Easter 4, St Thomas, Sioux City—19 April 2015

Readings: Acts 3: 12-19; 1 John 3: 1-7; Luke 24: 36-48

There is a lot going on this morning: a baptism, confirmation, and the marking of the end of the ministry with you of your Rector, Torey. In many ways it is bittersweet. And yet it is an end and a beginning rolled into one. The baptism and confirmation are both a fruit of the ministry of your Rector, and at the same time are evidence that God continues to work with you as everyone moves forward. For in a few moments you will promise to support these persons in their life in Christ—a statement of upholding the future—even as you say farewell to a passing present.

Having noted that, I warned and somewhat apologized to the candidates that Torey’s leaving would be dominating my expressed thoughts today. At times like this it is easy to be anxious or even to feel sorry for ourselves. We are facing loss and change, right on the heels of your extraordinary bravery as a community to say that Church as we have known Church doesn’t add up; and we need to be flexible. Torey has led you along that path. I think it has helped stop doomsday thinking that would look to your savings and predict how long you would survive in the traditional model of being served by a full-time, seminary-trained priest.

Wonderful as we all may be, that is not what our faith depends upon. God has brought you someone new to be baptized and a lively person to be confirmed to emphasize that point.

In fact, as I looked at the readings for today, I initially saw little that excited me for the occasion. They in fact seemed somewhat “pat” for our special circumstances; until I looked deeper, and remembered something. The disciples were in the middle of receiving some rather startling testimony, as we come upon them in the Gospel. The two men who had been walking home to Emmaus had encountered a stranger, you recall, on the way. They had, at first, scoffed at him for seeming quite oblivious about the sad events that had happened in Jerusalem around Jesus’ crucifixion, but became increasingly intrigued by his knowledgeable response about Moses and the prophets. Suddenly, as they were breaking bread together with him, they recognized that the stranger was in fact the Risen Christ, and had just come hurrying back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples. Those who stayed in Jerusalem in turn were saying how some of them had also seen the Lord when Jesus appeared among them.

The disciples did not expect the appearance even while some had experienced the Risen Christ. And so it would happen over the next forty days that Jesus would pop in and out of their lives, and as they became more anticipatory about it, they began to hunger for the opportunity to learn from Him while He was among them. They were in transition, and it became a time for intense formation.

There was a sense of urgency to have ears that could ear. They knew something no one else would believe if they dared mention it. “This Jesus who had been crucified, God had raised from the dead. And they were witnesses of these things.” This was a precious time—these forty days while Jesus was with them—and they took to it with great eagerness.

What I am trying to say and I think what the Word of God selected down the centuries and not specifically for this day is saying is to remind us that we are not the first and only community of faith to move into the unknown of transition. The early disciples stood where you stand except perhaps even more so. Torey speaks of the Jesus the disciples were transitioning from; and seeks to articulate and model His way of life with us all. He is not Jesus; and in fact Jesus is not leaving the building with Elvis! Jesus did leave His disciples but this is where the encouragement of the readings from Acts and 1 John come into play. In them we hear the voices of the two leading apostles—Peter and John—who, like the others, had been left wondering and amazed, perhaps even afraid, at Jesus’ comings and goings. Yet now they appear as changed men!

Peter has a story to tell—as incredible as it ever was—but this time he believes it and knows its significance. “This Jesus, whom your leaders crucified, God has raised from the dead. And through Him there is forgiveness of sins to all who repent.”

Likewise, John, years later, nevertheless has the same sense of confidence and assurance. To a very different audience, John reinforces that his life has become a witness to who Jesus is and how, through Him as Crucified and Risen, we are all made clean. You can hear the sparkle in their voices. They know of what they speak and write. Their eyes, I imagine, tell the story as well as their words.

They were men who had witnessed something extraordinary and of God. It would drive them to be able to face exile and their own deaths on Christ’s behalf. By now John was so at one with the Spirit of God that he could admit his ignorance about the details of the afterlife. He knew that he looked forward to when we would see Jesus, “whom you do not know.” He added, “We may not know how we will be—but we will be like Him.” Isn’t that what we are preparing for when we look around and see one another acting as Jesus with one another—praying for healing; offering forgiveness and reconciliation; delivering from oppressive forces; being illuminated by wisdom and insight on the human condition? We catch glimpses of Jesus in one another, and John says this will be the ultimate recognition of our own identity when we see Him face to face.  It happens constantly—in and through and beyond transition.

My daughter is a great believer in self-affirmation. Her mirror is surrounded by statements of dignity and things to uplift the self-esteem. She also takes time to reward herself for things we might think just part of a normal day. One day she gave herself a check mark for announcing as she looked in the mirror, “Kim, you are awesome!” It is not narcissism, but a healthy dose of self-esteem bolstering.

John says we should look in the mirror and see Jesus forming in us, and rejoice. What if we placed 1 John 3: 2 on our mirrors?

Peter and John received their new Rector, but she did not come in any human form, but in a fiery tongue and a rushing wind. I say that the Spirit did not come in human form but, in fact, assumed the form of every one who was in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost. What had been a start for the disciples has been continuous with us. Today I will affirm for J.T. that he is sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. I think it is time we began to believe or appropriate more directly our belief that the Spirit is always present to bridge our transitions, and never stops shaping us into that image in which we will be able to recognize ourselves in Jesus.

How blessed it would be if your new partner in ministry, your new rector, fitting perfectly within the material circumstances you can afford as you agree to work together, found here such a community of the Spirit. What if, in this place there were a people with an extraordinary story of how the Risen Christ walks among them as an ongoing reality with or without a transition of persons? What if the new partner found a people who carried themselves with a certain gaze of love and confident faith that knowingly registered that the purpose of God continues with them? What if, such a people were ones who know that even if they might not be sure of the details of what lies ahead and how they will be when the ultimate transition comes upon them, at least are certain that when they see Jesus, they shall be like Him!

                                                                                                                                                                  Amen 

Easter Vigil, Cathedral Church of St Paul, Des Moines—4 April 2015

Readings: Genesis: 1:1-2:2; Genesis 22:1-18; Exodus 14:10-15:1; and Ezekiel 37:1-14

In a month’s time I have a rather special birthday coming along. It is one that seems to have the attention of a number of well-wishers who are sending me numerous invitations to let them help me. Of course it is my 65^th and the well-wishers have all kinds of Medicare packages they want to sell me. Whether the significance of becoming an official “senior” is impacting my Easter reflections, I cannot say, but I want to begin by saying the obvious—life is a one-way street. It sounds more like the title of a country-and-western ballad than a sermon, and no doubt by the end of the service someone might have googled and discovered the same!

Clearly, life is a one-way street, and one which none of us actually chose to find ourselves traveling down. In the best circumstance, love brought us here at the human level, and no matter what our circumstances of origin, we believe Love at the divine level has everything to with this unexpected and unrequested gift of life. Into that very same Love we commend our own loved ones at our end for we grow to realize that nothing can ever separate us from such Love.

It is also clear to us as we reach midlife, perhaps that we cannot go back, and in most cases we do not want to go back. I am not interested in returning to my youth, strange and counter-cultural as that may seem.  We may have mid-life crises, which look like we are seeking to relive the past, but normally it is just that we are doing NOW what we would have done THEN. And it is the strangeness of this that catches our eye, only reinforcing the fact that nothing rolls back the clock.  As I say, few of us would ever seek to go back to younger years—younger dreams, yes, and younger vigor, certainly. But the one way pull of living wins out.

What the Christian life offers, however, is this—at every place along the one-way street, there’s new life; at every place where reflection meets reality, reality meets hope, repentance meets forgiveness and failure meets mercy.

God simply starts again with us, breathing again into our being God’s own breath that creates life. For some it is a new life literally through healing; for others it is about emotional deliverance or spiritual awakening. And it happens at our most vulnerable and exposed moments. God brings this new life to where we are along this one-way street. There is never any need to go back in time or wish things were different. God says, “Behold, I make all things new,” and asks us to “receive the Spirit” as we hear in the first words of the Risen Christ to His disciples in the Upper Room.

I share this sermon with one of our beloveds who most recently reached the end of her one-way street. Barbara James was my phone interviewer as part of the Iowa Episcopal election process for which today I celebrate my 12^th anniversary of consecration.  Barbara left some books behind on a shelf in the Guild Hall and invited any of us to take whatever we were drawn to. I took Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing, a book I believe you studied in one of the book study groups Barbara was part of. The title gripped my attention, especially its subtitle—The Search for a Christian Spirituality. Through that book God has met me on my road with the offering of new life in “search for a Christian spirituality.”

You see, we all have to keep up with ourselves as we grow. That is why we celebrate dying and rising year after year on the big stage of Holy Week and Easter Day; and also daily in our personal prayers for this world of confused and desperate nations, and of our own personal strivings. It does not matter your role in the Church—bishop or not, this process of growth must and does, at our best, go on.

Rolheiser writes of appropriating the essence of the Paschal mystery deep into the many areas of our lives and he stretches out the Paschal message all the way through to the Day of Pentecost, and invites us to live in harmony not only with the death and resurrection of Jesus but also with His forty days of Eastertide—His ascension and the gift of the Indwelling Spirit.

Good Friday for him is an occasion to “name our deaths,” in the face of the real deal of the loss of life.                        

                  

Easter Sunday is the time to receive new life or to claim our births.

The forty days send us along a period of readjustment to this gift of the new, and is appropriate as a time for grieving what we have lost as we adjust to the new reality.

Ascension invites us to let go of the old and let it bless you, refusing to cling on to it. “Don’t cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing,” he writes.

Finally, the Day of Pentecost is the reception for new Spirit for the new life you are already living. “Accept the spirit of life you are, in fact, living.”

Among the things he writes for us to name as our deaths, he includes youth, wholeness, dreams, honeymoons or our ideal of God and Church.

The claiming of new birth as we grieve and let go in a way that blesses us and the subsequent receiving of the Spirit’s gifts for this moment is the reality portrayed in Ezekiel. It is how dry bones get up and live as a marching army. And it is how each of us are never in such despair that we cannot be met with the Living God for a new and deeper gift of new birth suitable for our age and place along life’s one-way street.

In a few moments we will declare Christ as Risen. The organ will spring into life; flowers will appear from nowhere and transform the sanctuary, and the dry bones of liturgy will live with new life. Even more glorious will be the living and breathing icon or image of the Risen Christ declared in the new life received in baptism of our baptismal candidates, and in our renewing of baptismal vows.  This is Christ Risen, through each and every one of us who believes and so declares that Christ is Risen. Let the words of your declared faith sink into you as a people of conviction—both about how God reveals God’s self to us and the world; and about how such faith provides more that food for thought, but also power for living.

I can base my relationships, my sense of purpose and vocation, my vision for recrafting the world about me and my greater hope for human potential on such faith—that we are created, restored, and spiritually empowered. Made new at every point, we find ourselves this evening on the one-way street of Glory and to Glory.

Every Scripture we read tonight tells us about reaching dead ends on that road. We began with the nothingness out of which everything was made. The Universe was at a dead end and then God said: “Let there be.” We then heard how God brought Abraham and Moses, the great Patriarch and Prophet of the Jewish Faith, to the end of themselves: one at the extraordinary and unfair request to sacrifice Isaac, the very one on whom Abraham’s promised descendants would depend; and the other at the incomprehensible mockery of reaching the Red Sea shore where God directed Moses to bring his people into freedom only to be hemmed in by Egyptians on the one hand and the Sea on the other.

Where God leads us sometimes feels like a cruel joke at our expense. It often seems unfair and confusing—a dead end up a one-way street, with life barreling down upon us. Suddenly, God offers an alternative way—unimaginable and, because of that, unseen from our perspective: life out of death, truth out of error, and righteousness out of sin. We are invited to claim a new birth out of a named loss.

How ready are you for God’s unexpected new and renewed life?

Name your death.

Claim your new births.

Grieve the losses but only as you adjust to the new.

Don’t cling to what you must let go of, but be blessed as you let old things pass.

And accept the Spirit of life that in fact is gifting you for the life you are living NOW.

For in reality, we don’t go back. Rather, we are always invited to cycle and recycle forward from generation to generation in and with the Risen Christ who makes all things new, and meets us at multiple points along our one-way gift of life.

                                                                                                                              Amen

House of Bishops, Kanuga Conference Center, North Carolina, 12-18 March 2015

It is customary for the time at the spring House of Bishops to be an opportunity for retreat. The pattern has been early morning meditations, generally of a very personal, though ministry-related, nature from colleagues. Then we follow up with a time for prayerful reflection until gathering again for table sharing. The afternoons are set up for engaging speakers and various topics in-depth around the gathering’s theme. This year’s schedule was not so kind and hence this comprehensive report.

This March the theme has been “Curiosity, Compassion, and Courage.” The concept of being curious was linked with a call to openness—to being curious about your neighbor or the stranger in an affirming and attentive way. “Seeing the blessing of difference,” as was stated in one of the meditations. Compassion flows from such curious engagements and at times, the courage to walk with someone very different from ourselves may be demanded of us; hence the connection within the theme. We opened up our plenary sessions by giving an afternoon and evening to exploring racism. We saw the film Traces of the Trade which I hope we will bring to Iowa soon as we refresh our own inquiry into racism and especially for those of us who often “don’t know what we don’t know.” The meditations dealt with race and culture which also included reflections on Ferguson and its broader implications by Wayne Smith of the Diocese of Missouri; economics and class as particularly viewed through the lens of Native peoples; and the impact of growing up in an interfaith environment. Often, this powerful testimony is allowed to take us into our own silence before God until we are ready to share even in our intimate small groups at tables. But this year, with the shadow of General Convention over us, we quickly moved from reflection to brief sharing to upcoming GC topics.

“TREC, sex and elect” is how one of my table colleagues defined what will consume us at General Convention in Salt Lake City this summer. We certainly spent a whole afternoon on the report from the Task Force on Marriage, and again on The Reimagining of the Episcopal Church (TREC) Blue Book report. “Elect” (of the new Presiding Bishop at General Convention) was more of a constant buzz than a specific subject matter, as it will be until finalists are revealed in May and we gather for the Q&A at General Convention itself. The broader spectrum of things that we will handle at General Convention was the subject matter of the various groupings of bishops who gathered on the penultimate evening according to their specific interests.

It was disappointing, but not a surprise, that the issues raised by the Standing Commission on Social Justice and Public Policy (on which I have served for six years) did not make the scheduling “big time,” though our issues were there around the edges. We squeezed economics and class into the shortest day—Sunday—when, ironically, a number of us (myself included) were heading out to the golf course for what, for some of us, is our annual game of golf. I will never break 50 (over par that is) on that kind of frequency.

We hope however that the question of wealth disparity, food security, developing relational-based approaches to social justice and poverty alleviation (including Just Faith) and budgetary priority spending are all things that will get good attention in Salt Lake City. The Bishops United Against Gun Violence, of which I am a member along with more than sixty others, are planning to take their initiative for safer and more sensible gun laws to the streets on June 28th, and planning for that moved forward this week. Incidentally, my own spare time was taken up in seeking to respond to raised concerns about the passing through the Iowa legislature of a new omnibus gun law that is a step back from safer or more sensible gun legislation. I was grateful to have a partner on this with Bishop Trimble of the Iowa United Methodist Church as we sent a letter to every Iowa senator while they can still amend the bill.  

For this General Convention I am a member of the legislative committee receiving resolutions about our Church’s policy on Peace and International Affairs. Invariably this focuses on the Palestine-Israel situation and will also involve questions of our Church’s position with regard to “robotic and Cyber warfare.” There are calls for a stated position on gender violence across the globe, and we expect resolutions on global aspects of human trafficking as well as terrorism. These are particularly important to our relationships with our companion diocese, and I especially think of the Diocese of Swaziland where gender equality and resistance against gender violence is one of their major strategic goals as a Church in mission.

We were invited to name three things that we see in the possibilities for Church reimagining from the report being considered at General Convention. My three were: collaboration, neighborhood, and adaptation. We are being called to work together in following Jesus into our neighborhood and to be willing to adapt ourselves to meet the needs we find there as we seek to offer God’s good news.

Our time together was greatly helped by an introductory session led by The Rev. Dr. Eric Law of The Kaleidescope Institute who brought his teaching on “Grace Margin” and “Cycle of Blessing” or “Holy Currencies” to us. I believe that Eric is an inspired prophetic mission facilitator for our time. He just makes sense as he explains how we are invited by God into cycles of blessing. It sounds like jargon, but it works when you see living examples.

For example, Eric described six currencies that we all have at our disposal—mediums of exchange which carry value such as gracious leadership, time and place, money, wellness, truth, and relationship. In Ferguson, he noted that gracious leadership, truth, wellness, and relationship were lacking. However, The Salvation Army brought its currency of time and place (its camp site) and money into the situation and invited law enforcement and community young adults to come together for a week. In other words, through the gracious leadership of The Salvation Army, and the gracious leadership of those willing to come to the camp, they developed relationships out of which could come truth-telling and wellness. The immediate end product was to have youth and police walk down the street together. This was an alternative reimagining, and it is an example of the Church in mission in Ferguson.

We cannot tell what following Jesus into the neighborhood and “carrying light” will mean for us. And yet it is encouraging to hear even while at Kanuga of the kinds of open conversations you are having around the Chapter meetings and the plans for the 2016 diocesan budget. You are endeavoring to write your own Indaba questions when what is presented might not capture your imagination. You are also writing your own future with God. And that is a great gift. The Holy Spirit is at work among us and in us and I am excited about what your engagement in God’s mission, even at this conversation and early networking level, will produce. As we speak to one another, there is a keen listening going on for the Voice beyond our voices. I suppose that, too, is a good way to describe our constant hope for any House of Bishops meeting.

Below are links to daily accounts of the House of Bishops meetings from The Episcopal Church Public Affairs Office.

March 13, 2015

March 14, 2015

March 15, 2015

March 16, 2015

March 17, 2015

Reflections from Swaziland, 10 December 2014

Jet lag can have its benefits. It is almost four in the morning and I have completed my email thanks to the wifi at our B&B, and I even have alertness to start this blog.  How intent and consistent I can be as time passes and we arrive in Swaziland, I cannot say.

Our travels have been very smooth. The idea of gathering at the Cathedral with family and friends to send us off, both for lunch and a Eucharist, was a marvelous one. The liturgy our chaplain Elizabeth Popplewell had developed ended with an extended “send off blessing”. I invited people to form family and friend groups so that the travelers could be prayed over by those sending them off.  In the Eucharist my wife Donna had prayed for all our connections – especially at Atlanta which was a small window of time for such a trip, but proved effortless – and with our luggage at the end of our flights. Her prayers were answered. What remains is her final request – for God to bless our connections with the next generation of our Companion Relations in Swaziland. May our hearts find one another and our common hope to be ambassadors of reconciliation in Christ be ignited and launched.

One of my responsibilities at the Conference is to teach on Sunday morning about the Cross. It dawned on me this early morning that our theme for the trip and our logo for the t-shirts give me my opening image – “Under One Tree”. I think it was intended to convey that special meeting place in the rural areas of Swaziland where previous trips have met with people and leaders – a symbol of a gathering together. And yet of course, it has even deeper meaning when we understand that we all are gathered by God under that one tree on which Christ gave Himself for the world. Never too early to capture the Spirit’s nudging. Pray for us as we gather in Swaziland.

Watch this space and the Under One Tree blog for updates from Bishop Scarfe and others among our delegation to Swaziland.

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   

                                                                                      

Readings: Genesis45: 1-15; Romans 11:1-2, 29-32; Matthew 15: 21-28 

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.