Sermon Nov. 5 2017-Father Cunningham

          I am never sure how I feel about All Saints Day, which we commemorate today even though it was really this past Wednesday on November 1st.  The reason for my ambiguity about today is not because I am opposed to all of the saints, or any of them for that matter, it is just that something seems to get lost when all of the saints are lumped into a big bucket.  It feels kind of like the participation trophy of Holy Days.  Sort of like when they decided that Washington’s Birthday would become President’s Day.  In reality what this meant was that Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were commemorated in the same way as Warren Harding and Millard Fillmore.  I am sure Warren Harding’s mother loved him, but being remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal is not quite as impressive as being remembered as the Great Emancipator.  But back to All Saints.  The history of it is a little tricky, but here is what we know.  In 609 at the rededication of the Pantheon, Pope Boniface IV declared it to be dedicated to St Mary and All the Martyrs, but the day on which he did that was May 13th.  It would only be later, in the 8th century that it was moved to November 1st by Pope Gregory III, and shortened to All Saints Day.  Anyway we commemorate it today and now we now have to decide what to talk about for the next eight and a half minutes.

           The reading that we have from Matthew today to commemorate All Saints is from the Sermon on the Mount and this particular section is generally referred to as the Beatitudes, which comes from the Latin word beatus meaning blessed.  And since most of the verses in our reading start with the word blessed, it is pretty easy to see where it got that name.  I assume this section was selected as a reading for All Saints because it was seen as a kind of description of the saints – the meek, the hungry, those who mourn, those persecuted for righteousness sake, etcetera; which may make us ponder if we really want to be included in the list of all the saints.  By having this reading in such a context, it seems to be saying that this is prescriptive.  In other words, it seems that we are being told to go and become meek and hungry and then we get to go to heaven in a righteous robe.  And while that may be the case of what those who put together the lectionary wanted (I don’t know because I never met them), I am not sure that this is what Jesus was getting at. 

            In this country and probably in others we tend to suffer from an incomplete and often incorrect version of what Jesus came to earth for.  The popular view is that if we believe in Jesus, then when we die, we float up to heaven and strum our harps and dance around in clouds.  And in such a context when you read this passage from Matthew the tendency is to think that it is telling you to just sit tight.  If you are suffering or persecuted it will all be okay once you die and float up to heaven.  The issue with such an understanding is that not only does it put too great of separation between earth and heaven, it also puts too great of a separation between us and heaven.  Jesus is not saying that if you believe in him that he will one day help you get out of this dump, but rather that one day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and in that joining much will be the opposite of the way that it is now.  When God’s Kingdom is ultimately fulfilled a lot of things will be set right.  But see this is the thing with today’s reading; it is not to be read passively.  We are not to sit back and say, “Well that will be nice when God takes care of all of those poor people persecuted for righteousness sake.”  Instead, it is a call and a call that is on us to participate in.  This is the call that was answered by the saints we remember today.  These are the people that set out to comfort those who mourn, to feed the hungry, to show mercy to the merciful.  The reading today is not about something that God will take care of, but rather about something that the saints, through God’s help, took care and are taking care of.   And so really the call to be a Saint has nothing to do with the first half of the statements but rather with the second half.  Jesus is announcing a new a different kind of world and we, if we want to be saints, are called to participate in that new world. 

            And in some ways we might like the first interpretation better because it does get us off the hook.  If we see someone suffering we can just tell them to cheer up because God will fix it after they die.  But God does not let us off that easy; he wants us to help.  He wants us to look around and ask how we may comfort and feed those who are in need of such things. 

            One of the problems that has come as a result of the vast strides in communication is that we know too much about other people’s problems.  What I mean by this is that if you lived in Philadelphia 200 years ago and something bad happened in Charleston it would be several weeks before you heard anything, if you heard it at all.  Now if you pick up the paper or watch the news you have a whole smorgasbord of tragedies to choose from.  You not only hear about bad stuff in Charleston you also get the bad stuff from Miami, Cleveland, New Orleans, London, Seoul and any other place around the world.  We get more bad news quicker than at any other point in history.  And the problem with this is that it can sort of freeze us.  If we do something in our community it seems so insignificant compared to whatever the latest world tragedy may be.  How can visiting the lonely ever be as significant as stopping a mass shooting?  But here is the nice thing about the call of the saint.  It is not about geography or working on only the worst of tragedies.  Rather, it is a call to help with injustices we see in our everyday life or with things you can actually do something about.  Think about Jesus’ ministry.  From the northernmost point to the southernmost point in his three-year ministry it was not much more than 75 miles.  I mean that wouldn’t quite get you to Sheboygan from here.  But should we look at Jesus and say well sure you healed a blind man in Bethsaida, but what about the Lepers in Alexandria – there were like hundreds of those guys. 

            There is a statement about saints that you have probably heard me use, but it bears repeating.  A saint is not an ordinary person who does extraordinary things, rather a saint in an extraordinary person who does the ordinary things that other people will not do.  A saint will probably not solve the fighting in the Middle East or get rid of North Korea’s nuclear program, but they might comfort a friend who suffers or help out at a woman’s shelter.  One of the benefits in commemorating all of the saints at once is that it reminds us that saints come in all shapes and sizes and that we are only really asked to leave the campground cleaner than we found it.  We don’t have to fix everything, but we have make things a little better.  Or as Calvin Coolidge put it “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”  The call of the saint is to make our little corner of the world a little better, a little more like God created it so that we may be God’s not only now but forevermore. 

Sermon Oct. 29 2017-Father Cunningham

           Sometimes when I am preparing a sermon I go and read Biblical commentaries in hopes that they will help unlock some deep secret in the text.  I often emerge disappointed because these commentaries often spend entire paragraphs on verb tenses and sort of forget the whole meaning of the scripture bits.  It can kind of like reading a biography of someone only to have most of the book focus on the person’s digestive system – sure it is part of who they are, but kind of misses the point.  In today’s reading from Thessalonians, I was curious about the line, “For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”  There seemed to be something deeper going on in this passage.  Why does Paul bring up trickery – had he been accused of it or were there others who were using it.  Well, as you might have guessed I learned nothing from the commentaries that I looked at and so what follows is the Phil version of what I think is going on and let’s hope that it won’t be heretical. 

            So Paul contrasts two different ways of delivering a message.  The first as mentioned involved impure motives and trickery while the second method he describes as having been approved by God.  I think there are two different possibilities as to what motivated such a statement.  The first is that Paul and his companions have been accused of trickery and impure motives and so he is tackling that accusation head on, saying that it was no such thing but rather they did what God had instructed him to do.  The second possibility seems to be that he was contrasting the way he and his companions did things with some other group.  In other words, there was some group conveying a message through trickery and impure motives, but Paul and his companions were doing what God had ordained.  I don’t know that it makes a huge difference but I am inclined to go with the second explanation partly because he continues by saying, “As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.”  In this Paul is calling on those who witnessed him and his companions to verify that he did nothing nefarious.  But all of this points to a larger question, which has to do with how does one proselytize?  Paul is saying that some used trickery while he did not, but where is the line?  How much “sales job” does one need to put into the effort of proclaiming the Gospel? 

            Now fortunately for most Episcopalians this is not an issue because of our belief that proselytizing is tacky and that it’s why God invented the Baptists.  It is hard to be nefarious about something that you do not actually do.  But let’s say we actually decided to talk about the Gospel and actively sought to convert someone.  The question that Paul is raising has to do with how we actually go about that – are we honest or do we do whatever it takes to make the sale?  And when you put it like this the answer is pretty obvious, at least I hope that it is.  But there is a spectrum to this question because while we certainly would not promote deceitfulness, Churches quite often participate in things that are not directly related to the Gospel in order to bring people in.  I did a quick look on the interweb at various churches and how they promote their high school age youth groups.  In reading a description from a particular website I saw that they did talk about growing ones faith, however they also talked a lot about games and gym time.  One even boasted of the amount of snacks provided.  Now I am not picking on them and saying that if youth group is fun you are headed for perdition, but rather to ask the question of what does snack time have to do with the Kingdom of God.  On one level it could be seen as a trick to lure people in.  So what are we supposed to do?  Do we ban all activities that are not strictly related to the Gospel message? 

            Well, here is where it is good to be Anglican.  Please stick with me for a moment because I do get back to a point.  During the Reformation there was some tension over how the Bible influenced what we did in worship.  Some took the tack that if the Bible didn’t expressly say you could do something then you were not to do that particular thing in Church.  A good example of this is the Church of Christ, which does not use musical instruments in their worship because there is no record of musical instruments being used in New Testament worship.  Anglicans (and others) took a different approach to this by saying essentially that if the Bible does not ban it and it does not seem contrary to God’s will then we can do it.  Since the Bible does not say that you can’t use musical instruments and there does not seem to be anything that runs contrary to God’s will then we can use musical instruments, even though I have my doubts about the accordion.  And so employing this thinking in terms of spreading the Gospel we can use other things to bring people in as long as they are not contradictory to the will of God.  And I would add one thing to that which is that they cannot be more important than God.  In other words music is fine, but if worship becomes a concert then it is not fine, just as a fun youth group is fine as long as the fun is in service of the mission of drawing closer to God. 

            But now let’s return to the original question about spreading the Gospel and the way we should do it.  The first thing is obviously that we should do it.  And I know this makes many people squirm, including myself, but if we truly believe that Jesus is the way the truth and the life then we should probably pass that message on.  Secondly and I think this is a question for those of us at St. John Chrysostom and that is what are we doing about it?  Who are we talking to?  Have any of us invited someone to church lately or checked in with someone that we have not seen in a while?  We have probably all seen really bad proselytizing, we have also probably all seen bad Christian sales jobs where the message was lost in the medium but none of that is an excuse for us not doing it.  And I think this is something for us to reflect on.  Are we doing anything to bring more people to Christ?  All of us are supposed to be ambassadors for the Kingdom of God.  So I think the question for us, myself included is what are we doing?  Can we say like Paul that, “our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”  We need to speak a message that is pleasing to God so that we may be a participant in the expansion of his kingdom both now and forevermore. 

Sermon Oct. 15 2017-Father Cunningham

             Oscar Wilde once said that a sentimentalist “Is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."  Which seems like as good of definition as any.  I thought about this today because our parable is sort of a tonic for any sort of sentimentalism.  Certainly it all starts well enough; you have the generous king inviting all of the people of the town to a fabulous wedding feast.  I mean if you added a little snow and a fresh cut Christmas tree you would be 90% of your way to a Hallmark Christmas special.  It could all end with a non-threatening looking homeless man offering a slightly grammatically incorrect toast to the King before they all link arms and sing “Away in the Manger” together.  But Jesus does not let us off that easy; he does not allow this to be a simple, warm-hearted sentimental tale.  The King is certainly generous and the marginalized and outcasts all are invited and come to the glorious feast, but then we have this; “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”  The whole groovy kind of love vibe that we had going gets abruptly derailed.  So what is going on? 

            If the King is representative of God why does he get so upset over a piece of clothing, I mean its not like he was wearing white slacks after Labor Day.  To answer this question there are really two pieces of God’s personality that we must understand.  The first comes with the invitation.  That is when God says, “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.”  This is God saying that all are welcome to come, which is very true; God is a welcoming and loving God.  But God is also good and so wants us to be good too.  And as a result God asks for us to change – which in this case was to quite literally change into a wedding garment.  However I am not sure we always put these pieces together.  We either confuse an open invitation with no expectations of us once we actually show up, or we make the opposite mistake and get real excited about God’s exclusivity that we forget that all were welcome in the first place.  And actually, to maybe go out on a bit of a limb or paint with too broad of brush (you can take your pick of clichés) I think much of our church wars these days are grounded on a partial or incomplete reading of this parable.  What I mean by that is we have one group that is a first half reader and a different group, which is a second half reader.  What this means in practicality is that one group wants to talk mainly about the inclusiveness of God while the second group wants to talk about the exclusiveness of God vis a vis certain behaviors.  And I have to say that intellectually either of these positions is easier to understand than what Jesus spells out today.  It is not hard to think of a god with no standards like a fun-loving uncle who goes around giving people noogies and making sure that their wine glasses are full.  It is also not hard to conceive of a god with very strict standards and a system of tallies, who is constantly judging and telling us what we are doing wrong.  But to conceive of a God that simultaneously welcomes all while distaining sinful behavior is a little harder because the lines are not so distinct.  When does the welcoming everybody God turn into the “throw them into the outer darkness” God?  I mean can we get a schedule so that we know when to behave?  Well I am not sure if that is the right question to ask because I think there is another dynamic at work here, which has to do with the fact that people tend to pick sides in this parable based on what fits with their personality by either ignoring the welcoming side of God or the “throw them into the outer darkness” side of God.    

            I was listening to a podcast the other day, which I know makes me sound quite hip, but don’t be fooled.  Now please stick with me for a minute because this eventually gets back to the parable.  Anyway the topic of this podcast turned to what is so often on everyone’s minds these days and that is what is wrong with us, why do we have so much trouble getting along with each other.  The hypothesis that arose was rather interesting.  The person said that they blamed the coming apart of our society largely on the breakdown of institutions. What he meant by this was the institutions that civilized societies had so often relied on to create cohesion were breaking down and not functioning the way that they were intended.  He said every generation is invaded by barbarians, which we call children, and our job and the job of institutions within our society is to turn those barbarians into productive and valuable members of our society.  But he said institutions these days are not doing that because we do not view institutions as larger than ourselves but rather as extensions of ourselves.  So rather than going to a school or a church to be changed by it, we instead go to change that school or church into our image, or better yet save time and find one that it is already in our image by the time we get there.  And so we go to institutions that only validate what we already believe and are not transformed but rather encouraged in whatever it is that we believe.  Some of you may have seen the Babylon Bee, which is a kind of Christian version of The Onion.  Anyway they once had a headline that read, “Local Family Commutes 700 miles to attend Church that meets their exact Specifications.”  The article goes onto detail how this family almost found a church 400 miles away but its racquetball program was subpar so they had to keep looking.  And while I know this is satire there is a piece of truth, which marks all good satire.  We want institutions to cater to us. 

           Now take this mentality and look at it in terms of today’s parable.  If inclusiveness is your bag you kind of stop before the expulsion of the wedding guest, or chalk it up to a typo.  However, if you are a neo-puritan exclusionary type you get really excited about the ability to kick people out because they are not acting correctly and view the story as just one big build up to the exclusionary moral.  But, if we do either of those two things, are we allowing the institution of the church to do its work?  Shouldn’t the church transform us?  I mean there should be parts of Church, in general and in this parable specifically, that make everyone a little uncomfortable and that is not a bad thing.  If we like to be friendly and welcoming but are afraid to correct a friend this should push us a little.  If we love to tell people they are heretics and that they are going to spend eternity in the extra crispy section, this parable should also give us pause.  A life in Christ while being comforting is also going to be stretching because it asks something of us.

            Jesus today is saying that, of course, God welcomes all.  You are not chosen based on your social class, your profession or who your parents were, but once you come, you are expected to change.  If there are things about you that are repugnant to God, he is looking for those things to end.   God’s goodness is both welcoming and correcting.  Our life on this earth is not a call to sentimentality but is rather a call to grow, to stretch up to God.  Some of this may come easier than other parts, but we must never lose our focus so that we may be God’s both now and forevermore.