Family, History, Jesus, and the Church

(A sermon preached on at Christ Episcopal Church, Albertville, Alabama on August 5, 2012) 

Family, History, Jesus, and the Church 

What a wonderful weekend of family, friends and history.  First, allow me to explain how I came to be in Albertville this weekend in the first place. The story began several months ago in Wetumpka when my friend, Peggy Blackburn, managing Editor of our newspaper, the Wetumpka Herald, knowing that I often come up to visit my mother, asked if I would officiate at her daughter’s wedding on August 4 in Guntersville.  I readily agreed and not long afterwards, Father David Kendrick asked me if I could supply here because he and Laura were going to Washington D.C. for their son John’s wedding. Again I agreed.  And just over a month ago my brother Pat told me about the Main Street Music Festival and the program of Sand Mountain music history that was to take place this weekend.  Jim Connor (who wrote Grandma’s Feather Bed) and is one of Sand Mountain’s most famous musicians,  along with my friend Gary Pledger were to tell the “family” history of music on Sand Mountain.  Add to that my regular visits with my almost 90 year old mother, Eunice, and there really was no other place I wanted to be or could be this weekend. 

This convergence of family and friends and history reminds me of the convergence of family, friends and history which I found in this week’s opening collect (prayer) and this week’s lectionary readings from Exodus and Ephesians.  When my life experience and the scriptures come together like this it both excites me and scares me to death.  I sit up and listen because I am pretty sure God is about to communicate something I need to hear. 

I continue by rereading a portion of today’s opening collect: 

“Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. . . .” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 232) 

Keep this prayer in mind as we journey together as the family of God and the body of Christ, the Church.  We read in Exodus 16 that “the whole congregation of Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.  The Israelites said to them, if only we had died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt, but you have brought us here to die in the wilderness.  Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘say to the people, draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining. . . .Then the Lord said to Moses, tell the people that I shall feed them and they shall kno that I am the Lord their God.” 

Apparently God’s people have complained from the beginning of time.  They have misunderstood God, they have disagreed with God’s plans and with their fellow human beings.  God’s people have not liked God’s plan, they have not liked change, they have not liked the unknown and have very often not liked the ideas of their fellow travelers. 

Let’s move forward another 1200 years in our “family” history and see what “the prisoner of the Lord” has to say in his letter to the church in Ephesus, another congregation that has also fallen into disagreements, perhaps misunderstood Paul’s teachings and maybe even understood God’s calling but did not like what they heard. 

“I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you were called, with all humility and gentleness and patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain  the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1-16) 

As I read these words I felt in my soul that this is the key, this is the Gospel God sent Jesus into the world to call us into.  That it is through this lens that we are called to see and be the church in the world.   

As I looked at our beloved church and world through this lens and reflected on Bishop Sloan’s report from General Convention and his statement that the discussions there about important issues of human sexuality and relationships were both difficult and respectful.  The same, he said was true for the many other issues brought before convention from open communion to re-organization of the Episcopal Church.  I also read and reflected on the responses to our Bishop’s remarks and they too were respectful, whether they agreed or disagreed with the bishop’s decision to vote for a liturgy for the blessings of same sex relationships or agreed or disagreed with his decision not to implement the liturgy in our diocese. 

Whether we agree or disagree with Bishop Sloan is not the point.  The point is that “we treat one another with all humility, gentleness’ and patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. WOW! 

Paul continues in this passage from Ephesians: ‘for there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.”  But we as God’s people are not and should not be one in ideas, beliefs or talents. . . . “For each of us is given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.  The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.”

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord and we are given gifts, not to tear down the body, but to build up the body.  We are joined together in baptism with the Lord and with each other and as I tell people at baptisms, we are “stuck with each other and we do not have the luxarary to tear ourselves lose from one another.  Are baptism does not require us to agree with one another on everything, not even theology or the bible, but according to St. Paul it does call us to treat one another with “all humility, gentleness, patience bearing with one another in love, making every effort two maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  In a few minutes we will all come to the altar to receive the very body and blood of Christ, the very presence of Christ which joins us together with one another and with God.  When we stand or kneel together, quite likely beside someone with whom we disagree, we are the church, in all of our humanness and messiness.  And we see each other as who we are, children of God.  I believe this is God’s Call to us in our faith, in our politics, in our families and in the world.

Let us pray: “Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your church, and because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness. Amen.