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.
