For a printer-friendly version, click here.
RCL YEAR C, THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
February 18th, 2007
Exodus 34: 29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; St. Luke 9: 28b-43
St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church; World Mission Sunday
The Reverend George F. Woodward III
Our Mission is to make ourselves vehicles of Good News in the lives of others. That’s nearly the definition of friendship, isn’t it, to be a consistent source of blessing to another? Christ came to do that for us, and our own ministries are derivative, carrying the Good News of Jesus to others in bits and pieces, for none of us can receive the entirety of God’s Good News all at once.
When you carry a casserole to an ill-parishioner, you have brought a real piece of good news, provided you don’t linger in the doorway chatting too long! When you coach your children’s soccer team, you are Good News for a whole gang of kids; fingers crossed its not on Sunday morning! Bringing the Gospel, the Good News, doesn’t mean engaging in lots of God-talk, though there is a juncture at which well-chosen words about Christ are also Good News. Bringing the Gospel is much simpler than that. It is meeting other people at their point of their felt need, improving their lives a little bit at a time. That’s part of what Jesus meant when He said we were to be sowers of good seed, leaving the growth to God.
Doña Blanca came one evening to the large patio outside the dormitories where our group was staying in the fifth Anglican Village of El Maizal the Wednesday before last. She came with a group of about twenty-five men and women who were living in some of the thirty houses recently constructed by Episcopal Relief and Development on that site. Bishop Barahona was surprised to see them, and invited all of us to pull our chairs around in a large circle as we drank coffee and slapped mosquitoes and talked. Every Anglican Village our Church builds in El Salvador has an elementary school, a medical clinic visited every eight days by the Diocesan physician, and an Anglican Church. The village of El Maizal also has an agricultural project, and a recreational area for youth, including a swimming pool provided by the Diocese of Los Angeles.
“Never in my life,” said Doña Blanca, “could I have imagined living in a home of my own. I was a squatter in a shack in a poor barrio for many years. We had to walk a long way to find water and buy food. There was no school for my children. I cannot believe that I have a house. I cannot believe my children can go to school. And I heard the Bishop would be here tonight and I came to say thank you.” With that, Doña Blanca began to weep, as did many of the men and women who had come to express their gratitude that night. The Episcopal Church had brought them some Good News.
This is the Last Sunday in the Season of Epiphany, the season of “manifestation.” God has manifested Himself to us in Jesus Christ, and we are in turn to manifest love’s God and God’s love to a hurting world. To remind us of this, the Episcopal Church designates the Last Sunday of Epiphany as World Mission Sunday. Our Lord commanded us to carry Good News to the world. “Go ye into all the furthest reaches of the world, preaching Good News.”
We do much outreach at home, but our Lord commands us to travel further afield, perhaps knowing there are critical things to learn outside of one’s own cultural context. So Bishop Duwyani and members of our Companion Diocese of Jerusalem come here, and José López and Irma Alvarado and members of our Companion Diocese of El Salvador come here, and we go there, and we evangelize and change one another that we might together manifest more and more the image of Christ, which is contained by no one culture.
One day two weeks ago in El Salvador members of the CRISTOSAL Board of which I am a part, including the Bishops of Vermont and Central New York and Bishop Barahona of El Salvador, picked up the Salvadoran Lutheran Bishop Medardo Gómez and traveled by rough dirt road to the mountain village of Jayaque. There, last November 4th, two Lutheran pastors, Francisco Carrillo and his wife Jesús Calzada de Carrillo, were assassinated as they left services in their Lutheran Parish. Three young men not yet eighteen came up on bicycles and shot them dead, leaving the passengers in their truck unharmed.
The Carrillos were deeply involved in Human Rights work, and they annoyed the local branch of Diez y Ocho, the gang exported to Salvador from Los Angeles, by encouraging people to testify against gang members involved in crime. It is not known whether the Carrillos were murdered at the behest of angry authorities for their Human Rights activities or if the gang hit was gang-inspired. The police did not come to the scene of the crime for over two days, and no investigation has subsequently occurred. We held a prayer service with the local parish and laid a wreath at the foot of the crosses marking the site of the assassinations, and our full-communion with the Lutheran Church seemed a bit more tangible than before. I was reminded of our Lord’s repeated admonition that it would cost us dearly to live as Christians, that a commitment to Christ involves sacrifice. That isn’t a pinch we much feel, but here were two pastors who laid their lives on the line and lost them in Christ’s service. We have something to learn when we work with those in Christ’s service beyond our own borders.
I found myself thinking a lot about how we grow our parish. In El Salvador, the Church goes to an area and figures out how it can best serve the people there. They do not immediately build a church. They are not really there to build a church, but to serve the people as they might need served.
In the Bajo Lempa where our youth traveled some years ago, the Church realized the people were suffering from lung infections and early deaths because they cooked over open fires in their homes, so, working with Episcopal Relief and Development, the Church set out to build contained ovens with chimneys in the simple homes of the area. They built latrines behind the houses; hundreds and hundreds of latrines. They built schools. They’ve been doing this for twenty years. This year a contingent came to San Salvador from the remote Bajo Lempa seeking an interview with Bishop Martín Barahona to tell them they wanted to become Episcopalians, and they wanted to establish a Church in their communities. We traveled and met with that group of people in the outdoor area where their new parish of Cristo Rey is now meeting. “We know that you love God,” they told us, “because you have loved us, and we want to be Christians in a Church like that.”
What a good thing it was to hear that there, and what a good thing it would be to hear that here. To grow the Church, find the need and serve. Bring Good News with skin on, and if it seems right to talk about the reasons for one’s Faith, then so much the better.
The disciples have a glorious vision of Christ transfigured in today’s Gospel. It is an awesome, mystical, converting moment. But in the next verse they go down the mountain to engage the needs of the people. They meet a distraught father anxious over a son with a resistant affliction. Jesus heals the boy and returns him to his father. We’re not told anything at all about the man’s spiritual disposition. We’re not told whether or no he “accepted Christ as his personal Savior.” That was quite beside the point. The Good News had come, the seed had been scattered, and that is the calling of those who would be disciples.
I would like to form a small parish group supporting the efforts of CRISTOSAL in El Salvador, and if you think you might have interest in that, speak to me. I think it would deepen the lives of those involved, and offer much to folk in need. The Reverend Amy Denney asked me for help in expanding her school in San Salvador, and I’d like to be involved in that work.
I’d like to teach our children about the mission to which we have been called. Today we have crosses from El Salvador to present to the children, as I try to do from time to time, and that’s a start in teaching them what we’ve been taught is important in this world.
As I conclude my sermon this World Mission Sunday, Cynthia Woodman will present for us a short Power Point presentation on the efforts of our own Mission and Outreach Committee, and I hope you will be blessed by what you see.
Moses was in the Presence of the Lord at Sinai, and was sent back down the grand mountain to the camp, his face afire with a vision of God. The disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration witnessed Christ ablaze with God’s fire, and they, too, were sent down the mountain to serve. The Voice came from the swirling cloud around the Transfigured One, “This is My Beloved. Listen to Him.” And so we must listen, and we must obey, going in to all the world proclaiming Good News to the people. Amen. GFW+
+++
Sermons are posted at our website: www.SaintEdmunds.org
Commentary is found on our Parish Blog site: www.SaintEdmunds.vox.com
© St. Edmund's Church