The Rev. Holly Lyman Antolini
St. James' Episcopal Church, Cambridge
Diocese of Massachusetts
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with
the world.” Paul Farmer
6 Easter Year A
4-27-08
©Holly Lyman
Antolini
Lections: Acts 17: Ps. 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3: 13-22 John
14:15-21
Heavenly God, in
whom we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and
govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life
we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight.
AMEN.
Here we are, at last!
IT IS GOOD TO BE HERE! After so much
self-examination, searching, listening, questioning, experimenting, praying,
discerning, transitioning, wondering, waiting, hoping, dreaming, at last we are
here TOGETHER. At last we are joining
our two streams of ministry, my ordained tributary joining up with your broad
communal baptismal channel; me adding my own little velocity to the great flow
of St. James’ praise and offering in the community of Cambridge and the diocese
of MA, and beyond – WELL beyond! After all, here’s Judy Gay, celebrating 12
years tomorrow since her ordination to the priesthood in Lesotho! Here’s the Rev. Mary Tuusuuvira, ordained in
Uganda, another woman pioneer! Here’s
Jodi Mikalachki, whom we will be blessing on her way today to travel to Burundi
to serve with the Mennonites in the Hope School among the Batwa people in Mutaho
there. Here are SO MANY of you who have
arrived in this congregation from all parts of the world and remain connected to
all kinds of different places and people!
And all this great tide of baptismal ministry has been continuing to flow
over more than 140 years.
If that weren’t a
humbling enough thought for me as I begin my ministry as your Rector, just
entering this amazing great stone arc of a building would be. I feel like a very small “living
stone” compared with these great
enduring walls! (Well, now
they’re enduring, anyway, since you’ve done heroic work on them through the
Capital Campaign!) What an unmistakable
landmark St. James’ is! Massachusetts
Ave. practically has to make a full riverine elbow around our building and
garden to get into Boston or out to Arlington!
We are nothing if not VISIBLE!
(Apropos of our
visibility, by the way, I was lucky enough to be able to attend church at our
neighbor church, The Vineyard on Rindge Ave. two weeks ago, as I was JUST
BEGINNING to unload boxes into my new house out next to Sarah and Rick
Forrester’s in Lexington before I ran off to my first Annual Clergy Conference
in the Diocese of Massachusetts. I
learned a lot at The Vineyard (besides the fact, I confess, that I COVET the
billboard next to theirs on Mass Ave! I want to put one up with an arrow
pointing the OTHER way, to St. James’!!!).
They were celebrating their tenth anniversary – they’re the other end of
the ecclesiastical spectrum from us in a lot of ways, not just age! But
one of the things that REALLY struck me was the statistic they gave as their
reason for getting started, that only 2% of Cambridge citizens are regular
church attendees. If that’s true – and
it’s only a little more statistically drastic than I’ve often heard about the
secular Northeast – then 98% of the folks flowing to and from the metropolis up
and down Mass. Ave have yet to settle on a congregation. And here we are, stuck out in the middle of
the stream! You can’t MISS us! What an opportunity!)
I learned a lot at the
Clergy Conference too. This is a very
forward-looking diocese, and they were urging us clergy to help our
congregations think creatively as we reach out to that 98% of unchurched folks
that flow by St. James’ every day. The
world is a plenty scary place right now, and more than 2% of people badly need a
sense of purpose larger than their ballooning mortgage payment and their
dwindling share of the economic pie. We
who have been “baptized into Christ” need to be “ready to make our defense to
anyone who demands from us an account of the hope that is in us,” as the First Letter of Peter puts it in today’s
lectionary. Sorry to tell you, but it
looks like the self-examination, searching, listening, questioning,
experimenting, praying, discerning, transitioning, wondering, waiting, hoping,
dreaming isn’t ending here, just because I’M in the pulpit! It’s going to take a LOT MORE, going
forward. Looks like searching and
listening and discerning and dreaming are going to be our life blood, going
forward.
But do we have
RESOURCES?!?! Think of it: we Episcopalians have got the deep and ancient
heritage, our bishops and the Clergy Conference presenters reminded us. In a time of radical change, our taproot runs
deep into the ages-long experience of the little “c” catholic tradition. But we’ve also got openness, and a
willingness to embrace and dialogue with anyone, and to prize whatever new
insight they bring to the conversation.
We’re not wedded to a rigidly defined doctrine. We commune with Scripture and with each other
to discern truth. It’s an open-ended
process, even a democratic one, with laity and clergy all participating. We
EVOLVE.
Speaking of communing,
we’ve also got the great gift of Anglican SACRAMENTALITY, at the heart of which
– every Sunday morning -- we “taste and see” God with all our five senses in the
Eucharist. And flowing out from that sacrament, that intimate “partaking” of the
presence of Jesus Christ at the altar, we go forth and look for The Holy in ALL
of life. We tend to consider ALL OF LIFE
as SACRAMENT, capable at any moment of revealing The Holy to us. We blur the lines between “the sacred” and
“the profane.” We Episcopalians treat the whole of God’s Creation as a second
book of scripture, as the medieval scholastics used to call it, grasses and soil
and birds and sky, speaking to us of God.
As the 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Every
creature is a Word from God, and a book of God.”
As a result of this
sense of sacrament, we also tend to think beyond Sunday morning in the practice
of our faith. We love science
instead of fearing it. We engage the
issues of our society and time. We feel
RESPONSIBLE not just for beautiful worship nor for personal salvation, but for
faithful service to “the least, the last, the lost and the littlest” in our
society. As Richard Parker, member at
Christ Church Cambridge and lecturer at the Kennedy School, told the clergy, we
may be relatively small in numbers, but the Episcopal Church has always tended
to “FIGHT ABOVE ITS WEIGHT” in its capacity to influence national and world
affairs. That’s because we feel called not just to be alms-givers, but much more
than that: to be agents of social transformation, Christ’s hands and feet in the
world. Active Do-ers of the Word, not
hearers only. Bringers-in of God’s great
Realm of SHALOM, peace,
justice, wholeness.
Fortunately all of this
is hardly news to the congregation of St. James’! You’ve been living into all these aspects of
“life in Christ” already. (And on TOP of
all that, you have the Caribbean mass!!!)
With all of this going for us, how can we NOT achieve a mission of
providing a space – both physical space and community space – for some of those
98% of unchurched folks to find in St. James’ a place to encounter God without
being coerced; to enter into a relationship with this community that in turn
invites a relationship with God; to discover in themselves already the seeds of
a profound and personal calling “to serve and not be served,” as the St. James’
vision statement says?
But did I say it was
going to take continuing self-examination, searching, listening, questioning,
experimenting, praying, discerning, transitioning, wondering, waiting, hoping,
dreaming??? After all, our Gospel for
today makes the audacious claim, as followers of the Crucified and Risen Christ,
that the very Spirit of truth ABIDES – the Greek word for “abide” in John’s
Gospel is menei, related to
the noun mone or dwelling
place – with us and IN us. But before we start strutting around with our
thumbs in our suspenders, feeling righteous, let’s take a closer look at how
that claim gets made in John’s Gospel today.
First of all, notice the words are coming from Jesus on the eve of his
impending crucifixion. Being in touch
with the Spirit of truth doesn’t preserve us from pain and suffering and
struggle. Second, note that Jesus says
the Spirit of truth ” abides with you and he will be in
you.” That’s “you,
plural”: the Spirit is not so much abiding within individuals as within the
community. Jesus describes a kind of
nested indwelling, “I in my Father and you in me and I in
you.” A God-saturated communal abiding. But then he also warns that “the world” – in
John, that word “kosmos”
doesn’t refer so much to material reality as to the alienated state of those who
rely on their own power and limited perspective to try to “run” things – the
“world”cannot receive the Spirit of truth and cannot enjoy this God-saturated
state.
So what are the
conditions that bring about this “abiding” infusion of truthful Spirit, this
“having our being in God?” The condition
is the “keeping” [terein] of Jesus’ commandments. Twice Jesus says it, once in verse 15:“If
you love me, you will keep my commandments… and then
again in verse 21: “They who have my
commandments and keep them are those who love me…” The word “keep,” terein, “does surely mean ‘observe’ or ‘do’ in the sense
of any legal observance, but the word or ‘law’ to be observed is the law of
communal love,” not a checklist of “do’s and don’ts.” Jesus clarifies this in
the next chapter of the Gospel, Chapter 15:12, where he says “This is my
commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay
down one’s life for one’s friends.”
The Spirit of truth
comes to those who practice being a community of such self-offering love. This kind of “keeping” is less like “obeying
the law” and more like that of Mary in Luke’s infancy narrative, who “keeps
all the ‘things’ or ‘words’ of the birth of Jesus, pondering them in her
heart”[Gordon Lathrop, Proclamation 6,
Series A, 1996 Augsburg Fortress, p. 50]. We are
to TREASURE the COMMANDMENT to LOVE ONE ANOTHER, to ponder it, to practice
it. And in the very practicing and
pondering itself, God will be revealed.
So, in this season of
resurrection, at this moment of new beginnings, as I join my priestly calling to
your “royal priesthood” of baptism, let us treasure the PRACTICE of loving one
another, let us keep trying it on, lean into it, LIVE INTO IT. In all that we do, from allocating space in
the Parish Hall to singing psalms to long-range planning to pruning the Garden
to welcoming those of the 98% who cross our great stone threshold to “try us
out,” unsure yet whether they might want to stay long enough to know us and be
known, let us practice loving one another.
Let us try it out even when on occasion it seems as if truly to love one
another, to be open to one another’s point of view or need or passion, demands a
sacrifice akin to death.
