A
Sermon for IV Easter All
Saints' Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, N.C.
May 11, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
The Lesson from the Book of Acts of the Apostles for today tells the story
of how the early community of followers of the Risen Lord in Jerusalem, listening
to the Holy Spirit and deciding to continue the practice started by Jesus and
his circle of disciples, entered into a new and intentional social and economic
arrangement of selling all their property, placing the proceeds in common, and
sharing out of the common pot. It was an experiment in communal living, based
on the idea that Jesus was coming back any day and so why plan for the future? Later
in the Acts chronicles, it will relate that the community suffered when a
regional famine wiped out many of their resources, and the Apostles had to go
out to the gentile communities to beg and collect food and money for the
Jerusalem community.
Was the move to a communal economy a mistake? With
the benefit of hindsight, we can say that decision made it more difficult for
the Jerusalem community to adjust; but was it a mistake? Over the years I have
heard sermons on this passage as a Biblical Warrant for the advantage of the American
Capitalistic system and the failure of the early church to understand the evils
of Socialism, with the punchline being an un-Biblical admonition that “The Lord
helps those who help themselves.”
However, my view is that this story has nothing to
do with economics but with the faith of the community to make a decision to
risk and try something new. According to the Lords of Finance, they failed in
that experiment, but I believe according to our Risen Lord, the real problem
would be to play it safe and do nothing. The psychologist B. F. Skinner once
said, “A failure is not always a mistake; it
may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is
to stop trying.”
You see, I think that one of the greatest sins in
the church and in our lives is our fear of failure where our fear keeps us from
risking. We think that if God is with us, then we should not fail, but we see
lack of success in the lives of Christians and in the church all the time. God
does not guarantee success, only that God will be with us wherever we are, in
success or failure. The center of our faith as Christians is not that Jesus
went to Jerusalem and converted everyone and died in retirement in his old age
surrounded by children and grandchildren, but that his ministry ended with a
shameful death on a cross and God was with him through the hell of dying,
through the hell of loss of hope, and through the resurrection. Jesus is not a
poster boy for American success in life. Jesus is about faith; not that everything
is going to turn out perfectly, but that all things will be redeemed.
Today we read the 23rd Psalm, and it is
tempting to see this Psalm as a reassurance that with God as our shepherd,
everything is going to be just fine. The line from the King James version, “He
(God) restoreth my soul”, is burned in my memory because I have had reason to
hope for a restoration of soul after failures. The Hebrew word the King James
translators rendered as “Soul” is “nefesh” which means “life-breath”, “life”;
the image is of someone who had almost stopped breathing who God revives,
brings back to life.
On my way to visit someone this week, I was
listening to NPR’s All Things Considered
on the radio, and they were interviewing newly retired Yankee baseball relief pitcher,
Mariano Rivera who talked about his faith in his biography, Closer. His faith was not that God
helped him win games, but that God had given him a gift which he faithfully
developed. He said:
It's all about faith —
not only in baseball, but just normal life. My faith in the Lord is everything.
... That's why I was able to walk out of circumstances like losing Game 7 of
the World Series. I was fine. You know why? Because I gave everything that I
had. And if wasn't for me that day, well, it wasn't. But I wasn't going to
second-guess my faith or ability.
This church has known a lot of successes in the
almost 11 years I have been here and more than a few failures. Each time we
asked that God be with us as we tried to follow the will of God for this body
of Christ we call All Saints. There were times when I, or we, did not succeed, and I drew strength from the prayer for Young
Persons in the Book of Common Prayer (p.829) in which we ask: “Help them (the
young persons) to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a
chance for a new start.”
Today, in the wider culture, we remember Mothers and
we hold up images of perfect mothers and sentimentalize them. And each year I
hear from a couple mothers who feel like hypocrites because they think they
have failed as mothers. However, the reality is that those of us who have either
had or known mothers understand that they were not perfect. I loved my mother,
but she was a real person and knew more than a few failures. We do not love perfection, we love real people
who learn how to find new starts. Today in this church we proclaim that today
is always a new start, and the Lord is our Shepherd who restoreth our souls.
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