It is too light a thing...

                                                           Diocesan Convention 2014

                                       Isaiah 49:5-13; Ps 67; Eph. 3:1-12; Matt 28:16-20

Father Adam Trambley

November 7, 2014, St.John’s Sharon
(Sermon text is below the 12-minute video.)

Today’s readings are taken from the propers for the Mission of the Church.  These lessons are meant to be inspirational texts for auspicious occasions like this one, when we talk about going out to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  But things are never quite that rosy.  While the eleven disciples are on the mountain with their resurrected Lord Jesus, some doubted.  Paul’s letters, filled with soaring theology and missionary zeal, always seem to come in the midst of some heinous church conflict or other.  If the guy ever just sent his churches some feel-good Valentine’s Day cards -- you know, Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Jesus loves you, I do too, and here's some candy -- we don’t have them.  And when we come to today’s Isaiah reading, we pick it up on the upswing of a conversation already in progress.

In the previous chapter of Isaiah, God has called the people of Israel back from their exile.  They are to leave Babylon shouting for joy. Then at the beginning of chapter 49, the Lord calls his servant, who is presumably the one who would have been leading the people home, proclaiming the word of the Lord to them and glorifying God with them.  But somewhere along the line, it didn’t quite work out that way.  In verse four, right before our reading tonight begins, the prophet cries,

“I have labored in vain,

I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;”

And then, “yet..my reward [is] with my God.”

Sounds like he’s already waiting for his final reward.

Maybe somebody here tonight feels the same way God’s prophet did.  Maybe somebody felt a call to proclaim God’s good news and change lives and make a difference, and now sees fewer and fewer people in the pews and feels like they’ve spent their strength.  Maybe somebody worked tirelessly for their congregation, a congregation that now can’t keep the building up and doesn’t have any children in Sunday school, and now feels like they have labored in vain.  Maybe somebody gave sacrificially for years and wore out the kneeler in their pew, and now looks around at where things are and thinks it was all for nothing.   Maybe somebody here tonight feels just the like prophet did when he says, “my reward [is] with my God” -- that you’ve fought the good fight, finished as much of the race as you are going to get to, and just hope for that “well done good and faithful servant” after a nice funeral from the Book of Common Prayer.

The prophet knew how you feel.  He didn’t feel like he had succeeded in bringing Jacob back to God or gathering Israel together before the Lord.  The people weren’t showing up for Sabbath Worship, the buildings hadn’t been maintained since they were taken into exile seventy years ago, and the kids were all too busy playing on their iPapyrus game systems to memorize the Ten Commandments.  So he complains to God and says he gives up.

God listens and responds.  The Almighty says,

“It is too light a thing

that you should be my servant

To raise up the tribes of Jacob

And to restore the survivors of Israel;

I will give you as a light to the nations,

That my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Say, what?  The man just said he can’t handle the job with Israel, so God said you’re going to light up the world.  Sometimes people refer to that as “kicking a problem upstairs,” and it doesn’t generally work.  Jesus may never have had an MBA, but surely the God of all wisdom would know better.  Well, God knows better.  God knows that we never succeed in anything important if our vision is too small.  God knows that we can never lift people up unless we are lifting them up for something beyond themselves.  And God knows that we can never restore anyone to anything unless we give them enough light to shine onto others.  God knows it is too light a thing to raise up Jacob and restore Israel when the real work is to give light to the nations and let salvation reach to the ends of the earth.

God’s answer is the same to us when we are tired and worn down and giving up because somehow our congregational life isn’t all that it used to be or what we want it to be or what we believe it should to be.  It is too light a thing merely to raise up our Sunday morning tribe and restore those who used to be there.  I will give you as a light to the nations, says the Lord, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth. 

   

This commission may seem overwhelming, but the churches in this diocese are living into it, even in the midst of all the challenges we face.

Because it is too light a thing just to serve our members’ children, some of our churches have started pre-schools for the community.  Others give books at the holidays, or work with tutoring programs, or pack boxes of needed supplies to young’ins in other countries.

Because it is too light a thing just to bless the water we mix with the Eucharistic wine, some of our churches have drilled wells in arid lands so that people have enough to drink.  Others have provided food or animals or other basic necessities to those in need in far away places.

Because it is too light a thing just to have fellowship with one another at coffee hour, some of our churches sponsor community dinners where people sit down for a meal together and share stories and get to know each other and pray for one another.

Because it is too light a thing just to turn the basement keys over to a twelve-step group leader, one congregation has started a weekly Service of Evening Prayer and a Bible study for addicts and another congregation is helping those from a local half-way house find jobs and housing.

Because it is too light a thing just to pray for those we know, some of our congregations sponsor healing services for the community, others have prayer groups, Daughters of the King chapters, or intercessory teams, and many individuals go to their closets and pray fervently in secret for the needs of the church and the world, including for those who are not yet Christian.

Because it is too light a thing just to worry about the church in this corner of the Kingdom, this Diocese has a history of sending people out who have preached the gospel to different nations, tribes and tongues, and we have to commit to it once again.  After serving St. John’s in 1866, Deacon Hayward went to the Seneca Indians and got the Bible translated into their language.  After building the first Cathedral structure, John Franklin Spalding became missionary bishop of Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico in 1873, and his son Franklin Spencer Spalding followed his footsteps, becoming the mission bishop of Utah in 1904.   In the late 1930’s Miss Sarah True of Erie worked as a missionary in Liberia and died of malaria there while spreading the gospel.    

We can still bring light to the world, even today, from our homes in Northwestern Pennsylvania.  A local missionary from Hermitage has worked in Mexico for years, and is now raising up Mexican pastors and missionaries to go out to parts of the world where they can be more effective than tall, blond Americans.  A pastor from north of Pittsburgh started prayer-walking in unchurched areas and now has prayer centers and orphanages and medical facilities throughout Southeast Asia.  Of course they are evangelical charismatics, but there is no reason we can’t once again take the good news to the nations as Episcopalians from the Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania.  This call to go out to the nations is, after all, the Great Commission, and we delude ourselves if we think our congregations can hope to be lifted up and restored without seriously engaging evangelism to the nations.  We can struggle mightily to rebuild our own churches, but God’s answer remains that it is too light a thing just to restore your own enterprise.  God says, I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

This evening, our service is about the Mission of the Church, that awesome call to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  Our Diocese has a particular, God-ordained role to play in that mission, and so does every congregation and every person here tonight.  Anything less would just be too light a thing.   

For more information about what happened at our 2014 Diocesan Convention go to http://dionwpa.org/#/news-events/diocesan-convention-2014 .  

Moses, the Servant of the Lord, Died

                                                                Proper 25A 2014

                         Deut 34:1-12; Psalm 90;1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

Father Adam Trambley

Oct 26, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

From this morning’s lesson from Deuteronomy: Then Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, at the LORD’s command.

The Book of Common Prayer actually instructs Episcopal priests to talk about the practical aspects of dying and end of life planning at least once a year, and this reading about Moses’ death is, I think, an excellent model for how we temporally prepare for our own deaths, as well as deal with the deaths of those we love.

The first point to make is, of course, that Moses died.  Moses, the man who got the Ten Commandments, whom God used to perform powerful works in Egypt and in the desert, and who saw God face-to-face, this man Moses died.  Scripture tries to explain why in different ways – that Moses did something that displeased God, that the Israelites sinned so much that their leader was indirectly punished, or, as it says here rather straightforwardly, at the LORD’s command.  We should hesitate to assign specific reasons or causes to any particular death, as if we were some metaphysical coroner.  On the grandest human scale, death comes as a result of collective human sin, but any particular death is taken most straightforwardly as just something coming at God’s command.  We do best dealing with death as something that happened, not something we can figure out or claim to understand.

When Moses died, he saw the Promised Land, but he could not enter it.  All of us die in the midst of our work, or at least we do if we have imagined the scope of our work appropriately.  No one has ever spent all the time they want to with their grandchildren, or ensured the success of their business for the next hundred years, or eliminated hunger, or saved the environment, or completed the perfect work of art, or evangelized the Shenango Valley, or even finally cut the grass so that it doesn’t get out of control again in two weeks.  If we have an imagination and vision, we can see where our godly passions are taking us, but we won’t finally get there.  And that’s OK.  Moses didn’t get there either, although he spent forty years struggling for it.  As the Talmud, a book of Jewish teachings states, “We are not required to complete our work, but we are not at liberty to quit.”

Then Deuteronomy tells us that Moses was buried, but no one knows where he is buried, and that the people mourned for him until the mourning period was ended.  Here scripture is talking to us about letting go appropriately of those who have died.  God didn’t want anyone to know where Moses was buried because they would have kept coming back and building shrines, and some folks would have stayed to form the Moses Memorial Society and make a living selling tchotchkes to tourists.  That is not what God wanted.  Nor was it what Moses would have wanted.   Moses wanted people to follow God’s commands and live their lives in the Promised Land, and they couldn’t do that if they kept looking backwards.  Certainly Moses is still remembered and honored three thousand years later.  But he is honored by remembering what God did for him and living into the blessings God provided through him.  We move forward in the direction God pointed through Moses instead of being tied to where he physically stopped.

This moving on could happen because people actually stopped and mourned.  They sat with the hole in their lives where Moses had been.  They stared into it.  They watered it with their tears as their laments and their songs and their stories and their anger bounced around in that void.  Then, when the mourning period was over, they had made friends with that emptiness.  They still didn’t like it.  The loss may still have often been painful.  But they were ready to move on and allow the hole in their lives to exist until God filled parts of it in new ways.

Too often today, we stay stuck after a death because we don’t actually mourn.  We don’t make space and time at a death to become comfortable with the new empty space in our lives.  Instead we keep running back to the proverbial grave.  Rather than allowing ourselves to move into the Promised Land our loved ones were striving for, we refuse to go forward and live our lives without them.

I wish I were making this up.

The line between appropriate remembrance and being tied to the past is always difficult to navigate, but a few things have become common that seem unhelpful.  One trend is tattooing the names of deceased loved ones on our bodies.  The Old Testament actually forbids this.  Our bodies are meant for God’s future work, not as a plaque for the deceased.  These tattoos are almost always done out of love, but they can still interfere with the spiritual work of moving forward.  Another increasing trend is for people to keep the ashes of someone who has been cremated with them in their house, or even in jewelry they wear, or, perhaps most grotesquely, in stuffed animals with special compartments for the cremains.  We are meant to bury or inter the bodies or ashes of the deceased with honor.  Holding onto remains in places not consecrated for that purpose both keeps us from the work we have to do in the future and dishonors the remains of the deceased.

Of course, Moses has done his part in helping the people move on by preparing them.  Once the mourning period is over, the people are ready to follow Joshua, son of Nun.  The people are ready to follow Joshua for two reasons.  First, Moses has made his wishes clear that Joshua is to take his place by publicly laying his hands on Joshua.  Second, Moses has prepared Joshua for the job. 

Now we may not go around laying hands on people or pouring oil on their heads as we are preparing to die, but we have ways in our culture of making our wishes clear for how our legacy is to be carried on.  We may not have leadership of a people to pass on, but we may have money or property or the care of minor children or health care decisions when we are no longer able to make them or any number of other responsibilities and blessings to bestow.  Making our wishes on all of these matters clear before we die is essential if we want to help those after us move on cleanly.  Now this can be difficult.  Who knows how many people were in the back of the crowd when Moses laid his hand on Joshua, muttering, “I should have been the next guy not this stupid Joshua dude.”  Our duty is to make sure everyone is clear about what we want, and then to write it down in the appropriate legal documents.  We should write documents like wills and health care durable powers of attorney and living wills and whatever else the lawyers recommend.  If we don’t, we may place an unconscionable burden on our heirs.  But once we have written them, we also need to share them, so that there are no surprises or fights after the fact.  Let someone make peace with the fact that they aren’t getting the house before mom dies, so they don’t have to deal with both issues at the same time.  Make sure that no one in the family is surprised at a conference table with the doctor and other family members during a health care crisis.  We need to lay our proverbial hands on the people we want to make the decisions when we won’t be able to, and we need to tell them what decisions we want made, and hopefully those decisions are what we feel the Lord is calling us to do, just like the commands Moses gave to Joshua. 

I want to take a small detour here and just remind folks that it is entirely appropriate to include the church in any estate planning or will you might be doing.   Allen Hall would not have been built, and our operating budget would not be sustainable except for the generosity of people who have left a portion of their estates, large or small, to St. John’s.  Some people leave whatever they can, some people choose to leave 10 percent of their estate as a final tithe, and some people decide to endow their pledge in perpetuity, multiplying their pledge by twenty so that every year the church can use five percent of their bequest to have support in perpetuity.  If you have any questions about how to include St. John’s in your wills, including how to make gifts of stock or real estate, please let me know and I can answer those questions.  This concludes the word from this morning’s sponsor.

The last point I want to make about Moses and Joshua is that Moses prepared Joshua to carry on his work.  Moses gave Joshua important jobs, like scouting out the land of Canaan.  He took him along on important trips, like up the mountain when he received the Ten Commandments.  Granted, Joshua could only go part of the way up, but it still was leadership training.  Moses spent time with Joshua and ensured he was ready. 

We do our own training in different ways, but if we do it right, we are ready to pass on our mission and purpose.  Maybe we let our children host holiday dinners that we used to do so that they are ready for the next generation of family gatherings.  Maybe we mentor someone professionally so our trade is passed on.  Maybe we share the gospel with someone or invite someone to church or to a ministry so that the work we think is important continues.  Maybe we just make sure that those who will make decisions once we are gone are prepared to make the right decisions.  Also worth noting here is that Moses passed on his leadership to someone who wasn’t his own child.  Some things we might anoint a family member to do, but some things, especially our work outside our families, may go to those outside the family, and that is OK.

You may remember that the last speech Martin Luther King, Jr., gave before he died talked about this passage from Deuteronomy.  Dr. King said he has seen the Promised Land, and that he wasn’t going to get there but that others would.  He laid out his vision, he prepared others to do the work once he was gone, and we all now live in a society that is much more color-blind than when Brother Martin was alive.    

Moses, the servant of the LORD, died.  Someday, unless Jesus comes back real soon, we will all die, too.  Our deaths will come before we’ve gotten to our own promised land, but if we prepare properly, our deaths can help those who come after us get where they need to go.  They can leave us and move closer to the Promised Land in this life, while we leave them for a time and enter the Promised Land of eternal life. 

Believe and Prepare

Proper 24A 2014

Exodus 33; Psalm 99; 1Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

Father Adam Trambley

October 19, 2014

St.John’s Sharon

Believe and Prepare.

In the Exodus reading this morning, Moses is on the Mountain talking to the Lord.  Things have been rocky lately.  The Israelites got out of Egypt across the Red Sea.  They’ve seen God act in awesome ways.  Then they’ve grumbled about any number of details, and God come through with manna and quails and water.  Then Moses went up the mountain to get the commandments from God, and while he was up there the people broke pretty much all of them in a golden calf orgy.  After a bit of tough love to clean things up below, Moses has gone back up the mountain to talk with God. 

Moses is laying the people’s future back on God.  If Moses had any thoughts about how far he and the people were going to get on their own, Aaron’s bovine bacchanalia blew them out the window.  Moses says to God, “Look, if we are your people, if we have found favor with you, than you have to show yourself.”  The Almighty answers, “Don’t worry, I’ll go with you.”  Then Moses really presses God.  “OK,” he says, “but if you don’t with us, we aren’t going anywhere.  If you want us to be your people, to have something special to proclaim to the world, then you have to be with us all the time.  You can’t let us go on our own.  You can’t abandon us.  You can’t leave us to our own devises.  Come with us.”  Then scripture says, “The LORD said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked.’”

Moses was asking God for what God clearly wanted to do anyway.  We know that God planned to be with his people.  We know because God said it.  But Moses pushes him for it.  Moses lays his passion, his heart, his soul before the Lord and begs him for it.  Moses plays his role in interceding on behalf of the people to pull an even more forceful and committed answer from God.  The image is almost one of God preparing to walk down the street and Moses coming to him, grabbing his hand and pulling him forward at a sprint.  And as Moses pulls, God runs even faster and ends up lifting him on his shoulders and carrying him where he wants to go at a pace beyond anything Moses asked or imagined.  God nudged him a bit in the right direction, and then God responded to Moses passionate prayers with his own passionate power and love.

This passage isn’t the only time when God and Moses have this type of interactions.  We see it at the burning bush when Moses’ requests prompt God to reveal his divine name.  This sequence is also a model for us in our own prayers and work.  As we pour ourselves out in prayer, we aren’t so much trying to change God’s mind or convince him of something he doesn’t want.  Instead, our prayers and our first slow efforts are really the essential ingredients to get us moving so that God can move us along at his speed to the places where we both want to go.  God is going to get us there.  We just need to get ourselves prepared to cooperate.

Believe and Prepare.

Moses is, I think, our example this morning as we prepare to kick-off our Believe and Prepare Capital Campaign.  As many of you know, our kick-off dinner is tonight at 4:00pm, and you are all invited.  Even if you haven’t RSVPed yet, please know you are welcome.  As the invitation noted, tonight isn’t going to be a push for contributions.  Instead, we are going to spend some time going through the building, which some people may not have done before or very recently.  Then we are going to have a good dinner with an opportunity to spend some time together.  After dinner, we have a short movie and some other details about what we want to accomplish.  We should be done by 6:00, although I’m sure the coffee pot will be on for those who want to linger longer over a second or third dessert.   

I want especially to invite people who are newer to the parish, or even just visiting, to join us.  This dinner would be a good opportunity to find out more about our parish and our facilities, our hopes and dreams, and just generally how we roll.  Obviously, if you haven’t been here as long, you may not yet have the kind of commitment and investment, or have had time to develop the relationships, that would lead you to support a capital campaign.  That’s OK.  I’m glad you’re here to worship with us this morning, and feel free to engage any of our ministries and efforts as God leads you.  Over the next month and a half you will probably hear more about the capital campaign, about our annual stewardship efforts, about money, and about how it all relates to the life of faith.  We talk about this not because we are obsessed with money, but because Jesus talked about money, and how we relate to money matters as we grow in our faith.  But know also that we are not looking for anything in particular from you, even when you are on our mailing list and receive our appeals.  We are grateful you are with us, and hope you continue to find a way to develop your relationship with God alongside of us. So feel free to come tonight and have dinner without any pressure.

Now we could have chosen any number of names for this campaign, and we passed on such descriptive options as “Keep the Water Out of Our Walls” or “Give Your 401(k) to Jesus.”  As the campaign committee met and thought about names, we started to talk about why we would want to give.  Nick Baron spoke pretty powerfully about how he believed that God had a future for St. John’s with important mission and ministry and how we were called to prepare for that future.  Out of that inspiration, Believe and Prepare was born. 

At that meeting, Nick nailed the spiritual motivation for what we are trying to do in our Believe and Prepare Campaign.  First we believe that God has a future for us.  This belief is no small thing at a time when the valley has been shrinking, churches are closing, and the world is changing in ways that do not seem helpful to Christian congregations.  Despair would be easy.  We know there are fewer people showing up on Sunday morning than were here five or ten or twenty years ago.  But we also aren’t done yet.  A whole batch of little ones has started showing up.  We have new people joining us from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Hundreds of people are here over the course of the week for ECS and the Saturday lunches and AA meetings and guitar lessons and Cana’s Corner and Bible studies and any number of other activities, many of which weren’t happening a few years ago.  None of these good things that are happening are the basis of our belief, however.  They are just indications that confirm our belief that God has a future for us.  Our belief is in God and what God is going to do, and, that by the grace of God and our own obedience, we may get to be instruments of God’s work. 

The second part of our campaign is Prepare.  If we believe that God has future for us, than we dare not sit on our hands and do nothing like the guy with one talent who buried it in the ground and twiddled his thumbs hoping it all worked out OK.  Our call is to make ourselves and our congregation ready for the work God is going to do with us.  Much of that work is spiritual, and I’ll talk about prayer and our prayer vigil in a moment.  Some of that work is relational as we reach out to new people.  Some of that work is programmatic, as we develop the ministries to help others experience God’s love and learn about his good news.  But some of the work is the financial and structural stewardship of the facilities we have been given to use and maintain for future generations.  If we believe that God has a future for us, then we want to prepare a church sanctuary and classrooms and kitchens and dining rooms and bathrooms and offices that have walls that don’t leak and have adequate heating and air conditioning and good lighting and safe parking spaces and all the other things that help people feel welcome and able to focus on the work they are called to do.  The facilities we have are actually in better shape than probably any church I have ever worked in.  But we have a lot of space and we need to maintain it lest problems arise and the cost of fixing them skyrockets.  We also want to prepare all of our buildings to be well used, and not just some parts of our buildings.  I believe God has enough work to do in the valley that we’ll need all of our facilities, and maybe someday additional spaces, to undertake it. 

The abbreviated version of what we are preparing falls into four categories.  The first is basic exterior maintenance.  We need to repoint the stone, fix the louvers on the tower over the narthex to keep the birds out, repair the brick that is allowing water to seep into the corner of the lounge, replace the Plexiglas over the stained glass windows and fix the windows in the offices.  Our second area is some minor improvements like sealing the parking lot, fixing three ranks of organ pipes, and air conditioning the upstairs dining room.  Third, we want to air condition the church, because in this day and age people don’t go anywhere that isn’t air conditioned in the summer and having air conditioning is an essential part of welcoming and evangelism.  Then, fourth, we want to begin to prepare the basement for new ministries that could be started there in three to five years.  We don’t know what they will be yet, but we believe God has something in mind like maybe a pre-school or elder day care, and we want to prepare for it.   

Anyone who want to participate will have a variety of ways to do so, ranging from immediate gifts to pledges paid over five years.  Some gifts will be larger and some smaller, but all will be important.  $10,000 will fix the organ pipes, and $10 will buy a needed can of paint.  Those who can join us tonight will hear more details then, and information will come in the mail in the coming weeks for those who can’t.

Believe and Prepare

Remember Moses’ conversation with God in Exodus.  How God had a plan, and Moses had to ask enthusiastically so that Moses and God could work together to get where God wanted them to go.  We are in the same place with this capital campaign.  We believe that God is leading us in a certain direction, both to raise the funds we need to prepare the building for the work he wants done and then to do the actual ministry as it comes.  But we aren’t quite ready yet.  We, like Moses, need to passionately beg God to show up and do the work he wants done.  We need to plead with God to open his hand for the financial resources we need to keep the building up.  We need to implore God for all the right open doors, the almost coincidental connections, and the seemingly serendipitous opportunities to make our campaign successful and the work that comes after it fruitful.

Our parish is undertaking this prayer work in at least two ways.  First, we are in the midst of a twenty-four hour prayer vigil.  People have been praying in the chapel since 4:00 pm yesterday, are praying right now, and will continue until our dinner starts at 4:00 pm today.  If you have time this afternoon, please join us or spend some time praying wherever you are.  Second, we are praying our campaign prayer in place of our offertory sentence during our worship service, and we are encouraging everyone in the parish to pray it daily.  Feel free to rip the prayer out of your bulletin and post on your refrigerator, keep it by your nightstand, use it as a bookmark in your Bible or the John Grishom novel you are reading, or in whatever other way is helpful.  But please join us in passionately praying that God would be with us and use us to do the work he wants to accomplish.

There is an old story about a church that has a capital need.  The pastor gets into the pulpit and says, “I have some good news and some bad news.  The good is that God has given us all the money we need.  The bad news is that it is still in your wallets.”  Now I don’t know if this story would be true in our case or not.  I have no idea what is in anyone’s wallets or bank accounts.  But I know that God owns all the money in the universe.  And I know that this parish has been able to do ministry in the past because of contributions that nobody expected.  And I know that if we are pouring our hearts out in prayer to accomplish God’s work in God’s way, we can expect God to give us the resources we need to accomplish what we have to do.  As we beg God to show up for his work with us and as we begin to run down his path, he is going to pick us up and carry us where we need to go, quite possibly in ways we never expected.  We’ll be blessed with what we need.  If we do our part, we know that God is more than ready for his part.

Believe and Prepare. 

In closing, I’d ask you again for the following.  Most importantly, please pray for this campaign, for our parish and our ministry.  Second, come to dinner tonight with us if you can, and if you can’t, look for other information about the campaign as it comes out.   Then finally, believe in the future that God has in store for our parish, and in whatever ways that God leads you, help us prepare for it.