April 2, 2006 - Fifth Sunday in Lent - Bishop James Mathes

FIRST READING: Jeremiah 31: 31 - 34
PSALM: 119: 9-16
SECOND READING: Hebrews 5: 5-10
GOSPEL: John 12: 20-33

Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.


"Hearing Voices"

It is always a privilege and a joy to come together as the people of God, to break open the Word of God, to hear God speak to us, and to break open the bread of Eucharist so that we might be fed with the food of Heaven. For today, we recreate Jesus' feast with His disciples as our principle discipline, and, in so doing, we anticipate what the prayer book calls "a foretaste of [the] heavenly banquet".

Even though this is my first official visit to St. Paul in the Desert, I have been here on other occasions, including the memorial service for Fred Davis. St. Paul's feels like home and an oasis in the desert to which I can come for refreshment. Part of that feeling is no doubt due to the kindness and wisdom that I have received from your rector, whom I consider both friend and counselor. Andrew, with the people whom you serve, I say thank you for the blessing of who you are to me.

As I have ruminated about today's Gospel lesson, I have found myself thinking of this challenging time in our church's life. It is a time in which we struggle mightily to find our sense of self, of what is just, and of what is moral. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in our time, the question seems to be always circling around the question of sexuality and what it means to be a sexual being and a follower of Jesus. How are those two issues in harmony and conflict? As a church, there is much conflict, and a great measure of it is harsh around this issue.

In the short space of three years, our church has consecrated a gay man in a committed, life-long relationship to the Episcopate, continued with the practice of ordaining gays and lesbians to the priesthood and diaconate, and, in many locations, blessed gay and lesbian partnerships in various liturgical forms.

The response to what many consider just, right, transformational, and timely has elicited a dramatic, global reaction, in which those who differ with these actions have condemned these actions and have called for a decisive retraction of the same, using words like repentance, broken, or impaired communion. In the midst of all of this, we are supposed to walk the pilgrim's way of Lent, and I find myself wondering how what we are experiencing today relates to Jesus' essentially Lenten walk to Jerusalem.

As we hear in the Gospel reading for today, on this walk, Jesus proclaims what many would suggest is the core of the Gospel or Kerygma:

"Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for Eternal Life. Whoever serves Me must follow Me, and where I am, there will My servant be also. Whoever serves Me, the Father will honor"

As our Presiding Bishop has suggested so many times, the core of our Christian life is a process of dying and rising. It is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of Jesus that is fundamentally about humility, sacrifice, and surrender; and, when Jesus speaks this truth, it is seemingly confirmed from Heaven:

"Then a voice came from Heaven, 'I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.' The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, 'An angel has spoken to Him'. Jesus answered, 'This voice has come for your sake, not for Mine'".

A voice from Heaven that some hear and others apparently confuse as thunder, given as a divine gift, seems to confirm this core message.

In a church that is deeply divided, there are lots of voices. Many are very loud - heard by some with authority and by others as mere thunder. Bishops write letters and sermons. Organizations and interest groups have blogs on the Internet. We will go to General Convention, and many voices will speak what they consider to be the core - justice, sin, morality, prophetic - and they will seem to each believe that they are hearing the voice of God echo, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again".

Early in my ministry, I had the rare privilege of working at McLean Hospital as the protestant chaplain. McLean is a preeminent psychiatric hospital associated with Mass General. McLean Hospital was the hospital where the movie, "Girl Interrupted" was filmed, and it was actually a true story about a patient there.

As the chaplain, many of the patients that I met had religious ideations as a part of their psychoses. Actually, three different patients thought that they were the messiah. Each of these heard voices. The voices were clear to them. Others did not hear them. I remember reflecting on my work with these individuals with a wise priest who suggested that there is a fine line between religious devotion and insanity.

(Much laughter from the congregation)

You weren't supposed to laugh at that!!

Having worked within a psychiatric institution and the church, my sense is that both are prone to misdiagnoses. Sometimes the religiously gifted and holy are seen as insane; sometimes the insane are seen as religiously-inspired.

So, in our present state, with many voices speaking disparate words, as if they are echoed with Godly-approval, how are we to make our way? If we believe that being homosexual is a part of how someone is created by God, how do we speak to those who see it as sin? How do we behave towards each other when each seems so convinced that their word is God's Word?

I sense that the answer is in the one whom we follow to Jerusalem, who clearly knows the full measure of the way:

"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit".

Again, the way that Jesus trod was the way of dying and rising, humility, surrender, and sacrifice. It is a descent before it is an ascent. In finding our way, we do not ask how we will be made right or justified, but how God's Kingdom will become more apparent, and we try to discern how God will be glorified through our work on behalf of the Kingdom.

It is finally and fundamentally an experience of listening. It is a life-long vocation that does not set deadlines and ultimatums for the Holy Spirit to work through the body. It recognizes that the salvific work of Jesus Christ is present in this life and in the life to come. When we speak and think that we hear God's voice in our own, we must be willing to assume that it is merely thunder.

So where do we go from here, in this strange time charged with both hopeful possibility and frightening danger? It leaves us where we should be - on the road to Jerusalem with Jesus. If we are gay or lesbian, it leaves us in a church that is unsure of how to do the work of hospitality, blessing, and affirmation, because it is also doing the work of respecting divergence and communion in the midst of conflicting cultural norms. It leaves us in a church that is half-baked, broken, and in the process of becoming.

I am mindful of the story of Abba Poemen, who, on his deathbed, as his friends were congratulating him on having lived such a virtuous life, cried out, "I am still only a beginner. I have barely started with my own conversion."

That is us - beginners, who have the confidence of the One whom we follow. But in the end, as beginners, we can really be sure of only one thing - it is what Jesus promises, and this is really the only thing that matters.

"And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself."

Jesus will draw all people up from earth.

It is like the closing scene in the movie, "Places of the Heart". In the movie, people are in grave conflict. A young African-American shoots the white sheriff and is lynched. The sheriff's widow contends with the bankers and hires an African-American sharecropper who is run out of town by the Klan. The widow takes on a blind veteran who is dismissed by his own family. In the final scene, they are in church, receiving communion. As they give each other the bread, all are present. All receive the bread from each other - the murderer from his victim, the sharecropper from the Klansman. Each says the peace of God as the bread of life is given to the other. I am not sure which form of the word, "peace", they are using: the "peace" that passes all understanding, or that bread is a "piece" of God . . . . or maybe both.

In the end, they are giving and receiving Jesus, who says, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to Myself"

The Peace of God.


AMEN