20 June 2010

Isaiah 65:1-9
Psalm 22:19-28
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

Well, I had another one of “those” conversations this past week. “Those” conversations are ones in which people tell me all the reasons they don’t go to church, won’t go to church, or why they have left the church. While it’s likely true that a person who is searching for the perfect church is destined to become a church of one, it’s also true that we who are a part of the church have made the church a whole lot less than credible. In “those” conversations about why people find the church un-credible the first reason cited is, almost always, church politics – the caviling, the backbiting, the factionalism, the stirring up of dissent, the judgmental attitudes, the pitting of one group against another, the subjugation of women and minorities, crankiness about little kids, in-groups versus out-groups, and on and on and on. And it’s very tough to say that stuff doesn’t go on – in almost every tradition, in every diocese and synod, and in every congregation and parish. But it’s not just a contemporary phenomenon. Truth told, it seems to have gone on nearly forever, generation after generation.

We have three readings this morning that each deal with the problem of God’s children pitted one against another. We hear the prophet Isaiah speaking the word of God to those in the religious establishment who pride themselves on doing all the business of religion, convinced of their own rightness, satisfied that they alone know what is fit to do, and that they themselves are the ones to do it – and in the process they have lost sight of God and their own need of God. All that God-talk is for the weak, the poor, and the outcast – those other people who are all so deluded as to depend upon God to provide for all their needs.

In the second reading, Paul is dealing with a congregation in Galatia that’s in significant turmoil. There’s the old guard who say that in order to belong, you have to do certain things the way they’ve always been done. And those newcomers – they’re all so different. Women, non-citizens, people who don’t speak our language, people from cultures with all sorts of strange practices, people who don’t dress like us and people who don’t pray like us . . .

And then there’s the story from St. Luke’s Gospel – told by Luke in part to address divisions in the early church around him. In events prior to this morning’s episode, we’ve heard about Jesus revealing God’s love, compassion, and forgiveness to people in the homeland. Admittedly some of those in the homeland were at the bottom of the heap – but at least they were a part of “us.” At any rate, Jesus and his companions cross the Sea of Galilee to a land filled with pagans and their unclean food. There they encounter a strange individual that even the pagans themselves are afraid of. And Luke tells us that there, Jesus, rather than condemning these people and their ways as an abomination before the Lord, Jesus has compassion upon the thoroughly unsavory character and makes him whole so that he now proclaim the Gospel to all those Jesus would not regard as Other.

And speaking of The Other, some of you who spend time on Facebook may have noticed that I’ve posted a photo of Ted Haggard and a link to an article about the new faith community that Ted Haggard is starting. Among other things that Mr. Haggard has to say, he comments on what he calls, “THE GREAT DECEPTION (sic).” He explains: “On the outside of our [church] building[s] we say we are a hospital, but when people get inside they see it’s a courthouse.” And Mr. Haggard goes on to express his yearning for an end to a church based on divisionary principles – who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong – and he looks for a day when what he calls a “Love Reformation and the Gospel” will be at the center of the church’s life together.

I have to tell you: to my own surprise I ended up sending an email to Ted Haggard. I confessed to him that I have sat in judgment upon him, that he has been an object of my own scorn and even ridicule. And I asked him for forgiveness. I told him that in hearing his words of Gospel, something inside of me died, and that in hearing his witness to the Gospel of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, a new self was raised, I was raised – alive to claim Ted Haggard my own dear brother in Christ. I told him too that my caption next to the link I had posted was, “Only the dead can be raised.” You see, Ted Haggard did die, really and truly died – to his own hypocrisies, to the divisionary principle that pitted gay people against straight people. The old divisive, self-righteous, and self-serving part of Ted Haggard died a public and humiliating death – but now a new Christ-self has been raised from the dead by the healing Word of God in Christ – the healing word for all people, without regard to status or condition, that in Christ all is forgiven, all is forgotten, and all are unconditionally loved. All. No exceptions.

And that is why we're here in this place – it’s why we come here over and over again: to hear and receive. To hear and receive God’s promise spoken and given in baptism – that our old self, with our legion of demons, has been cast out, and drowned in the sea. We come to hear that in Christ, God will go anywhere – even among us who continually find new and ingenious ways to divide ourselves one from another. We come again and again to hear and receive the promise that God will go to every length to proclaim that the record of our legion of crazy thoughts and deeds is washed clean. And because we forget all that, and mistrust even God, we need daily to hear again in the words of confession and absolution that the old self IS DEAD! and a new Christ-self has been raised. And if we are not daily able to come into the presence of Word and Sacrament, then we ought at the very least when we arise in the morning and go to sleep at night, Luther tells us, to make the sign of the Holy Cross upon our bodies – a sign God has given us to remind us that in the crucified and risen Christ the old demon-possessed and self-absorbed self has been forever drowned, and that the new self has been raised to the Life of the Ages.

So yet again – at the command of Christ and by the Holy Orders of the Church – I say to each of you, individually, and to all of us together in this assembly – I proclaim to you and to all of us here – we have died to all those dreams and schemes we employ to divide ourselves one from another, in our families, in this faith community, in the church at large, and in the world. All our pet projects, our desired perfections, and our demonic rage for order have been cast into the sea and drowned. Hear this: having died, you and I and all of us have been raised to proclaim with our lips and with our lives that in Christ there is nothing that any longer divides us – neither age nor race; not ethnicity or culture; not socio-economic or marital status; neither physical nor mental capacities; not gender identity or sexual orientation. And in this Holy Feast to which we have again been summoned, partaking of the One Body and the One Cup – we are strengthened to be what we already are by the solemn and eternal decree of God: the One and undivided Body of Christ in and for the world God loves.

And that my brothers and sisters, that really is . . . incredible.