Proper 16 Year A 8-24-08
©Holly Lyman Antolini
Lections: Isaiah 51:1-6; Psalm 138; Romans 12:1-8;Matthew 16:13-20
I appeal to you... brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-what is good and acceptable and perfect. AMEN.
Discerning the will of God. How I WISH it were a simple, linear, rational thing! Don't YOU?!? But the longer I live, the more convinced I am that discernment is a life-long challenge, a life thread in the long skein of our human pilgrimage.
It is a CRITICALLY IMPORTANT THREAD, of course: the thread that binds our praise and adoration of God together with our outreach of love, healing, and justice to the world: one of the most important parts of our life as individuals and together as a congregation gathered in the name of Jesus Christ. But SIMPLE IT IS NOT. Discernment is not amenable to FORMULA, even a formula pulled straight from the language of Holy Scripture. Discernment is not a matter of FOLLOWING THE RULES. Discernment is a matter of relationship with God, a complex, ambiguous, often spiraling thing, a thing of such delicacy that it can be thrown off by the slightest pressure of our ego, yet a thing of such impact that, like those auction-rate securities our banking system thought such a hot bargain, a wrong discernment can throw not just our own personal lives but an entire global economy into chaos.
Discerning the will of God -- what is good and acceptable and perfect, as Paul says in his appeal to the Roman congregation is a matter of making what he calls our "bodies" - by which he means the TOTALITY OF OUR LIVES, family and work life, leisure, spiritual life, ALL OF IT - an offering to God. And not a dead offering, over and done with, like the sacrifices offered on the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem in Paul's day, but a constant dynamic LIVING offering and RE-OFFERING of EVERYTHING WE ARE and EVERYTHING WE DO. A LIVING SACRIFICE, as Paul calls it - SACRA-FICERE - a "holy making;" a continual MAKING HOLY of our lives by offering them, accomplishments and talents and enthusiasms and mistakes and missteps and doubts and sinking spirits and ALL, to God to do with them as God wills.
To borrow an image from the Olympics: this is NOT a "gold-medal" kind of process, this offering of ourselves that leads into good discernment. As exciting as I have found the Olympics at times in the last two weeks, I have to admit I've also found it profoundly ANNOYING. Here we watch these young people (and some very exciting NOT-SO-YOUNG people!) excelling beyond our wildest imaginings at all kinds of activity, some extremely fast; some extremely dangerous and death-defying, some astoundingly graceful and resilient. Every single person I've seen on my TV screen has been mind-bogglingly gifted at what they do. And yet every one of them except the ostensibly "top" three (and of those, the bronze and silver drop a league behind the so-called "gold" in prominence and rah-rah) gets dumped unceremoniously over and over by the press and the process, as if they'd become worthless. If our spiritual lives were anything like the Olympics, and we got dumped every time we failed, we'd all be on the rubbish heap of history long since.
Fortunately, God's ways are not our ways, nor God's thoughts our thoughts. Discernment is not a matter of "going for the gold." Discernment, in fact, is not in the ACHIEVEMENT so much as THE EFFORT, not in the end result so much as in the OFFERING. Discernment comes in the split second of self-emptying when we acknowledge that OUR LIVES ARE NOT OUR OWN, not some private perquisite to be hoarded, not some END IN THEMSELVES, BUT SOMETHING TO BE GIVEN AWAY TO A LARGER PURPOSE, a purpose we may never FULLY UNDERSTAND, a purpose we in our humble little way can only GLIMPSE, because only GOD is big enough and wise enough and powerful enough to COMPREHEND it. Only God is big enough "to contain or hold within [God's self the] total scope and significance..." [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprehend] of our purpose. That's why Paul immediately advises the Romans not to "think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith God has assigned. He's not saying, "Beat up on yourself." He's not saying, "Doubt that you have any value at all." Not a bit of it. He's simply reminding us that the INSTANT we get BIGGER THAN OUR BRITCHES, we drop God right out of the picture, just like THAT!
Because truth to be told, even in our most authentic OFFERING OF OURSELVES, we CAN and all too often DO MAKE MISTAKES. SOMETIMES REALLY BIG MISTAKES. MISTAKES WE THEN HAVE TO TURN AROUND AND OFFER UP TO GOD ALSO, JUST AS WE OFFER OUR ACHIEVEMENTS. I speak to you as a positive GOLD-MEDAL WINNER of MISTAKES! I KNOW whereof I speak! But God rejoices in our offering, even of our weaknesses, our blindnesses, our fallings-short. God can USE ANYTHING WE OFFER, as long as we genuinely OFFER IT UP.
And another thing: discernment is HOPELESS if we TRY TO GO IT ALONE. Hence Paul's moving right to the One Body with Many Members. We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. Our gifts - of prophecy, of faith, of ministry, of teaching, of exhortation, of leadership and diligence, of compassion and cheerfulness, and the list by no means is meant to end there, I assure you! - are meant to work TOGETHER for a LARGER PURPOSE and a LARGER DISCERNMENT. Frankly, our Body Gathered is a heck of a lot WISER than any ONE OF US who is a member of it! Yet EVERY ONE OF US members - and by the way, there is no "qualifying heat" for membership; if you're HERE, you're a MEMBER of the BODY - every member is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT in our OFFERING OF OURSELVES to the DISCERNMENT OF THE WHOLE.
"Who do people say that I am?" Jesus asks the disciples in Matthew's Gospel today. And they throw out a variety of suppositions - John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or some other prophet. "But who do YOU, my companions in the Way, my fellow pilgrims, say that I am?" he presses. We tend to hear this conversation as Jesus' litmus test of the disciples' insight, a test in which Peter takes the gold when he gushes, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." I want to invite you to hear it very differently. I want you to hear the question "Who do YOU say that I am?" as the Son of MAN not the Son of God - the human Jesus, not the divine, all-knowing Jesus - would have asked it, the Jesus who is seeking to understand what the heck is happening to him and whatever the heck God WANTS FROM HIM, the Jesus who does NOT ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER, who has to turn to his friends to help him see clearly. And I want you to allow yourselves to feel, for just a second, what kind of a TWISTING IN THE GUT Jesus feels when Peter speaks up. I want you to feel just how TERRIFYING IT IS for Jesus to acknowledge a calling to be the Messiah, what a FRIGHTENING WEIGHT OF POSSIBILITY and RESPONSIBILITY Jesus was being ASKED TO ACCEPT UPON HIMSELF IN THAT MOMENT. I want you to suppose, for just a moment, that the terrible pun Jesus makes naming "peter," "little stone", as the ROCK ON WHICH THE CHURCH WILL BE BUILT, is the kind of joke we make when we're nervous, as WELL as a word of TRUTH. The word of truth, if you delete all those images of Michelangelo's massive Church of St. Peter in Rome evoked by this passage, is that the impulsive, good-hearted, over-ambitious Peter - hardly the man you would choose for steadiness of purpose! - really IS the foundation of the Church, just as YOU and I are also the foundation, because he and WE ARE THE BODY, the VERY HUMAN, FALLIBLE BODY which IS the CHURCH. And WE, like Peter, are ALL GOD HAS TO DISCERN THE WAY FORWARD, to discern what to BIND and what to LOOSE, to discern what to KEEP and what to CHANGE. To discern when to MOVE FORWARD and when to HOLD HARD.
If that responsibility FRIGHTENS YOU, you're in GOOD COMPANY. It FRIGHTENED JESUS TOO. Because discernment is a very mysterious process, all-important, yet ambiguous. And what we discern, day in, day out, the choices we make, have PROFOUND IMPLICATIONS. Greater than we can possibly estimate, no matter how good our cybernetic tools for doing so.
So here we are, at St. James's, at the end of summer in 2008, faced with a discernment with some of those profound implications. Our beloved ROCKS on which our mission was founded ‘way back in the 1880's with the building of this beautiful building, have been showing signs of weakness. Our beautiful stained glass is gently folding down on itself (go take a look at the William Hunt Light of the World window in our west wall to see what I mean). Even after our heroic capital campaign to shore up our west Tower, you can still see where the mortar on the northwest corner of our church is crumbling, and any Sunday it rains, you can slosh through the leaks over the vestment area as the acolytes and deacons and I do. And that's not even taking a good close LOOK at the condition of the Parish House!
And now, quite suddenly, we here at St. James's discover that we have an opportunity such as comes around once in a generation: an opportunity in the sale of our neighboring property on the garden edge, the Cambridge Car Wash, to a developer who plans to build as many as 4 stories of condominiums on that site. Suddenly, we have to DISCERN whether to simply to let "the waves and the billows" of the developers' intentions roll over us, or whether in this moment of change, the Spirit is offering US the possibility of TRANSFORMATION: the possibility of reconfiguring the back part of our own property in such a way that we may potentially be able rebuild our Parish House, connect it more usefully to our Garden, contribute to the stock of affordable housing in North Cambridge, and provide ourselves with the funding FULLY to restore our Church. In service of that momentous discernment, as we have been reporting in the Sunday News and the Bell, the Vestry has commissioned a Property Redevelopment feasibility study, funded by our diocesan affordable-housing office, the Episcopal City Mission. With the ECM grant, we have teamed up with Abacus Architects and New Atlantic Development Corporation who are providing us by the end of September with details both on what we MIGHT be able to build on our land and what various possibilities might cost, as well as how one might FUND such a project and how we would conduct our life as a congregation when such a project was underway.
We are only part-way into the study, and the study will only give us parameters for any project we may decide to undertake. It is up to US, the congregation and your CONGREGATIONAL LEADERSHIP, to DISCERN what GOD IS CALLING US TO DO. It is up to US to DISCERN WHAT IS THE WILL OF GOD - WHAT IS GOOD AND ACCEPTABLE AND PERFECT. That's "perfect" not as in "pure" or "without blemish," but "perfect" as in "whole," "HEALTHY," "SHALOM." It is UP TO US to DETERMINE how our MISSION, OUR OFFERING OF OURSELVES, OUR SOULS & BODIES, OUR BODY OF CHRIST HERE AT ST. JAMES'S, can BEST BE the LIVING SACRIFICE that is holy and acceptable to God in this place, not only at THIS TIME, but possibly FOR A GENERATION OR MORE TO COME.
So we bid your prayers for the Redevelopment Committee and for your Vestry as they offer themselves in this discernment. And we ask you to stand ready this fall to JOIN THE DISCERNMENT YOURSELVES, in forums and focus groups, helping us all to see clearly what God HAS BEEN, IS, AND WILL BE CALLING US TO DO HERE AT ST. JAMES'S, in the Spirit of Jesus.
"Who do you say that I am?" asks Jesus. And in both honor and more than a little terror, we answer, "You are the Christ and WE are YOUR BODY. We offer ourselves, our whole selves. Transform us by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern your will - what is good and acceptable and perfect - for us here in this place and for the shalom of your beloved world!" AMEN.