Saturday, March 31, 2018

I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me (Easter)


A Reflection for the Feast of the Resurrection All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 1, 2018                                                     Thomas E. Wilson, Rector


I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me

Paul writes to the people in Corinth who are wasting energy over conflicts about who is right in the squabbles they have with each other. Paul says “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received.” He then passes on what is known as the Kerygma, the core of the message being proclaimed by the early church. That core message that was passed on to Paul which he shares with anyone who will listen is “I am living with you in a new age which is ushered in by Jesus’ birth, death, resurrection and union with God as the Christ, the Messiah who has lead me and will lead all people back to a relationship with God, through the Spirit which he gave to me and to all who place their trust in him to lead a new life where forgiveness, reconciliation and union with God are given as a gift of love.”

Paul says that was passed on to him when he was an enemy of the early Christians and a gift of loving grace was given to him, a love so great that he was forgiven before he even asked for forgiveness, brought into fellowship with those who were once his enemies, and with whom he shared God’s Spirit, reaching out to others in loving forgiveness so together they work for rebuilding the broken world.

Kerygma is a body of personal stories shared not by professional theologians but by ordinary people who have grown into a deeper awareness of a life of grace. Kerygma is not an orthodox Creedal substitute that you have to profess in order to be let into communion, rather it is thanks from the heart said by word and deed in many different ways.

Peter, in the reading from the Book of Acts, is telling his take of the Kerygma. As a disciple to the earthly Jesus, Peter had been a stumbling block to Jesus’s teachings over and over again, and by his denial of Jesus, had been complicit in his crucifixion. Peter finds, however, that the resurrected Christ speaks of love and forgiveness to him, and he realizes through his experience that there is nothing you can ever do, nothing that you can ever be, that is greater than the gift of God’s love for you. Peter passed on what has been passed on to him.

In the Gospel lesson from Mark for today, women come to the grave as an act of love to anoint the body of the man who had loved them. They are passing on the love that they had received. There they met a “Young Man”, who is not named, dressed in a white robe. Two chapters earlier in Mark’s Gospel there is another unnamed “Young Man” who runs away from the arrest of Jesus, and when the guards try to arrest him, they grab his linen cloth and the “Young Man” flees away naked. The “Young Man” who flees in shame might be the one now given the robe of purification as he was forgiven, and he passes on to the women what has been given to him, that there is no reason to hold on to shame, no reason to be afraid, for the author of all love is alive and his spirit will never leave us. Some of the commentators suggest that this “Young Man” might be John Mark, that person who tradition tells us might be the author of this Gospel.

What has been passed on to you and what do you then pass on to others as your Kerygma? What did you learn from your parents?. . . your schools? . . your friends?. . . your elected leaders? . . . your media figures? . . . your church? What have you chosen to pass on from what you have received?

One of the things I enjoy at All Saints’ are our Ministry Moments where a lay person speaks about how their faith has been nourished by working in a particular ministry of helping others. Rather than issue a call for needed volunteers for these worthwhile projects, I ask them to pass on what they have received.

The way that Christianity grew in the first couple of centuries was by people sharing their lives, personally sharing what had happened to them. In sociologist Rodney Stark’s book, The Triumph of Christianity, which was based on his previous studies of modern religious movements such as Mormonism, he looks at the growth of the early church from the 20 or so followers of Jesus at the time of his death around 32 AD to the Declaration of Constantine as a most favored religion in the Roman Empire in 312 AD. If we assume that the Roman Empire in the 4th Century had about 60 million people and about 10% of them were Christians, that would mean there were 6 million Christians of many different theological stripes. This assumes an annual rate of 40% growth which is possible if people share their stories with others by word and deed, demonstrating what living as a Christian was all about. It was not about teaching theology but about sharing.

After Christianity starts getting legal and being fed at the government trough, it changes from being spread by people sharing real lives to a cultivation of a clerical caste of Priests and Bishops who tell people what to do, with Creeds telling them the official position on what to believe, coercion with punishment after death for sin and punishment in this life for being a heretic. It moves from being a life-giving force to being a way to fit into the larger community of the state. It becomes a place to do officially-sponsored rituals instead of neighbors sharing the joys of God in their lives and the ways they found strength to meet the difficulties in this broken world.

I admit that I am one of the members of the priestly caste and, for the first several years of my membership, my main way of preaching was to teach theology and to straighten out thinking. It was fun and I enjoyed the delusion of being the smartest person in the room with the right educational credentials. I have come to realize that doesn’t work and I have moved from lectures and sermons to reflections with a lot more sharing, passing on, of what I have received.

As you know, I am retiring as the Rector of this church at the end of this month. I will take some months off trying to figure out how I may faithfully live as a Christian without being paid and to continue to pass on my Kerygma of what I have received.

What have you chosen to pass on from what you have received?


I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me
I pass on what was passed on to me,
listening to spaces between words,
as I would to hear the songs of birds,
being still as she’s asking me to see
what are her deep hopes and fears
before I even dare to say; “Oh yes,
I have shared some of them I guess,
but don’t be afraid, for over the years
I have learned to trust that the power
greater than ourselves is not shirking
the promise to redeem our working,
giving us strength thru that last hour,
when we come face to face with the one
who greets us when all our work is done.”

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