Zacchaeus, a Voyeur for Salvation

24  Pentecost, Cp26, November 3, 2013

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 Psalm 119:137-144

2 Thessalonians 1:1-5 (6-10) 11-12 Luke 19:1-10

  

Lectionary Link

 Perhaps you remember the Romantic Comedy movie from 1997 entitled,  As Good As It Gets?  In this film a reclusive, omni-phobic, misanthropic, obsessive compulsive writer, Melvin is falling in love with a waitress, Carol who is the only person who put in an effort to tolerate him.  Melvin, played by Jack Nicholson, is so pessimistic that he cannot say anything positive about anyone or anything.  With almost Tourette-like compulsion he says offensive things.  He is falling in love with Carol and he does something wonderful to help her son who has health problems; but even Carol can only take so much of his negativism.  She is at her wits end with him and she challenges Melvin to say something nice about her.

  And what is the nice and winning thing that Melvin finally says about Carol?  “You make me want to be a better man.”   And the word better means several things for Melvin.  Carol made Melvin be better by seeking some help for his panic condition; but she also made him better to understand the give and take of winsomeness that one has to practice to be successful in relationship and community.

  You make me want to be a better person.  This might sum up the dynamic of the encounter between Zacchaeus and Jesus of Nazareth.  Zacchaeus was more than tolerated by Jesus; he was invited by Jesus to a relationship and the end result was that Zaccheaus was inspired and motivated to become a much better person.  Jesus said about Zacchaeus:   “Today salvation has come to his house.”

   The quest for salvation might be seen to be a selfish quest in that salvation means that we become better people.  But this is the benefit of salvation; we become better people and the community becomes better for it as well.

  I was always partial to Zacchaeus.  He was stereotyped forever as being the short guy who had to climb the tree to see Jesus.  As a height challenged basketball player, I think Zacchaeus should be the patron saint of short persons; why not we have a saint for everything else?  Some traditions tells us that Zacchaeus was surnamed Matthias and became the twelfth disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot.   

  On All Saints Sunday, we trace the notion of saintliness to Jesus Christ.  Jesus was one who made Zacchaeus and others want to be better persons.  Zacchaeus became a better person first by amending his life.  He had cheated people out of money in his profession as a tax collector and after meeting Jesus he said, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much."

  What could be the literary function of this story about Zacchaeus in the literature of the early Christian community?

  It is a classical salvation story.  A very dubious person who was caught between the Jewish community and the Roman government was able to find a new status in his life.

  When people are desperate enough they become salvation voyeurs.   They start to become peeping toms for a better way of living.  “I will sneak a peek at Jesus just to see what he is all about.”   There is another incident in the Gospel of a voyeur for salvation.  You remember the woman with the issue of blood was in a crowd around Jesus and she thought, “If I just touch the hem of the garment of Jesus perhaps I will be healed.”  And she was healed and Jesus said, “Who touched me?”  And his disciples asked why would he say that with so many people around him.  And Jesus said that he felt power go out of him.

  Zacchaeus was too short to see over people and so he climbed into a tree to see Jesus.  His eyes made contact and with Jesus.  And in the crowd, Jesus was aware of the staring eyes from the seeking heart of Zacchaeus.  Jesus looked at him and said, “Hurry down for I must stay at your home today.”

  A subtext of this and other Gospel stories is that Jesus entered into fellowship with dubious characters.   Tax-collectors Jews who worked for the Romans in collecting taxes; they were called publicans and that made them automatic sinners in the eyes of the Jewish religious establishment.

  To whom did Jesus and salvations belong?  Jesus and salvation belonged to the people in need and who wanted him and the inclusive experience of salvation.  This is why we call the Gospel good news.  People catch a vision of what becoming better means.  They look for the people, the community and situation where they can become better.  Salvation is the experience of being affirmed and received into a community who support this quest of the heart to want life to be better.

  Today on All Saints Sunday, we acknowledge that saintliness comes from Jesus of Nazareth and it is still present with us in the risen Christ who is in our community.

  We as the community of the risen Christ need to be a community where saintliness means that we want to become better people and that by being together we help to make each other better people.  As we look at the role of the Christians in the community at large we need to ask this question, “Do people see Christians and want to be better people?”  There are many voyeurs for salvation in this world.  There are people looking on without us knowing it who are looking for a place of salvation.  There are people in quest to find people who would help make them be better people.

  This is our challenge as a parish community: To help each other be better people because we are together and as we do this we can become an inviting community for others to join us as they discover our parish community to be a place of salvation, a place where they can become better people.

  Let the salvation of Christ be known today in our parish community.  And let us live in such a way that we invite other people know that we are a community where they can become better people in every way.  Amen.

Thank God We're Sinners?

23 Pentecost, Cp25, October 27, 2013

Joel 2:23-32 Ps. 67

2 Tim. 4:6 8,18    Luke 18:9 14  

Lectionary Link

   We can be led to some very bad conclusions and even bias from reading some good things in the Bible, and in the Gospels, or even from the words of Jesus.

   Jesus told a parable to some people whom he perceived to be treating others with contempt.  And in this parable there were two people who went to the Temple to pray.  A Pharisee offered thanks that he was not like the poor tax collector.  And the poor tax collector simply beat his breast and said,  "Lord, have mercy on me a sinner."

  One of the wrong conclusions that we can reach about this parable of Jesus is “All Pharisees were shallow hypocrites.”  We have essentially adopted in common language a pejorative use of the word Pharisee.  In ordinary English language if someone calls you a Pharisee, it is meant to judge you as a low down hypocrite of the highest order.

  This is a wrong reading of the words of Jesus and a wrong judgment on the Pharisees.  It is like saying because I’ve had unfortunate interaction with five Episcopalians, all Episcopalians are bad and if I call you an Episcopalian I am not giving you a compliment.

  We also can read the Bible and the Gospels for the purpose of locating people whom we think are the real sinners.

  I think that the parable of Jesus about the Pharisee and the tax collector is basically about the judgmental attitudes that I might have if I  live as though my social class training is better than the background of someone else.  The parable of Jesus is told to show us that sin is not a matter of association with a class of people; sin is a very positive notion if it is understood with the attitude of knowing moral direction and orientation in life.   Sin and being a sinner are very important insights in the teaching of Jesus.  Knowing about sin and being a sinner are important personal insights which everyone needs to have.

  We get the impression from some preaching that the Bible is all about God convincing us about how bad we are as sinners so that we can really appreciate how good God is in offering us forgiveness and grace.

  The attitude of knowing that one is a sinner and that one has sinned is a most important insight in life.  In fact, it is a very positive insight in life.

  What Jesus criticized was the notion of goodness that is believe to have been attained by pedigree, nature, hard work and merit.

  I am better than you because of the pedigree of my family.  I come from an important family, therefore I am important.  This pedigree could be defined as being a Pharisee, an Episcopalian, a Baptist or a Blue Blood.  I have the breeding for goodness.  It’s in my nature to be good and better than people who were not born as good as I was born.

  I am better than you because I am smarter and I work harder than you.  So by my merits, by my work and study, I am in a position to make comparative judgments on others who are not as smart and who have not worked as hard as I have.

  The problem with this kind of thinking is that if we think in this way we can always be subject to the same judgments of people who think that they are better than us by pedigree, nature, hard work and merit.

  So this kind of thinking only encourages endless comparisons.  This kind of thinking does not get at what is needed in learning the art of living well.

  So how do we learn to live well?  We first learn from Jesus about the positive notion of sin and the positive vocation of sinning.

  If we cannot help but sin because it is unavoidable then we must begin to believe that God has given us sinning as an important vocation in life.

   How can sinning be an important vocation in life?

   The Greek word for sin comes from archery and it means missing the target.  We are on the archery range or we’re hunting with bow and arrow, we shoot and we miss.

  In the Greek language, the archer would say in the English translation, “Oh no, I sinned.”

  Missing targets in archery only means we missed to try again.  We retrieve the arrows and we keep on shooting.

  And herein is the positive notion of sin.  In our lives we keep on, keeping on at shooting for the perfect.  And sometimes we get close but we always miss the mark because there is always another future shot to take.  We may have come to approximate love and justice in significant ways today and yet because there is a tomorrow, we cannot rest on our laurels nor can we judge the archery of others.  We cannot judge the sin life of others.

  The positive notion of sin as propounded by Jesus is that each of us has our own targets based upon our own situations.

  The tax collector in his situation had a different target of excellence than did the proverbial Pharisee.  The Pharisee, instead of looking at his next target of excellence, took a pot shot at the tax collector for “not being in the same archery class as he was in.

  And this is the second positive insight that we can take from this parable of Jesus.  Sin is not about comparing my life with yours.  Sin is about comparing my life now with what my life will be in a future state.  The question is not whether I will ever be able to say or know whether I am better or worse than you;  but will I be able to say that I surpassed myself in a future state?

  In the positive notion of sin offered to us by Jesus, we are not allowed to compare ourselves with others, we are to accept our own path and we are to look to be better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than we are today.

   The positive notion of sin and being a sinner is to avoid comparison and to be on the path of having oneself in a future state be the only person in one's comparison.

  So indeed this makes sin and righteous relative and adaptable to the life situation of each person.  The Pharisee of the parable is one who had lost sight of the target.  And what is the target?  It is found in the words of Jesus when he said, “Be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect.”  If we know that the unreachable is the target then we are always aware of the moral direction and we know that we always need mercy.

  So let us embrace this positive notion of sinner and sin.

  Welcome to the Episcopal Church.  A place where you can know that being a sinner is a very positive notion.

  Let us embrace this positive notion of sin today.  I do not know what targets you have been shooting at in your lives; your targets are different than mine.  But we are here today to encourage each other in mercy and forgiveness and wish each other well in the effort to surpass ourselves in excellence in future states.   We need mercy and forgiveness to tolerate ourselves until we get to where we think we need to be in excellence.  And may God grant us the sense of being justified through the experience of God’s mercy.  We are justified by having the attitude of knowing that we need mercy.  And this is the positive insight about sin and being sinners.

   We do not judge a child for not having adult knowledge and experience; we hope to mentor them in surpassing themselves daily in the path of knowledge and more experience.  From the wisdom of Jesus we can learn that this is how a loving God mentors each of us in the individual circumstances of our life experience as we grow in excellence.  We hope for excellence.  We hope for what we do not yet have in excellence and we accept mercy for not having it yet.

  Sin is mainly positive; it is only negative when we willing give up the quest for excellence or when we believe our targets of excellent should be other people’s specific targets too.

  Let us embrace the positive notion of sin and mercy as healthy attitudes to have in our lives today.  Amen. 

Prayer as Holy Nagging?

22  Pentecost, Cp24, October 20, 2013

Jeremiah 31:27-34 Psalm 119:97-104

 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5   Luke 18:1-8a

Lectionary Link

   Welcome to our weekly session of dealing with puzzles from the Bible.  Perhaps one might regard the Bible to be too out of date to be the regular choice for reading pleasure.  However, we have inherited this book as the inspired textbook of our tradition and so it is “required” reading on Sundays and is recommended for our daily reading as well.

  How do we regard this requirement to read the Bible when it now exists in the midst of an ocean of other literature?  The Bible has come into disfavor because of the ways in which Christians have used the Bible.  Why cannot we regard the Bible to be an inventory of human situations that bear universal patterns for us to look to for insights for our lives?  Too many Bible preachers regard the Bible to be a museum of final human products that we go to revere as having final inspiration.  I would say that the Bible is inspired, but not yet.  Why, because the future of Bible reading is still open.  The Bible includes the inspired principles of love and justice which need to find future occasions of application.  Remember too that the Bible as an inventory of human situations means that all of the inventory is not applicable in all places at all time.  Just because we have a wardrobe full of clothes does not mean we try to wear them all at one; we chose the apparel for the current occasion of our lives.

  Jesus was a wisdom teacher and he used parables as an indirect method of teaching.  In the parable that we have read for today, Jesus encodes within a human scenario a common human condition of need.

  A widow needs justice; the judge who can provide justice does not adjudicate justice but the widow just keeps nagging the judge until the judge is worn down and finally rules for justice even when he is not otherwise inclined to do so.

  Herein is a situation universal to humanity.   It is a fact that there is an uneven distribution of injustice throughout the world.  And when we are on the receiving side of injustice it hurts.  Injustice can be so prolonged that it begins to gain power to unseat justice as the normal condition of life.   From the situation of injustice we can easily give up and begin to think that since injustice is so common that injustice becomes what is regarded to be what is normal about life.

  And this is the petitionary situation for the practice of prayer.  Jesus provided the punchline of the parable before he told the parable:  We should always pray and not lose heart.

  But Jesus what is the use of prayer?  Why should we not take up armed resistance?   Why should we not become terrorists to strike out against injustice?   Do we not have the right to oppose with our lives the practice of injustice?  Is not prayer just rolling over and accepting injustice?

  Do you see how the parable of Jesus anthropomorphizes the situation of injustice?  When we experience things that do not seem to fair to the normalcy of justice, health and goodness we can feel powerless to do anything.  The situation of injustice seems to have a personality to it.  We take all of the events in our lives personally.  It seems as though all of the free agents in life account for the situations of uneven justice and injustice to occur in life.  It is very hard not to take life personally but in situation of oppression by other human beings, we take life doubly personally.

  And what is our personal response to the uneven situations of injustice that occur in life and in our lives in particular?  Jesus said that we should pray always and not lose heart.  It seems as though prayer is the continual expression of nagging.

  Is this really what prayer is, a perpetual holy nagging to get what we want?  Holy nagging?  Is that what the prayer life is all about?  From the Gospel parable aftermath it does not seem that such holy nagging necessarily has timely outcomes from the point of view of the petitioner.   God, we need help and justice now!  Well, just keep nagging and it may or may not come but you are obligated to keep asking for justice.  And the future Son of Man stands to us as one who guarantees justice.

  What do we think about this holy nagging theory of prayer?

  First of all, what this parable acknowledges is the conditions of freedom in this world which accounts for the uneven spread of justice and injustice.  Judges have power and authority over helpless widows.  But just because there is freedom in this world for injustice to occur, that does not mean that we have to accept injustice as the recommendable condition of life.  And this is where the significance of holy nagging comes in; we must protest injustice continuously and not let it be asserted as the normal condition of life.

  Where slavery and discrimination were once regarded to be the norm in our country, voices of justice arose to challenge the status quo of injustice.  Nagging prayers actually became a very great Civil War to challenge injustice.  In more recent times the nagging prayer of peaceful and non-violent resistance became the practice of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others who kept up nagging against injustice.

  Prayer as perpetual nagging against the practice of injustice is a worthy occupation.  With such nagging we do not let ourselves accept injustice as normal.  With nagging prayer we create energy of resistance against the practice of injustice.  With nagging prayer we hope to wear out the opponents who themselves are enslaved by their very oppressive practice of injustice because ignorance has often become the accepted status quo of those who practice injustice.  “What’s   the fuss about, haven’t we always done it this way?   Women voting?  People of color riding wherever they want in the bus?  Gay and lesbian people full human rights?   Holy nagging for justice hopefully will eventually bring a fuller experience of justice.

  Prayer as holy nagging in situations where goodness, health, love and justice are not experienced is a witness both within the one who prays and within their settings that health, goodness, love and justice are what is humanly normal; and we are going to protest everything to the contrary with our nagging prayers.

  My friends, let us not be ashamed of our prayers as holy nagging today, especially if we are asking that this world experience the meanings of health, goodness, love and justice today.  With holy nagging we will never accept illness, evil, hatred and injustice as the normal conditions of life.  With holy nagging we will rally ourselves to practice justice and demand justice for all in our world.

  So, let us go forth and do some holy nagging today.  Amen.

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