Mustard Seed Faith Landscape Company

20Pentecost, Cp22, October 6, 2013

Lamentations 1:1-6  Psalm 37:1-10

2 Tim. 1:6-14     Luke 17:5-10     

   If a man from Mustard Seed Faith Landscape Company came to my house and ask me if I wanted my mulberry tree removed and planted in the sea, I’d probably say, “No, I’d like to keep the mulberry tree, but what can your faith do with all of these weeds in my yard and garden?  Can you command them to be uprooted and planted somewhere else?”  Frankly I’d be more concerned about the little weeds than the mulberry trees.  And maybe it was the little things that Jesus was trying to get out in the sayings that we have read in the appointed Gospel of the day.

  The disciples came to Jesus and said, “Increase our faith.”  But Jesus responded by going right to their motives, by contrasting the desire for increasing faith with what he called mustard seed faith.  The disciples were portrayed in the Gospels as those who wanted to be great, important and famous.  So they wanted great faith.  They wanted showmanship faith; they wanted faith events that played on the stage to the crowds.

  So Jesus said,  “Take care of the little things.”  Big things can happen over time because of the continuous accumulation of all of the little deeds and faith acts that express a basic faithful character in life.     For various reasons, we are often encouraged to dream big in life.  Expect to be great.  Expect great recognition.  We can be taught to expect so much adulation and public success in life that we can make ourselves perpetually disappointed with outcomes.  Give me big faith Jesus, give me great faith Jesus.  And Jesus said, “Well, there can be big outcomes but they come with mustard seed acts accumulated over time.”

   We can be like people who spend their money trying to win the big lottery in life and forget about a forty hour work week of just doing the job and bringing home the wages and what that can accomplish if done consistently over the span of one’s life.

  The words of Jesus reveal to us how important little events and acts are but they also chastise us for how in a culture of recognition and fame that we have made the ordinary into heroic deeds.

  It’s like me patting myself on the back and saying, “Congratulation Phil, great job!  You fixed yourself breakfast this morning and ate it? Or  Great job Phil, you took the trash bins to the curb to allow your own waste to be carried away.”  Or what about on the larger level of society, “ Good job people, you’ve decided to try to provide affordable health care for more people.   Good job people you’ve decided to make the environment safer and cleaner.   Good job, you’ve decided to have safe gun laws.”  What sort of environment of values do we live in if it becomes congratulatory and heroic to do things that are actually good and obvious for the health of our well-being?

  This is how we can understand the seeming ironic words of Jesus.  What does a worker under contract do?  He or she does his or her job.  And to do what we’re supposed to do does not need congratulations and we don’t need to elevate taking out the trash to some heroic deed.

  We can live lives of affirmation and positive support without having egos that need congratulations for doing things that define what is good and basic to a good life.

  The disciples wanted faith as though it was a quantity that they could add to their life.  And Jesus was trying to say to them that to be human is to be faithful.  To be humane is basic to good life, now why do we have to make what is basic and good as something great and heroic?

  What this shows us is that it has become so normal to be unfaithful in life that we have to make good and faithful deeds into the heroic.  And if we do that we end up making the religious deeds of faith into acts to perform for recognition for people who are trapped in patterns of insecurity about their own worth.

  We have been taught to live in cultures of affirmation for our children.  We have been living for several decades in a “Mister Rogers’ culture of affirmation.”  It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood and we are all special.

  At some time we need to embrace the basic goodness of small faithful deeds not because we are waiting for a “Mister Rogers” culture to give us rewards of praise for doing things that are just plain good for us and for our community.

  The words of Jesus seem so harsh but they really are a parable with the insight about arriving at the mature stage when one understands that acting with faith is its own reward.  That we get to be faithful, is its own reward and accumulated faithful deeds in fact make great and big things possible over time.

  Today as we survey the stewardship of our lives, let us embrace this basic notion; thank God that we get to be faithful with the time, talent and treasure of our lives.  We don’t need to be faithful in order to get something; that we are faithful is its own reward because being faithful blesses our lives and the lives of other.

  As we consider stewardship in our parish life, we should look at is as having the privilege to do what we can.  I get to preach….it a reward in itself for me…though it may not be for you.  We get to sing in the choir; some are tonally impair and can’t.  And some are tonally impair and still try.   We get to read the Scriptures…we get to teach Sunday School…we get to work on the altar guild…we get to serve on the vestry.  And if any of us are looking for some great faith or some subsequent reward or recognition or public fame or praise, we do not yet understand the insight of Jesus regarding faith.

  My friends, this is the secret:  We get to have faith and we get to do faithful acts.  This is what it means to be human in the best possible way.  And that we attain being human in the best possible way is its own reward.

  Let us pray:  Blessed God, we thank you that we get to be here today to offer our time, talent and treasure to you.  That we can do this we accept as the profound reward of living faithful lives.  Amen.

Session 1 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session

Starting where we are:

We are St.Mary's-in-the-Valley, in Ramona, CA, in the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, which is a diocese of The Episcopal Church.  The Episcopal Church is a member of the Anglican Communion whose titular head is the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is first among equals in a leadership role in the Anglican Communion.

But let us start personally.  Our Episcopal faith is not really about jumping through hoops for the church.  It is about your and my relationship with God and each other.  We are in a relationship with God whose reality and definition is clarified for us in the person of Jesus Christ.  And since the historical person Jesus is no longer accessible to us, we believe that words of his life and teaching have been left to give us an adequate way to know that God loves and cares for us.  People who were directly influenced by the life of Jesus have left us records of his words and life.  But they passed the Spirit of Christ to a next generation of believers and this Spirit of Christ has been passed on in each generation since the first century to engage us now in our Christian lives.

We can believe in a creator God as Father or Founder in the sense that it is rather obvious that we came into a world of Plenitude with a history and prehistory that is unknowable to us.  So we confess the great Mystery from where we have come.  In a vast world, there is not a human mind that can comprehend the Whole.  So how can we even trust whether the human mind can speak on behalf of the greater than human Being, God?   We assume that God is enough like human beings to accept the superlative attributes of human beings as being an adequate place to begin to confess One who is more than human.  The presence of Jesus in history and our belief that he was divinized, means that the confession of God as Son or Child of God is the acceptance of human experience as a valid way to come to a revelation or understanding about the existence of God as the One who is always on the horizon of human becoming.

Since it seems obvious to us that we are not alone in this world; we can experience each other and other creatures and things, we ask ourselves “What is it that allows us to have mutual experience of other sentient beings and non-sentient creation?”  We confess an ever-present Essence that is able to conduct mutual experience.   We confess the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is our confession that God’s creative Life is always with this world and is expressed as Freedom.  And this Freedom is shared in real ways by all creation that is less than God.  And so we know that the Freedom of God can be manifest in lesser freedoms in the created order and these results in the good and ills and competition of systems that account for our experience of good, bad, and evil.

Exercise:

Review your own history of how you have understood God in your life?  How have you understood God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit?  Be honest about the doubts that you may have.  Doubt is an honest response because we can’t possibly know everything.  Doubt can be honest humility.

Father Phil

Session 2 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 2 

Who are we?  How did we get to be who we are? 

Our Name: The Episcopal Church

We have other names: The Episcopal Church in the USA.  The Protestant Episcopal in the USA and we have a legal name: Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Are we Catholic?  Are we Protestant?

The common street language use of the word Catholic really means Roman Catholic.  But we are catholic in the sense that we use the Creed of the undivided church, the Nicene Creed and we say, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”  The word catholic comes from the Greek words “kata holos” meaning “on the whole.”  In the Apostles Creed (an ancient creed and used at baptism) we say, “I believe in the holy catholic church.”  So we believe in one church even though we know that in historical disagreements we have come to meet in separate churches or communions.

We are Protestant in the sense that we are not Roman Catholic.  The Reformation had its own unique pattern when Roman Catholic Christians in England in various ways expressed their disagreements with certain practices that arose in the Roman Catholic Church.  English Roman Catholics were influenced by Reformation movements that included the use of native language for the prayers instead of Latin.  Mutual disagreement and mutual reaction and retaliation between the Papacy and the English Crown along with a body of clergy in England who were influenced by the Reformation led to the gradual separation between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, but the separation was not fully finalized until 1896 when a Papal document declared that Anglican ordinations were not valid (canonically proper according to how the papacy defined validity).  We are Protestant in that we embraced a tradition that affirmed a greater role for the Bible, we believe prayer should be in the common language of the people who gather to pray, we allow clergy to marry and we believe that the Pope could serve as a “first among equals of all bishops” but not as an infallible spokesperson for the entire church.  As we shall see, we believe that God’s Spirit is active in our age too and can lead us to see the wisdom to change some ancient practices that seem to be unreasonable and promote ancient bias against people who dearly love God and want to follow Christ and have the full rights of all of the Church’s sacraments.

The Episcopal Church: What does our name tell us about ourselves?

Episcopal comes from the Greek word episkopos   ἐπίσκοπος.   It literally means “over seer” and from Latin we have the word supervisor(not a word that we use in the church).  The English word for episkopos is bishop.  So Episcopal means, “having bishops.”  This tells us something about our polity or church structures.  Other churches have bishops too:  the Roman Catholics, the Methodists, the Lutherans, the various Orthodox churches and there are similarities and differences in how bishops are appointed/elected/function and are defined in the various Christian bodies.

In the Episcopal Church in the United States we have a bishop in each diocese.  A diocese is a geographical area where a bishop has over sight.  The State of California has six Episcopal Dioceses and St. Mary's-in-the-Valley is located in the Diocese of San Diego.  And our bishop is The Right Reverend Susan Snook.

Exercise:

Ponder the difference stated above between catholic and Roman Catholic.  Is it scandalous that people who follow Christ are divided into so many different “churches” even while we say there is “one holy catholic church?”    Could we also understand the division into different churches as having diversity so that we can appeal to many more people?  If we had a “one size fits all” approach, would not lots of people feel left out and not part of the body of Christ?  Diversity allows us checks and balances since structural unity can be like a heavy handed “Empire.”  Diversity helps us to expand our hearts to appreciate differences.

Father Phil

Session 3 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 3 

The Episcopal Church:   Who are we?     

We are a particular Christian family among other Christian families.  Since our family identity has come from Roman Catholic, Protestant and “pre-Roman Catholic” church traditions some of our theologians have called us the via media, meaning the Middle Way.  In some ways our identity is “mongrel” in that we have incorporated aspects of so many eras of church traditions into our identity.

Since we do not view ourselves in a chauvinistic way as the best or as an exclusive Christian family, we often find that we are a church where compromise is experienced.  A Protestant marries a Roman Catholic and the couple might find The Episcopal Church to be a place where something of both traditions can be experienced.  People who eschew non-democratic Roman Catholic hierarchy find the Episcopal Church more graceful in combining connection with ancient tradition and liturgy with more modern values in assessing the meaning of person-hood and participation in church governance.  Persons who have experienced narrow fundamentalism in Protestant churches find The Episcopal Church a welcome relief because of our willingness to embrace modern science and rigorous thinking into our faith life. 

The above characteristics can be also a liability.  Since we are accepting of other people’s faith, we don’t tend to be active evangelists about our own faith community.  We assume that most highly educated people want to be their own agents of faith community choice without being button holed by someone who is pushing one’s own faith community.  We are welcoming of others who want to be with us but we perhaps rely upon the serendipity of situations for people to find us.  The Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church in our past have been very active colonial missionary churches and we do have active evangelism in our church history. It does remain that Episcopal parishes today tend to be the place where already convinced followers of Christ meet rather than places where people find out about Jesus Christ for the first time in their lives.

Exercise:

How did you come into the Episcopal Church?  Did you have a relationship with Christ before you came to the Episcopal Church?   How does the above description of the Episcopal fit your own description of your participation in The Episcopal Church?  If the above is true how can we promote “serendipity” of situations for other people who perhaps need to find us as their faith community of support?

 

Father Phil

Session 4 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 4 

The Episcopal Church:   Our chief heirloom     

We said that The Episcopal Church is a Christian family among other Christian families.  Along with a name, a family has features that provide unique identity.  The Roman Catholic Church has canon law, the papacy, and a theological architect like St. Thomas Aquinas as part of their heritage.  The Lutherans have Martin Luther’s prolific theological writings and the Presbyterians have the writings of John Calvin as chief heirlooms of their community identity.  What do Episcopalians have?  If we have a theological architect, it is Richard Hooker, but he does not have the exact corresponding stature in the Anglican tradition as do Aquinas, Luther and Calvin for their respective traditions.  So, what is our chief heirloom?  We would have to say it is The Book of Common Prayer.

In the mid-16^th century the Enlightenment was happening, feudal structures disappearing as well as the following: the rise of nation-state identities, spreading education/literacy, the printing press and the rediscovery of the “individual.”  Before this the individual was hidden in paternalistic structures and feudal figure heads decided for everyone in society.  In the church, clergy decided or mediated in the worship leadership in Latin prayers on behalf of lay people.  The Reformation was as much due to social changes in Europe and England as to any religious movement.  The social changes provide the conditions for the religious Reformation to take place.  The Enlightenment required that individuals become more active with their intellect in their faith and worship practices.  If a spectator laity watched the clergy perform the worship on their behalf in Latin, an uncommon language how could lay people fully participate in their faith except as dependent children?

Growing nationalism, King Henry VIII’s conflict with the Pope over an annulment and meddling in international affairs, a body of clergy influenced by the Reformation on the Continent, all gave rise to the conditions that brought into being the Book of Common Prayer.  When King Henry VIII, declared himself as one who would reform the Church in England as a non-papal catholic Church, he appointed Thomas Cranmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Cranmer had been influenced by Reformers on the Continent.

A way to challenge papal authority on the Continent was to translate Scripture into the vernacular languages and not rely on St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin version.  So what was the “common” language of the English people?  English, of course.  Cranmer penned the first Book of Common Prayer and brought the liturgy out of the exclusive grip of the clergy, the educated and the religious monastic and he made it accessible to the hearing of the average person in England.  Cranmer used various existing liturgies, reform liturgies in the Roman and Reformation traditions to create in his Tudor English what became a standard for English style. In the time of Henry VIII the Coverdale Bible in English had been placed in parish churches to be read by literate lay persons.

Cranmer collapsed the seven monastic prayer offices into Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer and this was an effort to end the division between two kinds of Christians, ordained/monastic and lay Christians.

The Book of Common Prayer, consistent with its origin of being in the common language of the people who pray, has undergone various revisions and has been translated into languages other than English.  The Episcopal Church has used five versions of The Book of Common Prayer; the pre-American Revolution church used the 1662 version before gaining their own American version in 1789.  There have been three subsequent revisions, 1892, 1928 and 1979 as well as trial and supplemental liturgies approved for use.

The Book of Common Prayer is indeed the chief heirloom of the Episcopal Church, even while we with all Christians acknowledge the Bible as the “official text book” of the church.

Exercise:

Compare your own experience of public worship.  Some other Protestant Churches have Orders of Service but give much more flexibility in choice to their clergy.  Other churches have much more “extemporaneous” prayers rather than shared “common” prayer in a textual form.  In our corporate prayer, we are all equal; no one “prays better” than another, since we are offering the prayers together.  Take a look sometime at the entire Book of Common Prayer. 

Father Phil

Session 5 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 5 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

With just a cursory glance at the index in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) one can note a unifying theme, the theme of Time.  One can find a calendar of seasons and days and reference to time of day, e.g. morning noon, and evening.  The Psalmist wrote, “Our time is in God’s hand.”  The BCP is a prayer strategy for us to remember that our time is in God’s hand.  The BCP can and is used both for corporate prayer and private devotions.  It belongs to everyone and even when we pray the prayers in private we are expressing our corporate agreement.  Some people object to the reading of “written prayers” as not being spontaneously heartfelt and therefore “vain repetition.”  It is not up to anyone to judge anyone about how our hearts are engaged with the prayers that we share together.  A prayer such as the “Our Father” could be judged as vain repetition by the same criterion.  Use of the BCP is not intended to discourage extemporaneous and privately composed prayer.  The BCP provides an order for people to join together to pray.

First, the BCP is a companion to the Bible.  In fact one could say that the BCP is the words of the Bible rearranged into an organized prayer format.  Since the BCP includes a lectionary (appointed lessons from the Bible), the use of the BCP requires a commitment to reading the Bible.

The BCP is a prayer strategy to invoke the presence of God on the times of our lives.  A way to understand the prayer strategy of the BCP is to see how the prayers therein conform to the different ways in which human beings experience time.  There is the experience of cyclical time with light and darkness being the most evident sign of a natural clock.  The daily offices of the BCP, such as Morning and Evening Prayer conform to this notion of cyclical time.  Changes in weather and length of daylight mark the seasons of our calendar of months.  The BCP includes a calendar of seasons, special feast days, holy days and fast days.  Each day is the same for having a morning and a night, but every child knows that some days like birthdays and Christmas are tinged with such social and cultural meaning as to create an entirely different experience and mood of time.  I would call this the experience of "special time."  There is still a further experience of time that I would call crisis time, or “rite of passage time” or “eventful time” using the Greek notion of time referred to as kairos.  The BCP has the prayer forms for what we call the sacraments which conform to this other human experience or mood of time.

In the next sessions we are going to look at these human experiences of time and how the BCP provides a mode of prayer to conform to these human experiences of time.  

My contention will be this:  These prayers not designed to force us into conformity church rules; they are gifts to help us be honest in becoming fully human in very practical and anthropologically sound ways.

Exercise:

Look at the index in the BCP. ( Book of Common Prayer online)  Notice all of the references to time.  Reflect upon your own experience of time.  Why does time seem to go slow when one is young and fast when one is old?  Why the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun?”  What is it that causes the experience of time to seem fast or slow, or boring, or timeless, or déjà vu or sublime?

Father Phil

Session 6 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 6 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

Part 2

The Book of Common Prayer is a strategy of prayer to invoke God upon the times of our life.  Prayer is not so much to “convince” God to be involved in our lives as much as it is a practice to attune ourselves to live in the state being aware of how God is always already involved in our lives.  The BCP provides a strategy for praying at regular intervals as a habit.  One of the results of the Reformation was to bring an end between two “kinds” of Christians, the ordained and monastic “heroic” Christians who were called to a higher calling of poverty, chastity and obedience, and “regular” Christians, the laity who were called to keep the Ten Commandments.  Reformation Christianity was a call for everyone to be “equally Christian” in their practice.  So in the Church of England, poverty, chastity and obedience became the call of fewer people as the call to pray in one’s own language was made the requirement of all baptized persons.  To do this the strategy of prayer had to be made accessible to all baptized persons.  The monastic communities had a daily habit of prayer, spiritual reading and work.  Following the Psalmist’s promise, “Seven times a day, I will praise thee…O Lord,” the monastic community had the habit of seven prayer hours during the day.  Of course, non-monastic lay people could not drop everything seven times a day to pray.  Archbishop Cranmer, who wrote the first  Book of Common Pryaer, collapsed the pre-noon prayer hours into one Morning Prayer and the post-noon prayer hours into one Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer.  This was a call to all baptized persons to elevate their lives of prayer as there was to be an end to these two classes of Christians.  All Christians were called to the vocation of prayer as the regular and ordinary habit of life.   The prayers were no longer locked in the monastery in a Latin breviary for the “professional people of prayer who used Latin.”  The Book of Common Prayer was in fact a kind of democratization of Christian citizenry by requiring all Christians to be involved in the official prayers of the Church.  Since prayer was in the common language of the people it could be done with understanding by all English speakers.  Morning and Evening Prayer in the parish church at the center of the village was to be the new norm for prayer even as monastic institutions were closing down.

As we see now in America our life style leaves us long distances from the parish church and secular life does not cater to a “stop everything and pray” habit.  One of the ways that we can incorporate Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer into our habit of life is through the online Morning and Evening Prayer sites.  These sites include the appointed lessons from the Bible for Morning and Evening Prayer.  If one does this one is praying through the Psalms on a regular basis as well as reading a majority of the Bible in a two year cycle.  Two such sites are: http://www.missionstclare.com/english/  and http://dailyoffice.org/ .  For your convenience, the St. John the Divine Facebook page links these two site each morning along with the popular Daily Meditation from Forward Day by Day. http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-John-the-Divine-Episcopal-Church-Morgan-Hill-CA/147286963103    Obviously where there is community of people who can join for prayer, it is preferable to join others in prayer for Morning and Evening Prayer but these online sites provide “virtual” prayer together.  Online Prayer is really another manifestation of the “commonization”  that began with the Book of Common Prayer.  

The philosophy of the Book of Common Prayer is that prayer should be common or accessible for people to pray.  The church will always be looking for ways to make prayer common or accessible to people to encourage prayer as the regular strategy of life.

Exercise:

Look in the Prayer Book at the Daily Prayers.  You can find them at this site online: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/bcp.htm Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Noonday Prayer. Compline.  Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families.  Order of Worship for Evening.  You will notice that there is Rite One which is the older English style, and Rite Two which is the less ornate modern English style.  Try the Daily Devotions Prayers with your children or at dinner time.  Go to one of the online sites and acquire the daily habit of Morning and Evening Prayer.  No excuse: It is very accessible, which is the true meaning of common.  No fumbling through the Bible looking for readings.

Father Phil