Renewals on the Way by The Rev. Bennett A. Brockman
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The Rev. Bennett A. Brockman
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
February 22, 2015
Renewals on the Way
This is my last scheduled Sunday at Trinity Church, and I feel a certain sadness in saying a formal farewell. Linda and I have truly enjoyed this time with you. At the same time, it is wonderful to see Don feeling so much stronger, and it’s inspiring to see how devoted he is to you all and the good work this parish does. The time has gone quickly, and we will miss you as we retire again and stay tuned for what God may have in mind for us next.
It has been a great blessing for me to work with Don and the vestry and leaders and staff of this parish in the daily and weekly routine. What a fine group of able and committed Christians doing God’s work! Beyond the day to day, I have admired the work of re-imagining that this congregation is engaged in, the work you describe by the acronym MDIG, the Mission Discernment Group. I understand that the Group is just on the point of reporting to the Vestry and parish. The report will be of great interest to everyone, I know; and I think it’s very timely that it will be presented during Lent, the season for looking for fresh connections to the re-creating Spirit of God.
Now the Gospel, the Good News that Jesus begins to proclaim in today’s Gospel has not changed. What has changed is the ability of the population today to hear and respond to the Gospel. The MDIG work signifies that this parish is boldly and deliberately looking for ways of co-operating anew with God’s unchanging mission for the Church, which is reconciling people to each other and to God through Jesus Christ—making the world whole, healing the world (II Corinthians 5:17-19).
Doing this work nowadays requires churches to preserve the best treasures of the past while translating them for people conditioned to be unreceptive or hostile to the message of Jesus as it has been expressed in the church most of us grew up in. It is critically important work. It is also very challenging work. It will prosper here, I believe, because this parish already manifests the willingness to engage the neighborhoods around it, and the neighborhoods from which its members come, in undertaking the holy work of reconciliation and healing. Here are a few examples: the day-school, Trinity Academy; the Choir School of Hartford; the leadership-formation emphasis of the acolyte program, as it overlaps with the Journey to Adulthood and Heads Up Hartford programs; the food, clothing, and worship ministry called “Church in the Park”; and the growing number of musical groups who are discovering Trinity Church as a superb venue for their performances.
This work of renewal that the parish is so deeply engaged in corresponds perfectly with the traditional aim of Lenten devotion, the “renewal of a right spirit within us,” as the Psalm says (51: 11). It is what Jesus means when he preaches repentance, a word that literally means a change of thinking.
A renewed world is what Noah has just seen in the lesson from Genesis we just heard. That story also points to a recurring theme in the Hebrew Scriptures appointed for Lent this year. That theme is God’s covenant, God’s promises to God’s people, along the course of human history. Noah received the first of these great promises. He and his family, and the pairs of creatures aboard the ark with them, survived the great flood that destroyed all other life on earth. Now, God covenants never again to destroy the whole world. And the bow in the sky becomes the everlasting token of that everlasting promise.
I’ve always thought it a serious oversight on God’s part that in renewing creation after the flood, he did not re-create paradise and re-form human beings as incapable of sin. Alas, the physics and biology of the world and the biology and psychology of human beings did not get reconstructed. Shortly after the flood, the story continues. Noah gets drunk and behaves shamefully. It is as if God is saying “this your world is the only possible world, and it’s up to you to choose the way of life, my way; or the way of death.” Renewal of a right spirit within us is still the requirement for living a fully meaningful human life.
The readings from the Hebrew Scriptures will reveal later agreements, covenant promises extended through Abraham and the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel, and through Moses and the prophets. Today’s Gospel story is Mark’s account of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus’ life in its fullness—in its arc from birth to baptism to ministry to crucifixion to resurrection—becomes the Great Covenant, God’s ultimate promise of true of life to human beings. That is the Great Covenant we affirm at our own baptism. This is the Good News that Jesus preaches.
Mark’s account abridges the temptation story Matthew and Luke tell more fully. They explain that Satan’s temptations occurred at the end of Jesus’ forty day fast and began with the temptation to deal with his hunger by using his divine power to transform stones into bread. Matthew and Luke report that Jesus refused to do that, quoting Scripture that human beings live not by bread alone but by the words of life that come from God. He similarly turns aside temptations to exercise power over the whole world, if he will worship Satan, or to dazzle crowds with his supernatural powers by jumping off tall buildings without being hurt.
It is vital to have this additional information, I believe, in order to see that the crucible in which Jesus’ ministry is formed is like the challenge of bringing the Good News to today’s culture. The point is not simply that good people should resist the temptations to indulge the flesh, the world, and the devil in their various manifestations, worthy though that goal may be. Rather, the invitation is to see that Jesus, fresh from baptism and the affirmation of the Spirit’s power upon him, becomes the focal point of a collision of ultimate authority and ultimate priorities and ultimate values and ultimate outcomes. It comes down to this: on what will one stake one’s life? On the power to kill, like Rome, and like Satan, whose name means ‘the adversary’? On the power to be a celebrity and dazzle crowds? Or on the power to create new life? To bring life out of death? The power of new creation? The power of God?
It is very hard to trust an invisible and rarely manifested God. The gods our surrounding culture worships promise what Jesus rejected: material possessions (super-size that for you?), power (worship it!), status (watch me fly!). All these false gods are perhaps wrapped up in one supreme deity: security. We even have a national department dedicated to it.
Security: the ability to guarantee an outcome. If only. I confess that I long for security as much as anyone here. The reality, though, is that the only way out of the desert—40 years for the people of ancient Israel, 40 days for Jesus—is through it; there are no shortcuts, and there are hazards and surprises aplenty along the way. And the destination won’t look like what anyone imagined. It has to be a journey of faith. And it will be a journey in which the familiar, traditional will be transformed and made new.
The journey ahead of us individually, or as a parish, does not promise security. But it invites serenity, because it will be grounded in the faith worth staking one’s life on. The faith that God’s love will never let us go. The faith that new creation arises from death, that healing and reconciliation are available. The faith that God will be in each moment as it evolves. The faith that values love and compassion over power and status. The faith that as we engage the people around us more and more deeply they will disclose the longings of their hearts, and can respond to Good News of Jesus just as we have. The faith that without quite knowing our destination, or what some end product will look like, or quite how we’ll get there, the journey and the destination and even the mistakes along the way will be blessed because we undertake the journey believing in this kind of God.
May God indeed bless you in this journey, and may you go on the way rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Amen.