A reflection on transfiguration

A Reflection for the Last Sunday of Epiphany  All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  February 10, 2013Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Exodus 34:29-35Psalm 992 Corinthians 3:12-4:2Luke 9:28-36,

Jesus, Peter, James, and John went up to the Mountain to pray. This small community of Jesus and his disciples were trying to figure out how to respond to the news that Peter had revealed to them that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, of God. The Messiah, or the Christ to use the Greek term, literally meant the “anointed one”, the one who God had chosen to lead the people back to a full relationship to God. 

There was a lot of difference of opinion among the prophets about the nature of the “anointed one”; some said that he would be a King, who would be like a “Son of David”, a warrior King who would return the Kingdom to a place of wealth, power and prestige. Others said that the “anointed one” would be a mystical figure who, through prayer or wisdom or divine light, would connect the people directly to God - a ‘new Moses” to bring in a perfect way of living, and a “new Elijah” who would create a new society of justice where social and personal ills were healed. Some saw the “anointed one” as the one who would bring in the “last days”, the end of the world, the final consummation where the dead would be raised for judgment, the wicked condemned, and the righteous rewarded. There were many other views, some wondrous and some hideous. 

Jesus, Peter, James, and John go up to the mountain to pray, to listen to God about the path they must take. While they are there, the disciples have visions of Jesus dialoging with Moses and Elijah, the manifestations of the law and the prophets. While they are there, the disciples enter into the fog and mist, not knowing which way to turn. While they are there, the disciples hear God speak to them, telling them to listen to Jesus. While they are there, the disciples see Jesus all alone, as if nothing has changed, and yet all is changed, as the Desire of God and the deepest Desire of Jesus have become one. Jesus has gone into the heart of God, and in that heart of love, he finds his own true desire.  As the anonymous 14th Century writer of the Cloud of Unknowing wrote, “Because it is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with God’s merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.” Which Path will Jesus take? And the answer of course is, “Yes”.

 

When we were studying at St. George’s College in Jerusalem, Pat and I took pilgrimages to the places associated with the life of Jesus. One of those pilgrimages was to Mount Tabor which witnesses identify as the Mount of the Transfiguration. It was a clear day, and we enjoyed the hike up to the Franciscan abbey church where there are two side chapels in the Bell Towers, one for Moses and one for Elijah. Isn’t that just like the church? It stands as a real metaphor for what is wrong with the Institutional church, as Peter says something without thinking, babbling away, about how they might build booths for Elijah and Moses, and the Bible quotes him, then says “For he did not know what he was saying!” to show that he is missing the point. BUT the church still spends time, money and resources to do what Jesus tried to ignore. 

From the top of the Mountain we could see the Golan Heights, over to the Sea of Galilee, down into the Valley of Jezreel where some of the many Biblical battles took place.  On that particular day, we had studied the 4th and 5th chapters of the Book of Judges in which the Judges Deborah and Barack defeat the Canaanite General Sisera at the foot of Mount Tabor, and Sisera runs away to save his life. In this grisly little story, Sisera thinks he finds refuge in the tent of Heber the Kenite, but Heber’s wife, Jael, drives a tent peg through Sisera’s skull while he is hiding under a rug. Deborah and Barack sing a song of the battle, and it ends with the image of Sisera’s mother looking down the road, wondering why she doesn’t see the dust from Sisera’s chariot returning in triumph from the battle he was so sure he would win.  Any parent who has grown children out on their own is aware of that nagging sliver of anxiety, even when you know your baby is all grown up and the “child” is probably just fine.  The top of the mountain is a place where you are not sure what is going to happen in anyone’s life. It is a place where you wonder if this song about Deborah, Barack, and Sisera entered into the conversation between Jesus, Elijah, Moses, and God. The Jewish Talmud examines the revenge song and its gloating about the pain of Sisera’s mother, the mother of the hated enemy. The Talmud suggests that when the Shofar is sounded 100 times at the Celebration of Rash Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we must stop and remember the hundred tears of Sisera’s mother for her child. Maybe the sacred conversation in the cloud suggests that an element of the nature of the Messiah is to feel compassion for the family of the enemy and to love even the enemy. When he comes down off the Mountain, Jesus teaches that we who claim to follow him are to love our enemy, and to show us how, he will give his life so that all, including his enemies, might be saved.

 

The Mountain is a sacred place and was considered sacred by the people who occupied this land long before Abraham first wandered into what we now call the Holy Land. Mountains are the places where one climbs up to the limits of earth, looking down on the places where we dwell. While we were there on that day, the fog and mist came rolling in across the Mediterranean plain. It was so thick and silent that we could not see anything anymore, and any talk just stopped as our thoughts were driven inside the depths of our individual souls. We listened to the silence, not knowing what was going to happen, but listening nevertheless. I would have loved to stay there in that holy moment of the stillness of the sacred, but we had to leave to spend the night at a convent in the Galilee.

 

The top of the Mountain is where Jesus and his inner circle have gone to pray and to listen in the stillness about what is the best path for them in this life where nothing is changed but all is changing. Our problem with prayer is that we think it has to do with the words that we say to God, and many times, like Peter, we are babbling because we don’t know what we are saying when we are so afraid of the cloud. I would say that if each prayer were worth one hundred points, two would have to do with talking and 98 would have to do with listening inside that sacred space in which we have brought the sorrow and folly of our world as dust on our clothes. We want God to pay attention to the dust on what we wear instead of the deeper question of who we are created to be. Prayer is allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the Pillar of Cloud and washing ourselves in the cleansing mist of the Holy Silence, being present so that we might hear where God wants us to breathe deeply of divine love. To pray is not about thinking but about loving as the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing reminds us:

(F)or God can well be loved, but God cannot be thought. By love God can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.

 

Jesus, Peter, James, and John went up to the Mountain to pray; today, join them. Where is your sacred place, where in stillness, listening in love in the silence, you may enter the “Pillar of Cloud” out of which God speaks?

reflection on systems

A Homily for IV Epiphany All Saints Church, Southern Shores, N.C. February3, 2013 Thomas E Wilson, Rector         

 Jeremiah 1:4-10 Psalm 71:1-6 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-30

It is good getting home again. I am at the age of my life that getting home is no longer a trauma. I remember when I came home from college, face to face with what therapists call “Family Systems theory” which states individuals cannot be fully understood outside of the systems in which they live and move and have their being. Families, and other institutions, tend to move toward “Homeostasis”, an internal balance where roles and rules are maintained in order for the system to remain the same even, and especially when things are changing and the individual will face the need to enter the roles and obey the rukles of that system. A child going to college is a difficult transition as they leave and especially when they come home and no longer want to be the obedient (or even disobedient) child they once were in the family dance. In dysfunctional families and institutions so much energy is wasted on wanting to force back members into familiar patterns of behavior. I know my parents breathed a sigh of relief when their bearded hippie son went back to school at the end of the summer and when the next year I announced that I would be working at a play 13 states away for the whole summer.

Decades later, when I came back for a High School reunion and was offered the opportunity to preach and celebrate Eucharist at the church of my youth full of nice people, I seemed to do a good job and the search committee cornered me to ask for a meeting. Part of the reason I said “No” was the fact that I would have to fight the same battles all over again of little Tommy Wilson, both the good sweet acolyte and Youth Group member and the bad kid who just didn't seem to understand the way the community wanted to return to a nostalgic past, even though the whole world, and I, had changed.

I think that is what is happening in the Gospel lesson for today as Jesus the good little boy is all grown up and the whole desert, baptism and holy spirit experience has changed him utterly. He has adopted a whole new understanding of what family, neighbor, enemy, God and the purpose of life is all about. He sees himself as a prophet in the mode of Jeremiah, not someone who sees the future but whose eyes have been opened to see God's vision for the present. We hear in the Hebrew Testament reading for today:

God reached out, touched my mouth, and said,
    “Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
    among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
    take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
    building and planting.”

When he comes back home to Nazareth the community is threatened because he calls for a new dynamic of seeing the expected rules and roles. The system of the small town of Nazareth is used to the “victim” mentality. “Oh poor us, we have the Romans abusing us and the Temple crowd In Jerusalem making us feel like second class religionists. All we can do is hunker down and ask the God who seems to be napping above the clouds to redeem all this after we are dead and give us our reward when we get into heaven.”

Jesus says, “No, God is acting right here and right now as the prophesies of old are being fulfilled in your hearing. The power to turn us from victims into lovers is available, but we are going to have to be open to change so that we might appropriate the power to form a new reality.”

The people say to each other “ What does he mean “we”? Who does this uppity boy think he is?” Then they proceed to give him the bum's rush out of town based on the systems theory response that this boy doesn't understand the rules and therefore they need to protect themselves and their institutions.

In Luke's Gospel this story is a leitmotif which will repeat itself over and over again in the Gospel and in the 2^nd part of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus, or the apostles, come into the communities and challenge the conventional systems' rules and thinking about reality, and they are either shunned, killed, imprisoned or run out of town. I think Luke is trying to tell the church itself that it needs to understand that it is here not to adjust to the world but to challenge the world with another way of living.

We see this challenge especially in the Epistle lesson from Paul in the 13^th chapter of 1^st Corinthians where the church in Corinth had been acting as if the central principles of life were power, pleasure, success, “being right”, and control. Paul suggests that there is another way to live in this world, where Love, which had been demonstrated by Jesus is the only faithful avenue of spiritual maturity.

When the church got legal in the Roman Empire, surprise, surprise, instead of choosing love as the option, the institution chose to adapt to the world and we became the systems who shunned, killed, imprisoned or run out of town those people who challenged the mindsets of the systems that wanted things to remain the same.

This week some of us will go to the Diocesan Convention. My prayer is that we, your delegates and the convention as a whole, will be open to the Holy Spirit's view of reality instead of being trapped into the maintenance of the institutional system as our primary response. The next week the vestry will gather for their retreat, which has been put off because of illnesses. Keep the vestry in your prayers so that we will not fall into the trap of seeing the homeostasis of the institution first, instead of what God's spirit might be saying to us.

Pray for me as well for I am part of the institution, and God forgive me that in my heart of hearts I want to settle into the way in which I am used to, because that is what I know and can do. The world has changed and while Sunday morning services will stay with us, we need to see other and additional options to be “the church” outside of the reliance on the liturgical hours which mean so much to me. As Jeremiah heard:

God reached out, touched my mouth, and said,
    “Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
    among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
    take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
    building and planting.”

A Reflection on re-commitment

A Homily for III Epiphany All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC January 27, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 Psalm 19 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a Luke 4:14-21

First of all I want to thank you for all your prayers for me while I was in the hospital. It was a lousy time for me, and I was heartened by your care. Each day for that week I was aware of my own need for a power greater than myself and the love and care which flowed over me. On Wednesday, January 23, as I was being driven home from the hospital and we were crossing the bridge back to Southern Shores, I saw our church through the trees and realized that, I was so thankful, I was needing to make a recommitment to my ministry here.

I have made many commitments to my Baptismal ministry in my life. In the last week of January in 1985, seven months after I made a re-commitment and was ordained a Deacon in my home church in Boone, North Carolina, I was in Christ Church in Blacksburg where I was working, and I re-committed myself to that new life when I was ordained a Priest. The next day, on the 3^rd Sunday of the Epiphany, I presided at my first celebration of the Eucharist and preached on the Gospel, as it is today, about Jesus beginning his ministry after his recommitment to God in his baptism.

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today from the 8^th Chapter of Nehemiah, the people who have come back from exile in Babylon are gathered together at the Water Gate in the ruined city of Jerusalem for a recommitment ceremony of the people to God. Ezra and the scribes read and explain the nature and expectations of that relationship, and the people undergo a cathartic experience, so overwhelmed with emotion, that they cry. Eventually the people are told to stop weeping and get ready for a celebration, the Feast of Booths. So what is happening here?

Well, there are several interpretations depending on how you view the event. Three widely separate groups use this event as a model: (1) the Jesuit Spiritual retreat, modeled by Ignatius of Loyola, (2) the old time revival preachers, and (3) the confrontational therapists in the 28 day recovery programs. And they would all join in saying, “Yes, that is the way to begin!”

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order in the Roman Catholic Church, put together a model for a retreat for spiritual healing. The exercises would have three parts - purgative, illuminative, and unitive. The “purgative” is to get rid of all the stuff that holds us back from commitment to God; the “illuminative” is to show how a new way of living might be; and the “unitive” is the coming to union with God. I first encountered the Ignatian model in 1978 in a program called Cursillo, a renewal movement in the Episcopal church which begins with a three day retreat, in which the recommitment is called the 4^th Day, the rest of our lives. In essence, the program was like was an expansion of the different parts of the Mass. In the Mass, or our Holy Communion service, there are three parts: (1) we stop what we are doing, running around like chickens, and just slow down and gather together, (2) we listen to what strengthening words might be given to us, and (3) we are invited to reconnect with God by symbolically taking God into our very being with the bread and wine, the body and blood of the one who loves us, which then gives us the motivation to lead a God-filled life in the “real” world when we leave the service - or as the Quakers used to say, “The meeting is over, now let the service begin.”

The Revival preachers have a formula for their sermons which usually is a kind of rerun of the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” theme. Part one of the sermon is to tell the people how loathsome to God is their behavior, which would then lead into letting the people know that there is a way out and that is repentance, as they are “beaten down to their knees” by their shame. Then, and only then, when they are down on their knees in repentance, are they given the message that God loves them. And then, as the choir sings “Just As I Am” for however many verses it takes, the weeping sinners are invited to join and be baptized as a sign that they could recommit to God. I remember when I gave a sermon at an ecumenical gathering, one of my very evangelical brethren came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “Oh Brother Tom, you really stepped on my feet tonight!” I replied that I was sorry that I was not aware that I had done so. He laughed and told me that it was a compliment, for I had reminded him of how he needed to repent and return to the Lord. The reality was that was the Holy Spirit acting and not me.

Years ago I did some volunteer work in a 28 day treatment facility for the diseases of alcohol and drug addiction based on the 12 step model. The first three steps are:

(1) We admit that we are powerless over alcohol ( or whatever it is to which we are addicted) - that our lives have become unmanageable.

(2) Come to believe that a Power Greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

(3) Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.

I would come in and co-lead groups on steps two and three. Many of the people had led tough lives, and part of the 28 day program was attempting to call them to a new way of thinking and feeling. Addicts tend to become psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual strangers to themselves. They tend to stuff down their feelings, and part of the task is to get them back in touch with their selves. In response to the question, “How are you feeling?”, they tended to say one of two things - “Not bad” or “Fine”. The more experienced of the group members would chime in with the response to “Not bad” with “The rev asked you what you were feeling, not what you weren't feeling! Happy, mad, sad, glad- what!” The response “Fine” would usually bring a retort like, “Oh yeah, FINE! F- I- N- E: F for all effed up (I am paraphrasing here), I for insecure, N for narcissistic, and E for egotistical. FINE is what got you into this place!” The groups were rough confrontations with reality so that they might rediscover themselves and begin the commitment to recovery. Tears were a regular part of group work, but the point was not the tears but the movement toward recovery.
Another interpretation of the weeping people in the lesson is that some people weep when they are overwhelmed when something wonderful is happening. I remember when Pat and I were getting married, one of those commitment moments, she cried all the way through our wedding vows. I mean to tell you, the tears really scared me. I leaned forward and asked her if she was all right, and she said she was so happy! Maybe the people gathered at the Water Gate in Jerusalem were weeping with joy and the scribes told them to continue with their joy.
What do we do when we are struck with the inescapable fact that God loves us more than we can ever realize or deserve and calls us all into a new relationship with God and our neighbor? We are free to weep or not weep, it doesn't matter, as long as we move to a deeper relationship. We can make re-commitments for lots of reasons, and sometimes we are aware that each day is a re-commitment. Each time the sun rises, we can remember that the Son rises for us and invites us into a new and deeper relationship with God, neighbor, and ourselves.
Today let us remember the promises and invitations that God makes and the promises that we made in response when we made our baptismal vows by turning to page 304 in the Book of Common Prayer.

Reflections on being sick Part 2

I just went through a bout of being sick again--  some of you remember that I went through some stuff before Christmas. Last week I went through some GI bleeding and ended up in the hospital because I lost so much blood. They threw me in bed and pumped blood in e and told me to settle down. I was not in pain only just weak for the week. I had to miss the services on Sunday and was muttering about how my sermon on which I worked so hard would not be read-- (threw it on the blog anyway after I got home). I fell more behind on my visits with people and committee work- had to postpone the vestry retreat-- my church said not to worry they could handle things but I had to come face to face with my sense of worth.

One of my lies that I carry around inside my soul is that my worth is determined by my performance- I am only as good as what I do- I am a human doing rather than a human being. Basically I was throwing myself a huge pity party.

The truth to combat the lie is that my worth is not based on my performance but on God's love for me. I have no problem  with looking at another person and seeing how they do not do something  but I don't question their worth- but my lie is that I am different than mere mortals. Last time I checked we call that arrogance where I tell God I don't need God's grace because I am my own savior. That gets me in real trouble with my soul. Healing comes in the awareness that I have limits and the world does not revolve around me. "Quel surprise!"

I am home now and will do some work from home but I am feeling better and stronger but I need to remember to continue to need the truth to combat the lies that lay so close to the surface of my soul.

As I did with last month's illness- after a couple of days I found again the prayer from the Book of Common Prayer on page 461: In the Morning

This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring

forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I

am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still,

help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it

patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.

Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit

of Jesus. Amen.

Reflection on MLK

This was the sermon I would have given on last Sunday but I ended up in the hospital but am home now.

A Sermon for II Epiphany All Saints Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC January 20, 2013 Thomas E Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 62:1-5 Psalm 36:5-10 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 John 2:1-11

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was written to a church that was dealing with a squabbling group of people who wanted win over their opponents. Paul writes to tell them that they are all part of the one body of Christ and all have a spirit from God that can be used to become one in Christ. The 12^th chapter of the epistle which our lesson for today is from, is a prelude to Paul’s point in the 13^th chapter that the gifts of the church is faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love.

This weekend we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and we horror his leadership in the areas of Civil Rights and it is well that we remember his contributions in that area but today I want to look at his contributions to our spiritual life as Christians. In 1963 King was leading a campaign to stop discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama. He was arrested and put into jail. While he was there eight leaders of the religious community, two Episcopal Bishops, two Methodist Bishops, a Roman Catholic Bishop, a Presbyterian Moderator, the Pastor of First Baptist in Birmingham, and a Jewish Rabbi wrote an open letter called “A Call to Unity” condemning Dr. King’s actions as an outsider fomenting trouble. They praised the actions of the police to maintain order and recommended that the problems of the discrimination should only be handled by the courts and the church arguing that the matters be decided in court.

King responded by writing a letter in response, which is now known as A Letter From a Birmingham Jail. The jailers refused to allow him paper so he wrote it in the margins of the newspaper scraps which were smuggled out and assembled in the offices of the organization. The New York Times at first refused to publish the letter in its magazine. It was finally published and it was shot across the bow of the American religious establishment.

He wrote in part:

. . . I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world.

Many churches struggled to respond. In the church in upstate New York in which I was in the youth group and an acolyte we had many arguments. I was one of the ones who pushed for greater action but got few responses than an admonition to respect my elders and to be patient. The next year the white wife of our white Bishop was arrested when she tried to enter with some of her black friends Trinity Episcopal Church in St. Augustine, Florida to desegregate it. Trinity had withdrawn its pledges to the Episcopal Church in response to “outside agitators. Back in the Diocese of Central New York, many of my church were appalled, but here was one of my elders I could respect.

I was one of those youth of whom Dr. King were disgusted by the church and I started my half century struggle of a love/hate relationship with the Lord I loved and the Institution with which I had a hard time. I was all for pushing a liberal crusade for justice but somehow it took me years to see the deeper side of Dr. King’s theology. What he was calling for was a recovery of the message of Christ to stand up for justice but also to love one’s enemies. As Jesus had disarmed Peter in the garden, so also we were to peacefully confront our enemies in order to work for reconciliation. His work on disruption was a plan for the entire system of oppression to collapse under its own weight for there could never be enough courts and jails to enforce the laws of discrimination but discrimination of the heart could only battled by love. I wanted victory and humiliation of my foes. He wanted to be a loving brother in the Kingdom of God.

Dr. King had many faults; he like all of us was both a sinner and a saint. But he was a prophet who pointed us in the direction that our faith in Christ calls for us to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.” The purpose of the church is not to enshrine the status quo but to live into our Baptism and allow the Holy Spirit to change us so that we might be freed from the prisons of our society’s, and our own, agendas by loving our neighbor and our enemy.

In the Gospel from John for today, Jesus turns the water into wine and it is the best wine for the celebration and I think the power of the Spirit of God has the ability to make us water people to be the wine poured out for the wedding feast of Christ and his church.