Thursday, November 30, 2017

Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

This is my sermon from the Feast of Christ the King, November 26 2017 at Church of the Advent, Cincinnati. 

  •   Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, which you may or may not know, as it’s perhaps one of the lesser known feast days of the church year. It’s original name is one of the best & probably most grandiose I’ve ever seen: The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. It’s one of the more recently added feasts in terms of the long history of Christianity, being added in 1925 by the Roman Catholic Church & later adopted by the Episcopal Church & Anglican Communion along with a whole host of other churches & traditions.
  •  Christ the king started out in an era, in 1920’s Europe, just after the world was torn apart violently by conflicts among kings and political leaders in WWI, and amidst the rise of fascism in Italy, and what would later become Nazism in Germany, as a whole host of authoritarian regimes began increasingly cropping up around the world. Pope Pius, at that time, wanted to remind the people that it was Christ, not any dictator or political leader, not any general or military authority, not any powerful businessman or financial interest – but Christ alone, who is truly Lord of all.
  •     We always celebrate Christ the King on the last Sunday before the season of Advent begins, and since Advent is the beginning of the new church year, Christ the King is the last Sunday of the current church year, which is always at the end of November. Although Pope Pius could not have imagined it 92 years ago when the Christ the King celebration began, just so happens that for us here in the modern day USA, that places it squarely after Thanksgiving and significantly right between the feasts which our material culture has chosen to worship – Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
  •      See, I don’t mention that by accident. Even though even the human leaders who planned this feast couldn’t have known it – I really believe God knew what God was doing here. Think about it – While every store, company and corporation are in fever pitch trying to make you buy, buy, buy more and more, never having enough so that you will spend every dime that you have in order to gain some false sense of satisfaction, or worthiness, or power, Christ the King reminds us that none of that matters at all! Christ the King tells us that nothing we can do can buy us the power or glory we crave, because it all belongs to Christ anyway. Christ the King tells us that no matter how much physical wealth or money or political influence the enormous corporations and mega-donors may have, it all really belongs to Christ anyway – and for that matter –Christ alone is the one with all the power!
  •      If you’re like me, the Gospel for today was a very familiar one. The imagery is so complex and beautiful that we could spend the rest of our lives unpacking it, and yet it’s so simple that small children usually understand it better than us adults. I could preach endlessly on this text, and if you stay active in church long enough you will certainly hear lots of sermons on it, but there’s one thing here I want you to notice on this feast of Christ the King.
  •       Our Christ – Our Jesus who is King of Kings and Lord of All, seated on the throne at the Right hand of the Father, doesn’t even play the same game as the earthly kings! Jesus doesn’t sit in some rich palace, or wear a heavy crown of gold and jewels. He doesn’t employ fleets of maids and servers to wait on him hand and foot, or crush the poor with his physical might. Our Christ is the one who IS the poor, who IS the Least of These, who IS the hungry and the imprisoned, and the sick, and the thirsty, and the naked!
  •      Christ the King is not some unreachably holy being up in the stars of heaven, but the hungry and the needy whom we serve each day at Open Door Ministries, or visit in the hospital, or bring coats to as the winter approaches.
  • One of my favorite Advent traditions is to see Handel’s Messiah performed sometime in December almost every year. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of Baroque music written by the great composer Handel in 1741, usually lasting about 2 to 3 hours and if you’ve never heard it performed live, you must. The piece quotes exclusively from Scripture, telling of Christ’s victory over death, his glory and his ultimate power over all creation. Part of what mystifies me every time is the beauty of the kingship language Handel borrows from Scripture in describing our Lord Christ. These are just 2 of the verses that stir my spirit every time I hear them:
  • Psalm 2:1-2 Why do the nations so furiously rage together: why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers take counsels together against the Lord and His anointed.
  • Revelation 19:6, 11:15, 19:16 Hallelujah! for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. The Kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ: and He shall reign for ever and ever. King of kings, Lord of lords.
  • These next four weeks, we prepare to encounter the Lord Christ again in some powerful & life-changing ways we don’t always think about. We will meet him in the awe-inspiring and terrifying apocalyptic vision of the end of times projected in Revelation & in Mark’s Gospel. And we will meet Christ in the fiery warnings of John the Baptist, and in the pregnant joyful anxiety of Mary and Joseph. And of course we will again meet again in a manger in Bethlehem not just a beautiful newborn baby, but the King of the Universe, Jesus Christ our Lord.
  • As we embark these coming weeks on that sacred journey, Join me in remembering Christ not only as our brother and friend, redeemer and teacher, but as the King of all Creation. Remember him, not as the ally of the rich or the powerful, but as the poor, the sick and the destitute before your eyes. But above all, remember The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.
  • AMEN

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The Community's Talents

I preached this sermon on November 19, 2017 at St. Phillips Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio. The Rector and Vestry of St. Phillips asked me to speak with them about how to navigate the urban challenges of gentrification, changing neighborhoods, etc. 

Based on Matt. 25:14-30



The Parable of the talents is a very familiar one – perhaps one of the best known or most often repeated parables in scripture. It’s told again in Luke 9, where it’s not just a rich man but a king who entrusts his servants with his wealth to invest according to their judgment. If you’re like me & you grew up in the church or you’ve been going to church a long time, you’ve heard many a sermon on this passage encouraging their congregations to invest their time, talent and treasure wisely in one way or another. You may also have heard this passage in sermons around stewardship season, encouraging you to contribute generously and invest in the stewardship of the church, so that the good works here at St. Phillips and other churches near and far may continue to grow and strengthen for many generations to come. And while Fr. Wilson and I certainly do encourage you to give generously to this wonderful church, and that is indeed part of the lesson that we can draw from this parable, it’s not the whole story.

Now if, perhaps you are new to this parable or new to the church, this is a fascinating story with simple but powerful imagery, if a little bit disturbing in the end.

 Here in Matthew, the placement of this story is significant. It’s preceded as we heard last week by the parable of the ten bridesmaids as we heard last week, which is all about how the well-prepared bridesmaids steward their resources of oil while the ill-prepared bridesmaids are left literally locked out when the bridegroom (Christ himself) arrives. And then the section from Matthew 25 which follows this is even more famous than this one, and it’s of course Jesus’s ubiquitous statement “I was a stranger and you welcomed me… when you did it unto the least of these you did it unto me”.

So here we find that this parable of the talents – this lesson about how we steward and take care of the resources God gives us - is situated among two very important lessons that teach us something about today’s parable too. It’s not just about taking care of material resources, but it’s intimately connected both with being prepared to meet God at the unexpected moments of God’s arrival among us and it’s about taking care of the poorest, neediest, most struggling and the ‘least of these’ in God’s kingdom.


Now, whenever I read this parable, the line that always gets me, that sticks in my craw so to speak, is this line near the end of the reading:
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

Isn’t that the opposite of what God would want? Isn’t this the same God who pledges to uplift those who have nothing and who abhors greed and hoarding of material possessions? Isn’t this after all the same God who just a few lines later will insist on giving to the least of these? Then how would this God, in what seems to be an act of downright cruelty, take the small pittance from the one who had the least to begin with and give it to the one who had the most already and now has even more? Imagine for a moment, the young teenage mothers from places like Ghana and Guatemala whom I have had the privilege to serve in my ministry, or refugees from Iraq or Afghanistan, some of whom I’ve gotten to know personally who survived some of the worst atrocities humans can levy on one another. Think of the neediest in your own communities the most downtrodden persons you have ever met and think of what it must sound like to hear such a phrase:

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

How in the world could that be? How could the God we love ever say such a thing?

That was the question I always struggled with, for years and years until I realized that it what we’re talking about here isn’t that God is taking from the poor and giving to the rich, but that this is about what we do with OUR TALENTS – our skills and abilities, our knowledge and capacities with which God has blessed us.

I’m incredibly grateful to the New Living Translation which actually draws this out much better than our own translation here. There it says:
To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away.

So it isn’t about the rich vs the poor, the have’s vs the have-not’s, but it’s about that we DO with whatever it is that we have. It’s about whether we will use well the gifts which we have been given and whether we will invest those talents – those skills and abilities and the knowledge we have – into the work of growing the Kingdom of God. And yet when we do not use our talents well, they wither on the vine, and they atrophy and die. Think of those skills which you never practice or those muscles you never engage. Think of those things which perhaps you could do well many years ago but you haven’t tried in a long time. It’s like fruit that goes uneaten and grows mold in a few days. Or as one who’s been to the gym only once in the last few months, it’s like the abs and biceps I used to have but are now long gone!

As was in the introduction, I am proud to serve a church called Church of the Advent in Cincinnati, in a neighborhood called Walnut Hills just a few minutes from the heart of Downtown Cincinnati. Most Sundays we’re home to about 50 hardy and Christ-loving souls, which for me is by far the smallest parish I’ve had the good pleasure to serve. But while Advent may be small, we are small but mighty! While I know lots of other Cincinnati churches of many stripes and types are busy on Sundays but sit empty much of the week, Advent is not one of them! Almost every day of the week, our beloved 1860’s edifice is filled with God’s people, some who have very little money or none at all and some who have much more. We’re among the most racially diverse Episcopal churches in our city, and we have an extraordinarily committed base of active laypeople, a majority of whom live within just a few blocks of our church.

Our beloved parish proudly hosts Open Door Ministries – a program going strong for 40 years which provides a food pantry 5 days a week and hot meals 3 days a week. We host one of the city’s few church-based payee programs, helping those suffering from addictions, disabilities or mental illnesses to ensure that their bills are paid consistently to prevent them from falling into homelessness. We host a monthly clothing drive in conjunction with a local Presbyterian Church and another large food pantry each month together with another area congregation.

Needless to say I am extremely proud of all these ministries inside our building, but I’m at least equally proud of what we do outside of our church in the neighborhood of Walnut Hills. Just in the last few months, Advent has joined with other Episcopal ministries to support local Latino & immigrant ministries, provide hurricane relief in Texas, to protest in favor of the rights of migrants and to meet at our US Senator’s office to advocate for fair housing policy. And Church of the Advent is a founding member of the Walnut Hills Faith Alliance, a quickly growing group of now almost 10 local congregations of all different denominations, working together every single month to put on events and provide for the needs of children and families in our community. From throwing neighborhood parties for children to celebrate Easter, the 4th of July, Halloween and others, to providing backpacks, hygiene products and coats for neighborhood schoolchildren, to planning a summer reading program next year at no cost to neighborhood parents, we are investing deeply in the children and families of our neighborhood!

Just last weekend as we hosted Diocesan convention, and delegates were invited to attend dinner in the neighborhood, visiting local churches and ministries around Cincinnati. We at Advent were extraordinarily privileged to host two of your own from right here at St. Phillips, along with a hefty contingent from Trinity Columbus as well. But we didn’t just have dinner for us delegates, we hosted a community dinner as we do each month, open to the poor and the needy in our neighborhood, as well as several homeless families and children from Interfaith Hospitality Network who were spending that week sleeping over at our church. If you don’t believe me you can ask the delegates from St. Phillips about their experience at Advent, but I can tell you, they got to experience a little bit of the ways we invest every day, using our talents for the people of our community.

I’m not saying all this just to brag about my church, although I am extremely proud of all that we do. I’m saying this to tell you one thing: That you can do the same and even more in the name of Christ. Although this is my first time here, I have heard for years about this wonderful congregation and your important place in the neighborhood of Near East. I have heard about your commitment to urban ministry and to the people of this community. And so I hope you will join with me, dear friends, fellow Episcopalians and most importantly lovers of Christ, in using our talents well.

AMEN

Saturday, November 4, 2017

90 Years of Glory to God!

It was such an amazing & extraordinary honor to serve as the keynote speaker for the 90th anniversary celebration of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Gary, Indiana! I was baptized at St. Aug's, most of my relatives have been baptized there, married there, served there and/or were buried there, and my great-grandmother Anna Washington was one of the church's prominent founders in 1927! Thanks be to God for the wonderful continuing legacy of St. Augustine's in Gary - the first and only predominantly black Episcopal church in The Diocese of Northern Indiana and (I'm told) in the entire state of Indiana!


It is such an honor to be here for this incredible event, to celebrate the anniversary of our beloved church, St. Augustine’s. It is so good to see all of you here, to celebrate, to remember, to give thanks and to prepare ourselves for the road ahead as we mark this 90th year of our little church on 19th street that continues to bear witness to Christ in what our Presiding Bishop reminds us is this Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement. This week, which happens also to mark the great feasts of All Saints and All Souls, I am especially reminded of that great cloud of witnesses, the myriads and generations of those who came before us, those whom we remember with fondness and those whose names go unrecorded, those whose acts of generosity, of stewardship and of leadership carried on the faith and brought us to where we stand today.

I’ve said often that I’ve been a member of St. Augustine’s even since before I was born! By that I mean that my family has had the enormous honor to be part of this church for now four generations, going all the way back to its founding 90 years ago. My father grew up here, my grandparents were married here, my great-grandmother is memorialized here and I was baptized here. St. Augustine’s is quite literally in my blood! Love of this place, our church, flows through my veins so deeply that now as the first clergyman in our family, I intend to celebrate my first Eucharist as a priest right there at St. Augustine’s! Our church is a special place, a very special place and we must never forget it.

So as I’ve promised Fr. Hyndman, I’m nor going to preach, I didn’t come for that today! I am however, going to speak on a text, and say a few words on a scripture that is near and dear to my heart, that I think sheds some light on where we are and where we ought to go from here. So I want to attract our attention to the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy, going back to the Old Testament, and the end of the great story of the Exodus, the escape of the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt and their wandering through the desert for 40 long years. Now, the people at this point find themselves at the edge of the desert, preparing to cross the river into the Promised Land, and Moses, now aged and long in years stands at the top of the mountain and gives the people a long discourse on what to do and how to conduct themselves after he’s gone, and a new leader comes to carry the people on to their next journeys in the land of Canaan. And this is what Moses says:

Read Deuteronomy 6:10-15a

All of us, the daughters and sons of St. Augustine’s are the inheritors of a great legacy. We, standing 90 years after the founding of our beloved community, have all been blessed to inherit in St. Aug’s houses that we did not build, vineyards we did not plant and cisterns we did not hew. Even the eldest among us here weren’t yet even born or at most were little children in 1927.  It was those who came before us, those who are no longer here who came up to Gary, largely from the cotton fields of the south on which they and their parents had labored in slavery. It was they, who arrived here seeking jobs, a better life, and maybe even an ounce of relief from the brutal racism of the South. They whose faith in God carried them through that great Exodus and once they had arrived in this place, built a temple to God where future generations would worship Him in centuries yet to come!
The author Ann Lamott, is known among many things for saying that when it comes down to it, all prayers come down to three words “wow” “thanks” and “help”. That at the end of the day, our expressions to God are either (1) expressions of pure amazement, wonderment, straight dumbfounded energy at the radiance of God’s work in the world, (2) Gratitude – thanksgiving for those works of God and for God’s love in our lives, and (3) supplication, asking God’s and God’s people to intervene in our lives and in the lives of one another.

So when I think about St. Aug’s and all that we are and all that we have achieved, the first thing I can say is just Wow! Wow that the sons and daughters of slaves and sharecroppers were so filled with the spirit of Christ that they built this first and only black Episcopal church in this diocese and in this state! Wow that its architecture is a recognized historical treasure and a lighthouse for the love of Jesus! Wow that its founders were the first generation of black college graduates at the height of segregation. Wow that those great matriarchs and patriarchs passed down so much of themselves and their histories and their legacies that generations later we can gather to celebrate all that they accomplished. Wow! And so we stand in awe of all God has done and continues to do in the lives of this church an in our world.

And in those 90 years, so many saints of our church, beloved souls have come through this place. They mothered and fathered our beloved congregation, starting ministries and serving the poor, giving rest to the weary and clothing the naked. This place has borne witness and even led in the great histories of the last century and of this century. It was the parents and grandparents of my generation, many of whom are here in this room, who fought for civil rights, were black pioneers in their fields. It was they who raised up and led alongside good clergy to raise up younger generations in the faith – some of whom are in this room and some of whom have gone on to proclaim and serve God in other places.

Many of us who sit here today are the children of those generations – I think of people like my grandmother Jane Graves Hill and my uncle Tid Washington, People like Ms. McCants and those who donated what they had in life an even in death to keep our beloved church strong through the generations. Some of us here were peers of those women and men, people who dug with them the wells from which my generation is now blessed to drink. People who planted the olive trees from which I and my generation now gain shade, from whose fruit we are nourished. They, and many of you here, year after year gave of yourselves day after day, in the heat of the sun and in the freezing Indiana winters, to maintain and improve this place for 90 long years.

And so for this we tell God not only Wow but Thank you! Thank you God that you’ve provided and inspired people through the generations to strengthen this church that we celebrate today. Thank you that the storms of all these decades have not dampened our devotion or wearied our spirit. Thank you that the love of Jesus is as manifest today as it was in 1927 and before. Thank you that when the first black Presiding Bishop was looking for the best congregation to visit in Northern Indiana he looked no further than here to St. Augustine’s in Gary, Indiana! Thank you that there are those of us here who are willing and able to carry this place for decades more into the future! Thank you!

And so, I want to return for a moment to the Deuteronomy text from the 6th chapter and the 20th verse. Moses continues and he addresses what to do with the next generations of the future of the Israelite people saying:

Read Deuteronomy 6:20-24

Teach your children and grandchildren of all that God has done for them through all these many years! Teach them to love and serve God and one another and the legacies of their ancestors. As Moses says elsewhere in Deuteronomy, take God’s word and strap it to your foreheads and tie it to your arms. Wear it around your necks and nail it to your doorposts. Read it as they wake up and as they go to bed. Rear them in the faith as many of us were reared in the faith. When they ask you “what is the meaning of these things” tell them. And do not just stay in our building, no matter how beautiful it may be, but go out into the world, teaching not just your children, but those children in your neighborhoods, communities, schools and programs. Reach out to those around you - get out of your comfort zones and interact with those whom you would not otherwise interact. Build connections to young and old alike, and let nothing – not one thing – stop you from sharing the love of Jesus Christ in this world. Continue to share and give generously, be stewards of this Church as our predecessors were stewards to us.

Above all, be builders of the Church and builders of the Faith! Join me in digging wells from which others will drink, planting trees under which others will receive shade and harvest their fruit, build the City of God in ministries through which others will live and love and raise their families! It is my hope, my conviction that Our church – beloved St. Augustine’s – will last long and strong after every one of us here has left this life for the next. And it will be left to those behind us to carry on that joy, that responsibility and that promise into a future yet unknown.

And so the final prayer I have for you and for God today is simply “help”. Help join with me, with your priest and your bishop, to carry this church into a future we cannot know. Help me in recommitting ourselves and our church to the stewardship not merely of a building or an institution but of the people of Jesus Christ in Gary, Indiana and beyond! And may God help us every moment of every day, every sunrise and every sunset, to carry on that legacy as Moses taught us more than 3,000 years ago, that Jesus taught us 2,000 years ago, and that our ancestors taught us 90 years ago! May God guide us and St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, not only into another 90 years and another century, but into countess generations in the movement of Jesus Christ.


Amen