Second Sunday of Easter
	Year B RCL

Thomas and Community-A Baptism Sermon April 15, 2012

Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

Though I’ve not been posting in some time, I’ve been hard at work reading and thinking on what the shape of the Church might be in age to come. (Like I’m unique in that, right?)

Part of what I’ve been doing is reading Bonhoeffer with colleagues for presentations we gave this past Saturday on the 66th Anniversary of his execution.  It seems to me that Bonhoeffer was having the ‘Emergent’ and ‘Missional’ conversation in his writing in the late 30′s up until the time of his death in 1945.

Much of our interest was coincided with the publication of Eric Metaxas’ new biography of Bonhoeffer entitled Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy. Though I have not read the book, the reviews are interesting in that they comment (generally) that Metaxas comes close to claiming a generally ‘evangelical’ reading of Bonhoeffer’s thought and work on ecclesiology.

Rather than get hung up on that, I suspect that what make Bonhoeffer so appealing to Christians of many different traditions are the deep truths he speaks and how he doesn’t shy away from ambiguity and is willing to wrestle with the issues of discipleship, worship, prayer and community that resonate with the age in which we find ourselves.

His work at Finkenwalde could well be seen as an expression of what we’ve come to call ‘the new monasticism’ in the Church today.  I guess it’s really “true, there’s nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9)

At any rate here are a couple of resources to check out on the life and work of Bonhoeffer and its meaning for the Church (read ‘Body of Christ’) in this “world come of age” (Bonhoeffer from Letters and Papers from Prison)

The Bonhoeffer Site

Jeffrey C. Pugh talks about his book Religionless Christianity and the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today was a first for me.

I went to a Bloggers gathering here in Worcester. Since I’ve been here in Worcester I’ve tried to learn what I could about my new City.  It’s not always easy.  The caricatures of what has been and what’s not every going to be possible often obscure the what is.

The group of folks I spent time with today was a small sampling of a number of the folks I’ve interacted with via Twitter and the Worcester Blogroll. We come from varied backgrounds but share a common desire to see our city be a better place to live, work, play, learn and grow.

We came from several faith traditions or no tradition at all. Being a priest openly in a group of ‘normal folks’ can be hard. Folks often judge where I am (or I project that judgmental stance on them!) and we don’t talk about what’s actual and what’s common.

This was different. I fit in. I was able to contribute, learn, relate and share the common vision of a better place to be. It was nice!

(The Calzones at Firewood Cafe on Chandler St. don’t stink either!).

Check out the gathering place for some of these cool folks at http://worcesterbloggers.posterous.com.

Thanks to Nic, Cathy, Mike, Karl, Carrie, Trish, Jordan and Mary for making my first actual meeting with these ‘virtual’ friends comfortable and inspiring!  Until next time.

Yesterday in the Common of Holy Women, Holy Men we remembered David Pendleton Oakerhater.  You can read something about his life and ministry as a Deacon of and to the Cheyenne here. I found his story to be compelling and hopeful.

Aside from who he was personally and historically, I was most captured by the collect we prayed as we remembered him. I believe it has (and probably always has had) particular importance to people who ‘live and move and have their being’ in an environment where Christianity and discipleship to Jesus Christ is the exception and not the rule.  Here’s the text of the prayer.

O God of unsearchable wisdom and infinite mercy, who chose a captive warrior, David Oakerhater, to be your servant, and sent him to be a missionary to his own people and to exercise the office of a deacon among them: Liberate us, who commemorate him today, from bondage to self, and empower us for service to you and to the neighbors you have given us; through Jesus Christ, the captain of our salvation; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.

There are two parts of this prayer that I believe are most applicable to God’s people (THE CHURCH) as we seek to be faithful to God’s Mission in the world here and now.

The first is this portion

O God of unsearchable wisdom and infinite mercy, who chose a captive warrior,

I want to claim that if we take our lives of discipleship with any seriousness at all we will find ourselves as ‘captive warriors’ for the Gospel we proclaim.  Jesus is all about captivating hearts and sending their owners out with the zeal of a ‘warrior’. The imagery of Paul’s ‘putting on the whole armor of God’ (Romans 13:12, Ephesians 6:11 and Ephesians 6:13) lets us know that doing what we are called to do is likely to be a struggle.

We like Paul and Oakerhater have captive hearts beating within us and it is the life of God in our hearts that inspires the courage to do the loving battle of witness and evangelism (dang, I sound downright Evangelical in that sentence).  Like Ignatius of Loyola and Francis of Assisi before him, warriors have a way of being converted into deep lovers of God and the peace that passes all understanding.

God is choosing us in this age to do what Oakerhater did, namely to

be a missionary to his own people.

We are smack dab in the middle of a mission field.  If you doubt that for a minute, just take a look at this webpage from the Pew Forum on Religion. Did you look? Yup that’s right the states of New England–Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont occupy all but one of the bottom slots in the Poll (Alaska!).

If you feel like you’re fighting against the tide New Englanders it’s because you are! So then it seems to me that we don’t have much choice when it comes to being ‘On Mission’.  That’s where we is….

The second part of the prayer that ought to speak to us as well, as an express desire of our captive hearts, is this;

Liberate us, who commemorate him today, from bondage to self, and empower us for service to you and to the neighbors you have given us;

Apparently, according to this prayer, we are to view the neighbors around us, who don’t care much for religion, not as the enemy but as gifts.  More remarkably it says that we are to pray to be ‘empowered to serve’ them, not to beat them up or make them feel bad about their irrelgiosity.

This seems like tough work to me.

Dadgum!

Can’t we just choose something else to do?

It seems to me that the answer is a resounding and simple, NO. We cannot shrink from this task because it is too difficult for us. Because it is too difficult it would seem that the only choice available to us as ‘captive warriors’ is to join our efforts and hearts to the desires of God and the power of the Trinity to be faithful witnesses to God’s love and longing for each person in this disjointed and altogether too scary world.

At the end of the day, we have the ability and commission to say in the face of despair, disappointment and disillusionment that someone cares and that someone is Jesus. And that here, at this time, Jesus looks like this little community huddled around a nondescript table, sharing the simplest of meals in the unwavering hope that the Kingdom is among us and is dying to be born across the stage of the whole Creation (paraphrase Romans 8:19) by our simply being in this world.

May God make it so!

24th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 28 Year B RCL

Sermon Audio for November 15, 2009–The Rev’d Warren Hicks

1 Samuel 1:4-20

1 Samuel 2:1-10

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25

Mark 13:1-8

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes shelter in Him–

Psalm 34:8

Yesterday our Deacon from St. Luke’s and I had the privilege of worshiping after worship.  We took part in a weekly service on Worcester Common with a special congregation.  We were guests, for a second time, of the people at Worcester Fellowship.

The Fellowship is part of a loose network of street ministries that seeks to attend to the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of both the homeless populations of cities and those who don’t otherwise have a faith community.

For me, the experience both times I’ve attended has been a humbling one and one that gives me a glimpse of just what Jesus seems to be about, especially in Mark’s Gospel.  There’s a real cross-section of folks who come for very different reasons.

There’s an aging retired RC religious who knows at her core that this is where she belongs.  There are any number of folks who are struggling on the road to recovery.  There are faces and voices from ‘all sorts and conditions’ as the 1928 Book of Common Prayer put it so aptly.

Ghanaians, Guatamalens, Albanians, Americans, and others I can’t identify gather on the Worcester Common to share their lives and struggles and partake in the common life of Jesus in different ways.  They gather in rings around a table set up with juice and bread, participating as they are comfortable, but all expecting to be fed one way or another.

Harmonica, violin and the voices of the hungry and faithful are raised in praise.  The desires of hearts, spoken and unspoken, are lifted to God.  Prayers of despair and hope are shared and the words of Hope from the Gospel are offered.  And God shows up!

We shared the cup and the loaf and then bologna and cheese, clean socks, open ears and open hearts before we gathered up and went about our day.

It was on the Common to be sure, but there was nothing ordinary about what we did!

Come with us some first Sunday and Taste and See for yourself!!!!

O God of peace, you have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.  (From A Public Service of Healing, The Book of Occasional Services, p. 166)

The words of this prayer are appropriate ones as we move toward the ‘unofficial’ beginning of summer, the Memorial Day Weekend.  There’s no shortage of wisdom and beauty in this prayer just as there’s no shortage of beauty in the New England spring and summer.

We are winding down another ‘program’ year at St. Luke’s.  Choir will take a summer hiatus soon.  The Sunday School WoRM program will take a break (though Summer Celebration is just getting into full swing!).  On June 28th we’ll begin our Summer schedule of a single Sunday service beginning at 9 a.m.  It sure seems that the ‘busyness’ of activity will wind down.  In some ways, it seems to me, that we then will be free to engage in some of the most important ‘business’ that God gives us.

One of the main ‘jobs’ we have in ‘striving to be a community of faith where people come to know, love and follow Jesus Christ’ is to pay attention to the formation of our community.

The fact is that deep, sustaining relationships require investment—investment of time, vulnerability, compassion and sacrifice.  My hope and prayer for us as we enter a slower paced season is that we will take the opportunity for joint worship to deepen the bonds of affection, which form our community.  I hope and pray that we’ll make new friends and keep the old.  I hope and pray that we’ll find out things about one another and the power and call of God that we never knew we never knew.  I hope and pray we’ll find and take the invitation to return and rest and find new strength for call into God’s mission and ministry in the quietness of God’s presence in our worship, in one another and in our world.

Remember, we cannot give to the world that which we do not possess.  The fruit of our Sabbath times are promised to be ‘the Peace of God which passes all understanding.’ May that peace be yours and may you all share it freely

Is the final question in this video the one that the Church should be dealing with most?

Thanks to my colleague Rich Simpson for sending the video link and the provocative question??

How does the message of the Gospel compete with all the other demands that a massively transitional world throws at us?  How do we imagine the path to faithful witness in the face of a world that is preparing for questions it can’t even ask yet?

Christian Century Blogs for Lent 2009

Some of the Best Blog Postings for Lent from Christian Century Blogs

Don’t Eat Alone

The Connection

Pastor’s PostFaith at Ease

Holy Vignettes

I-YOUniverse

Where the Wind

As the Deer

The Other Jesus Mark Powell

Getting There

Ellen Haroutunian

Theolog

Welcoming Spirit

Living Word by Word

Where the Wind Faith in Community

When Grace Happens

Theophiliacs J. Stambaugh

Theophiliacs A. Hunt

Everyday Liturgy Available Light

Work in Progress

Allan Bevere

A Diner at the End of Time

The Painted Prayerbook

Just Words

The Church Geek

Breaking Fast on the Beach

The Pocket Mardis

Reflectionary

One Hand Clapping

Unorthodoxology

Many of you (if there are many of you) will know that I am more than a bit of a Technology Jones.  I Twitter.  I’m on Facebook.  I blog, I podcast (ok, sort of).  One of the reasons behind this is I love gadgets.  I like my phone.  I’m fond of my MacBook.  Some folks tinker with cars, I’ve always been interested in making connections with folks.

The convergence between my Techno-Jones interests and my desire to connect with folks and to connect folks I connect with has taken an interesting turn.

I want to share with you this blog post from a friend of mine that summarizes the current state of explosive growth on Facebook.

More than a year ago I reponded to two clergy colleagues who asked me to join Facebook.  For a time I resisted and then I looked in on it.  I liked the folks who asked so I gave it a shot.  After spending some time doing little with it, I dutifully updated my profile, started to add some of my background information about Schools and where I’d been and what I’d done.  After a bit I found that there were other folks doing the same thing.  I remember clicking through to my High School Class Group and finding that I was the 3rd of my graduating class to join a group on Facebook of folks admitting to having graduated in 1978 from Fairview High School in Boulder, CO.

One of the other guys I found there I hadn’t seen since we graduated HS some 30 years ago.  We started to exchange messages and found we had common interests.  I had managed to become more ‘friendly’ with him over 3000 miles of the country than we’d been in the same town and HS of 2000 students.  But, the circle was still small.

Once in awhile I’d stumble upon new ‘friends’ or more accurately ‘friends of friends’ or acquaintances of people and I began to be aware of how thin the separation between folks can really be.  I remember wondering if I’d ever amass as many as 50 ‘Friends’ on Facebook.  This week sometime I’ll likely pass the 400 ‘Friends’ threshold.

The connections continued and I’d check through my email address book every so often with tool on Facebook to see if folks I knew otherwise were in the FB world.  I’d come up with 2 or 3 every so often.  Last night I did it again and the tool came up with 67 ‘hits’.  It confirmed something I’d suspected.  Namely, that folks FB is getting older and it’s reach is getting broader.  People I hadn’t thought of in 30 years, much less talked to, are seemingly excited about making connections that they’d forgotten or at least put away.

So, where’s the connection to the Gospel?  it’s this.  Somehow, through people reaching out and carrying a message to other folks, connections are being made.  A community, albeit a virtual one if you will, is forming and the growth is geometric not simply arithmetic.

Simply put, the Good News of God in Christ has always grown and spread in exactly the same way the FB is exploding.  Someone tells someone else, who invites them to look and see and then the decision is made as to whether the relationships made possible give life or not.

FB is not the point…the point is this; we were created for relationship and we’ll suspend our disbelief and skepticism at times to take a chance on connecting with ‘the Other’.  If we can regain the sense of wonder and excitement of talking about Jesus as much as we do about saving the Rainforest with’Green Patch’ or playing the latest iteration of ‘Scrabble’ on FB then just like Facebook with it’s millions of users, the Gospel can go viral again, just as it did in the first centuries after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension.

We can hope and we can invite! Wanna be Jesus’ friend??