April 30, 2017 - Fr. Cunningham

In this country and in most of Europe, Christianity has been in the doldrums for some time.  The United States has not seen the large-scale abandonment of the Church that much of Europe has experienced, but it would be quite a stretch to say that the church is vibrant and thriving.   In just the seven years between 2007 and 2014 the number of people in the United States who say that they have no religion has grown from 16% of the population to 23% of the population.  Similarly if you just want to look at the Episcopal Church we lost 37,669 members in 2015 alone, a decline of 2.1%.  And so when we read things like today’s passage from Acts which says, “So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added” the immediate question that comes to mind is what are we doing wrong?  Well I wish I knew.  There are of course plenty of theories and plenty of experts all of which claim they have the secret sauce to stop this decline.  If you want to have fun sometime type the term “church growth” into the Amazon search feature.  I did it the other day and got 24,463 results.  I am not sure if that equates to 24,463 books, but if it does that means there is almost one unique book on church growth for everyone who left the Episcopal Church in 2015.  I mean if the church were growing the way books on church growth were growing we would make those in Acts today look like amateurs.  And it is not just books on church growth that are growing; there are also countless articles, lectures and church growth experts who work both freelance and for diocese and other Christian groups.  In my diocese of West Texas we have a person entirely dedicated to Church growth, which has allowed us to shrink at a slower rate than the rest of the Episcopal Church.  And so I don’t think we can blame church decline on a lack of experts or lack of books, but we do have to admit that it hasn’t worked.  Like Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin, “The more you tighten your grip…the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  The more we talk about growing the Church the more shrinking we do.  And so into this cheery assessment of the state of the Church I am hesitant to add one more theory on what the church needs, but here goes. 

As best I can tell from the Acts of the Apostles they never called in a church growth expert and St. Paul never published a book on church growth.  As best I can tell they just went out and spread the Gospel.  Yes certainly they wanted converts and cared about it otherwise we would not have recorded the number that we have today, but they did not have a concept of church growth as a thing in and of itself.  Rather they wanted as many people to understand what had happened in the world through the death and resurrection of Christ.  Which might seem like a subtle distinction but it has a different focus – the focus of the former is on numbers while the focus of the latter is on Jesus.  The first focuses on growth for its own sake while the second sees growth as a byproduct of bringing people into the truth of Jesus Christ.  And so the question for those of us who have been trained to desire church growth is, “So if we focus on Jesus then will the church grow?”  And here again I have to say that I don’t know.  But I say I don’t know with a caveat.  And that caveat is that I am not sure if numbers are the right metric.  For while today we hear that the church added 3000 people, in other places in the Bible, like Matthew, we hear from Jesus, “and you will be hated by all because of my name.”  That quote rarely shows up on get well cards and it hardly makes it sound like Jesus had Church growth in mind as a metric by which to measure the success of his mission.  For it would seem that Jesus predicted that not everyone would become a Christian.    

We tend to look at the Church as a marketing problem to be solved.  And, of course, the answer to any marketing problem is more – be it more things sold, more likes on Facebook or more people at a certain movie. Put in very general terms marketing measures success by how many products are sold and the way it convinces us to buy the products is to tell us that the purchase of that product will make our lives instantly better – using a detergent will make our towels cleaner, using a mattress will make us sleep better and eating a particular food will make our colon healthier.  And in many ways Christianity has largely bought into this formula – you become Christian and it will make your life better and it will happen right now.  But here is the thing, I know lots of Christians who have had or are having tragedy in their life.  I know Christians who are wealthy, but I also know ones who are barely getting by.  I know Christians with perfect children, but I also know ones whose children are delinquents. But the real message should not be centered around an instantaneous life improvement but rather is centered around being in relationship with the God of the universe.  St. Teresa of Avila had a rather famous exchange with God where she heard God say, “Teresa, whom the Lord loves, he chastises. This is how I treat all my friends.” To which Teresa replied, “No wonder you have so few!” 

Christianity is not rated on how it makes our life better but whether or not it makes us better, if it makes us more like Christ.  And in a society raised on self-esteem being told that we might need to change something about us to grow closer to God is going to be a message that might be a hard sell.  But becoming a Christian was never about ease but rather about holiness and our growing in holiness.  God is not our concierge whose sole job is to make sure that we get everything we desire, but rather God is a loving parent who wants us to grow into Godliness.  And if you think of it like this it starts to become apparent why our numbers may be in decline.  For if the default mindset of most of the Western World judges the worthiness of any endeavor on whether it makes our life easier or better then how do you sell a product which says it might make your life harder as you grow in holiness.

And so all of this may make you wonder why you are here in the first place, why didn’t you just go to Starbucks this morning.  But here is the thing.  Being in communion with the God of the universe gives us the stability to endure the trials and travails of this life.  But just as the rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous bad things happen to both the Godly and the Ungodly.  Those who buy the right laundry detergent still have problems.  But for those who believe in Jesus Christ we know that he was raised from the dead.  Which means that God can redeem everything, including our sufferings and mild discomforts. 

I don’t know what the future of the Church holds –whether it will continue to decline or not.  But what I do know is that Jesus Christ died and rose for our sins so that we may be called sons and daughters of the most high.  That message does not always translate into an easy life, but it does translate to holiness so that we may be God’s both now and forevermore. 

April 16, 2017 - Fr. Cunningham

A friend of mine, who worked with schizophrenic patients, once made an interesting observation about those patients of hers that heard voices.  The thing is, she said, was that the voices never said anything helpful or life affirming like “My, you look handsome today, have you been working out?”  Instead the voices were always unhelpful telling them bad things about themselves and others.  And while this was certainly attributable to mental illness the phenomenon of having voices inside our head give us negative, unhelpful and wrong information does not solely belong to the mentally ill.  If you don't believe me than believe the Bible and Mary Magdalene because today we hear, "So [Mary] ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him'". And I don't want to be too hard on Mary because she did reach a fairly logical conclusion, but still in the absence of information her mind went to the worst place.  The body of Jesus was not where it was supposed to be so there must be nefarious forces at work - the unnamed “they” have taken him.  And if “they” have taken him it must be for less than charitable reasons.  In Mary’s mind the missing body could only point to one more insult in a week already full of insults.  It was not just enough to crucify Jesus but now it seems that, like Oliver Cromwell, they wanted to dig him up just so that they could hang him.  However as we all know, because this is the Sunday when the Easter bunny shows up, that this is not what really happened.  Mary's mind, by going to the worst place, was not reflecting reality but rather a much darker version of it, a version where evil won and continued to win.  But if there is anything to learn from Easter it is that evil did not win.  No matter how dark and horrible things looked the light shone forth in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. 

In the drama of this week we start with the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, which was followed, in rapid succession, by the Last Supper, the betrayal and arrest of Jesus and finally the crucifixion of Jesus.  We have gone from excitement and anticipation to unease to utter despair.  And the reason for the despair is that it all seemed so final, so absolute because Jesus was dead, they had seen him laid in the tomb and everyone knows what it means when you are laid in a tomb.  This is why death has been the preferred method of tyrants across the ages because it works so well to silence those who were inconvenient to their view of reality.  Both the crosses of the Roman Empire and the death camps of the Khmer Rouge had one purpose and that was to get rid of the people who opposed the regime.  And up until today it had worked.  Once you killed someone they ceased to be an issue because, as we learn from the beginning of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, “Dead men tell no tales.”  And that is why Mary’s mind went straight to grave robbing today.  The only thing that could be done with someone who had died, in terms of movement, was for a living person to move their body.  But as Jesus told us earlier in Matthew’s Gospel – With God all things are possible.  With his death there were now more options than someone taking the body of Jesus. 

There is something of a debate going on in the world of physics these days about why our universe follows the laws that it does.  So for example why is gravitation acceleration always 9.80665 m/s^2?  Why doesn’t a rock fall faster in Ho Ho Kus, New Jersey than it does in Montreal, Quebec?  In other words why do things always work the same?  Why are there actual repeatable laws in the universe and not just a series of random events?  Why if I let go of a rock does it not occasionally float up in the air rather than drop?  I won’t get into all of the theories about why the universe follows set laws but I will just say that it does.  Science depends on experiments being repeatable and for experiments to be repeatable there need to be fixed laws that govern the universe.  And so while I am sure you are all fascinated by this conversation a few of you may be wondering what this has to do with Easter.  What does this consistency within the fabric of the universe mean in terms of the Resurrection of Jesus?  Well I am glad you asked.  The thing is that up until today when people were crucified they stayed dead – always.  If you don’t believe me go and watch Spartacus (The Kirk Douglas version not the TV series).  And so the question to ask today in Jesus being raised from the dead is did God step in and briefly alter the underlying laws of the universe? And the answer to that is yes and no.  Yes in the sense that in the time before and after the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth dead people have stayed dead.  Jesus is the only person who has been resurrected.  But here is the no part of the answer.  The temporary altering of the laws of the universe was not a onetime trick but was rather a revealing of the ultimate plan of God for everyone and not just Jesus.  In other words the plan is for all of us who believe in Jesus to be raised from the dead.  This is why we say that we believe in the resurrection of the dead every Sunday during the creed.  This is not a fancy church way of saying that we float up to heaven, play harps and help George Bailey get out of trouble, but rather means that just like Jesus today we are going to be resurrected; we are going to have glorified bodies.  Just like Jesus, death will not be the final word.  That is why today is so celebratory.  The one thing that humanity has never been able to conquer, death itself has been conquered.  And so our minds do not need to be like Mary Magdalene’s today and think that the worst has happened because we know through the Resurrection of Jesus that no matter how terrible things may look the final victory is assured.  Or as St. Paul puts it, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Since chocolate bunnies do not put as much money into the economy as Christmas wish lists, Easter has been relegated to the other Christian Holiday.  Easter decorations do not start showing up in stores in mid January.  And all of this can make us think that Easter while being nice is sort of optional, but that is not the case.  Easter, not Christmas, is the day that is the central event of Christianity.  In the Nicene Creed Christmas gets 15 words and Easter gets between 25 and 59 words depending on how strictly or loosely you define the term.  All Christmas tells us is that Jesus came (which is of course a big deal) but he could of come looked around and decided that it was all not worth it, that we were beyond saving.  But today is the day where he tells us that we are worth saving and have been saved.  Our sin has been forgiven and if our sin has been forgiven we are able to revert back to the original plan.  The plan where there was no pain or death but only life everlasting.  Today is a glorious day because it shows that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are able to be with God both now and forevermore.