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Sermon, 5 Easter, May 18, 2014

John 14:1-14
the one who believes in me will do the works that I do
I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me. How do you hear those two sentences? What do they mean? Some of you may
recall Ive preached about them more than once. Ive made no secret of rejecting a
traditional interpretation that hears them chauvinistically, by which I mean as if Jesus is
saying that the only way to live out true faith and to be eternally embraced by God is to
be a good, card-carrying Christian.
Certainly that is one way to interpret todays Gospel, and Ill acknowledge my arrogance
in believing I have a better way of hearing it than some of the great Christian thinkers of
past and present. But there you are. My mind is just a little too practical and limited to
understand how Jesus was endorsing and prescribing Christianity decades before it
became a religion. Jesus was a Jew, and, with several notable exceptions including
Roman centurions and some Samaritans, his audience was fellow Jews.
Beyond that, he isnt asking us to believe in a religion; his message is much more direct
and personal. Its about him - his life and, I believe, ours . . . his way of inhabiting and
serving the world. He isnt speaking about sectarianism here. That isnt what Thomas is
asking. Hes speaking about a true way of being for us to emulate. How we go about
doing that has a lot to do with imitating him, no matter how pale a shadow we may cast.
He couldnt be more clear in telling us that if we seek to be with him, well find him in
each other . . . in feeding his sheep . . . in acts of love and kindness. Just as he
came to serve and save sinners - and that means everyone - he calls us to find not only
his Spirit but our true selves in a life of service . . . in carrying out Gods purpose of
mercy and forgiveness.
I question any notion that Christ intends for us to take on a mission of defending
orthodoxy or contesting the validity of anyone elses faith. Yes, Jesus upheld the law,
but lets not forget how he broke the sabbath and ate with tax collectors and prostitutes
and turned away from condemning an adulterer. He upheld the law not by strict
adherence but by fulfilling its spirit. For us to follow that entails not some robotic
conformity but rather struggling to use our hearts and minds to grow in faith.
Let me try to bring all this into 21st century Episcopal life in the low country. In fact let
me further localize it along a short stretch of Highway 174, where we have a dispute, a
disagreement. Theres a church down the highway that found its denominations
seeming abandonment of orthodoxy and scriptural interpretation so offensive, so
heretical, that it felt compelled to effect a schism - to leave the Episcopal Church. What
were, what are the Episcopal Churchs unpalatable sins? I should let those folks speak
for themselves, but I think most of us are pretty clear it has something to do with a
sense of us as an undisciplined liberal institution run amok. What with a woman
presiding over us and openly gay bishops and all, they see us as a wayward religious
tail wagged by a trendy, secular dog.
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And what about us? How do we see those folks? Again, there are probably any number
of answers to that, but I think its fairly accurate to say we see them as lost or misguided
if not uncharitably following some personal inner demons while using select scripture
passages and narrow orthodoxy to justify their biases . . . all this at the expense of
the unity that used to characterize the once emblematic wide tent of an Episcopal
denomination that knew how to disagree without enmity or separation . . . that
celebrated its diversity.
So here we are, well under a mile apart geographically, and maybe not as far apart as
we think spiritually. We both see ourselves as victims . . . not in some overblown
sense, perhaps, like the billions of hungry, oppressed people in the world, but victims
nevertheless . . . victims of people or forces who just dont get it, get us. Like so much
else in a world thats long gone more than a little crazy over religious strife, we each see
ourselves as right and those others as wrong.
I wonder how God sees us? I dont mean, how does God see us as his children? I dont
think God has stopped forgiving us, loving us . . . all of us. I mean I wonder how God
sees us corporately, responding to the call Jesus gives in todays Gospel to do the
works that he does. I wonder if God, in seeing how preoccupied with our petty disputes
weve become, sheds similar tears to those Jesus shed at Lazaruss tomb - tears of
frustration because, again and again, we just dont get it . . . again and again we find
ways to miss the big picture as we leave his hungry sheep unattended.
I want to be clear now that this is me speaking, not God, but more and more I find our
church (and others) pretty much like Nero - fiddling while Rome burns. What in the
world are we doing? Its not that a major part of a diocese packing up and leaving and
taking property that isnt its own doesnt matter. Its that there are so many other things
that matter so much more.
I wonder what our savior makes of our stewardship of Gods creation - our once pristine
world. The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands prepared the dry land. What does
God make of the greed and arrogance, the willful blindness and apathy that has us
burying our heads in the sand while we accelerate the pollution and deforestation that
will put this low country as well as much of the populated areas of the rest of the world
under a rising, increasingly acidic ocean, perhaps in the lifetimes of our grandchildren if
not before? Do we believe the ignorance and lies that abound about the incontrovertible
science of this? Some of us may say sure, but thats politics; it has nothing to do with
religion or faith. Really? Not even if the climate change were causing threatens enough
of the worlds food supply that billions face hunger if not starvation? Not even if were
causing a mass extinction of species that rivals if not surpasses the effects of the
asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Not even if the systematic denial of whats
already happening is fueled by greed and arrogance and other qualities our faith
decries?
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And what about justice? Are we going to blithely sit on our hands while our
impoverished, inadequately educated neighbors endure a systematic campaign to take
away their voting rights and underfund public education? Are we going to continue to
twiddle our thumbs and watch how every schoolyard slaughter somehow ends up with
still more guns being sold and sensible, popular regulation further undermined? Are we
going to sit silently while our political and justice systems steamroll our country into
even more of a billionaires playground than it is already? Doesnt our silence endorse
the haves and reject the have-nots? Is that what Jesus was talking about when he told
us that if we have love in our hearts we should feed his sheep?
There are any number of other examples of stuff, real stuff, thats going on out there in
the real world, but I think you get my point. In case it isnt sufficiently clear, let me
restate it another way. I think the history of the church has always been at its best and
most faithful when engaged with the needy and unjust world in which it finds itself . . .
engaged in more ways than bringing a few cans of soup to the food pantry (as important
and faithful as that is) . . . engaged in powerful ways that operationalize the
transformational love God manifests for all creation. Im thinking of things like the great
civil rights movement, born very much out of the churchs responding to the call of the
prophet Amos that justice should roll down like waters, like an ever rolling stream. Im
thinking of things like the peace movement that refused to tolerate the horror and waste
of an unjust war, where faithful people risked safety and freedom to fight for what they
truly believed to be right. And Im wondering where that fight is now? Is any of it still
germinating in the church, or are we too preoccupied with questions of dogma and
church property to worry ourselves with less celestial matters?
I hunger for a church that first attracted me to it by the societal changes for the better it
was effectively fighting for. They werent so much internal changes, unless you count
the fight to ordain and consecrate women (and now LGBT people), whose significance
redounded far beyond any religious boundaries and in fact worked for justice
everywhere. And thats what I yearn for now. I dont want to abandon or ignore our
legitimate disputes with our neighbors. I just want to see those kinds of disputes in the
context in which I imagine God sees them. I want us to focus most on what really
matters.
Perhaps we may hear the Christian imperative to aggressively work for justice as not all
that love oriented. But as the song says, love is a many splendored thing. Lord knows it
isnt all sweetness and light. Its work and commitment and, as manifested in Christ who
proclaims himself the way and the truth and the life, its inseparable from justice. Here
we are in the Easter season - the time of resurrection and hope and even impossible
dreams - but were never far away from the harsh truths that brought Easter about.
Jesus tells us that the one who believes in me will do the works that I do. What are
those works? Thats what we come here again and again to rediscover, but you can be
sure that theyre directed towards the real needs of the world and our shared life within
it.
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Thankfully, our diocese has recently joined forces with other denominations to
encourage us to get involved in some of the social justice issues boiling over out there.
And as Ive said before and will again, this mission church here on Edisto has a lot of
what I think the church should be and do going for it. From our very first formation,
weve had our focus on reaching out in response to many of the needs so evident
around us. We do indeed strive to serve our neighbors in Gods name with a taste of
Gods love. But lets not kid ourselves. For all that we do, theres ever so much more
that Christ is calling us to. The challenge isnt just to think generously but to think big.
Well likely know were doing that when it costs us more . . . not just money but the
hard work and risk of confronting injustice wherever we find it, having in mind the
admonishment from Proverbs that Where there is no vision, the people perish.
As we conclude todays service, I hope youll join me in paying special heed to a few of
my favorite words in the Eucharists ever so relevant coda: those words that ask God to
Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love
and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart; through Christ our Lord.
Amen.