Be of Good Courage: Reflections on Pentecost

 

RCL Pentecost A

28 May 2023

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

         In the summer of 1995 I found myself being asked at the last minute to preach on Pentecost in a three-point parish in the Ottawa region.  I was part of a group being hosted by the rector of the parish who, three days before our visit, had been stricken with what her physician said was the worst case of laryngitis he had ever encountered.  Because of its severity she had been directed to remain pretty much silent for ten days.

 

         Even though I had preached on Pentecost on more than one occasion, I found myself a bit anxious.  Major feasts such as Pentecost require some preparation, perhaps re-visiting biblical commentaries on the readings.  But I was far from home and did not have access to resources that I would usually consult.

 

         In part my anxiety stemmed from the fact that I had grown up in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the Episcopal Church in the United States was embroiled in a controversy over the Holy Spirit, a controversy associated with the charismatic renewal.  The same controversy stirred up the waters of the Anglican Church of Canada.

 

         Without going into too much detail, the controversy centred on a simple question:  How do we know when the Holy Spirit is working in the church?  What are the signs of the Spirit’s presence?  There were those Anglicans, influenced by the Pentecostal movement that began in the early 1900’s, who believed that the Spirit was surely present when people spoke in tongues, when healing ministries were active, when people spoke prophetic messages.  Growing up in the Diocese of Colorado where the charismatic renewal had a significant presence meant navigating these controversies wherever one went.

 

         But as I prepared for that Pentecost in 1995, I realized what I believed was the most certain sign of the Spirit’s presence.  It was not tongues, miracles and prophecy, though these are signs.  It was not worship that engaged the heart more than the mind, though this is a false dichotomy.  The surest sign of the Spirit’s presence is when Christians face the challenges of the present with courage.

 

Jesus said to his disciples, “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.  Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.  I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace.  In the world you face persecution, but take courage:  I have conquered the world!” (John 16.32-33 NRSVue)

 

         Let’s look a bit closer at the story of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles.  When the leaders of the apostolic community are gathered, they are not ignorant of the mission and ministry of Jesus.  They have been with him for three years.  They have heard his teaching in many times and places.  They are witnesses to the resurrection.  They have spent forty days in his risen presence.  But they are still huddled for safety in that same upper room where he broke the bread and poured the wine.  

 

It’s not for want of knowledge that they hide.  It’s not for want of experience that they hide.  They are afraid and their fear renders them silent.  I’m sure that they had hoped that Jesus would stay and continue to be physically present among them.  But he had ascended and he had entrusted his mission and ministry to them.  He had promised that he would send them the Paraclete, the Advocate, to enable them to do what he had asked them, his friends, to do.

 

The Spirit descends upon them and the apostles can no longer remain silent.  Their fears are real.  There are those in the Jewish community who think that the apostolic community is delusional at best, heretical at worst.  The religious leadership has managed to smear Jesus as a political and religious revolutionary whose followers constituted a threat to the Roman imperial government.  But despite these ‘real and present dangers’, Peter and his colleagues step out and speak out.  And from that moment everything changes and a movement begins that has led to this day, to this congregation, to you and me as friends of Jesus.

 

Courage is not the absence of fear.  Courage is the choice to face our fears, our doubts, our hesitations, because we have hope in God’s purpose for us and a vision for the future God has set before us.  Courage empowers both individuals and communities.  Courage enables us to do what needs to be done, even if we cannot yet see the outcome.

 

In every generation Christians have needed to call upon the Spirit to give us courage.  We have need of that gift now.  Last week Conwest, our development partner, informed us that it is withdrawing from the residential construction business.  They will finish two projects currently in construction but not continue their involvement with our project.  Although this decision is not an unusual one in the development world, it comes as a blow to us.  Conwest is committed to working with us to identify a construction partner who will take over the project.  The Property Development Committee is meeting this week and we will consider how best to proceed.  I recognize how Conwest’s decision generates anxiety and apprehension, but there are also reasons for hope.

 

·      Conwest and our consultant, Terra Housing, are identifying potential partners.

·      We are through the costly and difficult municipal approval process.  We have a project that will be shovel-ready once the necessary permits are issued.

·      We have a supportive Bishop and Diocesan Council who are committed to seeing this project reach fruition.

·      We have had setbacks before but have the perseverance and vision to continue.

 

So that we can take counsel together, I am calling a Parish Town Hall for Sunday, 11 June 2023, to discuss our property development, to answer questions and to do some work to assist our Search Committee.  Together, with the Spirit’s help, we will map a way forward.

 

         In 1930, at a time when the United States and the industrial world, was in the midst of the Great Depression, Henry Emerson Fosdick wrote a hymn that has resonated for more than ninety years.  Even though Fosdick was the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, a church built with a multi-million-dollar donation from John D. Rockefeller Jr., he was a champion of what’s known as the ‘social gospel’, a commitment to the needs of urban poor and racial justice.  He was widely praised and just as widely condemned.  But he knew what his congregation needed; he knew what we needed. [1]

 

God of grace and God of glory,

on your people pour your power;

now fulfil your church’s story;

bring its bud to glorious flower.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

for the facing of this hour,

for the facing of this hour. [2]

 

Fosdick lived to see the end of the Depression, achieved only after great sacrifices and a world war.  But the pulpit of Riverside Church continues to this day to be a place from which a message of justice and inclusion is preached.

 

         We have served New Westminster since 1859.  We’ve burnt down twice and built thrice.  We’ve endured the moving of the provincial capital to Victoria and the re-location of the Bishop’s chair to Christ Church.  We had to re-start our property redevelopment when our first development partner was not up to the task.  We had to re-tool our hoped-for affordable housing plans when BC Housing chose not to fund our project.  We rode the rough water of COVID and municipal legislative process and achieved what had eluded us for years.

 

We’re a bit floppy at the joints.  But we are still here.  We’re a touch worried and uncertain.  But we are still here.  We may be ‘ . . . wearied by the changes and chances of this life . . . ‘.  But we are still here.  On this Pentecost we pray for wisdom and for courage, confident in our faith that we will find a way to continue to gather, to be transformed and to be sent forth to proclaim the good news of God in Christ.  Because God knows – and we know – there is work to be done in this place and in these times.  God of grace and God of glory, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour.

 

---

[1] Drawn from https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-god-of-grace-and-god-of-glory.

 

[2] ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’, Common Praise 577.

  

Now What Do We Do? Reflections on the Ascension

RCL Easter 7A

21 May 2023

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

 

            In the summer between Grade 9 and Grade 10, two of my teachers, Mr Knox and Mr Kordula, asked if I wanted to work in their 4^th of July fireworks business.  These were the days when teachers were only paid nine months of the year and many supplemented their income by side businesses.  I was thrilled for two reasons:  In my school being asked by Mr Knox and Mr Kordula to work for them was considered a really special deal and, perhaps more importantly, I love fireworks.  One of the perks of working for the two Mr K’s was being able to take home $15 of free fireworks a week – US $15 in 1968 dollars!

             After two weeks of ramping up inventory, preparing assortment bags and putting the firework stands together, we were ready for business.  There were some older boys who had worked in previous summers, so each one took one of the younger boys – sorry, only boys in those days – under their wings.  My ‘mentor’ took me to our assigned stand and business began.  After a couple of days I learned that I would left on my own.  My ‘mentor’ would be driving a circuit to other stands to make sure all was going well.  I would be responsible for an eight-hour shift.

            The day of my solo debut arrived – a hot Colorado summer day, $50 in my cash box and several thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks on the side of a busy street.  My ‘mentor’ drove away – I had no car and was too young to drive – and I was on my own.  Within two hours I learned that the procedures manual did not cover all the situations I faced:

·      What do I do and where do I go if I need to use the washroom?  Answer – Thanks be to God for the friendly and sympathetic manager of the gas station next to my stand!

·      What do I do if I run out of change or end up with too many ten’s and twenty’s?  Answer – Make friends with the manager of the convenience store on the other side of my stand!

·      What do I do if some kid who has been saving up his allowance for weeks to buy an assortment pack comes up 10¢ short?  Answer – Be generous the first time and less generous on repeat occasions.

By the end of the summer I had learned a great deal and earned my employers a good return on their investment.

            I’m pretty sure that all of us have had a similar experience.  We begin a new job and undertake a new responsibility only to discover that there are many things not covered by our training or by the procedures manual.  Waiting around for our supervisors to return or for a revised procedures manual is not an option.  We have to use our natural talents and skills and trust whatever learned experience we have to do the best we can.

            Forty-three days ago, in a place far from here and two millennia distant, a small group of Jewish women and men had an experience that would eventually transform them into a potent movement of renewal and reconciliation that continues to this day.  Their beloved rabbi had been raised from the dead and had spent forty days with them.  During those days he had shared his heart with them.  He had told them that they were to be witnesses to his mission and to continue his ministry.  He had assured them that they would have the resources they needed to do what God wanted them to do.

            I am sure that the disciples expected that Jesus would remain with them forever.  But three days ago he was taken up into heaven and they were left gaping up into the sky.  I have always loved the two angels who come along and tell the disciples to move on.  The angels know what we know now – we are not called to stand around hoping that our supervisors will show up or a new procedures manual will be put into our hands. But I can’t help but think that the disciples asked themselves a question that generations of Christians have asked time and time again as we ‘are wearied by the changes and chances of this life’ – What do we do now?

            What do we do now?  First and foremost, we gather.  In his lengthy poem, ‘The Church Porch’ the Anglican poet and priest George Herbert writes:

 

Though private prayer be a brave designe,
Yet publick hath more promises, more love:
And love’s a weight to hearts, to eies a signe.
We all are but cold suitours; let us move

Where it is warmest. Leave thy six and seven;

Pray with the most: for where most pray, is heaven.

 

In a society where individualism and privacy have been asked to bear weight that they were never intended to bear, the Christian community acts in a counter-cultural fashion by holding up the coming together of people as a fundamental quality of being human.  It is gathering together as God’s people, whether within the walls of this cathedral or within the virtual confines of Zoom or Facebook, that we strengthen one another, encourage one another, enlighten one another, sustain one another.

            What do we do now?  When we gather, we transform ourselves and others.  The breaking open of the Word of God, the lifting up our intercessions, thanksgivings and petitions and our sharing in the bread broken and the wine poured have the power to take people who are weary, uncertain and discouraged and reinvigorate them, enlighten them and rekindle the hope that fuels the human heart and the Christian movement.  As we have been saying during this Easter season and will say again in a few moments, “Dear friends in Christ, God bids you welcome to this table.  Here we are strengthened for the journey.  Here strangers become friends and the seeker finds God’s wisdom speaking to them.  See who you are and become what you see.”

            What do we do now?  We gather.  We transform.  And we send.  As Jesus ascends, he does so in the confidence that his friends already have within the knowledge, authority and power to continue the work begun by God in creation, furthered by the covenant with the people of Israel and renewed in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  No one can deny that our lives can be roller coasters of success and failure, hope and despair, clarity and doubt.  But what can be affirmed is that we are not alone and God’s commission is to a people, living in real places, in real times and in real circumstances.  At the end of the eucharist, the deacon takes on the role of the angels at the ascension and says, in so many words, ‘Don’t hang around here.  There is work to be done and we have the knowledge, skills, resources and power to do what needs to be done.  Move on!’

            Friends, there is work to be done.  We need to build up our resiliency as a community serving this downtown neighbourhood.  We need to build up our confidence in our future as witnesses to the risen life of Christ.  But most of all, we need to build up our hope and trust in one another, our joy in gathering, our joy in being transformed, our joy in being sent.  So let’s move on!

 

Mission, Power and the Choice: A Sermon by Archdeacon Richard Geoffrey Leggett on John 20.1-31

 

Mission, Power and Choice: Reflections on John 20.19-31

 

Mission, Power and Choice

Reflections on John 20.19-31

 

RCL Easter 2A

16 April 2023

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Church

New Westminster BC

 

         In 1859 a recently-ordained deacon embarked from California on board a ship bound for Shanghai.  His name was Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky and he would spend the next forty-seven years of his life as a Christian missionary, bishop, educator and translator in China.

 

         Schereschewsky had already had an incredible journey, geographically and spiritually, before boarding that ship at the age of twenty-eight in 1859.  Born in Lithuania in 1831 to parents who were orthodox Jews, Schereschewsky was intended for the rabbinate.  But an encounter with a New Testament in Hebrew during his rabbinical studies convinced him that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah.  His spiritual journey then led him from his rabbinical college in Ukraine to Germany and then to the United States, from the messianic Jewish movement to the Baptists to the Presbyterians and finally to the Episcopalians.

 

         He eventually became Bishop of Shanghai in 1877 and was instrumental in establishing educational institutions and in translating the Scriptures and liturgical materials into various Chinese dialects.  But just four years into his episcopal ministry, Schereschewsky was stricken by a stroke.  He resigned as bishop in 1884 and spent the remainder of his life as a translator.  By the end of his life he was able to use only two fingers on one hand to type, but he persevered.  When asked by a reporter about his struggles and frustrations as a result of the stroke, Schereschewsky said, ‘It was hard at first.  But, in the end, God enabled to do the ministry I was suited to do.’

 

         Schereschewsky has always been a favourite modern saint of mine.  The bishop who ordained me, Bill Frey, always wanted to name a new parish after him but never did.  In Schereschewsky I have found a living example of some ideas I see in today’s familiar gospel reading from John.

 

         It is Easter evening and the Eleven along with other disciples are hiding, afraid of the religious authorities and the Romans, uncertain about the future and confused by the reports that their Lord is not dead.  Then Jesus comes into their midst, through the locked doors of the room and of their hearts.  In the space of a few moments he transforms them into a community with a purpose:  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20.21c NRSVue)  They are no longer a community of disciples, that is to say, students or protégés.  They are now an apostolic community, ambassadors, agents, the continuing presence of Christ in the world.

 

         It’s not enough, though, to be commissioned, to be called, they, and we, need to know what it is that God would have them, us, do:  “(Jesus breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’” (John 20.22a-23)

 

         They, and we, are given power to liberate or to oppress.  Throughout the Gospels it is undeniably clear that God in Jesus is at work liberating the creation from all that oppresses us, all that binds us.  God frees us form our fear of death; God frees us from our inability to become more fully human in the image of God and the likeness of Christ; God frees us from our selfishness and misuse of the resources God has entrusted to us.

 

         But in giving us the power to heal, God has also given us the power to hurt.  It is the divine dilemma:  by entrusting to us the power to do what we know God wants us to do, God must take the risk that we will choose to walk in other paths and to ignore the ‘better angels of our nature’.

 

         In Thomas the Eleven and the others face the first test of their commitment to the ministry of Jesus and the power that Christ through the Spirit has breathed upon them.  Do they embrace Thomas despite his doubts and sarcastic remarks or do they shun him?  They choose to embrace him and, in this sign, this work of God, we are able to “continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing (we) may have life in his name.” (John 20.31bc)

 

         More than one hundred and twenty-five years ago Samuel Schereschewsky came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah and used the power given to him to build bridges between China and North America.  His legacy continues in St. John’s College at UBC, founded in 1997 by alumni of the original college in Shanghai, closed by the Communist government in 1951.  By the Spirit’s power Schereschewsky moved the two fingers left to him to continue the work of translating the Scriptures, a translation which is still used by Chinese Christians to this day.  He accepted the commission and used the Spirit’s power to build up and to heal, even when weakened and limited in his abilities.

 

         Through our baptism, you and I have been incorporated in this ministry of liberation God began in Jesus and continues in and through us.  We have been given power to heal or to hurt, to build up or to tear down.  The choice always lies before us, just as it did when the Eleven and the others pondered how to solve a problem like Thomas.

 

         Who are our Thomases?  From what do they, do we, need liberation?  On this Sunday, on every Sunday, on every day, Jesus has come through our locked doors and stands in our midst, waiting to see what we will choose.

Easter Sunday 2023 04 09

Walking Through Closed Doors: Reflections on John 20.1-18

RCL Easter A

9 April 2023

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

            In the early spring of 1960 a small Lutheran congregation in Martha’s Vineyard offered a $100 prize in a local poetry competition.  The prise was won by a student from Harvard who wrote a poem entitled ‘Seven Stanzas for Easter’.  He donated the prize money, with a little over $1000 in today’s dollars, to the congregation.  His name was John Updike.

 

            John Updike went on to become one of the significant American writers of the later decades of the twentieth century.  In the view of some critics he ranks among the greatest American writers, while in the mind of other critics he was a voice of a conservative, uptight middle America.  To this day he remains a widely read author as well as a much debated one.  But his poem reveals a deep faith in the reality, the physicality of the resurrection, a faith he seems to have kept throughout his life.

 

Make no mistake:  if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

 

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh:  ours.

 

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

 

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier times:

let us walk through the door.

 

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

 

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

 

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle

and crushed by remonstrance. [1]

 

            Ever since that first Easter some two thousand years ago Christians and our critics have struggled to explain what happened to transform a small group of frightened and for most part working-class, uneducated Palestinian Jews into a movement that would eventually include two billion people in more than 45,000 distinctive expressions of the good news of God in Christ.  To some the resurrection is a spiritual experience, a mystical experience, an affirmation of our deepest hope that there is more to life than what we experience with our five senses.

 

            To others the resurrection is a metaphor, a story told to re-assure us that evil is always overcome by good, that life is stronger than death, love stronger than hate, justice stronger than oppression.  To some the resurrection is a story from a more naïve past when people lived in a world populated by gods, demi-gods and other mysterious beings.

 

            All these ways of understanding the resurrection offer us a means of comprehending what is, honestly compels me to say, is incomprehensible, whether two thousand years ago or today.  But these different ways, as well as all the other ways, do not describe what I believe to have happened on this morning outside Jerusalem.

 

            I believe that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead in the fullness of his humanity, in the fullness of the person that Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and all the other witnesses to the resurrection knew and loved and mourned and touched.  There was, to be sure, something different about him, a quality of life that was, if you wish, other-worldly.  But it was Jesus, the Jesus who taught and healed and suffered and died.

 

            When we confess our faith in the resurrection, we are confessing our belief that matter matters, that God cares for the totality of what it means to be a human person – our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our souls, our memories, all that makes me me and you you.  To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe that what we see and touch and celebrate in creation is the result of God’s loving intention.  The physical is not an accident but the result of God’s choice to make room for us in the kosmos.

 

            Gretchen Ziegenhals writes that “ . . . if we believe in the resurrection of the body, we will respect all bodies here among us – Black, brown and white bodies; rich and poor; male, female, trans and nonbinary; straight and gay; friend and stranger; young and old.” [2]

 

            While we wait for the resurrection – for our bodies and those of our loved ones to be ‘regathered’, as Updike describes – there is embodied work for us to do now, despite our pandemic limitations:  the work of justice and equity; the work of feeding and housing; the work of sharing bread, employment and fellowship; the work of making room for other voices and bodies; the work of ministering to the sick and the lonely in whatever ways we can. [3]

 

           When I was younger and regularly singing in my parish choir, I realized that there were hymns that I did not enjoy singing.  The tunes were lovely, but the words did not express what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus who was raised by God from the dead. Many of these hymns were the hymns of people who were oppressed and who struggled in their day-to-day lives.  They were filled with hope ‘in the sweet by and by, when we’ll meet at that beautiful shore’.  But I didn’t hear hope; I heard resignation and acceptance of the world as it is rather than working tirelessly and fearlessly for the world as God desires it to become.

 

           I have no certain knowledge of when creation will become what God desires it to become.  In the meantime I trust that God holds all the faithful departed in anticipation of that day when God’s purposes are achieved.  In the meantime I pray that “we, who share [Christ’s] body, [may live] his risen life; we, who drink his cup, bring life to others; we, whom the Spirit lights, give light to the world . . . so that we and all [God’s] children shall be free”. [4]  Why?  Because God raised Jesus from the dead, everything that made Jesus Jesus, and, in so doing, has shown us that matter matters to God and that we, everything that makes us us, matters to God, now and in the age to come.

---

[1] John Updike, ‘Seven Stanzas for Easter’ (1960).

 

[2] Gretchen E. Ziegenhals, ‘Walking through closed doors this Easter – the resurrection of the body’ https://faithandleadership.com/gretchen-e-ziegenhals-walking-through-closed-doors-easter-the-resurrection-the-body.

 

 

[3] Gretchen E. Ziegenhals, ‘Walking through closed doors this Easter – the resurrection of the body’ https://faithandleadership.com/gretchen-e-ziegenhals-walking-through-closed-doors-easter-the-resurrection-the-body.

 

[4] The Book of Alternative Services (1985), 214-215.

 

Good Friday -- Good Grief

On this Good Friday, I invite you to grieve and to lament.  We often, in my opinion, rush too quickly to Easter and, in so doing, fill the empty tomb with the baggage of our griefs and sorrows.

The Sermon begins at 24:45 in the recording.