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.

Reflections on visitation to Trinity Episcopal Church, Denison—20 July 2014

A congregation never knows what lies around the corner. Trinity Episcopal Church is part of the Trinity cluster which includes St Paul’s, Harlan and Trinity, Carroll. The three churches share a priest, though they are independent of each other in their governance. They serve different communities. Denison has a large Latino population and has recently attracted other non-Anglo peoples. My conversations with the cluster after the retirement of long-serving priest, Glen Rankin, two years ago have centered around the idea of centering the call of a new priest around the Denison rectory and seeking a bilingual priest who could initiate a Spanish-speaking congregation. To this end the Board of Directors of the Diocese approved a grant to Trinity to help renovate the Rectory, which was augmented by one from Trinity, Carroll on behalf of the cluster. Last year we met together for several rounds of bible study in an effort to reinvigorate the cluster and talk about their common future.

One Sunday morning about a dozen Anglicans from South Sudan turned up in Denison for the morning worship. They quickly became a part of the community, and decided to connect with Trinity as part of their regular Sunday service. The group was organized with a pastor and deacon who, though raised Anglican, had been formed and called to ordination through an independent Bible College. In effect for our canonical purposes they are pastors ordained not in the historical apostolic tradition. The group grew, and participated in the cluster’s joint events, such as the picnic Eucharist in last August which was one of my visitations to the cluster. (In effect, I do three visits every eighteen months, one to each Church).

The small group of members from Trinity worked hard at receiving their new guests—painting the facilities next door which had been a local pre-school, overseeing the completion of the renovated rectory. New life and energy were flowing through the congregation. Eventually the South Sudanese leadership realized that the morning service time did not fit the work schedules of many of their people, and began holding an afternoon worship on Sundays. The new parish priest, Diana Wright, attended but the service was in Dinka and led by the pastor and deacon, using a well-worn Anglican prayer book.

On my visitation, the cluster gathered in the morning, about two dozen of us, and in the afternoon we worshipped in Dinka and English with almost five-dozen South Sudanese. About fifty people came forward for reaffirmation of baptismal vows and the laying on of hands. It was a hot day, and at times I felt like I was back in South Sudan.

The arrival of the Dinka was not the only surprise up God’s sleeve for the people of Trinity. A few months ago they were approached about the use of their pre-school for a new Pentecostal congregation led by a pastor from El Salvador.  And so at the end of my visit, I paid a call on the Central American congregation gathering for 4pm worship next door in Trinity’s Hall, bringing greetings and offering welcome. They were about thirty-five in number.

We simply never know what God has in store for us. It is a joyful and hopeful story, but not without its problems. The congregations, especially the two Anglicans, have to learn how to grow together without one overwhelming the other. How can they be life giving to each other? In one way simply offering a structure within which to become tied to one’s historical ecclesiastical roots is a gift on the part of the people of Trinity. Cultural difference, especially in terms of understandings of leadership and gender, is an ongoing issue. Mutual expectations of responsibilities on both sides in terms of the upkeep of the buildings and how to make decisions that are of mutual benefit while acknowledging the canonical structure of our governance are other things still to be worked out. I left for vacation after my trip to Denison full of hope and ready to work with what might become a new chapter in the life of the Diocese as we work on creating our first South Sudanese congregation based in partnership at Trinity. I returned to find that we are not quite there yet, and that there is more work to be done on seeking how to be in mission together with Christ with these communities of each and all. I have decided that it is a good problem to have, and an important one to resolve quickly.

Sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church, Denison                                                                 

Readings: Isaiah 44; Romans 8: 12-25; Matthew 13: 14-30, 36-43

This week I had to break down and hire a young man to take a stab at my garden. It has really overgrown—with weeds that look like trees hiding in the bushes; and flowerbeds minus flowers taken over by more weeds and growing seedlings of nearby trees! It is a jungle. It is a mess and rain on my only day off is not helping me get any handle on it.

I wish I had at least been intentional and sown good seed; and could blame an enemy for mixing in the weeds. But no such luck. My garden has had a few good years, and more bad ones; but this is the worst I have experienced. How quickly things get away from you. We should blame Adam and Eve. Leave things untended and disaster happens. And so I have hired a savior!

I have just been away at the Episcopal Youth Event where I learned that the five marks of mission of the Anglican Communion can be reduced to five words—tell; teach; tend; transform and treasure. Tend and treasure are the two words that stand out with respect to the parable Jesus tells us today: the wheat and the tares.

According to the Apostle Paul, we live in a physical or natural world groaning under the weight of its very way of being. Maybe that is how he looked at his own garden. It is probably accurate to say that Paul was not an ecologist, and yet his words sound very appropriate to our understanding of what is happening within nature today. In fact the hardship of human battles with nature have been with us from the beginning, even to the point that the Creation story ends with disobedience causing humans to be thrown out of the idyllic state of Eden (where presumably flowers blossomed without the need for tilling and care) and were condemned to a life of servitude towards nature. It would have to be tamed by us to provide food and nourishment, or simply not to be overrun, not to mention having a garden for simply enjoyment.

So for Paul the great reversal that had taken place in Jesus Christ—where out of death had come life—had its impact, too, upon nature and our relationship with it. Our freedom is to be nature’s freedom. For Jesus restores all things in God. The enemy in the parable is defeated. Whenever, however, the Scriptures speak of such future things—there is always the sense and recognition that restoration and salvation happen even as we labor and struggle. It is always “while we were yet sinners (that) Christ died for us” as Paul says to the Corinthians. New life comes out of and with suffering, and that suffering is the struggle of the Spirit and the flesh, or the struggle of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

My jungle backyard could be the last word. I could just retire to my room, close the curtains and never give it another thought. This year it certainly has proven too much for me. Calling on help—bringing another in to work with me became my hope. In that simple act there was a refusal to let decay become the last word.

The early disciples or followers of Jesus needed to know the lay of the land. They needed to know that not everyone would receive their good news about Jesus, though many would. They also needed to know that patience was a virtue in the lives of faith. Jesus would not leave them unprepared or naïve about the struggle before them.

The listeners of Jesus would be aware of the familiar weed that grew among the wheat—which in its early shoots looked a lot like wheat. Underground, its roots would tangle with the wheat roots and to pull up one was to risk the destruction of the other, the good other. And so it became best to let them grow up together until their distinction became clearer around harvest time. The weed also had the additional element of being poisonous. So they were not to rush to judgment, nor be premature in their discernment, but show patience. Patience and longsuffering are important fruits of the Spirit, by the way.

Jesus also needed his disciples to realize that their work of following was not without resistance. There was an enemy of the Gospel rooted in nature itself and in our self-centeredness. These realities from Jesus’ day are as present to us today as they were then. Life has not changed, nor has human nature. And so in a few moments I will ask: “Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil and do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord?” and “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?” To which as followers of Jesus, we say, “I will with God’s help.” And God promises to give us that help in the activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The challenges and the choice is not to be overwhelmed; to know when to call for help; to trust that nature itself is freed when we find our freedom of Spirit—our love, our joy, our peace, our hope, our faith, our gentleness, our patience, our meekness, our perseverance—all as ways of life.    

This is what you have been seeking to do down the years. You would not still be gathering if that were not so. Your future lies where it has always been—in the purposes and mission of God which you are continually asked to tell, teach, tend, transform and treasure.

What you cannot afford to do is lose faith, to get overwhelmed by nature’s wildness and Satan’s adversity, to become fixed in the past and retire to your room with your curtains closed and to turn on each other in frustration and in the toughness of the task of being a follower of Jesus.

In a few moments I am going to invite you to be prayed over. I am going to remind you that the Spirit who has begun a good work in you can and will direct you and uphold you in the service of Christ and Christ’s Kingdom. I urge you to receive this gift of prayer into your own hearts. Jesus’ own disciples and the Church they founded needed to be reminded that He was with them always—not because it was easy going, but because it was tough going. Yet in the end, with Isaiah, they would say to God’s question, Who is there beside Me?, “No one, Lord, not One. There is no God like you, and we are glad to be your followers and your servants. Here I am Lord, use me until that day of harvest when all is made clear.”

Amen 

Reflections on visitation to St Luke’s Des Moines—13 July 2014

Flying in from the Episcopal Youth Event (EYE) very late on Friday night, I was not sure what state I would be in as I met with clergy from the Metro Chapter for clericus Saturday morning, and then with the laity for the Chapter Conversation with the Bishop Saturday afternoon. I warned the people of St Luke’s that sometimes I carry over the energetic spirit of these kinds of events into Sunday morning, and so they should not be surprised if I suddenly shout out “How’s it going Episcopalians?” A dozen senior-high students from the Diocese of Iowa attended EYE on the campus of Villanova University, Philadelphia. It was a stroll down memory lane for me, as my daughter attended Villanova and I found myself recalling the many trips we made during those four years, first from LA and then from Iowa—especially the different halls from which we packed and unpacked loaded vans. I think people were ready to say: “Yes, we know. Your daughter went here.” As things went on Sunday at St. Luke’s, I was quite controlled. The experience with the youth, however, did have its impact upon my choice of direction for the sermon.

I confirmed a couple of young people with significant connections with the life of St Luke’s. One was Elizabeth Elfvin the grand-daughter of long-term Rector Robert Elfvin. Robert’s wife Karen was present but Robert was unable to make the long trip from Ely, Minnesota. The other young confirmand was Benjamin Russell, the son of Jeff Russell, who played a prominent part as Senior Warden in the lengthy transition process after Robert’s retirement before the congregation settled on Martha Kester as Rector, even as she was about to be called up for active duty as chaplain to the Iowa National Guard in Afghanistan. Sometimes being Senior Warden during such times can be very wearing on a person, and there was a sense of closure to those days as we prayed for God’s strengthening for service on the next generation. For their standing with Martha during her time in Afghanistan, the congregation received a Patriot Award (given to employers who support service members). I was mindful of my gratitude to Ben Webb for stepping in as an interim while Martha was away.

The congregation has, I think, gone through some changes but with the presence of a wide range across the generations and a noticeable number of young adults among them, there is an expectation of growing into renewal and a new day. St Luke’s had been a center for the Angel Food Ministry, a program that has stopped. They continue, however, their concern for the needy through an extensive buddy backpack ministry, as well as support for ministry in Haiti and Kenya. On the Sunday after my visitation, the congregation was anticipating a visiting priest from Kenya who directs The Ekklesia Foundation for Gender Education, a leading advocate “for equality and gender justice from a biblical perspective in Africa and Kenya.” Martha’s ongoing work as chaplain to the Iowa Guard, with its requirements for monthly training, brings its own connections and emphases at St Luke’s. I hope that the Young Adult Ministry Development Team will find opportunity to work with the congregation both in terms of its ability to gather young adults beyond college as well as increase a focus on work at neighboring Drake University. In October, the church is hosting a marriage retreat with the interesting title of “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage.” I encourage them to be bolder in making their creative offerings known throughout the Metro Chapter.

Sermon at St Luke’s, Des Moines 

                                                                                    

Readings: Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8: 1-11; Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23 

I have just returned from the Episcopal Youth Event in Philadelphia and so please forgive me if I break out into clapping, iphone light waving, and the occasional “So, how’s it going, Episcopalians!” If people wonder about the state of the Church today, they should not worry about God working among our young people. They want to praise, they want to pray and they want to serve; and they have signatory scriptures—God’s word that guides them. I sat in a class of forty high-schoolers who were in a workshop on how to discern God’s will, and how to learn to meditate and journal on God’s word. It was stunning to interact with them.

The sower is sowing the seed and the richness of the harvest depends upon the preparation of the soil into which it has been cast. And maybe we have to notice that we older end might be the very stones that create the shallow dirt—that we don’t let the roots grow deep enough for our young people’s growth as they face the resistance. Or perhaps we are the thistles and weeds that clog their joy and faith, exuberance and vision, as they come from events like EYE or Happening and their life in Christ shoots up, ready to flower?

Now this is nothing personal about you. Nor is it a comment about this community. You just happen to be my first visit after EYE! And the images are fresh before me and I know that we have an obligation as the ministry support and fellow members in Christ to be nutrients and life-givers—faith-growers to the newly baptized and recently confirmed, as well as to one another, including your priest and bishop.

In other words, we need each other. We need to respect that there is nothing automatic about the Kingdom of God’s appearance. There is a resistant force that we call evil—prowling around like a lion—Peter says in that sentence we use for compline—seeking whom he can devour! That is why the five marks of mission are so important, and I was glad to see that at least among our young people an effort is being made to immerse them in them. You can learn them on one hand, using your five fingers: Tell; Teach; Tend; Transform; Treasure.

To the prowling devil we can say in Christ’s Name—“not on our patch; not down our street. Get behind me Satan!” The struggle is as old as the early patriarchal history of our Hebrew roots.

Esau and Jacob fighting in their mother’s womb; an image declared as prophesy of two warring nations to be. These are the scary parts of Scripture especially as we see back into the days of the Patriarchs, beginning in fact with Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, and Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael and see a long view only too real at least over these past fourteen hundred years. Of course, we do not have a direct prophetic prediction about Christianity and Islam—even though the players’ line of descent seems to coincide. We do, however, have an early dispute of primary origin which can lay claim to or be taken for a new global faith fight. The roaring lion in fact doesn’t take sides but looks on with glee when the opportunity presents itself to have us devour one another. That is the point of God’s call to us to be alert and aware. To be careful how we tend the garden of our souls.

It is why we must make our children aware and alert that this walk of faith requires close attention. I say this as I think about confirmation, and the tendency to want to engage our children in the process before they are ready. Sometimes it is our adult needs that prevail rather than where they may be in their own reckoning and wrestling with the faith. For it is when all of us, regardless of our age, can recognize and claim the truth that “being justified by faith, we have peace with God” that we have the foundation to declare Jesus as Savior and Lord, and make the life commitment to follow Him as such—reaffirming our renunciation of evil and promising to make a life-long vow to celebrate and serve God as long as we have breath and until we see God face-to-face. To this end we can then commit to tell the faith; teach others in it; tend to the sick and needy; seek the transformation of our human systems into that which reflects the love of God’s reign; and treasure every aspect of our life as a gift both personally and environmentally.

Think for a moment of Martha’s commitment to the Iowa Guard. She is no longer in Afghanistan surrounded by the dangers of that experience. Yet every month she is to be found at Camp Dodge in training—always being made ready for whatever her nation might ask of her. When she excuses herself from the Clericus group on a Saturday or is not able to attend a Chapter meeting even in her own church, she wrote to me, “The Army is not a flexible organization.”

Nor, I would imagine, would we want it to be. Can you imagine the following command: “There’s an attack on our left flank—if you are able or feel so obliged, I would appreciate it if you could go out there and push them back a bit. Of course, to those of you who feel like it right now, your nation thanks you.”

But what about the rocks and thistles of our faith life—the attention needed to be paid to the preparedness of the good soil that bears fruit? What about the discipline required of us all to grow spiritual fruits, listed by Paul in Galatians as “kindness, love, peace, humility, gentleness, hope, steadfastness, joy?”

At its best have we turned the Kingdom of God into a proselytizing agency, and at its worst a social club? God’s highest purpose is for the Kingdom to be a place in which human beings and human community reflect the fullness of God’s character of self-sacrificial love. And that takes our full attention and effort. The Spirit continues to seek lives that can be transformed and transforming. We are always invited to be justified by faith and thus at peace with God so that out of that very same peace our children can learn the faith and thrive within it too. All of us are invited to share in the experiences of common growth in the knowledge and love of God in Jesus Christ. To that end we are invited to prepare the soil for ourselves and for those who come after us. It is the action of the whole Church growing together.

We need to be as prepared for the mission of God as our soldiers are for their national missions. Are we ready to give our formation in faith, our discipleship as followers of Christ, our full commitment, and to do it as young and older together, not fighting for birthrights, but honoring with expectancy what God will do with one another in telling, teaching, tending, transforming and treasuring this life we have been graciously given?

 Amen.