Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013 (Second Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11)
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Reading Scripture with people of other faiths
Sermon delivered Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 (Thursday in the Week of the Epiphany) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, during a Eucharist in which members of the Sikh community in Nashville were invited to be present to observe and/or participate in our worship, as part of an on-going interfaith dialogue. The scriptures appointed by the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary for this day were: Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 147; 1 John 4:19-5:4; and Luke 4:14-22.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
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