Lent 4: Becoming Ambassadors for Christ
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Lent 4 – Year C
March 10, 2013
Sermon Preached by The Rev. Don Hamer, Rector
Joshua 5:9-12 2 Cor. 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
This morning we continue our Lenten journey of looking for God in unfamiliar places or in unfamiliar circumstances. To summarize where we have been during these past several weeks, on the first Sunday of Lent Pastor George followed Jesus on his trip into the wilderness and shared with us the need to be vulnerable in the wilderness as a pathway toward understanding our reliance on God. Then on the Second Sunday in Lent we explored questions about the very nature of God, and how we can come to know God through the example of Jesus himself. Then last Sunday Fr. Frank Kirkpatrick challenged us to avoid the wilderness of the temptation of the Garden of Eden – the temptation of relying solely on ourselves, thinking that we are responsible for our own fortunes and hold our own destiny in our hands. See what you miss when you don’t show up here for a few weeks?
Which brings us to today, where in our Old Testament reading from Joshua we see the Israelites – for the first time in decades – eating from the land they inhabit and not the manna God had provided from Heaven while they were wandering in the wilderness. This reading, as it turns out, reinforces the point Fran was making last week, and it tells us something about human nature and our relationship to God: For forty years, the Israelites wandered through the wilderness and survived on the manna – they didn’t always like it, and they complained that it was boring, but they survived. When you think about it, after forty years, they got to depend on that manna, boring or not. And even though they now had food to eat from the produce of the land, that must have been pretty scary to know that the guaranteed nourishment they had come to depend on was stopping. But what happened? They became accustomed to depending on the fruit of their own labors for food, and before long, they forgot about the manna. Now working hard to produce food is not a bad thing, right? But what happened over time – they forgot that it was God who had gotten them through that wilderness time, and they fell into the exact sin that Frank warned against last week – forgetting God and thinking they alone controlled their destiny.
And it wasn’t long before they were turning to other gods and not the One God who brought them out of the wilderness. Nineteen chapters following the one we read this morning, Joshua is challenging his followers to decide which God they will worship – the one their father’s worshipped, or the gods of the land in which they have settled.
It is easy for us to do the same thing. When you think about it, that’s one of the morals of the story of the Prodigal Son we just heard from the Gospel of Luke: The Son had all he needed while he was living with his father, but he got bored with life on the farm and wanted to go to the big City, where he could make it on his own. Well, that didn’t work out so well for him, did it? And before you know it, here he is, a Jew, feeding pigs, who are ritually impure for Jews. It takes him hitting the bottom before he realized how good he had it back home, and he decides to throw himself on his father’s mercy, say he’s sorry, and return. And when he returns to his father, he has still squandered his inheritance, but he is in a far better –and a far wiser – place back in his father’s house.
Like humans, churches can also forget about their dependence on God and begin to look inward – and in the process, sometimes forget or lose sight of the reality that it is God’s mission we are supposed to be furthering and not our own. That is why a central focus of the Episcopal Diocese right now is on mission discernment – trying to strip away the accretions of decades of focusing on the preservation of the institutional church as we had come to know it rather than focusing on furthering God’s mission and bringing the weight of the church to further that mission. We began, as Episcopal author the late Verna Dozier observed, to conflate the mission of the institution with the mission of God, and convinced ourselves they were one and the same.
Now we find ourselves in the 21st century realizing that we have some work to do rediscovering that Dream of God. With the evidence all around us, we are finally – and in many instances, belatedly, and often (to our shame) because of financial circumstances -- coming to the realization that the institutions we humans have set up to glorify God as often as not are monuments to our own visions but necessarily reflective of God’s Dream. This is part of the hard work to which the Vestry and I are inviting the congregation over the next several years – discerning who we are as children of God, discerning where God is already at work in the world around us, and discerning what gifts we have at our disposal to contribute to that work.
But wait a minute – this sounds a little scary, doesn’t it? Rethinking the familiar for the unfamiliar? Risking that which we know for the unknown? But this is the wilderness to which we are called beginning now, during this season of Lent, so that we may more faithfully live out the commission given us by the resurrected Christ come Eastertide. For this is what St. Paul is saying when he writes in this morning’s passage from Second Corinthians: If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation . . . entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. . . This, my friends, is an awesome responsibility, not one to be taken lightly.
As I said, we Episcopalians are not alone on this journey. Not only is this going on in our own diocese, it is going on in virtually every major denomination at some level or another. Just last evening, Boo Morton and I were the guests of our neighbors down the street at Grace Lutheran Church. They were holding a pot luck supper to which they had invited a guest speaker from the New England Synod. And guess what the topic was? How Grace can become a more missional church, more responsive to God’s appeal to bring God’s kingdom closer. Boo and I were not the only guests in attendance. Pastor John Marschhausen of Immanuel Lutheran downtown, and Pastor Tom Beveridge from Christ Church Cathedral were on hand as well. Because we can all be assured that part of the conversation going forward is how the various denominations, and the various churches within the Christian denominations, can work together in support of God’s mission rather than in competition with one another.
And so Pastor Jane challenged the members of Grace last evening to consider really looking at their congregation and their congregational life. She invited them into a process that may take them 2 – 5 years to complete, and she acknowledged that the process may lead them through some wilderness times and perhaps to some conclusions that will make some people uncomfortable. And she reminded us that Jesus didn’t come to make us comfortable – Jesus came to bring God’s reign to earth. As St. Paul reminds us, part and parcel of our Christianity is not being afraid to do that next new thing that Jesus sets before us, and embracing that mission almost always means going through uncharted territory.
Pastor Jane left us with three criteria which can serve as touchpoints for us as we individually and collectively reflect on how we as the institutional church can be more faithful to further God’s mission in our own time. They are not easy criteria, and they are not the only criteria. But as I said two weeks ago, Jesus seldom gave easy or comfortable answers to questions about further God’s kingdom. So here are three criteria which were put out there last evening:
--You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when the pain of remaining the way you are is greater than the pain of risking a change.
--You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when you are more concerned about the people who have not yet been to your church than you are about the ones who were thee before and left. And the third criterion is
--You know you are ready to be a missional congregation when you would be willing to let the congregation – note that I didn’t say “church” but I said “congregation” – you would be willing to let the congregation as you know it die if that would lead the way to bringing the reign of God closer.
As we continue this Lenten journey through the wilderness of stepping back and discerning who we are and who we are in relationship to God, I invite you to ponder these questions, along with the questions of who we understand God to be and what it is we understand about God. I invite you to engage these questions not into a journey of hopelessness and despair, but in the full knowledge that this is EXACTLY what St. Paul invites us to do in the process of being ambassadors of the risen Christ whose resurrection we will celebrate at Easter. AMEN.