Christianity sprang up in
Jerusalem,
then spread quickly around the Middle East.
Paul started out in Syria
and spread the word
as far as the coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.
But no one had imagined
taking the gospel to pagan Europe
until Paul had a vision.
Our lesson says, “During
the night, Paul had a vision.
there stood a man of Macedonia . . . saying,
‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’
When he had seen this vision, we immediately
tried to cross over to Macedonia,
being convinced that God had called us
to proclaim the good news to them.”
That’s how Christianity
got to Europe.
It happened again 300
years later.
An English boy named
Patrick was captured by slavers
and spent his adolescence as a slave in pagan Ireland,
but he eventually escaped and returned home.
There he lived with his
family and friends for 6 good years.
Then one night he had a
vision he described this way.
“I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland.
His name was Victoricus and he carried many letters
. . . (H)e gave me one of them. . . .
I imagined I heard the voice of those very people . . .
beside the western sea – and they cried out, as with one
voice:
‘we appeal to you holy servant boy, come and walk among
us.’”
So Patrick, who despised
Ireland,
returned to the land of his captivity
to share with his former enemies the good
news of God.
In 1863, Ozi Whitaker
from Massachusetts graduated
from seminary in Philadelphia,
and struck out for his first parish, Gold Hill, Nevada.
The Comstock was a tough
and lonely land back then.
Ozzie lasted 2 years.
Having seen the error of
his ways,
he hotfooted it back to New Jersey, got married,
and become rector of a well-heeled East Coast church.
But God had other plans.
Not long after that, he
heard the call and came back west
to Virginia City and served this diocese for 19 years.
From Virginia City, he
spread the gospel throughout Nevada and Arizona.
He celebrated the first
Episcopal communion
in Pioche on September 17, 1870 in a saloon.
Today we will affirm
that:
“We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
church.”
“Apostolic” means we are
sent to someone else.
We have a mission outside
our own walls.
The church was born with
a mission and lives for a mission
to a world that needs Christ’s love more desperately
today than ever.
What is true for the
church is true for every individual Christian.
God has to work a sort of
spiritual aikido on us.
We come to God because we
need something.
We need some healing or
peace or joy.
We come to God with a
spiritual need,
but the Catch 22 is: our spiritual needs can never be met
as long as we are trying to get them met.
God, like an EMT, patches us up a
little,
then gives us a mission to help someone else.
In the course of serving
others,
we get healed ourselves,
find peace ourselves,
discover our own joy.
I don’t know how that
works, but it does.
Jesus said, “Whoever
tries to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
That’s what Paul,
Patrick, and Bishop Whitaker did.
They lost the lives they
had known.
They left their homes and
their comfort zones
to share Christ’s love with strangers
and found a life of self-giving, a life for others,
that paradoxically gave them joy.
Paul did not want to go
to Europe.
They weren’t his kind of
people.
But the warmest, fondest,
most affectionate letter
he ever wrote was to the Philippians,
the people of Macedonia he left his beloved Turkey to
serve.
Patrick went to Ireland kicking
and screaming
but near the end of his life he wrote a poem
praising and thanking God for allowing him to serve
among these people at the edge of the world.
And some say Ozzie came
to like us well enough too.
Joining the apostolic
mission is the very means of our salvation.
It’s how we are set free
and made whole.
Christ gives us the
mission to liberate us from the prison of self
the way Moses liberated Israel from the prison of Egypt.
Today our confirmands will
take on the Jesus mission.
The confirmands will say,
“Yes, I will share the love of Jesus
with the world.”
I will take up my share
of the mission given by Christ
and passed down by Paul, Patrick, Bishop Whitaker
and a line of Christians 2,000 years long.”
Each of us has our part
in the apostolic mission.
We bear the Christ light
to those in darkness.
We are here to give
comfort to the afflicted,
to bring hope to the despairing,
to feed the hungry, and strengthen the weak.
Congregations do not exist
to sustain themselves.
We are here to serve the
world in the name of Jesus.
We don’t have to cross
oceans like Paul or Patrick
or continents like Bishop Whitaker.
Human need is never any
farther away than next door.
The basic discernment for
any congregation is:
what does our
community need?
How can we serve the
people in need here and now?
Need is not just hunger
and material poverty.
It is loneliness,
addiction, spiritual confusion.
Our task is to heal our
neighbors’ wounds,
whatever they may be.
As a member of Nevadans
for the Common Good,
All Saints is taking on the issues of teacher shortages
and inequality in education based on
race and class.
All Saints is challenging a system that puts economic
pressure
on people to move into nursing homes when
their health
would be better served in their own homes.
All Saints is challenging an immigration systems that
deports people
who are eligible to be here – they just
haven’t jumped thorugh
the procedural hoops – and separates families
driving children
into poverty.
I am proud of All Saints’
leadership in this work.
You have committed to
deliver twice as many people
to the Nevadans For the Common Good convention on May 9
as the second largest congregation.
And I believe you can do
it. You’ve done it before.
Do you see how different
this is from one of those churches
with people sitting around sourly
looking for things to grumble about.
“I like this. I don’t
like that.”
Christianity is
forgetting what we like or don’t like.
It’s getting outside
ourselves to seek and serve Christ in all persons.
Our likes and dislikes,
these are like Turkey to Paul
but God invited Paul outside Turkey
to pagan Europe
where he discovered love and joy.
Our comfortable groups of
those we already know well,
are like England to Patrick
but God invited Patrick outside
England to pagan Ireland
where he found the meaning of his life.
Our old familiar ways,
the stories we tell ourselves about how it has always
been
and will always be forever and ever amen
are
like the East Coast to Ozzie Whittaker
-- but God invited Ozzie to leave the
old East Coast
and share God’s love in this pagan
desert.
A church for others,
shapes
the souls of each of our members
to become men and women for others.
We don’t just share the
gospel by word and deed
when we’re doing church work.
It happens everywhere we
go with everyone we meet.
As our confirmands take
their vows,
they inspire
us to renew our own efforts
to show our friends, neighbors , and the strangers
what the
love of Jesus looks like.
And so now, Brothers and
Sisters, it is time for all of us
to commit ourselves once more
to a life for others in the name of Christ
Jesus.
