Sermon (Fr Peay) May 20, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Dealfield, Wisconsin

The Feast of Pentecost – May 20, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[text: John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15]

But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me: and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.

            One of the things Tony Robinson, a contemporary pastoral theologian,  has said that I like – and, actually there are many – is his observation of how Protestants tend to be ‘Unitarians’ of one or the other person of the Trinity. Most mainline Protestants are Unitarians of the Father; while Evangelical Protestants tend to be Unitarians of the Son, and Pentecostal/Charismatic Protestants are Unitarians of the Holy Spirit. What Tony points out is that we get caught up in one or the other, for want of an easier understood word, revelation of the Persons of the Trinity. As a result, we get stuck and miss the fullness of what God wants to open to us. What I’d like to emphasize on Pentecost Sunday is that the Spirit – the Counselor or Advocate (the Greek Paraclete – one called alongside to help) – proceeds from the Father and sent by the Son so that we can be drawn into and kept in the truth of God’s loving will-to-relationship revealed in Jesus Christ.

            Our brothers and sisters in the Christian East describe this mutual interdependence of the Divine Persons of the Trinity with the word perichoresis, which literally means to “go around”  and also describes a Greek folk dance. The contemporary British theologian Alister McGrath has written that this doctrine, "allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of the other two. An image often used to express this idea is that of a 'community of being,' in which each person, while maintaining its distinctive identity, penetrates the others and is penetrated by them." [Christian Theology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Blackwell, 2001.] What I believe is that in God becoming one with us in Jesus, we are then kept in that oneness through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Divine dance continues and expresses itself in us as we grow and witness in God’s love. The Counselor, the Advocate, then, is the source of the dance, the movement toward oneness with God.

            I came across a story recounted by the late Jesuit spiritual writer Anthony de Mello in his book The Heart of the Enlightened.  He recounts how:

many years ago, a bishop on the East Coast of the United States paid a visit to a small religious college on the West Coast. He was lodged in the home of the college president, who was a progressive young man, a professor of physics and chemistry. The president one day invited the members of his faculty to dinner with the bishop so that they could benefit from his wisdom and experience. After dinner the talk turned to the future, and the bishop claimed that the “millennium” could not be far off. One of the reasons he cited was the fact that everything in nature had now already been discovered, and all possible inventions had been made. The president politely demurred. In his opinion, he said, humanity was on the threshold of brilliant new discoveries. The bishop dared the president to mention one. The president said he expected that within the next fifty years or so humans would learn to fly. This threw the bishop into a fit of laughter. “Rubbish, my dear man,” he exclaimed, “if God had intended us to fly, He would have provided us with wings. Flight is reserved for the birds and the angels.” By the way: The president’s name was Wright. He had two sons named Orville and Wilbur—who became the inventors of the first airplane.

Wright, by the way, went on to also become a bishop in the United Brethren in Christ and have a distinguished career in the church. It goes to show us that even people of faith can sometimes be scoffers.

            There are some who want to consign Pentecost and what it stands for to the pages of history; an unrepeatable act.  Could it just be that the One who would “lead us into all truth;” the One, as the early teachers of the Church said, points us to the face of the Father and the Son, is among us?  I think so. And I also think, believe, am convinced that the Church – and I mean across the board – needs to recover the wonder of the presence of the Counselor. If we are not as animated or as powerful as we should be in making a difference in the world, it is because we lack the breath – the pneuma, the ruah – of God in fullness within us.

            On this Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the Church’s birthday, but it shouldn’t be simply a ‘memorial,’ a remembrance of a great day long ago. No. The Church – and this parish of St. John Chrysostom in Delafield – needs to claim afresh what happened on that day, and happens on EVERY DAY that we open ourselves to God’s presence and power – the Holy Spirit. I was touched and moved yesterday by our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry’s words to the now Duke and Duchess of Sussex on their wedding day. He reminded them that the God of love gives us POWER to transform the world. He quoted one of my favorite thinkers, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who once said that when we unleashed the power of love we would have discovered fire for the second time. It is true!

God knows that the world in which we live – fraught with so much dishonesty, dysfunction, lack of reasoned discourse or civility, and outright violence – needs the FIRE of the Holy Spirit to fall fresh upon it! That fire, my dear sisters and brothers, will only fall if the people of God, the people called by Jesus’ precious Name, CHRISTIANS, open up and then step up to do God’s will. So today, as followers of Christ, as people of the Spirit, I pray that we open ourselves to the Counselor, to listen to what God’s Spirit has for us and then live accordingly – dance, fly, make a difference. The COUNSELOR is among us….and the DANCE GOES ON!

Sermon (Fr Peay) May 13, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, WI

7th Sunday of Easter/Mothers’ Day – May 13, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

               Years ago John Lennon wrote a song with some rather fancy musical dynamics, but pretty straightforward words. The essential message was: all you need is love. I won’t sing it for you – though as I read these words I bet you’ll sing it in your head, because I have the whole time I worked on this – but here are the words:

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game

It's easy.

There's nothing you can make that can't be made.

No one you can save that can't be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you

in time - It's easy.

All you need is love, all you need is love,

All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

All you need is love, all you need is love,

All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

Nothing you can see that isn't shown.

Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.

It's easy.

All you need is love, all you need is love,

All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

All you need is love (all together now)

All you need is love (everybody)

All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

I’m not sure if John Lennon realized it, but he was singing what Jesus taught and lived.

John, the Gospel writer, records Jesus saying, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them, and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. . .”  Those words from John 14 preface what we’ve been hearing the last several weeks.  What is being said here is that the essence of Christian faith is not about theological niceties – though that doesn’t mean that we’re not to be concerned about them. Rather, the truest theology is going to be lived out. Those who “get” what Jesus is teaching will live it out. God rest him, but John Lennon sang a good game, but didn’t live the essence of love. Because it’s not that easy, that’s where the words are wrong, it’s not that easy. Love that transforms, love that abides and is consistent – even when the loved one isn’t – that kind of love is very hard. That kind of love is also accountable and responsible. Jesus taught that kind of love and, more importantly, lived it – right to the Cross and through the Resurrection. He loved us, so that we might know, in a tangible way, how much we are loved and how we are to love in turn. It will do, that love, all the things the song talks about, but it isn’t easy, it’s work and it’s work that has to be done every day.

Jesus talks about he and the Father “making their home” with those who are living in this love. Jesus, elsewhere, will talk about “abiding” in him and in his love. When we live as we’re called to live we’ll be “at home,” comfortable in the everyday, ordinary showing of who God is by being who we are. Jesus invites us to share in the community that is the Trinity, to make our home with God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Augustine speaks of it this way in one of his Tractates on John’s Gospel:

The saints are distinguished from the world by that love which maketh the one-minded    Unanimes. to dwell [together] in a house. In this house Father and Son make their abode, and impart that very love to those whom They shall also honor at last with this promised self manifestation; of which the disciple questioned his Master, that not only those who then listened might learn it from His own lips, but we also from his Gospel. For he had made inquiry about the manifestation of Christ, and heard [in reply] about His loving and abiding.

You and I, we, are supposed to become the very dwelling place of God. And when the Church, God’s family, God’s community is gathered for worship, then that community is made real, manifest to the whole world. Here, among us, is where people should know they can find that love that is all you need – how sad that we, as Christians, too often fall short. We talk a good game, but don’t always live it out (especially if someone does something, or says something we don’t like). But there’s that love again, lifting us up, holding out the promise of forgiveness, of transformation, and of real change. We can “learn how to be you in time,” it’s not easy, but all we need is love.

            What we hear in John’s Gospel today is Jesus’s “high priestly prayer,” in which he is commending us to the Father. Continuing, and deepening, that love relationship we are to have. Part of that deepening is to really mean what we pray when we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” Jesus asks the Father to sanctify us …make us holy…in the truth, which is God’s own word. Which means doing and living as God wills, as God wants.

I came across another way of expressing this reality in a story by the Roman Catholic priest-sociologist-novelist Andrew Greeley. He told this story:

Once upon a time back in the last century there was a young woman from Ireland who had lost her parents and all her family. Some kind people wrote to their relatives in America and said we have this fourteen year old orphan here who is very bright and very pretty and very hard working, We don’t want her to go to the orphanage because she won’t have any opportunities there to develop her talents. Would you ever consider hiring her as a servant girl. You’d have to pay her way over on the boat, but she’ll work for nothing until she earns her fare. You won’t go wrong with her. So the Americans, who could afford a serving girl, but never had one and weren’t altogether sure what they would do with such a person talked about it and said, well, what have we to lose. So they sent the fare for the boat and the train. And waited for the young woman to come.

 She sailed from Kinsale. The last she saw of Ireland were the twin spires of the church as they faded into the background. Weeks later, sick and thin and exhausted, she arrived in the city where her master and mistress lived. They took one look at the poor child and said, Dear, we don’t need a servant, but we have room for another daughter. When they brought her home the other children hugged her and said, hooray! We have another sister. With their help she grew up to go to college and university and become very successful and was a great credit to those who took her into their family. (The Trinity is a family into which God has invited us) 

Jesus came among us to invite us into the family, to say to us, “Be at home with us” and to open us to the wonder of what we were created to be. To come to that, to accept the invitation, to made truly in the image and likeness of God; well, love is all you need.

It is appropriate to talk about this “abiding” and “home making” as we celebrate and honor mothers.  Mothers put up with a lot, but that love and desire to make a home keeps the door open. Love can find a home and love can make a home in us and then will make a difference. Perhaps that’s why there are so many medieval texts, including the Showings of Julian of Norwich that refer to Jesus as “mother”? That’s because God is not only our Father, but also our Mother and our Brother…..God is our family.

Today celebrate love that has built many a home and changed many a life. Love – unselfish, self-giving, open-hearted – love is all we need. It is offered to us freely by the God who is Father, Mother, family to us, if we will but respond and learn to be who we really are. Love is all we need. All together now……….everybody………all we need is love. Amen.

Sermon (Fr. Peay) April 29, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin

Fifth Sunday of Easter – April 29, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[texts: 1 John 4:7-21/John 15:1-8]

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.””

            At the turn of the last century the South African clergyman and spiritual writer Andrew Murray observed, “During the life of Jesus on earth, the word He chiefly used when speaking of the relations of the disciples to Himself was: ‘Follow me.’ When about to leave for heaven, He gave them a new word, in which their more intimate and spiritual union with Himself in glory should be expressed. That chosen word was ‘Abide in me.’ It is to be feared that there are many earnest followers of Jesus from whom the meaning of this word, with the blessed experience it promises, is very much hidden. While trusting in their Savior for pardon and for help, and seeking to some extent to obey Him, they have hardly realised to what closeness of union, to what intimacy of fellowship, to what wondrous oneness of life and interest, He invited them when He said, ‘Abide in me.’ This is not only an unspeakable loss to themselves, but the Church and the world suffers in what they lose.” [Daily Thoughts on Holiness] Ever since I came across Murray’s words I have thought about what he said, especially about the possibilities Christ-followers, the Church, and the world lose because we have not actualized the gift Christ offers to us. As I see the state of the churches I think that, like so many other things, we’ve not learned the lesson God wants us to learn and so our lives are so much less than what they could be or were meant to be.

            The text of John chapter fifteen is a lesson in what it means to abide in God and God’s love through Christ. The reading today uses an organic metaphor to introduce us to abiding in Jesus. So in verses one to the beginning of verse five Jesus sets the stage with the vine (Jesus), the vine-dresser (God the Father) and the branches (us). In the second part of verse five through verse eight we learn the results of abiding – bearing fruit and giving glory to the Father – or not abiding in love. Now we’re brought to what this abiding really means. We move from need, to fruit, and in these eight verses, we come to understand love and the ultimate show of abiding – loving one another, living out the commandment to love as Jesus has, so Jesus’ joy may be in us and our joy may be complete.

            What John does in this text is to reflect on the oneness, the unity, between the Father and Jesus. At the core is the use of the verb menein, to remain or abide. To abide means to dwell, to remain in a place. In the Hebrew scripture this word is used of God’s promise and counsel – it abides, that is, it isn’t transitory or changing. The New Testament builds on this concept of God’s immutability and John particularly stresses the new level of immanence – the word, by the way, is formed from the Latin equivalent of menein and its root is the word for dwelling or house (manse, mansion) – so there is also a new level of intimacy brought by Christ to the believer.

            Jesus is saying, “live in me,” “dwell in me,” “be at home in me.” This is a powerful invitation to relationship, one that Julian of Norwich mirrors in the following passage from her Showings of Divine Love. “Also in this he showed me a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was generally answered thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, “It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.” And so all things have their being by the love of God.” [Showing of Love Julian Bolton Holloway, translator, p. 8-9] Here we see the ‘oneing’ that Julian celebrates throughout her touching, wonderfully profound and fruitful book.

            As she contemplates this wonder of all creation she comes to understand something else, there are three proprieties to it. “In this little thing I saw three properties: The first is that God made it; The second that God loves it; The third that God keeps it. But what is this to me, truly, the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell. For, till I am substantially oned to him I may never have full rest, nor true bliss; that is to say until I be so fastened to him, that there be right nought that is made between my God and me.” [p. 9]  The remarkable thing is that these are the properties of creation – not external to it – so all that is is because of God. We are to abide in God because it is that abiding which gives us life and, as Julian says, we will never know full rest nor true bliss until there is NOTHING between our God and ourselves. Note, too, that the Maker, Lover, and Keeper corresponds to the economic concept of the Trinity, so all of creation reflects the life of the One God in Three persons who makes, loves, and sustains the world and all that is in it.

            Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” The follower of Jesus is thus to become an “abider,” a resident, if you will, who sets-up housekeeping in God’s love shown forth in Jesus’ life and teaching. So, a disciple abiding in love does something as Jesus does something to show his abiding in the Father. Jesus lives his life in conformity to the will of the Father in unselfish, loving service and this love is what witnesses to the Father. He bears fruit – the fruit of LOVE. Love, then, is the action; love that is self-giving, other-focused and which builds-up and reconciles. Jesus lives this love and the Father is glorified in that living. The harvest is rich.

            As Murray pointed out, many Christians get stuck at the point of “belief,” They give an assent to what they see as Jesus’ teaching, but don’t move to that next level, which someone called “beloving.” This is the point being made in the Epistle lesson, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them...We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” Believing leads to beloving and beloving leads to behaving. If we have taken up residence in God’s love it’s simply going to show in our actions and in our attitudes. We can’t love God and act in a hateful manner at the same time – they are simply mutual inconsistent.

            I know it’s easy to say we should do this and that the hard part is the “how.” To my mind we come to abide in Christ and keep his commandment of love by doing three things: by study, by prayer, and by service.  We learn to abide by dwelling, remaining, in the teaching Jesus and his followers have left us – study. The “oneing” Julian talks about is the abiding of the gospel text and the goal of prayer. In prayer, she says, “our will should be turned, rejoicing, into the will of our Lord.” As she says, “the fruit and the end of our prayer is to be one and love our Lord in all things.”

            Third, we come to abide in Christ’s love through service. It is only natural that once we’ve studied and prayed that we do something – study and prayer give rise to action. Service can take on many forms, including our attendance in worship (“divine service”), seeing to the needs of the poor and less fortunate, and ministering to others’ spiritual needs. If we want to keep the fabric of our lives together growing and flourishing then all of us have to help – and not look for “ways out” when someone is calling us to ask us to do something. The list of potential means of service is endless, what’s important is for us to remember that all of our life is to reflect God’s glory. Our chief service is to live as a child of God, as part of the people of God. Whenever we act as a child of God we’re showing forth service.

            Our coming to abide reflects what Julian saw as the making, loving and keeping of the world by God. We come to abide by study – making, by prayer – loving, and by service – keeping. If we do these things we will, over time, come to experience the wonder of what it means to dwell in God and to be “oned” with God. To know, as Julian said, “to be so fastened to him that there is nought/nothing between my God and me.” Being oned with God is coming to the fullness of awareness that God indeed dwells within us and we in God.

            Today we conclude with a little prayer of Julian’s. Pray with me, please: “God, of Thy goodness, give me Thyself, for only in Thee have I all. Amen.”