Pickles, Holiness and Perfection

RCL Epiphany 7A

20 February 2011

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Focus texts:  Leviticus 19.2; Matthew 5.48

         On the 11^th of June 1981 I was ordained deacon in the Cathedral of Saint John in the Wilderness in Denver, Colorado.  Five months and six days earlier William Wolfrum, better known as ‘Dub’, was ordained bishop in the same cathedral.  When I joined Dub on the diocesan staff, he told me that he expected me to teach him how to be a bishop and he would teach me how to be a priest.  He kept his end of the agreement admirably and I can only pray that I kept mine.

         About a month or two before I was ordained, Dub and his wife, Beverly, joined the diocesan bishop, Bill Frey and his wife, Barbara, for a tour of the Diocese of Colorado, an area of more than 103,000 square miles.  They travelled from large urban centres to smaller towns and rural communities.  In each place the two bishops and their wives would worship with those who gathered and gave people an opportunity to learn more about the suffragan bishop and his wife.

         In one community a woman stood up and directed a question at Bev Wolfrum.  “Bev,” she said, “we are so blessed to have Barbara Frey among us.  She writes spiritual columns and books.  She leads retreats.  She gives inspirational talks all the diocese and the country.  What do you do?”  The woman’s question was followed by a period of silence while most of the assembled people waited with bated breath to hear how Bev would measure herself against Barbara, described in terms just a degree or so lower than the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The silence was broken by Bev’s sturdy voice.  “I do pickles,” she said.

         Bev did do pickles and numerous other dishes including three-bean salad, a dish she tried to get me to eat for years.  But while she was cooking or canning or anything else in her kitchen, she also listened well and offered wisdom to many people who might be daunted to approach Barbara but who found a safer haven in Bev’s kitchen.  When Paula and I became engaged, it was Dub and Bev who did our pre-marital preparation with humour, wisdom and common sense.

         In today’s readings from Leviticus and the gospel according to Matthew are two phrases which, on first hearing, can be off-putting because they are daunting.  “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” speaks the Holy One to Moses and the assembled people of Israel.  “Be perfect . . . as your Father in heaven is perfect,” speaks Jesus to the disciples and the assembled people on the mount of the Beatitudes.

         What does it mean to be holy?  How can we be perfect?  For most of us holiness is a quality we have rarely experienced and perfection is a state we know we will never be able to achieve.  Perhaps the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa are holy, but they are not perfect.  Perhaps there are models and actors whose physical forms seem to us to be perfect, yet these forms will eventually pass away and the realities of aging will leave their marks.  Yet these difficult sayings have been preserved by our ancestors in the faith because they call us to be who we are as people who have faith in the God of Israel, the God of Jesus, the God of the earliest Christian communities.

         What does it mean to be holy?  In the Hebrew scriptures holiness is a quality only found in God.  But the people of Israel are holy and are not yet holy.  They are holy because they have been chosen by God to be God’s own people, a holiness they did not earn but were gifted by God’s generous choice.  But they are not yet holy, because they continue to struggle to be faithful to the covenant God established with them on Mount Sinai.

         What does it mean to be ‘perfect’?  In the New Testament the word translated as ‘perfection’ in English is telos.  Telos does not mean without blemish or fault, without any imperfections or insufficiencies.  Telos means ‘the purpose for which one exists’ or ‘maturity in one’s identity’ or ‘the goal towards which one strives’.  When Jesus exhorts his listeners to be ‘perfect’ as God is perfect, it is a call to become more authentic, to shed the illusions and delusions we all have about who we are and what we are capable of doing.  To be telos is to be fully alive as a human being created in the image and likeness of God.

         Holiness and perfection, as understood in the scriptures, are not extraordinary qualities of human life.  They are actually ordinary.  By ‘ordinary’ I mean they are qualities that God, through the Holy Spirit, enables all of us to cultivate.  What is required to achieve these, however, is discipline, humour and the willingness to persevere.

         All of us here at Saint Faith’s are familiar with the promises of the baptismal covenant.  At every baptism and on other occasions these words have echoed through this place of worship.  What these promises represent, however, may not be immediately apparent.  They form what is sometimes called ‘a rule of life’, a guide to spiritual growth.  Dare I say that they represent a way of holiness and perfection?

         When we promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, we are accepting God’s call to be part of a community that has gathered around font, lectern and table for two thousand years.  It is a promise to deepen our conversation with God through personal and corporate prayer, one of the means God uses to centre us, to renew us and to enliven our imaginations.

         When we promise to persevere in resisting evil and, whenever we fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord, we are accepting God’s call to be part of a community that knows that evil is real but that forgiveness and reconciliation is more real and more enduring.  It is a promise to face our own darknesses with courage because God’s light shines into every darkness and cannot be overcome.

        When we promise to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ, we are accepting God’s call to share with others what we know of the love of Christ poured into our hearts.  It is a promise not to be silent about the joy and peace we have found here.

         When we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbour as ourselves, we are accepting God’s call to radical hospitality and to the recognition that the stranger, no matter how we might define the word ‘stranger’, is not our enemy but our friend.  It is a promise to build neighbourhood wherever we are and however we can.

        When we promise to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being, we are accepting God’s call to speak for the voiceless.  It is a promise to do justice not just speak about it.

        In our baptism and in our partaking of the eucharist we participate in God’s holiness and are infected with the virus of holiness.  That virus waxes and wanes in us in proportion to our conscious and active commitment to live out the promises of our baptismal covenant.        

        In our daily lives we are challenged to be perfect as our God is perfect.  That perfection looms like a guiding star upon the horizons of our lives, a star we sometimes lose sight of, but a star that never disappears from the sky.  Our journey towards that star requires discipline, humour and perseverance, but the journey will bring us to our telos.

         My sisters and brothers, sometimes holiness surprises us in the kitchen as a quiet saint prepares pickles, listens to us and gives us guidance that re-orients us towards perfection.  Sometimes perfection surprises us in a person who is so comfortable in her or his own skin, so quietly competent in the work God has entrusted to her or him, and that perfection, this embodiment of her or his telos, re-orients us towards holiness.

        Shortly we will begin our annual Lenten pilgrimage that leads us to Jerusalem and the remembrance of those events which gave rise to our faith.  This year’s pilgrimage comes at a time when we are in the midst of re-imagining the future of ministry in this parish in conversation with our Anglican neighbours.  I invite you to join me in renewing our commitment to the rule of holiness and perfection expressed in our baptismal covenant so that our Easter renewal of faith will be even richer.

        As we prepare for this journey, let us remember that God’s temple is holy and we are that temple.  All things are ours whether the world or life or death or the present or the future --- all belong to us and we belong to Christ.  Amen.

         

A Never-ending story

The Celebration of the Feast of Agnes, Martyr

23 January 2011

Saint Agnes Anglican Church

North Vancouver BC

+ May my mouth speak the praise of our God and may all the faithful bless the holy name of God for ever and ever.  Amen.

         In the year 284 of the common era Diocletian, a Roman general of Croatian origin, became the emperor of an empire that was in the midst of a decline from which it would eventually succumb.  Despite all the evidence of its decline Diocletian was committed to restoring the Roman Empire to its former glory.

         To accomplish this Diocletian became a true autocrat and emphasized the status of the emperor as the earthly embodiment of divine power.  He actively worked to restore the old Roman civil religion and, to achieve its restoration, Diocletian was quite happy to use the full coercive power of the state.  One group that felt the lash of Diocletian’s desire to revive the glories of the past were the Manichees, a religious group that shared some affinities with certain Christian teachings.  They were bullied, abused, arrested, tortured and executed in the name of the restoration of the Roman state.

         By this time in Roman history, however, the followers of the way of Jesus of Nazareth were moving into the main-stream of Roman society and were already including members of wealthy Roman families as well as members of the imperial household, the powerful bureaucracy which ran the imperial government, within the numbers of Christians in the Empire.  For almost twenty years Diocletian held back his hand from active persecution of Christians, but in 303 Diocletian unleashed the power of the state upon the Christian community.  Although there were regions where Diocletian’s anti-Christian policy was not enforced, this time came to be known by some early Christian historians as the ‘Great Persecution’.

         How Agnes, a young girl of twelve or thirteen and a member of a prominent family, came to fall into the hands of the Roman authorities is the subject of various accounts and legends.  These stories, while entertaining in a strange way, are not why we remember her nor why it is important to continue to enshrine her name by dedicating parish churches in her name.

         What we need to remember is that on or about the 21^st of January in the year 304 of the common era Agnes died because she was a Christian and would not abandon her faith in the face of certain death.  That would be enough to merit keeping her name alive, indeed the name of any of the numerous martyrs, whether Christian or not, who have refused to yield to political or religious persecution.  For those of us gathered in this church dedicated to Agnes, however, there is a more pressing reason to remember her.  Agnes dared to believe in a new way of looking at the world even as her own culture and society were surely dying, a slow death to be sure, but dying nevertheless.

         Here in North Vancouver it is fitting to have a church dedicated to such a courageous young person.  The parishes of this deanery have dared to look at how Anglican ministry might be shaped in the months and years ahead as it has become clear that older models of ministry no longer serve our present reality and that the time has come to allow them to die with dignity.  Rather than grasping after the glories of past days as Diocletian tried to do, you have chosen the way of Agnes, daring to follow the way of Jesus even if it is not entirely clear where that way may lead you.

• You have embraced the new yet ancient ministry of deacons as a mark of your future.
• You have broadened your horizons to reach beyond parish boundaries to encompass all the regions of North Vancouver. 
• You have dared our diocesan structures to play ‘catch up’ with you as we realize that our canons and regulations may not be agile enough to support the initiatives that we need to undertake to proclaim the good news in what is increasingly an ignorant, indifferent and, at times, hostile post-religious society. 

         Just yesterday, Douglas Todd wrote in the Vancouver Sun about a recent study that indicates how far religious ignorance has permeated our society, touching even those who claim to be, in some fashion or another, religious.

         This is not the first time we have lived in such times.  At some point between the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 and the beginnings of active imperial opposition to the Christian movement in the 90’s, a Christian leader wrote from Rome to Christians living in the eastern regions of the Empire.  These Christians had “once participated in the social and cultural life of their communities, but since their conversion to Christ have become marginalized and abused.”  (The New Oxford Annotated Bible)  The dominant Roman view of foreign religions, which is what Christianity was considered to be, was that they “. . . caused immorality (especially adultery), insubordination within the household, and sedition against the state.”  (The HarperCollins Study Bible).  After all, Paul taught Christian women that they could divorce their unbelieving husbands, that in Christ there was no male nor female, no slave nor free, no Jew or Greek and that only Jesus was ‘Lord’, a title usually reserved for the emperor.

         What is striking is the author’s view of how the Christian communities should respond to this ostracism and abuse.  We might expect him to say something like, “Hunker down.  Lie low for a well.  Move out of the cities.”  But this is not his message.  The author emphasizes what the Christians share with their non-Christian neighbours and encourages Christians “. . . to critical, responsible service of God in the family and in other institutions of society” rather than an abandonment of the world.  (The HarperCollins Study Bible)  “Above all,” he writes, “maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins.  Be hospitable to one another without complaining.  Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.”  (1 Peter 4.8-10)

         My sisters and brothers of the Parish of Saint Agnes, you have chosen to walk the way of the martyrs, a word which simply means ‘witness’ in Greek.  It is to you and to all of us facing the challenges of sharing our faith in a post-religious culture that Jesus says, “[Do] not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”  (Matthew 10.19-20)  Like the communities to whom the author of 1 Peter wrote, we are not to abandon our world and hide away.  We to whom God has entrusted manifold gifts of grace are being challenged to find new ways to pour out that grace on a society and culture that is in need of it.  Our task is to find the language and structures that will help us to this.

         Whether they knew it or not, the people who decided to call this parish, the Parish of Saint Agnes, were daring to say to the whole world:  We are Agnes, here in North America, here in North Vancouver, here in this time and, we hope, for time to come.  Just as Agnes faced a dying society and culture in the confidence of a faith in a living God who dares to make all things new, so will we embody the same faith in the same living God

• who raises up what is cast down;
• who makes new things that had grown old and
• who is bringing to perfection all things through Jesus, our way, our truth, our life.

         We are all familiar with the invitation to share the bread and wine of the eucharist:  “The gifts of God for the people of God.”  Less familiar perhaps is the whole phrase that we believe Augustine of Hippo, the great fifth-century North African theologian, spoke to his people as he held up the consecrated bread and wine before them:  “The gifts of God for the people of God.  See who you are.  Become what you see.”  When we dedicate a parish to one saint or another, we do so for a reason.  It is as if we are saying to the whole community, “See who we are.  Help us become what we see.”

         As a young priest in the Diocese of Colorado I was taught a song that originated somewhere in Africa where people walk for hours to attend worship.  As they walk, they sing:  “We have another world in view, in view.  We have another world in view.  We have another world in view, in view.  We have another world in view.  Our Saviour has come to prepare us a place.  We have another world in view.  Our Saviour has come to prepare us a place.  We have another world in view.”  My friends, we are emerging from a long period where the church did not have another world in view.  We were so deeply rooted in the institutions of our society, so closely identified with the structures of power, that we might be excused for losing sight of who we were and who we were to become.  But we have another world in view.

         Even as painful as some of the losses of the past decades are, these losses may have begun clear our eyes to see and our arteries to fuel a renewed vision of what it means to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  Our places for worship are not sanctuaries from the needs and concerns of the world in which we live and work but mission stations where we are fed and nurtured by Word and Spirit, by fellowship and prayer, by study and sacrament, to participate in God’s mission.    Agnes understood this and took her place in the procession of saints, some martyrs, some imprisoned and maltreated, who lead us into our neighbourhoods not away from them.  Therefore, joining with the heavenly chorus, with prophets, apostles and martyrs, and with those in every generation who have looked to God in hope, who have caught a glimpse of the new world in which God calls us to share, let us proclaim an ancient hymn of praise,

Splendour and honour and sovereign power *

         are yours by right, O Lord our God,

For you created everything that is, *

         and by your will they were created and have their being.

And yours by right, O Lamb that was slain, *

         for with your sacrifice you have redeemed for God,

From every family, language, people and nation, *

         a priestly community to serve our God on earth.

And so, to the One who sits upon the throne, *

         and to Christ the Lamb,

Be worship and praise, dominion and splendour,

         for ever and for evermore.  Amen.

Revelation 4.11; 5.9-10, 13 alt. by RGL+

It Gets Better!

Here is a great video from Children's Hospital Boston to share with our GLBT youth!

Are You Being Served?

RCL Proper 2A

16 January 2011

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

         From time to time an older British comedy will make an appearance on one television channel or another.  The series takes place in a family-owned and operated department store and features the antics of the owner and his staff, an eclectic collection of hard-workers and shirkers.  You may be familiar with the title, “Are You Being Served?”  Given the reluctance of some of the staff to provide any service to the customers, the answer is frequently, “No, I am not being served!”  One reason I find the programme amusing is that I spent four summers, four Christmases and one full year working in a department store in Colorado when I was a university student.  The programme brings back vivid memories of how we sometimes looked very busy in order to avoid contact with the many and various characters who came to the store every day.

         But if I spend too much time in that part of my past, I begin to recall memories that have more significant meaning.  I remember one older woman, perhaps my grandmothers’ age, coming up to me with a package in her hands that was tied up in twine.  “Would you please cut this twine with your pen-knife,” she asked me.  “I’m sorry,” I answered, “I don’t have a pen-knife.”  “Oh,” she responded, “I thought all gentlemen carried pen-knives.”  Her comment, gently made without any real criticism, lingered with me.  For months afterwards I carried a pen-knife in the hope that she would return and give me a chance to redeem myself and show myself to be a true gentleman.  By the way, I do carry a pen-knife in my dispatch case!

         When I think back on my days in retail, I find myself wandering further back to my childhood and memories of my maternal grandmother, Mildred Broom.  Her working days were spent as an assistant in Mr Wheatley’s corner shop in Molesey, a suburb of London.  Every time I went into that shop, I was well and truly served, not just because my grandmother worked there, but because the shop was a centre of the community’s life.  Neighbours met in the shop and spent far more time than they needed as they shared stories, gossip, hopes and joys, concerns and sorrows, with each other, with my grandmother and with Mr Wheatley.  Once, when I was in grade three, the school bus driver delivered me to the wrong address and it was hours before we finally found the right ‘Green Lane’ in the vastness of Metropolitan London.  The next day I was in the corner shop telling everybody about my harrowing adventure.  Mr Wheatley gave me a packet of Macintosh toffees in honour of my bravery.  Mr Wheatley’s shop was more than a place to buy things; it was a place where many of the neighbourhood’s needs for companionship, for listening hearts and ears, for a recognition that we existed even in the midst of a large city, all these needs were met, sometimes with a nod or a kind word, sometimes with Macintosh toffees.

         ‘Service’ and ‘servant’ and ‘serving’ are words that are having a hard time in the twenty-first century.  In contemporary youth culture, for example, the phrase, "you got served," means to be put down, to put in one's place.  Imagine going to a party where you are asked to tell about what your children or grandchildren or yourself are doing these days.  “Well,” you say, “I am proud to say that we are all involved in the service industry.”  Here in Kerrisdale I expect you might find yourself quickly enveloped in a cone of silence or by a circle of sympathetic friends offering their condolences.  When the government announces the current employment statistics, an increase in the number of jobs in the so-called ‘service industry’ is not considered a particularly encouraging statistic.  Yet who among us has not walked away from an encounter with a sales person or a restaurant worker or someone else engaged in the ‘service industry’ feeling a bit better because he or she, in that brief encounter, has treated us as a human being rather than an object or has gone out of their way to provide us with an item or a service we really needed.

         “And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honoured in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength --- [the LORD] 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.’”  (Isaiah 49.5-6)

         These words were spoken more than twenty-five hundred years ago to a people living in exile and holding on to the hope that they would be restored to the land that they had lost.  No doubt some of them hoped that the return would bring back the old days, but the words of the prophet challenge that hope with God’s call to the people to be more than just one more nation on the face of the earth, one more people holding on to a land and to a tradition --- “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.”  The work that God was calling them to undertake surpassed the geographical constraints of their original homeland.

         For all these centuries this is what God has done, is doing and will continue to do --- establishing communities of faith throughout the world, not as small enclaves of privilege or cultural continuation, but as lights to the world, illumining a way of life that calls us beyond ourselves and into partnership with God.  One of the concrete ways that we participate with God in breaking down the walls that people erect to keep others out, how we participate with God in building communities that are life-giving, is by learning the needs and concerns of those among whom we live and work so that we can identify how we, as a community of faith, can respond in ways the embody our faith even as we meet those needs.

         Some of you know that we are engaged in a mysterious process called the ‘Ministry Assessment Process’.  There are some people in the Diocese who believe this to be a thinly-veiled effort to close parishes and to sell their assets.  Certainly this attitude has been reflected in some of the ill-chosen words of the representatives of the Anglican Network in Canada in explaining why they have chosen to seek leave to appeal their judicial defeats to the Supreme Court of Canada.  But ‘MAP’, as this Process is frequently called, is about re-discovering the neighbourhoods in which we live and work so that we can be a light to the nations so that the good news of God in Jesus of Nazareth can be shared, if not in words, then definitely by deeds of service and compassion, hospitality and openness.

         MAP asks us, “Why do you have a pre-school in the parish?”  One simple answer would be to say, “We need the revenue.”  But this would not be an adequate answer to that question.  Stepping Stones certainly is a source of revenue, but that is not why we have a pre-school here.  We have a pre-school because we live in a society where many families require two incomes to support their needs and their desires.  In a society such as this a pre-school and the care it provides the ‘little ones’ is not only desirable but necessary.  MAP will challenge us to look at how we might strengthen this partnership as an expression of our service to this community.

         MAP asks us, “Why do you have recitals in the church?”  One simple answer would be to say, “We need the revenue.”  But this would not be an adequate answer to the question.  As our provincial and federal governments decrease funding for the arts, private teachers are picking up more and more of the responsibility to offer our young people instruction in the arts, especially the art of music.  If there is one thing Saint Faith’s has enjoyed and continues to enjoy is a love of music, sung and instrumental.  By opening our building to recitals, we welcome families, many of whom have no connection with a religious community, into our space with its abundant reminders of the good news.  MAP will challenge us here as well.  How might we make stronger connections with the teachers, perhaps bringing their students into our worship, so that they are not an ‘outside user group’, but our neighbours.

         Time does not permit me to give an extended treatment of all the groups and the communities with whom Saint Faith’s comes into contact.  But if we are to be faithful to the call of God expressed in the words of the prophet Isaiah, then we will not shy away from asking how our hospitality to the Special Olympics programme for younger children might grow into a more visible partnership.  These and other questions will arise in the months ahead.  They are driven not by a desire to end our ministry here, but by our hopes that we will find new ways to be a light here in this part of the city.

         It would be naïve to assume that there will not be changes of one sort or another in the months and years ahead.  One of the tasks of the priest who will come to be our priest-in-charge after Paula’s departure will be to build on the work done thus far and help the leadership of the congregation articulate a vision for what comes next.  Just as Isaiah encouraged the people to look at themselves in new ways, so too will the priest-in-charge call upon the members of this parish to see the future of ministry here in new and, I hope, life-giving ways.

         "Are you being served?"  That is our question for our neighbours and wider community.  In some ways my hope is that we might be a bit like Mr Wheatley's corner store, a place where strangers become friends, where the lost are found, where those in need find their needs met --- perhaps even with Maintosh toffees.

         In the meantime let us listen carefully to the Scriptures as they are read Sunday after Sunday.  As we hear them read, let us be attentive to any phrases, any images, any words that seem to grip us or open new vistas.  Then let us share those with one another and perhaps even with those who do not join us in our worship.

         In the meantime let us break the bread and share the cup Sunday after Sunday.  As we break the bread and share the cup, let us remember that bread does not fulfill its purposes until it is broken and shared, that wine does not fulfill its purposes until it is poured and shared.  We who eat this bread and drink this cup do not fulfill our purpose, our identity as the body of Christ, until we open ourselves to our neighbours and to the needs of our communities.  While we were yet in our mothers’ wombs, God called each one of us by name to this ministry.  While we were yet in our mothers’ wombs, God called us to be lights in a world that is often grey.  Even when we think we are labouring in vain and our energy is waning, God has chosen us for this work in this place.  I dare to say that God needs us to be here, not as a cultural artifact, but as a centre for God’s mission and ministry.  For that, my sisters and brothers, is who we truly are.

Let us pray.

God of grace and glory, you call us with your voice of flame to be your people, faithful and courageous.  As your beloved Son embraced his mission in the waters of baptism, inspire us with the fire of your Spirit to join him in his transforming work.  We ask this in the name of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.  (Revised Common Lectionary Prayers)

The Primate's New Year's Day Address

Please click on the title of this post to read the Primate's New Year's Day address, given at Christ Church Cathedral in Ottawa.

May the Primate's hopes be realized in the year and years to come.

Quirky Nativity

Here's a quirky but fun take on the Nativity story --- especially for those of us who are relatively adept at the new social media but still have our moments of caution!  Just click on the title of this post and you'll be connected to Youtube.

Mission & Money --- A Not So Peaceable Kingdom

[This sermon was prepared for the parish of Saint Helen's Point Grey to make links between congregational financial support of the Diocese and the mission of God in the world.  The above painting is by Edward Hicks, the Quaker minister and artist (1780 - 1849) and retrieved from fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca on Saturday, 4 December 2010.]

RCL Advent 2A

5 December 2010

Saint Helen’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

            More than seven hundred years before the advent of Jesus of Nazareth a priest and prophet living in the southern kingdom of Judah received a series of revelations from the God of Israel.  These revelations came at a time of political and social disintegration as both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah were slowly and surely absorbed into the Assyrian Empire.  We know this priest and prophet as Isaiah, son of Amoz, a name which can mean ‘Yahweh has saved’ or ‘Yahweh may save’.  Perhaps his parents, keenly aware of the crisis into which their son was being born, chose a name to express their deepest hope that Yahweh, the God of Israel, would bring the two kingdoms safely out of the crisis just as surely as God had brought the people out of Egypt.

            The kings of Judah, David’s successors, were weak and inconsequential when compared to the kings of the neighbouring nations; they were, as Isaiah describes them, ‘the stump of Jesse’.  Yet Isaiah believed that the kings of Judah reigning in Jerusalem were a divine institution and that any future messianic kingdom would be led by a descendant of David.  But this future messianic kingdom would not be perfect because ‘some people will still be poor, others ruthless or wicked.  The difference from the current age will lie, rather, in the king’s response to these problems:  He will always render accurate and fair judgments” (The Jewish Study Bible).  Isaiah shared the common view of Near Eastern peoples of this time that “the mark of a truly righteous king is his willingness to protect the poor and his nation’s other marginalized groups, especially widows and orphans” (The New Interpreter’s Study Bible).  As Isaiah speaks, “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth . . . . Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.” (Isaiah 11.3b-4a, 5)

            When we set this beautiful vision of an ideal kingdom of justice and equity in context, a world in which even the natural order reflects a new harmony between predator and prey, we realize that this is a message predicated on the ending of one world before the new world can begin.  It is an acknowledgement that we inhabit a world that is not just, where inequity flourishes and the natural world suffers the consequences of human greed and selfishness.

            Let us jump forward many centuries.  The final decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth were times of considerable religious fervour in North America.  Not only were the so-called ‘mainline’ traditions establishing themselves in the changed political environment following the American Revolution, but there was a strong ‘end of times’ spirituality that burned on the frontier of European settlements, both in Canada and in the United States.  The Shakers, a break-away sect from the Quakers, established communes in which celibacy was maintained and Mother Anne, the founder of the movement, was considered the incarnation of the feminine dimension of Jesus Christ.  A young man in western New York by the name of Joseph Smith would experience a revelation that led him to discover what he called ‘another testament of Jesus Christ’ and to start a movement we now know as the Mormons.

            During these decades a young Quaker minister and artist by the name of Edward Hicks began to paint.  Among his works is a scene he would paint some sixty-one times in his life and which he called ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’.  His inspiration came from today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah with its proclamation of an ideal world in which ‘(the) wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.’ (Isaiah 11.6)  Often his paintings of this theme included, in the background, a scene of William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony, signing a landmark treaty with the native people of the Colony.

            Hicks was concerned by what he saw as a growing worldliness on the part of his contemporaries as well as by the growing number of divisive sects and splits within the various religious communities of the time.  His reverence for William Penn did not blind Hicks to the fact that the native people of the United States were not treated with the respect and justice that Penn had shown to them in the early days of Pennsylvania.  In some versions of ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ it is possible to sense some of Hicks’ growing despair:  the colours are darker and the scene of Penn with the native people is omitted.  One senses that Hicks is holding on to Isaiah’s vision even as that vision seems to slip further and further into a very distant future.

            Isaiah and his interpreter, Edward Hicks, hold before us what I believe is God’s most urgent task in the world today:  the bringing into being of a genuine peaceable kingdom where justice and equity for all people, regardless of any of the natural or imagined distinctions we identify, and where the resources of our world are used responsibly and fairly so that every human being has fullness of life and the creation itself flourishes.

            But how does God achieve this mission?  While there are many ways in which God accomplishes the divine purposes in creation, I want to focus on one means that God uses --- you and I,  the community of the baptized believers who follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth.  Throughout the biblical witness God consistently employs human agents to achieve the divine purposes and, in these last days, my sisters and brothers, we, the church, are called to be agents of God.  One of Isaiah’s contemporaries, the prophet Micah, gives us the agenda for how we are to participate in this mission:  “[God] has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6.8).

            We are challenged to embody ‘the peaceable kingdom’ for which we wait, to offer to those in whose midst we live and work a foretaste of what is to come: 

     i)         Ensure that no human being is treated as a means to someone else’s purpose but as one made in the image and likeness of the living God. 

   ii)         Offer to all people that covenant love and faithfulness that God offers to every human being, loving neighbour as one loves oneself. 

 iii)         Rather than grasp after divinity, become fully alive after the model of Jesus of Nazareth. 

It is this mission we are to serve with our stewardship of our time and our talents and

our treasure.

            While I could say more about how we use our time and talents to further God’s ‘peaceable kingdom’, your Rector asked me, as a member of the Diocesan Council and as a former member of General Synod, to share with you how the financial resources we give to the work of the Diocese and to the General Synod to participate in the mission of God that I have described.

            Agenda item #1:  Do justice.  In the more than twenty years of my involvement in diocesan and national structures I believe that doing justice has been a central focus in the programme work of our Diocese and our General Synod.  Whether we are talking about support for affordable housing initiatives or responding to the needs of the poorest members of our communities or working towards the healing of ancient hurts caused to aboriginal people, the funds that come from this parish to the Diocese and from the Diocese to the programme of the General Synod have directly contributed to concrete acts of justice such as The 127 Housing Society, The Street Priest Initiative of Saint James and the Healing and Reconciliation Fund to name but three.  Without these funds these and similar agencies and programmes are often unable to apply for matching grants or to undertake vital initiatives.  Some of our funding supports the work of ‘Kairos’, the ecumenical justice coalition, that works both publicly and behind the scenes as an advocate for those who have no voice, whether in this country or abroad, in the corridors of political and economic power.

            Agenda Item #2:  Love kindness.  In the Hebrew Bible, the word translated into English as ‘kindness’ is chesed.  Chesed means more than ‘kindness’; it means ‘steadfast love and covenantal fidelity’; it means sticking with someone even when you would prefer to pretend you have no knowledge of who they are and no desire to be in any sort of relationship with them.  It means being as faithful to one another as God is faithful to us.  This is what the Diocese or the General Synod does through the financial support it receives from congregations and other sources:  Our diocesan and national leadership helps us remain faithful to one another, both in Canada and in the world. 

            In the Anglican tradition the diocese, not the congregation, is the smallest unit of the church; congregations are expressions of a diocesan strategy to meet the needs of a great diversity of people spread over a particular expanse of geography.  Contrary to the common parlance, I am not here as a ‘guest’ or as a ‘visitor’; I am here as one of your priests and I am as accountable to you as I am to the people of Saint Faith’s where I am the honorary assistant.  We are connected even when we may not know each well or at all.

            Many of the diocesan and national committees whose work relies on the funding received from congregations and dioceses are engaged in activities that help us remain faithful to one another.  For more than twenty years I have been engaged in diocesan and national projects associated with the worship life of the Anglican Church of Canada, work funded, in part, by St Helen’s and focused on helping us share in common prayer that unites us.  When the Bishop travels to Taiwan or to a meeting of the Provincial House of Bishops or to a meeting of the National House of Bishops, he does so in order, in some way, to link us to that broader community of Anglicans whom we consider our family --- not visitors or guests.  Much of what is called ‘administrative’ is really an expression of pastoral ministry that, at its heart, ensures that we are responsible to one another and supportive of one another.  A substantial portion of the budget of the General Synod supports ministry in the northern two-thirds of our country, the so-called ‘Council of the North’, where many congregations are vital, life-giving centres of spiritual growth, but not always financially sustainable without assistance from the southern dioceses.

            Agenda Item #3:  Walk humbly with God.  Key to walking humbly with God is knowing who we are and for what purpose we were created.  In our present climate of controversy regarding how shall we live in right relationship with God, some of the financial resources of our communities have been used to fund educational programmes intended, not to lead to a particular conclusion, but to help Christians talk with one another prayerfully and respectfully.  Some of our resources are used to fund theological education including non-traditional programmes for the training of laity and clergy.  Other resources are devoted to inter-church and inter-faith dialogues and relationships where new partnerships are being forged and mutual respect between peoples of differing faiths and traditions is growing.

            Perhaps one of the more significant developments in the life of our Diocese is the Ministry Assessment Process.  Through this Process congregations and deaneries are discovering new ways to be the presence of Christ in changing contexts.  As a former Mentor in this Process I know that the financial support from congregations such as St Helen’s has helped a smaller parish, thought to be dying, to discover new springs of life and new partnerships so that its ministry can continue in an area of the city that truly needs us to be present.

            My friends, line-item budgets do not always help us understand how our gifts are working towards that ‘peaceable kingdom’ proclaimed by Isaiah and painted so many times by Edward Hicks.  Line items do not always reveal how our gifts are helping us do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God --- but that work is happening and this congregation as well as those from Powell River to White Rock and from the University Endowment Lands to Hope participate in God’s mission to establish a peaceable kingdom where justice, covenant loyalty and humility reign over oppression, betrayal and arrogance.  Even as we wait for that kingdom to come, let us not fail to use our gifts so that the whole world will see that things which were cast down are being raised up, that things which have grown old are being made new and that all things are being brought to their perfection by the God whose power working in us does infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

Let us pray.

Labouring God, with axe and winnowing fork you clear a holy space where hurt and destruction have no place, and a little child holds sway.  Clear our lives of hatred and despair, sow seeds of joy and peace, that shoots of hope may spring forth and we may live in harmony with one another.  [We ask this in Christ’s name.]  Amen.  [Revised Common Lectionary Prayers]