| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost This week I have been forcibly struck by the terrible intrusion of chaos and violence into the lives of people who just want to quietly live their lives as close to God as they can. I am speaking, of course, of the profoundly disturbed man who invaded an Amish community school and killed 5 young girls and wounded 5 others. The subsequent media invasion of the lives of these people has been also painful. Clearly it makes great copy and grist for the talking heads to chew on Fox News and CNN. One of my favorite personal prayers at the end of worship is "O God grant that what we have said with our lips we may believe in our hearts and practice and show forth in our lives." Say — Believe — Practice The Amish do practice what they believe and say. And one of their practices that comes out of belief and prayer is forgiveness. So on the days following the death of the 5 little Amish girls, the Amish community, including members of the family of one of the murdered children, took food and forgiveness and shared grief to the family of the man who had done this. His family also was in shock and terrible grief and pain. The Amish people were doing what they say they believe. I have spent a lot of my life as a priest sharing the pain of bad news with people who are in shock, sharing the grief, sharing the pain. But I have also listened to many people who have survived something they thought might kill them, cancer, heart attacks, major surgery, car wrecks, fires, assaults…. Almost always they speak first of a sense of wonder over being alive and secondly a sense of "wondering" what they were supposed to do about it-a feeling of need to change, to be more aware, to practice what they believed and said. I felt this way myself after my heart surgery. What was I going to do to change my life, to live my life in concert with my beliefs and my words? lips — hearts — lives. I remember many years ago now a friend who told me after his son's murder that he was trying to make a conscious decision to not live his life out of anger. He knew with some spiritual presence that even lost in pain, anger would kill him and his family inwardly if he let it. Our Stewardship theme this year of Our Lord 2006 is the response of the congregation to the priest when he or she holds up and breaks the "Priest Host", the large wafer symbolizing the Body of Christ broken for us. The priest often says or sings the words, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us" and then the people respond "Therefore let us keep the feast." Well, what does keeping the feast mean? The words of priest and people come from an ancient Christian Canticle or song called the Pascha Nostrum in Latin which means "Our Passover". For most Christians the idea of observing a Passover is thought of exclusively Jewish. But the words come from Paul's letter written to the Corinthians about 25 years after Jesus' crucifixion and St. Paul and most of the early Christians were, of course, Jewish. They thought in terms of a God who had acted on their behalf in the past and who was still acting to give them a new life and freedom from bondage of body, mind, or spirit. The Pascha Nostrum is on page 83 in our prayer book. It is used in Morning Prayer during the Easter season as the initial song at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, and lastly it is sometimes sung as a body is borne from the church at a burial. It is made up of three anthems taken from the words of St. Paul. The first part speaks of the death and resurrection of Jesus as a "Christian Passover". Unleavened bread was a symbol to Jews of a new beginning and a reminder of deliverance from bondage. St. Paul speaks of the old leavened bread of malice as the way people thought and acted before they were saved. The second anthem is from Paul's letter to the Romans when he applies the idea of this new life as coming after death, the death of the old, making way for the new in baptism, dying to the old ways of thinking and acting. The third anthem is again taken from Corinthians and Paul is saying that what humankind lost when Adam broke his relationship of trust with God has been regained by Jesus and can be regained by each of us. We are all promising to "keep the feast" of God, to be willing to be changed. The poet W. H. Auden said of humankind that mostly we would "rather be ruined than changed." We would rather wallow in a life we are sick of but used to than take a chance on changing. But we must not be such people. Why? Because our lives have been bought at a price. And that price was paid because of love, so that we might have a chance at a greater life. How many of us have been willing to sacrifice so that our children or friends will have a better life. If we know how to do this, then how much more does God wish the same? "Keeping the feast" is a way of practicing what you believe and say. We, symbolically, are reminded of this every time we make our Anglican Altar call and get up out of our pews and come to the altar to share the Eucharist. We keep this symbolic feast within our liturgy as a symbol of keeping the greater feast which involves all the rest of our lives outside this place. This Sunday, we begin to move toward our All Saints' Sunday service on November 5th. On that day we will combine a celebration of the lives of all those who have died in relationship with God and the bringing of our own gifts to lay before the altar here. Our gifts are the commitments of our life. Our lives are symbolized by our actions as changed people, people who are aware that they have been saved for a purpose, that they have been "passed over" by the angel of death and given a new life — every day. "v On November 5th we will make the commitment of our lives tangible with the gifts of precious time that God has given us to make a difference by our talents given to each, so wonderfully diverse and made holy in the giving and by our treasure, the money we make to use for God's gift of living. We call this act of commitment an "Ingathering" which is language taken from the old idea of a communal harvest where people had to work together to bring in the grain that would keep everyone alive another year. We also use the ubiquitous word "stewardship" to describe the process of keeping the commitment we have made to living a new life; not with the old leaven of malice; not being men and women sleep walking through life, looking alive but being dead to God and to our neighbors; not being people doomed to endlessly repeating the broken patterns of the old lives we inherited from the past, to endlessly playing only the cards we have been dealt as if God were a crooked casino owner. How does anyone find the spiritual strength to begin again? To not succumb to living our of anger? To giving forgiveness to the wife and children of your daughter's murdered? How? Because our lives have been bought at a price. We here today, of all people, ought to understand this. We have been passed over by the angel of death. We have been given a new life, a second chance, a contract extension. It's all stewardship! Change is in the air? What are we going to do? Amen The Reverend James T. Tucker October 8, 2006 *Past sermons may be found here. |
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