patiently waiting for God. I know that I am not very good at it. I’m a fix-it kind of guy. If something is broken, then let’s get to work and fix it. That’s how I think. That’s how I operate.

But, when things are broken within ourselves, or within our church, what kind of response does God teach us to take? Stop and pray and wait.



Right now, we have challenges in our congregations that keep us from being able to effectively bear witness to the gospel in our communities. What is the answer? What is the solution to our challenges? It is prayer. I can’t explain to you why or how this works. But prayer is why we are here, and prayer is the unique offering that we give to the world around us.

Prayer is our task. Both individually and collectively, to come before the presence of the living God with trust and to present our needs with hopeful expectation. This is not the easy path to take, but it is the faithful path, the one that leads to joy and abundance in our life together in Christ. Amen.

The Life That Really is Life

A Sermon for Proper 21 C RCL 9/26/2010, offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

During this season of Pentecost, as we move into the Autumn months, the lectionary bombards us with readings about money and wealth and giving. It certainly seems like a carefully planned conspiracy by church leaders to prep us all for the coming stewardship season, doesn’t it?. But we have talked about money and wealth quite a bit here recently, and today I think we are ready to pursue a different tact.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that Jesus is not, in fact, primarily speaking about money and wealth in this parable today. What he is speaking about is the quality of our character, our ability to see our neighbor in need, the state of our heart. The question at the heart of the matter is this: what is the goal of our relationship with God, our journey with God through this complicated and confusing life?

Last week, a stopped by a local coffee shop to grab a cup of coffee, sit for a few minutes and go through my e-mail. I was the only patron at the time, and so the woman working at the coffee shop felt comfortable to talk with me. Of course, I had my collar on, so she talked with me about her prayers. Her daughter stopped by quickly and talked with her mother. When she left, the mother explained to me that her daughter is studying hard to pass the state nursing test, to become a licensed and registered nurse. The daughter has failed it three times already. This is her fourth attempt at it. Therefore, the mother explained that all her family is right now praying the St. Joseph novena in order for her daughter to pass the state nursing test. She said, “You know, the prayer to St. Joseph for special causes that my daughter has is slightly different from mine. So I’m praying them both, because we really need her to pass this test!”

What’s wrong with this picture? I am not opposed to the idea of praying to the saints. There are many different ways to pray, and the Scriptures do encourage us to pray for one another within the body of Christ. Whether the members of the Body are dead or alive, that doesn’t make any real difference in this. We can all pray for one another.

But look at her situation more deeply. What is the purpose of prayer? Is it simply a way for us to get what we want? Some kind of divine lottery game? So that, if we pick just the right numbers, or in the case, say just the right prayer for just the right number of days, then we will be the fortunate one who wins the prize?

Is this what prayer is about? Is this how we view our relationship with God? Perhaps that example is a bit too obvious for you, so let’s try another. How is it that we view the sacraments of the church, the usual channels of grace that God has appointed for us?

Do you honestly think if you come to church regularly, receive communion often, given to and support the church, that in some way God is going to give you more goods things than those who never darken the doors of a church?

The answer is no, no, no. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and gives rain to the righteous and to the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45).

What is the primary purpose of prayer but to place ourselves intentionally in the presence of God so that we can draw close to God? What is the purpose of attending church, of joining together in worship but to be in a place where God can touch us and change us? What is the purpose of receiving communion, of participating in the sacraments but to embrace the grace that is given so that we might become the bearers of God in this dark and confused world?

What is the purpose of praying a novena to St. Joseph except to draw near to St. Joseph and to learn from him how to live a life of faithfulness and strength, commitment and devotion? What is the goal of our relationship with God but to be united to God and to our neighbor in love?

There is an old story of a man, a spiritual seeker, who visited a Sufi community and was very impressed by what he saw. Here’s a little background to help you understand this. Within the Muslim world, miracles have never been an important part of their faith. Muhammad never performed any miracles. But, over the years, Sufi communities within Islam embraced a more mystical, spiritual path, and thus they have tended to seek after and accept the miraculous.

So this man came to the Master of the Sufi community, and he said this: “Master, I am very impressed by the spiritual depth of your community, and I would like to join you here. But first, I must ask this question: Do you believe that God performs miracles?”

An understandable question, coming from a Muslim seeker. The answer from the Sufi Master is superb, in spite of its old-fasioned language. He said: “Yes, of course. But some believe it is a miracle when God does the will of man. We believe it is a miracle when man does the will of God.”

We believe it is a miracle when men and women do the will of God!

When Jesus shares this parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in no way does he offer this as a way to curry God’s favor, so that if we act well then we can avoid the fate of this rich man. There is no special formula to win God’s blessing. The purpose of Jesus’ teaching is NOT to give us clues about how we can best manipulate God into giving us what we want.

Our task rather is to submit ourselves, with love and gratitude, to the purposes and dreams and visions of God, to learn the art of contentment. St. Clement of Alexandria explained the purposes of God in this way: “Providence is a disciplinary art.”

Providence, the working out of God’s plan in the actual realities of everyday life, is a disciplinary art. It is God’s way of shaping us, correcting us –so to speak, of guiding us toward a life of union with God, where we become one with God.

My friends, let us push forward to “take hold of the life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19), as the apostle states so well. That life that is deep within us far beyond the superficial things of this world. That life that is lived in conscious and intentional harmony with the will and purpose of God, whatever that might be. Amen.

The Whole Fullness of Deity

Sermon for Proper 12 C RCL 7-25-2010

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:             Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

Recently, I heard a story from someone who attended a church summer camp a number of years ago. During one of the large group gatherings, a group of men dressed all in black rushed into the chapel. They were carrying machine guns and they immediately went up to the front and tied up the four pastors who were there, and they held a gun to the head of the main pastor. And one of the masked men yelled out over the noise to the hundreds of camp kids and counselors who were there that anyone who is a Christian needs to stand up.

A few brave souls stood up – the faithful few, but the rest ran out all of the doors in a chaotic scramble. There were kids running all through the woods, scared and crying, with girls screaming, older kids cursing. And as this one particular camper tells the story, she and her friends were running back to their cabin to find a safe place to hide when they saw camp counselors going along all of the paths with flashlights and bullhorns. And the counselors were proclaiming to everyone with their bullhorns: “Don’t be afraid. It’s not real; it’s only a play!” You see, it all was just a skit designed to be part of the chapel lesson that night!

Some zealous, probably well-intentioned, but very inexperienced young person must have planned that skit, because they thought that it was a great way to teach a lesson about the boldness of Christians, that we ought to be brave to stand up for our faith in the face of any kind of danger.

This lesson is very much like the one intended by those who have often posed this question: “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would they have enough evidence to convict you?”

I don’t often think about my potential response to this kind of challenge to my faith, but I thought about it this past week in response to our reading today from the Letter to the Colossians.

Here in our passage today, we are given a litany of different forces at work in the milieu of the first century which had the potential to distract or subvert the faith of these Christians. Philosophy, empty deceit, human tradition, the elemental spirits of the universe (whatever these might be, nobody seems to know!), matters of food and drink, festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, self-abasement, the worship of angels, visions, human ways of thinking.

We, of course, cannot relate necessarily to this particular list, because we have our own forces at work in our society that have the potential to de-rail our life with Christ.

And as I thought about these challenges to my faith, it seems clear that the greatest danger, for me at least, is what I will call the general malaise of secularism. That is, it is so easy to fall into an easy pattern of busyness, to go about life doing what we do, trusting in our abilities and our technologies to keep life moving along. And before we know it, a day, a week, a month passes before we really give God much of a thought.

It’s really all about time. When the question is asked if they would have enough evidence to convict me as a Christian, I think that the most important measure of this is the amount of time that I intentionally spend on my relationship with God.

There is no deep and healthy relationship without a noticeable, measurable amount of time spent together by two people with the intention of knowing each other more deeply.

As most of you know, we men tend to be very good at being able to pick up a friendship right where we left off, even if we haven’t seen each other in a year or more. That’s how it is for me and my friends. We see each other once or twice a year. It’s really no big deal to most of us men, and I have a hunch that a lot of men feel this same way about God. “It’s no big deal,” they think, “when I get back to church eventually, God and I will pick up right where we left off!”

But it doesn’t work that way with deeper relationships. You can’t do that with your spouse, your partner, your girlfriend!

When we are talking about our relationship with God, what we are talking about is the intentional time that we spend in prayer. When you boil it all down, our regular daily practice of prayer IS the measure of our closeness, and our bond of connection, with God.

Jesus himself spent regular time in prayer abiding in that close connection with the one he called “Abba”. When the disciples ask about his prayer practice, so that they might learn from his experience, he begins with this signature note of his teaching about the nature of God: Abba.

Of course, we say “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We say it so much that it is likely that we forget how tremendous a gift that this represents. To call God our Abba, our Daddy, our Papa, means that we have now been brought into the same intimate connection with God as Jesus himself experienced. The same. Brothers and sisters together in the same family!

The mystery of the Incarnation allows pulls us in this direction: God became what we are in Christ – God took up our human nature – in order that we might become what God is – that we might take up the divine nature.

St. Paul sums it up very clearly for us in our reading today. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians  2:9). That’s mind-blowing, and to be honest, we humans still haven’t quite figured out all the implications of that.

Eugene Peterson, in his free-form contemporary translation called  The Message, puts that verse in this way: “Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don't need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him” (emphasis added).  

The fullness of God’s nature is seen clearly in Jesus Christ, because he is the Incarnation of God. But this verse continues, and here we find the kicker: “AND YOU have come to fullness in him” (Colossians 2:10).

You and I have come to fullness in Christ. What more can we ask for, then, but to actually and tangibly experience this fullness, this completeness in our daily lives because of our close relationship with God.

This week, my friends, as you go about your busy lives, spend a few minutes each day thinking about the Lord’s Prayer. Don’t rush through it, as usual. Pause on each phrase, each distinctive word, and let the Spirit guide you into new and creative ways to understand these familiar words. Meditate on them, my friends. Chew on them mentally.

And remember that it is a gift of the fullness of Christ that we are privileged to call God our Abba, our Father. Amen.   

D-Mac is victorious over the G-men !

What a beautiful day it is when the Eagles beat the Giants, especially when it means a trip to the NFC Championship game! The Cardinals don't have a prayer. Good days are ahead for the City of Brotherly Love!