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Welcome to my little blog of sermons and stories. I don't consider myself a "preacher." When I'm preached to, I fall asleep. zzzzzzzzzz. So do you! But if I hear a good story, I listen and chew on it until it sinks in. Kids tune out at lectures but they love stories...and we're all kids at heart.

So, set aside sin and guilt and all that institutional claptrap and sit back and revel in the love of God which has no strings attached. And always remember to laugh.

And for my sister and brother story tellers out there, remember plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. ;)

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

21 July 2015 - The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost Proper 10

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I’ve been so glad to see the cooler weather come back.  When I’m at home, I’ve been holed up in my basement for the last several weeks confined to my study which we fondly call “the Man Cave.”  It’s about 10 degrees cooler down there and then with a fan it gets quite comfortable.  But after a while it can be a bit oppressive so I’ve gone to the other side of the basement at times which is storage, the furnace and the washroom, and done some organizing.  I was rummaging through a box when I stumbled upon a very old binder inside of which I found, of all things, all the handouts from my Confirmation class – written on parchment.  And when I read this morning’s cheery Gospel reading, my mind went back to my Confirmation class those many years ago. 

We had studied all the important facts of the Christian faith: the Ever-blessed Trinity, the Humanity and Divinity of Christ, the Seven Sacraments especially the Eucharist and Baptism.  We’d memorized the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and giggled through the Creed of St. Athanasius. We learned how to use the Prayer Book and it’s place in the faith of the Anglican Church.  It was all somewhat interesting though on occasion rather dry.  But the Rector did his best to make it interesting and at times even fun. 

One Saturday morning he said, “You’ve been learning all the academic stuff about the Christian Faith – the nuts and bolts of belief.  But this morning we’re going to learn about what it means to put those beliefs into practice; what it really means to be a follower of Jesus.”

He then proceeded to open his big, black Prayer Book/Bible combination and read to us the story of the beheading of St. John the Baptist.  Of course, we boys were thrilled with all the intrigue and gore and the girls just shrieked at it – probably more appropriately.



After the reading, the Rector said, “Being a Christian is not about belief.  It’s about action.  It’s about following Jesus and being willing to face even death for what is right and true and moral.”  We then proceeded to enter into a conversation about what was really going on in this gruesome episode of the Gospel of Mark.

First off, we found out that John the Baptist was in jail because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.  By the time of his arrest, John was very popular and very influential within Jewish religious society.  People eagerly listened to him.  He was a prophet.  And he’d been loudly criticizing Herod’s marriage to his dead brother’s wife.  This was not Herod the Great of the Christmas stories, but Herod Agrippa his son.  His wife, Herodias, had probably been a main instigator of the marriage having been previously married to a nobleman and not willing to give up the lifestyle, power, prestige and wealth that went along with it.  But John saw this as nothing less than incest and had been screaming about it for a while and turning public opinion against Herod and especially Herodias.  So, she had a grudge and was out for blood.

The second thing we learned is that if one does the math, this being a second marriage, their daughter, Herodias named after her mother, couldn’t’ve been more than nine or ten years old.  This little creepy fact tells us that the poor girl was manipulated into her mother’s web of revenge.  I mean, what ten year old girl knows what to ask for in such a setting?  So, naturally she runs to her mother and asks what to ask for.  And Herodias had a plan: to silence John for good!

The Rector continued, “Morality is not something confined to what happens behind closed doors. In fact,” he said, “much of what happens behind closed doors is nobody’s business unless someone is being injured or abused.”  He went on to say that morality is a much broader issue and has to do with the degradation of human dignity.  That which claims that certain people are less than human or disposable or relegates them to poverty, hunger or war
is what is truly immoral.  John seems to have either known Herodias or her reputationand her scheming and manipulation of people for her own benefit.At least for John, this was beyond the limits of morality.     He’d probably even used her as a teaching tool while preaching to the crowds.  And it had cost him his head.

The Rector continued, “Being a Christian is not just about reciting Creeds and elaborate rituals.  Those things are fine and good, but their function is to give usthe courage to be willing to stand for what is right and just and moral in the face of institutional and individual greed and selfishness which doesn’t care who gets rolled over in the process. 


Being a Christian is about standing up for those who have no one to stand up for them; about being the voice for the voiceless; about standing with the poor and the outcast and the marginalized and the unloved in the face of criticism and even the threat of death because that’s what John the Baptist did.  In fact, it’s what Jesus did on steroids.  Jesus confronted the establishment of his time with their greed and arrogance and disregard for human dignity and demanded an end to it all.  He threatened their wealth and their power and their prestige so much so that their only option was to shut him up too.”

Now, of course, we listening to all this were about twelve years oldso we were starting to get a bit nervous and uncomfortable.  I mean, at that age, being told that we were called to go to the gallows for a cause was a bit overwhelming as well as a big heavy.  But then, the Rector asked,“What happened after Jesus was crucified?”  We all looked at each other until one of the boys said, “They buried him.”  The Rector said, “Yeah. OK. What happened after that?”  One of the girls chimed in gleefully, “He rose from the dead.”  Bingo!” said the Rector.  Jesus is raised from the dead showing that the powers of evil and even death itself are no match for the Source of truth and love and morality and peace and justice which is the very Being of God.  In other words, when we follow John the Baptist and Jesus himself and willingly give our lives for the sake of what’s right, the result is new life and transformation and Resurrection.  It may not happen overnight, but it has a cumulative effect and in the end the powers of evil never had any hope at all.” 

He then took out a file folder in which there were several photos.  The first was of Jesus but the rest were of people from our own time:  Martin Luther King; Mohandas Gandhi; Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement; Dietrich Bonheoffer, the German Pastor who had stood up against Hitler;  Nelson Mandela who at that time was still in prison.  We passed the pictures around the room, reading the blurbs on their reverse side about these remarkable and at times even non-Christian people.  And as we did, the Rector said to us, “This, my friends, is what it means to be a Christian.  These are the things that are not negotiable.”

When the Bishop came soon afterwards to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation to us, he had an hour before the Liturgy with us all to make sure that we were prepared to reaffirm our faith in Jesus Christ.  Afterwards, he asked the Rector, “Where did these kids get all this stuff about being willing to give one’s life for the Gospel?”  The Rector smiled, “From the Scriptures and the Saints.  Where else?”  The Bishop then too smiled and said, “Good work!  These kids may change the world yet!”

I have to admit that I’ve not, as of yet, changed the world and I haven’t heard the names of the others in that Confirmation class in the news.  But I have listened recently to the decisions of the Supreme Court upholding the dignity of the human being especially in ensuring that everyone has access to health care no matter their economic standing.  I followed online the proceedings of General Convention in Salt Lake City as the Episcopal Church reaffirmed its commitment to Christ and for justice and peace among all people and respect for the dignity of every human being among a myriad of issues – rather than seeking the security and safety of the institution.  And in these things had taken place because many, many people had followed the examples of Christ and John the Baptist and put their lives on the line for the truth.And as we continue to hear of the horror stories of terror on far away shores and murders in Churches in our own land, I still have hope because I know that in the end, if we are willing to do more than just “believe,” but truly have faith, that we and people of good will of every stripe will continue to bring transformation and new life and Resurrection to our world. 

As the years, OK, decades, have rolled by since that Confirmation class, I’ve struggled with the idea of being like John the Baptist or even Jesus himself.  I’m not very good at it.  Part of me is a confirmed and devout coward.  But then, I remember that I’m not called to give my life as an individual but as part of a community of faith called to give its life for the truth.  And so we come here, week after week, to support each other in our mutual calling and to celebrate the fact that the Living Christ dwells deeply in our midst and to be fed by him so that at least my cowardice and our courage can be fortified and we can continue the mission of transforming the world for the sake of him who gave his life for the world and calls us to do the same: Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.


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