The Moment You Have Been Waiting For

Ministry and Evangelism

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 29, 2009

Text: John 12:20-33

You have just heard what has to be one of the most confusing passages in all the New Testament. On days like this I sometimes think we should change the response to the gospel reading to something like, “Praise to you, Lord Christ, we think.”

Some Greeks are attending the Passover in Jerusalem. It is clear that they are not just Greek-speaking Jews but are in fact Gentiles, most likely converts to Judaism. They ask Philip, who happens to have a Greek name and to come from a generally Greek-speaking area of Galilee, to speak with Jesus. For whatever reason, Philip goes to Andrew, the other disciple with a Greek name. Andrew then does what he is frequently pictured in the gospel narratives as doing: he brings people to Jesus, along with Philip with whom he frequently works as a team.

The careful reader of John’s gospel will have noticed that for the last several chapters, Jesus has been saying things that suggest a universal appeal of the Good News. He has sheep other than the fold of Israel who will hear his voice and come to him, so that there will be one flock, one shepherd, for instance. The arrival of the Greeks, who come looking for him, marks a climactic moment. Their very coming is so important that the gospel writer leaves them standing there as he delves into the meaning of their arrival. Like Nicodemus in Chapter 3, the Greeks are left to drift off the pages of the gospel without the benefit of a conclusion to the narrative that brings them there.

The other gospels deal with the arrival of the gentiles in different ways. Matthew tells the story of the Magi, thus presenting the gentiles as having been among the first beyond the holy family itself to recognize the true identity of Jesus. Mark tells his story in such a way as to reveal the gradual dawning upon Jesus himself of the mission to the gentiles, presenting as a climactic moment the appearance of a Syrophonœcian woman (another Greek-speaking gentile) who seems to have caused a kind of epiphany for Jesus, not just an epiphany of Jesus. Luke writes the most gentile-directed gospel of all, and overtly places the notion of a gentile mission in the birth narratives by having the aged Simeon at his presentation in the temple refer to him as “a light to enlighten the gentiles.” So this is the way John handles the idea, by telling an account of how, in his narrative, the first gentiles come to Jesus.

The point is that what distinguishes Jesus’ ministry more than any other single thing is that it blasts open the wall that separates Israel from the rest of the world, and brings to the table of Abraham all those who were formerly left out. And, speaking of Abraham, this very notion is embedded in the Covenant with Abraham, where the promise of God is to furnish descendants of Abraham as numerous as the sand on the seashore or the stars in the heavens. Isaiah picks up the theme by saying that the vocation of Israel is to be a light to the nations. Jesus fulfills these hopes and promises by willingly laying down his life by being lifted up on the cross so that he might draw the whole world to himself.

You may recall that I have bargained with you to look at Sundays’ scriptures through the lens of ministry. What does this passage have to do with ministry? What light does it shed on what you and I do as disciples of Jesus? In large part, the way we answer that will depend on how we read the story. Is the story, for example, about how we have been included? Perhaps. But consider another narrative. I once lived in an idyllic New England town. Its very name—“Newtown”—suggested an imaginary place that existed a bit outside the everyday world. It was not uncommon, I found when I moved there, for the topic of party conversations to be, “Don’t you just love Newtown?” People would frequently swap stories about how they were glad to have moved to Newtown, how much they liked—no, loved—it. But some of us noticed that there was an element in the “I love Newtown” story that went like this: “Now that I am here, I want to make sure that I am among the last to come here. Let’s do everything we can to keep the town from changing. And that means we need to limit who comes in.” I say all this publicly because it was no secret. During the thirteen years that I lived there, some of us, led by the churches, had to talk openly and persuasively about the kind of exclusionism that that attitude bred. In order to do ministry there, we had to prick the bubble of illusion that somehow we were without problems, without pain. And we had to work to dismantle the wall that separated Newtown from the “gentiles,” the others, who were unable to come in.

The single biggest reason that Jesus got nailed to the cross was his penchant for including the outsider, the other. And nothing is better attested about his ministry than that. Whether it was a teaching about a Samaritan, the healing of a woman who was ritually impure, a conversation with a morally questionable Samaritan woman, his open table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners, his ministry over and over crashed the presuppositions that folks behind the religious fences were safe from invasion. Whether he believed that from the start or whether, as Mark seems to suggest, he came to that position gradually, clearly by the end of his brief ministry it was clear: no one was excluded from the realm of God.

And nothing less can characterize and shape our ministry. Like Philip and Andrew, our job is to bring people to Jesus. For us, it is not just a matter of escorting a delegation to Jesus for an interview; it is bringing into his presence and community all people who show the slightest interest in being a part of it. And it is even moreso our responsibility to issue invitations to people to come meet Jesus by meeting his community, the Church.

I am going to assume that that point needs no further elaboration. But I think we do need to spell out what specifically it looks like when we practice a kind of hospitality and outreach that mirrors Jesus’ own ministry. First, there is nothing wrong or offensive about inviting folks to come with you to your community of faith. It all depends on how you do it. “I’d like you to join me this Friday for supper at our church,” is one way. “Would you like to come with us to St. Stephen’s?” is another. Second, respect the fact that the answer might well be no. Folks may wish to decline. And if you have ever been cornered by someone’s insistence that you do something you don’t want to do, you know how uncomfortable that can be. So leave plenty of room for someone to say no, thank you. Respect for boundaries is a basic tool of hospitality.

But what about a more pointed matter, sharing your faith? The courteous thing to do is to invite someone to share their faith—or lack of faith—before we start sharing ours. To begin with, we frequently find that someone who we might have thought didn’t have much faith actually has a good deal of it. And not uncommonly, our own faith is enriched by someone else’s. I try to make it a point to ask questions rather than make statements. “What gives you strength?” “What do you value most?” It is not surprising that when we practice asking questions, we usually inspire others to ask them too. And when someone asks you a question, that is your entrée, their invitation to share your faith. What does give you strength? What is important to you? Where do you go to look for meaning?

You might well be wondering what all this has to do with what Jesus says at this climactic moment when the Greeks come seeking him. I don’t know that his parable about the seed falling into the earth and dying so that it can produce much fruit has much to say about expanding the boundaries of the community of faith. But there is something about his response that addresses our reluctance to do the ministry of evangelism (did you know that is what we have been talking about?) or anything else that might seem hard or off-putting. Jesus lets us know that nothing of worth happens without considerable risk. “A little of us has to die in order to grow again,” says El Gallo in The Fantasticks. And it is true. The only way we will ever follow Jesus is by letting go of our fears and preconceptions, and by daring to follow the example of his authenticity.

Don’t be surprised, when you find yourself doing that, if you have the strange sensation that “the hour has come.” It might be that you begin to taste what it is like to be doing what your were created to do, and finding an unutterable beauty and freedom in doing it.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2009

Things Are the Opposite Of What You Think

Ego, Self, and Ministry: An Explosive Possibility

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 8, 2009

Mark 8:31-38

If we were to make a list of gospel passages that we might wish had never been said, the passage from the gospel today might well lead all others. “If any would come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” Doesn’t this trouble you?

You might be just vaguely aware that there are hosts of people who nurse their victimhood because they think that in doing so they are behaving the way Christ wants them to. Think of the woman whose alcoholic husband beats her and verbally trashes her, who, fearing for her life, takes refuge in the belief that by staying in her marriage she is doing the will of Jesus, just carrying her cross, just carrying her cross. Or think of the hosts of men and women through the centuries who have tried to lower their sense of self-importance by wearing hairshirts, flagellating the skin off their backs, sitting atop pillars for years, starving themselves nearly to death, cutting off body parts, all manner of things. You don’t know anybody like that? Well, believe me, those are live examples, and not all of them in the distant past.

Generally, the harder the saying the more trustworthy its authenticity. So this one must really be authentic! Jesus seems to have been utterly serious. Somehow he had gotten the notion that his vocation involved suffering and denying a shameful death. Peter pulled him aside and argued, “Master! You can’t talk this way. This is no speech for a Messiah to be giving. You’ve got bullies to beat, enemies to conquer, kingdoms to set up, justice to meet out. What’s all this nonsense about suffering and dying? Don’t you think your followers are owed a little consideration? Keep on talking this way, and you’ll do in your own movement.”

And Jesus responds, “You’re thinking the typical human way, Peter—er, Satan—you and that tempting tongue of yours.” (Or words to that effect.) And then he gives us, in the middle of this hard saying, a clue as to what he really is talking about. “Not the way God thinks…,” he adds. There is another way of thinking about these matters. And, frankly, it is a way that isn’t too familiar to the average, virtually unconscious human.

So much of the gospel message depends for a right hearing on how carefully and accurately we understand a couple of basic things. One of those things, which this passage itself defines and illuminates, is that things are not always what they seem. Take death, for instance. Everything that appears to be death is not death, nor is death itself a bad thing. In fact, death is a part of the created order and thank God it is. But, ironically, the very things human beings do to insulate themselves from death frequently only create an illusion that death can be managed or banished. Some of those things, like accumulating power, amassing fortunes, protecting security, and extending life expectancy, look to be life-giving, but in fact are not. They are quite often parts of the program to which Jesus referred when he said, “those who would save their lives will lose them.” Or you can take life, for another instance. Everything that appears to be life is not life.
Sometimes life is lost by those who invest most deeply in the things that are easily identified with the very best things possible: good looks, great intelligence, lots of money, plenty of things. And Jesus is by no means alone in saying that “those who lose their life for my sake and the gospel’s will find it.” For all religious traditions, in one way or another, point to the truth that there is a way to live that is not altogether obvious and which must be consciously sought and chosen.

A third instance of things not being exactly what they seem on the surface is the matter of self. While it is true that Jesus and the gospel writers do not share our preoccupation with “self,” which has come to be a major topic of investigation and discourse through the centuries, it is nonetheless true that at rock bottom, this passage is talking about two different ways of approaching one’s self. Mark uses the word that means “soul” to mean “life.” It is a word that you know: ψυχη or psyche. And, in the New Testament, it frequently means the whole living person, or “self,” if you will. Thanks to depth psychology, we have developed a way of differentiating between the “Self,” by which we mean the core reality of the human being, and the “ego,” which is the conscious, willing self, the “I” that we use to refer to ourselves. (See how tricky language gets?) Ego sometimes gets bad press in places like churches, and it is wrongly assumed that the ego is a bad thing. But the ego is a natural, normal part of us, and we need it to be strong. (If you want to see lots of weak egos, visit a mental hospital.) The problem is that the ego can sometimes get inflated out of all proportion. When that happens, ironically the ego becomes immobilized or ineffective. You can picture the hapless ego as the driver of a stagecoach, unable to control and restrain a team of wild horses, so powerful are the unconscious drives that direct and rule the person. With this in mind, we can take Jesus’ saying to mean: “Those would be my disciples must absolutely come to terms with their egos, and decide not to live an ego-driven life. Because all those things that inflated egos seek spell the death of real life. On the other hand, letting go of the ego and living out of a deeper, truer Self is precisely the way to Life. It involves taking up a cross, which is to say that it is difficult. You will identify with things that your ego would normally run from, like suffering in the cause of Truth, forgiving when all you want to do is keep on hating, and sacrificing for the sake of Justice. But, though you may well lose your life literally, you will in fact find what it is truly to live.”

So far, so good. We now are able to put Jesus’ saying into language that makes a little more sense than a notion that can be used to justify permanent victimhood. But you might remember that you and I are in the process of reading scripture like this from the point of view of what it has to say about ministry. This leads to a very interesting question: is there any such thing as ministry without ego? And, if so, why are great big egos sometimes drawn to ministry, which might look like a way to give up everything but frequently is not that at all? (And I am not talking about ordained ministry, by the way, but about the way we organize and live our whole lives in the service of Truth, with a passion for Justice, guided by Love.)

There is no such thing as egoless ministry. God redeems the ego right along with the rest of us. But if ministry—specifically being a disciple of Jesus—involves living from a different center, acting not from an inflated ego but from a deeper place, how? How do we do it?

We can take a number of approaches. Some will seek authorities—Church tradition, manuals of discipline, books such as The Purpose Driven Life or the old classic In His Steps or the even older classic The Imitation of Christ, celebrities of various kinds, philosophers. One of those authorities may become your guiding star. Others will insist on the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount of some other passage from the Bible. And that may work for you, too. I suggest a third alternative. Focus on a couple of basic practices that can keep you grounded.
The first of these might be to build into your life a regular practice of reflection. Some journal. Some meditate. Others pause and take stock daily in prayer. Others have a spiritual director whom they see periodically. All of these are examples of ways that one can practice being reflective. And why is that important? Because if we don’t stop and look at our lives somewhat objectively, chances are we will continue, like Peter, to think in purely human, ego-driven terms, never seeing the higher way nor hearing the deeper call. We’re apt to get stuck doing the things that our tribe or family or political alliances tell us we ought to do in order to be accepted, and as a result we will live somebody else’s life rather than our own, which we will surely lose.

Another way to ground yourself is to study Jesus’ life diligently, attentively, inquisitively, critically, honestly. You will, of course, ponder the gospels frequently. But also look at what St. Paul—who never knew him personally—has to say about life in Christ. That will lead you into places like Romans 8, in which he discusses “walking in the Spirit of Christ,” and Philippians, in which he describes what it is like to count everything else as so much trash in contrast to knowing and responding to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. You might try styling your life along the lines of a list in St. Paul, where he enumerates the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Most of those things are virtues, and you only acquire them by deliberate actions, such as random acts of kindness, or even planned acts of kindness. You and I both have known a lot of people who gained the whole world but never found the beauty of life, but I’ll bet that between us we can’t name one person who has diligently lived a life of kindness, patience, gentleness, and goodness who could tell us that they were so thoroughly disappointed because by doing all those things they had somehow missed out on life. No. Because those things are the abundant life which Jesus came to give us, and which he promises we will in fact find if we stop holding on to our fear of death, let it go, take up this strangely beautiful way of the cross, and follow him.

Sometimes, frankly, I understand those who always have something better to do than to go to church, those who find following Jesus a quaint idea that is quite silly in a world where there are so many other attractive options. I understand how some people are so beat up by churches and stupid hierarchies that they want no further part of anything vaguely Christian. I too find Buddhism attractive with its forthright dealing with suffering and its counsel to detach. I find the option of Judaism compelling with its warm conversations with the Master of the Universe. But when I look into my own heart I see sometimes a fear, not unlike that of John Donne, whose sin of fear was that when he had spun his last thread he would perish on the shore. This Dunn’s fear is that some day this body will cease to work for me, this body I have learned so hard, so late to love. What if, like my mother and her sister and others of my relatives I wind up crippled by a stroke, no longer able to run or walk or paint or write, maybe even like Jean-Dominique Bauby, my ψυχη, my life sealed in a frozen body, unable to communicate or even, like him, to dictate by winking my one working eye a whole book called the Diving Bell and the Butterfly? I fear losing life as I know it and I want to save it (don’t you?). And then I flip through the annals of Christ lovers and find the story of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. He was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity, came to this country in the 1850’s, and wound up becoming a missionary to China and eventually Bishop of Shanghai. Facile in languages, he had taught himself Chinese on the voyage to the Orient. Translating the Bible into Wenli, he determined to carry on his work even after devastating paralysis caused him to resign his see. So for the rest of his life he pecked out on a typewriter (100 or more years ago) using the middle finger of his partially paralyzed hand over 2000 pages of text. Before he died, he said, “I have sat in this chair for twenty years. At first it seemed hard. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

All who would lose their life for my sake and the gospel’s will find it. Would you rather have it that way, or gain the whole world?

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Take a Moment to Reflect, and See What You See

Withdrawal and Action: The Rhythm of Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 1, 2009.

Mark 1:9-15

“And immediately the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness.”

No sooner had Jesus been baptized, Mark tells us, than the same Spirit which alighted on him pushed him right out of the Jordan and into the desert. I don’t know, but I suspect that if Jesus were telling us the story today he might say something like, “Deep down I knew that I had to get away, to spend time by myself, before I could even think about that urgent, compelling ministry I was about to begin. You can’t imagine how many things swimming around in my head and heart I had to sort out.”

Ministry is rhythm. As such, it resonates between polarities: action and contemplation, engagement and receptivity, work and rest, words and silence. That rhythm we reflect in the way we structure time. The oldest institution in our religion is the Sabbath, a day of rest and withdrawal standing in contrast to six days of labor. We build into the Church Year the season of Lent, which itself is a kind of Sabbath, bidding introspection and encourage stock-taking. Lent affords a change of pace from energetic celebrations and even a deepening of the hues of ordinary time that sometimes vacillates between blandness and frenzy.

In the last few decades, a fair number of voices have raised the issue of Sabbath time, including our own Tilden Edwards in a book by that title. Judging from the evidence, I would say that few of us have heard the message. Yes, we believe in vacations. We even see the value in things like meditation and retreats. But for the most part, we have not yet begun to think of ministry as something besides doing. We imagine that ministry is about meetings or demonstrations or serving meals or teaching Sunday school or running errands or fighting for justice. And, to be sure, all of those things are important dimensions of ministry. What we often miss, however, is that our model, Jesus, quite clearly demonstrates that an equally important dimension of ministry is the pause for reflection that precedes or follows the doing. He not only does this by going out into the desert at the beginning of his ministry. He continues to withdraw for reflection and prayer all during his ministry.

Certainly not every, but the average parish church in this country is filled with people who are looking to do something that will give meaning to their lives. In the past decade or two, I have noticed that young people, for example, have become highly motivated to engage in mission, relishing anything that is an obvious way to improve life for people in need. All of this is good. But in contrast, things like prayer (including meditation), fasting, study and reflection sit on the back burner, turned down real low. And, frankly, that is true here in St. Stephen’s. We prize doing. We are not so sure about reflecting. Sometimes human need and the pain of the world seem so great that it appears to be a shame not to be involved in doing something about it every waking minute.

Mark does not tell us much about the experience of Jesus. And in any case, the ultimate source of the withdrawal of Jesus had to be Jesus himself. No one else was around to observe or take notes. Both Matthew and Luke take Mark’s story and open it up, telling us the substance of the struggle that Jesus had, giving us graphic accounts of the temptations he faced. Not so Mark. He simply gives us, in his characteristically understated way, a sketch of what it was like when Jesus went on retreat. Jesus stayed in the desert. He was there for forty days. Satan tempted him. He was with the wild beasts. Angels ministered to him.

With that kind of billing, little wonder that the idea of withdrawal—retreat—desert experience lacks compelling attractiveness. It is much more rewarding to set about feeding the hungry or healing the sick. But there is something important about this withdrawal, something not to be missed. For one thing, it puts to flight the notion once and for all that there is much of a distinction between the inner life and the outer life after all. No one who engages in the active life of serving others or striving for peace and justice does that for very long without encountering temptation, beasts, and angels. Sometimes the temptation might be to try to change the world single-handedly and sometimes it is to give up entirely. Beasts can be systems that seem to be impossible to change and sometimes they are the very people that you are trying to help. Sometimes the angels are unexpected allies in the struggle and sometimes they are that mysterious source of energy that keeps us going when we want to stop. What is good about the desert experience is that it gives us the opportunity to face all these things before, during, or after we encounter them in the world of action.

We do not “do” ministry for very long before we realize that we ourselves are all mixed up in the world we are trying to address and even in the people that we are serving. We go to do something that in the abstract seems oh-so-loving and before we know it, we realize that we have all kinds of ego investments in the outcome. Or we rock along enjoying our ministry at Loaves and Fishes or visiting the sick and we realize suddenly that we are confronted with the possibility of stepping outside our comfort zone and our first impulse is to say no, maybe even to hide, to deny, to resign. All of that is quite natural. But it is all the more indicative of our need to reflect on, to pray about, to ponder the particular beasts and angels that get all mixed up inside ourselves and in the ministries that we do.

How would you be different come Easter, say, if this Lent you opened yourself to new possibilities of paying attention to your inner life? Have you ever been to a quiet day, like the one Carolyn Bluemle will lead next Saturday? You might want to try it. How might you understand your ministry better if you spent fifty minutes next Friday night focusing with us on “grounding,” a basic Christian practice that has deep implications for ecological stewardship as well as for spiritual growth?

Nothing is apt to surprise you much more than finding that this rhythm of ministry is also a harmony. Inner life and outer life are not in opposition; they harmonize. Action and contemplation are not in competition; they blend. Work and rest, withdrawal and assertion are not strangers; they complement each other. And, as Jesus’ life shows, the forty days in the desert prepared him for what was to come. Those who minister—which is all of us, all of the time—are likely to find that it is not just practical sense that leads us to do something like take time out for reflection. It really is nothing other than the Holy Spirit of God who drives us to do it.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Las Hojas y Las Cenizas

Un sermón predicado a la iglesia de San Esteban y la Encarnación, Washington, DC, miércoles de cenizas, el 25 de febrero 2009

Cuando entraron ustedes en la iglesia esta noche, vieron que el espacio era diferente. A lado de la fuente hacia un árbol seco. Inmediatamente, se puso ver otro árbol detrás del altar. Miren la capilla de resurrección. Hay una colección de cuadras de la artista Margaret Parker, que dibuja y pinta muchas representaciones de árboles con ramos sin hojas.

Hace muchos meses, unos miembros de nuestra congregación han estado planeando nuestra observancia de cuaresma. Buscamos símbolos para significar el tema de renovación y crecimiento. Entonces elegimos el árbol. Durante invierno, como este invierno, el árbol está completamente desnudo, totalmente sin protección. Es necesario que el árbol pierda sus hojas a fin de que crezca otra vez.

De manera similar, nuestras almas necesitan quitarse todas las cosas que prohíben nuestro crecimiento en la imagen de Cristo. Envidia, arrogancia, codicia, crueldad: todas estas cosas debemos derramar como tantas hojas, que deben ser recogidos y quemados. Cenizas nos recuerdan que somos como árboles durante invierno—desnudos, puros, vacíos, listos para la primavera del Espíritu cuando podemos producir capullos nuevos.

En unos momentos vamos juntarnos alrededor la fuente para participar en la liturgia de miércoles de cenizas. Nos recordamos allá que morimos en bautismo como hojas del árbol, en preparación para vida nueva. En la imposición de cenizas, dejamos nuestros pecados. En la paz, recordamos que somos conectados a todo la comunidad de Cristo en la que crecimos juntos. Luego, vamos al altar para la comunión, recordando que cuando morimos, siempre resucitamos con Cristo para vivir. Siempre. Amen.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Do We Need Priests?

The following is a summary of the project on which my thesis is based for the degree of Doctor of Ministry. I made the report to the parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC, on December 18, 2008. The thesis has been completed. I will be happy to answer further inquiries.

Continuing the Dialogue

Reflections on the Parish-wide Conversation,
“Priests: Do We Need Them?”
Fall, 2008

I could not be happier with the way the folks of St. Stephen’s participated in the survey and parish-wide conversation, “Priests: Do We Need Them?” In so doing, you supported me personally in my quest to be a Doctor of Ministry. More importantly, you engaged in a dialogue that is critical to the way we organize for and do ministry in St. Stephen and the Incarnation.

Ninety-three people took the survey online, and an additional six asked to take it manually. At least 70 people completed most of it. Approximately 70 persons participated in the meeting on Sunday, October 12 to view the presentation, hear the results of the survey, and to discuss the place of priesthood in our shared ministry. Forty-three persons turned in written responses to the discussion questions I posed. Those are remarkable figures. I am deeply grateful for your help and participation.

Parishioners regularly register a high degree of satisfaction with our parish life. Of those responding to the reflection questions on October 12, almost everyone had positive things to say about how they felt they were practicing priestly ministry in their lives. Most were quite positive about the way they feel supported in their ministries by the clergy. One may fairly ask if there is any value to pursuing this issue of whether we need priests, or what value ordained leadership has, or whether there is any point in articulating a coherent theology of priesthood when it seems to most people that ministry is working fairly well in St. Stephen’s. To those questions I respond by placing this discussion in several different contexts.

The Discussion in Context

Of immediate importance is the unique context of our “shared leadership model.” When St. Stephen’s went through an arduous and thorough process of thinking through its leadership needs beginning ten years ago, no one could have known the practical issues that would have to be dealt with as various senior wardens came and went and as senior priests accommodated themselves to a system quite different from the standard arrangement in the Church. We have learned some things in the last four and a half years, and we continue to learn. It is clear now, for example, that the senior priest, while in theory having no direct responsibility for parish finances, must in fact be a part of the oversight of fundraising, budgeting, and financial management. This can significantly impact the time commitments of the senior priest. Likewise, in a system that is used to carrying on liturgically and pastorally without direct involvement and supervision of ordained clergy, it can be problematic for clergy sometimes to know who is taking responsibility for what. And when decisions have to be made, it is not always clear who has the authority or the responsibility for making a decision, or how it is to be made. Almost all parish systems operate on some model of “shared leadership.” Rarely is there a single person who has all the authority and all the responsibility for making every decision and for setting the course of the entire ministry. Our particular form of shared ministry, however, necessitates constant communication, flexibility, a high tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to negotiate boundaries and roles, and sometimes a staggering degree of volunteer time, especially on the part of the senior warden, whose responsibilities can be daunting.

One of the reasons for doing this project, then, has to do with the reality that St. Stephen’s, in practicing a ministry that takes lay persons’ gifts seriously, has chosen to create a system that demands deep lay commitment. There is no default position that the clergy, especially the senior priest, is ultimately responsible for the wellbeing of the church. While such an idea of “shared ministry” is attractive and laudable, it depends directly on the willingness of lay persons continually to make major time commitments and very real sacrifices. Furthermore, a priest in such a system, having been trained to exercise leadership in a generally hierarchical structure, finds herself or himself constantly challenged to use a variety of skills—not all of them mature—in exploring and testing what sorts of leadership will effectively move the parish towards its goals. Indeed it is not clear who has the responsibility for guiding the parish towards it goals, or how those goals originate, or who is accountable for monitoring the progress towards meeting them. This is not to say that the “shared leadership model” is basically flawed. But it is to say that it rests on a number of assumptions that have not always been thoroughly understood. And it is not completely rhetorical to ask ,“Do we need priests?” when it is far from certain exactly what priests do that any lay persons cannot do as well or better. If shared ministry is to work, somewhere along the way—better sooner than later—folks involved in it need to know what it is they are doing, how they are doing it, and who is responsible for what.

Not as a part of this project per se, but arising out of this same cluster of questions, the senior and junior wardens, Jane Bishop and Cam Crockett, have joined with Brian Best and me this fall in a set of conversations reviewing the shared ministry model and how it is working. The details of those conversations are not germane to this report, but one of the outcomes of this project has been that we do have a base for seeing more clearly now both what the parish understands priesthood to be about (as practiced both by the ordained and more generally by the entire Christian community). Several things have driven this evaluation. The main one is that we need to make sure that we have a doable and sustainable job for the senior warden. Otherwise the system cannot function.

Another context in which this project needs to be seen is the trajectory of growth of the parish. While that growth is not linear and uninterrupted, it has in fact occurred over the last several years, especially as the neighborhood has changed, the congregation’s demographic is shifting (lots of new babies, for example!), and economic stresses make themselves felt. We have had major decisions to make. Every indicator suggests that we will continue to have more to make. One example is the revisions to our building necessitated by the moving out of the Washington Free Clinic requiring renovating the third floor of the parish house to make marketable office space. Another is the refurbishment of our church school space this year in response to a growing population of youngsters. Another decision, or set of decisions, has had to do with our burgeoning Latino ministry and the need to stabilize financially the clergy leadership of it. Decisions like these are all related to the parish’s possible and actual growth. They are inherently related to the core mission of St. Stephen’s and the way it understands its ministry. My point is that decisions like these will continue to confront the parish and will demand that there be a clear way of addressing concerns and coming to conclusions that is clear, direct, and effective. A complicated, unclear, or unrealistic method of decision-making will impede the parish’s growth and hamper its ability to accomplish its mission.

Yet I place this project in a still larger context. The Episcopal Church began looking afresh at the meaning of priesthood in the 1970’s when the question of ordaining women began to reshape people’s thinking. A number of writers began exploring the meaning of ordination, specifically priestly ordination, arguing that there was nothing about it that prima facie disqualified women. At the same time a number of people working on issues of ministry encouraged the Church to look seriously at the ministry of all the baptized as fundamental to its mission. Interestingly, St. Stephen’s was at the forefront of both these movements. The rise of emphasis on both ordination and total ministry lifted into prominence the question of how the priest is and what the priest does in community. The more the Church has sorted out questions surrounding ordination, the larger looms the question of whether we need priests in the first place. Clearly, the way the Church structures its liturgy and polity, it needs priests. It needs priests because, by delegating to them the regulation of its liturgical life, it has made them essential. It also needs them because to this day they are trained to be leaders of the Christian community. When liturgical life and community leadership cease to be the province of the priest, an identity crisis ensues in which priests begin to wonder whether they have any use or value. In turn, that can lead, as identity crises often do, to unproductive reaction in the form of withdrawal, over-functioning, excessive control, or burnout. Thus the question of what a priest is, what a priest does, and how the priest relates to the larger community of the baptized is not at all minor or incidental to the practice of ministry in the wider Church.

Some things I learned from the survey

The understanding of priesthood among the people of St. Stephen’s does not greatly different from that in the larger Church. Priests are seen as leaders; as ministers of the Church’s core possessions, Word and Sacrament; as guardians and interpreters of Tradition; and as spiritually aware persons who can listen, support, guide, forgive, bless, and heal. (Incidentally, priests in this community are not too frequently seen as healers, judging from the survey.) But priests are clearly not seen on the whole as superior, either essentially or morally, to other Christians, nor as enjoying greater importance than lay persons within the Body of Christ. On the edges, there is on the one hand noticeable clergy dependence, and on the other hand some anti-clericalism. But the great majority of people see priests as valuable and their various responsibilities as integral to the life of the Church. A strong majority see ordination as a necessary element in the life of the Church.

Things you said in the conversation

There were four questions at the end of the power point presentation on which participants were asked to reflect and to talk with each other. One was “if ‘the priesthood of all believers’ means that we all practice Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, how do you practice priestly ministry in your life here and now?” A number of people identified their daily life and work as the context for doing so. A few mentioned their roles in church and their attempts to bring people into the Christian assembly. One respondent wrote, “[I practice priestly ministry] by being a human vessel for the will of God and the interconnected web of existence.” A number of people mentioned that they practice their ministry in their work for justice. Clearly reaching out to housemates, co-workers, neighbors, and friends with sensitivity and compassion is key to Christian practice for a great many people. Others identify particular devotional practices, such as tithing, reading and studying the Bible, and prayer as ways in which they live their ministries.

A second question asked, “How have the clergy at St. Stephen’s supported you in your ministry?” Sermons, teaching, listening, caring, reflecting, were some of the things you mentioned. Offering the community’s rituals, inspiring liturgies, welcoming, and support in times of crisis were other things you noted.

To the third question, “Do we have an adequate understanding of priesthood in St. Stephen’s, you were rather evenly divided between those who said yes and those who said no. A fair number of people answered with qualifications, one way or the other.

About three-fourths of those responding to the questions offered suggestions of next steps that we might take “to deepen our understanding of how all of us, priests and lay people, fit together in the one ministry which is Christ’s.” Suggestions ranged from having more small groups, to occasional conversations like the one on October 12, to prayer groups, to sermons and adult forums. Many expressed a desire not to drop the topic but to continue discussing it. Some saw ministry in either more specific or more generic ways than a limited discussion of priesthood or shared ministry. One suggested that there be a “verdant earth” group looking at ways that we can live more ecologically responsibly.

Where do we go from here?

Almost certainly we shall be looking as a community at our shared leadership model in the near future. That look will no doubt be informed by much of what we have learned about our own thinking in relation to priesthood specifically and to ministry in general.

Those who have some energy around the formation of groups, whether for ecological sensitivity or for prayer or for some other purpose will need to take responsibility for announcing a date, time, and place for such a group to meet and organize. Let others gather around you. We can offer you support and resources in some cases, and the parish office can definitely offer you help in communicating.

Given the interest in the topic, either narrowly or broadly, it would seem to me that we need to look for opportunities to continue the dialogue. One possibility is to use our Fridays in Lent as opportunities to look at some dimension(s) of ministry. Another is to plan next year’s adult forums and other Christian formation opportunities with these issues in mind. A third is to use the resources we have, preaching for example, to address some of these concerns more directly. And a fourth is occasionally to revisit these matters with a special meeting, as some in fact suggested. I could see, for example, an annual “mini-conference” perhaps on a Friday night and Saturday morning, or on another Sunday after the 10:30 liturgy, dealing with some aspect of our ministry together. My concern is that we not have “just another program” that overloads already busy lives, but that we gather to reflect in a way that is directly and clearly tied to the central missional consciousness of St. Stephen’s.

Frank G. Dunn
18 December 2008

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

The Healing That Cannot Keep Its Mouth Shut

Ministry: Bringing Healing and Wholeness to the World

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Febuary 15, 2009

Text: Mark 1:40-45

If you were to find yourself in the gospel story we just heard, who would you be? The leper? Since few of us have had any contact with leprosy, I doubt that we would relate to him all that quickly. Jesus? Since even fewer of us experience the power to heal miraculously, my guess is that we don’t readily see ourselves as Jesus. Are you an onlooker, curious about what is happening, saying to yourself, “Nah. No such thing. You can’t heal leprosy that way. Man ought to see a doctor.” Or maybe one of the disciples, saying, “Wow! That’s amazing!” Or are you one of the hundreds who heard the newly healed former leper advertising Jesus and wondered if it was true, or if such a thing could happen to you?

There is, of course, no right or wrong answer, just the truth of where the story sits closest to you. But how might we begin to see ourselves if we were to approach the story as a commentary on ministry? What I have in mind is to look at the story through the lens of what it has to say about what you and I might understand about our own ministry as Christians. In fact, I want to make today the first of a series of sermons that look at ministry from various angles. The reason grows out of two experiences I had last year. One was the experience of preaching a series of sermons on Christian practices. I began it in July and continued it through All Saints in November. It was the first time I had done such a thing. It transformed the way I approach preaching. And, if I may say, judging from the number of comments and questions that you voiced to me as we dealt together with some of those topics (discernment, confession, stewardship, proclamation), I would say that those sermons worked to stir up a fair amount of conversation, which is what one hopes sermons in fact might do from time to time. The other experience was the event we shared in October when in a parish-wide conversation as a part of my doctoral program at Virginia Seminary I heard you clearly saying that you wanted to focus more on the issues of the ministry that we share. So I have set myself the goal of looking at least through Easter, and possibly beyond, at the scriptures through this lens: what does this say about ministry?

Now, I have to admit “ministry” is an awfully churchy word. While many of us in this congregation use it easily, it is not lost on me that a good many people simply don’t think of anything they do as “ministry.” If you are in that group, you are not alone. So let’s start with the fact that “ministry” needs a little explaining. To begin with, ministry does not refer to the activity of the clergy. Clergy participate in ministry, but primarily because ministry is something that we all share—and not just those in the Church, but all people everywhere. Ministry is the work we do, the things we say, the activities we engage in, the people we relate to. What makes it Christian, if it is Christian, is not ordination into the ranks of clergy but that it glorifies the God we know through Jesus Christ. The great symbol of the life of ministry, and the effective gateway into it, is baptism. When we are baptized, we join the ranks of those who expressly commit to live the way Jesus lived and minister the way Jesus ministers. That means we practice our ministry—or at least aim to—by making God’s love the focus and motive of all we do. It means that our ministry is transparently one of forgiveness and reconciliation. It means that our ministry has to do with sitting down and eating, literally, with anybody and everybody. It means that we spend considerable energy on getting to know the outcasts and marginal people in society. It means that we pray with some concentration and regularity. It means that we keep pointing beyond ourselves to the God who embraces the whole creation. And it means that we heal.

Healing characterized the ministry of Jesus. There is no doubt about that. While Jesus was not the only known healer of his day, he definitely generated a whole cycle of stories with his astonishing healing. In Mark’s gospel, however, Jesus makes clear—more or less—that healing was tangential to his ministry of proclaiming the Good News, not the other way around. In this healing story, Jesus does what he frequently does when he heals: he brings someone out of a state of isolation and reintegrates them into the community. Healing in these stories is rarely a matter of simply curing a bodily ailment. Jesus’ healing is a way of restoring a person to wholeness. Hence the stories often include a reference to sins being forgiven or faith being involved in wellness. So, if we style our ministry after Jesus’, we will be healers intent on helping to bring about wholeness.

That might seem a stretch for you. Let’s look a bit more deeply into the whole matter of healing. One of the issues that always comes up when we read and talk about The New Testament is how differently people thought about sickness and healing in those days from how we think about them now. In a way we seem to be far removed from the world of exorcism, leprosy, and a number of the things that were current in Jesus’ day. What has happened, more than anything else, is that during the intervening centuries, we have adopted a medical model for understanding healing, and generally (at last in our part of the world) we have approached all sickness and all healing as if they were somewhat mechanical processes that, through medical science, we can manage, at least theoretically. Medicine is valuable, even essential. But anyone who practices modern medicine will quickly tell you how much is trial and error, how much we still don’t know, and how mysterious are the factors that go into a person’s healing. I think of Larry Dossey, a physician who started out several years ago to write a treatise debunking the notion that prayer is an effectual component in healing. In his research, which was honest enough, Dossey confronted evidence that he did not expect: namely, that prayer has a very salient effect on the healing process in countless instances.

There is another kind of healing experience. Let us call it spiritual healing. It includes things like mental and emotional health that certainly have a relationship with bodily health, but are not quite the same as the wellness or sickness of a kidney. They have to do with attitudes, behaviors, life patterns and positions. Sometimes those things can be deleterious for an individual, as for example, we can see in the case of addictions. And sometimes we can be healed of those diseases of the spirit, which almost always leave some mark on the body, too. We take it for granted now. But back in the 1930’s, it was very courageous of many churches, especially Episcopal churches, to house Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. To this day, countless AA and NA groups, and other 12-step programs, find homes within Episcopal parishes because we recognized early on that the church had a vocation to support and engage in the kind of spiritual healing that goes on in AA.

There is a third kind of healing, which certainly overlaps with the latter. And that is what we can call “sacramental healing.” Every week at the end of our 10:30 liturgy, whoever wishes to do so may come to the side altar for prayers of healing and the laying on of hands. For years this has been a major part of my ministry. I cannot begin to tell you in the context of this (or any) sermon all the things that I have learned and experienced through the laying on of hands with prayer for healing. But I can tell you this: lives have been changed, beginning with mine. For something like 500 years, Christians assumed that the Body of Christ (namely the Church) was on this earth to heal as much as Jesus healed. People went to church and prayed expecting to be healed. And record after record indicates that they were. And then what always seems to happen in the church happened. Somebody tried to regularize it so it wouldn’t get out of hand. And the spontaneity fled. The Church might have gained control, but it soon lost a sense of its vocation to be a healing community.

But if something, like healing, is authentic to the life of the Church, it will pop up from time to time, in one form or another. And so healing did. It appeared in charismatic and Pentecostal revivals. It began to appear in the work of individual healers, many of whom conventional rationalists dismissed as charlatans (and some of whom might have been). Gifts of healing began to occur in strange places like in prayer groups of women in The Episcopal Church, led by people like Helen Shoemaker and Polly Wiley, and more recently, Avery Brooke, names that some of you will recognize and some of you know personally.

I believe that what all this is about is the Presence of the Spirit of God in our lives and in our midst. The Spirit eventually breaks down barriers, opens minds, melts stony hearts, and frees captives. It is not opposed to conventional medical healing but rather part and parcel of it. The Spirit, interestingly, is teaching us that healing is not about keeping bodies from dying. It is about making people whole, just as Jesus did. We all die eventually, and the point of the healing ministry is not to forestall death as long as possible. Nor is it to get us to believe that death is somehow a flaw in creation. Rather, the focus of healing is to enable us to embrace our mortality, allowing the Spirit of God so to infuse us that our bodies, our minds, our souls are relieved of all those things we could do to fight our humanity, and thus freed to live as whole human beings as much as possible. Let me say that again: the focus of healing is to enable us to embrace our mortality rather than fight it, so that we can be as whole as possible.

But our ministry of healing is not just a matter of becoming more whole ourselves. Our ministry is to take the healing to what we call “the world.” And by that I mean to the places where Jesus was always meeting God: the deserted places and the streets. When we work for justice, we are engaged in the healing of society. When we act for peace, whether individually or as a part of a mass movement, we are working for the healing of the world. What we might well do is to consider the things we have learned about how healing and wholeness happen in places like our altar, and translate that into the way we live in our work, in our play, in our social circles. A short list of some of those things would include touch, prayer, listening, caring, and being connected. What might happen if we kept those things in mind every day as some of the ways in which we could actually bring about the healing and wholeness of our world?

Most commentators on this passage have spent a lot of words on the question of why Jesus was so insistent that the healed leper and many others not broadcast the healing incidents. That is a good question, and one to which there is no single definitive answer. But another question almost no one asks is what the healed leper said and what others heard. We can only imagine. But I think we can trust our imagination and fairly conclude that the man said something like, “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me—yes, I am that leper you knew and shunned. That man Jesus healed me.” And I suspect we can trust our imagination when it envisions a host of people saying, “We’ve got to see this. We can use some of that.” It’s crass. But it’s human. And, in a way, that is what will ultimately heal the world: enough people saying, “Here’s what happened to me.” And enough others saying, “That is what we need, too.” Maybe the proclamation that Jesus was so intent on getting on with was in fact helped by this excited, disobedient, joy-filled man. And it could be sped along, too, when you spread the word: “Have I got some Good News to share. This old world, like this old body, can be whole once more. You can believe it.”

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Mucho Ministerio

Supongamos que no hubiera Navidad. Supongamos que no teníamos nigún idea de pastores u ángeles o María o José o Belén. Imaginemos que no exista una cuenta de los tres reyes, o la que nos da conocimiento del masacre de los inocentes por Herodes. Este sería el caso si el año cristiano se fundiera en el evangelio de San Marcos.

En ese caso, nuestra celebración de la vida de Jesús se iniciaría hoy. Marcos, escribiendo muchos años antes de Lucas y Mateo, no dice nada del nacimiento de Jesús. Si tuviéramos solo su evangelio, sin duda se pusiera creer que la historia de Jesús se inició con su bautismo.

¿Cuál diferencia hay? En primer lugar, la historia del bautismo de Jesús es central para Marcos. Es el momento cuando Jesús conoce su relación especial con el Padre. La voz del cielo proclama, “Tu eres mi hijo, mi amado, mi eligido.” ¿La relación entre El Hijo y El Padre se inció en ese momento? Marcos no nos dice. Pero no es el punto. Para él, el bautismo es el principio del ministerio de Jesús.

Para entender ese ministerio, es importante que pongamos atención al papel de Juan Bautista, con quien Jesús se identifica por venir a pedir bautismo. Juan parece como los profetas de Israel antiguo. El vive in el desierto, así nos recuerda que la salvación tradicionalmente viene del desierto. Moisés había guiado al pueblo de Israel por el desierto cuando habían salido de Egipto. Elías había ido al desierto cuando se reveló la dirección de Dios. David había escapado al desierto para evitar la cólera de Saúl el Rey. Y veremos que Jesús iré al desierto inmediatamente después de su bautismo, y regresará al desierto en otros momentos durante su ministerio. Juan Bautista es claramente una figura de la tradición de los profetas, y nosotros lo sabemos por qué el está conectado a la profecía de Isaias, que escribió de la “voz gritando en el desierto, preparen el camino del Señor.” Además, lo sabemos por qué Juan llamó al pueblo arrepentirse, el mensaje usual de los profetas antiguos.

Cuando Jesús viene para pedir bautismo de Juan, el elije identificar con esa causa, ese movimiento. No tuvo una sola opción. Por ejemplo, era posible que él habría podido elegir juntarse con los Zelotas, que querían iniciar una guerra con los Romanos. O él habría podido juntarse la comunidad de los Esenios que vivían en el desierto cercano. Pero, Jesús viene a Juan. Por eso él está ciertamente eligiendo ser un miembro de la compañía de los profetas que llamaban a la gente que se vuelvan y sea salvada.

Nuestro bautismo significa el comienzo de un ministerio, lo mismo que el ministerio de Jesús. En unos momentos, nosotros nos juntaremos alrededor la fuente. Allí renovaremos nuestro pacto bautismal. Cuando la comunidad entera se junta en un circulo, podemos recordarnos que Santo Bautismo es la iniciación en el pueblo de Dios. Por cuanto la iglesia es en verdad el cuerpo de Cristo, el circulo significa que todas las personas bautizadas ni solo son miembros de una comunidad, sino también los miembros del cuerpo de Cristo…sus brazos y sus piernas y sus manos. Hacemos el trabajo de Cristo en este mundo. Santa Teresa dijo una vez, “Cristo no tiene ningún cuerpo en la tierra sino el tuyo; no tiene ningunas manos sino las tuyas; no tiene ningunos pies sino los tuyos. Por tus ojos el mira con piedad al mundo. Por tus pies él camina de hacer bien. Por tus manos él bendijo a todo el mundo. Ahora Cristo no tiene ningún cuerpo sino el tuyo.”

Las preguntas que siguen el credo de los apóstoles (creo en Dios Padre, en Jesucristo, y en Dios el Espíritu Santo) contienen el centro de la fe cristiana. Ellas forman un programa para conducir a cada persona bautizada en un viaje para crecer hasta alcanzar la madurez de la plenitud de Cristo. La primer pregunta es, “¿Continuarás en la enseñanza y comunión de los apóstoles, en la fracción del pan y en las oraciones?” Nuestro ministerio depende en nuestra conexión con el cuerpo de Cristo, la comunidad de fe. La próxima pregunta, “¿Perseverarás en resistir al mal, y cuando caigas en pecado, te arrepentirás y te volverás al Señor?” nos recuerda que debemos consciente del mal y de la realidad de su poder en este mundo. Tenemos saber la diferencia entre bien y mal. Además necesitamos saber arrepentirnos. Prometemos también que proclamaremos pro medio de la palabra y el ejemplo las Buenas Nuevas de Dios en Cristo. Palabra y ejemplo ambos son necesarios. San Francisco dijo, “Proclamen el evangelio todo el tiempo. Cuando se necesita, usen palabras.” En la próxima vota, decimos que buscaremos y serviremos a Cristo en todas las personas, amando a nuestro prójimo como a nosotros mismos. San Benito escribió en su regula que los monjas recibieran al extranjero como si a Cristo. La Madre Teresa de Calcuta sirvió a los pobres como ellos fueran Cristo en verdad. No prometemos que hallemos a Cristo en todas las personas, pero lo busquemos. La ultima vota es que luchemos por la justicia y la paz y respectemos la dignidad de todas las personas. No es opcional en nuestro ministerio, sino es integral.

Nuestra vida que se origina en bautismo, como el ministerio de Jesús, no se termina en ese momento, sino sigue hasta morimos. Además, cuando morimos, no morimos finalmente, sino vivimos unidos con Cristo por siempre. El secreto lo más bien guardado en todo el cristianismo es que no tenemos esperar hasta muerte para juntarnos con Dios. Estamos unido con Cristo en su resurrección por medio de nuestro bautismo. El punto de todo es que aceptemos el ministerio de Cristo como el nuestro. Ese ministerio es glorificar a Dios en esta vida y la venidera. Como Jesús, nuestra vocación es traer todo el mundo a Dios. También, como a Jesús, Dios nos dice hoy, “Tu eres mi amado, mi elegido.”

Ordinary Lives, Exceptional Drama

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, January 4, 2009

“What’s new?”

“Oh, nothing. Same old, same old.”

You’ve had that conversation. You probably would have had it last week had it not been Christmas. Not a lot happens in your life. Work. Home. Groceries. Doctor’s appointment. Home. Sleep. Up. Work. Home.

Or maybe that is not you at all. Your life has a bit, maybe more than a bit, of excitement. But you have surely known somebody whose life is like that. You meet him in the post office or on coffee break, or you get to talking with her while you’re both waiting to have your hair done.

Theirs is a deceivingly simple little narrative that masks a whole lot of drama going on. Scratch the surface of such quotidian little lives and you frequently discover all kinds of insects crawling around, the howling of pain, bursts of enthusiasm, heartfelt joys, storied griefs. Take a life, yours or the guy’s in the apartment across the hall, and chart it. You will find some themes. One is a flood. Sometimes it is a literal flood of swollen rivers washing away the family home. More often it is a figurative flood, a torrent of mortal ills that all but drown the human caught in the middle. Another theme is a flight. Sometimes it is a literal flight, such as a flight into Egypt to escape a tyrant’s pogrom, or a desperate flight to avoid starvation or danger of economic disaster. Other times it is a figurative flight. It can be a flight of fantasy to survive unconscionable abuse. It might be a flight into drugs or behavior that a person uses to medicate himself against depression or fear or a generalized anxiety. Almost everybody has at one time or another chosen, or been forced, to flee one thing or another.

Jesus was no exception.

Matthew alone among the gospel writers tells us of the story of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt. And he doesn’t tell us the story to demonstrate how Jesus is just like us in some or all respects. Quite the contrary. Matthew’s Jesus is the one who is the distinctive Son of God who sums up the whole history of Israel including its flight into Egypt. Matthew’s Jesus is the new Moses, yet greater than Moses, who will lead his people out of darkness and slavery and death into light and freedom and life. Matthew’s Jesus will be rabbi and prophet and law-giver who will be something quite unlike anything the world has ever seen. But, strangely enough, in showing how Jesus is so categorically different from the average human, Matthew at the same time weaves a story of just how much in common with humanity Jesus really shares. He is a strange, and somewhat isolated infant. He has enemies, even before he is two years old. He suffers. He dies. And he flees, a refugee at an early age. All these are pretty human developments.

So let’s open the story of the Flight into Egypt and use it as a mirror to see ourselves.

At first glance, it seems that the story is about Joseph, who apparently does very noble things. But on closer inspection, the story is not about Joseph so much as it is about God. God is a provident God, and has a stake in the well-being of Jesus. And so God communicates through the angel to Joseph in a dream with instructions to take the child and his mother and depart into Egypt. So God is the chief actor in this drama. God is interested in preserving the life of the child.

Do you find it possible to believe that God is every bit as concerned about you as about Jesus? No? I wonder. A week or so before the recent election I was in an airport and needed something to read. A prominent display offered copies of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a memoir that he wrote when a young man just out of law school. I had read his later book, The Audacity of Hope. It is good, but Dreams from My Father is better than good. It is remarkable. Obama tells quite candidly and without varnish the story of his life, the loss of his father from his childhood years, his reluctance to study as a growing boy, his ongoing struggle to make sense of his bi-racial background. He writes frankly of his adolescent escapades, his flirtation with marijuana and alcohol, his desire to be accepted. One can read all that and wonder how he decided on some level to listen to other voices, beckoning him to make something of himself, calling him to spend his energies in organizing the poor to exercise political power, often when they saw no reason to follow his leading. Did Obama believe from the beginning that he had some big destiny? I don’t think so. I think he simply went from one thing to another, keeping an open mind about what he could best do. And we now know where that life has taken him. It would have been quite easy, even sensible, for him to have said when he was sixteen or twenty-one, or thirty-three that his life was “only” another ordinary life, with no particular promise of being distinctive. But it is also possible to see that his is one example of a quite ordinary life in which Providence was actively working. The same thing is true of you. Your life is quite possibly just that significant. You can choose to live as if it is so.

Another thing that we can see is that this “Egypt” into which Joseph flees with child and wife is not at all unlike some of the places that we escape to, fleeing the threats which assault us. Egypt is a mix of things. It offers some protection; it also offers stagnation. It might promise stability, but it also holds the possibility of escape from reality. Israel had gone into Egypt in order to avoid starving in the famine in the land of Canaan. But after generations the promising land had become an installation of slaves. Israel had to make a move to get out of Egypt. In order for the story of Jesus to get on with its purpose, “out of Egypt” God called his “son.” There may be parallels in your life. Is there some place you are hiding? Is there something to which you are called but have not yet found a way to embrace? Is there some form of slavery—perhaps an addiction—that you are holding on to, perhaps believing in a comforting fantasy—but which you would need to be called away from if you are going to be the whole person you are meant to be?

And what about these dreams in the story? God communicates to Joseph through dreams. Before we skirt that as a literary device, maybe we can pause to consider that dreams are in fact the language of God. As crazy as dreams can sometimes be, your dreams will not lie to you. If you pay attention to them, it is quite possible, even likely, that you will begin to connect patterns in your life. Most people need to do that with a practiced guide, either a spiritual director or a psychotherapist. The point is that God frequently mediates the truth to us through quite normal and ordinary means, like dreams, not in smashing signs and wonders that are quite rare and exotic. We can, like Joseph, learn to trust our dreams.

Look, too, at the end of the story. Joseph takes the child and his mother and settles in Nazareth. For Matthew, the importance of this is that he sees it fulfilling a prophecy that has to do with Jesus’ vocation. But in a larger, more general sense, the story’s third movement has to do with an exodus, a coming out of Egypt, and the finding of a new home. Threats are still around—not all the Herodians are dead. For you and me, the trip into Egypt frequently ends in a homecoming. I remember some years ago talking with Russ, a parishioner, on a Sunday morning. How, I asked him, had he come to be a part of the church community. Russ then told me a remarkable story. Having grown up in a good family, he had lost his way, spending some years after his marriage drinking his life away, ultimately winding up seriously drunk and thoroughly depressed. One night Russ put a gun to his temple, and had even begun to put some pressure on the trigger when he heard a voice somewhere within saying, “Not yet.” He put the gun down, drove himself to an AA meeting, which happened to convene in the undercroft of Trinity Church. After going to meetings for several weeks, he would hear the organ being played upstairs. He went to listen. He decided to return. He kept coming, finding his way out of Egypt into a new place, where he ultimately found a new life and started a new family.

The Flight into Egypt has been a favorite theme of paintings, especially in the Renaissance. Some depict the Holy Family in haste. Some imagine them exhausted, greatly tired by the flight. Others pick up on the angel imagery and see Joseph, Mary, and the baby surviving through the ministrations of angels. But none to my knowledge shows them leaving Egypt, but always on their way there. I suppose one could argue that the flight to and from Egypt looks so much the same that it is really impossible to distinguish between the two. But the story of Jesus is that Egypt ultimately ends and it is time to go home and get about growing into manhood. And the story of our “flights into Egypt” are about not staying but leaving eventually. There is ministry to be done, there is life to be lived, there is indeed a story to be told. Maybe there will even be other flights into Egypt for whatever reason, and yet more deliverances in the future.

But the point of it all is that there is, in the end, an exodus. There is a way out, a coming out, a calling forth. Those who sought the child’s life die, and the child has another crack at living. In some sense ministry can begin—that is to say, life can take on some purpose—only after we have left the flight and have begun to be aware that the drama of these ordinary, sometimes dull, frequently unexciting lives of ours are in fact being lived within the embrace of one who both leads us to places where we can survive, and leads us out to sometimes rare occasions to proclaim liberty to other captives and justice to the forces that seek to destroy new life.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

An Unlikely Meeting, and You Are In It

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2008


Christianity involves a meeting of time and eternity. That is the hook on which hangs just about everything we do. It is the key to understanding our sacraments, in which visible pieces of matter—bread, wine, water, oil—become not just the symbols but the conveyors of Spirit. It is true, too, of our worship. What you are experiencing right now is more than a meeting in time. It is deliberately and carefully designed to be a window through which we look at the divine and the divine beholds us. It is in fact what we say about ourselves, which might stretch believability beyond all reason: we say that we are “the Body of Christ,” and we mean that the Christian community is more than the sum total of the individuals who are members of it. We say that the eternal Christ dwells in us and we in him.

We Christians continue to tell the story (and in some cases believe it) that when the Eternal God breaks into time and we earth creatures open ourselves freely to encounter God, suddenly not only time is transcended but so are we. Certainly not in all the world, but in a good chunk of it that includes the society in which we live, people find that a daunting stretch to believe. True, we can suspend our rationalism long enough to read and enjoy the Hogwarts magic of Harry Potter. We can even make room in our world to dazzle little children with stories about tooth fairies. We go so far as to invest a considerable slice of the GNP in “the magic of Christmas” which is Santa Claus. But on the whole, many of us live in a world that carries with it a great sense of despair. We are easily disillusioned and quickly distrustful of anything that sounds too airy-fairy.

Luke’s telling of the Annunciation reminds us that at the very heart of our formative story sits Mystery. For him, it is a story which is a part of a larger narrative about the unqualified uniqueness of Jesus, special from his conception on. Luke’s Jesus flips the whole course of human history. As Mary’s song puts it, God has “scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” That is the theme, Luke proclaims, of the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. None of this is put to a vote, let alone decided on the basis of whether people find it credible or not. Luke presents it as truth, and challenges us to sign on to the movement which still, in his day, was turning the world upside down. If we were to raise the objection, “Wait, Luke, please; we don’t get it; why this story about an annunciation, replete with angel and virgin?” Luke would likely respond, “I’m simply telling you the truth. What is important is not what you make of the angel, or the virgin, but what you make of Jesus.”

So here we have a story, like so many others in the Bible, that stretches post-modern people’s imaginations. We can accept, or dismiss, it as either helpful or unhelpful evidence that Jesus is uniquely important. Or we can step into the story and begin to ride its ripples out to the edges of our consciousness and beyond. What might happen if we chose that second alternative? Might we begin to see that the Mystery is something far past believing, but ultimately life-changing?

The English poet of the last century, Edwin Muir, came across something one day that might give us a clue of what this transcendent thing is about. Muir tells that while he was in Rome as Director of the British Council’s office, he stopped one day to observe a plaque on a house in the Via degli Artisti. He looked for a long time at the image representing the annunciation. An angel and a young girl, their bodies inclined towards each other, their knees bent as if they were overcome by love, ‘tutto tremante,’ gazed upon each other;…and that representation of a human love so intense that it could not reach further, seemed the perfect earthly symbol of the love that passes understanding.” Muir wrote a poem, “The Annunciation,” that grew out of the image he describes. It is about the coming together of time and eternity, the heavenly and the earthly, in a moment that sums up the whole of existence, while just yards away the world keeps going on, oblivious to the sublime encounter of God and humanity. Listen to lines from the poem:

The angel and the girl are met….
See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the others’ face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there.…
…Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way…

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.


This is not quite the biblical story, is it? And yet, it really is the biblical story, poured into a slightly modified image. It is the image of the human being sought out by a love powerful and strong that simply will not let go, a love that is wildly ravishing in its insistence, the love of a God who is totally fascinated with that God’s own creation. It is not incidental that Muir found his own life experience a witness to that love, his own marriage an example of it. “My soul magnifies the Lord.” It is not so far from the trembling that flesh feels for flesh in the deepening rapture in which two human beings stand unmasked to each other.

Yes. Mystery is taking us in two directions at once. It grounds us in our own human experience, in places like kitchens and bedrooms and cemeteries and hospitals, and in moments like forgiveness and love-making and burying the dead and nursing children and feeding the hungry. Simultaneously it transports us to realms that we have no words for and no pictures of, spaces we can only talk in the language of song or poetry, in phrases like “the bright immensities” and “the dayspring from on high.” Time and eternity meet like angel and girl on earth, “the only meeting place,” says Muir. And when they meet, suddenly everything is changed, as if a black-and-white world sprang at once into vibrant color.

What is the meaning of all this? It is tempting to say that we are charged, or at least invited, to be on the lookout for the divine messenger, coming in ordinary moments like birth or death or pain or happiness. And no doubt that is a good idea. We can take our cues from Mary, who through her simple acquiescence to the Spirit of God, becomes the vessel through which the whole cosmos is renewed—an image beautifully written on the icon which has been leading our Advent processions. But the message might be as well that no amount of preparation or openness either bids or forbids the holy approach of the angel to the girl, the coming of eternity into time. We cannot buy it nor rush it nor plan for it nor avoid it. It just is. It happens when it will, sometimes to the most unlikely of people at the most inconvenient of moments.

But in a larger sense there is a response we can make to the Mystery, an action we can take, even a practice in which we can engage. And that is, as one of our best loved hymns puts it, we can “bow in humble adoration,” acknowledging that the Lord of Love liberates us from being trapped in our own limited time, with its familiar but ultimately inadequate categories where everything gets neatly pigeon-holed. The God that moves towards Mary with a message of gloriously impossible news is the God that is loose in your life this very minute, with the startling idea that you are an instrument of shockingly good things.

Stranger things have happened.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2008
notes:

permission not granted to print "The Annunciation" by Edwin Muir. See D. M. Allchin, The Joy of All Creation (Cowley, 1984), p. 130. Also P. H. Butter, ed. Selected Letters of Edwin Muir (London: Hogarth, 1974), p. 154.

Rescuing Advent, Somewhat Differently This Time

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 2008

“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day…. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief…” 2 Peter 3:8-15a

Maybe the reason that cultural Christmas has elbowed Advent right out to the sidelines of Christian consciousness is that Advent, after all is said and done, is just too hard to deal with. If you really hear the message, such as that in the Second Epistle of Peter today, Advent just seems so, so, well, inconvenient.

Advent is mostly about the end time. That made a good deal of sense to folks in the 6th century who thought there ought to be a season to ponder the coming again of Christ in power and great glory. They had a working notion of judgment, and believed that it might behoove them to get ready for the Day by that name. We, on the other hand, don’t much care for the topic of judgment. Even though we hear sermons on how judgment is a good idea once or twice a year, we are largely unmoved, preferring instead to dwell on kindlier matters, such as forgiveness, love, and peace.

I used to jump up and down about Advent, it being pretty close to my favorite of all seasons. I wanted to protect it from the encroachments of Christmas carols and Santas and reindeer and prematurely born Baby Jesuses. I insisted that our family follow the custom of putting up the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, and not a bit sooner. Many years I even waited to do my shopping until Christmas Eve, just hours before the 4:00 pageant, which, of course, occurred on Christmas Eve where it belonged, rather than to one of the Advent Sundays in earlier December. But I have begun to rethink Advent. Maybe it is just battle fatigue, but I find it of dubious worth to continue to preach something that folks have a hard time even remembering by the time they get to coffee hour, so strange it is to their ears and lives.

Now, by no means do I intend to suggest that Advent has no message at all worth hearing or believing. I simply have a quandary on my hands, not in knowing what Advent is about, but in finding out how it connects with the lives we are living in the 21st century. So, as the queen said to Alice in Wonderland, I will begin at the beginning, there being no better place to start. And the beginning is in the Early Church, long before there was anything like a season of Advent or even a celebration of Christmas, for that matter. You can get a glimpse of what was on the minds of Christians towards the end of the first century by reading the Second Letter of Peter again, for example. “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Well said. But fudging the issue just a little. Truth to tell, Christians were perplexed, upset even, that the long awaited return of Jesus Christ had not happened. The first generation was dying out, and perhaps by the time of Second Peter, the second or third were following them. Somehow it had not happened as they had planned. If Jesus, as the gospels sometimes suggest, had predicted his coming again, then he was clearly wrong, or had a weird sense of timing. If, on the other hand, the church had invented the notion, then clearly the Church was wide of the mark. So the author of Second Peter seems to be saying that the idea is right but that the Church’s perception of God’s time is all messed up. You can’t, he says, be going around thinking of the eternal in finite, human terms. Good point. But still he argues that the great and awesome Day of the Lord will indeed come—like a thief in the night, when you wish you had left the lights on and stayed awake for your own safety’s sake.

Give him credit. This author is not inventing this stuff. The notion of the great and terrible Day of the Lord had been around for centuries. It was Israel’s idea that there would be a day when God would intervene in history, both to redeem and to judge, to liberate and to condemn. The prophets had issued stern warnings, as our collect today reminds us, for the people to forsake their sins, because, all things considered, the Day of the Lord was not in fact a day to picnic, but a Day of “clouds and thick darkness,” according to Joel, and, according to Amos, “a day of gloom with no light in it.” Christians—who of course were themselves Jewish in the beginning—had taken the old Day of the Lord idea and transferred it to the Day of Christ, associating it with the final showdown between the living, resurrected Jesus and the forces of evil. If, of course, you are opposed to evil and consider yourself something of a victim of it, you just can’t wait for the Day of the Lord. If, on the other hand, you suspect that you won’t come off all that well in the last battle, you probably begin nixing the idea as preposterous to begin with, saying, as some of Second Peter’s crowd asked, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Our ancestors died, and life goes on the way it always has since the beginning of creation.’” In other words, let’s get serious: there is no such thing.

The author of Second Peter follows the prophetic pattern in telling his hearers to shape up, to lead lives of holiness and godliness, so as to be found at peace when the Day of the Lord dawns and Christ comes again. And that is largely what the function of the Judgment Day idea has been: whip up people’s imaginations (Second Peter does it with images of the earth burning up and the heavens going out with a bang) and put the fear of God in them so that they will behave. If you think this idea is completely out-of-service these days, I suggest you look at the way that Santa Claus is frequently the bearer of the imagery of the mysterious one who comes like a thief in the night (right down your chimney, even if you don’t have one) and for that coming you’d better watch out, you’d better not pout, better not cry, I’m telling you why… Same thing. It actually used to work for neurotically good little children like me. I wanted to be on the side of the nice rather than the naughty.

Is this an adequate basis for good behavior, this notion that Jesus will come again and judge the living and the dead? Some would say yes, and I suppose if it works, then leave it alone. But am I willing to be good only because I think it will get me a pass on Judgment Day? Hardly. And I doubt that you are. Maybe there is an alternative. Maybe the real motivation for being holy, for being Christ-like, is that it actually is liberating, fulfilling, even rewarding to do so. Looking for a moment at the whole matter from an evolutionary perspective, we can see that human beings are perfectly capable of acting like reptiles on some occasions, like furry mammals on others, and like our primate cousins quite frequently. But we are also capable of responding to a higher sense of purpose. We are able to make conscious sacrifices for the common good. We can choose to give without expecting anything in return. We can spend our energies actually doing things that don’t serve only our own interests but rather the interests of others. We can even, unlike most species, take a longer view of things and wind up exercising love and compassion for our enemies, which is totally counter-intuitive. The jury is out on the question of whether we are evolving in the direction of sharing rather than hoarding, of cooperating rather than competing. But it is fairly clear that these are the abilities that will enable us to survive rather than perish on this planet. And, when we behave in these ways, loving our neighbors as ourselves, we are in fact living out our baptismal vocation to let the Christ light shine through us. “As many as are baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia.” And if you don’t think that we can garner much encouragement from the evolutionary process, then perhaps the prophecy of Isaiah suggests that something more drastic can happen: every valley will be exalted and every mountain and hill be made low in a great and radical shift from oppressive behavior to liberating action.

Is there any use, then, in retaining an idea of the Day of the Lord, if its usefulness is not primarily to make us behave? What might happen, for example, if we were to take the Day of the Lord to mean not a showdown but a thorough healing of the world’s pain and sickness? What if we were to see that our efforts to promote peace were altogether about a refashioning of the way people relate to each other? What if we went to work during these next four years trying to make health care a reality for everyone because we were motivated by the vision of a future that Christ the Healer was opening up, a future more nearly free of disease and fear? What if our motivation for stamping out poverty and hunger through meeting the Millennium Development Goals was the picture of what life on earth could be were we to live as children of one family? You can call it by lots of names. But if you happen to be in the biblical tradition, the name you could call that future is “The Day of the Lord.” It has to do with justice and truth, and as today’s psalm imagines it, with righteousness and peace kissing each other.

I think we’re on our way. I read it between the headlines of doom and underneath the dismal reports of the stock market. I see it in the distance, coming as surely as the winter snows and as clearly as the return of the light of spring. Sometimes our poets and songwriters grab it out of the air, or our children express it in their art, as in the quilt that hangs in our chapel. Nowhere is it more eloquently expressed than in the finale to Les Miserables:

Do you hear the people sing,
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies,
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.

They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord,
They will walk behind the plough-share,
They will put away the sword,
The chain will be broken
And all men shall have their reward!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!


Tomorrow, or the Day of the Lord, may not come like a thief in the night; but neither will it come on January 20 when Barack Obama is President of the United States. Because the Day of the Lord is not about Barack Obama, and he knows it. It is about how we roll up our sleeves (Obama is calling us to that!) and dig in to make this a more just society, indeed a more holy society taking on the character of the Just and Holy One. It is about making change more than a slogan and a leader more than a fixer. Getting that right and doing that truth will make Advent the reality we’ve all been waiting for.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2008

Saints: Human Beings Fully Alive

Practicing the Imitation of Christ:

If You Were Fully Alive What Would You Be?

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, November 2, 2008



Many people don’t want to be saints. And many saints never much wanted to be human beings. So thought George Orwell, British novelist and essayist of the last century. That doesn’t square with the lore of Episcopal All Saints celebrations and their accompanying theology. We sing with great gusto, “They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one, too.”

So what is going on here? There are several differing, if not conflicting, meanings of sainthood. First, there is that basic definition that comes straight out of the New Testament: the saints, “the holy ones” are all the People of God, without distinction. Then, there is the use of saint to denote a exemplar of Christian life. And finally, there is the sense in which a saint is one who has passed even beyond the level of model or example to become a miracle-worker. Clearly in that sense, or even in the second, not all of us are saints. Furthermore, one does not get to be a saint by “intending” to be one. Sainthood is a gift, not an achievement.

I would like to propose a different way of thinking about sainthood—not necessarily original, mind you, but different from any of those ways. I propose that we entertain the possibility that sainthood, or saintliness, is something that is indeed a gift but one which cannot be fully realized unless and until it is practiced. What would happen, for example, if we thought of sanctity or saintliness as a gift such as playing a musical instrument, or sewing, or designing, or playing basketball, or dancing? We might see, first, that there are all kinds of forms of saintliness—not just one kind. And we might come to understand that while saintliness starts off and ends up being a gift, still it is a gift which gets better and better the more we put effort into it, much as the gift of sewing or of dancing or of playing the flute improves—and becomes recognizably a talent—the more we practice.

Those of you who have followed my preaching since July (don’t break my heart and tell me you haven’t noticed!) will recognize the theme song: Christian practices. We have now looked up close at discernment, proclamation, creating community, repentance, stewardship, love of God and neighbor as practices that Christians do in living the Christian life. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Each of these practices involves specific actions that we take in order to cultivate one or more specific virtues. Today is the climax of the series, although hardly the end of the exploration of Christian practices. Sainthood—being a saint—and its chief identifying mark, saintliness or sanctity—is exactly what the Christian life is about. It is about that gift of God’s life, eternal life, that is given to each of us in our baptism, which we take and practice and practice and practice so that we may become artists of the holy. To say the same thing another way, sanctity is the key virtue that we are perfecting through living the Christian life.

Now if I were a seeker, as some of you are, who was by no means certain about all this Christian life stuff, I would start fidgeting about now. I would not be too sure that this sanctity business was for me. Like Billy Joel, I might be singing, “They say there's a heaven for those who will wait. Some say it's better, but I say it ain't. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Sinners are much more fun...” Sanctity has an appeal, as Orwell suggested, to those who really aren’t much interested in being human. But how many of you would fall into that category? Am I marketing something here for which there is no real market? Sanctity? Saintliness?

Then there is a further objection that will be lobbed my way from those who are theologically astute. “Works, works, works!” they will shout. “He’s selling salvation by works. We know better. It only comes by faith.” All right, both of you have me. So let me deal with both of you, one at a time.

Second objection first. The whole process of being a saint is in fact about living out our faith. But, as much as Luther despised the Epistle of James as “right strawy,” still I think James had it right when he said faith without works is dead. So we’re not talking here about “winning salvation” or “going to heaven when we die” or any of that. We are talking about living out our faith, living out our relationship with Jesus Christ. And the way we do that is in concrete actions. Hold your horses while I answer the seekers.

Seekers, don’t be afraid of the concept of saintliness or sanctity. Because much to perhaps your surprise, it is not opposed to your being fully human. Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the Early Church’s prominent theologians, wrote, “The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Bingo. That is a great definition of sainthood: a fully alive human being. The heart of holiness, the center of saintliness, is being authentic. How do we know that? Well, that brings us to the heart of the practice at hand.

And the practice is what I call the imitation of Christ. In the book by that title, Thomas a Kempis laid out some ideas, one of which was to distrust the human intellect. In all due respect, that is not what I am talking about. I am rather speaking of following the pattern of Jesus’ life as it is set forth in the gospels. His is at once the quintessential spirit-filled life and also the prime example of an authentic life. There is nothing phony or hokey about Jesus’ life. Thus, to “imitate” him means that we cannot be phony or hokey either. To follow what the Prayer Book calls “his example in all virtuous and godly living” is not to be cheap plastic imitations of Jesus but lives styled on the model of his.

Let me pause to say both a good word and a word of caution about the recently popular notion of WWJD, “What Would Jesus Do?” On the one hand, it is not a bad idea for Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?” It might well expose much of what we are up to as quite hostile to Jesus’ way of life. War, environmental damage, and investing money quickly come to mind as things that seem quite foreign to Jesus’ life. And that is the word of caution. Trying to live as a first century Jew in the Roman Empire is not an option for many people on the planet today. WWJD? is a question that sometimes must honestly be answered, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

But there is in fact a series of actions in which the practice of the imitation of Christ consists. One could comprise lots of lists, some short and some long. I can’t think of a better one than the beatitudes from Matthew’s gospel which we hear today. They describe a series of steps that progressively lead to a practice of the kind of life that we see Jesus living on the pages of the gospels. Being “poor in spirit” describes that fundamental receptivity and openness to growth that is the opposite of pride and hunger for power. Being able to mourn may not sound like a gift, but in fact it is the capacity to feel genuine sorrow that is integral to being human. Showing mercy, hungering and thirsting after justice, the meekness exhibited in showing kindness and consideration, humility, purity and singleness of heart, making peace where there is discord: all of these are actions that accord with Jesus’ life. What is more they are possible for any human being. Not that they come naturally—that is the point: they have to be practiced!

Notice that the beatitudes end with a teaching about being persecuted. In Matthew’s day, as in our own, it is not infrequent that practicing the Christian life is a guaranteed way to make one quite unpopular with the surrounding crowd. Saints tend to irritate people, who generally experience them as cranky. That is why so few people get genuinely excited about being one. It is counter-cultural and counter-intuitive. And, in some circumstances—running for public office comes to mind—there are occasions when one is apt to be thoroughly trashed, if not killed outright, for speaking unpopular truth. All Saints Day never lets us forget that a great many of our models and exemplars are those who have had their white robes washed in blood, so threatening was their witness to and against the established order. If you are not willing to run that kind of risk, then it is fair to ask if the Christian life is something you are very much interested in after all.

One of my favorite stories by one of my favorite authors is “The Great Stone Face,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The young boy Ernest learns from his mother the legend of the great stone face, cut by the elements into the side of a mountain that overlooks their valley. Some day a person will come to resemble the great stone face. Various ones apparently do, but disappointingly fail to portray some quality of the great face—its warmth, its smile, its honor. Ernest grows up and grows old, spending his life meditating on the great stone face until finally his fellow townspeople see that Ernest himself reflects the great face. In becoming himself, he has become the long-sought likeness of the face. Even then, Ernest continues to watch for someone greater still who would by and by appear, bearing a better resemblance to the Great Stone Face. That is a parable of what the practice of sainthood is like. We mediate and emulate and gaze upon Christ the model to such an extent that we begin, quite unconsciously, exhibiting the qualities of the one who is our model. Ironically, the better we do it, the less preoccupied we are with ourselves. It really is not about us, after all. It is about the Great God, the fountain of all being, whose life and love are what the saints practice and practice and practice till they are lost in wonder, love, and praise. In a sense, nothing is left but God alone. But in another sense, the glory of God is finally realized when, one by one, human persons become fully themselves, fully alive.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2008