I was sick for a good portion of last week, and while lazing around, I read a book. For fun. It’s called Redshirts, by John Scalzi. And if you spent any portion of your younger life watching Star Trek, especially the first series, I recommend it. Redshirts is the story of a small group of people who become junior crew members on a starship called the Intrepid,  the flagship of an interplanetary exploration force. During their early weeks on the Intrepid, they notice several things. There are five senior officers on the ship, including the captain, who nearly always go on away missions, beaming onto damaged ships or plague-ridden planets. That seems… strange. And while the senior crew always mysteriously survive any encounter or adventure, one, two, or more of the junior officers who accompany them on these missions always end up dead… killed by things like sand worms, crazed cleaning robots, and ice sharks. The title of the book, Redshirts, comes from the fact that many of the junior crew members who suffered similar fates on Star Trek in the 1960s wore red uniform shirts on their ill-fated journeys.

The main characters in the novel also notice that sometimes they seem to be living their own lives, and thinking their own thoughts. But at other times, especially moments of excitement, on a mission or facing an enemy, they get caught up in something bigger. Their words and actions are no longer their own, but follow the demands of the narrative, driven by the drama. Almost as if there was a script, and they were just characters in the hands of a merciless writer. Eventually they discover that they are somehow living as extras in an early-2000s era TV series, a B-grade Star Trek knock-off. When the writer decides to kill someone as a dramatic moment before a commercial break, a real person on their real starship … dies. At one point in their investigations, a more experienced member of the crew warns them: Stay away from the Narrative. Stay away from the Narrative.

Why the book report? Well, you may have noticed that it’s Lent. Lent is the season in which Christians prepare for the mystery and joy of Easter. By ancient tradition, it is a season of penitence, a season to examine our lives, repent of our sins, and try to live more fully as God’s people. It’s the season in our church’s year when the word and notion of Sin stands most in the center of our life and liturgy. So I’ve taken it as part of my work as a preacher and teacher to preach at least one sermon, every Lent, about what we’re talking about when we talk about sin. To offer some fresh way to come to grips with this difficult, important, dangerous, powerful word. So welcome to this year’s Sin sermon.

In Lent we begin our worship with a litany of confession. I appreciate our Lenten litanies, the Great Litany and this lesser Litany, from the Ash Wednesday liturgy, that we use weekly. It feels good for my soul to lay out, line by line, all the small and large ways that I fall short of my intentions for my own life. Anger at my own frustration: check. Intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts: check. Waste and pollution of Creation: Check. I am sorry, God. So very sorry. I believe in the power of the Litany as a spiritual exercise. And, at the same time,I acknowledge its limits.

Marcus Borg, the great Scripture scholar and theologian who passed away a few weeks ago, wrote in his book Speaking Christian that in the church, we have tended to overfocus on sins, and underfocus on Sin. That’s Sin, singular, with a capital S. Sins are the ways that we as individuals fall short of the call of Christ on our lives and hearts. Things done which we ought not to have done, things undone which we ought to have done. What Francis Spufford wonderfully renames as “The Human Propensity to Mess Things Up.” Abbreviated HPtFtU. I have found Spufford’s terminology helpful; some folks who find the word “sin” strange, artificial, or loaded, can readily recognize their own propensity to mess things up, and offer it to God for healing.

Talking about sins, the reality of that propensity in all our lives, is part of the work of the church, and of this season. But do we talk enough about Sin? Singular, capital-S Sin? The great big word for what ails us. For the Human Condition. For what makes the world and our lives imperfect, painful, broken. Do we talk enough about Sin, the flawed and harmful status quo that is simply daily life, the way things are?

Borg suggests that the church’s overfocus on sins has kept us from taking a hard look at Sin. Is this what we tell each other, what we tell ourselves? – “If I can just fix my life, live up to my own standards, and everybody else’s, and God’s, and be a good person, things will be OK.” That’s an impossible illusion. You can’t do it, and even if you could, it wouldn’t save you from pain, from struggle, from life.

What if our calling as people of God is not primarily to help our members correct their sins, but to be a community that bravely names and grapples with Sin, and its grip on all of us?…

Walter Brueggeman – another great Scripture scholar of our time – gave a speech in 2005 about the scripts that run our lives. He writes that our lives and our communities are organized by and around particular scripts. We are taught the scripts of our family, culture, and society, in explicit ways but also, overwhelmingly, in implicit ways, simply by growing up and being formed by images, assumptions, expectations, labels. There are, of course, many scripts in our complex society. A political debate, for example, is a clash of conflicting scripts about what’s wrong with a state or a nation, and how to fix it. But Brueggeman steps back and says, We all, left and right, live under the umbrella of an overarching 21st-century American script. He calls it “therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism.”

Our dominant script is therapeutic because of the near-universal assumption that the goal of human life is happiness and freedom from pain, and that there is a product or treatment to counteract every pain, discomfort, or trouble that life brings us. That seems so natural, doesn’t it? But hold it up against Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, his call to his followers to hold their own lives lightly and walk willingly into risk and suffering, when such suffering may serve God or benefit a neighbor. This assumption we have, that pain is a problem to be solved – that pain is a problem that CAN be solved – it is not the assumption of every human culture. It is not the assumption of Scripture. And it is, in fact, not true.

Our dominant script is technological because of the near-universal assumption  that, in Brueggeman’s words,“everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity… There is nothing so complex or so remote that it cannot be solved.” But of course! These are the days of miracle and wonder! Look at all that we’ve achieved; surely anything is possible. And yet, this is not the assumption of every human culture; nor of Scripture; and it is, in fact, not true.

Our dominant script is consumerist, because we live in a culture that teaches us that the world and its resources are infinitely available to us; that if you want it, you need it; that we are defined by our possessions; that she who dies with the most toys, wins; that our deepest yearnings and aspirations can be satisfied with a little help from a credit card. I have a healthy suspicion of the consumerist mentality, and yet this stuff still drives me; it’s deep, it’s powerful. And again: the idea that wholeness, happiness, satisfaction are available for purchase – this is not the mindset of every human culture. It is emphatically not the mindset of Scripture – as Jesus reminds us today, you could gain the whole world, and still lose your life, your soul. The script of consumerism, too, is not true.

And finally, our dominant script is militaristic – grounded in the assumption that our way of life is under threat and in need of protection. That if we let too many of Them in, We might not have it so good anymore. That if we question the Powers that Be, we must not love America or appreciate how good we have it. Our fundamental cultural militarism is based on a mindset of scarcity and fear. And while some of that thinking may indeed be present in every human culture -Scripture tells us that God has called us away from it, again and again and again. Look at Jesus and Peter, arguing, in today’s Gospel: Peter is looking for victory in terms of human power. He says, You’re the One, Jesus! You will ride into Jerusalem in triumph, call down your angelic army to kick out the Romans, restore Israel to greatness, and rule as our holy King!  And Jesus says, Nope. That’s not the story we’re living, Peter. Because that story, too, is false. Has always been false. We can’t protect or fight our way into justice, peace, or true human flourishing.

This script, the therapeutic, technological, consumerist, militarist script of early 21st century America, this script promises to keep us safe and make us happy. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats; all our parties are invested in versions of this narrative. It’s the air we breathe, the water we swim in. It directs how we organize our lives, set our goals, solve our problems, spend our time. And it’s a lie.

Brueggeman writes, “That script has failed… We are not safe, and we are not happy.  [That] script is guaranteed to produce new depths of insecurity, and new waves of unhappiness… [Our] health depends, for society and for its members, on disengaging from… that failed script.” In a very real sense, we are all redshirts in a narrative that was not written to benefit us. There’s a moment in the book, Redshirts, when one character asks another, I know you’re a man of faith; but how can you still believe in God, when God keeps putting us in these terrible situations? And the second character says, That’s not God. God is not the writer of the narratives that are killing us. These are human scripts.

Many aspects of the scripts that drive our lives – the narratives that suck us in and write our stories for us – they were composed without our best interests at heart. They were written to protect power and privilege. To maintain a social and economic status quo. To continue concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. To keep most of us too distracted or busy or superficially satiated to ask hard questions. Stay away from the Narrative, indeed!…

Marcus Borg, talking about the churches’ language of Sin, points out that Scripture contains several dominant images of what ails us, as human beings. One of those images is bondage. The archetypal story, though not the only one, is of Israel’s time of slavery in Egypt. Their time, their work, their lives not their own.  The Book of Exodus doesn’t tell us  that the Israelites were in bondage because they had sinned. Their enslavement wasn’t a punishment. It was just a thing that happened. A thing that humans do to each other. And the solution to their situation of bondage wasn’t forgiveness: it was liberation.

That story and that image come up again and again, in the Bible and in Christian history: the human condition as bondage, enslavement, subjugation to some Pharaoh or another; God’s grace coming to us as freedom, the parting of a sea, the breaking of chains, the bursting open of a prison door; the call into openness and light and the uncertainty and hope of new paths.

Borg writes, too, about what bondage can look like when we take it into ourselves, internalize it: he names it as sloth. Sloth. One of the seven great sins named by the early church. Sloth isn’t laziness, exactly; it’s deeper and darker. Sloth is apathy, passivity. Dejection. Despair. Nihilism. It can even manifest as a crippling restlessness – the kind that makes you hit Refresh on Facebook again, instead of doing something worth doing, like writing a poem or washing the dishes.

Borg describes Sloth as “leaving it to the snake.”  He explains, “The reference is to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden [complacently] letting the serpent tell them what to do…. You are ‘going along’ with what you have heard, with how things are.” Sloth is what bondage looks like when you wear it on your soul.

So… what do we do? If we are even a tiny bit persuaded by the idea that we are maybe possibly in bondage to a dominant script that promises us safety and happiness but actually delivers fear, inequality, alienation and struggle?

Here’s what happens in the novel. The characters start to notice.They notice when the narrative takes over, and tries to suck them in, feed them words and ideas that aren’t their own and that put them at risk. They talk about it. Together, they become able to name the Narrative and its destructive impact. Together, they find some ways to evade the Narrative; but they decide that their own escape isn’t enough, because it leaves others still subject to the lethal script. They decide challenge the Narrative itself, to try to change the very script of their reality.

In the book, they use a tidy bit of black-hole time travel to go back to 21st century Earth and convince the TV show’s writer to stop killing them. In the real world,

our driving narratives are pretty entrenched. We can’t change them by convincing one writer. But we can change ourselves.  We can choose to ground our lives in other narratives. In Brueggeman’s words, “[we can abandon that dominant] script in favor of a new one, a process that we call conversion.”

What if our calling as people of God is not primarily to help our members correct their sins – but to be a community that bravely names and grapples with Sin, and its grip on our lives?… With that which holds us in bondage, which I am naming today as a Script, a Narrative, the therapeutic, technological, consumerist, militarist logic of our nation and our century? What if our calling as people of God is, in part, to notice and share and muster the courage, together, to name that Narrative and its costs and victims, instead of leaving it to the snake, sunk in weariness and apathy?

Brueggeman sees no “What if” about it. He writes,  “It is the task of the church and its ministry to detach us from that powerful script, … through the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe and joyous… “The claim of that alternative script,” he continues, “is that there is at work among us a Truth that makes us safe, that makes us free, that makes us joyous in a way that the comfort and ease of the consumer economy cannot even imagine…. The slow, steady work [of the church is to make us able,] personally and communally, … to renounce old scripts of death and enter new scripts of life.” Or as Paul puts it in the Letter to the Romans: “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

It is hard and uncertain and strange to step out of the dominant script, to wade against the powerful currents of our culture and way of life. The alternative script isn’t straightforward or tidy. In many respects it’s much messier than the Narrative that drives our world. But that uncertain, ambivalent, wondering space is exactly the kind of space where the Holy spirit can find us, and work with us and in us.

Maybe this is what a church that engages with Sin, singular, big-S, human-condition Sin, looks like:  A plucky band of redshirts talking together about what we see, in our daily lives and the world around us, of the ways that the dominant narrative closes minds, damages lives, limits possibilities, holds us in bondage. Finding courage in our community, and wisdom in our Scriptures, and power in the Spirit of God, to begin to live by another script, the messy, sprawling, lifegiving story being written and rewritten, day by day, century by century,  by the One whom we name as the Author of our salvation.

The Rev. Miranda K. Hassett, St. Dunstan’s Church, Madison, WI

Today we come to the end of the church’s season of Epiphany, as we receive the Gospel of the Transfiguration. Epiphany always begins with two holy stories from the Gospels, the books that tell the life of Jesus. First, the three Wise Men, those patient seekers, who saw a remarkable future for a seemingly-ordinary child, and honored him with royal gifts. And second, the baptism of Jesus, now an adult – that moment when those gathered beside the Jordan saw the Spirit descend like a dove upon the stranger in the water, and heard a voice from heaven proclaim, This is my beloved son!

And we conclude the season with one more story of revelation, of seeing truth beyond what’s readily visible – Jesus’ closest friends follow him off to a nearby hillside, probably expecting to spend some time in quiet prayer. Instead they see their friend and teacher transfigured before them, dazzling white, shining bright; and then obscured by a dark cloud of holy mystery.

All of these keystone stories of Epiphany are stories of people having their eyes opened to see the holiness in what’s right in front of them – the scruffy radical from Nazareth. It is an experience that can be joyful, strange, and/or terrifying.

We use another text of revelation, of transfiguration, in the season of Epiphany – Canticle 11, the Third Song of Isaiah. We use it as our Song of Praise in this season. Here is the text:

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you. For behold, darkness covers the land; deep gloom enshrouds the people. But over you the Lord will rise, and his glory will appear upon you. Nations will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning. Your gates will always be open; by day or by night they will never be shut. They will call you, The City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel. Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders. You will call your walls, Salvation, and all your portals, Praise.  The sun will no more be your light by day; by night you will not need the brightness of the moon. The Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.

This text comes from near the end of the book of Isaiah. It is part of a long prophetic hymn about the restoration of Israel after decades of conquest, destruction, and exile. It holds out the promise and hope of a new season of peace, prosperity, and righteousness. The chapters that follow offer beautiful verses like this: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord… You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her…. You shall be called, ‘Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.’”

All these rich and lovely images of restoration and peace focus on Jerusalem, the great City of the people Israel. Jerusalem was both the religious and political capital, the site of the great Temple, the heart of the people.  Jerusalem stands symbolically for the whole nation – rebuilding Jerusalem is rebuilding the people Israel; peace and prosperity for Jerusalem mean peace and prosperity for the whole land and its inhabitants.

In casting this beautiful image of a restored Jerusalem, the prophet, inspired by the spirit of God, isn’t just seeing beyond the ruins left by conquest; he is seeing beyond the squalor and poverty of normal life in a great city, even at the best of times. Big cities, always and everywhere, have some things in common. They’re always places of great cultural mixing, folks from all over rubbing shoulders – resulting in terrific food, art and music; and also intergroup hatreds and gang violence. Cities are always places of extreme population density, meaning crowdedness and discomfort and lack of privacy; meaning also the rapid spread of whatever diseases the human race is dealing with at the time: bubonic plague, HIV, measles. Cities are always places of extreme poverty – because if you’re poor in the country, at least you can build a shack and grow a little food; but if you’re poor in the city, you can literally have nothing. Nothing but your own labor or your own body with which to try to earn enough to stay alive. And of course population density and poverty mean that cities have also always been places of crime and danger.

What I’m saying is, even before Jerusalem was conquered by her enemies  in the 6th century, the great city was no vision of loveliness, justice and peace. She was a city. Messy and risky and smelly. Like any great city today.

Canticle 11 offers us a vision of a city transformed – you might even say transfigured. Its violence and its poverty swept away; shining with the light of God, a beacon to all those dwelling in darkness, near and far.

Who here knows the name Brandon Stanton?  …  Okay, who here has heard of Humans of New York? …

Humans of New York, or HONY, is a photoblog, posted on Facebook and Instagram. It’s the work of a photographer named Brandon Stanton. He approaches people on the streets of New York City – notorious as one of the world’s most unfriendly places – and asks if he can take their photo.  And if they say yes, he uses the process of taking the photograph as a doorway into conversation. He asks them things like, Tell me about a person you admire. Or, What’s your biggest struggle right now? Or, What’s your biggest regret in life? Your biggest hope?

And he publishes a photo, or two, of each subject, and a few evocative sentences from whatever that person shared in conversation. A bright-eyed child says he wants to be an architect when he grows up. A white-haired lady holding an umbrella printed with kittens talks about her husband’s dying advice. An elderly couple remembers a night of dancing, a half-century ago. A young woman – the photo only shows her hands – talks about bathing her dying sister. An unshaven man perched in a doorway, with garbage bags of his possessions at his feet, shares memories of his father.

The photos and the words are remarkable. And so is the response. If you read things on the Internet with any regularity, you know the cardinal rule: Don’t read the comments. The comments on any story are often where the hate and irrationality and nastiness spill out, regardless of the substance of the story. But the comments on the Humans of New York posts are amazing. Partly because Brandon has established policies and norms about nasty or unkind posts; but more because the way Brandon presents his subjects invites the viewer to see and respond to their humanity. To affirm the hopes of a child, the beauty of an uncertain young woman, the value of a scarred and weary man. Unlike almost anywhere else on the Internet, the comments on HONY are uplifting. People offering affirmation, praise, hope, prayers, words of encouragement, offers of help.

Think about what it’s like to be on the sidewalk of a big, big city – remember or imagine; we’ve all seen those movies. Crushed among strangers, avoiding eye contact. Trying not to see, not to be seen, just keep moving and get on with your business. HONY, Brandon, breaks that open. Strips away the strangeness of the stranger. Reveals our shared humanity, and calls forth our compassionate response.

And amazing things can happen when we see each other. On January 19, Brandon took a picture of a young man,  an African-American middle school student named Vidal. Vidal goes to school in a high-crime part of Brooklyn – as Brandon says, “not the best place to be a kid.” Brandon asked Vidal to tell him about a person he admires. Vidal told Brandon about the principal at his school, Mrs. Lopez, and her compassionate response when kids get in trouble. Vidal said, “One time she made every student stand up, and she told each one of us that we matter.”

Brandon got interested and visited the school, and ended up profiling the principal and teachers, and their hard, passionate work to create hopeful futures for kids from poor and under-served neighborhoods. Turns out Mrs. Lopez had a dream for her students. She wanted to take every incoming 6th grade class to tour Harvard University. Many of the kids have never left New York, and she wanted them to know what it feels like to stand on the campus of one of the world’s great universities. To imagine that they could belong there.  But of course, that trip is expensive – a stretch for the budget of a small school and its families. Brandon wondered whether he could use the popularity of HONY to get them some help with that project. He created an online fundraising campaign for the school. His goal was to raise $100,000, enough to fund the program for three years. The campaign hit $100,000 within an hour, and raised $700,000 in the first four days, from 25,000 donors all over the country and the world.

The total on the campaign – which is still going – now stands at $1.3 million dollars. Incredible wealth for a high-poverty middle school in Brooklyn, which will enable them to open a lot of doors for their kids. You might have seen that just last week, Brandon, Vidal, and Mrs. Lopez took a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit President Obama.

Amazing things become possible when we see each other.

Through Brandon’s lens, New York is a city transfigured. A city Not Forsaken; a city with walls of salvation, and gates of praise; a city ablaze with the Presence of God. No longer reduced to its dirt and crowdedness, poverty and crime. A place where human hopes dwell, a place where people love and dream and remember. A place where people can, sometimes, take the risk of seeing each other, and responding to each other, to the beauty of our shared humanity.

In the Gospel of the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John, and we with them,  witness the dazzling fulness of divine grace present in their friend Jesus, who usually just looks like an ordinary guy. And what about the rest of us ordinary folk? If a city can be transfigured into a haven of plenty and peace – if a man can be transfigured into a icon of God’s glory – can you or I be transfigured too? Do we, might we, shine with divine light, once in a while?

Paul thinks so. In today’s Epistle, in language so beautiful that it’s been woven into our Eucharistic preface for Epiphany, he writes, ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’

God shines in our hearts; and makes us shine with the light that comes from encountering the fulness of divine love made known to us in Christ Jesus. Elsewhere, in the letter to the Romans, Paul writes,  “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2) Our translators here have gone for the rhyme, conformed/transformed. But that word, transformed? It’s the same Greek verb as “transfigured,” in today’s Gospel. Be transfigured by the renewing of your mind.  

When our guest iconographer was with us last month, he talked about holy images in Eastern Christianity and traditions about how the faces are painted. They’re not painted as if there were a light over here, casting highlights and shadows. Instead, they shine gently with their own light. In the understanding of the iconographic tradition, holy people glow from within. Holy people glow from the inside. God shines in our hearts.

But it can be hard to see that light, to notice that glow, in each other, and maybe especially in ourselves. We need a mountaintop moment when the veil of ordinary sight is ripped away and we see clearly, for a moment, the staggering beauty of something so familiar, so humble. We need poets like the voice of Canticle 11 to cast a vision of what could be, if we scrubbed the streets and threw open the gates and lived into our wildest hopes. We need a new way of seeing, a fresh lens, like Brandon’s work with HONY, to help us notice that that stranger on a park bench, or a doorway, or the next office over has a story, and a heart, and a beauty all his own.

I think one of the holiest things we can do, as a church, as a community of faith, is to look at each other with those eyes. Witness to the light that shines from your neighbor’s face, and life; and name it, speak it. Because we often can’t see our own light.  Be the Humans of New York comments section for each other: offering affirmation and praise, hope and prayers, words of encouragement, offers of help.

And I think another of the holiest things we can do as a church, as a gathering of God’s people in this time and place, is to look at the world with those eyes. With eyes that see beauty and hope and possibility in the mess and struggle and ugliness around us. With eyes that see even in stranger the truth of our common humanity, the light of divine grace stirring in each soul. With eyes that are eager to see, that search passionately and persistently, for glints and sparks and divine twinkles that show us God’s transfiguring and transforming grace always already at work, waiting for us to notice, and catch up, and join in.

It’s the custom in the Episcopal Church, on Annual Meeting Sunday, for the Rector to present a little speech on where the church has been in the past year, and where she thinks it’s going. And it’s our custom at St. Dunstan’s, as at many churches, for that speech to be my sermon, so that you don’t have to listen to me give TWO fifteen-minute talks in one morning.

I could probably spend 15 minutes just talking about everything we’ve changed in 2014.  2014 was a year of a lot of transitions and new approaches. We hired our office coordinator Pamela in March, and she’s already become essential. We got new accounting and member database software, and then a new office computer that can run it all better. Anyone who’s been through software transitions can guess how many hours that’s taken! We upgraded our Internet service here at the church – a long-overdue transition. I spend a lot less time waiting for pages to load than I used to, and we can actually stream video, and show some of the infinite world of content – some of which is actually useful and relevant – on our awesome new TV & Roku setup in the Meeting Room. We found a new home for our elderly commercial dishwasher – you can visit it over at Sector 67 Makerspace, if you miss it – and we bought a new dishwasher which is used several times a week. We changed over most of the light bulbs in this building to LED technology, to reduce our energy use and, we hope, give us longer bulb life!

And then there’s all the new stuff we did in 2014. Our growth, numerical and spiritual, called for new spaces and opportunities to grow more and go deeper. We began to offer some kind of teaching or sharing time every Sunday at 9am. Our growing Sunday School now meets twice a month. We added a summer Vacation Bible School, which was wildly successful. And our Sandbox Worship began in the fall of 2013 but became a weekly gathering in March of 2014.

Many of you may not be aware of a lot of these changes. New lightbulbs, or the fact that your giving statement is generated by Quickbooks instead of ACS… who knew? But believe me when I tell you that all of these changes have taken a lot of time and energy, for your church staff and many volunteers, too. I’m looking forward to a year in which all these changes can settle out and become our new normal. But as much energy as they took, and as crazy as we maybe were to pack so many into one year, they were all necessary, for various reasons. We replaced things and models and arrangements that weren’t serving us well anymore – too old, too big, too expensive, too slow, too limited. We’re moving forward with greater flexibility, focus, and efficiency, better able to become whatever God has in mind for St. Dunstan’s in the 21st century.

I wish I could tell you that we’re done. That we’ve changed what we needed to change and upgraded what we needed to upgrade and begun what we needed to begin, and we’re good to go. But I can’t tell you that. We are living in a time of great change, for the world, for the church.  This is the decade in which the Episcopal Church, as a body, finally has to face and respond to the epochal changes in culture, faith, and economy that have transformed the face of American society and religion over the past half-century. That’s the urgency behind the work of the Task Force for Re-Imagining the Episcopal Church, or TREC. TREC was called into being by our last national church gathering, the General Convention in 2012. They recently released their final report, in preparation for this summer’s General Convention, at which I will serve as a deputy from our diocese.

The simplest way to explain their work is to quote a little from the report itself. (You can download the full report here.) 

“The members of the Task Force for Reimagining The Episcopal Church believe that the Holy Spirit is calling our Church to participate in God’s mission in a faithful and life-giving way in a changing world…. 

[We must learn how to form Christian community and practice Christian witness in environments where the culture no longer supports Christian identity, practice, and belonging as it once did.]

The Task Force spent two years in discussions with thousands of Episcopalians about their hopes, dreams, ideas, and concerns for the Church and about our collective mission to serve Christ. We also reviewed broad research on the identity and mission of The Episcopal Church in which thousands more participated. We studied how other churches and even non-religious organizations have innovated to pursue their missions in a changing world. We conferred, we listened and read, and we prayed. 

In this final report, we present our recommendations for changes in the Church’s structures, governance, and administration, to serve God’s mission in the world.” 

TREC urgently calls the attention of all Episcopalians to the fact that big, big changes have gone on outside the church, and that big, big changes are needed inside the church, for us to adapt and flourish in this new reality. We’re not talking about moving a service time from 7:30 to 8am, or rearranging the chairs, or updating the website, though all of those things may be good changes to make. We’re talking about rethinking what it means to be church. What it means to belong. What it means to follow. What it means to serve.

I find it both terrifying and comforting to be reminded that the changes we’re dealing with at St. Dunstan’s – different patterns of belonging and giving and participating, different things people are seeking in a faith community – that’s not just us. It’s the whole Episcopal Church – and more: it’s the Protestants and the Catholics and even the Evangelicals, friends. Everybody in the church as it has been is striving to get a handle on the church as it is becoming.

Which brings me back to the TREC report. Because a lot of what it contains are recommendations for General Convention to deal with: resolutions about how we elect bishops, for example. But early on in the report, they lay out a call to the Church as a whole, and to all its member parishes and people. A set of simple yet transformational practices that they believe were the heart of the Christian way since the days of Jesus, and that still have the power to renew us today:

Follow Jesus together into the neighborhood, and travel lightly. 

The TREC report uses a portion of Luke 10 as its keystone Scripture, and I’d love to study that Scripture with all of you sometime; your Vestry read and reflected on it together this week. But it’s not one of our readings today, and in the interests of having this be at least 30% sermon, I do want to pull in today’s Scriptures. Fortunately, they connect pretty well with the TREC practices. Follow Jesus together into the neighborhood, and travel lightly. Let’s take a look, piece by piece.

Follow Jesus together.

The TREC report says, “Christianity is an embodied way of life, not just an institution or set of ideas. The Episcopal Church has a distinct and rich heritage of interpreting and expressing the Way of Jesus, [how to live as Christians in the world.] The renewal of our Church will come only through discerning the shape of that Way and practicing it together in the power of the Spirit.”

Today’s Gospel from John brings us, quite simply, a story of following Jesus together. Jesus calls Philip. Philip knows Andrew and Peter, who have already begun to follow Jesus. Philip goes and calls his friend Nathanael, shares what he’s heard and seen from this new rabbi, and urges him to follow Jesus too. All of these young men are taking a risk – doing something new and strange and daring, leaving home, following this rabbi, questioning the status quo, risking trouble with both religious and political authorities.

But they’re doing it TOGETHER. With friends. When you’re starting something new, or hard, or new and hard, having friends beside you makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

Follow Jesus together. What might that look like for us here at St. Dunstan’s? I think it looks like deepening our bonds of friendship and mutual care. Spending time together. Having real conversations. Bearing one another’s burdens. Sharing in both weeping and laughter. Listening and responding to one another, in the language of our parish mission statement. Building up the “together”. And building up, too, our shared sense of what it means to follow Jesus. Exploring Christianity as an way of life. Talking and wondering and sharing and praying – together – about what lived faith looks like and feels like for us. When are we conscious of bringing our faith into our daily life? – or of needing our faith? I anticipate with hope some holy conversations in the months and years ahead, as we explore what living faith means for us, individually and together.

Follow Jesus together, into the neighborhood. 

The TREC report says, “Jesus sends us together into the places where ordinary life unfolds. We are sent to [share the good news of God’s Kingdom and share in God’s work] of peacemaking and healing…. For many churches now disconnected from neighbors, this will mean attempting small experiments in [listening and in] sharing God’s peace [with our neighbors].”

The word “neighbors” here is used with a literalism that challenges us: the people who live near your church. Most churches are fairly disengaged from their immediate neighbors and the issues and concerns of their neighborhoods. TREC challenges us to re-engage, to look, listen, and learn. To seek out where God may have work for us to do, or may already be at work among our neighbors, and to join in that work.

Looking outside our church walls can be overwhelming. There are SO many issues, and SO many needs. SO many voices telling us that we live in terrible times. Watching the news can make us feel that we, like Samuel, are living in a time when the word of the Lord is rare, and hopeful visions are few and far between. But don’t let the news mislead or overwhelm you. There are good things happening in the world, in the big picture and over the long term. There are many ways in which human life has substantively improved in the past century. Maybe the realization that God is still at work in the world can turn our despair to hope, our discouragement to courage.

Yes, there are many voices that clamor in our ears, about the needs and struggles of our neighbors, near and far. What young Samuel discovered is that sometimes the voice that wakes and calls and stirs you turns out to be the voice of God. In the months and years ahead, let’s ask God’s Holy Spirit to help us listen with discerning ears to the voices around us, to discover together where God is calling us into new or deeper engagement with the world around us.

Follow Jesus together, into the neighborhood, and travel lightly. 

Travel lightly. 

Jesus, in sending out his disciples to preach and heal, told them to carry no bag or purse, not even an extra pair of shoes. The TREC report says, “Jesus sends us out empty-handed so that we might rely upon God’s abundance, which sometimes comes to us through the hospitality of our neighbors. We must hold [our inherited institutions and practices] loosely as we make space for alternative patterns of organizing our life together. We must discern what of our traditions is life-giving and what unduly weighs us down. Traveling lightly means going in vulnerability, risking being changed by God and our neighbors.”

Traveling lightly is very much what Paul is talking about in this portion of the first letter to the church in Corinth. Paul is writing this letter in a time when he expects Jesus’ return, and the end of the world as we know it, pretty much any day now.

A few verses earlier he used the phrase, “In view of the impending crisis…” In Paul’s later letters he begins to shift gears, to offer teachings on how to live as followers of Christ for the long haul. But there’s a theme here that carries on in Paul’s letters and in Christian thought over the millennia – what the Buddhists call non-attachment. “Let those who buy be as though they had no possessions, and let those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.” Paul says, if you’re invested in the way things are, you’re less ready for the way things are becoming, less open to the unknown future that is even now taking shape in the present.

I don’t think “traveling light” for us, in the here and now, means ignoring our spouses or burying our emotions. But the Episcopal Church as a whole is undertaking the needful work of discerning how to “travel lightly” into the 21st century, changing or laying to rest practices and structures and patterns that weigh us down or hold us back. And we can ask those same questions in our parishes. No sacred cows; everything on the table. If there’s anything we do just because we’ve always done it, anything we have just because we have it, it’s worth taking a thoughtful and prayerful look at it together, and asking ourselves:

Is this blessing us, or our neighbors? Is it life-giving, energizing, joyful?  Could it be? Can we make it so? Can we name why it matters to us, and are those Gospel reasons or human reasons? Does concern with protecting or preserving it

make us fearful, or reluctant to follow a new call? Is it something that attracts and engages new members, or creates stumbling blocks and closes doors? Is there anything that needs to die, that we are called to name, and grieve, and lay to rest? Is there anything that wants to be born, that we are called to draw forth, and baptize, and nurture? If we spend a year or eighteen months asking those questions about everything, I absolutely believe we’d have a lot less baggage to carry forward and a lot more energy and enthusiasm for the journey.

Follow Jesus together, into the neighborhood, and travel lightly. 

The TREC report says, “We believe that, rather than an anxious focus on how to preserve our institution, a joyful focus on these basic practices [of Christianity as a] movement will hold the real key for moving us into God’s future.”

We are in a good place, St. Dunstan’s. We have such a concentration of good, loving, committed, smart, brave, curious, generous, interesting, amazing people here. I am so blessed to be your priest; I am so excited by what God is doing among us and with us.  We have our feet on solid ground financially, for the moment; we have the blessing of young and old  caring for each other and living our faith together; we have strong and joyful worship at the heart of our common life. This is a wonderful year to say, Where do we go from here? What do we become? To say, with Samuel, Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening! To hear, with Nathanael, the words of Jesus: You will see greater things than these! 

Seeking the way of Jesus, together – hearing God’s call in the many voices around us, and following it into deeper engagement with our neighbors – holding lightly the way things have been, in confidence that there is hope in the way things are becoming … let us follow Jesus together, into the neighborhood, and travel lightly.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, stay with us, as we walk in new paths; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen.

On the second and third Sundays in Advent, our lectionary, or cycle of Bible readings, always gives us a good dose of John the Baptist. John appears in all four of our Gospels, proclaiming Jesus’ mission and baptizing Jesus at the beginning of his years of ministry and teaching, as told in those books. Matthew and Luke both begin their gospels with stories about Jesus’ parents and birth; Mark and John both begin with John the Baptist, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord.

It’s interesting to pause and reflect why our Advent lessons give us so much of John the Baptist.Two Sundays out of four, every Advent! I, personally, always resist it a little. I’d rather be in those first chapters of Matthew and Luke, working our way towards the stable, the star, the holy birth. I think the lectionary brings us John and his words because of the traditional understanding of Advent as a penitential season – a season to prepare our hearts and lives for God’s coming. The collect for the second Sunday of Advent says in part, “Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.” John stands in that lineage of Old Testament prophets, and with his predecessors, calls us across the ages to renewal of life.

I think, too, that we get so much John in the lectionary to help us avoid the temptation

of a sentimental over-focus on the sweet baby in the manger. The beauty and wonder of the Nativity story draws our eyes and our hearts. John the Baptist says to us, ‘Yes, yes, cute baby, great story; but do you realize who that child is going to grow up to be? The strange, beautiful, challenging truths he’s going to speak? Are you ready to face his violent death; are you ready to see him rise from the grave; are you ready to follow where he may lead you? The baby is only the beginning.’

But John has his own birth story, in the Gospel of Luke. You can read it here; it’s a wonderful story! 

Luke, perhaps the most literary of the four Gospel writers, knows the Old Testament very well. His story of John’s conception and birth – recorded only in his gospel – may be based on stories and memories that were passed on to him, and became part of his “orderly account.”  Luke’s story of John’s birth is quite *clearly* based, in part, on stories of wondrous births from the Hebrew Scriptures: Abraham and Sarah bearing a son in old age; Manoah questioning the angel; Hannah’s prayers and her triumphant song. Luke skillfully weaves together the themes and poetry of those older holy stories, and creates something new, and delightful.

In looking at the story of John this year, in its fulness – from Zechariah in the sanctuary

to his death in Herod’s prison – something dawned on me that I’d never considered before. John… is a PK. A PK – a preacher’s kid, or priest’s kid.

I don’t know how widespread the PK stereotypes are, but I certainly grew up with them.

Here’s the basic gist: PKs tend to be overly serious, and precociously churchy, as children. They’re at church all the time, because their mom or dad is at church all the time. And as kids they actually like it: acolyting, reading, helping out in the sacristy, all that stuff. As teens and young adults, they either stick with that, become youth group leaders, go to seminary right out of college, that sort of thing. OR they go the other direction, throw off their straightlaced youth and get as far away from church as possible; and undertake any number of lifestyle experiments, sometimes reckless, even self-destructive.

I love realizing that John the Baptist was a PK because it fits. It fits so well. Imagine little John shadowing his daddy Zechariah as he performed his duties as a priest. Helping with the incense, the oil, the bread, learning the prayers and gestures, memorizing the Scriptures and the songs. Maybe he even snuck into the sanctuary, the holy of holies, once or twice; surely, surely he peeped in, driven by a child’s curiosity and a PK’s piety. I bet he was one of those kids who played “temple” at home,with sticks and stones and simple clay figures. He grew up steeped in the language and symbols, the formalized holiness, of the Great Temple, the heart of first-century Judaism. John could have become a priest himself. He came from a priestly family. I’m sure he had the skills, and he clearly had a heart that was open to God.

But… John swung the other way. He rejected the Temple, the symbol and center of his parents’ and his people’s faith. Perhaps, as Jesus did, he saw that the faith of the Temple wasn’t moving hearts from despair to hope, wasn’t moving the world from oppression to justice.

And John didn’t just, you know, quit going to church and become a carpenter or an accountant or something.  He set himself up as a prophet of a different kind of faith. He drew upon the Hebrew Scriptures, which he no doubt knew backwards and forwards, and he cast himself as a latter-day prophet. Living in the wilderness, wearing rags and animal hides, eating whatever he could find, thoroughly rejecting his parents’ middle-class respectability and establishment piety. John preached faith without a temple,

without costly offerings of livestock or a priest to pronounce purity. He said: Change your heart. Change your life. Be fair and just and kind. That’s harder than it sounds, but DO IT.  Let your life bear witness that your heart has been transformed. Then you’ll be ready for what God is about to do. You don’t need a huge ornate building; you don’t need priests in fancy clothes; you don’t need particular prayers or songs or gestures. You just need to look unflinchingly at your own daily life, hold it up against God’s call to live with justice and compassion, and do what you need to do.

All of that, I think, makes John an interesting icon for the Episcopal Church in the 21st century. We are a church of formal worship, not entirely unlike the great Temple. We have our songs and prayers, incense and holy vessels and priests in fancy robes, and oh, do we have our traditions. We have been steeped in the rituals of holiness; we have experienced the ancient grace of those patterns and ways of worship. I hope we won’t walk away from them; I believe they have power and purpose.

And yet: the wilderness of our times, the yearnings and struggles of our society, call us, I think, to be like John: grounded in those traditions, but ready, eager, hungry for something new, for the breaking-in of holiness in our time and place.

Can we find inspiration in John the Baptist, the Wild Man, the Prophet? Are we willing to leave the temple to walk the wilderness, sustaining ourselves however we can, while we seek God’s word and God’s call?  Are we open to a faith that goes deeper than words and gestures, that sinks into hearts, touches lives, and fuels the transformation of the world?

Come, Lord Jesus!