See Who We Are. Become What We See.

See Who You Are.  Become What You See.

The 4^th Sunday after Pentecost

28 June 2020

 

RCL Proper 13A

Genesis 22.1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6.12-23; Matthew 10.40-42

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

How can we sing the Lord’s song upon an alien soil?

            The COVID-19 pandemic has stirred up a controversy among the ranks of those folk who plan, who lead and who ponder the experience of public worship.  This controversy swirls around a simple question:  ‘Should we celebrate the eucharist when so many of our people are unable to participate in person?’.

            It’s a fair question.  Even if our ritual traditions have wrapped the sharing of bread and wine in many layers, the eucharist is, after all, a meal.  If, when we are live-streaming the eucharist because we cannot celebrate it in a larger public gathering, only a small number of people are present and only the priest and a server or deacon receives, then are we keeping faith with Jesus who told all of us to eat this bread and drink this cup?

            I feel this tension most keenly when I point to the consecrated bread and wine on the holy table and then say to those who are present and those who are participating on-line, ‘The gifts of God for the people of God.’  I then consume some of the consecrated bread and all the consecrated wine and Carole consumes the bread that remains.  Somehow I feel that the words and the actions are disconnected.  But I’ll come back to this in a moment.

 

Receiving our marching orders

            Chapter 10 of the Gospel according to Matthew is devoted to Jesus’ instructions, exhortations and warnings to the twelve apostles.  Today we hear his final words before they push off in a new direction, as Jesus travels the highways and byways of Palestine, always working his way towards Jerusalem.  In these three short verses we hear not only their marching orders but ours as disciples of Jesus.

 

1)  We are to be prophets.

            Contrary to popular belief and usage, biblical prophets do not predict the future.  They are people led by God’s Spirit to speak God’s truth to a given people at a given time and place.  Prophets point to what God is doing in the events of their times and ours.  In many ways the prophet’s role is to take the blinders away from our eyes so that we can see more clearly how God is at work in our world whether on-stage or off.

            All disciples of Jesus are to be prophets.  We’re baptized into the same prophetic role as the first apostolic generation was empowered by their experience of Jesus’s life, teaching and resurrection.  We speak of God’s justice, the clear arc of God’s history working towards justice, in a world where injustice is not only widespread and systemic but serves the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

 

2)  We are to be righteous.

            Do not forget that there is a big difference between being self-righteous and being righteous.  Self-righteous folk are convinced that they are always right and that others need to be compelled to follow the same path as theirs.  Self-righteous folk rarely engage in conversations; they prefer monologues filled with moral advice and little self-examination.

            The righteous person tends to seek a conversation with others, especially those whom they may not understand or whose way of life is different from their own.  The righteous are interested in having right relationships:  with God, with others and with self.  The righteous seek to be faithful to their baptismal covenant by

·      resisting evil and, when they fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord; 

·      seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving neighbours as oneself;

·      striving for justice and peace by respecting the dignity of every human person, and

·      safeguarding the integrity of God’s creation.

At the end of the day, the righteous are always just a little bit surprised to learn that others think of them as righteous.  They tend to point to others rather than to themselves.  They understand it’s a lifetime process not something achieved in a moment.

 

3)  We are to be grateful.

            Genuine gratitude is ultimately rooted in a humility that recognizes that all that we are and all that we have is a gift from God.  We are never self-sufficient.  We are always dependant upon the kindness of strangers.  A cup of cold water in the hand of a stranger when we are thirsty is a gift from the hand of God.

            

See who we are.  Become what we see.

            When the priest or bishop presiding at the eucharist says, ‘The gifts of God for the people of God,’ they are speaking words which have an ancient pedigree.  Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-century North African bishop and theologian, is said to have invited his congregation to come forward to receive communion with these words, ‘The gifts of God for the people of God.  See who you are.  Become what you see.’

            What God desires for us in that we become who we truly are, but this is a process not a one-time event.  To be made in the image of God is God’s gift to us, but to grow into the likeness of God is a life-long journey towards spiritual maturity.  Our pilgrimage towards such maturity is strewn with moments of achievement punctuated with obstacles and doubts.  This pandemic is just such a time where obstacles and doubts may cast shadows on our path.

            We all know the old saying that ‘seeing is believing’.  Whether we are physically or digitally present, when we see the gifts of God, we take a step towards becoming what we see.  We see what we love:  the gathered community, the beauty of this space where so many of our memories have been formed, the self-offering of God embodied in the bread and wine.  Seeing these gifts stirs up our belief, a word whose roots, I remind you, mean ‘to consider beloved’.

            Even as we wait to resume sharing the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation, we can see who we are --- the beloved of God being reminded that we are beloved by God.  Even as we wait to sing God’s praise with our own voices and to greet each other with the sign of peace, we can become what we see --- grateful and righteous prophets of a generous and just Creator of the universe.

            For we are the gifts of God for the whole human family.  See who we are.  Become what we see.