And just for effect—wow! To paraphrase a Grateful Dead tag line, “what
a long, strange trip—and yet wondrous trip— this has been” I simply can’
t believe that its been almost a full year since this community of faith
came into being. So much has happened since August of 2000, hasn’t
it? When we met together a year ago, most of us didn’t even know each
other—we had no history together and no stories to tell, good or bad,
about ourselves. Now, of course, we do have some of those stories,
some history to share—we have of our Valentine Circle Fair, where we
went mad with the Karaoke; we have stories of two picnics, one which
involved a very competitive game of volleyball, in which we lost the
volleyball itself in the David and Wayne’s woods for some 20 or 30
minutes; we now have the shared story of having a very hurried moment
of holy communion because some of us heard the tornado siren going
off during the service one Sunday night—and many of us spent a good
hour or so in the church basement, having our first fear-based Afterglow;
we’ve seen the birth of the Prayer Team, the St. Luke’s Team, and the
birth and death of a few Circles of Hope; we’ve also had the incredible
privilege of painting the North Winds Living Facility, a nursing home for
those living with HIV and AIDS. But for me, the moment that sticks out in
me personally is the first and LAST time I sang publicly—and having the
distinct honor of becoming the first pastor on staff at the Cathedral of
Hope to receive a lifetime ban on singing publicly ever again!
You know, God has done a wondrous thing with us and through us this
last year, but its also been a lot of work, giving birth to the Cathedral of
Hope in Oklahoma City. When Rev. Michael Piazza first introduced the
idea planting the Cathedral in OKC, many in our congregation in Dallas
caught that vision with him—some of you dreamers are here from Dallas
tonight, worshipping with us. But dreams come true usually because of
hard work and commitment and the Cathedral in Dallas showed each of
those traits in the last 18 months, sharing its resources, its wisdom, its
staff and its incredible congregation with us here in OKC. And so, on
behalf of those of us here who have become that realized dream, I want
to say “thank you” to our brothers and sisters in Dallas who poured
themselves into our lives in so many ways, both seen and unseen.
Thank you! (CLAP) But I also want point the saints here who have
worked so hard on making this place and community a reality here in
OKC—the Circle Leaders, the Chancel Assistants, the ushers, the
Prayer Team, the Office Angels, the Afterglow Coordinators, the
Communion servers, the RAIN Team, and especially the music staff and
the incredible choir who consistently give us joy week in and week out. I
am constantly amazed at what we do in this place—and even more
amazed at all the hard work it takes to be the church—and even then,
there is still much, much to do, isn’t there?
Actually, this whole week I was thinking how extraordinary that people
even make a commitment to be a part of a community of faith, to be the
church, and especially I am amazed that people join a place like the
Cathedral, where we make it so clear that when we join in the greater
mission of this church, we really are making a commitment of each other
and to the whole world. We ask people to take off their bibs and put on
their aprons all the time in this place—to cease being a consumer and
become a producer—and people still join! You know, scholars of
religions tell us that faith is becoming more and more individualistic, more
private, more isolated—and that people really are making choices
against “organized religion” in favor of, well, I guess, disorganized
religion. We are fast becoming a country of religious loners, spiritual
lone rangers, a people who disconnect our personal faith from a
community of faith. Sometimes we have pretty good reasons for running
from churches—most of us here can give some sort of testimony to some
of the shadow sides of being part of a church community—of being lied
to about our sexuality, among other things, and then being ostracized
when we discovered the truth about ourselves. But, on the other hand,
sometimes its just seems easier to go it alone because going with other
people is just a lot of work, to be honest.
So, why do we gather every week in Circles, in teams, for the
extravagance of worship? Why do we do this thing called church when
others have said “no way:” to this absurd thing we live out here
together? And I have to admit that I personally think about this question
all the time, between my falling in and out of love with the church on a
regular basis. I was just visiting some good friends in the Northwest this
past week and, as a joke, one of them picked up one of those cheap
paperbacks for me that you can always find in drug stores. They laid a
copy of a book entitled “For I Have Sinned: True Stories Of Clergy Who
Kill” right next to my bed in the guest bedroom. I must admit, in the back
of my mind, I was wondering whether they thought I was looking for tips—
or that maybe that I looked like I was on the edge and they were just
trying to be helpful and add that little extra push. Now, I’ve never been
tempted to kill, but like most of us, I’ve certainly been tempted to run from
the church at various times in my life, especially when it gets rough. Yet,
despite all the hard stuff, despite the temptation to do this faith thing by
myself, by ourselves, we gather in our Circles, our Teams, in worship—
we gather together to be and do the madness of the church.
And I think the reason we gather is hinted at in the passage from
Matthew that we just heard a few minutes ago—and is also found in the
reading from the prophet Joel that we also heard this evening. In
Matthew, we see Jesus getting involved in this theological argument
about what you were or were not allowed to do on the Jewish day of rest,
the Sabbath. Some folks during that era said that you literally couldn’t
do anything on the Sabbath, not even an act of goodness like rescuing a
trapped animal or even helping out another human. Others believed
that you could break the Sabbath and work if it served the human good.
Jesus here gets involved in this little argument and he takes the side of
those who believe that serving good supersedes even God’s own law,
that doing good is the greatest act of honor towards God. But he adds
another reason to why its OK to break the Sabbath laws for the greater
good, like feeding people as David did in the example Jesus gave—and
that other new reason was the very miracle those folks were witnessing
right before their eyes some two thousand years ago. “I tell you,” Jesus
says to his listeners, “something greater than the temple is here.” And
we know he’s not just referring to himself, because what he is referring to
is gender neutral in the Greek; rather, we know that the “something
greater” he is speaking of included his followers in that place and even, I
think, transcended time and space, and would one day include us as
well. That “something greater” is exactly what Joel is speaking of in the
first reading we heard today—the moment when God’s spirit would be
poured out into the world and into the most unlikely of people, a people
who would continue to tell of God’s wondrous love, people like you and
me. We are that “something greater” Jesus spoke of 2000 years ago
and we gather to be his followers and to be the church, the people of
God who know they need each other if they are going to be followers of
this Jesus of Nazareth.
I guess one of the things I wanted to remind us of today is that we are
part of the “something greater” that God is constantly bringing into being
in this world—and that we are not simply another organization or group
that you and I will make a choice about joining or not joining, another
volunteer group in a world of great organizations doing good things in
the world. Richard Lischer, who is a Lutheran minister, recently wrote a
book about his first parish, and on his last Sunday there, he tells of what
he sees from the pulpit: he writes, “But now, I looked out upon this cloud
of upturned faces, each representing others already turned to the light, I
was embraced by a wholeness I never before experienced. It seemed to
me that I was looking at the church as God sees it, not as a series of
individual quirks and opinions, but as a single heart of love and sorrow.
The only thing that made us different from any other kinship group or
society was the mysterious presence of Jesus in the community. We
were his body, which is not a metaphor. The ordinary world is really
capable of hosting the infinite Being.” I think he is right—what makes the
church different from all the other great organizations we are involved in
and that we care about is the simple fact that mysterious presence of
Christ is here. And Lischer here reminds us that when we constantly say
the church is the body of Christ, we aren’t just saying, “the church is
LIKE the body of Christ”—no, we really are Christ in this world, the
presence of God in this world. God surely shows God’s face to us in
many, many ways, but the most sure way I know of finding Christ in this
world is by looking into your face and my face, the faces of the people
gathered here and in other communities of Christian faith. Now, I’m not
saying that seeing Christ in our faces is always easy—it isn’t easy,
especially when you are looking into the face of Pat Robertson or Jerry
Falwell—but we are reminded both in Matthew and here that we really
part of something mysterious and wondrous, something that is greater
than all of our stumbles and disappointments, our grace and beauty, that
we can each name when we begin to talk about our experiences with the
church. I think the reason we gather in many ways, both here and in a
million other churches out there, is that somehow you and I got swept
away in that “something greater” that Jesus said was being born some
2000 years ago.
But being swept up in the “something greater” that is the church, the
body of Christ means something more than being a metaphor—it means
actually being the hands and feet of the Christ in this world. And I think
we really try to do that here at the Cathedral—its reflected in the core
values that we think God has called us to live out—the values of justice,
hope, liberation, compassion, and, of course, being followers of Jesus.
Being Christ in this world for us means putting those values into practice
in our lives—and it struck me this past few months that maybe we were
being called to focus our energy on one particular Cathedral value, at
least for the coming year, something that I see arising in us and
something we need to attend to so that it becomes part of the air that we
breath. There is a moment in the last part of this passage from Matthew
where Jesus does good on the Sabbath, where he makes clear his
commitment to other people, where he shows compassion when he could
have just waited a few hours and avoided a lot of criticism, and even
maybe avoided the intrigue that would later take him to the cross. On
this day, he showed compassion—he didn’t just talk about compassion—
he became compassion for this man who came to him with a need for
healing and wholeness. This past Spring, I think I saw us living out that
compassion in ways that still move me—and in particular, I saw moment
where, if I had any doubt left that Christ was the church, it all dissipated
and I think I saw us as we really are, as this mysterious presence of
Christ in this world. I was dropping off some left over cake at Northwinds
from Afterglow one Sunday evening after worship, which is, as I have
said, a living facility for those living HIV and AIDS. One of our folks who
is involved in the RAIN Team wasn’t at worship that night because she
had been asked by the staff at North Winds to sit with a man who was
fast approaching his final hours on earth. I found her in a fairly dark
room, drenched mostly in shadows, holding the hand of a man she did
not know, gazing at him with eyes that were surely Christ’s eyes. She
didn’t know I was there, being a witness to this scene, at least not for
another few minutes, which made the moment more beautiful to me. And
I walked away from that moment incredibly humbled at the presence of
Christ in her and in us, we ordinary people who have become a part of
that “something greater” than ourselves. Compassion was shown and its
something that is all around us here, and its something I think we need to
pay special attention as the RAIN Team begins its second year, as the
St. Luke’s Team, with its ministry of visiting people who are ill, becomes a
part of who we are. But compassion goes beyond teams and plans—it
has to do with seeing a need and doing something about it, even when it
might seem scary, like when Christ chose to heal that man’s hands,
despite all the pressure to just wait until the Sabbath had ended. I think
God’s calling us to eat and breath and live out compassion this second
year, not to the detriment of our other core values, but to make each of
those values fuller and real. We have been given the gift of God’s
compassion, just in time, as HIMS of PRAISE will remind us in a few
moments, and now its time to be the body of Christ, to be his hands and
feet in this world. We are the church, the “something greater” all of
creation has anticipated and waited for, and now we are asked to be and
do the compassion we have been given, right here and right now.
Amen.
