Transition - What Won't Change

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Transition - What Won't Change
 
Rev. Dorothy offered us powerful words in her Sunday sermon. She asked the question, What does one who loves God look like? Her answers are more questions - good thought provoking questions for us and our times.
 
  • What does one who loves God look like? The intent of the question is that the focus be internal. The outer ritual is intended to be a reflection of the inner reality.
  • What does righteous anger look like? The profane condemnation of others, the language and actions designed to keep “them” in line?  
  • We readily celebrate Christmas and Easter with such pageantry outwardly. But are we really glad that love showed up in Bethlehem? In our depictions of that grand event of Jesus’ birth do we sanitize the birth so much that we forget the point was to identify with the ordinariness of the human experience?
  • Then the crucifixion-- the pain of false accusations. Jesus was not Empire -- Jesus was crucified by Empire.
  • Yes, this teaching is about moral laxity -- but not as those who challenged Jesus intended the question. The law was intended to be a life affirming way to live. Jesus never condemns the law. You see, the intent of the law was the matter of the Heart. No wonder Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the law. Jesus lived as one who loved God.
 
Jesus lived as one who loved God.
 
Dorothy quoted Richard Rohr on this manner of life:
 
… Good theology maintains two freedoms: it keeps people free for God and it keeps God free for people. The harder task is actually the second, because what religion tends to do is tell God whom God can love and whom God is not allowed to love.
In most church theology and morality, God is very unfree.
 
Putting God in a box, making God a commodity is not the message. God does not equal empire and empire certainly does not equal God.
 
In her book, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community, Stephanie Spellers asks: How does a denomination historically connected to establishment and empire become a church that loves Jesus, lives in solidarity with the oppressed, and seeks the flourishing of all God’s children? Friends, she is talking about us - the Episcopal Church. Historically the Episcopal Church has too often been identified with and allied with the empire. Remember in the 60's - "the man." That has in some communities changed. That has in St. Mark's changed.
 
Spellers continues her good line of questions quoting the Rev. Paul Washington who challenges the church with the following:
 
Those who are cowards will ask, ‘Is it safe?’
Those who are political will ask, ‘Is it expedient?’
Those who are vain will ask, ‘Is it popular?’
But those who have a conscience will ask, “Is it right?’
 
Certainly in the long history of St. Mark's - 155 years - there were times when we did the safe, expedient, and popular thing. But there were on balance more times when this community stepped out in faith to ask, Is it right? And today we continue to ask, What is it we are called to do and to be, what is God calling St. Mark's into and out of?
 
This will not change. This is who we are as those who love God.
 
Rev. Dorothy with some edits from Malinda