Third Sunday of Easter Sermon

Folks: Here is my sermon text from last Sunday. I have decided to "post" my sermon's here from now on and will (in a few weeks) shut down the other blog site that I had previsously posted on. Hope you will find this "blog" site easier to find, and it will help me to make sure that I remain current on the sermon posting responsibility! Hope you enjoy!

The Third Sunday of Easter – Year A (RCL) 2011
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland, OR
Sunday, May 8, 2011

PEOPLE OF THE WAY – PEOPLE OF HOPE – PEOPLE OF THE WEIRD

Let us Pray: Dear God, as we go along our life’s way, help us to be aware of your presence with us. Open our eyes, make us expectant, eager to be met by you. Give us open minds, open eyes, open hearts to receive your gracious presence and to share it with all you would have us meet. You are the resurrection, and the life. Amen.

(SUNG) BE KNOWN TO US, LORD JESUS
IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD.

Our lifetimes are marked by spiritual, political and social events that have influenced us to such an extent that we can often recall, many years later the exact time and place we were when these events burst into our lives marking and changing them forever. Few of us (in a certain age range) would fail to be able to tell you where they were when they received the news that John Fitzgerald or Robert Francis Kennedy were assassinated; or when Tranquility Base reported that “the Eagle had landed” and Neil Armstrong spoke of “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” So, will your children; grand and great grandchildren report on what they were doing when they realized that passenger jetliners were being flown into the World Trade Center or Pentagon? Now will we mark with the same sense of cultural memory the events of last Sunday evening inside the walled compound of an unmarked estate in Abbottabad, Pakistan? Will the young men and women who spontaneously gathered outside the Whitehouse, College Campuses or the under construction Freedom Tower at the former site of the World Trade Center Towers in lower Manhattan, have wonderful stories to relay to their children and grandchildren around celebrating the violent end of another human life? Trust me; the hypothetical questions I’m posing fill me with as much confusion and torn emotion as I’m sure they do for you and the hundreds of thousands of Americans or Pakistanis; Muslim, Christian or atheist/agnostic who struggle to understand what we might do when our enemies face the reality of our outrage for the horrific crimes committed against innocent children, women and men who committed no greater crime than arriving at school or work or play on the impossibly blue sky late summer morning in September of 2001. I do know what the Gospel message of Jesus the Christ asks of us: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”

I’m not saying the answers are easy, or fair (in the sense of human justice or fairness) and I am saying that the message of the Christ whom we claim to follow is clear when it comes to what we owe our enemies and those who hate us for the Prince of Peace whom we claim as our savior and our God. I encourage you to listen to the anthem that the Choir will sing just after Communion this morning [I’d like to share with you the lyrics of an anthem that the Choir will sing at the 10:00 AM service this morning] I discovered the availability of a hymn text by the well known writer Andrew Pratt when a clergy colleague of mine who is the Rector at St. John the Baptist Parish on the campus of OES told me that their Director of Music, Scott Crandal had written a hymn tune to set the text and was offering the copyrighted anthem for use by anyone who would find it helpful in generating a conversation around our Christian responsibility toward those whom we consider our enemies. The text reads:

We cannot gloat: a time for grief,
another mother's son is dead,
and if that son has killed and maimed,
it is the better least is said;
but let us mourn for all the loss,
within the shadow of the cross.
We mourn for victims we have loved,
and for the orphans yet unborn;
for those for whom a searing pain
greets this and every rising dawn,
and then we bow our heads and pray
that peace might drench the world today.
And to that end we pledge our lives,
our words, our actions and our deeds,
as following the Prince of Peace,
we'll work for peace till peace succeeds,
in breaking every barrier down,
that love may be our goal and crown. © Andrew Pratt 2/5/2011

We are called, each of us who claim this Jesus to live out the Gospel vision of God’s Kindom come among us. That is why we are the ones in our culture who have to give voice to the hard choices that Christ’s Gospel demands of us. We have to be the ones who continue to live out our responsibility to love our enemies and pray for those who abuse us. That same Gospel calls us today and every day toward the Kindom of God made manifest among us right here; right now. The Kindom might be messy, it might be imperfect – it might even at times be petty, gossipy or seemingly trite. It is however that same Kindom that Jesus came among us to proclaim that Kindom in which the hungry are fed, the captive are set free and the mourning rejoice in the Easter joy of the triumph of life over death. Is that that Kindom that we live out inside our Red doors and outside with our Red Tabernacle bringing the Good News into the places where it needs most to be heard.

Our Gospel text for this morning, from the Author of Luke/Acts tells the story of the amazing journey from the cold hard despair of the locked room we visited last week, to the joyous and faith filled hope that happened on the road to Emmaus when the two un-named disciples, completely unknowing met the risen Christ in Word and Sacrament just as we have the chance to do each time we gather in table fellowship.

Those earliest followers of the risen Christ were known simply as “people of the way” and that way is what we later followers cling to with expectant hope – filled with the joy of our God’s victory over darkness and death. The author of Luke’s Gospel recounts the Emmaus roadside journey of amazement and blessing in the revelation of scripture and the recognition and fulfillment of hope in the blessing and breaking of bread. The disciples welcomed a stranger and found in that welcome the reality of God with us – Emmanuel – in the person of the risen Christ. Filled with hope they returned from Emmaus to Jerusalem to share the good news with the other apostles who were gathered in the locked house; and with us – that God indeed is with us in the welcoming of strangers and in the sharing of our table fellowship.

From that journey shared on the way to Emmaus, from the scriptures revealed and explained by the risen Christ to the bread taken, blessed, broken and given we have followed the way for two hundred centuries. In each of our encounters with the risen Christ we continue to be amazed at the unexpected gifts found in the welcoming of strangers as we find the Christ revealed in them. It is in the common and everyday experiences that we are caught unaware – in the simple gifts of bread and Word that the Divine presence continues to reveal itself and move us from cold despair to joy-filled hope.

(SUNG) BE KNOWN TO US, LORD JESUS
IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD.

On this Sunday when we recognize the Easter joy anew; when we share bread broken and wine for all from the one cup – we also share in the fellowship of our community around coffee and cake; and we move from this place to take that bread and wine (actually the cup we take out to the park uses grape juice rather than wine) and add to it bread spread with peanut butter and jelly to share with the hungry of body as well as the hungry of spirit; and we have recently added eggs to our feast that we share will all who ask – and we make sure that we also have treats for the critters who share our lives and are such a blessing to our ministries; critters like ranger and sophie & Otto.

This is our community of believers led by an Irish Catholic Episcopal priest and a UCC Minister of Outreach who met each other and connected in the Good News of the Gospel shared among the members of the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus; and who now are growing into a greater understanding of what Jesus meant when he called us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

It’s all good and it’s all powerful and growing into our unique and wonderful ministry at the corner of 13th and Clay and moving out further and further into the heart of our city. Sometimes it is rich and full of deep and reverent liturgy and sometimes it is real and rough and full of drug addicts and drunks and we are all children of a loving God and I can just bet that God is watching and smiling and wondering what we’ll do next. In closing, I’d like to share with you a passage from Mike Yaconelli’s book Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People:

“In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch has turned many of the inhabitants of Narnia into stone, but Aslan, the Christ figure, jumps into the stone courtyard, pouncing on the statues, breathing life into them.

The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white, the courtyard was now ablaze with colors; glossy chestnut side of centaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, ruddy-brown of foxes, dogs and satyrs, yellow stockings and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silver, and the beech-girls in fresh transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow. And instead of the deadly silence, the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.

Lewis’ summary of what is happening in Narnia is a brilliant description of what a church should look like: “The courtyard no longer looked like a museum, it looked more like a zoo.” It is in the incongruence and oddness of our disjointed spirituality that ought to characterize every church. For God so loved the world, that whosoever believes in him will, from that point on, be considered weird by the rest of the world, which means the church should be more like a zoo than a tomb of identical mummies.”

We are about bringing that unique brand of Christianity to a city who’s unofficial motto is Keep Portland Weird; as messy as it is; as funky as it can get – I wouldn’t want to worship with anyone else I know – Would You?