The Invitation of Jesus Overcomes Wellism and Discrimination

21 Pentecost, Cp23, October 13, 2013

2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c   Ps.66:1-11

2 Tim. 2:8-15   Luke 17:11-19    

Lectionary Link

  Today I would like for us to consider how differences amongst people have been the occasion for great human failure.

  I say this because the fearful ways in which we often experience differences, lead us to practice victimization.  Victimization creates oppression and oppression is not just an external force, it is also an attitude that we can take on ourselves and use against ourselves.  The forces of victimization are quite damaging.  Habits of victimization can even get embedded in our institutional and cultural life in blatant or subtle forms of discrimination.

  We know that victimization can start early on the playground when children make fun of the way someone looks, their size or how they are dressed. It can be institutionalized in slavery and sexism and many other cultural forms of discrimination.  We know that it can become institutionalized even in religious practices.  History reveals many examples where religious laws and practices reinforced and solidified discriminatory practices.

  During the time of Jesus and during the period of the early church there were questions that were being addressed in the religious communities.  Did God’s grace and favor and healing extend to people outside of the official religious communities of Judaism?  And would people outside of the communities of Judaism even know how to respond to God grace and favor if they received it?

  If you understand these two questions, perhaps you can understand how the Gospel story functioned when it was told and read in the early Christian communities.

  What Jesus found in the religion of his time was a religion that discriminated against people who were “sick” as designated by religious establishment that dabbled in medical definitions of disease in a way that Jesus found unacceptable.  The official religion of his time also excluded poor countryside folk and foreigners.

  Within the Judaism of his time there was a very well defined purity code that was practiced for the “safety” of the community.  People who had certain diseases were quarantined from their communities until they could be ritually cleared to be safe to appear in the general public.  The lepers suffered from what we know today as psoriasis or eczema and yet because of their appearance they were deemed unworthy or infectious to the general community.  One of the ten   lepers who approached Jesus had a second strike against him; he was also a Samaritan.  A Samaritan was something of a “mongrel” Israelite; Samaritans were northern tribal Israelites who had entered into marriages with the Assyrians, a conquering nation.  They had even retained a Torah based religion but they were not a pure ethnic group.

  It is interesting to note that the Samaritan leper was traveling with nine lepers from Judea.  When one shares a common crisis with other people, perhaps in a dire situation, one is willing to forgo some basic biases and prejudices because one understands that the hatred, fear and ignorance that drives victimization is essentially the same whether one is talking about ethnic prejudice, prejudice against the impaired or ill, or any other social group.

  In this Gospel story Jesus stands as the one who countered the religious authorities who were upholding the rather irrational purity codes.  Jesus gave permission to the stranger and the social outcast to re-enter the common community.  Health is not just about being cured of a disease; health is about having access to a significant community of support and care.

   There are non-believers and skeptics today who will tell us that they are not Christians, because they have found religious people and religious authority to be creating victims rather than inviting people to the church as a significant community of support.  And that criticism should cause all of us some soul searching about the openness of our own hearts.

  The nature of Christ is to invite all people to fellowship and community.  Many people understand religion to be like a club that has rules to tell us who belongs and who doesn’t belong.

  The Gospel of Christ is preached today to tell us that all people belong equally in the dignity of God.  The Gospel is preached so that the response of the Samaritan leper can be the true religious act of all people.

  The true religious act of all people is to take time to say thanks to God for being included in the wonderful family of God as sons and daughters of God and as brothers and sisters of Christ.

  We have accrued so much baggage in how Christianity is practiced that we can easily forget how simple and basic the Gospel is:  Wherever we are made to feel quarantined or isolated from community, Jesus stands as the gate and the door to invite us to the community of God and to the community of people who practice this ever generous invitation.

  I do hope that we will understand the mission of our parish is to practice this ever-generous invitation of Christ to all persons into our midst.

  If we can agree on this, then all of the other details that constitute what it is to live together in community will take secondary priority.

  The generous invitation of Jesus Christ should help us to give up all of the little purity codes that we have learned in our society that keep us from offering friendship to all people.

  Let us be thankful today that God is a God who invites all persons to know that they are in the family of God.

  And let us be a friendly people who are committed to let everyone know about the generous, winsome and loving invitation of God in Christ.  With the love of Christ we can celebrate our differences and overcome the habits of victimization.  By welcoming all to the love of God, we can encourage all people to make the most authentic religious act of worship of all, which is saying, “Thank you God.”  By the way, you do know what Eucharist means?  It means “Thanksgiving.”   Amen.

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