Year A, Proper 18, September 4 th , 2005
Homily
Ezekiel 33:1-11; Psalm 119; Romans 12:9-21; St. Matthew 18:15-20
St. Edmund's Episcopal Church
The Reverend George F. Woodward III

Our lives are not our own, and that, I think, is the foundation for all of today's lessons. We are born into a particular context, into particular families, churches, communities and nations which often precede us and will exist after we are gone. Human beings are by nature communal creatures. The ties that bind are what give our lives meaning. The Seven Deadly Sins.things like greed, envy, gluttony, pride, luxury.though these seem nowadays to be what we call the good life (!).these things are called Deadly Sins because they erode relationships and community with their self-centered focus.

It is the best of news that our lives are not our own; that we belong to each other, and that we belong to each other because we belong to God. Community is only viable as an outgrowth of shared purpose and identity, and for Christians, purpose and identity flow from our commitment to God, or rather, from a recognition of God's commitment to us. Our identity is found in a particular community, which is itself founded on relationship between God and human beings.

I think we all felt the ties that bind this week as we saw horrifying pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I didn't see much television in El Salvador, but the little I saw not only evoked a sense of concern for those suffering the storm, but showed what happens when community frays. There was the storm itself, but worse than the storm was the realization that an evacuating community had simply left behind thousands of people too elderly or too poor to have had access to cars and transport. They were the forgotten ones, the ones failed by the community. Then, too, was the footage of looting and the breakdown of social order. This event challenges us to rise to the responsibilities of inter-relationship and human community.

The prophet Ezekiel, the Apostle Paul, the Lord Jesus, all speak in Scripture to tell us that we are not our own, and that we have responsibility for one another. The sentinel must blow the trumpet, love must be genuine, the Church must discipline itself for the purposes of love. We are people under profound obligation to one another because of our commitment to God in Christ.

As I think many of you know I went with a group of clergy to El Salvador last week to see some of the amazing work the Episcopal Church is doing in that country with those so much need. We visited completed Anglican Villages where houses, clinics, schools and churches have been constructed for the victims of the earthquakes of 2000-2001, and of Hurricane Mitch. We saw the hands on work ERD does in teaching agricultural methods and animal husbandry, visited the shrimp farms where food is raised for families and also to be sold as a supplement to family income.

One current ERD project is to build latrines behind the rudimentary homes of country people so they might live in sanitary conditions, and the building of concrete and stone ovens in their brush arbor homes so they use less firewood and no longer live in homes filled with carcinogenic smoke, the source of many illnesses.

One day we visited a school in a deeply impoverished area called the Bajo Lempa a few hours outside of the capital city. Episcopal Relief and Development has built several latrines behind the school and given $250 outdoor stove to the school which allows them to produce food for the children, who often have little to eat. The Principal met with us to express his thanks, as though we were ourselves responsible. But then, with tearful eyes, he said something that struck me. He said, "because you have come, we no longer feel forgotten."

None of us wants to be forgotten. Not the aging, not the retired, nor mothers and fathers whose children have grown, nor young people feeling awkward in school; certainly not the victims of Huricane Katrina. This Labor Day came about in part to remind laborers on whom we so much depend that they are not forgotten. The poor of the world need to know the First World has not left them behind. We are inextricably bound to each other, and that is very much at the core of our Faith.

Every community develops a language to assure the members that they are engaged in the same enterprise. Recently I spoke to a Chaplain at one of our UC campuses. She said she wanted to learn the culture of the university she had gone to serve so she was listening carefully to faculty conversations as they met at social functions and in hallways. One day, the priest said, the penny dropped and she realized that when people met they exchanged grievances. The currency of that university was grievance!

Sometimes this is so in the Church, but whenever it is, we must repent. Our Faith summons us to a different currency. "Let love be genuine. Hold fast to what is good. Contribute to the needs of the saints. Live in harmony one another. Associate with the lowly." This currency of reconciliation and mutual care doesn't always come easily. The community of Faith is where we learn these techniques so that we may carry them beyond ourselves.

Socrates had it wrong. It's finally not the unexamined life that is not worth living, but the uncommitted life. We all belong to one another, every one of us on this planet. That's the way God made us; Christ died to keep us that way, which means that our sin is only and always that we break the bonds that God has empowered us to create. Human unity is really less something we are called on to create than something we are called to recognize and manifest.

St. Paul calls us the "household" of God, the "oikonomia" of God, the economy of God. The committed life consists of creating that economy, here in this parish, and with those whom God calls us in mutual ministry. Jesus says only two or three are required. Where two or three are gathered in His Name, there He is also. Two at a time, twenty at a time, two hundred at a time, we might give ourselves to community building, to the currency of reconciliation, to the bonds of peace, and effect change for God's sake, in God's Name, in God's world. Amen. GFW+

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