Bishop's Blog

Bishop Scarfe shares his experiences, reflections, and sermons.







Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Reflections on Visitation to Calvary Sioux City—17 August 2014

I believe that I found the real Field of Dreams on the corner of K49 and C38 in northwest Iowa. It is stunning and so essentially Iowa at its most classic. My only regret is that I did not follow my instinct and stop to take a 360-degree video from the center of the junction. Given Iowa rural traffic, I had the time. Instead I was able to zigzag my way home through countryside I had not passed through in all my travels.

I was finishing a full day that began with a Eucharistic celebration with the peoples of Calvary Sioux City and All Saints Storm Lake. The latter came over to present a couple for reaffirmation and reception while their newly baptized son witnessed. Seeing that the son was 15 years of age, and indicating that if I had baptized him I would also have confirmed him, we went ahead and I confirmed him too, along with another young man from Calvary. An older man returning to the Church and seeking to reaffirm his faith and membership made up those presented.  Both congregations are experiencing growth these days.  There was optimism and good energy, too, at the Chapter conversation/teaching session on Saturday afternoon where we were enriched with people from St Thomas and St Paul’s in Sioux City, and from St George’s Le Mars. It was the discovery that one of the matriarchs from Le Mars was fighting cancer that took me to go further north to visit with her at the nursing facility, and to come across the corner of K49 and C38 on my way home!

Calvary Sioux City is a plucky congregation. It is helped by being the home of a large, four-generation family of Episcopalians whose ancestry probably goes further back than that. The confirmand was the latest to assume responsibility for his baptismal vows in this formal way. The congregation, however, continues to be alert to the most recent offerings on congregational development. They carried on the liturgical space and action ideas of Richard Giles from Convention 2012, and they inspire conversation that leads to thinking of what it might mean to be Episcopalians for Sioux City rather than separated in our individual mission goals as congregations. Their attitude encouraged me to preach around this idea, especially coming off my time in Bradford on vacation. The clergy of Sioux City do know each other well. And it is very possible that they might be able to launch for us this new sense of mission within a defined community, not just as individual units, but as the Episcopal presence collectively. What would it be like if vestries devoted one vestry meeting per quarter to meet together with other vestries in their city or county to discuss mission together? And what if that grew to become a routine ecumenical experience?

Two additional pieces of ministry during the weekend was first to welcome the pastor and deacon of the South Sudanese congregation that had been nesting in TrinityDenison. They have submitted a formal request to form an Episcopal mission for their people with 27 founding members. The second activity was to meet with the bishop’s committee of St Paul’s and affirm an extension for Bishop Mabuza’s time with them through 2016. The search process will begin in Fall 2015 by which time we hope there will be a wider pool of candidates, and an ongoing growth of the leadership at St Paul’s. The Bishop’s Committee is now eight people plus two youth representatives—one for the youth in general and another for the acolytes. I have asked Bishop Mabuza to oversee the work with the South Sudanese community in the western region, as well as to receive an aspirant discerning holy orders from Calvary. In many ways it was a very fulfilling weekend of work for the Gospel.


Sermon at Calvary, Sioux City—17 August 2014   

                                                                                      

I have just enjoyed a few weeks back home in Bradford where I was raised. Bradford has become quite a center for immigration over the years. People are given citizenship by way of their participation—if that is the right word—in the British Empire. Hundreds of thousands—now several millions—of people, especially from the India sub-continent have come to places like Bradford over the past 50 years with an increasing concentration of families from Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Muslim nations carved out of India after World War II.

Whole school districts are Muslim. Two or three large Mosques mark the landscape as you look over the city from the hill on which my childhood home stands. Christians are torn in their reaction. The Cathedral hired a Muslim for their communications officer. And yet there are others who think every Muslim must be proselytized and that their religion is not of God.

I was in a meeting of clergy and lay leaders who have sought to pray for the people of Bradford in an intense, ongoing way. They cast a middle-of-the-road approach to the Muslim as neighbor—simply asking, if a Muslim family approached your church inquiring about your faith in Jesus, what would you say and how would you approach their inquiry?

Today’s Scriptures lead us to reflect on God’s expanding vision out of which our faith in Jesus Christ grows. Joseph sets us up: “You meant it for bad,” he says to his brothers who, if you recall, tried to kill him or at least lose him for good by selling him off as a slave. “You meant it for bad, but God turned it to good.” Read the chapters in Genesis that tell Joseph’s story. It is a great tale of pride, jealousy, deceit, humbling, restoration, forgiveness and providence. Look up chapters 35-50.

Joseph ended up in Egypt after he was sold into slavery. After a bout in prison, he became Pharoah’s right-hand man, saved the nation and region from the ravishing effects of a long drought and famine by making judicious preparation, having been tipped off by God in a dream. It is worth making a musical about his life! Eventually, he was reunited with his brothers who needed food during the famine and came to Egypt for it. In our passage today, Joseph reveals his true identity to them and is able to forgive because he has seen that, “God, not you, sent me here?”

Is it possible that there are other situations, even as we live, that one day 50 years on or even less, to which we might say, “God, not you; not national pride, not international strategy, sent me here?”
Paul could never fully settle his thoughts on the implications of the coming of Jesus for his Jewish faith, the faith tradition of his upbringing. He wrestled with the fact that God had come in Jesus Christ and had established a new way, truth and life. Where did that leave the Jewish people, and what did that say of God’s promises? His hope was that they would recognize Jesus for themselves, as he had done, as the fulfilment of their Messianic hopes and dreams.

What he was careful to say was that we owe everything to the faithful of the Jewish tradition, without whom we would never have known a framework into which Jesus was manifest. Nor, he surmises, would we have received mercy without their disobedience. It is a very difficult suggestion, but one with which he sought to find some resolution or peace to his dilemma.

It is a strange phrase: “God has imposed all in disobedience that He may be merciful to all.” He warns that if the Jewish people can be superseded, so much more readily can Christians who are merely “grafted on” to salvation history. Whether Jesus was actually being confronted with this same dilemma in the woman from Canaan is also challenging. Is it all right to suggest that He was, rather than assume that He was stringing her along using the language of others without adhering to it Himself to make a point? Or did she really stop Him in His tracks and open His eyes?

We know that she was right. Later in John we will read of Jesus praying for sheep of other folds.
The Bradford prayer group shifts focus from Churches as congregation growers to Churches as community witnesses, prophets, social reformers, peacemakers, reconcilers, wisdom bearers. Jesus stepped beyond his religious tradition as its fulfilment and its judge. His actions and teaching were deemed blasphemous. But is He not the same today? Is it possible that He stand as fulfilment and judge of every religion, including that built upon and around His own revelation and teaching.
One thing is sure—our disobedience to the essence of following Jesus within or without our tradition may still become a means for God to bring His mercy to others beyond us. Could that be the peacemakers and the true innocents of every faith?

Bishop Leslie Newbiggin, a great ecumenist, believed that the Cross of Christ—God’s great self-giving to humanity—is the standard by which all religion is judged. God is always in the innocent who suffer, among the peacemakers and justice seekers who offer what time they have on this earth for the good of others. And it is by that Cross we are all fulfilled and judged, Christianity and Christians included.