Bryan Cones - Pentecost XV, September 21, 2014

Matthew 20:1-16, Exodus 16:2-15

Today’s gospel passage puts me in mind of a friend and fellow spiritual traveler from my home parish of St. John’s. She’s a lifelong Christian, someone who is really at home with the Bible, struggled with it and been faithful over her many years. Despite all that, she admits there are some passages of scripture she will never understand, and today’s gospel is the first on that list. “It’s just completely unfair,” she says. I swear she told me she even “hated” it.

Does any American Christian like this story? Does anyone who has to work for a living like this story? It’s bad enough that the laborers who put in an hour make the same as those who worked for twelve hours. Nowadays we might ask why even those who were hired first got paid the same. Did that all work equally hard? Did they get comparable job performance reviews? Surely there was some worker in the vineyard who did the equivalent of checking email all day, never getting anything done. What kind of business owner is this vineyard keeper anyway?

It may not seem obvious, but the first reading about the manna and quail is no less at odds with the way we think about the economy of things. Manna, if you’ll remember, just falls from the sky, a resource that appears equally everywhere, like sunlight or rain. There are rules restricting its use: Each family can only collect what they need for the day. Anything more than that rots and becomes full of worms. It can’t be kept overnight, except in preparation for the Sabbath. It can’t be canned or pickled or frozen or dried for further use. You can’t cultivate it, you can’t turn it into a commodity, and you can’t package it into mutual funds, or put it into an IRA. If you live on manna, you will have to depend on God as long as you live.

Wages without work, food without farming: Welcome to God’s economy. Another name for it is grace. And if we want to know what experiencing grace is like, these two stories are places to begin.

Imagine being one of those grumbling Israelites in the desert, so hungry for the “fleshpots of Egypt” that you’d rather be a slave. You were on board when God was defeating Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, but now the food is running out, and you are starting to wonder if you are going to die out here with your kids and everyone you love.

Then in the evening comes a flock of quail, and then in the morning food so unusual, that the people name with a question, “What is it?”—a play on the word “manna.” And it all returns, evening after evening, morning after morning. Imagine the feeling of surprise and relief, of gratitude and wonder.

That’s how God’s grace sometimes feels.

Or place yourself in the shoes of that laborer hired a five o’clock. You've been hanging around all day, hoping someone might hire you, so that you can take whatever you earn and buy food for the evening. As the day goes on your hopes start to fade and you wonder what your family will eat tonight. You had just about given up when someone hires you with only an hour left in the day. You know the wages won’t be much, but might be something to take the edge of off your family’s hunger. After your short hour, you are surprised to be called first for pay, then even more surprised to get paid for a full day, for the other 11 hours you didn’t work. You know you haven’t earned it, and you probably head home as fast as you can before the owner catches his mistake. Everyone will eat tonight.

That’s how God’s grace sometimes feels.

It’s tempting to judge those workers hired in the morning, as if they are the butt of the parable. But let’s come alongside them, too, and imagine we showed up with the crowd of laborers, a lot more workers than work, most likely. In a stroke of luck you are at the right place at the right time, and you and your buddies make a deal with the landowner, for the “usual wage”—this owner drives a hard bargain—but it’s better than nothing. You work all day long to make sure you get the full wage, and get curious when these other workers show up. You’re a little irritated when those last few get paid first, but you get your hopes up when they get the full day’s wage. Maybe this guy is not so tight with his money after all. Maybe this is your lucky day. But by the time he gets to you, his generosity has evidently run out. Why can’t I catch a break? you think to yourself. And why did this rich dude have to shove it in our faces? He could have just paid us first, and we never would have known he was so “generous.” What a jerk.

That’s how God’s grace sometimes feels.

God’s economy: The surprising nourishing gift, the surprising unearned gift, the surprising unfair gift. Perhaps we've all experienced each of them, and the feelings that go with them.

Those feelings might be a clue that God’s grace is right in front of us. And if we notice a feeling like that: gratefulness at the abundant sunshine, the rain, the love of your family that nourishes you everyday; or that hard-to-name feeling when you benefit from something you know you haven’t earned or don’t deserve, perhaps a time you’ve really screwed up but find forgiveness instead of consequences; even the resentment that sometimes comes with someone else’s turn of good luck, especially when our work seem to go unrecognized. When we notice feelings like that, they might be signals that God is passing by, bearing gifts.

And when we notice that grace, how might we respond, knowing that grace, like manna, has to be used or lost, that the opportunity pass us by before we know it? How might we reflect that moment of grace, magnify it, pay it forward, multiply it? How might we, as those who receive God’s grace, turn around and give grace as well?

Perhaps, like that vineyard owner, we might recognize the needs of others, invite them in, give them a share of what has been given to us. Perhaps we might discover a hunger to share generously, to give up our attitudes about what’s fair or who deserves it, even if our generosity scandalizes or offends some. Perhaps we might discover in ourselves that our capacity for receiving God’s grace grows as we learn to give grace as God gives it. Maybe we could become partners, producers, job creators in God’s economy, givers with the Giver, as well as receivers.

That is also, after all, how God’s grace sometimes feels.

Bryan Cones - Pentecost XIV, September 14, 2014

Romans 14:1-12

If you ever had any doubt that the Bible covers every eventuality, or wondered if the apostle Paul had an unpublished thought about anything, today’s reading from Romans should set your mind at ease since it takes care of the vexing question of relations between vegetarians and meat eaters in the church. So if you are a pescatarian, a strict vegan, or cover everything you eat with bacon, the Episcopal Church, in the name of Paul, welcomes you. Just please don’t judge each other, and whatever you eat, eat it to the glory of God.

The issue Paul was addressing, of course, didn’t have much to do with the merits of vegetarianism as such. He was most likely trying to deal with a “mixed body” in Rome, groups that made different choices about how to relate to the world around them: Jewish Christians, who wanted to follow Jesus and keep kosher, stuck with vegetables as the safest way to avoid improperly slaughtered or prepared animals, as a way of maintaining purity in a pagan world.

On the other side were the Gentile Christians, for whom keeping kosher wasn’t really all that important, and who didn’t feel the need to remain quite so separate from the world around them, at least not when it came to dinner.

Paul is at pains to remind them that, whatever choices they make, the unity of the body was of paramount importance, and any choice they makes should reflect first of all their devotion to Christ, reflected in their devotion to one another. Above all, they ought not judge or give offense to each other over the small issues of what one eats.

Or as my mother, channeling Paul, may have put it more simply to me and my brothers: Don’t pester each other. It’s OK if you are different, just remember that you are part of one family.

Whether to eat meat or not was hardly the last conflict to cause division in the body. Christian have often struggled with and disagreed about how best to relate to the world around them, and what it means to honor Christ in the world.

Could a Christian be a soldier or a Roman official, which required taking oaths to the emperor Should Christians marry non-believers? Could babies be baptized, or does a person have to show real commitment to the gospel?

Later in Christian history: Could Christians go to war against each other? Could they lend money at interest? Could Christians own slaves or participate in the slave trade?

Closer to our own time: Could Christians drink alcohol? Could a woman hold authority in church or at home? Could she be ordained? Should Christians support or oppose segregation or the Vietnam War? Should gay and lesbian people be welcomed into church? Should they be ordained? Should they be married in church?

I hope by now we are getting close to some of the disputes in our own contemporary churches, disputes that have been, and sometimes still are, every bit as divisive as the first argument about what Christians should eat. Some have actually torn churches apart, and others, thankfully, have since been resolved.

Perhaps we may be embarrassed or ashamed that some of those questions were ever raised at all. In hindsight the answers seem obvious to us.

How are we Christians called to live in a “mixed body,” whether here in church, or just as importantly, in our families, or workplaces or out in the world around us, where differences quickly become polarized chasms, especially around election time, or when dealing with something that scares or threatens us.

I was thinking about that question on Thursday morning as I rode my bike to church past several groups of firefighters and paramedics standing at attention, who were gathering, as they have these past 13 years, on September 11 morning to remember their fallen comrades. It was also the morning after the president announced more airstrikes as part of the war that started that day.

As I rode, I heard a question Ann Gannon had asked the previous Friday after our morning Eucharist: “What are we to do about what is going on in Syria and Iraq?”

I realized on that ride I have been struggling with how to relate as a Christian in this complicated and broken world, and that I don’t have a good answer for myself. But the question put me in mind of two saints of the church, every bit as different as those vegetarians and meat-eaters, who both struggled with a similar question, and came up with different answers.

One was Roman Catholic Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker, and was a strict pacifist on the question of war, who opposed even fighting in World War II, despite the obvious evil of the Nazis, though she did think the United States should be preparing doctors and nurses and medical supplies to bind up the wounds of that war.

When asked once in the 1960s what she would do if the Russians invaded New York City, where she lived, she answered, “I would try to make them feel as welcome as possible.” Mind you, she didn’t want the Russians to invade, she was just convinced that hospitality should be the guiding value for Christians, even and especially to enemies.

Perhaps Dorothy would remind us of today’s gospel with its command to forgive extravagantly, rather than seek retribution or revenge through violence, even in the cause of justice.

A contemporary of hers, Reinhold Niebuhr, was a Lutheran professor of theology and a well-known public leader of Protestant Christianity. He was also a fierce critic of Christian pacifists. As far has he was concerned, Christians were morally bound to get their hands dirty, including using violent force in war, given the sinfulness of humanity and the troubles of the world. Christians couldn’t avoid the mess of politics or war on principle.

Reading today’s first reading, he might have pointed out that, when the cause is just, even God sometimes goes to war. As far as he was concerned, Christians had no choice about World War II. The evil of Nazism was simply so great it that required going to war.

Two great Christians of astonishing commitment, and two completely different approaches to the same problem. Each, to use Paul’s words, was “fully convinced in their own minds” of the way to live as Christians in a troubled world. And both were deeply devoted to the body of Christ as whole: Dorothy spent her life offering hospitality to the poor; she also went to Mass every day, and by all accounts was a mystic.

Niebuhr was not only a theologian, but a man of faith so deep and so everyday, that it is said that he wrote a version of the Serenity Prayer, “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”

The two inhabited the one body of Christ because they believed as Paul did: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.”

How do we live in a “mixed body”? How do we hold together the differences without getting on each other’s nerves, without tearing the body apart?

I’d like to imagine that, in the spirit of Dorothy and Reinhold, we might show the world around us how it is possible to live together despite our differences. Our Christian faith requires that we struggle with the brokenness of the world, that we make a commitment to bringing about its healing, even if we sometimes disagree about how.

And it also requires that we stick together as we do so, submitting ourselves to community, the body of Christ, and our minds to the mind of Christ. Indeed, perhaps by living in one body, a mixed body, we can also discern together the solutions, probably the many solutions, to what ails us, and what ails our world.

Perhaps what is most important of all is that we hang together, trusting that the Spirit of Christ will lead us, together, to the fullness of gospel truth and gospel peace, that we hope for.

Kristin White Sermon - Bill Heyck Funeral

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

Bill Heyck Funeral – September 13, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

Jesus speaks the words of this gospel passage on the last night he shares with his friends, his disciples. They have eaten their supper together, the betrayer has left the table. Jesus tells that he is leaving, going to a place where they cannot go. He tells them to love each other, hears Peter’s protest about laying down his life. And then, these words: Do not let your hearts be troubled.

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“Oh, my people,”[1] writes T.S. Eliot.

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They have given up their lives to follow him. They left their families, their homes, their old understandings, to follow this rabbi who is the son of a carpenter from a backwater town, with his unorthodox theology and his inappropriate practices (at least according to temple custom). They have thrown their lot in with him. They listened to his teachings, watched others…many others…do the same. Their hands have carried his miracles. This has been their life, these past three years. Now he says they he’s leaving, going to a place they cannot come? How can their hearts not be troubled?

How can our hearts not be troubled?

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Let your hearts be filled by this: Bill loved you. He loved the struggle of good discourse in a well-crafted argument, the insight gained by digging into the process. He loved great ideas. He loved golf, delighted in going to the Masters, the year before last, on what Deni has called a sacred pilgrimage. He loved a cup of tea in the garden, watching for a goldfinch on the feeder, stood ready to protect the birds’ food from squirrels, with a sling shot, as necessary, and malted milk balls (which, Hunter suggested the other day, sent rather a mixed message to the squirrels). He loved the life he shared with so many of you in the academy. The church. His friends. His family. Deni.

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My first real conversation with Bill took place shortly after I arrived at St. Augustine’s two years ago. In the season of Advent I preached a sermon referencing T.S. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi.” Bill wanted to talk about these lines:

“And I would do it again, but set down/This, set down/This: were we led all that way for/Birth or death?”[2]

It was in that conversation I found the mind of a professor: he was unwilling to settle for easy answers, hungering instead after a measure of truth, looking for faith’s foothold not too readily found. It was in that conversation as well that I learned of Bill’s then-chronic leukemia, about the path he was following with that disease.

Soon after that, Bill’s diagnosis changed from chronic to acute. His immune system compromised from the treatment meant he didn’t feel safe being out among groups of people. Since he didn’t feel able to come to church as often, I went to visit him. Over many cups of tea, we talked about Palestine and Israel, the wars in Iraq and Syria, his concern for the environment, disagreed about the theologian Marcus Borg. We talked about Bill’s frustration at his disease, the lack of a cure, his hope that researchers would get to work on it. We talked about his friendships, his pride in and love for his children, Hunter and Shannon and their families, his 50 years with Deni.

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In his poem “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot writes of “wavering between the profit and the loss/In this brief transit where the dreams cross/The dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying.”[3]

Bill hungered after logic and explanation, fought this illness with a stalwart kind of courage. He wanted there to be reason attached to circumstance. It was probably the thread that ran most continuously through our conversations. It was probably my greatest frustration not to have reason and logic and explanation to offer him.

But I did have the Sacrament, and the words of the prophets and of Jesus, the words of our prayers, and the hope, in Eliot’s words, that this is the space where dreams cross. And I did have the promise that we would be with him, with them, all the way through that time, and beyond. (Do not let your heart be troubled.) Nearly every time I saw him in these last months, he asked me to bring Communion. He missed being able to be physically present as part of this Body of Christ which is the Church; so he was present by extension, even in his absence, as we prayed for him, as he received the gifts blessed at this table.

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“Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still/…our peace in his will/And…even among these rocks/Sister, mother/…spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,/Suffer me not to be separated/And let my cry come unto thee.”[4]

Last Friday, he was ready to talk about those things he had not been ready to talk about, before then. (“Suffer me not to be separated,” I heard in my mind as we spoke.) He said that he wanted to be buried here at St. Augustine’s. He asked how many hymns we could sing today, and I told him the same thing his friend Cotton Fite had said in response to the very same question: that we’d be pleased to stay and sing all day. He said he hoped you all would come forward to receive the gifts from this table. He told me he loved this church. He said that he didn’t want to leave his family. He told me to take care of Deni. I promised that we would, and we will.

He brought Eliot’s words into that last conversation as well, and we merged them with our own. “This is the way the world ends,”[5] he said. “We thank thee for our little light, that it is dappled with shadow,”[6] I responded.

My prayer for Bill, for you, for all of us, is that we might find a way into the words Jesus shares with his disciples as he prepares to say goodbye:

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

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The theologian Molly Marshall writes about that space beyond our mortal life as “a mystery for those yet living…where God abides, yet a place that has room.”[7] She argues that it is God’s essence – that it is God’s essence – to make space for others, to accompany God’s people home.

This is all too much cloaked in mystery and abstraction at a time when absence is the thing so keenly felt. “But set down this,” Eliot writes, “Set down this”: And the theologian returns: “What we know of God in Christ is that God has not chosen to be God without us.”[8] God has not chosen to remain a remote abstraction. In Christ, God puts on flesh to be God With Us, with a mind that thinks and a stomach that hungers and a heart that beats. God comes among us, that we might come among God.

Today’s gospel passage is customarily translated in this way: “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.” My professor in seminary read the Greek differently. Where others read “house,” or “mansion,” he read “heart.” He saw Jesus as returning to a place next to God’s own heart, going ahead of us to prepare a place there, for us, that we might return there with him, in that space near God’s heart.

The words of a prayer jumble for me, from Christ, to Eliot, to Christ again…for Bill, for his family, for you…that it might be a promise we can trust, a space in which to place our own hearts:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” “But be ye satisfied that you have light/Enough to take your step and find your foothold.”[9] May you seek and find the space that has been prepared for you. The place next to God’s own heart.

[1] Eliot, T.S. “Ash Wednesday,” Collected Poems 1909-1935. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Publishing, 1950. 65.

[2] Ibid, “Journey of the Magi,” 69.

[3] Ibid, 66.

[4] Ibid, “Ash Wednesday,” 67.

[5] Ibid, “The Hollow Men,” 59.

[6] Ibid, “The Rock,” 113.

[7] Molly Marshall. “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. 468.

[8] Cynthia A. Jarvis. “Homiletical Perspective,” Ibid. 467.

[9] T.S. Eliot, “The Rock,” 112.

Kristin White Sermon - Pentecost XIII, Homecoming Sunday

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

Homecoming Sunday – September 7, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

At first hearing, today’s gospel sounds to me like it’s always and only about rules. Worse, those rules are about what to do when somebody messes up. Someone sins against you, go to him alone. If he listens, great. If not, go back to him with two others. If he still won’t listen, take it to the whole church. If he won’t listen then, even to the church, let that person be to you like a Gentile, or a tax collector.

Clear, right? Someone makes a mistake, you take this step, then the next, then the next, and here’s the result: Option A or Option B. Apologetic and restored, or unapologetic and shunned. It’s like some kind of divine flow chart for how the church deals with sinners.

When I hear this gospel, I think about opposites that are finally just a little too simple: right and wrong, offended and offender, problem and solution. It feels too-quickly-sorted, too hard. And that bit about treating somebody who doesn’t come through like a Gentile or a tax collector? Those were the people most likely to be ostracized by the community already. So now Jesus is reinforcing that notion? It doesn’t even sound much like Jesus to me.

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So, welcome to Homecoming Sunday. On this day when so many are returning after a time away, when others are coming to us for perhaps the first time, I have to tell you: the preacher doesn’t get to pick the gospel lesson that the community hears, on this Sunday or any other. It’s chosen through an elaborate process that I learned about in seminary and will share with you another time. But I will confess that were I the chooser of today’s gospel, at first flinch I would have chosen something else – something about trust and hope and becoming the beloved community. At first flinch, I would not have chosen a gospel that begins with the line: “If another member of the church sins against you…” and continues, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Then again. How did Jesus treat people, even Gentiles? Even tax collectors? Isn’t Matthew himself, the one writing down these words, a member of Jesus’ own closest community of friends and followers, isn’t he a tax collector?

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This part of Matthew’s gospel is entirely about how a community of faith is meant to be church, to and for one another and God. You have sheep? Great. Losing one means you don’t look around for a couple of minutes and then move on with most, instead of all, of your flock. You stick around. You find your sheep. Somebody sins against you? You forgive them. You forgive them not once, but seventy times. And another. And another. And another. And another.

Because, as church, this is who we are: we are a people who belong to each other, and to God. And because we are human, this is what we do: we make mistakes. We disappoint. We hurt each other. So what keeps us as church, for one another and for God, is not whether we make mistakes, disappoint, hurt each other, but how we knit ourselves back together, restore ourselves to ourselves, and to God, when (not if) that happens.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran preacher and pastor I admire. She leads a house church in Denver that actually outgrew her own home, called House for All Sinners and Saints. She tells the story of newcomer brunch gatherings, led by established members of House for potential new members. Those folks who have been members and are welcoming new members share stories about what drew them and has bound them to this church, what they love about it. And then, at the end, Nadia stands up, and says this: “Welcome to House for All Sinners and Saints. We will disappoint you.” She talks about her own love of the church and her own mistakes, promises that she does her best as the pastor, and that she will do her best imperfectly. And she says this: “Decide now. Decide now what you are going to do…when I or someone else falls short in this community. Decide now, before it happens, whether and how you will create space for restoration. Because I tell you that at that moment, if you do not, then when (when, not if) that mistake happens, you will miss the beauty of grace. You will miss the beauty of God restoring what people have broken.”

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I’ve been wrestling with this gospel text all week. On Friday, I talked with a St. A’s friend about it, about my ambivalence with the rules and the apparent shunning. A little while later, she texted me with this thought: “so maybe the gospel was about the idea that the community is so important and necessary that it overrides absolutely everything else…”

Belonging to each other is an act of willing vulnerability, something the sociologist Brené Brown might call wholehearted living. Participating as a member of a community of faith is counter to what our culture would teach us about placing ourselves at the center of everything, about believing we are able to buy our own comfort, our own safety, our own happiness. Too often, I think, we talk nostalgically about that word “community,” forget the hard work of honesty and authenticity that real community requires.

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Last Sunday marked the feast of our patron saint, Augustine of Hippo. The passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans at the heart of Augustine’s conversion is actually found in today’s second lesson: “Instead,” Paul writes, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Put on Christ.

Jesus’ words at the end of this gospel resonate with the same message: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there with them.”

Let me tell you about the ways I have seen this church put on Christ in these last days. Last Sunday, just before church began, a member of St. A’s came up to tell me that the Rev. Joe Howell, former rector of this parish, was gravely ill. We prayed for Joe as part of our worship…and an hour after church, another of our members, Pieter DeVryer, called me to say that Joe had departed this life. I have spent time this past week with people whose family members have died, and what they have said to me is this: “I don’t know what I would do without the people of St. A’s around me.” Our beautiful choir gathered together again on Wednesday after the summer’s break, began their gathering with a meal before singing, began their meal by singing their grace. Our vestry, the leaders of this church, gathered on Thursday night and worked together in good humor and trust, with hope and deep faith, to do the work of leading the church we love. I visited our most senior member, Ruth Johnston, this week. We will be praying for her in the Prayers of the People as her 104th birthday is next Friday. Ruth is sick now, and I took her a prayer shawl knitted by our new guild, by folks who gather in fellowship to knit these shawls as a source of comfort and love. I wrapped that shawl around Ruth’s very thin shoulders, and as I think again of that moment, the words that I hear are Paul’s words from the Letter to the Romans: “put on Christ.”

In the end, maybe this gospel is exactly the very word we need to hear today. Because as my parishioner friend wrote, Christ calls us to protect what is most sacred, the beloved community. This beloved community. Maybe we need rules that sound hard at first hearing because we do make mistakes, and we will…because those moments of grace are too precious to not happen…because we need to have a way to restore ourselves to right relationship, in order that they can. We need each other, to surround and enfold one another in moments of grief and loss, and wonder and joy. We need to remember the people who have helped make this church what it has been and what it is becoming, need leaders who gather in trust and hope. We need a choir that finds joy and harmony together, and then sings those things into our midst.

Welcome home to a church where we belong to each other, and to God, in vulnerable and grace-filled ways. Welcome to a place where we strive, persistently and imperfectly, as our patron saint did, to put on Christ. Welcome to a community in which we gather, trusting Christ’s promise that as we gather, he’s right here.

Welcome home.

Kristin White Sermon - Feast of Augustine

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Feast of Augustine of Hippo – August 31, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

This is the advice that Augustine of Hippo, patron saint of this parish, shares about preaching:

“It is more the piety of prayer than the ready facility of orators that enables (the preacher to be understood); by praying both for himself and for those he is about to address, let him be a pray-er before being a speak-er. At the very moment he steps up to speak, before he even opens up his mouth and says a word, let him lift up his thirsty soul to God, begging that it may belch forth…what (God) has filled it with.”[1]

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From his earliest days as a young man, Augustine sought relentlessly after truth. Educated in rhetoric, he knew how to prepare and present a well-reasoned argument, a craft he then taught in Carthage and Rome and Milan. Still seeking truth, Augustine looked to the stars, consulted astrologers who promised their wisdom. When that fell short, he joined the Manicheans, that Persian religion with the narrative of a cosmic battle between the spiritual realm of goodness and light, and the material realm of wickedness and dark. He moved to Milan, became a Neoplatonist, seeking instead after truth in philosophy. He loved a woman he would not marry, fathered a child whom he adored. Eventually, perhaps through the prayers of his mother Monica and the preaching of his bishop, Ambrose, Augustine found his way into the Christian life. Agonizing over truth and its revelation, he walked through a garden, heard a voice say, “take up and read,” opened Paul’s letter calling him to “put on Christ.”

“I have read in Plato and Cicero things that are wise and very beautiful,” Augustine wrote in his Confessions. “But I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.”

Something within that quote encompasses something real about who Augustine was, and is, about the namesake of this Body. He sought and sought after truth, wisdom, beauty – in argument, in the night sky, in an explanation that finally proved too uncomplicated, in physicality, in objectivity…and then, at least in the moment he said these words, Augustine revealed a glimpse of something true, found instead in the promise of relationship, of refuge.

“I am the way,” Jesus says in today’s gospel. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

It doesn’t mean Augustine was finished with striving. His conversion, which might mark a happy end for somebody else, sent him still farther in the journey. Instead of concluding his autobiography, the Confessions, with that moment in Book 9, Augustine persisted with four more (lengthy) books, still seeking after explanation.

He would go on to do battle with the Donatists in their arguments over the truth of the sacraments in times of persecutions. He would address the Pelagians in their thought that goodness could be mastered. He would write and write and write about the truth he had found, about the truth he was seeking, craft his own arguments about salvation and grace, about the meaning of original sin and what constitutes a just war.

Augustine’s restlessness would persist throughout the whole of his journey, up to the very time he wrote his last work, City of God. Vandals were moving in to sack the city of which he was bishop. As he died, they would continue their march, in the end burning and destroying everything – except Augustine’s library, his cathedral, which they left untouched.

What does it mean for us, who carry the name of this brilliant and restless and frustrated and deeply faithful man? What does it mean for us to be the Body of Christ here and now, in this time and place?

What I knew of this church before I knew you was the long tradition of seeking after truth. From the time Frank Wilson was pastor of St. A’s, one of the most prolific writers of his generation, through the time of the Rev. Howell, the Rev. Mazza, the Rev. Musgrave, until this day – you are a people who dig in and seek after truth, who hunger for wisdom. A few days ago one of your former wardens told me the story of a discussion you shared about stem-cell research some years ago. People from two very different perspectives shared their understandings on that topic, and then you took the time for people to discuss and question and doubt and share their own thoughts. That sounds to me like wisdom seeking understanding. All of it – the discussion and doubt, the questioning and sharing – seeking after truth is a faithful act, very much in the tradition of our namesake.

When Bishop Lee told the story of his own journey of faith here in our Lounge last fall, there was no voice telling him to read, no words rising off the page as they did for Augustine. Instead, Bishop Lee talked about being a little kid looking out at the night sky, and wondering if this was all that there was…terrified that we were all alone in the universe. And as he told it, his fear of the absence of God became testimony of his own hunger for God.

Whether it was in the stars or in an explanation of the cosmos that didn’t manage to go far enough or in wisdom that was finally incomplete, or ultimately, in the faith that became a kind of pavement upon which Augustine could find his way, I believe the sacred restlessness with which he lived was a holy testimony to what, to whom, he sought: “I am the way,” Jesus says. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am.”

In his book Teaching Christianity, when he’s not giving preaching advice, Augustine says this: “Faith gives way to sight…and hope gives way to bliss itself…while charity will grow when these other two fade out. If we love by believing what we cannot see, how much more will we do so when we have begun to see it?”[2]

We may not have Vandals waiting to sack this city, but that might only be thanks to the accidents of our birth that we find ourselves here, instead of Queragosh, or Peshmerga, or Erbil. There is much to call us to a holy restlessness, in the cause of faith, for the sake of the world. As children are being done unspeakable harm, and Christians persecuted for their faith and driven out of their homes, as the people who would help them have their own lives threatened, we could do worse than to seek after a kind wisdom, a measure of hope. We could do worse, on behalf of a people living not so far away from where our patron saint lived and served, than to seek restlessly after the one who promises: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

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I love the fact that the glass doors at the back of our church commemorating Augustine’s life include a pathway that traces his journey. Physically, spiritually, intellectually, he was in motion. He was on the way, a follower of The Way. I also love that the phrase we probably associate most closely with our patron is found there as well: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Perhaps, as the apparent absence of God for our bishop offered a testimony of his striving for God…so might our patron’s acknowledgment of restlessness point toward his striving for rest, for the home that would only be found in the one who created him.

I have read in Plato and Cicero things that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come to me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle, and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

[1] Teaching Christianity. Augustine of Hippo. Edmund Hill, O.P., trans. New York: Augustinian Heritage Institute, 1996. 218.

[2] Ibid. 125.

Bryan Cones Sermon - Pentecost XI

Bryan Cones

Pentecost 11A

Matthew 16:13-20

“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,

and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Binding and loosing—the two sides of the church’s mission

            here in the gospel of Matthew,

            the charge placed on those who profess

Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.

To be a part of the church Jesus calls forth

            is to have a share in that binding and loosing

for the sake of the reign of God.

The “binding” part we Christians seem to have down pretty well.

Every subgroup in the Christian movement

has its own special brand of binding:

The Orthodox have the holy synods

and the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

The Roman Catholics have the papacy and a well-defined hierarchy,

            councils, canon law and the catechism.

The churches of the Reformation have their confessions

and books of discipline.

The monastic movements all have their “rules” that bind them.

Anglican churches for centuries had the Book of Common Prayer

            —often a particular version produced in 1662—

and we Episcopalians bind ourselves

through the baptismal covenant, among other things.

So binding we get—

the basic meaning of the word “religion” is to bind, after all.

That’s a bit curious to me, since as I read it,

all Jesus actually binds his followers to

            is love of God and love of neighbor,

            which seems rule enough to live by.

Loosing, though, Christians seem to do less of.

I sometimes wonder what Christian churches would look like

            if we led with “loosing” rather than “binding,”

            if we saw our vocation as primarily unbinding,

of freeing humankind of everything, save the command to love.

I wonder what church would be like if we saw our job

            as unleashing the creative potential

of everyone and everything around us,

so that love of God and love of neighbor could flourish

in ways we can’t imagine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about binding and loosing this week

            as the events in Ferguson, Missouri have been unfolding.

So much of what is being said about it seems unhelpful,

            but when I mute all the commentary

I am struck by how much “binding” I see:

the police all strapped together,

            bulletproof vests and shields and helmets and armored cars,

and the protesters, some with their faces bound in masks,

some eventually bound in handcuffs

or restrained by the police.

Those visible “bonds” though are the sacraments

            of the real bindings that are holding Ferguson,

            holding all of us,

all that equipment is the visible sign that points to and enacts

            the distrust, the anger, the lack of opportunity,

            the racism and oppression,

all the diabolical forces that continue to hold our society bound

            in injustice, in violence, in sin, in death.

In my more pessimistic moments I fear that,

whatever happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson

            that resulted in Michael’s death,

those two men were already bound so tightly by these forces

            that what happened between them was almost inevitable,

with the consequences falling most heavily, fatally,

on a young man of color,

            as it so often does both there in Missouri and here in Chicago.

What would the church, our church, any church, be like

if we took as our primary calling to loose these powerful bindings?

What if each of us, or a few of us together, or all of us,

chose just one of those bindings, just one buckle of it, or one lock,

            and dedicated ourselves to working on it,

            to gnawing at it, to cracking it,

so that humankind and creation might be just a little freer,

            just a little more able to live under grace,

to experience just a little more the love of God and neighbor?

Those aren’t easy questions to answer;

            I’m not sure I have answers for myself.

But I am convinced that our faith in Jesus,

            a faith lived as love of God and love of neighbor,

binds us to answer them,

binds us to working on them,

binds us to unbinding, to setting free.

Perhaps the “keys to the kingdom of heaven”

that Jesus has bequeathed to us

have something to with unlocking whatever holds us bound

to the destructive powers that drive the suffering of the world.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons,

loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people,

and respect the dignity of every human being?

It is to those words of our baptismal covenant

that we bind ourselves

Sunday after Sunday, day after day.

It is after all the privilege of those who are baptized

            to partner with God in unleashing

            the love of God and love of neighbor

for the sake of everyone and everything.

And Jesus has given us not only the authority

but also the grace to accomplish this mission.

How we enact that grace,

how we perform it,

how we embody it

            in this place, in this church,

is a question left to us to answer.