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RCL Year C, Easter Six, May 13th, 2007
Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; St. John 14: 23-29
St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church
The Reverend George F. Woodward IIISally had had a pretty hectic day with her four year old. When bedtime finally came, she laid down the law: “We’re putting on your pj’s, brushing your teeth, and reading ONE book, not two…then, light’s out!” Once the child was in bed, her son’s arms slipped around her neck, and her son whispered, “We learned in Sunday School about little boys and girls who don’t have mommies and daddies.” Sally was touched to hear these words. She knew she’d been a little grouchy. Tears began to well up in her eyes. Then her son continued: “Maybe you could go be THEIR mommy?!”
Blessed Mother’s Day to all Mothers, and blessings on your daily grind. This is a good day also for talking about our daily grind as Christians who make up the Church, because the Church is referred to in our Tradition as our Mother. As the joy and duty of all mothers is to preside over the nurture of their ever changing children through each of the developmental stages of life, so too for Mother Church. One deals with an infant very differently than with a toddler, and guiding a teen requires yet a different skill set. Mothers must be adaptable, observant, intuitive, and quick on their feet. They must challenge more often than shelter, reprove sensibly, encourage always, and recognize their own strengths and limitations as they press toward the goal of launching confident, well-prepared and independent adults into the world, where it is hoped they will shoulder their own duties in shaping the Church, the nation and culture, offering good stewardship of their vocations and relationships. We understand then, why motherhood has come to be a good metaphor for the tasks of the Church.
Mothers and fathers strive to form the character of their children as those children meet the changes life brings. The goal is to shape people with sufficient resilience and foundation to meet whatever challenge may come. So too the Church.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not let them be afraid,” says Jesus in today’s reading from St. John’s Gospel, and He knew just how troubled and afraid hearts could be. He was a man acquainted with grief, we’re told. We see Him weeping over Jerusalem, moved to compassion by the sick, the blind, the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus knew terrible loneliness, and the fear that stalks the human heart. Don’t let yourself give in to the grip of those ailments, He said.
And the remedy He proposes is the remedy of home, which may initially seem odd counsel from a man who had no where to lay His head; no wife or children, no established residence or regular mortgage payment. “Those who love Me will keep My word, and My Father will love them, and We will come to them and make Our home with them.” The remedy for the troubled and fearful heart, the anchor needed for the navigation of life’s challenges, is a spiritual home.
I led a group of parishioners on pilgrimage to the cradle of Christianity in contemporary Turkey ten years ago, and what a shock it was for many to stand outside the shackled gates of the Church of the Holy Wisdom in an obscure Turkish village waiting for someone to find the mayor, who alone had the key to open the gate. The Church of the Holy Wisdom is no ordinary church. It was the church where the Council of Nicea was held in 325 A.D.; the place where the most important Creed of our religion was formulated. It was the church where the 7th Ecumenical Council met in 787 A.D., allowing Christians to use paintings and icons in worship. We were standing outside one of the most important, bedraggled sites in all Christendom, and our visit was so unusual a Turkish television crew showed up and interviewed us! Would there be more frequent Christian visitors, they wanted to know, as Christianity entered its third millennium?
We were reminded, as anyone returning to the old homestead to find it unalterably changed is reminded, that the heart’s true home must be found where we are living now. That old homestead, the cradle of our Faith, is now Muslim, and apparently not much visited by Christians. That should rattle our complacency, as should the prediction by some that Europe will be a Muslim continent by century’s end. Whenever we settle for a tepid Christianity, we hasten toward a similar conclusion. We comprise Mother Church, you and me, and like some boozy overwhelmed and uncaring Mom with too many kids to bother with, it is possible to become inattentive to our Christian duties. The world is in flux, and only living faiths, those that offer a spiritual home along the pilgrim way, will survive.
“Home” is a word that embodies our deepest hopes for a safe place to rest the heart, for lasting intimacy, re-creation and wholeness. It is a home God wants to make with us and for us. God wants to live intimately with us, Christ says, not merely as individuals but as a community built together, conversant with our struggles and concerns, influencing and guiding our development. Such a vision of human life contrasts with the materialist drive for autonomy, affluence and power which now dominates our culture. The materialist vision has its consolations, but it does not offer “peace such as the world cannot give.”
The author of the Apocalypse, writing in the Book of Revelation, reached for a metaphor to describe the Christian vision, and spoke of being at home in a New Jerusalem, a city of clarity where even gold would be transparent, where the gates would always be open, and where God will suffuse everything and everyone. God gives the dreamer a dream of a home, a community, a city full of light, clarity, truth, beauty and the Presence of God. That is the vision we are to strive for. We are to form in one another a spiritual home with God, displacing the fearful and troubled heart.
There’s a story of a ship’s captain sailing at night when he saw what looked like the lights of another ship heading straight toward him. He had his signal-man blink in code to the other ship: “Change your course 10 degrees North.” The reply came back: “Change your course 10 degrees South.” The ships captain answered: “My rank is captain, change 10 degrees North.” To which the reply was: “I am seaman first class. Change your course South.” This impertinence infuriated the captain, so he signaled back: “This is a battleship! Change your course North!” And the final reply came back: “Change South. This is a lighthouse!”
If we determine that God was uniquely manifest in Jesus, and that Christ is indeed the Way, the Truth and the Life; if we become convinced that He was telling us the truth when He said that centering oneself in God’s Presence is more important than devotion to accumulation, success and power; if He was right to tell us that we have to die to ourselves so that we may effectively serve God and others, then we will probably have to change course. If we call ourselves Christians, but function as secularists, a change in course is needed.
Anglican Divine William Law said in his classic (“A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”): “If you will stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as Christians have been (in the past), your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you have never thoroughly intended it.” What sort of mother will we make Mother Church to be here in this place? Will the values of our Faith pass away from our part of the world as they have from Asia Minor simply because we were never fully intentional about the practice of our Faith?
To let God build a home in you, and in all of us together, as Christ taught, is to become an intentional disciple. To become a disciple of Jesus isn’t to try to make your life look like Christ’s life. That’s the mistake some make when they say only unmarried males can be priests, because Jesus was, after all, an unmarried male. The outward circumstances of our lives always diverge from the life of Jesus because we are not Jewish, or because we are beardless, or married, or living in the 21st century, and because the life of Jesus has already, in any case, been lived. What remains for us is not the living of Jesus’ faithfully completed life, but faithfulness in our lives, still in progress. We aren’t disciples by trying to look like Jesus, we are disciples by learning from Jesus the same receptivity and availability to God that will allow God to indwell our peculiar lives and circumstance. That is what you must thoroughly intend.
The Church teaches that the contemporary vision of the unencumbered self is a false one. The myth of the unencumbered self, of the individual obligated primarily toward the pursuit of happiness, is no Christian vision. Christ’s vision is communal and encumbered. It requires commitment and sacrifice. God makes God’s home with us, and we in turn practice fatherhood and motherhood to one another, to the neighbor, the alien and stranger. We are obligated and encumbered people with a responsibility to practice the Christian Faith in our generation.
For the duties of home-life together in this place we are sent an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, Who comes along side of us and teaches us new duties and fresh paths that we may grow and change and develop and become the vital community God intends. Do not let your heart be troubled. Do not let your heart be afraid. Christ is building a home through you for others, a place to stand and be obligated, a place to practice love’s disciplines, and to learn the peace that the world cannot give. The gates of the church at Nicea are shackled, but our own gates are open wide with the promise of a New Jerusalem. We must thoroughly intend this thing God has made us to be; a spiritual home in anxious times. Amen. GFW+
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