Sermon Oct. 29 2017-Father Cunningham

           Sometimes when I am preparing a sermon I go and read Biblical commentaries in hopes that they will help unlock some deep secret in the text.  I often emerge disappointed because these commentaries often spend entire paragraphs on verb tenses and sort of forget the whole meaning of the scripture bits.  It can kind of like reading a biography of someone only to have most of the book focus on the person’s digestive system – sure it is part of who they are, but kind of misses the point.  In today’s reading from Thessalonians, I was curious about the line, “For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”  There seemed to be something deeper going on in this passage.  Why does Paul bring up trickery – had he been accused of it or were there others who were using it.  Well, as you might have guessed I learned nothing from the commentaries that I looked at and so what follows is the Phil version of what I think is going on and let’s hope that it won’t be heretical. 

            So Paul contrasts two different ways of delivering a message.  The first as mentioned involved impure motives and trickery while the second method he describes as having been approved by God.  I think there are two different possibilities as to what motivated such a statement.  The first is that Paul and his companions have been accused of trickery and impure motives and so he is tackling that accusation head on, saying that it was no such thing but rather they did what God had instructed him to do.  The second possibility seems to be that he was contrasting the way he and his companions did things with some other group.  In other words, there was some group conveying a message through trickery and impure motives, but Paul and his companions were doing what God had ordained.  I don’t know that it makes a huge difference but I am inclined to go with the second explanation partly because he continues by saying, “As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.”  In this Paul is calling on those who witnessed him and his companions to verify that he did nothing nefarious.  But all of this points to a larger question, which has to do with how does one proselytize?  Paul is saying that some used trickery while he did not, but where is the line?  How much “sales job” does one need to put into the effort of proclaiming the Gospel? 

            Now fortunately for most Episcopalians this is not an issue because of our belief that proselytizing is tacky and that it’s why God invented the Baptists.  It is hard to be nefarious about something that you do not actually do.  But let’s say we actually decided to talk about the Gospel and actively sought to convert someone.  The question that Paul is raising has to do with how we actually go about that – are we honest or do we do whatever it takes to make the sale?  And when you put it like this the answer is pretty obvious, at least I hope that it is.  But there is a spectrum to this question because while we certainly would not promote deceitfulness, Churches quite often participate in things that are not directly related to the Gospel in order to bring people in.  I did a quick look on the interweb at various churches and how they promote their high school age youth groups.  In reading a description from a particular website I saw that they did talk about growing ones faith, however they also talked a lot about games and gym time.  One even boasted of the amount of snacks provided.  Now I am not picking on them and saying that if youth group is fun you are headed for perdition, but rather to ask the question of what does snack time have to do with the Kingdom of God.  On one level it could be seen as a trick to lure people in.  So what are we supposed to do?  Do we ban all activities that are not strictly related to the Gospel message? 

            Well, here is where it is good to be Anglican.  Please stick with me for a moment because I do get back to a point.  During the Reformation there was some tension over how the Bible influenced what we did in worship.  Some took the tack that if the Bible didn’t expressly say you could do something then you were not to do that particular thing in Church.  A good example of this is the Church of Christ, which does not use musical instruments in their worship because there is no record of musical instruments being used in New Testament worship.  Anglicans (and others) took a different approach to this by saying essentially that if the Bible does not ban it and it does not seem contrary to God’s will then we can do it.  Since the Bible does not say that you can’t use musical instruments and there does not seem to be anything that runs contrary to God’s will then we can use musical instruments, even though I have my doubts about the accordion.  And so employing this thinking in terms of spreading the Gospel we can use other things to bring people in as long as they are not contradictory to the will of God.  And I would add one thing to that which is that they cannot be more important than God.  In other words music is fine, but if worship becomes a concert then it is not fine, just as a fun youth group is fine as long as the fun is in service of the mission of drawing closer to God. 

            But now let’s return to the original question about spreading the Gospel and the way we should do it.  The first thing is obviously that we should do it.  And I know this makes many people squirm, including myself, but if we truly believe that Jesus is the way the truth and the life then we should probably pass that message on.  Secondly and I think this is a question for those of us at St. John Chrysostom and that is what are we doing about it?  Who are we talking to?  Have any of us invited someone to church lately or checked in with someone that we have not seen in a while?  We have probably all seen really bad proselytizing, we have also probably all seen bad Christian sales jobs where the message was lost in the medium but none of that is an excuse for us not doing it.  And I think this is something for us to reflect on.  Are we doing anything to bring more people to Christ?  All of us are supposed to be ambassadors for the Kingdom of God.  So I think the question for us, myself included is what are we doing?  Can we say like Paul that, “our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”  We need to speak a message that is pleasing to God so that we may be a participant in the expansion of his kingdom both now and forevermore. 

Sermon Oct. 15 2017-Father Cunningham

             Oscar Wilde once said that a sentimentalist “Is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."  Which seems like as good of definition as any.  I thought about this today because our parable is sort of a tonic for any sort of sentimentalism.  Certainly it all starts well enough; you have the generous king inviting all of the people of the town to a fabulous wedding feast.  I mean if you added a little snow and a fresh cut Christmas tree you would be 90% of your way to a Hallmark Christmas special.  It could all end with a non-threatening looking homeless man offering a slightly grammatically incorrect toast to the King before they all link arms and sing “Away in the Manger” together.  But Jesus does not let us off that easy; he does not allow this to be a simple, warm-hearted sentimental tale.  The King is certainly generous and the marginalized and outcasts all are invited and come to the glorious feast, but then we have this; “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”  The whole groovy kind of love vibe that we had going gets abruptly derailed.  So what is going on? 

            If the King is representative of God why does he get so upset over a piece of clothing, I mean its not like he was wearing white slacks after Labor Day.  To answer this question there are really two pieces of God’s personality that we must understand.  The first comes with the invitation.  That is when God says, “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.”  This is God saying that all are welcome to come, which is very true; God is a welcoming and loving God.  But God is also good and so wants us to be good too.  And as a result God asks for us to change – which in this case was to quite literally change into a wedding garment.  However I am not sure we always put these pieces together.  We either confuse an open invitation with no expectations of us once we actually show up, or we make the opposite mistake and get real excited about God’s exclusivity that we forget that all were welcome in the first place.  And actually, to maybe go out on a bit of a limb or paint with too broad of brush (you can take your pick of clichés) I think much of our church wars these days are grounded on a partial or incomplete reading of this parable.  What I mean by that is we have one group that is a first half reader and a different group, which is a second half reader.  What this means in practicality is that one group wants to talk mainly about the inclusiveness of God while the second group wants to talk about the exclusiveness of God vis a vis certain behaviors.  And I have to say that intellectually either of these positions is easier to understand than what Jesus spells out today.  It is not hard to think of a god with no standards like a fun-loving uncle who goes around giving people noogies and making sure that their wine glasses are full.  It is also not hard to conceive of a god with very strict standards and a system of tallies, who is constantly judging and telling us what we are doing wrong.  But to conceive of a God that simultaneously welcomes all while distaining sinful behavior is a little harder because the lines are not so distinct.  When does the welcoming everybody God turn into the “throw them into the outer darkness” God?  I mean can we get a schedule so that we know when to behave?  Well I am not sure if that is the right question to ask because I think there is another dynamic at work here, which has to do with the fact that people tend to pick sides in this parable based on what fits with their personality by either ignoring the welcoming side of God or the “throw them into the outer darkness” side of God.    

            I was listening to a podcast the other day, which I know makes me sound quite hip, but don’t be fooled.  Now please stick with me for a minute because this eventually gets back to the parable.  Anyway the topic of this podcast turned to what is so often on everyone’s minds these days and that is what is wrong with us, why do we have so much trouble getting along with each other.  The hypothesis that arose was rather interesting.  The person said that they blamed the coming apart of our society largely on the breakdown of institutions. What he meant by this was the institutions that civilized societies had so often relied on to create cohesion were breaking down and not functioning the way that they were intended.  He said every generation is invaded by barbarians, which we call children, and our job and the job of institutions within our society is to turn those barbarians into productive and valuable members of our society.  But he said institutions these days are not doing that because we do not view institutions as larger than ourselves but rather as extensions of ourselves.  So rather than going to a school or a church to be changed by it, we instead go to change that school or church into our image, or better yet save time and find one that it is already in our image by the time we get there.  And so we go to institutions that only validate what we already believe and are not transformed but rather encouraged in whatever it is that we believe.  Some of you may have seen the Babylon Bee, which is a kind of Christian version of The Onion.  Anyway they once had a headline that read, “Local Family Commutes 700 miles to attend Church that meets their exact Specifications.”  The article goes onto detail how this family almost found a church 400 miles away but its racquetball program was subpar so they had to keep looking.  And while I know this is satire there is a piece of truth, which marks all good satire.  We want institutions to cater to us. 

           Now take this mentality and look at it in terms of today’s parable.  If inclusiveness is your bag you kind of stop before the expulsion of the wedding guest, or chalk it up to a typo.  However, if you are a neo-puritan exclusionary type you get really excited about the ability to kick people out because they are not acting correctly and view the story as just one big build up to the exclusionary moral.  But, if we do either of those two things, are we allowing the institution of the church to do its work?  Shouldn’t the church transform us?  I mean there should be parts of Church, in general and in this parable specifically, that make everyone a little uncomfortable and that is not a bad thing.  If we like to be friendly and welcoming but are afraid to correct a friend this should push us a little.  If we love to tell people they are heretics and that they are going to spend eternity in the extra crispy section, this parable should also give us pause.  A life in Christ while being comforting is also going to be stretching because it asks something of us.

            Jesus today is saying that, of course, God welcomes all.  You are not chosen based on your social class, your profession or who your parents were, but once you come, you are expected to change.  If there are things about you that are repugnant to God, he is looking for those things to end.   God’s goodness is both welcoming and correcting.  Our life on this earth is not a call to sentimentality but is rather a call to grow, to stretch up to God.  Some of this may come easier than other parts, but we must never lose our focus so that we may be God’s both now and forevermore. 

Sermon October 8, 2017 - Fr. Cunningham

             There was something of a trend over the last twenty years or so in the world of popular culture that had to do with telling a well-known story from the perspective of a different character within the story.  One of the most famous of these was the musical Wicked, which told the story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the wicked witch.  Some of these adaptations have been entertaining, others not so much, but I won’t bore you with my literary criticism.  Instead I bring this up to simply point out that sometimes in stories there are characters that we either forget exist or simply see as a means to an end.  The Wicked Witch exists to be wicked just as the Big Bad Wolf’s raison d’etre is to be big and bad and a wolf. 

             And because you figured I would eventually get to something from the Bible this same thing can be said of out parable today.  The parable of the wicked tenants is generally looked at as concerning two groups – the tenants and the landowner, with the landowner representing God and the tenants the chief priests and Pharisees.  The moral of the story is that those whom God has left in charge have not been doing a very good job and as a result will not inherit the kingdom of God.  But I want to take a moment and instead of focusing on the main characters to look at the characters that are thrown in to make the larger point and those are the three groups of people that the landowner sent to the tenants – the first and second are a group of slaves while the third is the landowner’s son.  From the little information we are given one or two of the slaves are beaten, one or two are stoned and at least two slaves and the son are killed.  Now, I don’t want to enter a creative writing contest so I am not going to start fleshing out these characters, but rather, instead, want to focus on the shedding of innocent blood.  All three groups that went to the tenants were not doing anything wrong or even out of the ordinary; they had been given a routine job, which was to collect the rent.  But as a result of the wickedness of the tenants they ended up losing their lives.  And with events like we have had this past week in Las Vegas this is not something just found in fiction.  People who were doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary were killed in Las Vegas.  And when things like this happen the human impulse is to ask why.  Why do people doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary suffer and die.  Our brains are ill at ease when the cause and effect do not seem to work. 

If someone gets drunk and smashes their car into a telephone pole we will mourn the loss and see it as a waste of a life, but still we know why it happened – there is a straight line from the action of getting drunk to the tragedy of crashing a car.  But that is not the case with the slaves, or the son or those who went to the concert in Las Vegas; there was no action on their part that should have led to their death.  And so when things like this happen we move from seeking human explanations to seeking divine explanations.  The question becomes how did God let something like this happen?  If God loves us why would he not stop this senseless evil?  In one sense the “why question” is easy to answer.  We can say that we live in a fallen world and that in this fallen world God has allowed for free will and that free will often results in wicked and evil behavior.  However, I am not sure if this is really getting to the heart of the question.  For at times when great tragedy has struck, logical explanations always seem a little trite.  I mean it is true that more people die from bee stings every year than die from mass shootings, but does that do anything to help a grieving parent or spouse?  Acts like the terror in Las Vegas tear at the very fabric of our society because they are so unfair and so unjust that the answers as to why will not satisfy.  And so in many ways when we ask the question of why there will never be a satisfactory answer because actions like this go against what is good and noble and just.  They reveal something very wrong about the world and the loss we feel points to something deeper within us.

            Many of you probably know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He was a German Theologian and Pastor who was killed for his part in a plot to try and assassinate Hitler.  In one of the letters he wrote before his execution he wrote this concerning the loss of a loved one and the pain that we feel:

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through.  That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us.  It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

            This is an interesting way of looking at tragedy and loss.  The pain is part of keeping alive our former communion.  And while I realize that he is talking about someone we personally knew and loved I do think it speaks to us about mass tragedies.  Because when he says that the pain keeps alive the former communion I think it can also be used to address the communion we share as human beings - what is sometimes referred to as our common humanity.  The senseless destruction of human life causes pain because something of humanity has been killed.  A creature made in the image of God is no more and that causes a tear in our common relationship. 

            These days I think pain may be harder to deal with than at other times because modern science has solved many of the problems of pain and led us to expect that there is something that can make it go away.  But what of the pain that will not go away?  What of the pain that cannot be quickly solved?  In many ways it is a reminder that all is not well with the world.  I once heard the story about a person discussing with a friend that they would not fly because of the front-page stories about airline crashes.  The friend replied that this is exactly the time to fly, when those stories cease to make the front page is when it is time to worry.  What the friend ,of course, meant was that if crashes became routine than they would no longer be on the front page indicating that travel is much more dangerous.  The fact that we are outraged and grasping for answers shows something of God.  God the Father had to watch his son crucified, he knows what it is to stand by helplessly and watch evil happen.  The heartbreak that we feel is the same as God feels and it shows our link to the creator and sustainer of the universe. 

             And so when we ask why, I don’t think that we really want the answer because that does not make the pain go away, but rather the reason we ask why is us reaching to God who dwells in us.  It is showing what brokenness and sinfulness look like to God and by extension to us.  It is a reminder that we don’t want to live in a world where people merrily gun down total strangers.  It is a call to look to something greater to something beautiful.  In the coming weeks we will probably learn more of this shooters motivations, just as this morning we learned why the tenants killed the slaves and the son, but understanding motivations is different from justifying evil.  Evil should never be satisfactorily explained because if it is we have lost the fact that we are made in God’s image.  Hurt and sorrow are painful markers within us that tell us that humanity was created for something greater, to be in communion with God and to follow in his ways both now and forevermore.