Sermons

Sermon, The Rev. Brian C. Taylor, May 2

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May 2, 2010
5 Easter
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Martin Luther King said once that story of the church is like a great extended family that receives a tremendous bequest: they receive an inheritance of a wonderful, beautiful, spacious, luxurious home to share. There is only one stipulation. The whole family must live in it together.

This “uh-oh!” moment was the experience of the young, traditionalist, Christian community in Jerusalem when Peter and Paul began bringing Gentiles into the old ancestral home. We heard this story in the first reading today, from Acts.

It is a story about God doing a new thing, and the people of God learning to participate in what God was trying to do. This new thing would transform the early Christian community from a small sect of Judaism into a movement that swept the western world. It was the most powerful thing that happened in the first century of the church.

Up until this point, followers of Jesus were still Jewish. Chief among their spiritual disciplines was the practice of keeping dietary and social laws mandating that they avoid certain foods and certain company when they ate. They were not supposed to sit down to a meal of a nice ham with a bunch of clean-shaven, materialistic hedonists in togas.

But the Gentiles liked what they had heard about Jesus from Peter, and invited him into their homes. Even worse, they wanted to be a part of the Jesus movement by skipping right over 2,000 years of Jewish religious practice, and going immediately to baptism. Peter recognized the fact that these Gentiles manifested authentic signs of the Spirit in their lives, but at first, he must have said “no, we don’t do it this way.”

But God was about to do a new thing, and to invite Peter and the rest of the early church to participate in what he was doing. So God gave Peter a vision. A large sheet came down from heaven, covered in disgusting, unnatural animals that had been considered unfit for human consumption by Jews for a thousand years. It would be like us seeing a sheet covered in cockroaches, sheep’s eyeballs, and snakes, with a voice saying “Get up, kill, and eat! For what God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

The vision wasn’t about food. It was about people. The new thing that God was doing was profound. God had given these Gentiles, even before they were baptized, a connection with Jesus, and the accompanying gifts of the Spirit.

In Peter’s vision, the boundaries around religion just fell away. The clean and the unclean mingled, the sacred and the secular mixed, and it became impossible to tell them apart. Peter and the rest of the early church came to understand the new thing that God was inviting them into, and it was really what Jesus had taught all along. They realized that the message was about life, not religion. It was about how all of us humans relate to God, to one another, and to the world we live in.

God was taking the heart of Jewish tradition – love, mercy, and faith - and exploding it out of its religious confines, into the whole world. Religion became transformed into the kingdom of God. Later, of course, the church turned the kingdom back into a religion with strong boundaries again. It’s a movement back and forth between rigidity and freedom.

Religion tends to get hide-bound, insisting on its beliefs and customs. We start thinking that tradition is what it is all about, and we forget that the liberating movement of the Spirit is what gave rise to religion in the first place. We say, “well, the Spirit moved a long time ago, but that never happens any more.”

This passage from Acts is what a study group of the Episcopal Church took with them to England when we were called upon the carpet for including gay and lesbian people into the full life of the church: blessing their relationships and ordaining them. We said to the bearded ones in Jerusalem – I mean Canterbury – that God is manifesting authentic gifts of the Spirit in the lives of people who, until now, have lived outside our norms, and we recognize them as faithful. At this point the question arises, as it did for Peter, “who am I that I should hinder God?”

For the last few months I’ve been studying a movement among Christians that is growing, especially in England, Canada, and the U.S. I will be exploring some of it in person during my sabbatical. In England, they call it “Fresh Expressions;” here we say it is the “Emerging Church.”

In this movement, church is not so much about having something that we create and maintain here – buildings, programs, budgets, and vestments - and then inviting people into it. It is about discovering where God may already be at work in the world, and joining in.

And so the emerging church is joining with young people in pubs and in parks and on Facebook, with homeless men and prostitutes on the street, with low-income families in housing projects, and instead of trying to get them to come to us and join in what we do here, we train and send people to them, to gather them where they are, to share scripture and sacrament and prayers and fellowship, so that we participate in what God is trying to do among them.

Lo and behold, what is discovered is church, out there in the world. The boundaries between secular and sacred, clean and unclean, just melt away, and it not about religion anymore, but about life; it is about authentic gifts of the Spirit being manifested in human beings.

This is nothing new, of course. It’s called “mission,” and religious orders and many churches have been doing it for centuries. What may be new is that more of the mainstream of the church is looking at themselves as being mission-based. In fact, our Episcopal Church is beginning to realize that while we will never agree theologically with many of our third-world brothers and sisters in the Anglican Communion, we can partner with them in mission, which is more important, anyway.

And so as I do this reading, I’m finding myself wondering how we might become more mission-based. How might we, for instance, discover the movement of the Spirit already at work in the community of our Food Pantry neighbors, and how we might add a little scripture and sacrament and service to others more needy than they are, and then name it church?

How can we make our 5pm bilingual service more than an invitation to come here and join us in what we do, and move out into Hispanic communities with our message of a contemporary, intelligent, inclusive gospel?

How might we discover and participate in the work of God that is already happening in your place of employment, in Albuquerque Interfaith’s community organizing?

How can we take the kirtan mass and make it more than a devotional practice for us, and perhaps by including food and discussion and community, make it authentic church for the semi-Buddhists and agnostics who would never come on Sunday mornings, but come to the kirtan mass?

As the new Ministry Complex is going up – and tomorrow morning, the concrete will be poured – let’s keep in mind that the mission of the church – our mission – is to take the good news into the world, not just to welcome new members into our religious scene here. Let’s use this new resource as a place to be sent from.

And over the next year or more, as our core team for the ReImagine process looks at where God might be calling us into the future, let’s move our gaze from ourselves out into the world, and ask ourselves “what new thing might God be trying to do out there, and how can we participate in it?”