RCL Proper 18B
4 August 2024
Church of the Epiphany
Surrey BC
One of the first things that I do most mornings is to read the headlines from The Guardian, a British news source that has been operating since 1821. It has a chequered history with some of its founders having profited from the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people but, over the last one hundred years, The Guardian is now one of the media voices for those who are arguing for a more progressive approach to our world’s challenges. Unlike most media outlets, The Guardian is not owned by a private company but is financed by a Trust whose proceeds benefit journalists and journalism rather than shareholders.
One of the features that I read regularly is entitled ‘Dining across the Divide’. In these features two people who would not regularly break bread together because of their differing political and social view share a meal. They are then interviewed about their experience of having a conversation with each other. More often than not the two people leave the meal with a greater appreciation of each other’s points of view. They may not agree, but they come away acknowledging that the other person is not a ‘monster’ or ‘weird’. Sometimes they even become friends.
At the heart of the Letter to the Ephesians is the conviction that “(the) mystery of faith . . . is that through the one body of Jesus, God has brought together two disparate groups under one plan of salvation.”[1] Most Christians today do not know that one of the greatest crises the early Christian movement faced was the relationship between Jewish believers in Jesus as the Christ and the non-Jews who heard the good news of God in Christ and became followers of the Way of Jesus. Evidence as to how the leadership of the Christian movement tried to deal with this crisis or failed to deal with this crisis can be found in almost every book in the New Testament.
Many – but not all – Jews in the time of Jesus and the early Christian movement had come to believe that the non-Jewish world was a threat – unclean, unethical, unworthy of respect. Many – but not all – non-Jews in the time of Jesus and the early Christian movement had come to believe that the Jewish way of life was bizarre, disloyal to the Empire, narrow-minded. Since all of the first followers of Jesus were Jews, it was difficult to know how best to respond to the growing numbers of non-Jews who were coming into the movement.
The unity that the Christian community needed in order to navigate the religious, political and social currents that threatened to overwhelm the community was not easy to maintain. Christians knew that they were already one body through their baptism, a spiritual unity that came as God’s gift. But the visible unity of the community, a community made up of people with distinct views on who Jesus was, on how the community should be governed and on what made good disciples, was, and still is, a work in progress.
The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians understood that key to managing our growth into more visible unity was, and is, the character of the leadership of the movement. What we heard in today’s second reading has been for me what I might call one of my ‘desert island’ passages of scripture. I believe it lays out before us the necessary elements of the unity that God desires for us, not just as Christians, but as people living in the world.
· We need ‘apostles’, people who have the gifts to lead us as we share the good news of God in Christ to a world in which there are many who aren’t sure that the good news is good news.
· We need ‘prophets’, people who speak God’s truth to us in real times and in real places and who are willing to face the cost of speaking the truth in love.
· We need ‘evangelists’, people who know how to share the good news in the many languages and cultures of our world, our local communities, our distinct generations.
· We need ‘pastors and teachers’, people who use their knowledge, skills and experiences to build us up by appealing to our hopes rather than whip us by catering to our fears.
Leadership is meant to equip us for ministry, to build us up in the unity of faith and the knowledge of God, to nurture us so that we become fully who we are as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. Leadership, true leadership, equips us to be a community of self-giving, self-sacrificing love, the love we know in Christ Jesus.
Unfortunately, we are living in a world where such leadership is not as evident as we might wish. We see too many examples, particularly in the partisanship of many political leaders, both in Canada and in the United States. In a world of sound bites, character and concern for the public good of all people are casualties in the quest for political power. Few if any of our leaders seem to be willing to dine across the divide.
But here in our parish as we continue our journey towards the next chapter in our history, we have the opportunity to build one another up, to nurture each other, to rejoice in our distinctive ways of finding God’s presence in our lives and in our choices. “In a world that increasingly seems to embrace arrogance, violence and short-temperedness,” the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians invites us “to embrace humility, gentleness and patience.”[2]
Beginning this Sunday and on the rest of the Sundays of August, I will be asking you to answer a question after the sermon. Your answers, whether in English or Arabic, will help the Search Committee craft a vision that we hope will attract the ordained leader we need to nurture us to grow into the maturity that God in Christ offers to us.
So today, my friends, here is the first question: ‘What do you value most about the Church of the Epiphany?’
No comments:
Post a Comment