Seeing Being and Doing

A Sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on All Saints Day, 2009 at the Convent Chapel of St. Mary's Medical Center, Huntington, WV and based on Ecclesiasticus 2: 1-11

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Because there was Benedict, there was Gregory. Because there was Gregory, there was Augustine. Because there was Augustine, there was Canterbury. there was Canterbury, there was Anglicanism – and us, All Saints Anglican Church. But it was nearly not so. For it seems that Augustine got cold feet on the way to the land of the Angles.

Author Albert Holtz tells the story in his book “A Saint on Every Corner”: “as Augustine and his little band traveled overland through Gaul, they began to hear disturbing tales of the savage and murderous English natives. They heard graphic details of the strange customs and the unpronounceable tongue that awaited them. There were sailor's hair-raising reports of the treacherous currents and killer storms that lay in wait for them in crossing the English Channel. It seemed the list of hazards grew longer by the day.”

Finally the “missionaries' enthusiasm evaporated and they held a meeting to discuss whether their mission was really such a good idea after all. [Apparently] their caution won out and they elected to send Augustine back to Rome to explain to Pope Gregory how impossible their mission was and to ask for permission to return to their monastery in Italy.”

Fortunately for us, Gregory was having none of it and told Augustine to high- tale it back to England and not come back until he had accomplished his mission! ... Today, says Holtz, “these monks are venerated as great pioneers and saints”, but it's somehow comforting to know that “they too, were subject to an occasional case of cold feet! Like the rest of us, they were susceptible at times to discouragement and doubt”.

I can relate! I've told you all before – only half in jest, that I'd almost rather do anything but trust God... meaning that following God and doing things His way requires that I 'Trust in him" (Eccl.2:6). As I do so, "he will help me and make my ways straight". Sounds a lot like Prov. 3:5,6: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." But trusting the Lord often brings trials, and we should be prepared for this.

The writer of Ecclesiasticus admonishes us:
“My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing. Set your heart right and be steadfast, and do not be impetuous in time of calamity...(2:1,2) One wonders if Augustine had ever heard these words – and if he had, did he just forget them momentarily – or did he really not know that he had to be prepared for hardship in the service of the Lord? ... I tend to think he just got cold feet momentarily.

Surely he would have read Paul's letter to the Ephesians – just as we read it together today – and he most likely would have known the Beatitudes by heart. His knowledge of God's Word would have given him a Vision of Life in the Kingdom.

This vision of the Kingdom is one which sees that God the Father loves us and has sent Jesus Christ his Son, to reconcile us to Him, to unite all things in him, to give us an inheritance sealed in the Holy Spirit, and to accompany that inheritance with wisdom, enlightenment about God, and immeasurable power coming from the right hand of God the Father, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. (Eph 1:1-23).

Only a Great Vision could have inspired Augustine and his little band to set off to England in the first place. And only a Great Vision could have stiffened up their backbones to go back once they had doubts. Because they saw something the World did not see, they were willing to forsake all and give themselves to a seemingly impossible mission. Because they did, we are sitting here today.

So we thank God for the Saints who went before us, who made it possible for us to worship God in Spirit and in truth. And we look to their courageous example as a challenge to See what they saw, to Be what they were and to Do what they did. Appropriately enough then, we are focusing today on Seeing, Being and Doing as Saints of God.

Seeing
In their book, Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon challenge us to think about the Beatitudes that we read today as a 'vision of the 'in-breaking of a new society' – a picture of the way God IS. The Beatitudes, they say, are not a strategy for achieving a better society, they are a Picture, a Promise, an imaginative example of life in the Kingdom of God. (pg. 84)

The Beatitudes show us a picture of blessedness diametrically opposed to the wisdom of the World. Jesus says that we are blessed when we are poor, sad hungry and hated. The World says we are blessed when we are rich, happy sated and well-connected. Jesus shows us a Vision of blessedness that depends upon God for sustenance; the World demands that we be Self-Sufficient. The Picture Jesus shows us is a picture of what heaven on earth would look like. It's a foreshadowing of how things will be when all is summed up in Christ, but it's also a picture of how the Church is to look now. It's a picture of a peculiar people, living in a peculiar way because they See something the World does not see. In Sum: they see that 'in Christ, God has already made history come out right.” (Resident Aliens, pg. 87)

In other words, Christians see that God is moving history towards fulfillment and redemption, reconciliation of all things in the Beloved – and ultimately to a New Heaven and a New Earth. We, as the Saints, or 'called-out' ones of God, know that we have been called out of seeing the World as our all-in-all. We are a community - a 'resident alien colony' that affirms a different reality than the World.

Instead of worshiping money, power, position and security; instead of accepting the world's claim to be all there is and accepting its demand that we worship It as Ultimate Reality, we, as the Saints of God, worship the One who IS Provision, Peace, Shalom and Victory. Instead of trusting in what we can SEE with our physical eyes, we as the Saints of God, see a true Vision of Reality with the eyes of our heart.

We look up to Christ crucified and see One who was willing to give up everything worldly for the JOY set before him. We see in Christ God's self-giving LOVE and we learn that freedom comes from doing the will of another, peace comes from submitting to a violent death, and power is perfected in weakness. What we see looks like foolishness or madness to the world. What we see is the END of the world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God established here and now.

We are a people who See something different than the world sees.

Being
We are also a people who understand our Being differently than the worldlings around us. The people of the World see themselves as having erupted out of a primordial soup by chance over the course of unimaginably long periods of time. Religions and traditions of the past developed to help people deal with their ignorance and superstitions, but through the rise of Science and Technology, belief in the supernatural or the miraculous has largely been discredited. Old sources of Authority have been shrugged off and people have been set free to pursue their own understandings of life and morality.

The average person has become so thoroughly independent that it is now a secular 'sin' to suggest that there is something called Truth that is bigger than myself and which demands my allegiance. Since all 'truths' are equally valid it has now become 'hateful' to proclaim that some things are right and some things are wrong.

This past week, our President signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act which creates additional penalties for violent crimes motivated by the victim's "actual or perceived" gender, "gender identity," sexual orientation, or disability" - all of which sounds upright, until you realize that "evangelist Michael Marcavage, director of Philadelphia-based Repent America, was one of 11 Christians who were jailed and charged with a hate crime for carrying Bible verse banners and preaching at a 2004 homosexual pride event in Philadelphia. The charges were later dismissed -- and in 2008, the state's Supreme Court ruled the law had been passed illegally by the Pennsylvania legislature. (Jim Brown, OneNewsNow, 10/29/2009)

But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the recent federal legislation is a new incarnation of the Pennsylvania law and is, as Marcavage says, 'an effort to silence Christians.' In an ironic twist then, those who seek freedom for themselves are willing to imprison those who use their freedom to dissent from the demand for absolute license.

Granted, not everyone is so militant. The basic attitude of most folks towards Truth today is that of someone who has a not-too-compelling hobby that they dabble at once in a while. Moral behavior has been so privatized that almost everything is now merely a lifestyle choice – with the exception of murder, child molestation, being a Nazi or a wife-beater, or listening to the Great Satan himself, Rush Limbaugh.

The only trouble with this radical sort of Freedom is that life becomes rather trivial and meaningless. The World cannot affirm an essential meaning and goodness in human Being because it thinks it arose by accident. Religion and Spirituality are essentially props to secular existence; they have value only insofar as they 'help' us – or assist us to feel more comfortable in our Worldly life, keeping the despair at bay.

But our understanding of ourselves as Christians is fundamentally different from the World's. We believe that God had us in mind when he began the Creation and that we as the Church embody God's highest plan for Creation – to have intimate fellowship with those He has created and to bring them up into himself in a Love relationship – to create a community of Saints if you will. We understand that the physical world and everything in it was created to facilitate our love relationship with God – and thus we have a sense of security and Meaning in our Being.

We ARE because God made us. We live and move and have our being because we live and move and have our being IN GOD. We understand that we were made to love God and thus Worship is central to WHO we are in Christ. We believe that in worshiping God we are most truly ourselves and that in the Eucharist that we BECOME what we already are: the Body of Christ. As we worship God around his table, we come together with all the Saints who have ever lived and we cry out Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of heaven and earth. We cast down our crowns before him and He receives our love and worship, giving us Himself in return – most especially in the Body and the Blood of his own dear Son.

Thus, our worship of God can be thought of as part of our essence as Human Beings. We exist to Worship and to receive back God's love in return. Since the Eucharist embodies the self-giving love, we are most truly ourselves at the moment of Communing with our God. The Eucharist is the wellspring of our existence and we cannot live without it. At this table, we become what we are: God's people, created before the foundation of the world to be Saints - those 'called out' of the World.

Doing
Our fundamental identity as the Saints of God is to be a worshiping community. Thus, Worship is the fulfillment of the first great Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart mind soul and strength.

The second commandment gives us our marching orders in the world: love your neighbor as yourself. God loves us and gives Himself to us through the Incarnation and the Sacraments. He now commands us to give Christ to the world the same way he did: Incarnationally and Sacramentally.

Look around you Saints. You are the Presence of Christ in the World. Because God has placed His Holy Spirit within you, you are Sacramental - an outward sign of an inward and spiritual reality, and a means of communicating God's Grace – you are the living, moving means of God's grace to this world. God incarnates you with Himself and Communicates Himself to the world through You! That means that your basic vocation as a Christian is to be a minister and missionary. You are the hands and feet of Christ. You are the A team. That's all, there ain't no B Team. If the world is to know Christ, it will come to know Him through YOU. Just like Augustine and his little band, You are to Tell what you know and Give what you Got.

It's an exciting and daunting challenge. Especially when we face so many struggles ourselves. We're surrounded by family problems, problems at work, financial problems, sickness and death. Each day seems a struggle just to keep body and soul together, much less run around and save the world!

And yet, this is what we are called to do: to love and serve God by loving and serving the world. We are to embody Christ and to communicate His love to the world through our words and our work. If we fail to do so, we have simply and basically failed to be what we are – Christ's body on earth.

This is why we need to celebrate All Saints Day. We need to remember exemplars of the faith who have demonstrated how to pour themselves out in the world for love of God and their neighbors. We also need to remember that the good we do in the world is not simply Social Work. The good works we do are done 'to a person' as Mother Teresa used to say -that is, to Christ.

If we See correctly – if we have a right Vision of the World, we will see ourselves as Christ's body, ministering to Christ in all people. We will seek the welfare of our city, our nation, and the world, not so much to prop up the the man-made structures of the world, but to bring God's love into the world, so that all people may know Him and enjoy Him forever.

This is a tough job because the World is fundamentally opposed to God. The world doesn't want to submit itself to the Lordship of Christ- and it especially doesn't want you to remind it that there is a God to worship apart from the World. That's why the world will persecute you and tell you to SHUT UP! Go Away! Leave us to pursue our path of destruction! We're Happy that way!
The Bible tells us that all who desire to live Godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. And so we shall. Friends, we are coming into a time, when Christians will more and more be pressured to shut up, go along, and get along with the World. If we love our God and we want to be faithful to Him, we cannot do this. And that will mean difficulty for us.

The witness of the Saints who have gone before us is that they persevered – sometimes under fair conditions, often under persecution. We must do what they did if we are to be found faithful - we must share our Vision that God is All in all, and that He is reconciling all things to Himself in Christ. We must pray for those who can't see this vision. We must minister to a hurting world as if we are ministering to Christ Himself. And we must always remember who we are: Creatures of God, our Father, created in Christ Jesus for Love and Good Works (Heb. 10:24).

We may struggle with difficulty and doubt. We may even try to turn around and go back like Father Augustine. But we must go forward for Christ and we must trust Him as we go.
I don't think I can do better than to repeat today's admonishment from Ecclesiasticus:

My Child,when you come to serve the Lord,
prepare yourself for testing.
Set you heart right and be steadfast,
and do not be impetuous in time of calamity.
Cling to him and do not depart,
so that your last days may be prosperous.
Accept whatever befalls you,
and in times of humiliation be patient.
For gold is tested in the fire,
and those found acceptable, in the furnace of humiliation.
Trust in him, and he will help you;
make your ways straight, and hope in him.
You who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy;
do not stray, or else you may fall.
You who fear the Lord, hope for good things,
for lasting joy and mercy.
Consider the generations of old and see:
has anyone persevered in the fear of the Lord and been forsaken?
Or has anyone called upon him and been neglected?
For the Lord is compassionate and merciful;
he forgives sins and saves in time of distress.

May God help us in our Seeing, our Being and our Doing. AMEN.