The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin's Episcopal Church
February 25, 2007
Lent 2 C
Brothers and sisters, we are in the wilderness.
The wilderness is a deep biblical metaphor for that scary and inhospitable place where people of faith wander, too far from the place where they began their journey to return, and not yet in sight of where they will end up. The wilderness is the place where faith and energy and hope falter – where dust and despair and drought suck the life out of soul and body – the place where Satan gains power to tempt and bewilder us because we’re hungry and tired and confused and ready to do anything to get ourselves out of the wilderness and into a place of safety and comfort.
The Anglican Communion, and especially the Episcopal Church, is in the wilderness. We’ve been here for awhile, but until the Primates’ meeting in Tanzania last week, I think we could still at least see where we’d come from and where we were going. But the meeting of the 38 heads of the 38 provinces that make up the world-wide Anglican communion didn’t come to any resolution at all. The official communiqué issued at the end of the meeting was a highly negotiated, every-syllable-bargained-for, compromise statement that scapegoats and rebukes the Episcopal Church, but stops short of delivering the death blow the Archbishop of Nigeria and his cohorts were campaigning for.
I have decided not to discuss the Primates’ meeting or the communiqué itself further in this sermon. Frankly, I find that too much chewing on that particular document makes me sick; it’s just not good for my spiritual health. If you want to know more about what happened in Dar-es-Salaam last week, I recommend the Episcopal News Service – easily accessible online, or our own diocesan web site, which has links to the primary documents themselves. Do not depend on secular press summaries; most of the ones I’ve seen are wrong. A little googling will lead you to hundreds of blogs representing opinions from across the political and theological spectrum. There is as much information out there as anyone could possibly desire; I’ve made a personal decision to unplug myself from all the cacophony and acknowledge that no amount of discussion, assertion, argument or affirmation is going to get us out of this wilderness any faster. We are going to be here for awhile.
Here’s why we’re in the wilderness. The communiqué seeks a response from our House of Bishops, which meets twice a year – in March and in September. It sets a deadline for the House of Bishops’ response – the last day of September this year. So at the very least, we are in the wilderness for the next six months or so, and I suspect that we may very well be in the wilderness for longer than that.
Here’s why we’re in the wilderness. The Episcopal Church has become the identified patient, the designated problem child of the communion for a variety of reasons. We began to ordain women long before the rest of the communion did, we are willing to tolerate a wide variety of ways to study and interpret the bible, we are willing to tolerate and even welcome a wide variety of theological opinion, and yes – for at least the last thirty years we have been discussing, reflecting on and living with the full participation of gay and lesbian Christians in every level of our church’s life.
We are not the only part of the Anglican Communion that welcomes the ministry of women, that has progressive biblical and theological views, and who is experiencing the growing role of gay and lesbian members in the church. But – because of Gene Robinson’s election in New Hampshire in 2003 – and for a variety of other reasons that may have absolutely nothing to do with religion – we have been made the focus of our communion’s struggle with all of these questions.
Israel was led out of slavery in Egypt, delivered from bondage and oppression by God’s glorious power. But then Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness – 40 years wandering in the desert before finally coming into that promised land of milk and honey. And those 40 years weren’t pretty. The book of Exodus is full of stories about just how badly Israel behaved in the wilderness – stories about faithlessness and apostasy, about sin and disobedience, stories about sheer cussedness and cupidity. The wilderness is a hard, hard place to be.
Jesus finds the wilderness a hard place to be, too. Luke’s story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is the last thing that happens to Jesus before he begins his public ministry. There’s a great paradox in the very first line of this passage – Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit from his baptism, and yet it is that very Spirit that leads him out into the wilderness. The Spirit has confirmed his identity as the Son of God, and it is that same Spirit that sends him into the wilderness where that identity will be tested by Satan, by God’s greatest adversary.
Luke tells us that Satan offers Jesus three temptations, all cutting to the very heart of who Jesus is, and what he has been sent to accomplish. “Command these stones to become bread”… “I will give you all the glory and authority of the kingdoms of this world”… “Prove your faith by casting yourself off this tower…” And three times Jesus asserts that he will not be dissuaded from his true self or from his intention. Jesus knows that he has come into the world for its salvation – to heal and teach, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to announce the fulfillment of all that the prophets have longed for, and ultimately to be betrayed, to be crucified, to die. The wilderness is a hard place – and Jesus is as hungry and tired and fed up as any human being can be – and still he holds fast to who he is and what he has been sent to do.
And that’s what I want to encourage us here at St. Martin’s to do while we’re in the wilderness. I think there are several temptations before us – several things that Satan might be dangling in front of us as ways to get ourselves out of the wilderness and into a place that feels safer and more comfortable.
One temptation is to stay in crisis mode. There is a tremendous amount of hand-wringing, anxiety, apocalyptic thinking and disaster mongering about. There are lots of people stirring lots of pots, spending lots of bandwidth talking about this, and proclaiming that if we don’t do the right thing, it will mean the end of life as we know it.
The nature of the wilderness is that we’re never quite sure where we are, and keeping the crisis mentality going at least gives us something to focus on – a point of reference that may feel like an anchor, but is really just a hamster wheel we can keep running on until we fall over from exhaustion. These are hard and challenging times, but a real crisis is waking up not knowing how you’re going to feed your children that day, or facing genocidal slaughter as your country is taken over by thugs, or freezing to death in a public park because you have no place to take shelter from the cold. I promise you that at St. Martin’s we will not succumb to the temptation of mistaking our internecine church battles for full-blown global catastrophe.
Another temptation is to allow that church battle to distract us from our mission and ministry in the world. Oh, you can bet that Satan enjoys this. I believe that this church battle is ultimately about justice and respect for human dignity, and I also believe that we need to keep our eyes on all the other work we do for justice and human dignity. We need to not let ourselves be distracted from our Christian vocation to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless and care for the abandoned. We have Gospel work to do and I think some of this squabbling is a wicked distraction from that Gospel work.
To resist that temptation, I will encourage us at St. Martin’s to get about that Gospel work with renewed energy and attention. Under Lisa Koelle’s leadership, our Outreach Commission is being reorganized and redirected. We are going to be strengthening our present local ministry efforts and seeking new opportunities both here and abroad. If you have never helped at the Epiphany soup kitchen, served at Amos House, or helped with the Cloak – sign up next time you hear the call for volunteers. Come to the Jazz Vespers this Friday and support the excellent work of Amos House. Make a donation to Episcopal Relief and Development, which supports incredible Gospel work in the poorest, most desperate parts of the world. By God’s grace, we can make even the wilderness a place of compassion and mercy.
And the third temptation I think, is to seek a quick way out of the wilderness by turning around and going back in the direction we came from. We are seduced by nostalgia, by that little voice that whispers to us that everything was better before, that if we just stopped talking about all this difficult stuff, it would go away. If everyone just knew their place and quit trying to change that place, we wouldn’t be in the wilderness at all.
Our Bishop said, during the 2003 debate about Gene Robinson, that she was going to vote to consent to his election because she believed that we are called to be in the wilderness with him, and with this issue. Our Presiding Bishop has said this week that she believes it is the Episcopal Church’s particular vocation right now to keep carrying this conversation forward. We are not going back.
One of the things that deeply attracted me to St. Martin’s is that our gay and lesbian members are such full and complete participants at every level of our parish life. I know that we are not all of one mind on this question; I know that there are differences of opinion and what I rejoice in is that we are so able, with all of those differences, to live and work together as members of the Body of Christ. No one has been forced to leave or told that he or she isn’t welcome. We do not have a litmus test for belonging.
I believe that part of our Christian vocation is to live into the vision of God’s shalom – into the vision of peace, fulfillment, coherence and completion that we call the Kingdom of God. We are not perfect – we fall short of the vision that God reveals to us – but I love how St. Martin’s really seeks to make that vision a reality, by being clear and explicit about our wilderness journey into being a truly diverse and comprehensive community. We are not going back. I believe that, however hard and unpleasant the wilderness can be, that God is going before us to the promised land, and that we ultimately rest in the peace and mercy of Christ.
visit – a visit that the Roman authorities prevented by putting him to death before he could make the journey. The church in Rome, like other Christians struggling in those early years, was trying to figure out how Jews and Gentiles could both be part of this new vision of salvation. How could Greeks inherit the promises God made to Jews? Wouldn’t there have to be some kind of first and second class status for Christians? How would people ever know who had truly been saved.
And Paul writes that all that is necessary is proclaim faith in Jesus Christ. God sorts all the rest of it out. “No one who believes in Christ will be put to shame…there is no distinction between Jew and Greek – the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.”
We are beginning our Lenten journey in the wilderness. I don’t know where we will end up, and I sure would be happier and more at ease if some of the people here in the wilderness with me would get out, and I am awfully tempted to announce that I know both what and who God wants. But Paul reminds me that no one – no one – will be put to shame. There is no distinction. God is generous to all.
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