Sermon for June 22, 2008

Genesis 21:8-21 June 22, 2008
Matthew 10:24-39 Pentecost 6

Matt 10:24-39

‘A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! ‘So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.
‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’

I speak to you in the name of him who says of himself that he brings not peace, but a sword, even Jesus, our Lord. Amen.

This morning’s readings from Genesis and Matthew have a very dark mood to them. In the first reading the Matriarch Sarah insists that her rival Hagar be ousted from Abraham’s camp and that she take her son with her. She is banished to the desert with nothing more than a loaf of bread and a skin of water to sustain herself and her son.
And then, even more ominously in the Gospel reading, Jesus warns, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.’

This does not sound like good news to me. I am not completely sure of what we are to make of this teaching, so let’s keep it on a back burner for a while and look at the context of this week.

It began well enough with Tiger Woods winning the US Open in double overtime while using a 9 iron as a crutch, protecting a broken leg. There has been the usual flow of news from Iraq and Afghanistan. The presidential campaign is clearly gearing up.
For me personally, it has been a wonderful week. My younger brother flew in from Vancouver and my older brother came down from Philadelphia. The three of us have not had several days together, especially with no crowds around, for many years. It was a gracious time to relearn our love for one another.

The chances are that for most of us, the week had a familiar rhythm. Those who have work got up and went to their jobs on Monday and probably had the same job on Friday. Some did not, victims of a faltering economy. Children, the lucky ones, might be eagerly looking forward to summer camp. Families were talking about vacations. Everyone wonders about the price of gasoline. Some pursued political interests. Most church doors were locked throughout the week, but they are now open on Sunday for a few bright hours of worship and affectionate conversation.

In many lands, all days were the same as men, women, and children, bearing lethal weapons, some wearing the uniforms of state, others carrying nothing but the will to kill each other did so, often in the name of religion.

Also this week, the State of California has seen hundreds of visitors, couples of men and couples of women taking the opportunity to celebrate their relationships as marriages under the new California law. As soon as the law was enacted, a counter-force initiated a move for a state constitutional amendment forbidding such marriages.

And speaking of counter-forces, this weekend, about 1,000 splinter group Anglicans, mostly from Africa and the Pacific Rim, some from the US, all opposed to what they consider liberal leadership within the Anglican Communion, will gather in Jerusalem for an eight-day meeting that likely will solidify the deep alienations, particularly over homosexuality, that have divided the church. The Bishop of Jerusalem, Zuhail Dahwani, pleaded with the organizers of the conference not to use his diocese that way. They ignored his plea.

In the mean time, about 800 bishops from around the world, including our own Bishop Klusmeyer, are packing their bags and reading white papers, getting ready to travel to England for The Lambeth Conference to be held in Canterbury next month.

The Lambeth Conference is a gathering of Anglican bishops from throughout the world, invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury every ten years, to meet for discussion and for the development of opportunities to work together for the furtherance of God’s rule on earth. It is a surprise to many Episcopalians to learn that The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, is the third largest Christian group in the world, having 77,000,000 members in over 160 countries.

In 1998 Barbara and I had the huge privilege of being a part of the last Lambeth. Then, we spent most of our time in small group bible study and in hearing reports on world issues like hunger and disease and Third World debt. It was not all sweetness and light, but bonds of affection were made and strengthened. This year the conversations will be dominated by matters of sexuality.

The two gatherings - the splinter group in Jerusalem and the main group in Canterbury, mostly of bishops, will talk about little but sexuality. They will talk as if warfare, environmental destruction, tribal hatreds, inequalities and repression among people, the fragility of hope, joblessness - as if God cared nothing about such things and is now concerned only with who makes love with whom.

In the Gospels, Jesus devotes two thirds of his teaching to wealth and power and the distribution of resources. He does challenge the standard interpretations of scripture of his day. He says not a word about sexuality.

And now, in Jerusalem and soon in Canterbury, Anglican bishops will seem to have probed the mind of God and come up with the perfect formulation of truth on matters of sexuality and the authority of scripture. With little sense of irony, they will promulgate Christian teachings in areas that Jesus never trod. As much as prayers for grace and humility will be offered, I fear that formal statements from each of those conferences will serve more to divide than to reconcile.

Perhaps all of this is what Jesus is talking about when he says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ... And one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

That’s the Gospel truth that is always simmering on some back burner of our lives, so let’s stir that pot for a few minutes. The discernment of truth is not easy. It usually takes several different points of view to get close to the kind of truth that enables people to live lives with integrity and generosity. We too often settle for some partisan prejudice that masquerades as truth, but usually makes someone else a victim. Such is not truth as God would have it. Yet lynchings happened in the light of a burning cross and roadside bombs are detonated in the name of Allah. It is only a short few years since Protestants and Catholics were doing such things to each other in Ireland. Ethnic and gender bias are hardly dead in our own culture and time. God must weep at such mockery of everything that the Good News of Jesus Christ stands for.

“Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me,” Jesus said. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

If we find the value of our lives in the pious and often biased opinions we hold, then our lives will crumble to dust, Jesus seems to be saying. The invitation here is to take up some worthy challenge that helps another. To bear another’s cross. The call is to let go of some prejudice that you hold but which makes somebody else a little less than human. The collateral promise in this is that in giving up something that seemed so dear, you in fact lose nothing at all. In truth, you gain a larger circle of friends and a more loving outlook on life, and a deeper peace than mere prejudice can ever give you.

I pray that people on both sides of the conversations in Jerusalem and Canterbury will discern truths deeper than their already held convictions. And I pray further that they all will remember that those with whom the strife is sparked are also beloved friends of Jesus.

As we just sang in Hymn #661, “The peace of God, it is no peace, but stride closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing - the marvelous peace of God.” Amen.

Sermon for June 15, 2008

Exodus 19:2-8a

They had journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. 3 Then Moses went up to God; the LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: 4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, 6 but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”
7 So Moses came, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the LORD had commanded him. 8 The people all answered as one: “Everything that the LORD has spoken we will do.”

In the Name of the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and of Jacob, Rachel and Leah. Amen.

Last week I talked about Abraham and the promise that God made to the great grandfather of the children of Israel.
- Abraham was a giant of a man, remembered as they told stories around the camp fire on nights when the moon was barely a wink coming from the night sky.

Today we meet the other superhero of all the Hebrew scriptures, Moses himself.

Moses is another of those biblical characters who does not break down easily into the morsels we usually serve up as readings on Sunday mornings.
- Even more than Abraham, Moses strides across the stage, never sitting still for a complete portrait. The heart of Hebrew scripture is called the Books of Moses. What governs the people from this time forward is called the Law of Moses.

It was by artful deception and some God given fortune that Moses even survived his own birth in Egypt. At the time Pharaoh had ordered that all male infants be killed.
- Moses’ mother hid him for a few months then floated him in a basket on the Nile where she knew that Pharaoh’s daughter would find him. Which she did - and adopted him and raised him as an Egyptian prince.

But Moses always knew of his own roots as a child of Israel. He showed that when he murdered an Egyptian overseer who was flogging an Israelite slave. Word of it reached Pharaoh so Moses fled again from Pharaoh’s wrath, this time into the Sinai desert.

It was during this time of his life that Moses first heard the voice of the living God. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Then the LORD said, “I have watched the misery of my people who are in Egypt… and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey... And you are just the guy to make it happen,” God said.

Moses whined some, trying to get off this particular hook. He made a lot of excuses and finally came up with the perfect challenge:
- “OK. Suppose I do go to the leaders of Israel and tell them what you have in mind. Who shall I say sent me?”

The new name that God revealed to Moses is actually very difficult to translate from the Hebrew. It is a form of the verb “to be.” It could mean, “I am who I am becoming,” or “I am who I am,” or simply “I AM.” One translation has it, “I will be there with you.” However you translate it, one thing is clear. God is a verb, not a noun or an adjective. God’s self description is not static, but active. He likes people who are on the move, not stuck in the mud.

“I AM WHO I AM. Tell the people that I AM has sent you to them.”
- And that pretty much shut Moses up. From that point on, at least for a while, he listened and followed orders.

He went back to Egypt and told Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And he ordered up ten plagues to prove that he really meant it.

Finally Pharaoh’s advisors convinced their boss that Moses and all the other Israelites should leave Egypt before anything worse happened.
- So Moses and all the rest packed their bags and camping gear and headed towards Sinai.
- They got to a marshy patch of the Nile delta that English translators mistook to be the Red Sea, when actually it was the reed sea.

It was just three months after that that this morning’s reading takes place.
- In seven short verses Moses moves from being the great liberator to being the great lawgiver. He made several trips up and down the mountain before his conversation with I AM was over. Each time he brought some new word to the camp on the plain below Mount Sinai.

Imagine how it might have been - a summer storm crackling out of the sky, lightning drawn to this high point, thunder deafening.
- “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,” God says in this morning’s reading. “and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.”

Wow! A treasured possession. Of God’s. Nice.
- It is too bad that that promise stands in the shadow of the phrase just before it: “if you obey my voice and keep my commandments.”

Well…. Does that mean that God’s love is conditional? That if we don’t follow all the rules, then God will NOT love us?
- That is what we are taught from our earliest memories, isn’t it? “If you don’t do as I say you’ll regret it when your father gets home.” “You can come for a beer after work if you fit in.”

Is that the kind of deal that God is offering here? Must we perfectly obey the law to earn the promise?

That is what it sounds like, but that can’t be quite right because Moses himself was a murderer, bringing us the commandment not to kill.
- More import, though, is that Scripture is nothing if not the record of God’s constant reaching across the gulf that we seek to put between God and ourselves.
- Reaching out to Abraham and his wildly dysfunctional family; reaching out here to Moses, forging a new bond with a rag tag troop of escaped slaves.
- In the reign of King David God watched over Jerusalem and the temple, giving a Golden Age of peace to which future generations would look back as they dreamed of a new Messiah - though David was a murderer as well, and an adulterer.
- Through the reluctant and imperfect prophets, God sought to reestablish the constantly re-broken covenant. That seems to be the major theme of all scripture.

When Moses came down from the mountain for the last time with the tablets of the law in his arms, he saw the whole camp dancing around a golden calf that his own brother Aaron had fashioned.
- Moses threw the tablets on the ground, breaking them into pieces. It’s as if he knew that these commandments would never be properly kept.

If the relationship with God were really dependent on obeying the law, then that would have been the end of it right there.
- The whole deal would have been off, wrecked before it was even delivered.
- But that was not it. Moses continued to lead the people towards the promised land because that part of God’s promise to Abraham had not yet been fully realized.

The Promised Land was elusive. They thought they had it for a while, but while Abraham was still alive, famine drove them to Egypt where eventually they would become slaves.
- It was from this status that Moses led the people towards the Promised Land.

Understand that Moses’ band was not lost in the desert. They knew perfectly well that to get from Egypt to Canaan you head northeast up along the coast. But Moses led them southeast into the wilderness.

Somehow he knew that they needed some serious time of rebuilding if they were truly to come together as a nation.
- Having just come through an excruciating period of slavery and abuse, they needed an extended retreat before leaping forward into an uncertain future.
- They needed to reclaim their identity as children of God before they could forge themselves into a united people. That was Moses’ job with them in the desert. He is the archetypal priest-in-charge.

So Moses led them by stages to the Promised Land.
- They broke some of the rules along the way. They discovered that being on the outs with God made them anxious and even miserable.

A rabbi colleague once told me that the Hebrew word “Torah,” which we translate as “law” does mean law in the sense that we usually understand. It would be better translated as “teaching.”
- Starting even with St. Paul, Christians made Torah sound rigid – what we do mean by law - so that the grace of Jesus would be all the more apparent.
- But how might Torah have made sense at the time?

To help themselves stay closer to God, the Hebrews did recall how God had led them out of bondage, and they tried to stay away from idols, things they had thought up themselves as if they could make them happy and content.

In their better moments they understood that actually knowing the name of God, I AM, was a sign that they had a relationship with God that should not be treated casually. They tried to treat God’s name with respect.

They discovered other things: taking a real day off each week reminded them that they were more than their job descriptions.
- they learned that treating their parents well protected their own place in the procession of time.
- they somehow knew that killing each other was a bad idea. Life, while abundant, is still a limited resource.

Some even learned that messing around with marriage vows was a bad plan. It seemed that sticking with one person, working through conflicts and hard times, was the best chance they had for actually growing up.

Stealing and making false promises caused painful fractures in the community.
- And they did sense that being jealous of what others had simply drew them into a morass of self-pity and resentment.

They only needed these ten fairly comprehensive but terse rules to make it all work.

It turned out that the Covenant that Moses brought down from the mountain was not a bunch of arbitrary rules designed to make life hard.
- It was a gift that made life more gracious.

They discovered that the “IF” of God’s promise was not God being stingy. It was just a reminder of what to look out for.
- Both as community and as individuals, they functioned better when they paid attention to the teachings that Moses had received from God.

So hear God’s promise, first to Abraham, reaffirmed through Moses, echoing down the ages so that it is now addressed directly to us: “Out of all the peoples of the earth, you are my treasured possession.”

And that’s both Torah and the Gospel truth. AMEN.

Sermon for June 8, 2008

Genesis 12:1-9 June 8th 2008

12 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and invoked the name of the LORD. 9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.


In the Name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. Amen.


The problem with the way most of us hear scripture is that we hear it in little excerpts of just a few verses. On Sunday mornings we are given no context. This morning’s introduction of Abraham and Sarah is a case in point.
- The saga of these people is too great and too important to be heard in snippets, nine verses at a time. Abraham was a huge character who deserves a bigger stage, whose story needs to be told in a bigger sweep than any one lesson can contain.... so we’ll look beyond this morning’s text to reach a fuller understanding... I am grateful to my colleague Barbara Taylor for the way she tells a tale.

The people at the center of this story we know best as Abraham and Sarah, but as the story opens they are Abram and Sarai. We’ll get to how their names were changed in a few minutes.

In the story we just heard about Abram, this is the first time the old patriarch had actually heard the voice of God. Abram was 75 years old and he had traipsed up from Babylon into Syria with his father’s clan and with his own wife Sarai.

Then we are told that the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

And when they got to Canaan, God added, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

Now on the face of it - as we might casually hear it - that’s pretty neat. Abram’s kids are going to inherit quite an estate.
- The problem is that all we know about Abram and Sarai as this story opens is that Sarai is barren. No children. And that was about the worst thing that could happen to a couple in those days. To make matters worse, Abram was 75 while Sarai was 66. The prospects weren’t good; nonetheless, Abram built an altar in thanksgiving for the promise. And he began to hope.

Taking the story of Abram and Sarai beyond this morning’s reading, God popped up every few years and reiterated the promise. “To your descendants I will give this land.”
- But there was the same problem: no descendants.

Then there was a famine in the land so Abram’s household moved to Egypt which always had plenty of grain.

In Egypt, Abram didn’t show the best of his character. The Genesis writer tells us that Sarai was very beautiful and Abram was afraid that the Egyptians would kill him in order to claim Sarai, even though she was in her 70s. So Abram said she was his sister, at which point Pharaoh claimed her as a concubine. In return, Abram got status and servants and became rich. There is an unflattering term for men who do what Abram did.

Somehow when Pharaoh learned that he had been tricked he just kicked Abram and Sarai out when he really had just cause to kill Abram. But that would have spoiled the plot.

So Abram and his household returned to Canaan with his nephew Lot and his tribe. After arguments broke out between Abram’s herders and Lot’s herders, in order to avoid a blood feud they agreed to part company. Lot took his family into the land East of the Jordan River while Abram stayed in the hills to the West.

But still there was no child. They were 87 and 78 yet still there was no clear sign that God was going to keep the promise. So Sarai convinced Abram that he should hedge his bets. “Have a child with my servant Hagar,” Sarai suggested. So he did and the result was a son named Ishmael.

This is the first instance in the bible of a blended family, and it didn’t work too well. Sarai was jealous and Hagar was kind of smug. The years rolled by and it must have been difficult for everybody. Hagar feeling that she was not getting the respect she deserved, Sarai feeling like a failure.
Ishmael as an adolescent knowing he is viewed as second best, even though he is the heir apparent. And there was Abram. Abram who would go out into the sky bright night hoping to hear that voice again. Hoping to hear some detail of how things would unfold.

“What’s up?” Sarai would ask. “Nothing,” he’d reply, as he chewed on a stem of sage grass.

And then when Abram was 99 while Sarai was a spring chicken of only 90, the voice came again.

“I am God Almighty,” God said, though what he actually said was in Hebrew: “I am El Shaddai.”
- That was rather important. God had told Abram his name, El Shaddai. A few hundred years later he’d use a different name when he introduces himself to Moses. Then the name will be Yahweh. But for Abram it was El Shaddai. And El Shaddai said to Abram something that might sound like a small thing to us but it was a big deal to the patriarch. “You shall no longer be called Abram” God said. “Instead you will be called Abraham,” which means “father of a multitude.”

Throughout scripture people are given new names and it always signifies a changed relationship. God seems to be moving into a higher gear.
- “And your wife will no longer be Sarai but will be Sarah,” God adds. Than means “princess.”

That was a bit of a puzzle still, because Sarah was still childless, even with the new name.
- The puzzle seems just to be extended when three messengers come, apparently from God, and inform the couple that they are going to have a son. Abraham seems to have laughed in renewed hope while Sarah laughed in derision. She was, after all, as scripture tells us, “past the age of child bearing.”
- But it’s still all promise and no action. Sarah is yet to wake up sick one morning and realize that she has something important to tell her husband.

As you might understand, the mood in the camp was not always easy. Hagar apparently became rather snippy and refused to address “Princess” by her new name. Abraham's name of “Father of a Multitude” seemed like a cruel joke to everybody who loved him and like crazy arrogance to everybody else.

There are a few more memorable stories in the Abraham saga, like the departure of Hagar and Ishmael and when the patriarch almost killed the son he had only waited a century to get. And there was the incident at Sodom and Gomorra. But they will hold for other sermons.

Starting with this morning’s reading and extending for twenty-four years, all that Abraham and Sarah had to go on was a series of promises the realization of which only seemed to get less and less likely.
- But still they lived with hope.

That must have been really hard. It maybe feel a bit dumb to allow yourself to be that gullible.

What this whole story tells us is that it’s a hard thing to live by a promise - live by it day in and month out, year by year to be reminded of it by the night sky and by the murmur of your lover by your side and even by your own name that was given to you in a special moment.

It is hard to believe in a promise that you cannot make come true. You simply cannot wrap up this particular train set on behalf of Santa Claus.

Everything is future tense. Whenever God speaks, all the blessings are yet to come. You will receive the land; you will have a son; the world will be blessed through you. So what is there to live on right now we might ask.

Well, where might we look for such food for the spirit? What better way is there to live than to be shaped by a promise, and a divine one at that?
- This story is telling us that that’s a pretty good way to begin a day - wondering what foretaste of the promise might be waiting nearby.
- And so, we latter day Abrahams and Sarahs do not live with wistful backward glances, nor are we to complain about any present dysfunction. God calls us to look forward with hope.
- That is what we are called to here at Emmanuel Church. Whatever we know of old disappointments and present disagreements pails next to the promise that we are bound for glory.
- A couple of weeks ago Michael Summers joked about a plot he was hatching to make Emmanuel Parish, Keyser into the flagship parish of a revitalized Anglican Communion. That might be a little over the top, but it’s the right direction.
- Our task, it seems to me, is to set a course and then let God set the timetable.
- A life lived with such a focus could relax into appreciating every day as it passes. Every encounter, each moment, is a seed that can be nurtured to bear fruit - and it is all promise. The world itself is the voice of God, inviting us to live with hope, to be awake to the possibilities and to know that everything echoes the heartbeat of God, that everything is holy.

That is what Abraham and Sarah learned. For twenty-four years they lived with a hope that hung precariously from a promise from God. For a quarter of a century they tended their flocks, moved through famine and wealth, deception and mercy, family alienation and the sweet gentleness of old age, always with an awareness of God’s promise leading them forward. And apparently they enjoyed each other as husband and wife.

Then one spring morning as Abraham neared his 100th birthday and Sarah was 90, she awoke to a new queeziness in her belly. Her husband who had come in the previous night from gazing up into the countless stars as he often did, was sleeping softly beside her.
- She shook him gently. “Abraham,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

Sermon for Pentecost/Mother's Day (May 11, 2008)

Acts 2:1-11 May 11th, 2008
John 7:37-39 Pentecost/Mother’s Day

In the Name of God, who is Spirit and who is Holy. Amen

Pentecost is an excellent day on which to begin a new chapter in a parish’s unfolding story. And when you add Mother’s Day to the mix, then we are triple blessed. For the next few minutes I will try to keep those three realities of mother, church, and new beginning in focus.

A while back, Barbara, my wife, was in Williamsburg helping her mother move from her apartment into an assisted living unit. Mom has not been very happy with the new arrangement. She was reluctant to give up some of the trinkets she has gathered over the years, reluctant to acknowledge the necessary changes in her life, but new circumstances required some letting go of old memorabilia. So Barbara returned to Fort Ashby with some things of her mother’s. We have hung in our home a Bavarian cuckoo clock that has hung in Mom’s dining room for as long as I can remember.

Mom’s name is Agnes and she is 95 years old, the last surviving of Barbara’s and my parents. For the past 44 years she has been a great mother-in-law and I love her dearly. Even though she grumbles at times, she can be funny and even a bit flirtatious, as she has always liked to be. When Barbara and I last visited, we took Mom out to lunch. She told us where she’d like to eat. She studied the menu with care. A gin and tonic, she thought, was in order. We had a good time together.

Over the past couple of years Mom has taken some falls that knock the stuffing out of her for a while. Her emotions are frayed and she is lonely, even though she has a lot of company, and she is fearful but does not know of what.

If it is a painful thing to see our parents as they struggle with changing life circumstances. I can only suppose that it is much worse to be on the inside of that struggle, trying to make sense of changes that don’t seem fair or necessary. Mom has adapted to using a walker, but she is rebelling against the other changes going on in her life. She does not like the sense that the boundaries of her life are shrinking. She does not like this new feeling that the world is somehow alien, perhaps even hostile. When she says she wants to go home, that means where she lived until fifteen years ago.

She did not used to be like that. As a young mother of three daughters – Barbara being the middle child – Agnes would push her girls out into the world to explore and to meet new people. Barbara tells stories from her childhood about forts built by the creek behind her home, and about playing with friends, unsupervised for hours. By contrast, our two grandchildren in Colorado hardly ever have an unsupervised moment. When Barbara was called home it was not because the world was dangerous but because supper was ready. Barbara remembers once when a man came to their house. It was the late 1940s, employment was scarce in upstate New York, and the man was looking for a meal. In those days they were called hobos. Mom made him a sandwich and talked with him as he ate it on the porch. It was simple hospitality.

Throughout her life, Mom has loved to play music. When Barbara and I were dating, as we walked up the pathway to her home we could hear Mom playing her Wurlitzer organ. She rarely played for any audience other than herself.

Above all, from her mother Barbara knew with complete conviction that she was loved. Her mother told her that regularly. No comparisons were made nor were conditions laid down. Barbara and her sisters were loved, and not much was feared.

Mom was widowed ten years ago. We, her family, all worried that she’d miss her husband so much that she’d shrink inside herself. Though she still misses Gerry, she did anything but shrink. She continued to make new friends in the retirement community to which they had moved a few years earlier. It is in the nature of retirement communities that the population turns over with some regularity. It is important to make new friends. In the years of her being a widow she has seemed even more unapologetically herself. She became a bit more connected to her faith. In her better moments she has had a sense of moving onward.

But moving onward doesn't always mean a cheerful journey. The death of someone we love is a burden to carry. Onward for my mother-in-law meant making a new life after 60 years of a partnership in which she had become a mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. Onward for Barbara and her sisters means feeling less grounded, less able to relax while Mom carries on. And Mom does carry on, often irascible, sometimes charming, and occasionally confounding. She loved Bill Clinton and would have kept on voting for him; and now she loves George W. Bush just as much. Loves ‘em both. Go figure.

And in all of that, Agnes might not be a bad image for how the church is called to be. Today is the Feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. And it’s a day when my life is joining with yours, so it’s a new birth for all of us.

One of the medieval images used to describe the Church is “Mother.” It does seem to me that Mother Church is a lot like my beloved mother-in-law. She is in danger of becoming brittle in her old age. We are irascible and contentious about things that either do not matter or that Jesus would resolve simply by opening his arms a little wider, welcoming a few more people into the family. We are often pretty good at feeding people who are hungry – but too often we do it through the safe distance of an anonymous check.

I fear that the church is no longer the young mother who sends her children out to meet new people and to explore, unsupervised for hours. The church has become old, pre-occupied with fear, caught up in worldly conflicts and forgetting that her Lord makes all things new, young again. How might it be if we, as church, decided that the most important thing was to make sure that we each are loved – without comparison and without condition. Loved.
- How might it be if we sat down with someone who is eating a needed sandwich and we talked with them for a while? Not trying to straighten them out, but just being a kind ear.
- How might it be if we loved equally people on both sides of a political divide?
- How might it be if we made music and danced for the pure delight of it?
- How might it be if we were all encouraged to explore the world in which we live – explore it without fear of being so closely supervised that we are nervous about our own thoughts and questionings.

This morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes the puzzling and happy chaos of the earliest disciples of Jesus as they felt a new Spirit move amongst them.
This was an adventurous spirit that embraced people across every imaginable line of division. This spirit was one that made all things new and propelled the early believers out into the world as ambassadors of God’s love for all people. The promise of that spirit is what embraces Emmanuel Church in Keyser, WV, as we gather today.

We live in a fearful and backward-looking age, in which the church sometimes seems trapped in nostalgia, convinced of its own rightness and resentful of new ideas, trapped in a religiosity that is more interested in being safe than in being either adventurous or generous.

We forget that we come from adventurers like Abraham and Moses and Paul and most particularly Jesus. They were guided only by promise and hope. Those whose faith we claim never knew what was around the next bend. They only trusted that God was with them. And we all know that that is what “Emmanuel” means – God with us. Both personally and institutionally, as we try to protect what we have earned, created or horded, we forget that Jesus promised a new creation, more in the tradition of Moses the adventurer than of the Pharisees who had transformed faith from a lively relationship with God into a set of rules.

We are called to better than that. We are called to love one another and to love strangers. We are called to love people at all points of any political spectrum. We are called to a lively relationship with God, not to an obligation to maintain the political balance of an ancient institution.

Do not forget for a moment that we are called to serve the hungry, not to argue about doctrine. We are called to welcome the stranger amongst us, not check credentials and vie for status.

So on this Feast of Pentecost I give thanks for my mother-in-law Agnes. I give thanks for the way she pushed her daughters out into the world to be adventurous. And I give thanks for all mothers who have taught their children that the world is an exciting place to explore, that the hungry should be fed, and that they- both the children and the hungry - are loved without comparison and without condition.

As we all begin together this new Pentecost for Emmanuel, may Mother Church grow in such an understanding of what it means to be church.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon by Bishop Martin Townsend, D.D., Priest-in-Charge