Luke 14:7-14                                                                       

A woman describes her mother, a “serious Anglican” on a hardscrabble farm in Ontario earlier in the last century:

My mother prayed on her knees at midday, at night, and first thing in the morning. Every day opened up to her to have God’s will done in it. Every night she totted up what she’d done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they’re missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can’t make use of. Even if you’re wracked by troubles, and sick and poor and ugly, you’ve got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter.

“You’ve got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter.” What a marvelous image! I always hesitate when we have a reading like the one this morning from Hebrews. There are soaring moments in Holy Scripture – the one in the Hebrews passage this morning, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” is an example. But then, embedded right there with these soaring moments are the nitty gritty ones: “Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.” 

I hesitate because I ask myself, can I preach on the soaring passages and ignore the nitty gritty ones? And if I preach on the nitty gritty ones, what can I say? Fornication means sex outside marriage. Well, these days virtually everyone has sex before they are married. Churches are full of people living together without getting married – some without any intention of ever getting married. Of all the marriages I’ve officiated at, only once has a couple not had premarital sexual relations; the man was a serious evangelical Christian. So what do I say?

Condemn everyone? Or is the Bible hopelesssly out of date when it comes to the nitty gritty? Are only the soaring passages relevant? Though if Jesus Christ is the “same yesterday and today and forever,” can the nitty gritty parts really be so easily discarded as applying only to the past?

The description of the farm woman carrying her soul through life on a platter comes from a marvelous short story by the Canadian author Alice Munro. The story tells how after the author’s parents died, their farm was sold to a commune of hippies. The hippies raised goats and painted a rainbow on the barn and flowers on the walls inside the old farmhouse—flowers and, in one room, a naked Adam and Eve. Revisiting her childhood home after the hippies left, and seeing the painting of the Adam and Eve couple, the author speculates on what sort of hippie orgies went on  in that room, which had been her parents’ bedroom.

The story is thus about the changes in morality that have occurred over the last century. It ends on an ambiguous note. We learn that the hippie commune collapsed; its easy amorality didn’t work. But we also learn that the prayer on your knees, soul on a platter morality of the old mother wasn’t the whole story. After the mother’s death, her husband in a nursing home grumbles in his senility about how harsh his wife’s moral standards had been in practice, how her righteousness had hurt her family. And the author herself, divorced, her hair dyed Copper Sunrise, telling a little white lie to paper over a relationship, the author concludes:

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having even if the parting has to come sooner or later. I wonder if those moments aren’t more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.

So Alice Munro’s story, entitled “Love’s Progress,” ends up where a lot of modern morality ends up: with ambiguity, a sense that neither the old absolutes nor the hippie discarding of all standards is the answer; with a wistful grasp at “moments of kindness and reconciliation” in a world where nothing lasts forever, a world essentially without God.

Well, I don’t know. In this sermon I have in effect offered you three choices: the old Anglican on your knees, soul on a platter choice; the hippie commune pattern; and the grasping at moments of kindness and reconciliation pattern. Maybe it’s my generation, maybe my vocation, maybe my experience of life: for myself I’m really pretty convinced that the on your knees, soul on a platter choice is the only real one, the one closest to “Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever.” It can be done wrong, of course – in ways untempered by forgiveness, with a self-righteousness that ends up hurting others. But it takes more seriously than the other choices, it seems to me, the fact that we live our lives under the eye of God and in relationship with other immortal souls. It gives ultimate value to our days, our actions.

The nitty gritty of a reading like the one from Hebrews today – not throwing people in prison and treating them as inhuman, not torturing people as though they were not like us, honoring marriage and treating sex as something sacred, freeing ourselves from the love of money and being content with what we have – this nitty gritty seems to me in the end of a piece with the soaring passages. In the lives I minister to, ignoring the nitty gritty leads to unhappiness and worse, has created a society that seems to me in many ways bent on destruction. “Mutual love,” which is what the Hebrews passage is about, may have its soaring moments, but it is built on nitty gritty and a sense of living in the presence of God.

Luke 13:10-17                                                                     

This week Anne and I were visiting old friends at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve known David since we were both 12 at camp – my oldest really good friend. We shared a tent there, roomed together at college, were in each other’s weddings, and have spent time together nearly every summer of our adult lives. This year was different. David was diagnosed last winter with an inoperable brain tumor and has just undergone weeks of arduous radiation and chemotherapy. He’s on a walker, with balance and vision problems. He tires easily. He gained some strength while we were there, but the future prognosis remains uncertain.

In our time together, sitting on his porch looking out at the sea, we reminisced about the past, caught up on our children and grandchildren, shared some thoughts about the state of the world, joked with each other as we always have. But one thing we didn’t talk about was faith, because David doesn’t believe in God; religion has never been part of his life; he has no time or use for it. He’s respectful of it in my life. Indeed, out of the blue he sent a check for $30,000 to help with the building fund for Holy Cross. But God, Christ, Scripture, prayer, church – for him they’re all a delusion, a waste of time, something to be indulged in an old friend perhaps, but not for him.

So for me it was as though a whole dimension were missing in my time with this dear friend. We could not talk about prayer – was Jesus there at all for him in his weakness, his thoughts of death? Was there comfort in the psalms? Things in his past that troubled him, for which he needed healing and forgiveness? What was his hope for the future, for a future beyond death? How did he see his life in terms of God’s kingdom, of Christ’s great dream for humankind? Did his suffering deepen his understanding of the Cross? These are the questions I think I would be exploring if it were I in his place, but to raise them with David would only have been a mockery, and I would never do that to someone I respect and love.

Perhaps, of course, David is right and I am wrong. Perhaps all this dimension of belief is just illusion, and people get old and sick and die and it all means nothing, life means nothing beyond the moments of its living – the things we build up and accumulate, our friends, our children and grandchildren, all of whom will be taken away in the end, will end in nothing. But for me, even if the whole dimension of belief were to prove illusion in terms of there being a heaven and life with God hereafter – nevertheless it is belief that gives shape and color and meaning to this life here and now. It is belief that redeems my suffering, gives me another chance when I sin or fail, underlies my moral values, my whole approach to life. I do not live alone or only for myself or this life. I live with Christ, in the communion of saints, for and with others, including all the others I do not know. And in fact I believe that this life is not all there is, not even the best there is. Because I know God here and now, I believe in heaven hereafter.

I love the Letter to the Hebrews from which the first reading this morning comes. I love it because it makes the great case for a living faith, for the dimension of belief that I’ve been trying to describe in what I’ve said here. Its author (and we have no idea who he was, except that he wrote the most eloquent prose in the New Testament) contrasts a dead, mechanical faith, expressed in terms of “things you can touch,” with the “city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, . . . the new covenant.”

In the context in which the Letter to the Hebrews was written, the old dead faith in “things” referred to the empty temple rituals performed again and again by a priestly caste on behalf of a passive, inert people. But I think we can with very little effort transpose what the author is saying to our modern secular materialism, life without the dimension of belief in God and Christ; in prayer, sacraments, church and Scripture; without the hope of heaven and the fear of hell. All our “getting and spending,” as the poet Wordsworth put it, all our search for meaning in the material and the momentary – it all fails in the end, like the rituals of the temple, to redeem our lives, give them ultimate purpose and meaning.

What the author of Hebrews urges upon us instead is faith in a “living God” manifest in Jesus Christ and in his worship. By faith he means not just empty Christian rituals, to replace the old empty Jewish ones. Rather, he means living our lives in terms of this greater dimension, this “heavenly” dimension, of a “kingdom that cannot be shaken,” of a God who is a “consuming fire.” Hebrews speaks again and again of the saints who journey in faith and hope, who live in this greater dimension of belief. The author points to Jesus, the “pioneer and perfecter” of this faith, through whom we “offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.”

Though I think we should all be ready and able to speak of our faith to someone without faith, I don’t think the purpose of faith is to arm us to go out and “convert” others to prove somehow that we’re right. Faith is best spread, I think, by example. Which means that the real question for us is not why does someone else not believe, but rather is my own belief a “living” one in the sense of what Hebrews speaks? Am I offering to God the “acceptable worship” of a life determined by Jesus Christ? Are we living in the heavenly kingdom “that cannot be shaken”? Are our lives shaped first, last and always, by our belief in the living God?

Luke 12:49-56                                                                     

Our friend Bishop Walmsley is off at Grace Church, East Concord this morning, filling in for Fr. Wells who’s on vacation. I overheard the Bishop last Sunday at coffee hour grumbling (nicely, of course) about having to preach on the gospel we’ve been given this morning. “It’s that passage about Jesus dividing families,” he said. “Who wants to talk about that?” And I feel the same way. A beautiful summer day; who wants to hear about divisions in families or bringing fire to the earth? But here we are: the Lord is speaking to us and we must listen. This is holy ground.

One reason this gospel reading is so hard for us is that it’s so far from anything we’ve experienced. Yes, church brings division in many of our families – only one parent comes on Sundays and there’s tension over whether to go off on an activity that the other parent wants; families have to choose whether to participate in something like a picnic or a sporting or dance event or go to church; sometimes couples argue about how much to pledge. I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty of working out these divisions. But they’re not really what Jesus is talking about. They don’t involve “bringing fire to the earth.”

In all the years I’ve worked with couples preparing them for marriage or trying to help them with marital conflicts, I’ve never once dealt with a situation in which religious differences were the issue. Money, yes. Sex, yes. Drinking, drugs, abuse, yes. Adultery, yes. But never religion. Couples getting married often have differences over religion – one believes, one doesn’t; one is Christian, one Jewish – but they always say, “we’ll work it out; it isn’t really an issue.” And usually, to be honest, it gets “worked out” by neither spouse going to church, no religious formation for the children. Conflict is avoided by avoiding religion altogether.

And that’s pretty much the case for our society generally. It seems to be important still for our presidential candidates to be believers – both President Bush and President Obama were shaped by strong conversion experiences – but we don’t want them to let their faith intrude into their politics. The promise by President Kennedy that he wouldn’t take orders from the Pope is still often cited when we talk about religion in the public square. Religion should be a purely private matter – so private that it shouldn’t even cause conflicts in a family, let alone a nation or a world.

So this gospel (and the passage from Jeremiah that goes with it) is alien stuff for us. Here are two prophets, Jeremiah and Jesus, announcing that they’ve come to bring division, come to bring fire. They have a message which, taken seriously, is bound to divide, and they’re going to deliver this message even if it kills them – which, we know, it will.

Let’s be clear: Jeremiah and Jesus aren’t talking about a message that divides in the sense of whether a family goes to church this week goes camping. Not divides in the sense of dad votes Republican and mom Democratic, do we pledge $10 a week or $100. Both these prophets are talking about a message of ultimate judgment, a message from God about eternal salvation or eternal damnation.

Jeremiah and Jesus don’t just deliver this message in the abstract, like the rant of some television evangelist. The message is delivered in the context of judgment on the state of the world. “Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” asks Jesus. The Greek word translated “present time” is kairos, from which we get our English word “crisis.” [Note: It turns out this isn't the correct etymology, but the point still holds for the meaning of kairos.] Kairos means the critical moment, the moment of decision, of judgment.

So if we want to be serious about the message of Jeremiah and Jesus, we have to begin by “interpreting” the kairos in which we live. We don’t like to do that. Look at our Government, which is so paralyzed that we can’t address any of our crisis problems – recession, unemployment, budget deficits, terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, tax reform, out of control health care costs, climate change, immigration, the very structure of our Constitution (and that’s just for starters). Look at our Churches, which also bicker away over marginal stuff like sexuality, celibacy and liturgy, and fail (at least at an institutional level) to offer prophetic witness in the lives of their leaders. Look at ourselves, our families and workplaces and schools: how often do we raise the real issues, the kairos questions, in ways that would require us to act, to change our lives?

For that’s the real question, isn’t it? The call to judgment that these prophets give – a call from God – is a call that requires us to change. We can read the Bible front to back as a story of those who respond to God by changing and those who don’t. Those who do often suffer and lose in worldly terms, but they inherit eternal life. For the change to which Jeremiah and Jesus call us is a change that brings us a peace and hope and strength of a kind the world cannot give. It’s the peace we see in the lives of the saints and martyrs, who display great courage, great sacrifice, great compassion, because like Jeremiah and Jesus, they share the life of God.

Let us listen, my friends. Let us take to heart. Let us pray, confessing the sin of our timidity, our reluctance, our blindness. And then let us respond to God’s call.

Luke 12:32-40                                                                     

 I’m thinking that we should replace the old Nicene Creed that we say each Sunday with something more up to date, something that better reflects what we actually believe. Something like this:

•  We believe that a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.
• God is not involved in my life except when I need God to solve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

This “creed” is the religious outlook of American teenagers, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion, a study of looking at a wide spectrum of congregations, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. And of course it is not just the creed of our teenagers; it is what we adults actually believe, for we are the ones teaching our children – or failing to teach them.

The authors of this study sum up our religious outlook as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. That is, it is moralistic in its emphasis on the importance of our being good, nice and fair to each other – without much thought as to what good, nice and fair might mean. It is therapeutic in being oriented to individual happiness and “feeling good about yourself.” And it is deistic in believing in a God who is not involved in life except when we need this God “to solve a problem.” Overall, it is a faith centered on us, not on God; one with an easy assumption that good people will go to heaven and that we are basically good; and a faith so bland and banal that it requires very little effort and makes very little claim on our lives. If we have anything better to do on Sunday than to devote a couple of hours to this faith, well, go do it – and given the blandness and banality of this faith, almost anything is probably better to do.

Now compare this faith with the gospel we’ve just heard. Jesus tells us to go and sell all our possessions, give our money to the poor, and in so doing build up for ourselves “an unfailing treasure in heaven.” He warns us that judgment is coming, the return to earth of the Son of Man, “at an unexpected hour,” and that we must be prepared and ready.

Underlying this message are some convictions very foreign to the creed of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. First, that God is intensely involved with our lives at every moment, that God controls history and cares for us and for all creation. Second, that how we live here and now has eternal consequences; that God rewards and punishes us in the future life, that hell as well as heaven is real. And third, that God has already established his rule among those who believe in him, has “given us the kingdom,” so that we live not in this world of chaos and insecurity, but in a world governed by the grace of Jesus Christ. In a word, this is a creed anything but bland, anything but banal.

Now imagine a teenager – imagine an adult! – who took that creed, that gospel faith seriously. Imagine, for instance, a young man named Jon Daniels growing up in Keene, New Hampshire, going to high school there, then on to college. Imagine him filled with the usual adolescent uncertainty about what to do with his life, what to be when he grows up. (And which if us, however old in years, is ever “grown up”?) Imagine him going to church one Sunday, Easter Day as it happens, and hearing the gospel read, receiving the Bread and Wine, and suddenly finding himself “converted,” convicted, overturned in heart and mind, in the very direction of his life, by the very message that we have heard today.

Off he goes, Jon Daniels, our young man, on a journey of faith like Abraham of old – “called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; . . . not knowing where he was going.” Off he goes, like the saints before him evoked in the Letter to the Hebrews, “strangers and foreigners on the earth, . . . desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” And you know, because you know who this Jon Daniels actually was, that his journey led to Alabama on a dark night in the Civil Rights Summer of 1965, where he was gunned down by fear and hatred while shielding from death a sixteen year-old black girl. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

And of course I don’t recount the story of Jonathan Daniels to suggest that the only response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to go to seminary or to work for civil rights. It is God who gives us our mission when we open ourselves to receive the Gospel, to make Jesus the radical pattern for our own self-abandonment, our own lives. Jon Daniels is just our local saint, one of us, so he comes in handy at these moments.

Well, we started these reflections by quoting the “creed” of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion. Another study, of Exemplary Youth Ministry, finds that churches in which young people exhibit highly devoted faith are likely to

• portray God as living, present and active
• place a high value on Scripture
• explain their church’s mission, practices and relationships as inspired by “the life and mission of Jesus Christ”
• emphasize spiritual growth, discipleship and vocation
• promote outreach and mission
• help teens develop “a positive, hopeful spirit,” “live out a life of service” and “live a Christian moral life.”

These congregations view young people, and I would add adults, “as Christ’s representatives in the world.” They see every one of their members as a potential Jonathan Daniels, because every one of them is called to nothing less than the life of Jesus Christ.

So there is a difference, there is a choice. What then do we believe? What do we want for our children – for ourselves? What is holding us back? What do we need to do? The Gospel of Christ is clear: We “must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

 ___________________

The studies referred to are the subject of an article by Kenda Creasy Dean, “Faith, nice and easy: The almost-Christian formation of teens,” in Christian Century, August 10, 2010, pp. 22-27.

This coming Saturday, August 14, is the commemoration in the calendar of the Episcopal Church of Blessed Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

Luke 12:13-21                                                                     

“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves

but are not rich toward God.”  –Luke 12:21

I want us to reflect together this morning about what it means to be “rich toward God.” But in order to do that, we have to begin by exploring the nature of greed. Greed is one of those words, like forgiveness, that we trivialize. We tell our children not to be greedy and grab all the doughnut holes at coffee hour. But we don’t notice how our whole lives in this world are founded on greed.

The calamity of the oil spill in the Gulf has brought this home to us. It is not just the negligence of British Petroleum, its greed for corporate profit. It is not just the failure to enforce government safety regulations, our naïve hope that the greedy self-interest of the marketplace would make government oversight unnecessary. We are each of us involved in this environmental catastrophe – and all the others in the world that don’t make the evening news – because in our greed we demand cheap and abundant fuel to sustain our consumerist lifestyle.

The Greek word for greed, pleonexia, is derived from pleon, “more.” John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, then the richest man in the world, was once asked how much money he needed to be happy. “Just one dollar more,” he replied. And we too, our whole economic system, our whole lifestyle, is founded on the fallacy that we if just have “more” we will at last be happy. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins – pride, anger, greed, sloth, lust, envy, and gluttony. When we look at these sins, we see that they all arise from our insecurity, our feeling that we need to make ourselves safe. We are like the man storing up crops in his barn as security against the uncertainties of life. “Just one dollar more.”

But of course, as the parable makes clear, this security in the end is illusory. It does not bring real happiness. Greed leads to even more insecurity – and to things like the fight between the man and his brother over their inheritance that led Jesus to tell the parable. When I look at my life, I spend much of it taking care of my possessions, possessions that I really don’t need and that fail to bring me real happiness. I spend much time worrying about the crops stored in my barn, about the barn roof, about whether people will steal my stores, about whether what I’ve saved up will in the end be enough. The seven deadly sins are deadly because they kill the soul, they bring spiritual death rather than happiness.

So what is the alternative? Jesus tells us that instead of storing up treasures for ourselves, we will find happiness by being “rich toward God.” Well, how do we go about that? We know all about being greedy, but being rich toward God is pretty much a new concept, isn’t it?

I’ve been reading as part of my daily prayers a little book that Canon LaFond gave every priest in the diocese, The Essential Henri Nouwen.* It’s set up for daily spiritual reflection, divided into short sections that take just a minute or two to read. Henri Nouwen, who died in 1996, was (and still is) one of the most popular and wisest spiritual guides of our time. He was a restless man, always seeking. He was also, despite the fact that he had an international reputation and sold hundreds of thousands of books, deeply insecure, perhaps because he carried with him the secret that he was gay. But his wounds led him to seek happiness in being rich toward God and to share his search with others.

We seek happiness, Henri Nouwen says, in the “up,” positive things in life. “But [happiness] in the Christian sense has very little to do with this. [Happiness] is only possible through the deep realization that life and death are never found completely separate. [Happiness] can really come about only where fear and love, joy and sorrow, tears and smiles exist together. [Happiness] is the acceptance of life in a constantly increasing awareness of its preciousness” – by which Nouwen means the fact that it is a gift from God, all of it, the “downs” as well as the “ups,” that it will end in death and nothing we do can make us secure against this inevitability.

So, says Nouwen, we must not divide life into good things and bad things, or separate our living from our dying, our joy from our pain. We must learn to embrace everything as gift and to find God in everything. As we gradually learn to do this, we will be freed from anxiety and insecurity, able to accept life as it comes, stopping seeking “more.” We will erase the boundaries between ourselves and others, and find our greatest happiness in reaching out, in generous giving, in self-sacrifice. For as Jesus shows us again and again, richness towards God is inseparable from richness towards our neighbor.

All of this seems so simple, so obvious, when I read it in the little Essential Henri Nouwen book each morning in my prayer time. But of course it is profoundly counter to all the messages of the world around us. It requires a reorientation of our values, our vision. The other morning at our men’s breakfast we were sitting next to a large gathering of a political group, gearing up for the fall election. Their conversation was full of anger, of hate, of fear. It was really raw, in the end all about greed. We came away, all of us I think, quite shaken. But that is why it is so important that we gather here each week, to listen to another word, to internalize another vision, to reenact another way of being, to learn true happiness by being rich toward God instead of just storing up treasures for ourselves.

_____________

*The Essential Henri Nouwen, Robert A. Jonas ed. (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2009). The quoted passage is from p. 61.

Luke 11:1-13                                                                       

 “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Two of our time’s greatest spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have announced that they will be withdrawing from the public scene. They want, each of them says, more time and space to pray. As Archbishop Tutu says, he’s been spending too much time in airports and hotels – like us, busy with the busyness of our busy world. The Dalai Lama explained that he needs to prepare for his death. I feel that need myself, as I look towards retirement. And of all the regrets I have about our ministry together, the greatest is that we’ve spent so little time on prayer.

So how good that this morning we listen to Jesus, teaching us about prayer. What is prayer? At its broadest sense, it is simply living in conscious communion with God. This can be talking with God, as in the readings this morning, or simply being silent and still and open before God. The readings are short, but really they tell us all we need to know about this essential element of the spiritual life. So let us listen!

 First, they tell us that we have a God who listens to us, who responds, who wishes to be in communion with us. The Genesis reading, in which Abraham is bargaining with God about the destruction of Sodom, is perhaps the best story in the Bible about God listening and responding in prayer. There’s nothing subtle here, nor in the gospel stories about the person banging on the door at midnight or the child asking for a fish. God listens. God responds. It’s as simple as that. It may not happen right away. It may not happen in the form we originally wanted. Frequently as we pray the shape of our asking changes in response to the Holy Spirit moving within us. But prayer does have effect. That is the first thing.

The second thing is that for prayer to work it must be persistent. It’s a matter for the long haul, not for instant results. Think of it in terms of an intimate friendship (which it is). Friendship develops gradually over time. It takes patience and experience. It takes time. And deep friendship requires that each friend be increasingly open and vulnerable with the other. So if I come to God asking something, God will usually come back to me, asking me to dig a little deeper into what is behind my request. That will alter my asking, to something more genuine. And again God will come back to me, revealing a little more about himself, about the realities of the world he has to deal with and how I fit into the bigger picture. So again, I will modify my prayer, and God again will respond. It is a back and forth, an on-going relationship. Persistence and openness to listen and change, to deepen in our understanding, is required. That is the second thing to remember.

The heart of all prayer – what God is leading us into as we deepen in our relationship with him – is what we call the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. It is what Jesus teaches his disciples in the reading this morning. The Lord’s Prayer is not really a set prayer, the way we have come to say it in church and by ourselves at home. It is an outline or structure for all prayer that is true, that is shaped by the response of God. And it is very simple, this outline or structure.

To begin with, it is focused on God and not on us. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” – not my kingdom or my will, not the kingdom of the United States or any other human invention. In true prayer the Holy Spirit leads us gently away from our orientation to God’s orientation, drawing us into the grand work of creation and salvation where we will find true joy in harmony with God. And this work is here “on earth”; we are not just praying for deliverance from this life to heaven.

Then come three petitions – things we ask for ourselves so that we can participate in the kingdom work of God. “Give us today our daily bread” is the first. The Greek word we translate as “daily” is unique; it occurs nowhere else, so we aren’t entirely clear what it means. The best guess is that it refers to what we need just for today or tomorrow. We are not to ask God to pile up riches and securitiy so we can live apart from him. It is like the manna the Hebrew’s ate in the wilderness after the Exodus; God sent the manna each day, enough for that day, and it spoiled if the Israelites tried to hoard it. So we are to ask only our “daily” bread. Only enough to feed us as we walk with God, not so much that we can be free of dependence on God.

Then we ask “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” Isn’t this a remarkable prayer! It asks that we live in a state of constant, on-going forgiveness. What a contrast to the impulse we all have to blame others and justify ourselves, to judge others by how they serve or agree with our interests. No: we are to pray and live forgiveness, humility, letting go and letting God.

Then the third petition, “lead us not into temptation” or “save us from the time of trial” and “deliver us from evil.” When we get into trouble – moral trouble – is when we reach out for more than we can handle, when we do not trust in God and remember our own limitations as human beings. Think of Adam and Eve in the Garden: not trusting in the goodness of God to provide for them, but led by the sense of insecurity awakened in them by the Serpent so that they want to be “like God” themselves. All sin, the Desert Fathers and Mothers tell us, is at heart the exaggeration or excess of some virtue. Lust is love – but carried to excess.  And so we pray to be protected from overreaching, from temptation and trial, and when we do fall into sin and evil, to be delivered from them.

You begin to see the picture of the human being in harmony with God that emerges from this prayer. You see how the doxology or praise at the end of the Lord’s Prayer – “For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory” – brings us back to the initial orientation on God, not us. This is the point of prayer, the answer that in one way or another God gives us when we pray. For here is our true joy, in centering our lives on him, finding our fulfillment in communion with him.

In this Holy Eucharist this prayer is acted out, ritualized, as we offer ourselves to God in bread and wine, are enfolded and sacrificed into God’s saving story, and receive back from God no less that God’s daily bread, God’s forgiveness, God’s deliverance from evil, in the Body and Blood of God’s Son, Jesus the Christ.

"Queen Alice" waves from the seat of Thom Thomas's 1964 Cadillac.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Joel also enjoyed a ride in the parade.

Will Townsend's flag-decked truck carried riders on an old church pew.

Fr. John wore an Uncle Sam hat complete with patriotic dreadlocks.

Terry Knowles and Kathleen Kenyon rode in style in Eric Peterson's convertible.

Brianna was in charge of the pole flying the Holy Spirit dove at the head of the line.

Kathleen Kenyon offered face painting at our booth after the parade.

Hunter, Aidan and Brooke kept step with Fr. John and their grandmother, Diane Beland.

Annabelle decorates her T-shirt with garden designs for the parade.

Jorja had the biggest bloom in God's garden.

Mr. Brown wasn't the only one with his tongue hanging out by the end of the march.

Tired marchers hitch a ride back to their cars at parade's end.

Yvette Desmarais and Anne McCausland try to move baked goodies in the afternoon heat.

Luke 10:38-42                                                                     

We’re standing in the sacristy there at St. Michael’s, Barrington, Illinois – me, the curate just out of seminary, the rector, and the visiting bishop – just about to go in to begin the liturgy. “Bill,” says the bishop to the rector, “what did I preach about last time I was here?” (This would have been four years earlier.) I watch a look of panic cross the rector’s face. Sermons have a short shelf life in memory; four years could be four centuries. “I remember you told a story about a dog,” the rector replied, color returning to his face. “Ah,” said the bishop, returning to his brief case the sermon he had taken out and pulling forth another. It turned out he had three sermons that he preached, rotating them as he went his rounds.

So, a story about stories. Fr. McLean remembered nothing about the bishop’s sermon except the dog story he’d told. You may well remember nothing about this story except my story about the bishop’s sermon. Stories are what are most memorable because we humans are constructed by stories. It is through stories that we find the most fundamental meaning of who we are and what life and reality are all about. The Bible endures as a source of truth because it is above all a collection of stories.

This morning we have two of the great stories in the Bible. In the reading from Genesis, three strangers appear at the tent of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham greets them and extends hospitality – a place to rest in the shade from the noonday desert sun, drink for themselves and their animals, a sumptuous feast. The visitors announce that a year hence, when they return that way, Sarah will have borne the heir promised by God to Abraham. Abraham and Sarah, mind you, are by this time ancient, well past their childbearing years.

If you read a little bit further in the story, you learn that Sarah, peeking out from the tent, laughs in disbelief at this foolish prediction of childbirth. But it comes to pass, and the child she bears she names Isaac, meaning “he laughs.” The story is about faith in God’s promises, in our covenant relationship with God, faith against all odds, all reason, even all nature. In Christian tradition, the three visitors come to represent angels, and then the Holy Trinity. A famous Russian icon depicting the scene is displayed on the oblations table by the Font this morning.

The story in the gospel reading, of Mary and Martha welcoming their friend Jesus to their home, is another story of hospitality. Martha has gone down in history as the active sister; Mary the contemplative one. But really this is a story about much deeper things than active and contemplative. Martha is the sister “distracted by many things,” weighed down with worry that she has to “do” something to welcome the Lord. Mary is the sister who chooses “the better part,” the “one thing necessary,” sitting at her Lord’s feet to receive his word of life.

So, in both cases, stories about God coming to people, being welcomed in the case of Abraham and Mary with open hearts, open minds, open hospitality, readiness to accept and believe; but in the case of Sarah and Martha, things standing in the way of this reception – Sarah’s disbelief that such a wondrous thing as her pregnancy could happen, Martha’s anxious assumption that hospitality requires busyness, achievement, merit on her part, not simply openness to what her visitor wants to bring her.

Let’s go back for a minute to the subject of story as the thing which constructs us, gives us meaning. I think about the world of my grandfather, whom I used to visit as a boy each summer. My grandfather was a man of stories. He told them at meal tables, breakfast, lunch and dinner. (In those days, families ate meals together.) He told them and listened to them with his friends, who came by each evening to sit on the porch, smoke cigars, play cards and . . . tell stories. Funny stories, amazing stories, sometimes sad stories. Stories about growing up, about ancestors and old ways; stories about dreams and hopes, successes and failures. As grandfather grew older, the stories would get repeated more often, but it didn’t really matter. The stories were what gave life.

What are our stories today? Well, I think most of them we get from the media. They are stories about celebrities, people of impossible wealth, impossible accomplishments, impossible physical beauty, impossible power. The people in my grandfather’s stories were accessible; the people in media stories are mostly inaccessible. That is part of the difference. There is also the fact that media stories are largely one-dimensional. We learn about a movie star’s latest multi-cultural adoption, but we do not know that movie star personally so we do not know about her own childhood, what her marriage (if she has one) is really like, what she fears or hopes or dreams. The people in my grandfather’s stories were multi-dimensional, because he knew them and often his listeners knew them. So the stories about them were full of nuance, of irony, of alternative possibilities; the characters in my grandfather’s life had pasts and futures. They were what I would call “open” – their stories were therefore “thick” and could be told in various ways. The characters in media stories are “closed” – their stories are correspondingly “thin” and we are told only one narrow version of them.

Biblical stories like the ones this morning are like beads on a necklace. None of them stands alone. Strung together through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, they tell one long story – a story that is still being told in our own lives, in the telling of our own stories. In the great story of the Bible, the central character is always God. Every other character, every story, revolves in some way around God. God enriches our stories, opens them to possibilities beyond ourselves. God connects our stories, one to another. In this Holy Eucharist each week, in the readings and our reflections, in the sharing of Bread and Wine, God’s story becomes our story and our stories become God’s story. We are Abraham. We are Mary. Nothing is impossible to those whose story is the story of God.

Luke 10:25-37                                                                     

I think this may be a troubling sermon for you. At least it is for me. There’s a good guy and a bad guy in the gospel today. The good guy is the Samaritan of course, who stops by the side of the road and cares for the man who’s been left there for dead. We know this Samaritan well; this is one of Jesus’s most familiar parables. The bad guy is – not the priest or the Levite who pass the injured man by – no, the real bad guy is the lawyer whose question prompts Jesus to tell the parable.

Why is the lawyer bad? Because, Luke tells us, he “wanted to justify himself.” That is, he put himself forward, tried to assert his own cleverness, sought to cross-examine or test Jesus. He should simply have done what the good Samaritan did, which was to obey what he knew to be God’s law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

So, what’s troubling about this? What’s troubling, I think, is that you and I are the lawyer, not the Samaritan. Putting ourself at the center, making ourselves the test of life – do I like such-and-such, does it make sense to me, does it withstand my test of self-interest – this is our default stance towards life. Maybe, if something meets our test, we go ahead and do what we should be doing according to God’s law. But often, I think, we’re just more interested in testing for ourselves and never get around to doing. And sometimes, of course, God fails our test and we don’t do his law at all.

We need an example here. Let’s take Mother Mary, the priest from Uganda who preached here three weeks ago. We learned all about her background in Uganda, the work of her husband here as a priest, trying to keep AIDS orphans together in families, off the streets, working the little farms their dead parents left them. We learned of Mother Mary’s dream, to buy a bicycle for every priest in her diocese back home, as a memorial to her father, a lay preacher, so these priests could travel around their parishes. We learned all of that, and of course we already knew what Uganda was like, the poverty and the orphans and AIDS and all. We did not really need Mother Mary to tell us. But here she was, embodying all of what we knew here in our very midst. She was, I suggest, like the beaten man lying by the side of the road. (Though just one of many along our road of life.)

So, how many of us “passed by on the other side”? Well, every one of us. Every one. Not a single person has come to me and said, “Let’s raise some money to help buy those bicycles for Mother Mary.” Nor have I suggested to the Vestry that we raise money to buy those bicycles. I have not even suggested to my wife that she and I write a check to buy a bicycle.

Oh, I have an excuse. Someone knowledgeable about Africa advised me before Mother Mary even came that it was not a good idea to just give money to Africans for projects. Such donations are often misappropriated or the project isn’t really feasible or what is most needed. Best to work through established channels like Episcopal Relief and Development. And that advice is not wrong. There are risks. But there were risks to the Samaritan in helping the man lying there on the road.

Risks – they’re what held the lawyer and his like back from following Jesus. This whole middle section of Luke’s gospel is about the risks of discipleship, the risks of taking Jesus seriously, of taking God seriously – and how these risks hold us back. The Gospel of God is a risky business indeed. Just look how many people it’s led to their deaths! “Go and do likewise,” Jesus tells us. And he’s been telling us that for 2000 years.

You know, the lawyer did not think of himself as a bad man. Quite to the contrary, those called “lawyers” in the gospels were scholars and teachers of the religious laws – God’s revelation – who sought to figure out what was right and what wrong. He took himself seriously, as did others take him no doubt. And we do not think of ourselves as bad. We’re interested in following the good and avoiding the bad.

But I think we’re so locked into a culture – going all the way back through the Enlightenment and probably beyond – that makes us the judges of good and bad, that in effect puts God to the test, that we don’t even realize that there may be a problem with this in terms of the Gospel. That in the Gospel of Jesus, God tests us, not the other way around.

Our churches, of instance, which should be the last places that fall victim to self-orientation, have in fact become market-driven consumer-oriented service providers just like everything else. I was looking at the brochure put out by another parish in our diocese (I could have been looking at our own, but it’s easier to see these things in someone else’s product). These brochures are, of course, essentially marketing tools. The Church spends a huge amount of time and energy on marketing these days.

This brochure included such phrases as “a place where people can worship and feel comfortable”; “youth and family ministries abound”; “come in and be a part”; “all are welcome without exception.” All oriented around the consumer, don’t you see. Not a single suggestion of the angular demands of the Gospel, of the risks Jesus might be calling us to, of the possibility that “feeling comfortable” isn’t the point of worship, that quite the opposite might be the point. That we should come to church to be radically reoriented around God.

What must we do to inherit eternal life, you and I? Do what Jesus tells us. No matter what the cost.

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20                                                          

In the parish I served in St. Charles, Illinois, the custom was to begin meetings of the city council with prayer led by one of the local clergy. I was always asked to perform this duty at the meeting closest to Independence Day because, as the city clerk explained, “the Episcopal Church is so historic.” I never had the heart to tell her that although many, even most, of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, the Episcopal clergy were mostly loyalists to the British Crown.

As the bulletin note recounts, plans to include commemoration of Independence Day in the first Episcopal Book of Common Prayer in 1786 were scuttled when it was pointed out that Episcopal clergy leading such a service were likely to be hooted down as hypocrites. It took at least a generation for the Episcopal Church, newly independent of the Church of England back home, to find its footing as an independent branch of Anglicanism. It remained, however, very much the church of the Anglo-American elite, tied to wealth and the Eastern Seaboard, slow to adapt to conditions in America as the frontier moved west. It was said that the Baptists walked west with the pioneers; the Methodists followed on horseback, and the Episcopalians waited for Pullman cars. We kept our established Church mentality; our worship and organization not quick to adapt to the culture of this new Nation.

But Jesus was a frontiersman. He preached and taught on the move, out-of-doors, on the road. He had followers, disciples, not ordained clergy. He wasn’t about doctrines or customs – indeed he offended those who were. He was about the Spirit, about the Good News, about transforming lives. Hit the road, he tells the “seventy others” he appoints in the gospel reading today to be advance men and women for his mission. Travel light. Where you’re welcomed, share the Good News. Where you’re not, shake the dust off your feet. The point of it all is not building a Church, but proclaiming the reign of God. And don’t worry about the outcome, Jesus tells his advance teams – success or failure. For whatever the results, “your names are written in heaven.”

That stuff about “no purse, no bag, no sandals” has obvious relevance to the organizational trappings of budgets and buildings and pensions and ordained ministers. But it seems to me that it extends beyond those things. Put back to back with the Galatians reading, we see that in order to spread the Gospel and keep the mission of Christ alive, there are other things we need to think about shedding.

Circumcision – that was the biggy for St. Paul. Paul took the Gospel on the road finding that it got a better reception among Gentiles than among his own Jews. The Jews were tied down by their insistence on observance of a complex set of cultic laws and regulations, tightly ordered ways of looking at life, and particularly at religion. But for the Gospel to be acceptable to Gentiles, it was necessary to do away with a lot of that baggage, especially the key Jewish requirement of circumcision for males. Circumcision was what marked you as one of the People of God. Dropping circumcision was the first great watershed in the growth of Christianity, what freed it to spread in the world. That’s what Paul is talking about when he says that “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything.”

We’re at an interesting point right now in our history as Episcopalians – and not just Episcopalians; Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants maybe all religions are at a similar point. The Anglican Communion as we know it seems to be falling apart, or at least changing radically. This is something that’s been building, like the pressure of tectonic plates before an earthquake – the liturgical changes of Vatican II and the 1979 Prayer Book; the ordination or women; the recognition of openly gay clergy. And all this against the background of a great weakening of denominational ties, so that in this room, and receiving Communion this morning, we have not just cradle Episcopalians, but Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and probably a dozen other church traditions as well as, increasingly commonly, people with no church affiliation or background at all (and often not a lot of interest in making any such affiliation).

I was reading a fascinating article recently that suggested that what is happening is that Anglicanism is changing from being a Church to being a movement. That is, as the organizational ties break down – with various branches of Anglicanism not recognizing one another and increasing inability to agree on how to agree – the Church stuff, the purses and bags and sandals of Christianity, is becoming less and less important. Instead, we have the characteristics of a movement, which is how Christianity started: it was first know simply as the Way, one of a variety of movements within first century Judaism.

At the graduation in May at my old seminary, Nashotah House, there were Episcopalians, Anglicans from Africa and Asia, several Protestants of different stripes, members of various Anglican groups that have broken away from the Episcopal Church over ordination of women and gays, over Prayer Book reforms. And the weird thing, as the Dean noted, is that they were all marching together at the graduation, all praying and celebrating together, all these people who in official Church terms were not in communion with one another. “What if we gave a schism,” he joked, “and nobody came?”

I don’t mean to say that everything about this breaking down of Church is good or that “movements” are without dangers. The great danger of movements is isolation and self-righteousness. It’s easy to be part of the Tea Party movement and say that taxes and government are bad. But when people like that get into office, they quickly find that it isn’t that simple. Breakaway movements have a long history of continuing to fragment. Garrison Keillor, of “Prairie Home Companion” fame, is fond of saying that his family belonged to one such movement, which had split so many times over issues of belief that finally there was only his parents, his siblings and his aunt and uncle.

Coming back to Jesus and Paul: they balanced the movement aspect of their mission with an insistence on community. You can’t be a Christian all by yourself. You can’t be a Christian without talking and trying to reach agreement with other Christians – even with those of other religions altogether. We are all children of one Father. We are all brothers and sisters. None of us is privy to the Truth. All of us are struggling together to find and follow the Word made flesh, Jesus. Some rules, some boundaries, are essential if people are to live together. So, movement yes, but Church also. A tension, a balance, between the two poles.

All of what we’ve been talking about applies also, I think, to this beloved country of ours, whose birthday we celebrate today. America was begun as a movement, an experiment in freedom on many fronts. With age and wealth and power have come the burdens and baggage of nationhood and empire. Like the Church, America faces enormous and unprecedented challenges today and much of our baggage impedes our ability to respond so as to meet those challenges successfully. Maybe we need to recapture the spirit of America as movement and let go of some of the baggage of America as nation and empire. But again, not easy to do; not without dangers.

As Americans, and as Christians, our call through all this is to take heart, not to tie our faith to the baggage of outmoded institutional forms, but to labor for what is right, love all others and rejoice that come what may history rests in the Lord and the names of the righteous are written in heaven.