Sermon (Fr Cunningham) July 1, 2018

Well, I have gotten so excited about doing this sermon series thing that I have decided to continue preaching from 2nd Corinthians just like I did the past two weeks.  I sort of feel like a cocaine monkey in one of those experiments from the 1980’s – even if I wanted to stop I am not sure that I could.  And there is also another reason for this, which is that I did not want to discuss the Markan sandwich that we have in our Gospel today.  If you are curious, a Markan Sandwich occurs in the book of Mark when you have the beginning of a story, which is then interrupted by another story and then the initial story is only resolved after the completion of the interrupting story.  So in today’s story Jairus comes and begs Jesus to heal his daughter, on the way to doing that he heals a woman with hemorrhages and then he resolves the first story by healing the daughter of Jairus.  Or put another way, discovering such patterns keeps New Testament Scholars employed, but back to 2nd Corinthians. 

What we have today is essentially a fund raising letter.  Paul in his travels would collect money from one place to strengthen the church in another place.  And it is sort of funny when reading it to realize that fund raising letters have not changed a whole lot.  It starts with flattery, moves to the argument for why they should give and ends by asking them to give what they can.  Now just because it follows a somewhat familiar pattern does not mean that we can move on without a little reflection.  This sermon will obviously take a little different tack than it would take in my home parish because I will not end it with an appeal for you to give money to St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church in Delafield, Wisconsin (unless you really want me to in which case I can give you the mailing address).  But baring that let’s take a few moments and reflect on the call to give money for the growth of Christ’s Kingdom. 

            As I said it begins with a bit of flattery.  Paul says, “As you excel in everything-- in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you-- so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.”  When I was looking at some commentaries about this passage one of them went to great lengths to explain that Paul was not being sarcastic.  I am not sure why the author of this commentary spent so much time on this - perhaps there is a sarcastic school of Pauline theology of which I was previously unaware that the writer felt he needed to counter.  Whatever the case Paul’s appeal appears to be genuine.  The Church at Corinth excels in faith, speech and knowledge and as a result of this Paul wants them to excel in another thing, a thing, which for lack of a better term we can call generosity.  Giving of themselves for the benefit of others.  Which sounds very nice, but it is probably worth asking why being generous is something worth excelling at.  And I don’t ask this flippantly; rather because I think now and then it is worth reflecting on why the things that we consider to be good and noble pursuits are actually good and noble pursuits.  And it would seem that St. Paul agrees because the next part of this appeal addresses just that question. 

            He states, “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something-- now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means.”  So the short answer to why we should be generous is because Jesus was generous.  And what Paul explains is that Jesus is the Son of God and yet he stooped to become one of us.  He gave up his glory to be born in a manger, walk on bad roads in mediocre footwear and toil as a carpenter.  I don’t think he means that he became literally poor or at least poor by the standards of those days, but rather in comparison to the glory and majesty of the Godhead he came down quite a bit.  In other places, like Philippians chapter 2 Paul expresses this same sentiment by saying though Jesus, “was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”

            Now, rather obviously for those of us who are mortal, which I assume includes all of us, we cannot literally give up divinity and come down into a different order and so the things that we can give up are not necessarily part of our essence or nature.  Instead, the things that we often can give up are the things that we possess.  While certainly some of these things can be parts of our personality like our ego, but more often they are things that we quite literally possess, that is the stuff that we own.  So when Paul makes the argument that people should donate in imitation of Christ it is not a perfect imitation largely because we are not actually the Son of God, but essentially he is asking us to do what we can, to imitate as best we can.  The important thing however in this imitation is that we do it with the same end in mine.  Christ came to bring us into communion with God, to tear down the barrier of sin that separated us from God.  So when we give to the Church we are continuing that mission.  Now that Christ has broken down the barriers that separate us from God we can help others to grow closer to God.  That is what the money that we give to the Church is supposed to do.  But there is also another reason and one which is more self-interested, but has the same end in mind and that has to do with freeing ourselves. 

            I had a seminary professor once say to our class that if he gave each of us one million dollars that it would have no effect on some of us while for others of us it would guarantee our perdition.  What he meant by the comment is that some people will make an idol out of money and the more they have the more of an idol they will make while others have a reasonable relationship with money where it does not possess them.  Money offers a special temptation because it gives us power to do things and with such power can come confusion about who God is, or at least about God’s place in the order of things.  When the power which money can offer pushes God to a secondary position it becomes a real problem.  Many people often misquote the book of Timothy by saying that money is the root of all evil, but what is actually said is that the love of money is the root of all evil.  Money is neutral.  It can build hospitals, churches and buy food for the hungry.  It can also buy heroin, build concentration camps and produce movies staring Brad Pitt.  But beyond that it can create a greedy soul - a soul that looks to its salvation not through God but through money.  That is why Jesus gives the warning about the inherent difficulty of the wealthy inheriting the kingdom of God because of the temptation to seek salvation in creation and not in the creator.  So the call to be generous is the call to be like Christ.  The call to cast off what we have so that we can be part of God’s plan for salvation.

            Christ came both to break down the barriers that exist between us and God but also to show us a way to live; a way that is free from that which separates us from God.  Part of that is trusting in God above all and being generous with our possessions.  If Jesus became man and dwelt among us we can at least give a hundred bucks to the church outreach fund.  No it is not exactly the same, but giving of ourselves, including that which we possess is as close as we humans come to Christ’s great sacrifice.  May we all imitate Christ in thought word and deed, so that we may be his both now and forevermore.        

Sermon (Fr Peay) July 1, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin

6th Sunday after Pentecost – July 1, 2018

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

[2 Corinthians 8:7-15/Mark 5:21-43]

            “Lord,” not a word we often use. How many of you have had someone ask you: “Is Jesus Christ your Lord and personal savior?” I know that I have, and not always in the most loving fashion, either. Yet, what that enthusiastic person was asking – at least as far as the part of  the question is concerned – is as old as the New Testament. So, I’d like to focus a bit today on what is the oldest profession of faith for the Christian Church: Jesus is Lord.

            What I want to do is to look at this very simple statement of faith – Jesus is Lord – and then look at how we see it operationally defined in two of the lessons we read together this morning.

            Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian of the twentieth century said, “A Christian is one who makes confession of Christ. And the Christian confession is confession of Jesus Christ the Lord.” (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 65). Scholars across the board agree “Jesus Christ is Lord” is the first attempt at Christians articulating what they believed. The confession can be found specifically in the writings of Paul; in Romans 10:9, Philippians 2:11 and also in 1 Corinthians 8:6. It is also found in the response of Peter to Jesus’ question in Mark 8:29, “And he asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Christ."

            What was being said at that moment? When Peter confesses Jesus to be “the Christ,” he is using the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word “Messiah.” It literally means “the anointed.” What it implies is the ability to rule. When monarchs were enthroned they were anointed with oil to demonstrate that they were chosen not by just the people, but by God. The anointed one, the messiah, was one who would come with power to return the kingship, the rule promised to David’s line to Israel. In short, it would be one who would restore Israel to its place of dignity as a nation and one whose ruler was chosen, favored by God.

            The term, however, takes on a different sense in the life and work of Jesus, because his announcement that the kingdom of God is “at hand,” is unlike any other. For Peter, and others, to come to put faith in him meant a whole new way of understanding what that kingdom is and how it is to be lived out.

            I like what Michael Jinkins has written in his delightful book Invitation to Theology:

“The title Lord (Greek, Kyrios) without a doubt was no ordinary title of respect for these Jewish men and women who were the first followers of Christ. Kyrios was the word used in the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint, in place of the holy and unspeakable name of the Lord God. YHWH (we’ve filled in the missing vowels to make the name “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” but in point of fact, because the name is sacred, it cannot be uttered, no one really knows what the vowels were). Kyrios, in other words, stands in for the sacred name of the Lord. A Greek-speaking follower of Jesus, like Paul for example, would not lightly place the title Kyrios on his lips. Even more solemnly would he apply it to the human Jesus who had met his death at the hands of Rome. Yet this title is applied to Jesus by Christians who, like Paul, understood its deepest meaning.” [p. 107-8]  

The earliest Christians realized that in Jesus they had come to an encounter with the living God. When they were with Jesus they understood who God was. They understood in that moment how God wanted them to live in a way that they never had before. They understood that this God who had said from the beginning, “I am with you always” now was with them in a special way. This God who had said “I am a God of steadfast love and faithfulness” was steadfastly loving and faithful and loving in a new and different way. And this encounter changed their lives from the inside out. Jesus didn’t call them to assent to a dogmatic formula – this is the attempt of Christians over the centuries to understand and explain what they believe and how it is to be worked out. As the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung has said, Jesus calls people to “Follow me,” not “Say after me.” What we see revealed, modeled in Jesus is the unselfish, unself-centered love of God reaching out to us so that we may be drawn into relationship with God.

Presbyterian minister and novelist, the late Frederick Buechner said something powerful that speaks to this point.

After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left. Grace is something you can never get [nor earn nor conjure] but only be given... The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the

world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you.

Nothing can ever separate us. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other

gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.

That is what the woman with the hemorrhages experienced. She knew that the experience of grace and healing were close to her. Her society, even her religion, had pushed her to the margins, had marked her as “unclean” and in what she heard of and from this Jesus she came to a new understanding of who she was. She wasn’t a “case,” she wasn’t “unclean,” she was a child of God who needed to be touched and loved and restored to the wonder of who she was. In a moment of incredible boldness she reached past her disease, her life-situation, her fear and her loneliness to touch one she knew could make a difference – and he did. She discovered what all of us are to discover – to profess Jesus as Lord is to be life-giving. Our faith is not to drain the life out of us, but to put life into us.

The same can be said for Jairus, and especially for his daughter – who, like the woman, goes unnamed, maybe because they have ALL of our names? That little girl is raised, as are all of us, from the deadness of selfishness and isolation that keeps us from loving God, from loving those around us and even from loving ourselves in the manner that we were meant to do.

What we see in Jesus’ action in Mark’s Gospel is what we also hear in Paul’s call to the Church at Corinth – generosity. Paul reminds the people, “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his  poverty you might become rich.” We become rich in the things of God. We become, as we learn elsewhere, the “co-heirs” of the kingdom of God, adopted children of the Father who has loved us into being and loves us into the new life of relationship. In short, because we are the recipients of generosity, we are to live generously. What I’m saying is that our lives are to be LIVED generously in the way we give of ourselves in loving service – as Jesus did.

To confess, to profess that Jesus is Lord is to mark one’s self as a follower of Jesus Christ – one who “goes around after” him. What that means, bottom line, is that our profession of faith is more about the way we live, about the way we speak, about our attitudes, our actions, our choices, our conduct of relationships than it is about assent to dogmatic statements (even though, as a Historical Theologian, I believe those statements to be very important as tools for guiding our thought and actions). Nevertheless, they don’t mean anything if we don’t live them – and that’s the point. To say that Jesus is Lord is to live in the same manner as he taught – loving God with everything we’ve got and our neighbor as ourselves.
            So, if someone asks you that question with which we started, “Is Jesus your Lord?” I pray that you can answer with confidence, seeing through the baggage of religious language over the years: Jesus is Lord? Yes. Jesus is Lord of life. I am a follower of Jesus Christ. And then, more importantly, live like it – that makes all the difference.

Sermon (Fr Peay) June 10, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, WI

3rd Sunday after Pentecost (B) – June 10, 2018

The Very Rev’d Steven A. Peay, PhD

                  “Where are you?” That’s the question God asks in this almost idyllic, intimate scenario painted in Genesis 3. But that question carries some heft, it’s not just a “yoo hoo,” if you get my point. God is asking that hard question that I remember my mother asking when I had most certainly done something out of line, and she was looking to get to the bottom of the issue. WHERE ARE YOU?

                  That question still holds, doesn’t it? When we’re wondering where someone stands on a particular issue, how they have engaged – or not engaged – in an activity, name it, we very often ask, “where are you?” And God, the Creator, the One who made us in God’s own image and likeness continues to ask that question of us, and to seek after us. When you give it some serious thought the whole Biblical record is really the playing out of this initial question. God wants to know us, be intimate with us, and we flee – what’s the problem here?

                  Well, let’s look at what this particular account of the Fall, which would give us that great line in the various readers going back to the 1697 NEW ENGLAND PRIMER:  In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.  God goes looking for Adam, and Adam talks about his embarrassment at being naked, so “I hid myself.” God inquires how Adam even realizes that he IS naked, and then asks if Adam has partaken of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam IMMEDIATELY tries to shift the blame elsewhere, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then God asks Eve and what does she do? “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”

                  It’s like the commercial with the kids – covered in mud – standing on the carpet saying, “It’s not my fault.” Here is the essence of that dreaded three letter word: SIN. It starts with the desire of human beings to be in charge of our own destiny, to take God’s place (or as it says in the first account in Genesis 3:5 when the tempter says to the woman, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”) It is a desire to have all the authority with none of the accountability. It is a move toward self-centeredness and self-will – that’s sin. We’ve trivialized sin as a catch-all for various misdemeanors, and missed the reality of how it changes us from being OTHER focused to being self-focused, and concerned with self-justification.

                  What we see here is the continual conflicted state that human beings have been dealing with from our origins. And, that there are two accounts in Genesis  of the Creation and the Fall tell us that we’ve been trying to make sense of our condition for about as long. We see some of this same rather harsh reality in Paul’s Second Letter to the Church in Corinth. He tells them “our outer nature is wasting away . . . .the earthly tent we live in is [to be] destroyed, “   And there’s even struggle that works its way into Jesus’ family, at least that seems to be what Mark is indicating. The two bottom lines, what we can see in these readings, as the late Carroll Stuhlmueller said, intercept one another to give us a solid foundation on which to orient our journey. “The one line declares that sorrow cannot be avoided; struggle is part of living. The other line promises victory in the midst of this struggle, provided a person does not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.” [Biblical Meditations, vol 5, p. 262] We Christians are not the only ones who grapple with this conflicted state of affairs. If you take a look at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism you’ll discover that the first one says that life is suffering, and the other three deal with how one gets through dealing with suffering.

                  The last verse from Genesis we read today is traditionally called the Protoevangelion – the proto-gospel or first proclamation of the Good News. “I will put enmity between you and the woman,  and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” God addresses this to the evil one, the tempter, but early Christians saw in those words the promise of God’s deliverance and the restoration of humanity to the intimacy for which we were created. 

We are, and we will be, engaged in an ongoing battle between good and evil. That’s the struggle, but there is an ultimately positive outcome. As Paul tells the Corinthians, “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Our task is to grow, day by day, more and more into the fullness of the life God has opened to us in fulfilling that Protoevangelion with THE GOSPEL revealed in Jesus Christ.

How do we do this? We do it by growing in spiritual maturity; to use Paul’s words in Ephesians 4: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Similarly in his letter to the Philippians Paul calls us to, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…”  How does Jesus say it in Mark’s gospel: ““Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

My point is that we have to be serious about doing God’s will – and not our own. We have to work at the relationship we have with God in Christ which began at our baptism and should be maturing our whole lives. We deepen that relationship every time we spend time in prayer, time in prayerful, intentional study of God’s Word, and especially when we come to the Lord’s Table and receive Christ in the Holy Communion. It is in that divine exchange that we , in the Words of Rite I, as  “partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.”  And in that mutual indwelling we are transformed, enabled to live, to love, and to serve just as Jesus did, and that’s where we’re supposed to be.

So, where are you?