Jesus said to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.  (John 20:29-31)

Today’s Gospel text comes from the Gospel according to John. John is the longest and latest-written of the four Gospels, and arguably the most complicated  in terms of material, authorship, and dating… and I freely admit it’s the gospel that I’m least comfortable with.  It differs in many ways from the other three Gospels, the books of the Bible that tell the events of Jesus’ earthly life. John’s Gospel covers some of the same terrain, the author was clearly familiar with the other gospels. But he also introduces other characters, and tells of other events, not included in Mark, Matthew, or Luke.

The author of John’s Gospel uses language in distinctive ways, rich, strange, symbolic, philosophical, sometimes paradoxical. The introduction to the Gospel of John in my trusty Harper-Collins study bible notes that in John’s Gospel, “instead of speaking in parables and short sayings [as he does in the other gospels], Jesus speaks in long, difficult monologues about himself, his relation to God, and the need to believe in him.”  The lectionary will bring us some of those speeches later in the Easter season.

John’s Gospel is also notable for having the strongest sense of hostility between Jesus and the Jews, perhaps because it was written in a context in which the Christian and Jewish communities were in the process of splitting apart, painfully and acrimoniously.

John’s Gospel has a strong strain of dualism – drawing stark distinctions between spirit/flesh, light/dark, heaven/earth, above/below, of this world and not of this world. That’s one of the aspects of John’s Gospel that I struggle with, since my sense of the teaching and mission of Jesus has a lot to do with transcending those dualisms, reconciling heaven and earth, insiders and outsiders, spirit and flesh.

I know some of you visited the St John’s Bible, the contemporary hand-written and illuminated Bible project, while it was on exhibit at the Chazen earlier this year. The main image for the Gospel of John is a striking one: a figure all in gold stands against a dark, murky background. It’s hard to make out any details of the figure, to resolve it into clarity – partly because the outlines of the figure are roughly-scrawled, not precise; and partly because the figure is gilded with real gold, which, under the lights of the gallery, makes it almost dazzlingly bright. In that combination of brilliance and obscurity, the artist has really captured something of the character of the Gospel according to John.

Why does the gospel bear the name of John? Throughout the gospel, it refers often to “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This nameless character pretty clearly fills the space occupied in the other Gospels by John, son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ closest friends. Long tradition assumes that the special language used for that disciple in this Gospel, means that he was also its author – or perhaps that the book was composed from traditions about Jesus that were passed on by John to the early Christian community that crafted the Gospel.

To be honest, this is another aspect of John’s Gospel that I struggle with a bit: this sense of there having been a BEST disciple. Here’s an example I noticed during Holy Week: in Mark’s Gospel, the earliest gospel, Peter is the only disciple who follows Jesus after his arrest; he follows him all the way to the High Priest’s courtyard – you know the story.

Here’s John’s version: “Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard;…  Peter was standing outside at the gate, so the other disciple spoke to the woman who was guarding the gate, and brought Peter in.” In other words, according to John, Peter only gets into that courtyard because John knows some people. Moments like this can make the voice of John’s Gospel come across as pretentious rather than profound, like that guy at the graduate student party who throws around a lot of big words to make sure you realize how brilliant and special he is.

But even though I struggle with John’s Gospel, I don’t dismiss it, and I don’t want to suggest that you should. The lectionary always brings us a lot of John’s Gospel in Easter season – because John has such a keen sense of Jesus’ divinity and cosmic nature. Remember how John’s Gospel starts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” John has the strongest sense, of the four Gospels, of Jesus as a divine personage or being who existed before and exists beyond the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth.  And the many theological discourses in John provide rich material for reflection about who Jesus was and is, what his life and ministry mean, and what God is doing in and through Jesus, for the world. So in the season when we celebrate the risen Christ, we receive John’s words to help us see Jesus not just as a wise teacher, a compassionate miracle-worker, a courageous advocate, but as God incarnate, the eternal Word become flesh.

Today’s Gospel passage always comes to us on the second Sunday after Easter… which means it’s one of those passages that the preacher has to find something fresh to say about, year in, year out, for two or three or four decades.  There are several reasons this Gospel story always follows on the heels of the Resurrection. First and maybe most familiar, this text includes what is generally know as the “doubting Thomas” story. Widely preached as a reminder to us not be doubtful, like that skeptical jerk Thomas. I have some issues with that interpretation, but that’s not this year’s sermon.

A second reason this text is important for the church is that this is John’s account of the bestowing of the Holy Spirit, the gift of God’s spirit to the disciples and the Church – his equivalent of the Pentecost story. Six chapters earlier, in John 14, in what’s known as the Farewell Discourse, Jesus’ long final speech to his disciples, Jesus told them that God would give them the Spirit:  “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” And here in John 20, Jesus himself gives the gift of that Spirit, breathing on and into the disciples.

That verb, “breathing on”, turns out to be pretty interesting. The author of John’s Gospel, who wrote in Greek, would have known the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint. In the Septuagint, that somewhat unusual verb is used a couple of places – in Genesis 2, when God breathes the breath of life

into the first human being, and in Ezekiel 37, the story of the Valley of the Dry Bones, as God instructs the prophet to call the breath of life into the dead bodies scattered before him: “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live” (Ezekiel 37:9). I’m sure the author of the Gospel of John  was intentionally evoking those scriptures in using that verb here; so when you visualize Jesus breathing on the disciples, it’s not just a little *huh*. This is power and purpose. This is the breath of life, a divine wind, a gust of holiness, filling their lungs and giving new life to their weary and fearful spirits.

The third reason this scripture comes to us every year, I think, is that this scripture addresses us. Listen again to John 20:31 – “These things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The “you” in that sentence is YOU. And me. John is speaking to all the Christians in other times and places who are removed, in geography and time, from the immediacy of the first community of believers and their first-hand knowledge of Jesus. In a sense, this verse boils down the whole purpose of John’s Gospel:  to encourage readers and hearers to believe and trust in Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God. The authors of the other gospels, known to us as Mark, Matthew, and Luke, are conscious of those who will come after; that’s why they’re writing gospels.But in these verses,  John is the most direct about it. He does what’s sometimes known as breaking the fourth wall.

The fourth wall is an idea from theater. Visualize it: the setup of the stage has three walls, the back and sides, and the audience is positioned as if we were looking through an invisible fourth wall. We watch through that fourth wall, seeing everything, moreso even than the characters in the story, but separate, outside the story, looking on. The fourth wall is the invisible barrier that forever separates the audience from the stage, or, making the jump to literature, that separates the reader from the narrative. And most of the time it stays intact: we watch or listen or read, and the story maintains its integrity and separateness, until the curtain comes down or we close the book and walk away.

But sometimes, the fourth wall is intentionally broken. The actors or the author address us, the viewers or readers. They speak from the stage or the page or into the camera, cross the invisible boundary that separates us, and involve us in the story. It’s a move that brings into the open what has previously been understood but unstated: that the text – be it story, play, or film – is an object that will be circulated, performed, read, viewed; and that there are readers and viewers out there, who are receiving and responding to the text.

One famous example familiar to many comes from J. M. Barrie’s story, Peter Pan. In both the book and the play, there’s a moment when Tinkerbell, Peter’s fairy friend, is dying after having drunk poison; and all the children of the world are asked – called – to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, in order to save Tinkerbell. Peter addresses all the children who might be dreaming of Neverland, and shouts to them: “If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die!” It’s a sweet moment – and if you’ve had the blessing of reading this story to a child young enough to respond to Peter’s call, you’ve seen the intensity in their face, the conviction in their eyes, as they clap fervently for Tink’s life.

At the risk of likening the Gospel to a fairy story, John’s move here is not entirely different. He’s inviting, even challenging, his readers to respond, and not just to respond, but to believe. He’s saying, I can’t give you an encounter with the risen Christ; but I can give you the testimony of those who knew him, who loved him and followed him and came to see him as Master, Messiah, Lord and God.

Here as he approaches the end of his gospel, his account of the life and significance of Jesus of Nazareth, John breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera, and says: This story is about you too, and it’s for you, too. Its challenges and puzzles, they’re yours as much as ours. Its promise, its hope: they’re yours too. Read, and let the story enter you, like that breath of life; wonder, and pray, and believe: so that you may join us, across time and space, in the fellowship of those who follow and trust in Jesus Christ, and so that you, too, may receive the fulness of life in God.

And that’s why, ultimately, I don’t really see John as the pretentious jerk at the campus party. Yeah, he uses a lot of big words, and he seems to think he’s got hold of something that nobody else really understands. But I think he wants us to understand.

Because after he’s been holding forth for an hour, there’s this moment when he actually looks at you, really looks at you,  and says, Listen, this thing I’m talking about: it’s just been really life-transforming. It means everything to me. It’s given me purpose and hope and joy, even when things are really hard. And I just want to share it.  I’d like you have it too.

So, this first Sunday after Easter, let’s meet John’s eyes, take his hand. Bust through that invisible wall, and share, across two thousand years, the wonder and struggle and joy of the life of faith.

Today we have heard the Gospel of the Resurrection according to Mark (Mark 16:1-8). Mark, the earliest Gospel, doesn’t tell of encounters between the risen Jesus and his friends; we never see the resurrected Christ, in Mark’s account. Mark knew about those encounters; he believed in a resurrected Jesus; but he made a literary choice to end his Gospel like this: with the bold, joyous proclamation of the angel, and with the uncertainty, confusion, and fear of those charged with the good news.

I think Mark’s Gospel is particularly apt for talking about the Resurrection. Because for a lot of folks, the idea of somebody literally coming back to life, after being dead – and dead for several days, mind you, not just coding on the operating table in a medical drama – that idea, in our modern, rational, post-Christian world, is frequently met with an uncomfortable silence and retreat – conversational, if not literal.

Resurrection is the church’s fancy word for rising from the dead – both the great single event of Jesus’ return, and the life beyond death that we believe awaits all God’s children, however you draw that circle. (Our church tends to draw it pretty widely.)

And resurrection is hard to talk about, hard to preach about. It’s Easter Sunday, after all – many of you are here as guests, visitors, seekers. Some of you may have drifted away from church and just don’t know whether you can swallow all this stuff anymore. Some of you have never really been part of a church, and wonder what it’s all about, what we’re all about. Resurrection is not the easiest place to start. But it’s Easter Sunday, after all – resurrection is kind of the main idea here. So.

What are we talking about when we talk about resurrection? Well, there’s the most literal meaning: rising again from the dead. Scripture and tradition teach us that Jesus, raised from death by the power of God, has defeated death, once and for all. In the language of our Easter Troparion, which we’ll sing later, Jesus “tramples down death by death.” The famous verse John 3:16, which was our Gospel a few weeks ago, says that God sent God’s son into the world so that those who trust in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. And today’s lesson from the prophet Isaiah, an Old Testament text which the Church reads in light of the life of Jesus, says, “God will destroy … the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; God will swallow up death forever.”

Of course people still die, in their earthly bodies. The Bible’s authors knew that just as well as we do. But Jesus talked a lot about eternal life, a new life in God beyond our earthly existence. So it became the conviction and teaching of the church that physical death is not an absolute ending, but leads into another kind of life. The resurrection of Jesus opens the door to the resurrection of everybody.

In 1 Corinthians 15, in the verses following today’s Epistle, Paul writes about the centrality of the Resurrection for Christians: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised,… then your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.”

Here’s the thing: it’s easy for us modern, rational, post-Christian Christians to think think that people 2000 years ago were superstitious and naive and didn’t really understand death as we do, so it was easier for them to believe that somebody would come back from death. Not true; if anything, they were probably more in touch with the realities of death than we are, in our world where death is handled by trained professionals, behind closed doors.

People knew perfectly well, in the first century, that people die and their bodies decay. Remember the story in John’s Gospel of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead? They warned Jesus, “Lord, it’s been three days; when you open the tomb, it is going to smell.”

Death was no mystery to the early Christians. They had to reconcile belief in eternal life beyond the grave with the obvious truth of bodily decay. Searching for an image to help us come to grips with the paradox, Paul offers the everyday magic of a seed sown in the earth giving rise to a plant:  “So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. Listen, I will tell you a mystery!  We will not all die, but we will all be changed… For … this mortal body must put on immortality.”

Paul’s poetic reflection on the mystery of resurrection is echoed in the Eucharistic prayer we use at funerals: “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended….” With two thousand years of theology and science at my back, I don’t feel that I can really do any better than Paul at putting words to strange and elusive hope of the resurrection of the dead.  The belief that those who have left this life and this world live on, in and with God, is not amenable to proof or explanation. It’s one of the things we take on faith, no more and no less than the church did in Paul’s time.

So that’s one of the things we’re talking about when we talk about resurrection: Death still happens, but Jesus’ rising from death means that death doesn’t have the same grip, the same claim on us, that it had before. That we don’t have to fear death, trusting that those we love, and we ourselves, will have everlasting life in God.

But that’s only part of what it means to be people of the resurrection. Indeed, we are missing out on a good deal of what our faith offers us, and asks of us, if we think of resurrection as an idea that only comes into play in the face of death.

What about resurrection in the face of life?  As a daily orientation, a way of being? A few verses farther along in that same chapter, the apostle Paul writes, “I die every day!” There are so many areas of our hearts, our lives, our world, in need of transformation. Renewal. Resurrection.

A few weeks ago, I dug into the meaning of another of those words we use in church and don’t examine nearly often enough: salvation. I looked at the Greek verb behind that English word, sozo – and all the ways it’s used in the New Testament.

Sozo can mean to save from a dangerous situation. To heal. To make well. To restore. To deliver from an ordeal. To rescue. To free. To keep, preserve, or protect.  And it’s used in situations ranging from real-world illness, danger, or bondage, to the metaphorical and spiritual conditions that mirror those outward realities.

What the centrality of that word and concept in our Christian scriptures says, to me, is that this is God’s intention, God’s desire, God’s purpose for each and all,

in individual lives and human history. Sozo: what God does, stirring mysteriously in human hearts; acting in the spaces left by our freedom, our wills, our choices; subtly bending history’s long arc. To free, to heal, to make well, rescue, deliver. To save.

The word Sozo was on my mind again this week as I reflected on resurrection.

Resurrection faith is much more than simply believing that Jesus rose from death, or even that we will rise from death. It’s believing and trusting that this is the kind of God, God is: the kind of God who acts, sometimes invisibly, sometimes dramatically, to bring wholeness from brokenness, freedom from bondage, life from death.

The tenth-century theologian Symeon wrote that when Jesus becomes fully alive in us, “everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in His light.” That’s resurrection faith. (Read the whole poem here.)

The 20th-century theologian and leader Martin Luther King, Jr.,  wrote, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” That’s resurrection faith.

And living as people of resurrection faith means seeking resurrection in this world, this life. Expecting renewal, reconciliation, restoration. And more than seeking and expecting: colluding with it. Becoming a co-conspirator with God in the ongoing always-and-everywhere work of transforming the world towards hope and healing, justice and mercy, love and delight. That’s what church is all about, what we’re all about. Bearing witness to resurrection. Being agents of transformation.

In a few moments, we will renew our baptismal covenant, affirming again the promises that are made every time a child or adult is baptized in an Episcopal church. We renew our baptismal intentions at Easter because one of the ancient meanings of the baptismal rite is passing through death into new life in Christ. And also because this day, Easter Day, is a wonderful time to re-commit to the practices that sustain and strengthen us as people of resurrection. People who seek and strive and hope for new life, not only in the next world, but in this one, here and now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.

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.