We believe in one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic church.
We confirm our members
into the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
All four of those
adjectives describing the church are rich and complex.
But the oddest of them,
the one we are likely to least understand,
Is
“apostolic.”
It means we are still
doing what the apostles did – but what’s that?
A disciple is someone who
follows Jesus.
But an apostle is someone
Jesus has sent out on a mission
to
someone else somewhere else.
We have to start out as
disicples before we can become apostles.
but until we become apostles we have not experienced
the fullness of the Christian life.
We have not been “made
whole.”
Take the prototype of
apostles – St. Paul.
He started out in Syria and spread the word
as far as Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.
But no one had imagined
taking a Middle Eastern religion to 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.
Paul was doing alright in
Turkey.
He had several
congregations to look after there.
But God sent him to
Europe.
Something like that
happened again 300 years later.
As a boy, St. Patrick was
captured by slave traders
and spent his adolescence as a slave in pagan Ireland.
Eventually he escaped and
returned to his home in England.
There he lived happy and
content with his family and friends,
worshiping faithfully in his Church for 6 good years.
Then one night Patrick
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 read the heading “the Voice of the Irish. . . ”
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 hated
Ireland with all his heart,
returned to the harsh, alien land of his captivity
to share with his former enemies the good news of God.
In 1863, a Massachusetts
boy, Ozzie Whitaker,
graduated from seminary in Philadelphia.
Something unusual
apparently captured his imagination,
because when he struck out from Philadelphia
looking
for his first parish,
he found
it in Gold Hill, Nevada.
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.
Ozzie was doing alright.
But God had other plans.
God’s call would not be
silent, would not let young Ozzie rest.
So he came back to serve St. Paul’s, Virginia City for 19
years.
But Virginia City was
getting too upscale
so God
sent Ozzie to celebrate the first
Episcopal communion
in Eastern Nevada on September 17, 1870 in a Pioche saloon.
On his second visit to
Pioche, he started the Sunday School.
Before long, Ozzie
Whitaker was the Bishop of Nevada and Arizona
covering
the whole diocese on horseback.
Paul, Patrick, and Ozzie
show us what “apostolic” means.
“Apostolic” means we are
sent to someone else.
We have a mission outside
our own walls – out past our comfort zone.
We do not exist as the
church to serve ourselves alone.
The church was born with
a mission and we live for a mission
to a world that needs Christ’s love more 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 problem is our spiritual needs can never be fully
met
as long as we are striving to get them met.
God gives us a bit of
consolation to patch us up,
but to really heal us,
God then
gives us a mission to help someone else.
In the course of serving
others,
we are healed ourselves,
we find peace ourselves,
we find our own joy.
As St. Francis said,
“It is in giving that we receive,
in pardoning that we are pardoned.”
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 left their
comfortable homes and their comfort zones
to share Christ’s love with others
and that life of self-giving, that life for others,
gave them their joy.
Today we celebrate
confirmation.
When we were baptized, we
received all the saving grace of God.
We became full members of
the church.
But in confirmation, we
take on the mission.
We say for ourselves,
“yes I will share the love of Christ
with the world.”
I will take my share of
the mission given by Christ
and passed down by Paul, Patrick, Ozzie Whitaker
and a line of Christians 2,000 years long.”
Each of us is given our
part in the apostolic mission.
We bear the Christ light
to those in darkness.
We are here to comfort
the afflicted,
to bring hope to the despairing,
to feed the hungry, and strengthen the weak.
Congregations do not
exist to sustain themselves.
The Church is here to
serve the world in the name of Jesus.
We don’t always have to
cross oceans like Paul or Patrick
or even cross the Mojave like Ozzie 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?
Your work with CACH feeding
poor children in your local school
is part of your answer to that question.
But 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.
God gives each of us
gifts and talents
to take our part in the mission.
Confirmation strengthens
those gifts.
Confirmation is a holy
and sacred moment when people
commit their gifts and talents to service.
Confirmands inspire us to
renew and redouble our own efforts
to show our friends and neighbors
and the strangers who pass our way
that there is love in this world,
the unconditional love of Jesus.
And so now, Brothers and
Sisters, it is time for all of us
to join the confirmands in committing ourselves
to a life for others in the name of Christ.
