Lent
3B 2015
Father Adam Trambley
March 8, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
“Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” In the Gospel today, Jesus comes into the
Temple and sees people selling animals for sacrifices and profiting by changing
the people’s Roman coins for ones without images on them. Jesus saw people using people to get
things. As Jesus’ disciples, we are
supposed to use things to get people.
Our prayer focus this week is for God’s transformation of
our communities. Our Seek God for the City prayer booklets
(which you can find near the entrances if you don’t already have one) have us
praying for devastated cities to be restored, for injustice to be turned to
generosity, for the lifting up of the poor in our communities, for a turning
aside from violence, and for God’s truth and justice and righteousness to fill
our communities. Among other ways, we
can pray for the transformation of our communities using these Lenten booklets
or by joining together on Thursday at 5:15 at the Sharon High School Parking
lot. Last week a half dozen people
prayed at the Sharon Municipal Building in what felt like a powerful time of
prayer.
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| Where we prayed last week (only with less green and more snow) |
To look at some ways that God is transforming people and
communities, I want to unpack what it means to use things to get people and
then share two stories about ways that God is using his Church as an agent of
transformation.
If we think about a basic marketplace, the focus is using
people to get things. Sellers are using
the people coming in to make money, while buyers are using sellers to acquire
goods and services. Sellers raise prices
as high as they can and buyers try to cut deals. Throughout much of history, and in many
places today, even people are bought and sold as commodities. When Jesus showed up in Jerusalem, the people
in the Temple were using the faithful coming to worship as a way to make as
much money as they could. Jesus didn’t
want them using his people to get things, so he drove out the animals and
poured the coins on the floor. The one
exception was the people selling doves, whom he told to take the animals
outside. Jesus was mad, but still practical
enough not to open the cages of dozens of pigeons inside the temple.
Instead of using people to get things, we are called to use
things to get people and bring those people into a relationship with Jesus
Christ and his church. All that we have
are tools to do the work of the gospel.
We have a beautiful worship space not because we need it or are entitled
to it, but because when we use it correctly, people can come in and experience
a deeper relationship with God. We give
a “thank you” to Laura Peretic and Bob Verholek and Katherine Huff who have
been painting and rehabbing the carillon room so that as people come into the
entryway to the sanctuary, they are already entering an environment that says
something about God, our care for his worship, and our care for those coming to
worship. The use of all of facilities for
ECS, for the lunches, for AA, and for a variety of other community meetings,
and the care we take in keeping them up, comes out of the same call. We are going to use what we have to bring
people in, not bring people in to raise money to support what we have. We do need resources for ministry, but we
trust God to provide those resources as we invite people to partner with us in his
work and bring them into our community.
Trust me, the world can tell the difference between a church that shows
up to make a buck like a carnival vendor and a church that shows up because
they love people and want to reach out to them.
The ways in which people in our community want to partner with us tells
us that they see us as bringing what we have to love them instead of using them
to get more things. The fact that people
keep visiting and finding God here is also a testament to our primary desire to
love the people we encounter and help them as best we can to meet their needs
and to find God.
Let me share a couple of other examples of a church using
what it has to reach people. The firsthappened in Bradford, PA. On February
23, a 24-inch water main broke, emptying the five million gallons of water in
the city’s two reserve tanks onto the Bradford campus of the University of
Pittsburgh. The city had no water for
about two days. Over 18,000 people were
affected. Supplies of bottled water ran
out, and the only way to flush toilets was with melted snow.
On Thursdays, the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in
Bradford serves a free soup lunch.
Without water, however, it is hard to make soup. So Deacon Gail Winslow made one of his famous
soups in Warren and drove it over thirty miles to Bradford, while others
brought in bread, fruit and cookies.
Volunteers drove in from other communities with bottled water for coffee
and tea, and were even able to give bottles to the guests to take home. Instead of serving 40 people that day, they
served 60, including both those struggling economically and the Kiwanis club
that probably couldn’t meet anywhere else.
A great story, even if it ended there.
But the story continues.
Given the total lack of water, and the conservation restrictions and
need to boil water to use it for days even after initial service was restored,
almost everything in Bradford was closed for about a week. Schools, businesses, factories, day cares,
and restaurants – even McDonalds – were forced to shut their doors. While such a shutdown was inconvenient for
many, for hourly-wage workers it meant that they lost about a quarter of their
monthly income. Again, the Episcopal
Church decided to step in and help.
Mother Stacey, the rector of Church of the Ascension, talked with
Episcopal Relief and Development. We
know ERD, and have donated to them as church at various times in the past. ERD is giving Church of the Ascension a grant
for between $8-10,000 as income replacement for hourly-wage workers in the
community who haven’t been able to work during this crisis. The Episcopal Church is making sure that
people who couldn’t shower for a week are still able to pay their rent, make
their car payments, feed their children and afford their medication. Use things to win people.
The second example is from Operation Capital City. Operation Capital City is a ministry begun by
Pastor Carol Missik that initially went to all thirty-two capitals of the
states in Mexico and brought local pastors together to pray. After that initial work was completed, OCC has
hosted conferences in Mexico and taken pastors to pray in Central and South
America. I have been on two mission
trips with OCC, and they have used Allen Hall for their annual meeting a couple
times. This summer, OCC is sponsoring a
special international bus trip for pastors from the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
Part of what makes this particular trip so exciting is the
way it is equipping the saints for ministry.
In Mexico, there is a saying, “somos
pobres,” which means “we are poor.”
This attitude of poverty was thrust upon the native people as nominally-Christian
Spanish conquistadors came and stripped the country of most of its wealth. This mindset continues as Mexico relates to
its wealthy northern neighbor, and it has been reinforced by the attitudes of
many North American missionaries over the years that have been happy to bring
their money and their gifts in return for a church mission that is entirely
dependent on the resources and leadership of their gringo mother church. Somos
pobres means that even the churches believed that they needed to use people
from other churches to get the things they needed, and that they didn’t have
enough themselves to dedicate to mission and ministry. Operation Capital City has come and said, “No mas ‘somos pobres’” – “no more, ‘we
are poor’.” Instead Mexico can be a
driver of mission to the rest of the world, especially to Central and South
America, and to places like the Middle East that are more accessible to Mexicans
than to those from the United States.
OCC is sponsoring a bus trip for pastors in a region of
Mexico where most folks are descended from the Mayans. You may remember the Mayans – somebody
misread their calendar a few years back and decided the world would end in
2012. From about 250-900 AD the Mayans
were one of the world’s most advanced civilizations, and maintained a high
degree of learning and wealth until the arrival of the Spanish. Mayan religious practices were not as
enlightened as their astronomy, however.
In ancient times, human sacrifice was practiced. Even today, pagan superstitions are too often
part of the area’s culture and dark magic is practiced in some of the mountains
of Mayan areas.
From June 23 to July 4 this summer, a couple busloads of
Christian pastors descended from the Mayans are going to go pray to bring
Christ’s light into many traditional Mayan areas. Beginning in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico,
they will drive through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. A couple times a day, they will stop in some
community and over a hundred pastors will jump off the buses and go throughout
the area praying for everyone and everything they can find. Then they’ll get back on the bus and go to
the next town. They will experience
themselves not as poor, but as people with important gifts to offer those in
their communities and even in other countries.
They will see God show up and perform miracles, because God always shows
up and does miracles when that many people from a variety of churches and
denominations dedicate two weeks of their time to pray for God to do amazing
things for other people. They will be
praying for God to transform their communities, and I have no doubt that God
will be doing some serious transforming.
The Mexican Mayan pastors will be learning what the people
of Ascension Episcopal Church in Bradford have learned and what we at St.
John’s have come to know. We are not
poor. We don’t need to use people to get
things. Instead, we can use our abundant
blessings to let people feel the extravagant love of God and to enter a
relationship with his Son, Jesus.
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