Monthly Archives: November 2014

McChurch and Community Engagement

Advent 1 Sermon at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Woodville, Texas:

It’s almost a given on the first Sunday in Advent, this first Sunday after Black Friday, that many congregations are hearing sermons today railing against greed and consumerism. For weeks we haven’t been able to get away from Black Friday advertising, or news stories on people fighting over big screen TVs or camped out in front of stores. I was determined not to be that priest who came in here and laid an Advent sermon on you about how this time of year we all spend too much time thinking about buying stuff, and not enough time thinking about God. Consumerism bad – God good. Sermon done.

But then I saw a story about a church branding agency trying to raise $1,000,000 to partner with any church willing to let them build a McDonald’s inside of it. It’s called – get ready for this – the McMass Project.

The project logo, believe it or not, and a link to the indigogo website, in case you're still struggling with whether to believe it, or not. (Image from indiegogo.com)

The project logo, believe it or not, and a link to the indigogo website, in case you’re still struggling with whether to believe it, or not. (Image from indiegogo.com)

Honestly, when I first read about it I was a little McNauseous. For us as Episcopalians, let alone for our sister Eucharistic tradition churches, to take the name of a sacred rite like the Mass and to use in a commercial venture mixing Happy Meals and the Holy Sacrament, seems like an abomination. For a while, I mourned the loss of people’s value for the sacred.

The prophet laments in Isaiah 64 that in our perception of God’s absence we have turned to sin. We have failed to call on God and to take ahold of him. Is it God’s fault for not showing up in the way we want him to? This Advent we’re not waiting for God to show up and shake the mountains. We’re waiting for a helpless infant in a manger. That hardly seems like a reasonable answer to our world’s desperate need for a visible God. And it didn’t seem like an answer for the nation of Israel, searching for hope after their sacred Temple is destroyed and their people are scattered to the winds.

The prophet’s cry in Isaiah resonates in its desperate call to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil – to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

That’s the kind of Old Testament presence of God you get hungry for when you’re thinking about today’s Christianity determined to act as if in into exile, melting down its gifts and trading them in for a golden calf – or in this case, the Golden Arches – while violence and suffering surround us and God seems silent and busy on his mountain.

It’s never good to get worked up about something that you haven’t bothered to read all the way through, so I kept reading the McDonald’s project’s proposal. According to them, the problem is that churches are failing at an alarming rate across the country – as many as ten thousand churches a year shut down. People are leaving churches in droves – three million people a year in the United States walk out the door after failing to find something to which they feel a connection. The solution, according to the project developers, is that churches need to innovate. The idea for what they call a “perfect partnership” is to combine churches, well-known for being community-centered organizations, with McDonalds, well-known for bringing in droves of people. A store in a good location becomes more valuable over time the more money it makes. Put the two together, this group claims, and you will create a self-sustaining, community-engaged, popular church.

The project's recipe for keeping churches sustainable, community-engaged, and popular. (Image from indiegogo.com)

The project’s recipe for keeping churches sustainable, community-engaged, and popular. (Image from indiegogo.com)

As much as I hate the idea of a McChurch – I have to admit they’re not completely wrong: churches ARE dying off, and people ARE leaving. And churches are known for being community-centered organizations. Or at least, they used to be. This is where the road divides between us as the Church, established by Jesus as his Body in the world until his return, and those who would package and sell our Christian identity like so many boxes of chicken nuggets.

It is our Christian identity of the church as community-engaged that we need to reclaim for God, in every way we can. Not by selling ourselves into a profit-making business partnership for financial survival, but by partnering in the community, serving and engaging so deeply and so consistently that our identity becomes indistinguishable from this community. When that happens, no one will be able to think of Woodville without thinking of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and a community dedicated to living for God.

That is the kind of relationship the people leaving the church in droves are hungry for, not for French fries. They are hungry to learn about and experience a kind of spirituality that is molded into a deeply meaningful and deeply satisfying Christian lifestyle. As it says in Isaiah: Still God, you are our Father, you are the potter, and we are the clay. We are hungry to be molded more and more into the image of God in which he has made us. In Advent, we learn to wait not for the mountains to shake, but for the manger to be filled. Faith is trusting not in huge signs from God, but from a God who knows about the strength that is found only in being vulnerable to each other – to risk everything we are to love someone else.

Advent is the time for waiting. But I can’t hardly wait because we’ve got a new church year in front of us. We have a new year with new opportunities God will be asking us to take him up on! But first, we have four weeks to ponder, to hope, and to recommit ourselves to living our identity as Jesus followers, and as his community-centered Church. It may seem like a long wait, but in just four Sundays Christmas Eve is coming, and it won’t be Mac-This or Mac-That. It will be the Mass of Christ, when we celebrate the ultimate moment that God became engaged in our human community.

 

On Ferguson, the Church, and What We Believe

“We’ve got a long way to go to get there, but I think we stand a chance if we are willing to be open to what we say we believe.” – Catherine, St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Morrow, Georgia/Episcopal News Service

What follows is a sermon I preached to my rural East Texas community Episcopal church in August, at the height of the racial uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri. As the nation waits tensely again this week for legal decisions, and Missouri communities gather offering peace and shelter, I encourage all pastors to redouble their efforts to preach peace and unity from their pulpits, and for all Christian people, particularly my Episcopalian brothers and sisters, to live what we say we believe:

Twenty years ago while a student journalist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis I became familiar with racism, and with Ferguson, the neighborhood located directly north of campus. Ferguson has stayed in the national eye these last few weeks as racial tension, violence, and calls for peace continue to be heard in that neighborhood. Twenty years ago, the racism I witnessed was also deeply troubling. The Missouri Ku Klux Klan was by its own description attempting to get stronger and more powerful by attracting more affluent and well-educated members by attempting to sponsor programming on the university radio station. The station refused to cooperate, and so the klan sued the state of Missouri in federal court to try to force the station to take its money, and read a promotional underwriting statement for the klan on air. At the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis I had the opportunity to interview the leader of the Missouri klan. Someone might be tempted to be sympathetic to his cause, as long as that someone hadn’t bothered to educate themselves on 150 years of klan history. When listening to voices in controversial moments in time, people of good faith should be careful to listen and feel for the presence of that deeper grace generated through the love of Jesus Christ. That grace will reveal the sinful from the just.

From a St. Louis art exhibit promotion/maatology.blogspot.com

From a St. Louis art exhibit promotion/maatology.blogspot.com.

The most telling thing in that interview happened in the last couple of minutes of our conversation. That’s when it became clear that what he was saying and what he was doing were two very different things.
Jesus talking to his disciples in Matthew 16 asks them to describe who the people of Caesarea Philippi are saying he is. Caesarea Philippi is an interesting location for this conversation to take place. Located about 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea was the center of worship for a number of pagan gods, the local community attraction being a huge natural spring feeding the Jordan River. Jesus and his disciples traveled there after an encounter with the Pharisees and Sadducees, who had teamed up to trap him, demanding he show them a sign to back up his claim of power. Instead, he makes a bold move for justice, confronting them in return, naming them as evil and unfaithful followers of God, who could understand the signs of impending weather, but who failed to recognize all the signs of their own hoped-for Messiah. And so into this atmosphere of blindness and accusation by God’s own people, into this town filled with pagan worshippers, Jesus puts the question to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The response varies – some say Elijah, some say John the Baptist, or Jeremiah. Then Jesus asks Simon directly, “Who do you say that I am?”

"Who do you say I am?" - Jesus

“Who do you say I am?” – Jesus

Simon’s answer is you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. This very interesting answer brings together both Hebrew and pagan traditions to claim Jesus’ kingship, the titles acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. In Hebrew that is the royal title of “anointed one” and the Son of God, another Hebrew title for royalty. Son of God was also used by Greek leaders, including the first Roman emperor Augustus, as a title of divine authority. Of course, we have inserted here that Jesus is son of the Living God. Not a cold pagan statue, or some pagan God in some undead netherworld who has to be charmed into appearing – a living God who walks among his people and gives them eternal life.

"You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." - Simon Peter

“You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” – Simon Peter

Jesus renames Simon as Peter, a play on his name, which means rock, and names him as the rock he will build his Church on. To be more exact, Jesus proclaims not Peter himself, but his faith, as God-inspired. Not the result of any experience Peter has had of his own effort, but that his faith is built by the work of God himself. The kind of faith God establishes in Peter is the faith that Jesus names as the foundation of the Body of Christ, the living Church that will remain on earth after his death, resurrection and ascension. The living Church that is charged with loving in his name and building the kingdom until Jesus returns to complete his work in the remaking of Creation.
To his Church represented by Peter, Jesus leaves the keys of the kingdom and the authority to act in his name with heavenly power. The keys of the kingdom is the knowledge inspired by God in Peter, the understanding Jesus leaves with us that he is the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one through whom we are reconciled to God in his sacrifice and through whom we have access to eternal life.
Our authority is the power of God lived through the Church to the world. The keys and the authority – these are the tools of our Gospel mission. What we say, and what we do. Holding the keys to the kingdom means we have a responsibility to say to others that there is a saving grace in knowing Jesus Christ. Having authority means that we have a responsibility to do actions that build up the kingdom – to do acts of love, mercy and justice in the world in his name.
As members of God’s holy, catholic and apostolic Church, what we say is as important as what we live. What we live is as important as what we say – because in both of those things, as representatives of the Church, we are speaking for Jesus Christ. We are living for Jesus Christ. In all places, at all times.
With the events in Ferguson and what seems to be a growing racial divide around the country, there is a growing call from within the Church for us to use our voices and our actions to live what we claim to believe – the love of Jesus for everyone, everywhere. Some of the hardest conversations we have and most challenging actions we take are in the course of race relations here in East Texas. Yet Jesus calls us to say and to do words and actions of justice, mercy, and grace – in all places, at all times. This week there were a lot of words and actions in Ferguson, words and actions of hate and peace.
Be reassured that God is with us in these difficult days – he never leaves us nor forsakes us. I want to close with some encouraging words of grace I came across in an Episcopal News Service story this week. It is a quote from a woman named Catherine who is a member of St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church in Morrow, Georgia, near Atlanta:
“My hope lies in the fact that I believe in the church we have a chance. Celebrating Holy Communion is so important because it reminds us that we’re committed to something bigger than ourselves. I believe the church is the place where we can develop real dialogue, real trust and model a different way to be with one another. We’ve got a long way to go to get there, but I think we stand a chance if we are willing to be open to what we say we believe.”
May what we say, and what we do, be what we believe.

Read, mark, and inwardly digest.

Dear fellow Episcopalians: Read, mark, and inwardly digest.