This weekend, we will welcome
several new people
into
our community of faith.
They will become part of us and
share our identity.
So today is a good time to consider
who we are.
Just what is our shared identity?
The bottom line is we believe in
Jesus.
We trust in Jesus.
We follow Jesus.
We are people who want to be like
Jesus.
That’s
basic.
But
sometimes we get it wrong.
We
think believing in Jesus is just having an opinion.
We
say, “Jesus is Lord,” and think that’s the end of it.
James
wrote his letter to a church
that thought the same thing.
They
wanted to just believe in Jesus
without letting it change anything.
But
James said, “That isn’t possible.”
“Do
you,” he asked, “with your acts of favoritism
really believe in . . . Jesus. . .?”
The
church folks had their doctrine straight,
but they didn’t care much about the
poor.
Well,
James thought they ought to care about the poor.
But
it’s more than that.
James
says you can’t believe in Jesus
without being seriously committed to the
poor.
It
isn’t just a nice thing to do.
It
is constitutive of our very identity.
It’s
what it means to be a Christian.
That’s
because of who Jesus is.
First
of all, Jesus was poor.
The
Biblical evidence is abundant
– the poor person’s temple offering
when
he was a baby,
the
holy family’s flight to Egypt with no belongings,
Jesus
saying he had no home,
his
burial in another man’s tomb.
If that evidence were not enough,
St.
Paul writes, “He became poor.”
If you are amused by people doing
mental gymnastics
to
avoid the obvious,
it’s
fun to read fundamentalists like Oral Roberts
trying
to prove that Jesus was rich.
The Scriptures about his poverty,
unlike all other Scriptures,
are
not to be taken literally.
Jesus identified with the poor.
He said how we treat the poor is
how we treat him.
Matthew 25: “I was hungry and you
fed me,
I
was thirsty and you gave me drink.
I
was an alien and your sheltered me. . . .
Whenever
you did such things for the least
of
these, you did it for me.”
The Christian moral lodestar is
what would Jesus do?
What did he do when people were
hungry?
He fed them.
16,000 children die of
malnutrition every day.
What would Jesus do?
When people were sick, he healed
them.
When people were paralyzed by
guilt, he forgave them.
When they were shut out from the
group,
he
befriended them and invited them in.
When they lacked knowledge, he
taught them.
If we believe in Jesus, we follow
him.
We do what he did.
This isn’t just for the Outreach
Committee.
It’s what Christians do.
To sign on as a member of the
Episcopal Church
is
to enlist in God’s mission
as
our Church understands it.
There’s a simple checklist for
what we do.
It’s the 5 Marks of Mission
adopted
for the worldwide Anglican Communion
in 1984 and reaffirmed in 1990.
The Episcopal Church adopted them
officially in 2009.
It’s simple:
1.
Evangelism: proclaim
the good news of the Kingdom.
2.
Formation: teach,
baptize, and nurture new believers.
3.
Benevolence: respond to
human need with loving service.
4.
Advocacy; transform
unjust structures in society
5.
Environmental
stewardship: sustain and renew the life
of
the earth.
I warn you there’s a 6th
Mark in the pipeline:
Reconciliation:
making peace in a war torn world.
That is what we exist to do.
I recently heard a parish leader
say our purpose
Is
to offer familiar rituals to provide a “comfort zone.”
I heard another parish leader say
she comes to church
because
the beautiful setting makes her
“feel
so spiritual.”
But the Church is not here to
provide an escape
from
the world.
The Church is here to be Christ
in the world.
In Communion, we take Christ’s
life into us
so
that we can live his life in the world.
Modern culture has redefined
religion.
We have constricted faith to
narrower and narrower
fields
of concern until Christianity
has
become irrelevant to real life.
Matters of money and power are
not our concern.
Matters of peace and justice are
not our concern.
Real issues are the exclusive
province of secular authority.
Faith is limited to people’s
private feelings
and
now that jurisdiction
has
been entrusted to psychiatry.
The remaining pallid ghost of
Christianity is irrelevant
to
anything people care about – like jobs and education.
No wonder so many young people
have lost interest.
We aren’t interesting because we
are not in the game.
Christians feel eviscerated by
the separation of Church & State.
That separation is a theological
principle taught
by a
Baptist preacher Roger Williams
of colonial Rhode Island.
But let me tell you something:
Roger Williams never intended to
exclude the voice
of
faith from issues of justice and mercy in society.
He was engaged in those issues
up
to his eyeballs his whole life.
In 1908 his Baptist follower,
Walter Rauschenbusch,
began
a Social Gospel movement
in Hell’s Kitchen,
New York City
that
spread all over this country applying Christian ethics
to
schools, child labor, racism, alcoholism,
and
a host of social ills.
in
Montgomery, Alabama got the idea
that
Jesus cared whether the city buses were segregated.
That would be Jesus the Jew who
healed the Gentile child
in
today’s lesson and desegregated Jacob’s well
in the story of the Samaritan woman.
Across the waters,
Victorian
England was divided by an argument
between
two rival moral visions.
One was the heartless Social
Darwinism
of
English agnostic philosopher Herbert Spencer.
It was the philosophical defense
of industrial tycoons’
exploitation
of the poor in sweat shops.
The opposing vision came from a
Christian,
an
Anglican novelist, Charles Dickens,
supported
by our greatest theologian,
Frederick Dennison Maurice.
The voices of Dickens and Maurice
echo
in
the Five Marks of Mission.
The voices of Moses, Amos,
Isaiah, and Joel
echo
in the Five Marks of Mission.
The voices of Roger Williams,
Walter Rauschenbusch,
and
Dr. King echo in the Five Marks of Mission.
But most importantly, the life of
Jesus echoes today
In
the Five Marks of Mission.
That’s who we are.
That’s why we’re here.
