Love One Another (Easter 5 April 28 2013)

Homily.  Yr C Easter 5, April 28 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 11:1-18; Ps 148; Rev 21:1-6; Jn 13:31-35

Love One Another

I want you to imagine this situation.  You’ve just been told that you have one day left to live.  You have one opportunity to communicate with your friends, to give them one final message.  It’s your last chance to sum things up for them in a way that they’ll remember when you’re gone.  But here’s the catch.  The only way you’ve got to communicate with them is to send them a tweet.  And for those of you who use Twitter, you’ll know that your tweet is limited to 140 characters, so you have to get right to the point, no wasted words, no long-winded speeches allowed.  What would you say?  What would you write in that tweet?

Jesus faced a situation a bit like that the last time he sat down with his disciples.  Of course there wasn’t the tweeting part, but he knew it was his last chance to speak to them.  Judas, his betrayer, had just left to arrange to have Jesus arrested later that night, which in turn would lead to Jesus’ execution the following day.  The scene at that last supper is a tense one.  And Jesus must have thought to himself, “What is the one thing that I want my followers to know and to remember when I’m gone?  What’s the one message they need to hear and learn so that they can carry on my work when I’m no longer with them?”

And so Jesus gets right to the point:  32 words, 130 characters, well within the limits of Twitter:

Love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

This is the one thing that Jesus wants us to know and do as his followers.  Love one another.  It is at once so simple and yet so difficult.

It’s simple because we know what it means to love.  It’s hard-wired right into our DNA.  Now, there may be some complicated situations when we’re not sure what to do, but 99% of the time we know what it means to love, we know what we should do, and it’s something that each of us does on a regular basis. That’s something we should celebrate.  As humans we are, after all, created in the image of God, and so loving is in our nature.  What’s more, as followers of Jesus we have been blessed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit of God which dwells within us urges each of us to love one another, just as the Spirit urged Peter to get up and go to Cornelius in our first reading this morning from Acts.

  

Love one another just as I have loved you.  It is simple but yet it’s also difficult.  Because often we know what it means to love and yet we don’t do it.  What is it that gets in our way?  Sometimes we’re afraid.  Sometimes our fear of the other overwhelms our love for the other.  Sometimes we’re tired.  After all, love is not effortless.  Sometimes we’re too busy, or too focused on our own goals, or we feel that we don’t have enough time, and the list goes on.

Way back in 1973 there was an interesting experiment done amongst the students at the Princeton Divinity School.  This was a group of young men, in those days it was just men, preparing for ordained ministry. Each of them was asked as part of the experiment to give a spontaneous sermon on why people should always stop to help strangers and each was then told that he had to rush over to the church immediately to deliver the sermon, and that it was important not to be late.  Now as it happened, on their way to the church, each of the students passed a man slumped in an alleyway, in a state of apparent distress.  Unbeknownst to the students, the man was acting the part for the study.

Now even though these priests-in-training were about to preach about helping strangers, how many of them do you think actually stopped to help the man in distress as they hurried along, trying to get to the church on time to deliver their important sermon?  How many?  Well, it was ten percent.  Only one in ten took the time to stop to see if he could help.

Love is difficult because love can be costly.  It can sometimes mean giving up on our own goals, whether that goal is to be on time to preach a sermon, or something else completely, something that might be more applicable to your situation.  It can also mean sometimes that we have to risk criticism from others.  In our first reading from the Book of Acts, Peter reaches out to Cornelius, the Gentile, the Roman soldier.  Peter must have been afraid when a Roman soldier knocked at his door.  But at the urging of the Spirit, he goes with him.  In many ways the book of Acts is all about how Jesus new commandment that we love one another actually plays out in the real, complicated, messy lives of his followers.  And one of the biggest questions that Jesus’ followers have to wrestle with in the book of Acts is the following:  Jesus calls us to love each other, but who gets to be included in that word “the other”?  Is loving one another limited to loving our friends and family?  Is it limited to loving our own “people”, however we may set those boundaries?  Or are we called to go beyond these limitations? To love the other, the stranger, the foreigner, the one who is different from us, the one we are afraid of, the one who is our enemy?

Of course Jesus himself had addressed that very question in the Gospel of Luke, when he was asked “who is my neighbor?” and he responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan.  But it seems that the lesson of that story didn’t really sink in, not even with Jesus closest friends and followers.

We read in Acts that the early community of followers of Jesus was a Jewish community who couldn’t even imagine that the other that Jesus was talking about might include Gentiles.  And so when Peter, driven by the Spirit of God, goes to the house of the foreigner Cornelius, breaks what he believes is God’s law by entering and eating with them, and then he teaches them and baptizes them, can you imagine the reception he’s going to get when he gets back to Jerusalem?  Peter is criticized, and he is forced to defend himself.  Loving the other can sometimes get us into trouble.  If the other is one of the marginalized in society, then loving the other can put us onto the margins as well.

A few years ago, there was a terrible tragedy that took place in New York City.  A man named Hugo Tale-Yax, a Guatemalan immigrant, homeless because he had just lost his job, early one morning he came upon a woman who was being attacked by a man.  He sprang into action and intervened, possibly saving the woman’s life.  But the assailant had a knife, and he stabbed Mr. Tale-Yax in the chest.  The assailant fled, Mr. Tale-Yax fell to the sidewalk, bleeding to death.  During the next 90 minutes, video camera records showed that there were about 20 people who walked past Mr. Tale-Yax as he lay dying on the sidewalk and not one stopped to help or to call the police.  When someone finally did call 911 and the firefighters arrived, the homeless man was dead.

I don’t know why those passersby didn’t help.  Perhaps they were afraid.  Perhaps they thought it was just another drunk lying on the sidewalk.  Perhaps, like those priests-in-training, they were focused on their own stuff, or they were in a hurry.

I don’t know much about the homeless man either.  I don’t know why he chose to act.  I don’t know if he was an atheist, or a Jew, or a Christian or a Muslim.  I don’t know if he had been baptized, or had ever attended a church, or had ever heard the words of Jesus.  I don’t know how he would have described himself or his beliefs.

But I do know this about him.  Hugo Tale-Yax, by his actions, showed himself to be a disciple of Jesus.

Because Jesus said “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.”

Amen.

Some Believe, Some Don`t (Easter 4, April 21 2013)

Homily :  Yr C Easter 4, April 21 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 9:36-43; Ps 23; Rev 7:9-17; Jn 10:22-30

Some Believe, Some Don’t 

Have you ever thought about how the gospels that we read on Sundays came together?  After all, the gospel writers had three years worth of material to choose from.  Not every story about Jesus, not every word he said could be written down in one document.  John, the author of the reading that we just heard this morning, says as much.  He finishes his book with the following words:

`Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.`

One reason that a particular story might have been included in the book is that it responded to a particular concern of the people for whom the book was written.  I suspect that’s true for today’s text.  Jesus is in the Temple, and there some people come up to him and still can’t believe that he’s the Messiah after all that he’s said and done.  I think that this is a story told in response to a very specific question that was being asked in the community of John during the first century AD.  Why is it that some people believe, and some people don`t believe?

John`s community lived in a time of division.  They believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God.  But they were surrounded by others who didn`t, and this became a source of division and conflict and at times even persecution.  Sometimes this division cut right through families, with some family members believing and others not believing.  And so quite rightly, people were asking `Why is it that some believe and some don’t?`

It’s a question we can well ask in our own time.  We too live in a world where some believe and some don’t.  Why?  Why is it that of two children brought up in the same way in the same family, one will profess faith and one other won’t?  I hear this question most often from parents and grandparents, and sometimes it’s spoken with great concern.  Why is it that our kids don’t go to church anymore?

And so in response, John tells us this story.  Jesus was walking in the temple when the Jews gathered around him and said to him, `if you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.`  And Jesus replies, using the image of the sheep and shepherd which was well known to his listeners,

`I have told you and you do not believe.  You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.  My sheep hear my voice.  I know them and they follow me.`

Now, we can go in two very different directions with this response.  In fact interpreters and theologians have gone in different directions through the centuries on this question.

We can interpret Jesus` response by going in the direction of predestination, the idea that somehow God has in advance predetermined who are going to be the sheep and who are not going to be the sheep, and that is why the sheep, the in-crowd if you like, are enabled to believe and the rest just don’t get it no matter how plain it is.

To be honest, I find this line of thinking to be unhelpful.  And in saying this, I hope I’m not offending any of you who are Calvinists!  But the idea of a God who predetermines things just doesn’t mesh very well for me with the loving God that I see revealed in Jesus, the one who calls people to respond to God’s invitation to be his people.

So I want to go in another direction with you this morning, and I want to do a little more exploration concerning the very nature of belief.  I think that in our modern world we have made some bad assumptions about belief.  And if you want to put the blame on someone, well we might as well go back a few hundred years and put the blame on Rene Descartes.  You remember Descartes?  He`s the one who in a quest for certainty made that famous statement, `I think therefore I am`.  And for four centuries since that famous statement, through the Enlightenment, Scepticism, Rationalism up until today, we have assumed that belief comes first.  That thought precedes action.  That our beliefs shape our behaviour. 

But I`m not so sure that belief comes first.  Modern psychology is now telling us that it is our behaviour that shapes our beliefs, not the other way around!  They`ve done experiments.  When people start recycling, after a while their concern for the environment increases.  When someone puts a political sign on their lawn, their support for that candidate rises dramatically.  Makes sense.  Our behaviour does shape our beliefs.  When you ask me if I believe that my wife loves me, I do.  But I only started to believe it after we had spent some time together, not the first time we met.  More and more we are coming to realize that behaviour shapes belief.

And it’s not just behaviour that shapes belief.  It’s also belonging that shapes belief.  Do you remember this past October when Diana Butler Bass came to speak to us?  One of her key messages was about the three B`s, Believing, Behaving and Belonging.  And she told us that we in churches have for hundreds of years been assuming, along with Descartes and everyone else, that first you believed, then you started behaving in a certain way, and then after that you started to belong to the church community.  But maybe we’ve had it backwards.  Because in my experience what actually happens is that first you belong to the community, to the church.  Then you start to behave in certain ways, new ways, loving one another, following Jesus` teachings, signing up to do coffee on a Sunday morning.  And then you find that your belonging and behaving starts to shape your beliefs.

Now I don’t want you to think I’m making this up, so let’s go back to our Gospel text.  Hear again what Jesus says in response to his questioners` failure to believe:

`You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.  My sheep hear my voice.  I know them and they follow me.`

Did you catch the four key words?

Belong.

Follow.

Hear.

Know (and remember that in Bible-speak, when we use the word know, we’re talking about relationship, in this image, the relationship between the shepherd and the sheep.)

Belong.  Follow.  Hear.  Know.   These are the things that lead to belief.

Let`s take the first two, belong and follow.  Aren`t these the two words that pretty much sum up the early Christian community, the one we`ve been reading about in the book of Acts?  The early Christian community was a movement, not a belief system.  The emphasis was on loving one another and following the lead of the Spirit, not on right doctrine.  In fact the first name for Christians recorded in the book of Acts is `the people who belong to the Way.`  In today’s readings, we are told of Tabitha, a model disciple, and we are told that `she was devoted to good works and acts of charity.`  For those early Christians, it was the experience of belonging to the community of those who follow Jesus and living that out on a daily basis that shaped and enabled their beliefs.  Christianity is a way of life that is lived out in community.

Jesus also says in today’s text, `My sheep hear my voice and I know them.`  I understand this as a call to be in relationship.  The sheep and the shepherd have an on-going relationship.  They know each other.  Sheep won’t follow just anyone, but they will follow the one that they know, the one whose voice they recognize and hear.

One of my favourite theologians, Karl Rahner, a leading voice in the church in the 20^th century, once said that `unless all Christians become mystics there will be no Christianity.`  I think that what he meant is that unless we enter into a relationship with God and learn to experience God as a real presence in our own lives, Christian faith and belief will be difficult to sustain in an age where we no longer believe things just because somebody else tells us we should.  And because God is a mystery, God is something we’ll never fully comprehend, then entering into relationship with God makes all of us mystics.  Not mystics in the sense of some sort of elite or people gifted with special visions, but mystics in the sense of what Rahner calls everyday mysticism, the growing awareness and experience of God`s Spirit in the ordinary, everyday stuff of our lives.

So, why do some people believe and some not believe?  We believe because we belong to a community of faith that nourishes and shapes us and is a living manifestation of God`s presence in our world.  We believe because we have chosen to follow Jesus, to live out his commandment that we love one another.  We believe because we act as if we have been called by God to be members of God’s family and serve those around us with justice and humility.  We believe because we are everyday mystics.  We pray.  We listen for God`s voice.  We are attentive to the movement of the spirit in our everyday lives.

Amen.

Peter and Paul (Easter 3, April 14 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Easter 3, April 14 2013, St. Albans

Readings: Acts 9:1-20; Ps 30; Rev 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

Peter and Paul

(an interactive homily)

There’s lots of material for us in today’s readings and there are many different directions that we could go in.  We could, for example, try to answer one of the questions that has stumped theologians for centuries:  why is it that Peter, totally naked, decided to get dressed before he jumped into the water?

But I’m going to leave that for you to figure out on your own.  Instead, I want to turn to the two great commissioning stories that we just read, one after the other today.  The first is often referred to as the conversion of Paul and the second as the reconciliation of Peter.

Peter and Paul were the two great leaders of the early church.  The best known of the apostles, the greatest of the saints of the church, the ones that get most of the press in the New Testament.  In a way it’s surprising that we find them together in our lectionary readings today because Peter and Paul were very different people.

Peter was the uneducated fisherman, called by Jesus as a disciple, who was with Jesus from the beginning of his ministry.  He spent three years with Jesus and was one of his closest friends.  Peter was an impulsive leader, quick to speak up and take initiative, but often getting it wrong, saying and doing the wrong things.  You remember some of those moments.  When Jesus asked the disciples, “Who Am I?”, it was Peter who responded “You are the Messiah”.  Peter was the first to recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the chosen one sent by God.   But he refused to believe that the Messiah would have to suffer, and Jesus had to rebuke him in no uncertain terms, saying “Get behind me Satan.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus is arrested, Peter is the one who pulls out a sword cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s slave, and Jesus has to tell him to put his sword away.

And when Jesus tells the disciples that he is going to his death, Peter claims that he is ready to follow him and lay down his life for Jesus.  Yet, when confronted after Jesus’ arrest, it is Peter who denies Jesus three times.

Then, after Jesus’ resurrection, it is Peter who becomes the acknowledged leader of the early community of Christians and the rock on whom the church is built, who defies the authorities, preaches passionately and performs great works of healing.

Paul on the other hand was a very different person.  Paul was an educated theologian and a Roman Citizen.  He never met Jesus during his lifetime – his encounter was with the risen Christ as we heard in our reading today.  Paul was the one who had the great conversion experience that we read about today.  He went from being someone who rounded up Christians and put them in jail to the greatest of the Christian missionaries, who traveled the Roman Empire building up Christian communities and preaching the gospel.

Whereas Peter was impulsive, Paul was a thinker.  After his encounter with Christ, he went away for three years to Arabia and Damascus to consider and think about what had just happened to him, what it meant and how he was to respond.  But when he did get it figured out, he was passionate and had a tremendous sense of urgency.

Whereas Peter’s ministry was at the centre of the Christian community, Paul’s ministry was on the edges.  His mission was to the Gentiles.  He pushed the limits of Christian practice and understanding.  He raised the difficult questions, such as whether Gentiles needed to follow the Jewish law?

Whereas Peter was the acknowledged leader and apostle, Paul was always fighting to establish his credentials.  Paul was often embroiled in conflict, and he wasn’t shy about explaining why he was right.  He even came into conflict with Peter.  One of the first great decisions of the early church was how to deal with non-Jews.  Though Peter and Paul worked out an agreement on this, at one point, Paul was so upset with Peter that in his letter to the Galatians he tells them that he “opposed Peter to his face”.   I imagine that Paul probably wasn’t an easy person to get along with.

A number of years ago, around the time when the Lord of the Rings movies had just come out, I used to do youth group retreats using the Lord of the Rings as a theme.  And one of the things I used to do on these retreats was to ask the youth which character in the Fellowship of the Ring they identify with?

So I thought I’d ask you the same thing this morning.  Who do you identify with, Peter or Paul?  Are you more like Peter or Paul?

And why?     

I tend to identify more with Paul.  I’m not sure why, it’s a bit of a gut instinct thing.  Perhaps because I’m not as impulsive as Peter.  I like to think things through like Paul, but once I’ve done that I can be quite passionate about my point of view, sometimes even a bit abrasive like Paul.  I also like the way Paul works at the edges and pushes the limits, in terms of mission and in terms of his theology.

How about you?  How many “Peter’s” have we got here?  How many “Paul’s”?

It’s good that we have both “Peters” and “Pauls” in our community, because we need both in the church.  We need the Peters that are the acknowledged leaders, the ones that have learned from their mistakes, and we need the Pauls who are passionate thinkers who push the boundaries of our faith.

Jesus knows that we need both Peters and Pauls.  In today’s readings he commissions both Peter and Paul, he gives both of them jobs to do.  But did you notice that he does it in two very different ways, and that he gives them two very different missions?

To Peter he says, “Feed my sheep”.  In fact he says it three times.

To Paul he says, “Proclaim the gospel.  Bring my name before peoples and kings.”  And immediately after his sight is restored, Paul goes into the synagogues and proclaims that Jesus is the Son of God.

The church has been commissioned by Jesus to both “feed my sheep” and to “proclaim the gospel”.  That’s why we need both our Peters and our Pauls.

We have those who in the tradition of Peter are good at “feeding the sheep”.  They provide leadership, care and nurture for the community.  They are the good shepherds who seek the lost, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak, and rescue and gather the sheep.  They look after the needs of the community.

We have those who in the tradition of Paul, “proclaim the message”.  They are persistent, like fighters and goal-oriented like athletes.  They convince, rebuke, encourage and teach.  The message they proclaim is the good news of Jesus Christ, and they proclaim that message by words and by actions.  I always remember the words of St. Francis of Assisi, another of our great saints, who said “proclaim the gospel; and if necessary, use words.”

And so again I turn to you.  How do you see your ministry in the church?  Do you put more emphasis on “feeding the sheep” or on “proclaiming the gospel”?

It is important for us as a congregation that we are able to take up both of these commissions, the commission of Peter to “feed my sheep” and the commission given to Paul to “proclaim the gospel”.  We need to figure out how to do both of these things here in our time and place.   How do you think we’re doing?

In my experience we in our churches are pretty good at the “feed my sheep” part of things.  We’ve been blessed with caring, compassionate people who look after each other.  I know that I’ve certainly been the recipient of such caring and compassion from my church community, particularly in times of need.

How are we doing at proclaiming the gospel?

Some of us find that to be a bit more of a challenge.  Maybe we’re not used to proclaiming the gospel, we’ve gotten out of practice.  Well since it’s the Easter season, the season of resurrection, maybe we should practice a bit.  In fact, maybe you could just take a minute to turn to the person next to you and in the spirit of this Easter season, share with them one area, one time or place, that you experience God as alive and present in your life.

As we hear and reflect on the stories of Peter and Paul, of their encounters with the risen Lord, it is an opportunity for us to reflect on how we’re doing and where we’re going as a community in response to the two great commissions that have been passed on to us.

Proclaim the gospel.

Feed my sheep.

Amen.