Seeing with God’s eyes

A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III

Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on March 22, 2020

Fourth Sunday in Lent

http://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent4_RCL.html 

If someone had asked us in January what might be the craziest thing about the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty, we might have predicted some sporting event or maybe an election result or something with the Tokyo Olympics or some dance crazy. How many of us would have picked a global pandemic that has led to such drastic curtailing of the everyday life we have become accustomed to, and in fact the everyday life that we have so long believed makes the world go around. I doubt anyone asked for such a mammoth disruption to not only our lives, but the lives of billions of others in the Family of God, but here we are. 

Here we are on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, with gatherings restricted to 10 people or less who keep about 6 feet apart. Proms, weddings, graduations, vacations, funerals… all cancelled in an effort to keep a virus from spreading, being shared from someone who may have little or no reaction to someone whose very life depends on not being exposed. It’s not where any of us thought we would be, nor wanted to be. Even many of my introverted friends are ready to cry “uncle” on all the alone time. Humanity has faced this before, a little over 100 years ago with the 1918 flu pandemic. The two people I know who were alive back then were very young children and have no real recollection of that time period. 

This issue, I hope, has raised our awareness of the many cracks in the safety net of our society and how wide the divide is between the haves and the have nots. One of the ways I’ve seen God at work in this time is the many people are stepping up and using their influence to direct systems to aid those most vulnerable in our communities. The New Bern Police set up cones around restaurants downtown to ensure at-the-door parking for those getting lunch or dinner so we can continue to support small businesses that are just getting back after Hurricane Florence. Craven County Schools is providing breakfast and lunch for all children under the age of 18 in a program called Free Meals on Big School Wheels. God continues to be at work in our community and in communities around the country and  the world as people act as though they are indeed their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. 

We are all finding a new normal, hopefully a temporary normal. For many of us, it means pushing against our very best selves who tend to rush to the side of someone who needs a hug or someone to sit across the table for a cup of coffee or lunch or dinner. But it also means a chance for us to see with new eyes all that God is doing.

The Fourth Sunday of Lent brings us two Scripture stories about how we see. The passage from John is one of my favorites because of the technical level of writing and how John pulls together the story. It is the longest passage in John’s Gospel in which Jesus isn’t present and is structured like a classic Greek drama. But I read it, I find something new. When I realized this week it was paired with the famous story from Hebrew Scripture where a young David is anointed as the future King of Israel, I had to look more deeply at both passages. Most weeks in our lectionary, the Old Testament story has a parallel with the Gospel reading. The parallel this week could be about timely miracles, or it could be about God and Jesus going against the grain of what humanity expects of our Creator and Savior. But at this time in our lives, I have to wonder, what is it that God is wanting us to see? Both of these stories are not just about God doing the unexpected because God does that all the time. But they teach us something about how God sees the world, how God sees humanity. In Samuel’s time tradition would have dictated the oldest or the strongest would be made king, but God chose the youngest and the one with the seemingly lowest job. The man born blind has his sight restored and never questions how or who. He was on the receiving end of this amazing gift, and he gave God the glory. Yet those who had known him as the blind beggar could not grasp what happened to him. Even when he kept saying (and this is one of my favorite lines in Scripture), “I am the man!” 

To me, this all begs the question: What is it that God wants us to see amidst a global pandemic? And let me clarify for the record that in no way do I believe God created this or caused this to inflict such harm across God’s creation. But I do believe that in all adversity, God wants us to learn something from it. So maybe it’s not just *what* does God want us to see, but *how* does God want us to see? Do we keep looking with our own eyes and only think the way *we* want to think? Or do we strive to see how God sees, which is to seek out the least among us, the ones on the fringes of knowing God’s deep and abiding love for them, and share a piece of the love God has for us? Because the love God has for us isn’t meant for us to hold on to, but to give away. 

I believe God is calling us, begging us, to see this world in a new way, and even to see church in a new way. Just because we as seekers and followers of Jesus cannot gather in person does not mean that the Church is closed. The Church is the people of God, and the people of God are out in the world being the hands, feet, and voice of Jesus. I think we need holy and sacred places to gather and worship. Since humankind first began to articulate an understanding of God, we have designated places, whether trees and mountains, structures big and small,  to the worship of God as we understood God at the time. Gathering as the family of God in sacred and holy places like this won’t change once all of this business has passed. But maybe God wants us to see how we connect to each other, how the Church connects to the world around us, and maybe to see all of that in a new light. 

As we approach Holy Week and Easter, I hope and pray that we will continue to be mindful of the ways God is speaking to each of us and to all of humanity and that we will have the bravery and the honesty to respond as the people of God. 

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Come and Be

Second Sunday after Epiphany Year A

The Rev. Deacon Lisa Kirby   Jan. 19, 2020

Last week’s Gospel recounting Jesus Baptism and this week’s lesson about what happened right afterwards, are familiar and chocked full of exciting news.

Through slavery and all their trials, the Jews had been looking for the Messiah. There were a bunch of what I call baby Messiah’s running around claiming to be the one.  But John says “This is the one on whom the Spirit descends and who will Baptize, not with water but with the Holy Spirit! Here is the Lamb of God.”

This is a revelation that turns the whole world upside down.  What the Jews have waited for generations upon generations has arrived in the form of a simple dark-skinned unassuming son of a carpenter.  He is the one who will save the Jews and then the whole world.

Two of John’s disciples were with John in the streets and heard these things and followed Jesus and asked, “where are you staying”.  “Come and see”. They stay with him and one of them, Andrew goes and finds his brother Simon and says, “come with me and follow Jesus.”  In order to do this, they dropped their nets, abandoned the family fishing business and followed the one who would make them fishers of men.

  I give Cortney credit for the understanding that when fisherman cast their nets, the nets take in all the fish!  You might be hoping to catch trout, but your net catches everything in its path.

If you are a fisher of men, and women and children when you cast your net you bring them all in.  You bring in all races, all nationalities, all faiths, all genders. ALL means All.  

And what about these particular fishermen? 

Jesus turns to Simon and says, from this day on you shall be called Cephas, which is translated Peter.

And who is Peter?  Peter is everyman, who stumbles and bumbles and puts his foot in his mouth with regularity. Despite being one of Jesus first and most faithful, he denies Jesus at the time of the crucifixion.  And yet Jesus names him to be the rock upon which the church is to be built.

There’s hope for us all.  Are we called to be part of what holds up his church?  We may not be big rocks, but we can be little pebbles and sand that fit in between the big rocks to give strength to the foundation and keep the rocks from shifting.

Come and See Jesus said.  What do we see? Do we see a Jesus who hangs out with the rich and powerful?  No, he hangs out with the poor, the sick, the ones oozing with sores, the outcasts.  

Come and see but more importantly Come and Be.  We are called to mimic the actions of Jesus.  

There are a bunch of “so called Christians” out there who think it’s okay to discriminate against God’s children, to withhold basic necessities from people who need them most, who think it’s okay for 45,000 people in a wealthy nation to die annually from lack of access to  health care others from lack of clean water.

There’s some organization that wants you to send money to promote “prosperity. Where’s the one promoting “generosity”. For if we are generous the needy will prosper at least to the point of having their basic human needs met.

If we are to come and be, we are to be giving and forgiving, accepting, and loving.  We are to be helping others, not condemning them for things beyond their control.

Paul posted a quotation the other day and I really like it “We should try to live such a way if the Gospels were lost, they could be re-written by looking at us.”

What is the Gospel I’m living? Look at people who loudly proclaim their faith but who do all the things Jesus would not do. What is their Gospel.

I read an article the other day called “The Kind of Christian of Refuse to Be.”  The writer begins by affirming that he IS a Christian but

He writes:

“I refuse to be a Christian who can’t find the beauty and truth in religious traditions other than my own.

I refuse to be a Christian devoid of the character of Jesus; his humility, his compassion, his smallness, his gentleness with people’s wounds, his attention to the poor, and the forgotten and the marginalized, his intolerance of religious hypocrisy, his clear expression of the love of God.

I refuse to be a Christian who can’t see the image of God in people of every color, every religious tradition, every sexual orientation.

Who is generous with damnation and stingy with Grace.”

He concludes “I am still a Christian—but I refuse to be one without Jesus.”

What sort of Christian will we be, and what sort will we refuse to be?

If we are Christians, if we are the living as followers of Jesus Christ, what sort of Gospel could be written based on our actions?

A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III

Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on January 12, 2020

Feast of the Baptism of our Lord

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi1_RCL.html

When Jesus was Baptized, God, through John, used a practice well known within the Jewish faith to do something new. God often does that: Takes what is known and familiar and uses that to do something new. Over the course of time, followers of Jesus have come to understand Baptism as both adoption into the family of God and a starting point for the ministry to which God has or will call us. The question is, how can we take what is well-known to the practice of our faith and let God use us to renew it, restore it, and leave it for generations of faithful that will come after us?

THAT is a loaded paragraph. So let's unpack it a little.

One of my favorite podcasts right now is called “You’re Wrong About.” It’s two people who take deep dives into headline grabbing events from American history and look at what the public story missed. They bring well-known incidents, like the OJ Simpson trial and the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan saga, back into the conversation in hopes that the listener will see it in a way that was most likely forgotten. The episodes aren’t short, but they are entertaining. And they are really revealing about the backstory that often went untold. One of the (I think) untended traits of the show is, after the chit-chat at the beginning, one of the hosts always says something along the lines of, “OK. So where to start with this story.” One of the pair has done all the research and presents it to their co-host, who then interjects their own memories of those incidents and asks clarifying questions. Their point in saying “where do we start” is that the back story that led to the headline events is always more complex than we realize. But knowing that backstory helps us see it all with new eyes.

Every year in our church calendar, the Sunday after January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus. It’s one of several days our Book of Common Prayer says is a most appropriate day for Baptisms, which we will do at our 11:00am service today. The Baptism of Jesus is the launch of his public ministry. He didn’t really do that three weeks after he was born; it was more like 30 years. It’s one of the few events that is recorded in all four Gospels. Each Gospel has its own perspective on the event, and each one has a few details that are unique to that writer. But what they all have in common is that, at least according to these four authors, Jesus does nothing related to his mission and ministry until he his Baptized by his cousin John in the River Jordan. And like every good saga, there’s a good backstory and reasons why Jesus was Baptized, even as we proclaim that he lived a sinless life. See, Jesus and John had been hovering around the same circle for a while. And people were going to John for his fiery preaching and a chance to get to turn their lives. Maybe there was a hope they could oust the Roman occupiers if they could get right with God. Maybe they just liked being called a brood of vipers. Either way, there was something attractive and mesmerizing about this guy. While people were going to hear and see what John was doing, the Gospel writers also infer people were also hanging around Jesus, too. So when Jesus comes to John for Baptism and John protests and Jesus says, “it is to fulfill all righteousness,” and John says, “OK, I’ll Baptize you,” God in the person of Jesus is again becoming vulnerable to become more approachable and relatable. It’s a moment that maybe the people at the time, even John, didn’t necessarily recognize as one that would change the course of history, the course of the geo-political world, and certainly the course of religion.

Baptism wasn’t something new or unique to John. Ritual washing had been a part of Jewish practice for nearly a thousand years by the time John comes on the scene. It was most often used for one of a dozen or more ways one might be unclean to enter the Temple or the synagogue. Sometimes, it was as simple as washing hands or feet or another part. Other times called for immersion of the whole body into the water. The sins and offenses John preached against called for that full immersion not merely to be forgiven of sins, but to wash away the impurities of the corrupt world. This devotion to John the Baptists’ teachings still exist in an ethnoreligious group called the Mandaeans, who thrived in Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East.

In Jesus’ Baptism, God takes what was already there, what already was a well-known part of the faith, and God renewed, refreshed, and reinvigorated its meaning. God used this moment not as a simple act of purifying, because Jesus didn’t need purifying, but God used it as a chance for humanity to see how God is doing something new. And in the course of reflecting on Jesus’ life and ministry, we have learned to see Baptism as the starting point for our own ministry and work as well as being formally marked as Christ’s own forever.

It was quite intentional to choose today, the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, to launch the congregational phase of the Sacred Sound & Space Campaign. If Baptism is the starting point for our ministry and work in God’s name, then the Baptism of Jesus is a great moment for us, a people empowered by God, to take what is familiar and known and loved and begin to renew it for the generations after us.  And as we renew this space, we will renew ourselves and our faith community as well. We started that part in December with the Advent devotion books. We continue it with the Sharing Our Faith series on Wednesday nights, and we will have another program in Lent. We are grateful that gifts have already come in to help us start in the process, that the balcony has already been reinforced to be able to safely accommodate a new organ, and we have been able to seriously explore enhancements to the lighting and lighting system.

Baptism is our starting point for ministry. We don’t all live into that ministry at the same speed or rhythm. Nor should we. The important part is that we work together to build up the Kingdom of God. This campaign isn’t about all of us giving the same amount or trying to out do someone else. It’s about renewing this space that, for generations before us, has been a powerful reminder of God’s love and grace, a space that has been a part of personal and family milestone, and a place where countless people have heard the Holy Spirit’s invitation to go and be the hands, feet, and voice of Jesus in the world. It’s about making sure it will continue to be all those things and more for generations after us.

In the same way that Baptism binds us to Jesus, we envision this campaign binding us closer together as followers of Jesus, that our success isn’t seen just in dollars raised and projects completed, but in deepening relationships across the parish. The podcast “You’re Wrong About” looks back to tell us what we missed at that moment in history. In this moment in the history of Christ Episcopal Church, New Bern, NC, I want people to look back and remember how we grew together, worked together, gave together.

Our three goals for this campaign are to raise the funds we need, to strengthen our individual faith, and to strengthen our community, and to do all those things together, arm-in-arm.

To keep us mindful of that call, I invite you to stand and join in singing “They’ll know we are Christians.” You should find a copy of the words in the pew rack in front of you.